Persian Fire: The First World Empire, Battle for the West - 'Magisterial' Books of the Year, Independent

by Tom Holland

Candidates from families other than the Pisistratids continued to be permitted to run for the archonship. Most, of course, were the tyrants’ placemen – most, but by no means all.

Miltiades: not the adventurer who had been a contemporary of Pisistratus, but his nephew,

Cleisthenes,

Cleisthenes

Alcmaeonids,

Cleisthenes

Hippias

King Cleomenes of Sparta,

Plataeans, citizens of a small city ten miles south of Thebes,

powerful Thebans.

Pisistratid

Hippias

Cleisthenes, no matter what he might have promised Cleomenes while in exile, had not the slightest intention of seeing his city become a client-state of Sparta.

Cleomenes himself, meanwhile, having risked Spartan lives in the cause of a thoroughly illegal war, was looking for precisely such a return on his investment. Even if he could not have a regime that was actively subservient, he wanted, at the very least, an Athens so racked by factionalism that she would cease to function as a threat to Sparta.

Soon enough, the compact between the two conspirators began to break down. In the shadow-boxing that followed, the advantage appeared to be all Cleomenes’. Certainly, Eupatrid suspicions of Cleisthenes remained as dark as ever, and there were any number of aristocrats, now that the dead hand of the tyranny had been r...

Cleis...

Isag...

Cleomenes,

Cleisthenes, though he had stooped to many low tricks in his time, had never sunk quite as low as that.

For all his mastery of scam and spin, he was much more than the grasping opportunist of his enemies’ propaganda. Resolute in his determination not to see Athens sunk to the status of a Spartan client-state, he could also recognise that Isagoras and his allies were fighting a war that had already had its day.

Alcmaeonids

Philaids,

Isagoras,

demokratia.

A programme so startling, so baldly radical, that it was wholly without precedent. His opponents, caught off balance, responded with howls of rage and disbelief.

The measures Cleisthenes was putting forward, in the sweep of their ambition, and in the brilliance of their design, did not have the character of a cornered gambler’s makeshift throw. Far from it: they showed every sign of having been most carefully worked out.

Eupatrid clans

Athens was sick – so much everyone agreed. What possible hope, then, for a cure? Only one, Cleisthenes and his associates appear to have decided. To break the mould; to harness the ambitions not only of the elite but of all the Athenian people; to create, from their energy, a future for Athens that would at last match the full measure of her potential.

Cleis...

Except that, suddenly, his nerve failed him. In the early summer of 507 BC, a herald arrived from Sparta, and demanded, citing the ancient c...

Clearly, in the game of cat and mouse between the two former allies, Cleomenes still had plenty of moves to make. Cleisthenes, as though dreading what migh...

Cleo...

Isagoras

democracy.

As the two men, king and quisling, deliberated, however, there came from the streets far below them an ominous and violent sound: that of rioting.

Democracy,

Pisistratids,

Demaratus,

Chalcis

Nor, for all that Athens, set upon the remote margins of the world as she was, stood shrouded in a natural obscurity, was Darius quite as oblivious to her now as he had previously been.

Reports of her revolution had arrived in Persepolis. In 507 BC, while the Athenians were nervously awaiting the Spartan onslaught, and noting, with alarm, that Hippias had taken refuge on the southern side of the Hellespont, in territory held by Persia, they had sent an embassy to Sardis.

Artaphernes, brother of the Ki...

Artaphernes,

Even after the great victories of 506 BC, who knew when Cleomenes might be back? An insurance policy against the Spartans was no bad thing – even if it had cost a symbolic humiliation. And what was a gift of earth and water? A gesture – nothing more.