Goaded by Democedes, who wanted to return to his native Greece, Atossa pleaded with her husband to turn his campaign westward—to invade Greece. That turn of the Persian empire from east to west, and the series of Greco-Persian wars that followed, would mark one of the definitive moments in the early history of the West. It was Atossa’s tumor, then, that quietly launched a thousand ships. Cancer, even as a clandestine illness, left its fingerprints on the ancient world.
