e Syrians, the
Babylonians, the Chaldees, the Phoenicians, the nations of Palestine,
the Armenians, the Bactrians, the Lydians, the Phrygians, the Parthians,
and the Medes, all obeyed the sceptre of the Great King: the Medes
standing next to the native Persians in honor, and the empire being
frequently spoken of as that of the Medes, or as that of the Medes and
Persians. Egypt and Cyrene were Persian provinces; the Greek colonists
in Asia Minor and the islands of the AEgean were Darius' subjects; and
their gallant but unsuccessful attempts to throw off the Persian yoke
had only served to rivet it more strongly, and to increase the general
belief that the Greeks could not stand before the Persians in a field
of battle. Darius' Scythian war, though unsuccessful in its immediate
object, had brought about the subjugation of Thrace and the submission
of Macedonia. From the Indus to the Peneus, all was his.

We may imagine the wrath with which the lord of so many nations must
have heard, nine years before the battle of Marathon, that a strange
nation toward the setting sun, called the Athenians, had dared to help
his rebels in Ionia against him, and that they had plundered and burned
the capital of one of his provinces. Before the burning of Sardis,
Darius seems never to have heard of the existence of Athens; but his
satraps in Asia Minor had for some time seen Athenian refugees at their
provincial courts imploring assistance against their fellow-countrymen.

When Hippias was driven away from Athens, and the tyrannic dynasty of
the Pisistratidae finally overthrown in B.C. 510, the banished tyrant and
his adherents, after vainly seeking to be restored by Spartan
intervention, had betaken themselves to Sardis, the capital city of the
satrapy of Artaphernes. There Hippias--in the expressive words of
Herodotus--began every kind of agitation, slandering the Athenians
before Artaphernes, and doing all he could to induce the satrap to place
Athens in subjection to him, as the tributary vassal of King Darius.
When the Athenians heard of his practices, they sent envoys to Sardis to
remonstrate with the Persians against taking up the quarrel of the
Athenian refugees.

But Artaphernes gave them in reply a menacing command to receive Hippias
back again if they looked for safety. The Athenians were resolved not to
purchase safety at such a price, and after rejecting the satrap's terms,
they considered that they and the Persians were dec