re, the note of
war was sounded, and men and munitions of war were actively gathered. On
the coast of Asia Minor a great fleet, numbering six hundred armed
triremes and many transports for men and horses, was prepared. The
Ionian and AEolian Greeks largely manned this fleet, and were forced to
aid their late foe in the effort to destroy their kinsmen beyond the
archipelago of the AEgean Sea.

An Athenian traitor accompanied the Persians, and guided their leader in
the advance against his native city. We have elsewhere spoken of
Pisistratus, the tyrant of Athens, whose treason Solon had in vain
endeavored to prevent. After his death, his sons Hipparchus and Hippias
succeeded him in the tyranny. Hipparchus was killed in 514 B.C., and in
511 Hippias, who had shown himself a cruel despot, was banished from
Athens. He repaired to the court of King Darius, where he dwelt many
years. Now he came back, as guide and counsellor to the Persians,
hoping, perhaps, to become again a despot of Athens; but only, as the
fates decreed, to find a grave on the fatal field of Marathon.

The assault on Greece was a twofold one. The first was defeated by
nature, the second by man. A land expedition, led by the Persian general
Mardonius, crossed the Hellespont in the year 493 B.C., proposing to
march to Athens along the coast, and with orders to bring all that were
left alive of its inhabitants as captives to the great king. On marched
the great host, nothing doubting that Greece would fall an easy prey to
their arms. And as they marched along the land, the fleet followed them
along the adjoining sea, until the stormy and perilous promontory of
Mount Athos was reached.

No doubt the Greeks viewed with deep alarm this formidable progress.
They had never yet directly measured arms with the Persians, and dreaded
them more than, as was afterwards shown, they had reason to. But at
Mount Athos the deities of the winds came to their aid. As the fleet was
rounding that promontory, often fatal to mariners, a frightful hurricane
swooped upon it, and destroyed three hundred of its ships, while no less
than twenty thousand men became victims of the waves. Some of the crews
reached the shores, but of these many died of cold, and others were
slain and devoured by wild beasts, which roamed in numbers on that
uninhabited point of land. The land army, too, lost heavily from the
hurricane; and Mardonius, fearing to advance farther after this
disaster, inglor