from PART II - THE GREEK STATES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
ATHENS BETWEEN THE INVASIONS BY PERSIA
Miltiades was the hero of the hour at Athens. The so-called Memorial to Miltiades, erected at the critical point in the Battle of Marathon, ensured his fame for posterity and was destined to fire the ambition of many able Athenians. It was a unique tribute by the Athenian people, the more so because Miltiades was a man with a chequered past: eponymous archon at the age of twenty-five or so under the tyrannical regime of the Pisistratidae in 524/3; ruler of the Chersonese 516–510 and 496–493 B.C.; winner of an Olympic victory in the chariot-race; and tried but acquitted on a charge of ‘tyranny’ over the Greeks in the Chersonese on his return to Athens in 493. At the height of his popularity he made a proposal which was accepted by the Assembly probably in the autumn of 490: to assume the offensive at sea against the island states which had sided with Persia voluntarily or perforce. Reasons for this strategy are easy to supply. Datis and Artaphernes had shown how vulnerable Athens was to a seaborne attack, and there was good reason to suppose that the Persian fleet might return with a larger expeditionary force and base itself upon Aegina, in order to make a landing on the coast of Attica. The best form of defence for Athens was to close the approaches by winning over the island states in the Cyclades (Themistocles was to follow the same strategy in the autumn of 480).
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