Tom Holland

And, you know, it's a success.

The entire Persian fleet is captured and sails out of the Persian harbour and goes off and becomes, you know, it's now in the hands of the rebels.

So that's a promising, clever, you know, admirable step.

Unexpected.

But also, Aristagoras is looking westwards across the Aegean and he's thinking, well, we might be able to get support there.

And so in the winter of 499, he boards a warship and he sets sail across the Aegean for mainland Greece.

And this is going to prove a very, very fateful mission because it is going to end up drawing the infant democracy of Athens into direct conflict with the king of kings.

Yeah, because Athens, like the Ionian cities, had until very recently been subject to the rule of a tyrannous, of a kind of autocratic strongman.

And this had been an aristocrat called Hippias.

And then in 510, Hippias had been expelled from the city by a great popular uprising.

And three years later, in 507, this radical political experiment had been introduced, a democracy.

So Athens is the prototype for the democratic regime that the Ionians are now dreaming of installing in their own cities.

Again, a bit like the French Revolution, the revolutionary regime in France attracts anxiety from all the neighbouring powers, the Austrians and the Prussians and so on, and they try to crush it.

This is what Athens' neighbours had tried to do.

Thebes, neighbouring city, absolutely hates the Athenians, and Sparta, the great military power in the south, in the Peloponnese.

Amazingly, the Athenians, despite the fact that up until this point they'd been absolute losers as soldiers, they defeat the Thebans and even more amazingly they see off the Spartans, kind of very Battle of Valmy style where the French defeat the Prussians.

Herodotus writes a very famous passage about how and why the Athenians had gone from being losers to complete winners.

He writes, the Athenians, while subjects of a tyrant, had been no more proficient in battle than any of their neighbors.

But then, once liberated from tyranny, they emerged as supreme by far, proof enough that the downtrodden, since their labors are all in the service of a master, will never willingly pull their weight, whereas free men,

because they have a stake in their own exertions, will set to them with relish.