the Great King’s bridge of boats across the Danube?”
“Yes! Darius, puffed up from his conquests in India, had led his great cumbersome army into Scythia. Of course he couldn’t catch the Scythian horsemen, who harried him so mercilessly he was lucky to escape.” (Ancestors of the Cossacks, thought Jason, remembering what he knew of Darius’s invasion of the Ukraine in 513 b.c.) “He’d ordered his subject Greek tyrants—including me—to build that bridge, and await his return before the horrible winter of that land set in. I proposed to the others that we destroy the bridge and leave him stranded north of the river, to either freeze or be feathered with Scythian arrows. We would have been free! But that crawling toad Histaeus, tyrant of Miletus, persuaded the others that my plan was too bold, too risky. So the bridge remained, and the tyrants welcomed back their master.”
“Including you,” Landry ventured.
“Of course. Do you take me for a fool? Yes, I groveled with the best of them. But later I joined the rebellion Histaeus instigated through his nephew Aristagoras.” Miltiades’s scowl lightened as though at a pleasant recollection. “The only good outcome was what happened to Histaeus after the rebellion had been crushed. He had the effrontery to demand that the Persian satrap send him to Susa to appeal to his old friend the Great King! The satrap complied—by sending his head there, pickled and packed in salt.”
“There was one other good outcome,” Landry demurred. “You yourself escaped.”
“Yes—twice. First from the Persians, and then from the Athenian Assembly after arriving here! This, even though after capturing the islands of Lemnos and Imbros from the Persians I gave them to Athens! I have Themistocles to thank for my acquittal. I’ll never forget that, even though he and I don’t agree on everything.”
“Like the fact that you persuaded the Assembly to execute the Persian emissaries who came demanding submission last year,” Chantal suggested diffidently. “He mentioned that he had reservations about that.” Even Miltiades looked slightly taken aback at a woman speaking up unbidden, but after a slight pause he continued.
“A lot of people discovered that they have reservations, after the fact. They said the person of an ambassador is sacred, and that we’d brought down the disfavor of the gods on ourselves.” Miltiades’s scowl was back at full intensity. “They just don’t understand. In a city like this, so traditionally riven by the feuds of aristocratic cliques, so uncertain of its new democracy that hasn’t had time to acquire habitual loyalties. . . .” Miltiades seemed to have difficulty putting it into words. In this land with so few rivers worthy of the name, there was no metaphor of burning bridges. “We needed to make our rejection irrevocable, by taking a dramatic step that left us with no alternative but to resist. Besides which, as a practical matter, it aligned us unbreakably with Sparta, which had killed the emissaries without even the formality of a trial.”
Jason was silent, remembering the twentieth-century debate over the pros and cons of the Allies’ “unconditional surrender” policy in World War II—a debate which hadn’t entirely died down among historians even in the twenty-fourth century. Miltiades had argued the Athenians into something like a mirror image of that: unconditional defiance.
“Can Sparta truly be relied on?” asked Landry, probing again for an historical insight.
“If Cleomenes were still alive, I’d be sure of it,” said Miltiades, referring to one of the Spartan kings, of whom there were always two. “Yes, I know, he was an enemy of the democracy in its earlier days—tried to force us to take Hippias back as tyrant! But . . . well. . . .” Fifth-century b.c. Ionic Greek also didn’t have anything about politics making strange bedfellows. “Lately, he was as staunch an enemy of Persia as any. And four years ago he did us all a favor by crushing Argos, which was threatening to stab us all in the back by joining the Persians at the Battle of Sepeia.” Miltiades chuckled. “He attacked them by surprise on the third night of a seven-day truce. When someone asked him about it, he said he’d sworn to the truce for seven days but hadn’t said anything about nights! And then when the Argive survivors retreated into the sacred grove of Argos, he ordered his helots to pile brush around the grove and burn it.”
“How horrible!” exclaimed Chantal.
“Exactly. Burning a sacred grove was just one more affront to the gods, added to the Spartans’ throwing