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's 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 towards the setting sun, called the Athenians, had
dared to help his rebels in Ionia against him, and that they had
plundered and burnt 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 510 B.C., 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) [Herod. lib. v. c. 96.] 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