But Aristagoras was unequal to the occasion; and the struggle for independence, which had promised so fair, was soon put down.  Despite a naval victory gained by the Greeks over the Phoenician fleet off Cyprus, that island was recovered by the Persians within a year.  Despite a courage and a perseverance worthy of a better fate, the Carians were soon afterwards forced to succumb.  The reduction of the Hellespontine Greeks and of the AEolians followed.  The toils now closed around Ionia, and her cities began to be attacked one by one; whereupon the incapable Aristagoras, deserting the falling cause, betook himself to Europe, where a just Nemesis pursued him:  he died by a Thracian sword.  After this the climax soon arrived.  Persia concentrated her strength upon Miletus, the cradle of the revolt, and the acknowledged chief of the cities; and though her sister states came gallantly to her aid, and a fleet was collected which made it for a while doubtful which way victory might incline, yet all was of no avail.  Laziness and insubordination began and treachery completed the work which all the force of Persia might have failed to accomplish; the combined Ionian fleet was totally defeated in the battle of Lade; and soon after Miletus herself fell.  The bulk of her inhabitants were transported into inner Asia and settled upon the Persian Gulf.  The whole Ionian coast was ravaged, and the cities punished by the loss of their most beautiful maidens and youths.  The islands off the coast were swept of their inhabitants.  The cities on the Hellespont and Sea of Marmora were burnt.  Miltiades barely escaped from the Chersonese with the loss of his son and his kingdom.  The flames of rebellion were everywhere ruthlessly trampled out; and the power of the Great King was once more firmly established over the coasts and islands of the Propontis and the Egean Sea.

It remained, however, to take vengeance upon the foreigners who had dared to lend their aid to the king’s revolted subjects, and had borne a part in the burning of Sardis.  The pride of the Persians felt such interference as an insult of the grossest kind:  and the tale may well be true that Darius, from the time that he first heard the news, employed an officer to bid him daily “remember Athens.”  The schemes which he had formerly entertained with respect to the reduction of Greece recurred with fresh force to his mind; and the task of crushing the revolt was no sooner completed than he proceeded to attempt their execution.  Selecting Mardonius, son of Gobryas the conspirator, and one of his own sons-in-law, for general, he gave him the command of a powerful expedition, which was to advance by way of Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly, against Eretria and Athens.  At the same time, with a wisdom which we should scarcely have expected in an Oriental, he commissioned him, ere he quitted Asia, to depose the tyrants who bore rule in the Greek cities, and to allow the establishment of democracies in their stead.  Such a measure was excellently calculated to preserve the fidelity of the Hellenic population and to prevent any renewal of disturbance.  It gave ample employment to unquiet spirits by opening to them a career in their own states—­and it removed the grievance which, more than anything else, had produced the recent rebellion.