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means the Great King was able to get information from the frontiers and send orders back in mere days, which seemed supernatural to the Greeks.”
    “I’m beginning to understand why the Ionian tyrants had to kowtow to him,” Mondrago said seriously. “The c apo di tutti capi. ”
    “Yes. But by so kowtowing they were swimming against the tide of the Greeks’ inveterate xenophobia, and thereby running the risk of alienating their own people. So their rule was always teetering on a knife-edge, and they were ready to jump either way: gain still greater favor with their master; or, failing that, go into rebellion out of sheer desperation.
    “In 500 b.c. Histaeus, the tyrant of Miletus, the largest and richest of the Ionian cities, tried the first option. He himself was living at the Persian court in a kind of gilded hostage situation—they gave him the title ‘Royal Table-Companion’—but through his nephew Aristagoras, who was standing in for him at Miletus, he offered to expedite a conquest of the Aegean island of Naxos, where he had contacts among the disgruntled aristocracy. As it turned out, Aristagoras made a total botch of the expedition. Rather than sit with folded hands and await the usual fate of Persian puppets who failed, Aristagoras reversed himself: he declared himself a convert to democracy of the kind Athens had had for the past eight years. He also called on the other Ionian cities to establish democracies and join Miletus in rebellion.”
    “The expression ‘big brass ones’ comes to mind,” commented Jason.
    “Indeed. The rebellion spread like wildfire through Ionia and beyond, and Aristagoras persuaded the Athenians to come to the aid of the new democracies. In 498 b.c. they sent an expeditionary force which marched inland and burned Sardis, the seat of Artaphernes, the local Persian satrap, or governor.” Landry caused the cursor to flash on Sardis.
    “Mission accomplished,” Mondrago remarked drily.
    “Not quite. The town was burned but the citadel held out and the Greeks were forced to retreat to the coast. On the way, they were cut to pieces by the Persian cavalry.”
    Mondrago looked perplexed. “I’ve studied the ancient Greek style of warfare, and I’ve always gotten the impression that the Persians had no answer to the hoplite, or heavy infantryman. That seems to be the pattern all the way up to Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire.”
    “One gets that impression because, as you’ve pointed out, the Greeks won in the end,” Landry explained with a chuckle. “It’s always the ultimate winner’s successes that are remembered. It comes as a shocking surprise to most people that George Washington was soundly trounced whenever he came up against professional British troops in the kind of open-field set-piece battle they were organized and trained to fight. However, your point is well taken as applied to the phalanx of hoplites. When it could be brought to bear under the right conditions—head-to-head combat on a narrow front—it was indeed unstoppable by anything except another phalanx. But it was a rigid, inflexible formation, and the hoplites who comprised it, loaded down with fifty to seventy pounds of armor and weapons, were incapable of rapid maneuvering.”
    Landry manipulated his controls again. An image appeared on the screen, superimposed on the map. It showed a man who seemed to have stepped out of a Grecian vase-painting. He were greaves on his lower legs, a cuirass with curving metal shoulder-plates, and a face-enclosing helmet with an impressive-looking but (to Jason’s eye) impractical-seeming horsehair crest. He carried a large round shield and a spear a couple of feet longer than he was. At his side hung a leaf-shaped sword. The image represented modern scholarship’s best reconstruction, which had turned out to be very much like those vase paintings after all.
    “When hoplites armed and equipped like this couldn’t form up, as in the