On the Threshold of a Conflict Between the East and the West. Herodotus’ Stories of Asians’ Attempts to Involve Sparta in War with the Persian Empire

Before the Greek-Persian wars, the Ionians had tried to engage the Hellenic states of the Balkan Greece in the flaring advance of a group of poleis in Asia Minor against the Persian rule, the Ionic revolt resulted in a large-scale (within the ancient world) conflict between the East and the West and unleashed a half-century’s confrontation between the Hellenes and the Achaemenid Empire. Aware of the ‘enormity’ of the Persian wars in the world history, Herodotus chose a topic of a Homeric scale to be accounted of epically. His historical and ethnographic text is made up of various myths, yarns, legends, anecdotes and amusing and edifying short stories. This article dwells on the well-known episode from Herodotus’ Histories about the bronze tablet that Aristagoras, the tyrant of Miletus, had brought from Ionia to Sparta to show to King Cleomenes (Herod. 5. 49). Aristagoras sought to engage the Spartans in a conflict with Persians by using this peculiar πίναξ which was an archaic geographic proto-map meant to persuade Cleomenes to set out on a dangerous military march. The map on the χάλκεος πίναξ showed the proximity to the lands that the Spartans were to reach together with the rebellious Ionians. Yet the King rejected the request and asked to indicate precisely the distance. Herodotus takes an ironic stand on the Ionic petitioner: if Aristagoras did count on engaging the Spartans, he should have concealed the actual state of affairs and tried to achieve the desired effect by using his deceptive ‘map’. According to the author of the article, the novella of Aristagoras’ mission in Sparta and the bronze tablet is presented in the Histories as a drama: with dialogues, urgings, attempts made by the protagonist (the tyrant of Miletus) to get King Cleomenes interested and win him over, yet Aristagoras’ designs failed. The moral of Herodotus’ parable about Aristagoras, Cleomenes, his daughter Gorgo and the ‘geographical map’ can be interpreted as follows: beware of the Ionians bringing fake tablets. But in Athens everything turned out differently. There Aristagoras’ mission was successful. Athenians sent Ionians 20 ships, which, as Herodotus writes in Homer’s language, became ‘the beginning of the disasters’ (ἀρχὴ κακῶν) of all Hellenes and barbarians (Herod. 5. 97. 3) – the beginning of a great conflict between Europe and Asia.