11
Of course there were still dangers.  But the Persians knew exactly
where to look for them.  Or so they thought.
Like the Babylonians before them, the Persians were blind to the
barbarians, and expected trouble only from nations celebrated for
military might.  They forgot that the real threat often comes from a
people everyone has totally dismissed.  So the great Persian leader
Darius didn't even bother with the scarcely civilized yokels who
squabbled interminably on a bunch of islands and rocky coasts to the
west.  It was a big mistake.
The western upstarts provoked a fight.  When some of the cities
under Persian rule revolted, the insignificant foreigners sent a fleet to
help them out.  Then these outlanders proceeded to burn down Sardis,
capital of the western segment of the Persian Empire.18
The Persians, determined to teach the impertinent nobodies a
lesson, ordered a naval detachment to administer punishment.  Like
the group of helicopters once dispatched to rescue American hostages
in Iran, the invincible Persian fleet ran into technical problems.  It was
wrecked in a storm.  In 490 B.C., the Persians tried again.  This time,
they sailed off to the homeland of the upstarts and clobbered one of
their pitifully backward towns into the turf.  But the nobodies turned
the tables.  They sent the invading Persian troops running and
destroyed seven of the Empire's momentarily victorious ships.19
The Persians had had it.  They were determined to make these
half-baked rednecks from a land scarcely marked on the map rue the
day they tangled with Persia.  Emperor Xerxes gathered an armada of
mind-boggling size.  Its ships numbered well over a thousand.20
What's more, according to Herodotus, the Persians put together an
army of 1,700,000 men,21 including troops from every territory of the
Empire--Arabia, Bactria, Media, Assyria, Ethiopia and Libya.22   Even
the distant Indians contributed their heaviest transport vehicle--the
war elephant.23
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