Aristagoras came to Athens. CHAPTER III. THE IONIAN REVOLT. The mist which hangs over the history of the last decade of the sixth century lifts somewhat when the historian enters upon the narrative of the first ten years of the fifth; but it does not wholly vanish. Striking incidents occur indeed within the range of vision; but it is evident that beyond that range many events took place which had much influence on the history of the time; and the causes of the known lie largely in the region of the unknown. It is impossible to accept the accounts which Herodotus gives of the Ionian revolt or of the Marathonian campaign as a full history of either of those events. There are wide gaps in both narratives; and much that is recorded is wholly unaccounted for by anything in the rest of the story, or is, in some cases, wholly inconsistent with other facts which are mentioned. In tracing the course of events the modern inquirer is in the position of an astronomer who, having observed aberrations in the course of a far-off planet which cannot be accounted for by any known causes, seeks in the dim distance beyond for the disturbing influence. There, alas! the parallel between the two inquirers ceases, inasmuch as mathematical formulæ have not yet been made applicable to human action. The imperfect character of the information which Herodotus furnishes with regard to the story of the great Revolt is so evident that the historian himself must have been conscious of it. The peculiarity of his narrative was therefore due in all probability to some simple reason; either, it may be, to the difficulties which met him in his search for reliable information, and to his disinclination to insert in his history anything which he personally regarded as unreliable; or to a determination to deal with only the most prominent and striking incidents of a part of history which was, after all, merely a preface to the great tale which he had set himself to tell—the story of the war in Europe in the years 480 B.C. and 479 B.C. It is possible that both causes had their effect on his narrative. But if any judgment can be formed from data furnished by the general characteristics of the history as a whole, the first of these two suggested causes is the more credible. If, as is manifestly the case, he experienced the greatest difficulty in arriving at the truth concerning events which were comparatively recent at the time at which he wrote, and which had been of a nature such as to attract the attention of the whole world of his day, it is by no means surprising if he experienced much greater difficulty in getting at the facts concerning what occurred at an earlier date, and about events which, though striking, were infinitely less remarkable than those of the period which immediately followed them. The defects in the story of the Ionian revolt,[15] to whatever cause they be due, are in the main of three kinds:—