For the Greeks, the early 5th century BC was the period of their battle against Persia and Carthage. After the Ionian Rising (500-494 BC), the Persian king Darius turned his attention to the northern coast of the Aegean. In 492 BC, Thrace and Macedon were turned into Persian territory. But Darius’ attempt to bring the entire Greek peninsula under Persian hegemony and punish Athens for the help which they had offered to the
Figure 18 An Etruscan helmet dedicated to Zeus of Olympia by the Syracusans (474 BC). This bronze helmet was found in the sanctuary of Olympia, and is now in the local museum. In the 6th and early 5th century BC, Carthaginians and Etruscans cooperated in order to halt Greek expansion in the Western Mediterranean. A couple of Greek victories thwarted this alliance: first, in 480, the Syracusans crushed the Carthaginians in the sea battle of Himera, on the Sicilian coast, and next, in 474, the Etruscans in the battle of Cyme, on the Italian coast near Naples. Hieron, the tyrant of Syracuse, dedicated some of the booty to Zeus in his sanctuary in Olympia, as was the Greek custom: part of the spoils of war were dedicated to the gods, to honor and thank them, but also to advertise one’s victories to the large numbers of people who visited large Panhellenic sanctuaries such as Olympia. Inscriptions helped to spread the message. The text on this helmet says: “Hieron, son of Deinomenes, and the Syracusans [have dedicated this helmet] to Zeus, from Cyme, [captured] from the Etruscans.” Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum
Greeks of Asia Minor ended in failure. After landing on the Attic coast, a Persian army was crushingly defeated in the battle of Marathon (490 BC). This victory of the Athenian hoplites showed that the Greeks were not going to give in without a struggle, and that the heavily armed Greek phalanx was superior when fielded against an enemy army consisting largely of lightly armed soldiers.
The Greek gained a breathing space of a decade. When it became clear that the Persians, now under their King Xerxes, would mount a large-scale attack aimed at conquering all of Greece, the Greeks tried to form to a defensive alliance. Almost all of the Peloponnese, that is, Sparta and its allies, Athens, and a number of states in Central Greece joined this alliance. In 480 BC, the Persians attacked byway of Thrace and were gaining ground. Troops of the Greek alliance, led by the Spartan king Leonidas, tried to halt the Persian advance at the pass of Thermopylae, the narrow entrance to Central Greece between the mountains and the sea. But this line of defense quickly fell because of treason, and the Persians could advance to the south without encountering much opposition. They captured Athens, from which the population had been evacuated, and destroyed the Acropolis with its temple of Athena.
The tables were turned at the sea battle of Salamis, a decisive victory for the Athenians. The decisive role was played by the Athenian war fleet. This consisted of 200 ships of the trieres, or trireme type, that is, a warship with three rows of oarsmen above each other. The trireme was in fact a ram vessel, with the large number of rowers providing the speed needed to successfully ram and sink the opposing ship in battle. Boarding the enemy vessel was also a possibility, as the trireme also carried a number of soldiers on board. It testifies to the strategic insight of the Athenian politician Themistocles that in the years before the Persian invasion he had urged his fellow citizens to build a strong fleet, to be financed from the profits of silver mining in the south of Attica. The phalanx of hoplites showed its superiority once more: in the spring following Salamis, the Persians, who had wintered in Greece, were beaten in the battle of Plataeae, where a Greek coalition led by Pausanias, regent in Sparta, turned out to be too strong for the Persian forces. Meanwhile, Carthage had opened a second front on Sicily, but in 480 BC the Greeks prevailed against that enemy too, in the battle of Himera.
After Salamis and Plataeae, the Persian policy became much more restrained, and subsequent aggression was initiated by the Greeks, but without much success. In the west, Carthage remained a dangerous opponent, even after Himera, but for the time being the Greeks had gained the upper hand. The Etruscans were defeated in 474 BC by the fleet of Syracuse in the battle of Cyme off the coast of southern Italy. This Etruscan defeat gave Rome the opportunity of attacking the Etruscan hegemony in Central and Northern Italy. But Rome still had a long way to go. The Greek successes in the first quarter of the 5th century BC benefited Athens above all others, by giving it the chance to establish their hegemony across the Aegean. Sparta, on the other hand, afraid that Spartan power on the Peloponnese might be weakened by too many adventures abroad, withdrew in isolation. That the Spartan fears were not groundless is shown by the large rebellion of the helots in the years between 464 and 459 BC.
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