The Archaic period of Greek history conventionally concludes with the Persian invasion of Greece in 480-479. The war itself and the events which gave rise to it are the primary subject of Herodotus’ Histories, written approximately half a century later. It has long been recognized that the non-contemporaneity of this source, together with the fact that its author almost certainly had no direct or unmediated experience of the Persian Empire, dictates caution on the part of the ancient historian, although earlier claims that it is nothing but a gossamer of fiction no longer command much support. The problem is that we have very little from the Persian side to balance Herodotus’ account, save for inscriptions and artistic reliefs, which portray the Greeks of Asia Minor (the Yauna) as subjects of the Great King of Persia. The “events” in Herodotus - especially for the years 480-479 - are relatively uncontroversial, but the specific emphasis and motivations given to them may ultimately tell us more about how later Greeks chose to commemorate them than it reveals anything about Persian foreign policy.
For Herodotus, the underlying causes of the Persian invasion go back to the Lydians, a population that inhabited much of what is now Turkey with their capital at Sardis. The Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor first experienced Lydian aggression with attacks against Miletus and Smyrna and the capture of Colophon during the reign of the Lydian king Gyges in the first half of the seventh century. About a century later, during the reign of Croesus, the remaining cities - though not the offshore islands of the eastern Aegean - were conquered and made tributary to the Lydian Empire. But Croesus’ empire was itself
A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. 1200-479 BCE, Second Edition. Jonathan M. Hall. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Attacked and conquered by the Persian king Cyrus II. Although the traditional date of 547/6 for this event has recently been questioned, excavations at Sardis do confirm a destruction date in the mid-sixth century. Following the defeat of Croesus, around half of the inhabitants of Phocaea decided to abandon their city and sail to Corsica (Herodotus 1.164-5), but the remaining Greek cities of Asia Minor were incorporated within the Persian Empire which, by the end of the sixth century, stretched from what is now Bulgaria in the northwest, to Afghanistan in the east, and Egypt and Libya in the south.
The Persians, from Anshan in the modern Iranian province of Fars, were an originally pastoralist, Indo-European-speaking people closely related to the Elamites and Medes who, along with the Babylonians, were the inheritors of the collapsed Assyrian Empire. According to Herodotus (1.130.2), the Persians had formerly been subjects of the Medes, though Near Eastern texts offer no confirmation of this. A Babylonian chronicle does, however, agree with Herodotus (1.127) that in 550/49, the Median king Ishtumegu (Astyages) marched against Cyrus, king of Anshan, and was defeated following the revolt of his army. Unlike the earlier Assyrian Empire, the Persian Empire generally respected the variety of customs, languages, religious beliefs, and political organizations that existed among its various subjects provided that they remained loyal and met the tribute quotas that were levied on them and that were formalized during the reign of Darius (Herodotus 3.89-117). The Jews regarded Cyrus as chosen by Yahweh to rebuild the second temple of Jerusalem (Isaiah 44.28-45.4), while in Egypt, Cyrus’ son Cambyses adopted the Egyptian throne-name Mesutire (child of the god Re). A letter from Darius to Gadatas, satrap (governor) of Ionia, threatens to punish him for levying taxes from the “Sacred Gardeners of Apollo” (ML 12). Some intellectuals fled what they perceived as servitude to an eastern despot: Xenophanes and Pythagoras, for example, emigrated to the west. But Heraclitus remained in Ephesus and, in general, the Persians’ reliance on local administrators was beneficial to the aristocracies of Ionia. Miletus in particular managed to negotiate a particularly favorable status with Cyrus (Herodotus 1.141.4).
In 499, the Greek cities rose up in rebellion against their Persian masters. According to Herodotus (5.28-38), the prime instigators were Aristagoras, the tyrant of Miletus, and his father-in-law, Histiaeus. The former was anxious to save face after failing to capture the Cyclades for Persia; the latter was keen to escape the semi-imprisonment that the Persian king Darius had imposed on him in Susa and to return to Miletus, the city that he had ruled before Aristagoras. Attempts to secure the aid of the Spartans failed (5.49-54), but Athens and Eretria answered the call to arms, dispatching twenty and five ships respectively (5.97). Initially, the Ionian Revolt looked as if it might be successful: a large number of Greek cities from the Hellespont in the north to Cyprus in the south rose up and Sardis was sacked. But north-south communications were hampered by the river valleys that punctuate the Anatolian coast and, once the Persians’ Phoenician fleet was mobilized, Cyprus was easily recaptured. The final major battle took place in 494 near the island of Lade, off the coast of
Miletus, where a combined fleet of 353 ships confronted 600 Phoenician vessels. The one hundred ships of Chios, stationed in the center of the Greek line, put up a valiant fight but, with the departure of forty-nine Samian vessels even before combat began, the Greek effort eventually collapsed (6.5-17). The revolt was over and Miletus, under siege for six years, was sacked and its inhabitants killed or enslaved (6.18). The shock of the event was felt particularly at Athens, which viewed itself as the metropolis of Miletus: the outpouring of grief that was provoked by the production, in 493/2, of a tragedy entitled The Capture of Miletus resulted in its playwright, Phrynichus, being fined 1,000 drachmas (6.21).
In Herodotus’ narrative, the ships that Athens and Eretria sent to aid the lonians “were the beginning of evils for both Greeks and barbarians” (5.97) since Darius resolved to punish the Greeks for their insolence. In reality, Darius may not have needed an excuse: his doomed campaign against Scythia in the 510s (4.1-142) reveals the imperialist ambitions he harbored in general; in the same decade, a Persian force had intervened in the internal politics of Samos (3.142-49) and Artaphernes, the Persian governor of Sardis, was perfectly happy to loan Aristagoras a fleet and troops for his expedition to subjugate the Cyclades. Furthermore, in 492, Darius’ nephew and son-in-law, Mardonius, began establishing vassal states in Thrace, Macedonia, and Thasos. It is however true that, alongside Naxos, it was Eretria and Athens that were the main objectives of the Persian naval expedition that set out in 490 under the command of Datis and Artaphernes and, in the case of Athens, it is possible that the intention was to punish the city for having violated its act of submission in ca. 507 (p. 241). After subjugating the city of Carystus on Euboea, the city of Eretria was betrayed to the Persians after a seven-day siege, its temples plundered and sacked, and its inhabitants enslaved and shipped off to the eastern reaches of the Persian Empire (6.99-101, 6.119). The Persian fleet then sailed on to Marathon, accompanied by the former tyrant, Hippias, who no doubt entertained hopes of being reinstalled in the city as a Persian vassal (6.102).
Something in the region of 9,000 Athenian troops marched to the Marathon area and set up camp near the sanctuary of Heracles to the south of the coastal plain. The long-distance runner Phidippides was dispatched to seek the help of the Spartans, though they claimed that the festival of the Carnea prevented them from marching out before the full moon; 1,000 soldiers from the Boeotian city of Plataea did, however, come to the Athenians’ aid. Ancient accounts, anxious to glorify the heroism and bravery of the Athenian hoplite, invariably exaggerate the numbers of Persians that they faced, though the Persian army is likely to have outnumbered the Athenians and Plataeans by at least two to one. The Athenians were brigaded in the ten new tribal regiments that Cleisthenes had instituted, with overall command rotating among the ten strategoi or regimental generals. Opinion was divided among the strategoi as to whether or not to wait for Spartan reinforcements, and each of the generals seems to have been reluctant to commit Athenian forces against a numerically superior enemy. Indeed, Datis, concluding that the Athenians were not going to risk a battle, re-embarked his cavalry on the transport ships.
Fearing, perhaps, that the Persian forces were heading for Phaleron, at that time the harbor of Athens, the general Miltiades gave the order for the Athenians to charge the one mile of no-man’s land so that the Persians would have less time to deploy their archers. To avoid being outflanked, the Athenians decided to weaken their center and strengthen their wings. The result was that the Persians easily broke through the center, where the tribal regiments commanded by Aristides and Themistocles were stationed, while the wings wheeled around and attacked the Persians in the rear. Routed, the Persians fled back to their ships but became bogged down in the marshes around the Kynosoura peninsula where their fleet was stationed. One hundred and ninety-two Athenians, including the polemarkhos Callimachus, fell and were buried on the battlefield with heroic honors. The toll on the Persian side was much heavier - the figure that tradition handed down was 6,400 dead. Although the Persians re-embarked and attempted to sail round Cape Sunium in order to reach Athens before the Athenian troops had the chance to regroup, they were forestalled. After a few days at anchor off Phaleron, the fleet sailed back to Asia Minor.
The Athenians were to gloat over their victory for centuries to come: the Marathonomakhai (“Marathon fighters”) were held up as heroic exemplars of courage and discipline. From the Persian perspective, the defeat at Marathon was hardly a major catastrophe but it does seem to have irked the Persian court since, shortly after coming to the throne in 486, Darius’ son and successor, Xerxes, decided to launch a new campaign against his western neighbors. A much larger army was assembled, though undoubtedly far short of the figure of 1.7 million troops that Herodotus (7.60) records, and a massive fleet was mobilized to accompany the army on its long march round the coastline of the North Aegean (Map IV.1). The Hellespont and the River Strymon were bridged and a canal dug through the Athos promontory of the Chalcidice - partly to avoid the sort of losses that were incurred eight years earlier when some 300 Persian ships had been wrecked by storms off the peninsula (Herodotus 6.44) and partly to demonstrate to the Greeks the sort of resources that Xerxes could employ. Demands for submission, in the form of earth and water, were sent to the Greek cities and many of them complied. The threat of conquest was imminent and it fell to the Spartans to organize resistance to Persian aggression.
Militarily speaking, Sparta was, at this time, the most powerful of the states in the Greek mainland. This was due, in part, to the city’s obsessive focus on martial training but it was also a consequence of a system of bilateral alliances that modern scholars term the Peloponnesian League. The origins of the League are often traced back to a supposed change of fortunes in Sparta’s ongoing conflict with the Arcadian city of Tegea (Herodotus 1.65). Certainly, by the time of the Persian invasion of Greece, Tegea was a Spartan ally, as were Sicyon, Elis, Corinth, Megara, and Aegina. The alliances were not forged on an equal basis: to judge from a fifth-century treaty with the Aetolian Erxadieis (SEG 26.41), allies were expected “to follow wherever the Lakedaimonians lead by land and sea and to have the same friends as they.” Nevertheless, after an embarrassing debacle in 506, when the Corinthians abandoned Cleomenes’
Expedition to restore Isagoras to power in Athens (5.74-5; see p. 241), it was decided that future military ventures would need the ratification of the League, with each ally having an equal vote (cf. Thucydides 1.141.6). In 481, the Spartans hurriedly assembled their Peloponnesian allies and a few other cities - Athens included - that had decided not to submit to Xerxes. Those present decided to terminate existing conflicts among themselves, especially the long-running conflict between Athens and Aegina; to seek the assistance of Argos, Syracuse, Corcyra, and Crete, all of whom ultimately refused to send help; and to confirm Spartan leadership over the expanded alliance.
At their next meeting in the spring of 480 at the Corinthian isthmus, the Greeks responded to a Thessalian request to send a force of 10,000 infantry to
Hold the Tempe pass between Macedonia and Thessaly but pulled back on the advice of the Macedonian king, Alexander I, who had come to terms with Persia and married his sister to a Persian nobleman. The Thessalians immediately offered submission to Xerxes and the Greeks concentrated their efforts further south, dispatching 7,000 infantry to the narrow Thermopylae pass and 271 triremes to a position just off Cape Artemisium in Euboea. The Persian superiority in numbers was to little avail in the narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea, and numerous Persian casualties were incurred in the four days during which the Greeks held the pass. In the end, however, a Malian informed Xerxes of a back pass through the mountains. Realizing that his forces had been encircled, the Spartan king and general Leonidas, who was commanding the Greek coalition, dismissed all the troops save for the 300 Spartan hop-lites he had brought with him, the Theban contingent, whose loyalty he suspected - rightly as it turned out - and the troops from Boeotian Thespiae, who refused to abandon the defense effort. So fundamental for Spartan propaganda was the image of the heroic Spartans fighting to the death that one can sometimes forget that Thermopylae was a total defeat. On the other hand, the Persian war machine had been temporarily delayed, incurring many casualties in the process, while an indecisive battle at sea off Artemisium, followed by a powerful storm, resulted in severe losses to the Persian fleet (Herodotus 8.6-16). It was, then, a somewhat reduced army that advanced south, capturing Boeotia and Attica and occupying and sacking the city of Athens itself.
The Persians found Athens virtually empty. Three years earlier, Themistocles had persuaded the assembly to use the proceeds from the discovery of a rich new silver vein in the Laurium mines to outfit a fleet of 200 triremes for the war against Aegina (Herodotus 7.144). Now, Themistocles persuaded his fellow citizens to transport their wives, families, and possessions to Salamis, Aegina, and Troezen, and to embark on the new ships. The Peloponnesian states wanted to pull back and defend the Corinthian isthmus, but Themistocles threatened to abandon the alliance and lead an Athenian colonization of Siris in South Italy unless the allies agreed to station their ships in the narrow straits between the Attic mainland and the island of Salamis. After luring the Persians into the straits, battle was joined on September 22, 480, and was vividly described by the playwright Aeschylus in his Persians, produced eight years later. The Greek ships were generally heavier than their Persian counterparts and they used their ramming techniques to devastating effect. The Persians are said to have lost some 200 ships, while their crews - many of whom could not swim - were drowned in the waters off Eleusis. The defeat was a major blow to the Persians’ ambitions and Xerxes returned home with half of his army, leaving the rest to winter in central Greece under the command of Mardonius.
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