The Persian Wars

1. The Background — Persia and the Rise of Persian Power

In the second half of the sixth century BC, the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great (r. 559–530 BC) and his successors conquered the entire Near East, including the Greek city-states of Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor (conquered by Cyrus in the 540s BC). Under the Persian king Darius I (r. 522–486 BC), the empire became the largest the world had yet seen, stretching from the Indus to the Aegean. The Ionian Greeks chafed under Persian rule and Persian-appointed tyrants, while the mainland Greek cities watched Persia's westward expansion with growing alarm. Persia had subjugated Thrace and Macedon, was threatening the Aegean islands, and seemed poised to absorb all of Greece (World History Encyclopedia, "Persian Wars," worldhistory.org/Persian_Wars/).

2. The Ionian Revolt (499–494 BC)

In 499 BC the Ionian city of Miletus, the richest of the Greek cities of Asia, rose in revolt against Persia under the leadership of Aristagoras, who had earlier failed to interest the Spartans but won aid from Athens and Eretria. The rebels marched on and burned Sardis, the seat of the Persian satrap — a direct challenge to Darius. (It was on this raid that Athenian help first gave Persia a grudge against Athens.) The revolt, however, was crushed: after a series of reverses the rebel fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Lade (494 BC), and Miletus itself was sacked and its population enslaved or deported. The failure of the Ionian Revolt showed the Greeks could not defeat Persia alone, but it also committed Sparta and Athens to hostility — and Darius, furious at the burning of Sardis, vowed to punish Athens and Eretria (World History Encyclopedia, "Battle of Lade," worldhistory.org/Battle_of_Lade/).

3. The First Persian Invasion — Marathon (490 BC)

In 492 BC Darius sent a first expedition under Mardonius to subdue Thrace and Macedon, but it was wrecked by a storm off Mount Athos. Two years later, in 490 BC, a great fleet under Datis and the king's nephew Artaphernes sailed directly across the Aegean. The Persians destroyed Eretria on Euboea and then landed on the plain of Marathon in Attica, about 40 km from Athens. The Athenians, outnumbered and with only the Plataeans as allies, marched out to meet them. Commanded by the ten generals — among them Miltiades, who persuaded his colleagues to fight — the hoplites charged the Persian line and won a stunning victory, driving the Persians back to their ships. According to tradition, the messenger Pheidippides ran the 26 miles from Marathon to Athens to announce the victory — "Rejoice, we conquer!" — before collapsing, the origin of the modern marathon race. Marathon proved that Greek hoplites could defeat Persian numbers and became the founding deliverance of Greek freedom (World History Encyclopedia, "Battle of Marathon," worldhistory.org/marathon/).

Marathon's aftermath was significant at home too: Themistocles, the rising Athenian statesman, argued that the real danger was Persia's naval power and persuaded the Athenians to use the new silver from the mines of Laurium to build a great fleet of 200 triremes — the warships that would save Greece a decade later. Darius died in 486 BC before he could renew the invasion, but his son and successor Xerxes inherited his father’s vow.

4. The Second Invasion — Thermopylae and Artemisium (480 BC)

In 480 BC Xerxes launched a massive invasion on an unprecedented scale — according to Herodotus hundreds of thousands of men (modern estimates are far lower, perhaps 100,000–300,000) supported by a huge fleet. He bridged the Hellespont with boats, cut a canal across the Athos peninsula, and rolled south. The Greek states, unifying in a rare moment of cooperation under Spartan leadership, decided to make their stand.

The famous rearguard action was fought at the narrow pass of Thermopylae in late August 480 BC. There a small allied force — famously 300 Spartans under King Leonidas, joined by several hundred Thespians and Thebans and others — held the pass against the Persian horde for three days, until a Greek traitor (Ephialtes) showed the Persians a mountain path that let them surround the defenders. Leonidas, rather than retreat, chose death; he and his Spartans fought to the last, in what became the supreme example of Spartan courage and the most celebrated last stand in history. At the same time the Greek fleet held the Persians at the indecisive sea-fight of Artemisium before withdrawing (World History Encyclopedia, "Battle of Thermopylae," worldhistory.org/thermopylae/).

With the fall of the pass, Xerxes' army poured into central Greece. The Athenians, on Themistocles' advice, abandoned their city, evacuated their people to the island of Salamis and the Peloponnese, and watched as the Persians burned Athens, including the old temples on the Acropolis. The fate of Greece now rested on the fleet.

5. Salamis (September 480 BC) — The Great Naval Victory

At the narrow straits of Salamis, where the island of Salamis faces the Attic coast, Themistocles devised a brilliant stroke. Despite hesitation among the Greeks (many wished to retreat to defend the Peloponnese), he lured the confident Persian fleet — which far outnumbered the Greeks — into the narrow waters, where its size became a fatal disadvantage. In September 480 BC the Greek triremes, fighting in waters they knew intimately, rammed and sank much of the Persian fleet in a decisive victory. Xerxes, whose supply line depended on his navy, watched the disaster from his throne on the shore and, fearing to be cut off, withdrew with the bulk of his army to Asia, leaving a large force in Greece under his general Mardonius to renew the war the following spring. Salamis remains one of the most decisive naval battles in history (World History Encyclopedia, "Battle of Salamis," worldhistory.org/salamis/).

6. Plataea and Mycale (479 BC) — The Final Victory

In the summer of 479 BC the Persian land forces under Mardonius were confronted by the largest Greek army ever assembled, commanded by the Spartan regent Pausanias. After days of manoeuvring on the plain of Plataea in Boeotia, the two armies clashed. In the decisive battle, the Spartans and their allies destroyed Mardonius' army; Mardonius himself was killed, and the Persian expedition shattered. On the same day, tradition records, the Greek fleet defeated the Persians at the Battle of Mycale on the Ionian coast, completing the double victory. With Plataea and Mycale, the Persian invasion was over and the freedom of mainland Greece was secured. Persia would remain a power, but it would never again seriously threaten the Greek mainland (World History Encyclopedia, "Battle of Plataea," worldhistory.org/Plataea/).

7. The Aftermath — From Deliverance to Empire

The Persian Wars were a turning point in world history. They saved the young institutions of Greek democracy, philosophy and culture from absorption into the Persian empire, and they gave the Greeks a transcendent victory that defined their identity. The temples burned by the Persians were left as visible memorials (“the Persian destruction” layers are still visible on the Acropolis), and the new Greek confidence expressed itself in the age of unparalleled creativity that followed. The war also created the conditions for Athens’ dominance: the Delian League, founded to protect the Greeks from Persia, would become the Athenian empire — the basis of the Golden Age — as told in the next volume.

7b. The Trireme and Greek Naval Power

Victory in the Persian Wars was in large part a naval victory, and it rested on a remarkable warship: the trireme. The trireme (“three-oared”) was a long, narrow, fast galley about 37 metres (120 feet) long, rowed by some 170 oarsmen arranged in three banks, with a bronze-tipped ram at the bow; it was not a heavily built merchant ship but a purpose-built war machine, capable of the high speeds and swift manoeuvres that allowed its crew to ram and shatter enemy hulls. The Phoenicians of the Levant, subjects of Persia, were the finest seamen of the ancient world and gave Xerxes his huge fleet; the Greeks — above all the Athenians, whose 200 triremes built by Themistocles from the silver of Laurium formed the largest Greek navy — matched them with skill and with the decisive advantage of fighting in the narrow, familiar waters of their own seas. At Salamis the Greeks won not by numbers but by position and seamanship: in the narrow strait the Persian fleet, crowded and unable to deploy, was rammed and destroyed in close-quarters fighting led by the Athenian and Aeginetan squadrons. The trireme, so expensive that only the richest states and (in time) the Athenian empire could maintain great fleets, was the instrument by which Athens rose to maritime power, and the rowers — the poorer citizens (“the naval mob”) — became a political force that underwrote radical democracy. The place Piraeus, Athens’ fortified port, and the Long Walls that bound it to the city were the physical expression of this new naval empire (World History Encyclopedia, "Trireme," worldhistory.org/trireme/).

7c. Herodotus — "Father of History" and His Sources

Everything we know of the Persian Wars passes through the lense of Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 484–425 BC), whom Cicero called the "father of history." Written probably in the 440s–430s BC, his Histories (literally "inquiries") set out both to record the great deeds of Greeks and barbarians and to explain why they fought; and although the work is dominated by the war, it is also a vast ethnographic treasury of the peoples of the Persian empire — Egyptians, Persians, Scythians, Babylonians, Libyans — and of the geography, customs and marvels of their worlds. Herodotus travelled widely (he knew Egypt, the Levant, and the Greek world) and drew on oral traditions, inscriptions, priests, and local guides; he reported rival versions of events and, famously, sometimes said "I do not believe this story" — but he also repeated tall tales he had heard, and his numbers (above all the size of Xerxes’ army) are certainly exaggerated. The task of the modern historian is therefore to use Herodotus with care, correcting his numbers from reason and archaeology while cherishing his invaluable witness to the events, the actors and the mental world of the age. It was Herodotus who preserved the stories of Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis in the form that made them immortal, and with him history-writing itself was born (World History Encyclopedia, "Herodotus," worldhistory.org/Herodotus/).

7d. The Persian Empire — Scale and Administration

The Persian empire that Xerxes led against Greece was the largest the world had yet seen, and understanding it clarifies the Greek achievement. Founded by Cyrus the Great (c. 559–530 BC) and extended by Cambyses and Darius I, it stretched from the Indus to the Aegean, and administered its many peoples through a system of satrapies (provinces under governors, the satraps), the Royal Road running from Susa to Sardis with its relay stations, a single imperial coinage, and the tolerance of local religions and customs. Darius reorganised the empire with the Code of laws, taxation and the great public works (including the new capital at Persepolis), and at its height the empire’s population and resources dwarfed those of Greece. The Persian army combined famous infantry (“the Immortals,” a corps of 10,000 royal guards), cavalry and archers, and the empire’s fleets drew on the Phoenicians, Egyptians and Ionian Greeks. That Greece — small, divided, democratic — was able not only to survive but to defeat this colossus was, in the ancient world’s own view, one of the most astonishing events in history, and it underpinned the Greeks’ conviction (expressed by Herodotus) of their own superiority in freedom over the "slaves" of the Great King. The Persian empire, defeated in Greece, nonetheless endured until Alexander destroyed it two centuries later (World History Encyclopedia, "Achaemenid Empire," worldhistory.org/Achaemenid_Empire/).

8. Selected Sources & Further Reading

I think it is better for all men to be brave rather than to flee, and to die nobly rather than to live in disgrace.— attributed to Leonidas at Thermopylae, in Herodotus (trans. A. D. Godley, Perseus)