Between 527 and 479 BC, Darius fails to defeat Athens, and the cities of Greece unite against his son Xerxes
THE PERSIAN EMPIRE, bulging out in almost all directions, made little progress to the northwest, where the Scythians lived.
“Scythia,” which Herodotus and other ancient historians refer to as though it were as easily located on a map as New Jersey, was no such thing. The Scythians had a score of tribes and a handful of kings, and they had been on the move for over two hundred years. In 516 BC, the center of their homeland lay between the two great rivers that ran into the Black Sea: the Danube to the west, and the Don river to the east.
These Scythians had been nomads when they first appeared in the records of the Assyrians, back before 700 BC, and they were still nomads in 516. “If we had towns, we might worry that they would be captured,” one of the Scythian kings told Darius, when he first threatened Persian invasion, “and if we had farmland we might worry about it being laid waste…. but we don’t haveeither.”1 Their customs were fierce. They made cups from the skulls of fallen enemies, and skinned their right arms (“fingernails and all,” Herodotus remarks) to use as covers for arrow quivers; they hauled the dead bodies of their kinsmen to feasts for forty days after death, offering food and drink to the corpses; they threw cannabis seeds onto glowing stones and inhaled the smoke, “shrieking with delight at the fumes” (an exception to the common wisdom that a marijuana habit inevitably makes one dreamy and nonaggressive).2
By 516, Darius had begun to plan his campaign against the Scythians. He had already paid a good deal of attention to the northwest frontier. Sardis, in Asia Minor, had become his secondary center of administration. To give himself easy access to Sardis, Darius built a new road from Susa all the way into Asia Minor. This Royal Road was dotted with post stations for the change of horses, so that a messenger could get rapidly from the west to the capital and back again.
64.1 Homeland of the Scythians
Now Darius himself rode along the Royal Road to Sardis, and then from Sardis to the edge of his territory. To attack the Scythians, he would bring his navy up the coast of Asia Minor, through the pass known as the Hellespont and into the Bosphorus Strait. From there, they would sail into the Black Sea and then up the Danube river (which Herodotus knew as the Ister), along the southern edge of Scythian territory.3
Meanwhile, his land forces would have to cross over the strait that separated Asia Minor from the land we now call Europe. It was not a particularly impressive expanse of water, but no eastern empire had yet crossed it. Darius assigned the job of building a bridge across the Bosphorus Strait to one of his Greek engineers, an Ionian named Mandrocles. Then he sent for his men.
The Persian army began the long march along the Royal Road towards Sardis, a force so concentrated that they shook the earth as they passed subjugated city after subjugated city. Meanwhile, the engineer Mandrocles had taken the measure of the strait. At its narrowest, it is around 650 meters, or 720 yards, wide (the length of seven American football fields), far too wide for a traditional bridge. Instead, Mandrocles designed a bridge built across galleys: low, flat-decked ships, roped together to form a floating foundation for a plank road covered with dirt and stones. This was the first pontoon bridge in history: “A bolted roadway, sewn with flax,” in the words of the Greek poet Aeschylus.4 It would still serve as a pattern for army bridge-builders centuries later.
Thousands of Persian foot soldiers and cavalry marched across the bridge, headed for a narrow place in the Danube. There they would meet the naval detachment and build another pontoon bridge into Scythian territory. The cities of Thrace on the other side did not attempt to block the advance. Most Thracians were afraid of the Scythians, and the Persian army might serve as protection against them.
64.1. Pontoon Bridge. Pontoon bridges remained a staple of military strategy for centuries; this pontoon bridge was constructed across the James River in Virginia during the American Civil War. Photo credit Medford Historical Society Collection/CORBIS
The Scythians did not line up in opposition. Instead, the tribes retreated constantly in front of the Persians, filling in wells and springs and torching trees and grasslands as they went. The Persians, following on, found themselves marching through rough wastes, foraging constantly for food and water, horses and men growing ever hungrier. They were never able to set up and fight a pitched battle, so they were never able to use the skills in which they were trained. “The whole business dragged on endlessly,” writes Herodotus, “…and things began to go badly for Darius.”5
Badly enough that, finally, the Great King turned back. The entire Persian force marched back to the south, back over the pontoon bridge across the Danube, leaving the unconquered Scythians behind. Persian court historians, and later Persian kings, dealt with this problem by only writing the history of the lands south of the Danube. For all practical purposes, the land on the other side of the river simply ceased to exist. If the Persians couldn’t take it, it clearly wasn’t important.6
But Darius did not leave without spoils. He headed back to Sardis and left the army behind him under his most trusted general, the Persian Megabazus, with orders to conquer Thrace.
The Thracian cities which had hoped for deliverance from the Scythian threat now found themselves falling, one by one, under Persian dominance. Megabazus was a competent general, and the Persian soldiers skilled fighters, but their task was made easier by the fractured nature of Thrace: each city had its own warrior-chief and its own army. “If the Thracians were ruled by a single person or had a common purpose,” Herodotus remarks, “they would be invincible and would be by far the most powerful nation in the world…. There is no way that it will ever happen, and that is why they are weak.”7
Megabazus turned Thrace into a new Persian satrapy, Skudra.8 Then he turned south and set his eyes on the next kingdom: Macedonia.
MACEDONIA, which stood between Thrace and the city-states of the Greek mainland, differed both from the Thracians above and the Greeks below. The cities of Macedonia belonged to a single kingdom, ruled by a single king.
The first Macedonian kings came from a warrior-chief clan called the Argead. The Argead hailed, originally, from the south, and were probably mostly Greek; the poet Hesiod provides the Macedonians with a mythological ancestry that makes them cousins of the Greek heroes and descendants of Zeus, probably reflecting a real ancient relationship of some kind.178
Moving north, the Argead conquered the land around the Thermaic Gulf and a little farther north, built a capital city (Aegae, near the ancient fortress of Edessa), organized an army, and collected taxes. Macedonia was the first state in Europe to achieve this level of organization.9
But it was a pretty rough and tumble kingdom. The kings of Macedonia did not come from the eastern tradition of divinely ordained kingship. They were warriors who held their thrones by force. And although the center of Macedonia was firmly under their control, their hold over the northern parts of Macedonia was much shakier. To the west lay a loose alliance of tribes called Illyrians (probably migrants down from the northwest, since the archaeological traces they have left behind bear a strong resemblance to those of the Celtic West Hallstatt, ranging north of Italy); to the north, Thracian tribes known collectively as the Paeonians.
In the year that Megabazus and his Persians appeared on the horizon with a well-conquered Thrace behind them, the king of Macedonia was Amyntas I (according to tradition, the ninth Argead king). The Persians rolled towards the Macedonian heartland, burning the towns of the Paeonians. Amyntas, seeing the smoke on the horizon, decided at once that resistance was futile.
When seven Persian delegates, led by Megabazus’s own son, crossed the Macedonian border with a message, Amyntas received them with honor at his palace at Aegea. “They demanded earth and water for King Darius,” Herodotus tells us,10 a Persian custom symbolizing dominance over the land and sea of a captured country. Amyntas agreed at once. He also offered his daughter in marriage to Megabazus’s son, by way of making him particularly welcome. This alliance turned out to be very good indeed for Macedonia; neither the Illyrians nor the remaining Paeonians would trouble their northern border, since to do so might be to risk Persian wrath.
Meanwhile, the Greeks to the south were rapidly approaching a state of panic. With Megabazus storming around to the north, and Amyntas of Macedonia now a Persian ally, there was little barrier now between Persian ambitions and the Greek peninsula.
Unfortunately the Greek cities had long been as divided as the Thracian tribes, and the two most powerful, Athens and Sparta, were suffering from internal convulsions.
SOLON’S REFORMS had not legislated Athens into peace.
The famous code had reorganized the city’s government. The top officials in Athens were still the archons, but there were two other levels of government below. The Council of Four Hundred, drawn by lot from the middle-and upper-class citizens of Athens, debated laws and decided which ones should be presented for a vote. The voting population of Athens made up the last level of government, the Assembly.
Every citizen of Athens belonged to the Assembly, which was not as democratic as it sounds; in order to be an Athenian citizen, you had to own property.11 But Solon had also legislated that the sons of citizens inherited citizenship, even if their fathers had grown poor and lost their land. This was supposed to keep voting power from becoming concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of wealthy monopolists.
Like the legal reforms themselves, this didn’t please two-thirds of Athenian citizens. Wealthy men wanted more influence than the Assembly gave them; the poorest Athenians were limited to membership in the lowest branch of Athenian government.
The Athenians divided into three squabbling groups over Solon’s reforms, each with its own nickname. The Men of the Coast wanted to keep Solon’s reforms, the Men of the Plain (the oldest families, the Main Line of Athens) wanted to return all power to the hands of the richest Athenians, and the Men of the Hills wanted complete democracy, with the poor and landless granted exactly the same privileges as everyone else. They were the wildest of the three, and their leader, Peisistratus, was, in the words of Aristotle, “an extreme democrat.”12 For one thing, he had been wounded fighting against the enemies of Athens, which gave him a lot of popular appeal (military service was always an advantage for a man who wanted the commoners on his side), and for another he seems to have been a very magnetic personality: “There was something subtly charming about the way he spoke,” Plutarch remarks. “He was so good at simulating faculties with which he was not naturally endowed, that he was credited with them, more than those who really did have them.”13 He also complained that he was in constant danger of being assassinated by his enemies, which was not paranoid, but rather exceedingly clever; it gave him a reason to collect an increasingly powerful bodyguard around him.
His increasing rabble of armed men worried the most conservative Athenians, and even Solon, returning from his travels in wild lands, was concerned. But Solon was by now very old, his voice shaky and his commanding presence reduced. He could not make much difference in the unfolding of events.
In 560, Peisistratus and his club-wielding bodyguards stormed into the Acropolis, and Peisistratus announced that he would take control of the city. The revolt was just about as successful as Cylon’s. He had overestimated the strength of his followers, and the Men of the Coast and the Men of the Plain forgot their differences, joined together, and drove the Men of the Hills out of Athens.
64.2 Greece at the Time of the Persian Wars
Peisistratus regathered himself in exile. He had tried sheer force; now he would try strategy. He made a secret alliance with the aristocratic Megacles, leader of the Men of the Coast, promising to marry his daughter in return for helping him get rid of the Men of the Plain (apparently the two parties had begun to bicker with each other, now that they were no longer united against the poor rabble), and came back.
This time Peisistratus, with the combined support of his own followers and Megacles’s, managed to hold on to power for a little longer. But soon he was in trouble again. This time, he annoyed his wife by “not having sex with her in the usual way,” as Herodotus puts it, and “later she told her mother, who may or may not have questioned her about it.”14 Megacles, informed of this development (and presumably already regretting his alliance with the rough and ready Men of the Hills), decided to switch sides again, and joined the Men of the Plain in driving Peisistratus back out.
Peisistratus had tried revolt; he had tried political alliance; his only path back into power was to buy it, and this path he took. He spent ten years or so working in silver mines, and then, in 546, hired an army of mercenaries and reentered Athens with armed men at his back. He ordered them to take away all weapons of Athenian citizens (the right to bear arms was not, apparently, one of the democratic privileges on his agenda), and from then on ruled as tyrant.15
In his own eyes, he was dominating the Athenians for their own good. And in fact he became quite popular; he reduced the taxes for the poor, “advanced money to the poorer people to help them in their labour,”16 and generally behaved like a mild and humble benefactor, as long as no one crossed him.
When he died in 528, his oldest son Hippias (from a previous marriage, before the irregular cavorting with Megacles’s daughter) inherited his job as tyrant, in quite kinglike fashion. This didn’t cause any heartburning until a family crisis ensued. According to Aristotle, Hippias’s younger brother, Hipparchus, fell madly in love with a handsome young man named Harmodius, who refused to have anything to do with him. Spurned, Hipparchus publicly remarked that Harmodius was a degenerate.
Harmodius was infuriated. He recruited a friend, and the two of them rushed Hipparchus at the height of a religious festival and murdered him. They had hoped that noise and celebration would mask their actions, but royal guards killed Harmodius and arrested his accomplice.
The murder of his brother put Hippias into a frenzy of rage. He ordered the young accomplice tortured for an unspeakably long time, until the young man, maddened by pain, accused all sorts of Athenian citizens of plotting against Hippias and his household, and then finally was released by death.
“In consequence of his vengeance for his brother,” writes Aristotle, “and of the execution and banishment of a large number of persons, Hippias became a distrusted and an embittered man.”17 He began a purge of everyone named by the young accomplice, and anyone else who got in his way.
The Athenians were delivered from this mess by an unlikely savior: the elder king of Sparta. This king, Cleomenes, had been told repeatedly by the prophetess at Delphi that it was his divine duty to overthrow the tyranny of Athens. In 508, he roused himself and marched towards Athens at the head of a Spartan army.179
The Delphic oracle was hardly unbiased (Athenian aristocrats, fleeing Hippias’s paranoia, had paid to build a gorgeous marble temple in place of the oracle’s old plain stone dwelling), and Cleomenes was likely not overwhelmed by a desire to see equality in Athens. In fact, the Spartan expansion across the center of the Peloponnese had produced a hugely unequal society. Native Spartan citizens were at the top. Beneath them lay a huge underclass of the conquered who could not be trusted as citizens: the helots, slaves and laborers. The Spartans liked it this way. The only equality in Sparta lay among male citizens over thirty, who were allowed to vote in the citywide assembly. Even there, Spartans were not permitted to debate. The airing of ideas was not considered useful in government. Young men spent their boyhoods, Plutarch tells us, trained into silent and ready obedience.18 Argument was no part of this training, which is why the old Greek name for the Spartans—the Lyconians—has given rise to our English word laconic.19
Cleomenes’s march to Athens was impelled not by a love for equality, but by fear of the advancing Persian juggernaut. If Athens fell completely apart into squabbling factions, it would scarcely be able to resist the Persian march south, and Athens was the biggest barrier left between Sparta and Persia. Cleomenes hoped to drive Hippias out, stop the squabbling, and restore Athenian strength.
The Spartan army chased Hippias out, and helped the Athenians hold elections. However, they refused to keep their fingers out of Athenian internal matters, and threw their weight behind one of the candidates.180 The Athenians, who saw in this a Spartan bid to fold Athens into its own orbit as a subject city, cast around for a powerful ally to help them against the dominant city of the south.
Someone in the Assembly (Herodotus does not say who) suggested that Spartan arrogance could only be checked if the Athenians made an alliance with some overwhelmingly huge army…like that of the Persians. So off went a delegation to Sardis, to ask the governor there (Darius’s half-brother Artaphranes, who had been left in charge when Darius headed back to Persepolis) for an alliance against the Spartans.
The Athenians seem to have overestimated their place in the international scene; this seemed like a perfectly reasonable proposal to them, but Herodotus writes that the delegation “was in the middle of delivering its message when Artaphrenes…asked the Athenians who they were and where they were from.” He undoubtedly knew the answer to this already, but this was a beautifully deflating inquiry, followed by a curt ultimatum: the Persians would only come to the aid of the Athenians if they agreed to send earth and water to Darius as a symbol of complete submission.
The delegates, surrounded by Persians, agreed, which at least got them safely out of Sardis, although they had to face the music back in Athens: “This got them into a lot of trouble on their return home,” Herodotus remarks.20 The Athenians had no intention of giving up any of their liberties. Instead, they turned to tackle the Spartan problem on their own, and fought a damagingly fierce set of skirmishes to get the remaining armed Spartans out of their city.
With the Spartans finally out of the picture, it took some time for the Athenians to reorder their tyrant-dominated government. When the dust cleared, the population had been divided into ten “tribes,” with tribal lines cutting across old family alliances in an attempt to destroy the ancient web of highborn power. The Council of Four Hundred became the Council of Five Hundred, with fifty representatives from each tribe. In a final effort to get rid of the dominance of aristocratic families, the city itself was then divided into thirty geographical units called demes, and the Athenians within each deme were ordered to use the name of the deme rather than their family names.18121 This was an interesting idea, but didn’t work particularly well; most Athenians eventually reverted to their old cognomens.
A new custom was introduced as well. Any citizen of Athens could be exiled from the city, should six thousand of his compatriots write his name down on pieces of pottery which were used as ballots. The pottery shards were called ostraka, and from this the custom of ten-year exile became known as “ostracism.” It was yet another safeguard against tyranny: “Whenever someone…becomes greater in power than is appropriate…,” writes Aristotle, “such excessive superiority usually leads to one-man rule…. On account of this, some states have ostracism.”22
According to Aristotle, the first Athenians to suffer ostracism were the friends of Hippias, who were forced to follow the ex-tyrant into exile.
MEANWHILE another Greek city had also decided to ask the Persian armies for help.
This was the Ionian city of Miletus, over on the edge of the Persian-ruled Asia Minor. The leader of Miletus was an ambitious warrior named Aristagorus, who had dominated his city as tyrant for years. Now he planned to cast his net wider. He went to the governor of Sardis and offered to conquer his way through the Greek islands called the Cyclades, all on behalf of Persia, if the Persians would just give him ships and soldiers.
Artaphranes agreed to this plan, and Aristagorus, delighted with his chance to become the tyrant of a whole mini-empire of islands, put together an invading force and sailed to his first target, Naxos.
Unfortunately the Greek city on Naxos proved impossible to break into. The inhabitants, rather than fighting, simply hauled all of their provisions inside the city and prepared to wait it out. After a four-month siege, Aristagorus had run out of Persian money, and Artaphranes, unimpressed with the tyrant’s skill in conquest, declined to throw any more at the project. Aristagorus was forced to sail back to Miletus with mud on his face, his ambitions thwarted.
He had learned, however, from watching Greek politics from across the water; and, like any good Athenian politician, he switched his ground. He decided to switch his alliance from pro-Persian to anti-Persian, sheerly out of expedience. He would lead the Greek cities of Asia Minor in a rebellion against the Persian overlords; and perhaps, eventually, unite them behind his leadership.
A few delicate inquiries showed him that other Ionian tyrants would undoubtedly be willing to join in a rebellion. But he had learned from his Naxos disaster that wars were expensive. He needed even more support to start a war against the Persians.
The obvious first ally for such a project was the warlike Sparta. Sparta was the chief and most powerful city in a loose alliance of Greek city-states called the Peloponnesian League—an association formed for mutual defense against enemies. If Sparta joined the war against Persia, so would other cities in the League. So Aristagorus travelled to Sparta and called on Cleomenes. Cleomenes not only refused to prod the Persian beast with a pin; he first laughed at Aristagorus, and then had Aristagorus pitched out of his city by force.
“After he had been thrown out of Sparta,” Herodotus writes, Aristagorus “chose to come to Athens, because after Sparta it was the most powerful Greek state.”23 Here, he found more receptive ears.
Hippias, the expelled Athenian tyrant, was threatening to come back. He had fled Greece, crossed the Hellespont, and gone to the Persians in hopes that Persian armies might help him reconquer Athens. Artaphranes, listening to the plan, could see that Hippias would be the ideal Persian wedge into Greece. He sent a message to Athens, telling them to take Hippias back or suffer invasion; this message had just arrived when Aristagorus showed up, proposing rebellion.24
Athens, indignant at this Persian ultimatum, agreed to send twenty ships to help with Aristagorus’s rebellion; its ally Eretria, on the coast, sent five.25 And so, in 500 BC, war began.
THE WAR BETWEEN the Persians and the Greeks, which trailed on for a little more than twenty years, receives barely a mention in Persian histories. But in Greece, it was at the center of every man’s life, and at the edge of every woman’s, for over two decades. Our accounts are all from Greeks: Herodotus, who was five years old when the war ended, but who interviewed eyewitnesses to reconstruct the events; Thucydides, born twenty or so years later, who made use of Herodotus’s accounts but corrected some of his interpretations based on other sources; and the Greek playwright Aeschylus, who was older than both the historians, and fought in the war himself. His play The Persians is the work of an eyewitness, but its spotlight is on Greek courage, not campaigns. 26 In the eyes of these men, the battles of the Persian Wars are central to the development of humanity. From the Persian point of view, they were small engagements which, when they went badly, were best ignored.
The Ionian cities that joined the revolt began on a high note by commandeering three hundred ships from Darius’s navy, and staffing them with Greeks.27 Darius immediately sent his fast and well-trained army to put down the Ionian revolt. Before they could arrive, Aristagorus and his allies had managed to surprise Sardis and enter it. The royal governor Artaphranes shut himself safely into the citadel, but the Ionians spread all through Sardis, intending to loot it. Unfortunately, the city began to burn almost at once. A soldier had torched a single house, and since the buildings of Sardis were mostly made of reeds, the fire spread through the whole city.
The “conflagration of Sardis,” as Herodotus calls it,28 made the Persians unredeemably angry. When the Persian and Ionian armies met up in Ephesus, the Ionians were thrashed. They scattered, and the Athenians, seeing that no good was going to come of this particular engagement, decided to go home. But the Ionians had no choice now but to keep on fighting. Burning Sardis was a point of no return. They could not now simply retreat without the most horrific consequences.
They did take the fighting offshore, though. A joint Ionian navy went up through the Hellespont and drove the Persian garrison stationed at Byzantium out of the city. Then the ships sailed back down the coast, collecting allies as they went.29 The rebellion had grown strong enough to stalemate the Persians for years of weary fighting.
The tide turned against the Ionian cities in 494, when a Persian fleet of six hundred ships came up against the Ionian ships in the open sea, just off the coast near Miletus. The Persians had been collecting themselves for a huge encounter, and they knew the Ionian fleet well; 300 of the 353 ships in the Greek fleet had been kidnapped from Darius’s navy at the beginning of the war.30
Scores of Ionian-manned ships were sunk. As the battle turned against the Greeks, scores more simply deserted. The admiral of the Ionian fleet sailed off to Sicily and turned pirate (although he only raided Carthaginian and Etruscan ships, and “left Greek shipping alone”).31Aristagorus himself fled Asia Minor entirely and went over to Thrace, where he was killed while trying to seize a Thracian city for his own.
The victorious Persians landed on the coast at Miletus, the city of Aristagorus the troublemaker. They cut the city off from all outside aid, dug under the walls, and brought it down. “Most of the male population was killed,” Herodotus says, “their women and children…reduced to slavery…. Those who remained alive were taken to Susa.” Darius resettled them in the marshes at the mouth of the Tigris, the one-time home of the Chaldeans.32 The Athenians, watching from afar, were distraught, despite their position as noncombatants. Miletus had once been a daughter city of Athens, and its destruction was a wound to the Athenian body.
Worse was to come. Darius had not forgotten the original Athenian and Eretrian participation in the rebellion. In 492, he put his general and son-inlaw Mardonius in charge of a two-pronged invasion force: a land force that would march through Asia Minor, across the Bosphorus on the pontoon bridge, and down through Thrace and Macedonia, and a naval force that would sail through the Aegean and meet the land force for an attack on the northern Greek cities.
This first Persian foray into Greece was cut short. The Persian navy had almost reached its goal when a storm blew up and wrecked almost every ship on the rocks near Mount Athos. Without its planned reinforcements, the land force retreated.
It took the Persian navy two years to rebuild. But by 490, the new fleet was ready to go, and Mardonius (who had been called back to Susa for reproof) was back on the job.
Herodotus says that this second invasion force had six hundred ships; even if this is an exaggeration, the sea invasion was so enormous that the Persians did not bother to march a land force down to reinforce it. On one of the ships was Hippias, who had been promised that he could become the tyrant of Athens once more when the Persians had wiped out the opposition.
The Persian soldiers began their sweep inland by destroying Naxos (Aristagorus had indeed been an incompetent general; the Persian forces overran Naxos in a matter of days) and then besieging Eretria. The next goal was Athens: the queen of Attica, the key to dominating the Greeks.
The Eretrian defenses were gone. The Athenians, braced to face the Persian cataclysm, sent a messenger south to Sparta to beg for assistance. This messenger was Pheidippides, a “trained runner” by profession who is said to have covered the 140 miles between Sparta and Athens in barely twenty-four hours, an amazing feat of strength. (Likely Herodotus telescopes the time that the journey took, but there is no reason to doubt the distance covered.)182 But the Spartans refused to answer the call. They were celebrating a religious holiday, and could not begin a march until the full moon.
The Spartans were a religious people (not to say superstitious), but it is very possible that they were attempting to avoid outright war with Persia. The Persians were arriving to punish Athens; their wrath was directed at those Greek cities which had joined in the Ionian rebellion, and the Spartans had declined.
Meanwhile, the Athenians had no choice but to face the Persians without aid.
Herodotus tells us that their commander, Miltiades, arranged the foot soldiers—the Athenian hoplites—in a slightly unusual formation, with a thin center line and massed troops on both wings. The hoplites were named after their shields, the Athenian hoplons, which had grips at the side rather than the center. The hoplon was designed to leave the right arm free for spear use, which meant that it exposed part of the user’s right-hand side, but it jutted out to the left far enough to cover the right side of the next hoplite over. It was, in other words, a style of armor that forced its users to stay in a tightly packed formation: the phalanx. A hoplite alone was terribly vulnerable. Only hoplites who remained jammed into the phalanx had a chance of survival.
This coerced discipline, plus desperation, made up for the smaller Athenian numbers. “The Athenians,” Herodotus tells us, “charged the invaders at a run,” which made the Persians think that perhaps they had all gone mad.33 And in fact the Athenian center broke almost at once. The massed wings, though, pushed the Persians between them, until the invaders began to retreat out from the deathly space between the phalanxes. As they went backwards towards their ships, they stumbled into marshy ground, many of them bogging down, trapped by the weight of their armor.
Many of the Persians made it back out to the ships and escaped. But the Athenians captured seven ships and killed a huge number of the invaders; Herodotus’s number of 6,400 Persian dead, as opposed to 192 Athenian casualties, is (like Henry V’s numbers at the Battle of Agincourt) a patriotic exaggeration. But the Battle of Marathon was a staggering victory for Athens. They had fought off the monster.
The Spartans arrived in time to help count the dead.
THE MEN who fought at Marathon were known later by the name Marathonomachoi, honored in Athens as World War II veterans have been in the United States for their role in freedom. Their victorious general Miltiades came to a thankless end, though, deprived of his command for failing to capture the island of Paros (which was Persian-loyal). He was brought to his trial suffering from a gangrenous wound received during the failed campaign, and died of it very shortly afterwards.
Darius, meanwhile, was considering ways of renewing the war with Greece. In 486, four years after Marathon, he raised taxes, probably to rebuild the army. Egypt rebelled almost at once, probably in reaction, but Darius had no time to deal with it. He grew ill in the fall of 486 and died before winter came.34
His oldest son, Xerxes, took his place.
Xerxes had been taking notes on his father’s career. Like Darius, he first sent his army to put down the opportunistic rebellions that always accompanied a change in the royal house. The inevitable revolt in Babylon he dealt with by dividing the city into two smaller satrapies, thus short-circuiting some of its factionalism. Egypt he reconquered by sheer force of arms, and then had his own title of “Lord of the Double Country” carved into inscriptions in both Egypt and Persia.35
Then he turned his eyes back to Greece. By 484, ports all over his empire were building ships. Three hundred and twenty were manned by Greek mercenaries; two hundred came from Egypt. Egyptians also helped Xerxes to build another pontoon bridge, this one a little farther south than Darius’s; it stretched across the Hellespont and was held together by Egyptian flax ropes.36
Meanwhile, Athens was building a fleet of triremes, long thin ships (around 120 feet long and only 15 feet wide) with room for 170 rowers, which meant they could knife through the water and ram other ships at high speed. In 481, Athens and thirty other cities joined together in a new league, the Hellenic League, formed specifically for the defense of Greece against the Persians. The Spartans, who had rejoined the anti-Persian cause, were the most experienced of the combined anti-Persian army.
In the fall of that same year, Xerxes in person marched his troops to Sardis, where they wintered, building up their strength and recovering from the journey. Then, in the spring of 480, he led them across the Hellespont.
The Greeks had little faith that the north would stand for very long. They established their front line of battle just below the Malian Gulf, with the army massed at Thermopylae, where the mountains divided to allow for passage. This was the only decent way for Xerxes to reach the southern part of the peninsula (although there was a hidden mountain road, which he was unlikely to discover). The navy was drawn up at the north end of Euboea.
There they waited. Meanwhile, behind them, Greece was in full preparation for disaster. The Athenians decided to expect the worst; a copy of a decree passed by the Council of five hundred has survived:
Resolved by the Council and the People…. To entrust the city to Athena the Mistress of Athens…. The Athenians themselves and the foreigners who live in Athens are to send their children and women to safety in Troezen…. They are to send the old men and their moveable possessions to safety on Salamis. The treasurers and priestesses are to remain on the Acropolis guarding the property of the gods. All the other Athenians and foreigners of military age are to embark on the 200 ships that are ready, and defend against the barbarian for the sake of their own freedom and that of the rest of the Greeks.37
And then Xerxes swept down. In front of the invaders, Thrace surrendered; and then the cities of Macedonia, one by one. Xerxes was marching down into the Greek mainland, and if he could get through the mountains, the cities to the south would be doomed. A troop from Attica had been given the job of keeping an eye on the hidden mountain road, just in case. But the all-important pass of Thermopylae was entrusted to the Spartan troops, seven thousand men under the Spartan king Leonidas (successor to Cleomenes).
This would have been sufficient for the narrow ground on which the Persians and Greeks would meet, had a Greek traitor not gone over to Xerxes and drawn him a map of the mountain road. Xerxes sent a commander to climb through it with the most highly trained of the Ten Thousand, the elite fighters that Herodotus calls “the Immortals.” When they came down on the other side of the mountains, they began to circle around to the rear of the Spartans.
Leonidas, seeing that his force was about to be sandwiched, realized that the battle had already been lost. He ordered all of his men but three hundred to retreat back down to the south. With these last three hundred, along with a few troops from the Greek cities of Thebes and Thespia who refused to leave, he fought a delaying action against Xerxes. Attica was doomed, but if his retreating Spartans could reach the Gulf of Corinth, they might still be able to hold the Peloponnese, along with Troezen, where the women and children were, and Salamis: all that would remain of Greece.
The Spartans fought until they were wiped out. In the battle, Immortals fell as well; two of Xerxes’s own brothers died.38 Later, the heroism of the soldiers who fell at the Battle of Thermopylae would become one of the most famous acts of heroism in history. Xerxes was unimpressed. He ordered Leonidas’s body to be beheaded and nailed up on a cross, like that of an executed criminal.
Plutarch tells us that the Greeks, harassed and desperate, had a brief and violent internal quarrel about what to do next. The Athenian troops in the combined Greek army begged the rest to make a stand in Attica, to protect Athens; but the others had no confidence that they could hold a wide northern front against the huge Persian army. They won the day. The entire force retreated back down into the Peloponnese, where they could mass their ships in the waters around the island of Salamis and also erect a defensive line across the narrow land bridge—the Isthmus of Corinth—that linked the Peloponnese to Attica. The Athenians did so under protest: “angry at this betrayal,” Plutarch writes, “and also dismayed and distressed at being deserted by their allies.”39
At the head of his soldiers, Xerxes marched in triumph to great Athens and overran it. The Persian soldiers burned the Acropolis; from the other side of the water, the Athenians were forced to sit and watch the smoke of their city rise up.
The next events are chronicled by the playwright Aeschylus, who was there. In his play The Persians, a Persian herald returns to the capital city of Susa to report to the queen mother that her son Xerxes has decided to attack the Greeks in the Peloponnese at once:
A Greek appeared from the enemy camp,
whispering to your son that under
cover of night every Greek to a man
would leap to his oar and row madly in every
direction to save his skin.40
The messenger had been sent by the Greek leader Themistocles, who knew that time was on the Persian side. The Greeks, penned up in the Peloponnese without allies, could most easily have been defeated with a slow and damaging war of attrition. The best possible strategy for Xerxes was to sit tight, send his navy around to ring the Peloponnese so that none of the outlying islands could provide aid, and regather himself for an attack.
So Themistocles sent a message to the Great King offering to change sides, and telling him that if he attacked at once, the weary and dispirited Greeks would scatter. Xerxes, convinced, did not bother to ring the island. Instead, he sent ships directly into the narrows to attack the Athenian triremes massed there.
Your son, at once,
deceived by Greek treachery, and the gods’
jealousy, let it be known to all his
captains that when the
sun descended below the horizon, and
darkness covered the dome of the sky,
they were to divide the fleet into three divisions
and block the Greeks’ escape to the open sea,
while other ships surrounded and circled the island.41
This was exactly what Themistocles wanted. The triremes, fast and maneuverable, could fight effectively in the cramped narrows around Salamis, while the more powerful Persian ships were unable to get out of the way of the ramming fronts.
Ship struck ship,
ramming with bows of brass,
breaking away whole prows.
The Greeks began it.
Men on opposing decks let fly their
spears.
We resisted at first, holding our own;
but soon our ships, so massed together,
struck each other head-on in the narrow strait,
bronze beak ramming bronze beak,
destroying oars and benches.
The Greeks then circled round in perfect
order and struck, and hulls were tumbled
wrong-side up, and the sea was no longer
seen for all the wreckage and floating bodies.
And all the shores and reefs bobbing with corpses.42
Persians, raised inland, were not swimmers. Those who fell overboard drowned, almost to a man.
Xerxes, who had sat himself down on a golden stool on high ground to view the battle, grew increasingly furious. This defeat need not have been the end for Xerxes, but his rage ruined him. He ordered the captains of his navy—all Phoenician, from the Phoenician cities that now lay under Persian control—put to death for cowardice. This turned every single Phoenician sailor against him. The Phoenicians, who were experienced at sea, knew exactly why their attack had failed.
Meanwhile, Babylon was rebelling again, and Themistocles was up to his usual schemes. He set free a Persian prisoner of war, who returned to Xerxes primed with the information that the Greek fleet intended to sail up to the Hellespont and rip up the pontoon bridge before Xerxes and his army could get back to it.43 At this news Xerxes decided to go home.
He announced that there would be a substantial reward for anyone who captured Themistocles (a useless gesture) and then marched back up through Macedonia and Thrace with the bulk of his army, leaving behind him a force of soldiers commanded by his son-in-law Mardonius. In effect, Xerxes was leaving Mardonius to die, to save himself from the embarrassment of out-and-out retreat. The Athenians marched across the Isthmus of Corinth, and met Mardonius and his reduced force at Plataea. Pausanias, the nephew of the heroic Leonidas, had inherited his post as general (and was also serving as regent for Leonidas’s young son, now king of Sparta). He led the assault; the Greeks were victorious and Mardonius died on the battlefield. “His corpse disappeared the day after the battle,” Herodotus writes, and no one knows where it was buried.44
This was a two-pronged attack. The navy had simultaneously been sent to confront the remains of the Persian fleet, which had retreated back across the Aegean all the way to the coast of Asia Minor. The Persians, seeing Greek ships behind them, decided not to risk another sea battle; they beached their ships on the shores of Asia Minor, just west of the mountain called Mycale, and lined up to fight on land.
Tradition held that both battles, Plataea and Mycale, took place on the same day in 479. At Mycale, Persians relied on the Ionian fighters in their ranks to back them up. But when the Greeks approached, the Ionians melted away, back towards their own cities, and left the Persians standing alone. The combined Athenian and Spartan forces drove the Persians back all the way to Sardis, killing them as they went. Only a few ever reached the safety of Sardis’s walls.
The Greek victories at Plataea and Mycale ended the Persian Wars. The loss didn’t make an enormous dent on the Persian psyche, although the Persians did allow their navy to shrink rather than rebuilding it.45 But Greek cities, from Sparta all the way over to the Ionian coast, had joined together in voluntary alliance to defeat a common enemy. It was the first joint action taken by the entire Greek world, a world held together not by political boundaries but by shared customs and language.
