Revisiting the causes, the infringing and defining past and the conduct of the clash between the Greeks and the Persians in the sixth and fifth century BC – a true world war with participating troops from three continents 2,500 years ago – may be a Herculean task. This is so, especially if attempted with a focus on executive options and decisions at political, strategic, operational and tactical levels. The surprise at Marathon, the guile in Salamis, the valour in Thermopylae and the cold efficiency, drill and skill in Plataea created the picture of the known history of the world as it is, but the details of how and why the events unfolded as they did are hazy and dubious in their interpretation. It was a complicated time in politics, ideology and war-making. Intrinsic facts and motives, hidden, known, understood and misunderstood are intermingled to this day and mar the historical perception of the first clearly ideological struggle between a new world order – promising Light, Justice and Order yet delivering oppression and exploitation – and the ones that simply wanted nothing to do with such heavenly bliss…
It was a prolonged struggle, and the two antagonists thought of it as one, or more, episodes of an older East-West struggle, although this may be a poor choice of words. It was the continuation of previous events, and if they did not believe so, they did pretend it to be so. The concurrent phase of this struggle opened up after the Trojan War, when the Kingdom of Lydia became a world power and subjugated the young colonies of the Greek Nation(s) in Western Asia Minor. The dynasty and the dynast changed, but since then a continuous pressure was to come from the East, up to this day; sometimes repulsed, sometimes exceeding the breaking point and surging across the Aegean. The Greco-Persian Wars of 540–479 were just a phase in this struggle the Greeks had since perhaps the times of the Hittites, well in the 2nd Millenium BC. But this phase was massive and involved new technology, new methods, clearly of a diverging evolutionary course in technology, processes and very different ideologies, making it a dissimilar opponents’ game, highly asymmetric in every conceivable way. Previous episodes were symmetric clashes between similar opponents.
No matter the approach followed in trying to elucidate the events, the motives and the ulterior thoughts, the researcher will eventually face a cardinal event: the build-up of the two factions in Greek politics: the Medizing one, siding with the Persian Empire (the Medes for the Ancient Greeks rather than the Persai as is historically correct), and the national-minded one, attempting resistance against the odds. The core issue is to correctly associate and deconvolute the known facts, as there are many missing links and dark spots, and also to interpret them correctly, as there are many vague issues due to a variety of reasons. The past of the two antagonists and other involved parties is helpful, as they both claimed heritage from powers of old. And a comparison with practices and procedures proven during other, better recorded historical times may well dissolve some prejudice and indoctrination of scholar research of times past and present to a better understanding of an era that defined world history as none other.