I’ve been learning about the Persian Wars recently, and am currently doing a MOOC with Hillsdale College and some Massolit courses on the subject. You can read a lot more about all the following battles and events in my analysis of Herodotus’ Histories.
A common theme explored in the Histories and other historical works is the idea of Greekness. Ancient Greece – or as it was called back then, Hellas – was divided into around 1000 poleis, or city-states. Sparta, Athens, Corinth and Rhodes are examples of these ancient poleis. Each polis had a very different way of life, political system or something else that set it apart from its other Greek counterparts. So what was it that made the Spartans, the Thebans, the Corinthians and hundreds of other civilisations all Greek?
The Greeks prided themselves on sharing three things: the same religion, the same general culture and the same language. Although many poleis spoke in different dialects (for example, the Spartans spoke a subset of Greek called Doric, while the Athenians spoke Ionic Greek), they all shared the same basic language, what is known today as Classical Greek.
In classical times, the Greeks didn’t actually call themselves “Greeks”. “Greeks” is a term we get from the Romans, who derogatorily called them the Graeci after a tiny band of Greeks who went by that name. In actual fact, the Greeks called themselves the Hellenes. They believed that every single Greek among them was descended from a man named Hellen, though we now know this is complete myth. The Hellenic world in antiquity was much larger than our modern notion of Ancient Greece today, spanning across all eastern Europe and the Mediterranean and into the coast of Turkey.
In his Histories, Herodotus commented – and scholars of today still agree with him – that without Sparta’s involvement in the wars, the Greeks would have lost. Athens may have put up some mild resistance, but it was the courage, determination and fearlessness of the Spartans that really ensured the Greek victory over the invading Persians.
I want to now provide some background on the state of the Persian Empire before Xerxes invaded Greece. Two fifths of the entire human race was living under Persian rule at the peak of the vast Achaemenid Empire. Under the reign of Cyrus the Great, Babylon, Assyria and Anatolia had been conquered and brought into his Empire; his son Cambyses had then conquered Egypt; and numerous rebellions were crushed and the Indus Valley was subjugated by Darius II. The invention of the enormous trireme, which required 170 oarsmen, rendered all other existing warships obsolete and practically useless.
It is easy to see why the Spartans were eager to avoid a war with their Persian neighbours. Indeed, they specifically did everything they could to prevent a conflict, but when it came apparent that they had no other choice than to fight – when a quarter of a million Persian troops came marching down into Greece proper – the Spartans picked up their weapons and prepared to meet the enemy with an unmatchable bravery.
The Persian Wars were begun by Xerxes’ father, Darius. He planned to invade and capture Euboea and from there march onwards to the Bay of Marathon. He targeted Euboea and Athens because they had been on the side of the Ionians during the unsuccessful Ionian Revolt in 500 BC.
Having successfully conquered Euboea, Darius’ army headed towards Marathon. Athens appealed to Sparta for help when they saw the Persian troops advancing. Although the Spartans agreed to help fend off the Persians – another example of different Greek poleis coming together to fight off a foreign force – they arrived too late at the battlefield as they were celebrating the Carneia festival, which they could not interrupt or postpone. Herodotus poses the theory that the Spartans were actually in the middle of a helot revolt which they could not abandon.
The Persians were defeated at Marathon, but the Greeks hadn’t seen the last of them yet. It is worth noting that Darius’ army was crushed by some 32 small poleis: out of 700 existing ones that could have resisted the Persians, only 32 mustered the courage to face them. Thessaly is an example of a polis that favoured the Persians instead of their homeland. The Thessalians believed that the odds against the Greeks were too high and that Persia would win; their thinking was that they would be praised by Darius after a Persian victory. Of course, the Greeks won the Wars ultimately, and held the Thessalians in contempt for a long time afterwards. Argos is another example of a polis that did not fight, but not because they wanted to be ruled by the Persians. They simply hated the Athenians and the Spartans so much that they could not bear to fight alongside them.
Darius retreated back to Persia to amass an even greater army, but died before he could invade Greece again. His son Xerxes took it upon himself to continue the fight, marching the Persian army towards Thermopylae. The Greeks (including the Spartans, whose festival/helot revolt was now over!) chose to set up camp at the famous tiny mountain pass there. Unfortunately for them, a soldier named Ephialtes betrayed his countrymen by telling the Persians about a way to access the seemingly impenetrable Greek troops from behind. Xerxes ordered his army to follow the route and they ambushed the Greeks, who dismissed all of their troops apart from a small batch of 300 Spartans, whom they essentially left behind to try and delay a suicide mission for as long as possible. A suicide mission it did indeed turn out to be: for although the Spartans fought gallantly and remarkably, they simply could not hold out against the thousands of Persians, and 299 of those 300 Spartans died that day.
Prior to the Battle of Thermopylae, some of the city-states involved had medized, or abandoned their fellow Greeks to become subservient to the Persian enemy. After the somehow glorious defeat at Thermopylae, followed by a certainly glorious victory at Salamis, these medized states returned to the Greek side to fight the Persians at the Battle of Plataea. This was the last battle in the Persian Wars before the Greeks were finally left alone by Xerxes. The Greek poleis collectively won, partly because of their expert navy but also because of the fact that the Persians had started a sea-battle and yet none of them could swim.
Greece had won against one of the greatest powers in the world at that time: the deadly, ever-expanding Persian Empire. But what would have happened had the Persians actually won? It’s easy to say that all the Greek poleis would have been suppressed somehow, and especially Athens. Athens would have seen the termination of its greatest political achievement, democracy, and the destruction if its buildings and religious sanctuaries. The architectural and literary talents of various famous Athenians would have been at least jeopardised if not entirely crushed. Playwrights such as Aeschylus and Euripides wouldn’t have had the scope for political expression in their works. The entirety of Classical Greek society as we know it today would have been utterly unrecognisable.
Interestingly, even after uniting to resist the Persians, the Greek poleis suddenly turned against each other again. In particular, Athens and Sparta quarrelled over who had been most responsible for the Persian defeat. Soon after the Persian Wars, Athens erected the Parthenon, a remarkable architectural feat to honour and thank Athena for helping them win against Darius and Xerxes. Some historians think that this was also an attempt on the Athenians’ part to rub their involvement in the face of the Spartans: a way of saying, “Look, we can build all these cool things to commemorate a victory we were responsible for!” to a polis that wasn’t particularly architecturally talented and so had no way of retaliation.
Herodotus claims the Battle of Salamis, which was essentially won by the Athenians, was the most vital for Greek victory. Other historians, including Professor Paul Cartledge, think that it was the Battle at Plataea that really pulled off such a decisive victory for the poleis. Either way, the Persian Wars signified a glorious victory for the Greeks, and showed that at the end of the day, it is courage, skill and determination, not the amount of soldiers you have, that wins all the wars in life.
