The Greco-Persian Wars were a series of conflicts between the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states which occurred between 499 BC and 449 BC. The Persian invasions of 490 BC and 480-479 BC became classics of military history, with the Greeks demonstrating their skill and courage against superior opposition at the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis. Ultimately, the Persian invasions were repulsed due to Greek heroism, and the victory of the Greeks saved Western civilization (as well as Athenian democracy) from destruction by the forces of the autocratic Persians.
History[]
The great Persian king Darius I, whose long reign lasted from 521 to 486 BC, had many Greek city-states within his domains. His predecessors had conquered Anatolia and had gained control of the Ionian Greeks who lived on the eastern side of the Aegean. At the start of the 5th century BC the Ionian cities rose in revolt against Persian rule. Darius sent an army and a navy - the ships supplied by another one of his subject peoples, the Phoenicians - to crush the revolt. The Ionians received some support from Athens and Eretria but were still humbled. In 494 BC the ringleader among the Ionian cities, Miletus, was destroyed by the Persians and its population deported to Central Asia. Carried forward by the momentum of the campaign, the Persians decided to extend their empire so it would cover the Aegean islands and mainland Greece. When Athens and Sparta rejected a demand for formal submission to Persian authority, Darius mounted a seaborne expedition to bring the city-states to heel.
Greek resistance[]
At this time Athens and Sparta were exceptional societies. Over the previous century Athens had evolved its own democratic system of government and its citizens were expected to perform military service when required, turning out with their own weaponry and armor. Sparta was a militarized society in which male citizens were raised as soldiers and lived in barracks from the age of 20. On land both the Athenians and Spartans fought chiefly as armored infantry, or hoplites. Each carrying a stabbing spear and a shield, the hoplites fought in a tight formation known as a phalanx.
Although the Greeks did also employ auxiliaries equipped with bows and slingshots as skirmishers, the focus on the tight-knit phalanx of citizen-soldiers made their armies contrast starkly with the forces of the Persian Empire. Bowmen were a vital element in their style of warfare, which gave missiles primacy over close combat, as were cavalry and chariots. Persian armies were large and well organized, operating under professional generals, and their campaigns were well planned with attention to logistics.
The Persian force that landed at Marathon, 25 miles from Athens, in August 490 BC was small by imperial standards; roughly 26,000 men were put ashore, along with some horses for the cavalry. The Athenians appealed to Sparta for support, but the Spartans claimed to be unable to dispatch soldiers immediately for religious reasons. Athens sent its hoplites to challenge the Persians while they were still on the beach. The Greeks were outnumbered by at least two to one, but they formed up in phalanxes and attacked. The onrush of the Athenian infantry turned the battle into a close-quarters melee in which Persian archery and horses could play no effective part. The shocked invaders extricated themselves with difficulty and at heavy cost in lives.
When Xerxes I ascended the Persian throne in 485 BC, he inherited the task of punishing the presumptuous Greek cities. This time there was to be no hastily organized seaborne expedition, but a well-planned, full-scale land invasion with naval support. The preparation of the invasion route by Xerxes' engineers was astonishingly thorough. They built two pontoon bridges across the narrow but treacherous straits of the Hellespont so that the massive army could march from Asia to Europe. They also dug a canal cutting across an isthmus by Mount Athos in Macedonia, so the Persian fleet that was accompanying the army on its journey would not have to sail around a notoriously dangerous promontory.
Meticulous plans[]
The Persian preparations took four years, giving Athens and Sparta plenty of time to look to their defenses. Most of the city-states in northern Greece gave their allegiance to Persia, but the city-states of the Peloponnese allied themselves with the Athenians and Spartans. Themistocles, a political leader in Athens, persuaded his fellow citizens to devote the wealth from a newly discovered silver mine to building a large fleet of triremes. These fast, maneuverable galleys, armed with a ram as the prow and rowed by 170 oarsmen, were to prove crucial to the outcome of the war.
The 200,000-strong Persian army crossed the Hellespont in spring 480 BC, led by Xerxes in person. It march south down the coast toward Athens, with a fleet of more than 1,000 war galleys and supply ships following offshore. The Athenians persuaded their allies to advance north to meet the invaders. The Greek fleet fought an indecisive battle with the Persians off Cape Artemisium, while a force of 7,000 hoplites and skirmishers commanded by the Spartan ruler Leonidas I took up a strong defensive position in a narrow pass at Thermopylae. There, they fought a holding action for three days, the restricted battlefield preventing the Persians from exploiting their vast superiority in numbers. Eventually, the Persians found a path through the mountains that brought them down on the rear of the Greek position. Leonidas and the cream of his hoplites fought on heroically until they were annihilated.
Destruction of Athens[]
As the Persians continued their advance, Athens was evacuated, its population carried to the safety of the island of Salamis, where the Greek fleet was now stationed. The Persian army sacked and then occupied Athens, as the Greek army withdrew further to the south so that it could defend the Peloponnese. The Spartans were keen to pull back the fleet as well, but Themistocles was insistent that the triremes stand and fight. The Greek fleet was heavily outnumbered - probably 300 warships to at least 700 in the Persian fleet - but Xerxes threw away much of this numerical advantage by dispersing his superior naval forces, and placing blocking squadrons to intercept a wrongly anticipated Greek withdrawal. When battle was finally joined off Salamis, the reduced Persian fleet was routed, smashed by the rams of the rapidly maneuvering triremes with their skillful teams of oarsmen. Xerxes abandoned all hope of victory that year and withdrew northward to winter his quarters.
Called away for imperial duties, Xerxes left for the east with part of his army, leaving his general, Mardonius, to continue the campaign the following year with the remainder. The Greek allies, after many hours of bickering among themselves, gathered all their manpower resources to field an army probably numbering 80,000, not greatly inferior to the force available to Mardonius. At Plataea in July 479 BC, the two armies clashed in a confused battle that the Greeks were able to win because of the superior fighting qualities of the hoplite infantry. Mardonius was killed along with many thousands of his soldiers. At the same time, a seaborne raid destroyed the remnants of the Persian fleet beached at Mycale. Persia's invasion of Greece had failed.
After defeating Xerxes' invasion force the Greeks launched a counter-offensive, but the city-states were often as eager to fight one another as to attack the Persians. The offensive against Persia was led by Athens, which formed the Delian League of city-states to prosecute the war. The main goal was to free the Aegean Islands and the Ionian Greek cities of Anatolia from Persian rule. Athenian-led forces also campaigned at length in Cyprus, and in 460 BC Athenian triremes were sent to Egypt to support an anti-Persian rebellion. The Egyptian expedition was a disaster, but in general Athens was successful in extending its own power and weakening Persian influence in Anatolia and the Aegean.