Ionian Revolt
It began in the year 494 BCE. Darius the Great, King of Persia, was looking to expand into Europe and led armies across the Bosphorus and even across the Danube, where he fought a little war with the Skythians, which would have ended in disaster if not for his Ionian Greek contingent from the coast of modern Turkey, who held the Danube bridgehead.
Both Darius and the Ionians drew the wrong conclusions from this little escapade: Darius came to believe he could rely completely on the loyalty of his Ionian friends; the Ionians concluded that Darius was weak and the time was right to rebel. The city of Miletus, the richest and most brilliant of the Ionian cities with sixty colonies of its own, sent emissaries to Greece asking for help in overthrowing their Persian overlords. The Spartans, cautious as ever, refused; the Athenians, impulsive as ever, sent 20 ships complete with marines.
At first the Ionian revolt was a success, the Greeks marching inland and burning Sardis, the capital of Croesus that was now the seat of the local satrap. But retribution followed. A Greek fleet of 353 ships was destroyed by a Persian fleet of over 600 (maybe – Herodotus often exaggerates) in the Battle of Lade in 494; Miletus was captured and razed, and the inhabitants carried off to the mouth of the Tigris 1,600km away to be slaves. When the Athenian poet Phrynichus dramatised the event in The Capture of Miletus, the Athenians wept so bitterly he was fined 1,000 drachmas for depressing them.
Marathon
Knowing the Athenians had been cheerleaders to the Ionian Revolt, Darius got busy planning a punitive expedition into Greece itself. A massive army was sent to invade from the north along the Aegean coast, supported by a grand armada under his son-in-law Mardonius, which sailed parallel to the army. One thing they don't tell you in the movies is that as Mardonius passed through Ionia on the way to mainland Greece, he used his army to depose the Greek tyrants and install democratic governments instead (yes, really. It was probably just a way of damping down the flame of rebellion, but nevertheless...). With the invasion going well, Darius then sent ambassadors to all the other cities of Greece demanding symbolic offerings of ge kai hydor – Earth and Water. Having seen the size of his army, most of them gave it – all, says Herodotus, except Athens and Sparta. The Athenians allegedly put the ambassadors on trial and executed them by throwing them into a pit, suggesting they dig out their own earth; the Spartans threw theirs down a well, suggesting they collect their own water. I'm not sure why we're supposed to cheer for people who murder ambassadors visiting under a flag of truce, but there you are.
Unfortunately, before the Persians could avenge this insult, their fleet was wrecked by a storm while rounding the Mount Athos peninsula. This was a major bummer because that vast army needed the fleet for supplies. To give you an idea how good ships are for ferrying in cargo, consider that before the advent of railways in America, it cost as much to move a tonne of goods 50km inland as it had to move it across the entire Atlantic. Donkeys and camels were never going to match that kind of load-bearing capacity, and horses weren't used for transport in those days (in fact, they were part of the cargo on board the ships. Nobody in that era had horseshoes and it would've done them no good if their cavalry went to the trouble of riding all the way to Greece only to arrive with lame mounts). So the army abort and fall back to billets elsewhere.
Displeased, Darius removed Mardonius from command and sent another, smaller army from Kilikia by ship, under the generals Datis and Artaphernes. They landed on the coast of Attika, in the bay of Marathon, where there was a road leading all the way to the polis of Athens itself.
Athens had an ace to play, however: a colourful character by the name of Miltiades. His uncle of the same name had made himself king of a barbarian tribe living on what we now call the Gallipoli peninsula, but the advent of the Persians had put the nephew out of a job. He'd found refuge in Athens, where he became an archon, one of the city's ten elected generals and statesmen; it was he who prevailed on the polemarch Callimarchus to use his casting vote to take Athens to war.
With that vote, Miltiades was effectively in charge of the Athenian military, and took a force of Athenian hoplites (including Callimarchus) up to Marathon and blocked all exits from the plain. A Mexican standoff ensued, but after five days the Persians got bored and decided to sail elsewhere, and started loading their cavalry (their best soldiers) back onto the ships. Seeing his chance, Miltiades attacked, the Athenians weighting their wings and advancing at the quick-step "a little over a mile," according to Herodotus, and cannoned into the milling Persian infantry. The Persians were enveloped and slaughtered: Herodotus claims 6,400 Persian dead for just 192 Athenians.
The Persians who had survived were then transported by fleet around Cape Sunium, to approach Athens from the Saronic Gulf. Seeing this, the Athenians about-faced and ran 33km back towards Athens to oppose them. When they arrived the Persians found the Athenians holding such commanding ground that it was impossible to attempt a landing, so they gave up and sailed home. A messenger subsequently ran all the way back to Athens to gasp, "We have been victorious!" – then fell dead from exhaustion. The slain were buried in a huge mound which still marks the site of the battle, and its veterans were held in high honour for the rest of their lives. But Callimachus had been killed, and without his restraint Miltiades went too far towards trying to reclaim his home at Gallipoli; he ended up dying in prison while awaiting prosecution by the Athenians.
Thermopylae
Not a man to give up easily, Darius planned another, even bigger army to invade Greece again, but before he could get it done the Egyptians revolted, requiring his attention there. Darius died in 486 while organising the Egyptian campaign, and the task of punishing Greece passed to his son Xerxes. The matter was not forgotten: every night, a slave stood by Xerxes's side at dinner and whispered, "Master, remember the Athenians."
So by 480, ten years after his father's expedition, Xerxes had an expedition of his own ready. This host deliberately included warriors from every corner of the Empire, because war wasn't just a way of conquering territory for the Great King. It was, as jerk-off middle-management types would say, a "team-building exercise." Guys under 25 are dangerous, especially when they don't have wives, jobs or children to tie them down. Too much free time gives them ideas; organising them into an army where your company commanders can beat the cheek out of them and put their natural bloodlust to work in a place far, far away from the heartland is just good management. Even better, a lot of them will be killed, and those who survive will return to their villages quietly traumatised and full of stories about what a fine fellow the Great King is, and how those people from Somewhere-stan our tribe's been fighting for the last thousand years aren't so bad either. See? Team-building!
Herodotus says Xerxes assembled 1,207 ships and 2.5 million men: that would've been way, way beyond the logistics of the time, and today the accepted figure is about 200,000 soldiers and 700 ships. This still easily left Athens outnumbered ten to one. In fact, his army was so vast he decided to bridge the Hellespont rather than ferry them across in ships. To this end he lined up scores of ships and laid a road down upon them, whereupon a storm arose and demolished the bridge. At this, Herodotus says, Xerxes was, "...full of wrath and straightaway gave orders that the Hellespont should receive 300 lashes, and that a pair of fetters should be cast into it." This mightn't have been the bout of childishness it sounds like: among his multinational host were many thousands of tribesmen who knew nothing of the enlightened Zoroastrian religion the Great King ascribed to, so to restore morale it was necessary to demonstrate that even the winds and waves were subject to the will of Xerxes. This time the wind and waves obeyed, and the bridges were completed: 314 ships in one, 360 in the second, spanning some 2.2km, with screens were erected on either side so that horses wouldn't take fright. The Persian army crossed into Europe in April, 480 BCE.
It's at this point Bold King Leonidas enters the story. The real Leonidas was almost exactly nothing like Gerard Butler: for one thing, he was already 60 years old, having been born some time in the 540s BCE – much more Badass Grandpa than Young, Hot and Shirtless. For another, he had a home life worthy of Jerry Springer. His father had been King Anaxandridas, whose wife was also his niece, and barren for so long the ephors had tried to convince Anaxandridas to divorce her and breed sons with someone else. But it seems Anaxandridas was fond of his first niece, because although he recognised the ephors' concerns, he wouldn't divorce her. Eventually they came to a compromise whereby he married his second while keeping his first, Big Love style.
This second wife immediately bore a healthy son, Kleomenes, and all seemed well and good – until, in a twist to make Hagar giggle, the first wife also gave birth to a son, this one named Doreius – then later had another, our Leonidas. Normally princes were the only Spartan boys exempt from a brutal childhood in the agoge, but Leonidas was so far from the throne he became one of the few to go through it. When Anaxandridas died in 520, Kleomenes succeeded him as Agiad king, offending Doreius so badly he quit Sparta forever and eventually died trying to rebuild his fortunes in Sicily. Then Kleomenes went stark raving mad, so the kingship passed to Leonidas, the boy who'd started out as Plan C. Just to be on the safe side, Leonidas legitimised his rule with a marriage to Kleomenes's daughter Gorgo – so like his father, Leonidas married his niece. Yeah, that hot sex scene from the movie? Incest.
Anyway, the timing of Xerxes's invasion coincided with the Karneia, and the Greeks considered warfare at this time sacrilegious, so they hatched a plan to delay the Persians. Leonidas and his personal guard of three-hundred hippeis (the usual very young men replaced with older veterans who had sons to replace them) formed a virtual suicide squad and marched north, gathering volunteers as they went. Leonidas's last words to Gorgo were, "Marry a good man and bear fine children," because Spartans were romantic like that.
The original plan was to fight at the Vale of Tempe on the northern border of Thessaly. King Alexander of Macedonia, however, warned that this narrow pass was easily flanked by several of the others, and that Xerxes's army was astoundingly large and could easily attack from the rear while still engaging at the front. They retreated instead to the Gates of Fire – Thermopylae – the strategic bottleneck where Greek lives could be sold most dearly.
Joining the Spartans were volunteers from several other Greek cities, including 400 of my boys the Thebans, making a total of 7,000 or so Greeks holding the narrow pass. The Spercheios River has been silting up the bay for the last 2,500 years, so unlike the modern Thermopylae it was then a narrow pass less than 16 metres wide, with a steep mountain on one side and the beach on the other. Xerxes waited four days for all his forces to get into camp, and in the meantime sent spies to observe the Greeks. He burst out laughing when the report came in that the Spartans were passing the time doing gymnastic exercises and combing their long hair, but one of his advisors corrected the impression, telling him that the Spartans, "when they are about to hazard their lives, adorn their heads with care," and warned him he was about to face the attack dogs of Greece, the "finest kingdom and town in Greece, with the bravest men."
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| Thermopylae today: in 480 the coast lay more or less where the road does now. |
On the fifth day after arriving Xerxes sent emissaries demanding the Spartans surrender their weapons. We all know what they said to that: Molon labe (Μολὼν Λαβέ), i.e. "Come and get them" – the original "come at me bro," and still the official motto of the Greek 1st Army Corps. Xerxes decided he'd had enough, and attacked. And got nowhere. Before the day was out he'd "leaped three times from his throne in agony for his army": pressing forward against this densely packed phalanx, the lightly-armoured Persian soldiers died like flies and made zero headway. Determined to break the Greeks, Xerxes committed his elites, the Immortals, so named because men in other regiments had been preselected as BCRs (battle casualty replacements). Against other forces they must've been a brilliant piece of psychological warfare - you throw everything you have against the 10,000 Immortals, manage to kill a good number of them, and the next day there's 10,000 of them again? Despite that, there was nothing particularly special about them – they had the same felt hat, same armour of fishlike scales, same wicker shield, and same short spear and bow as any other Persian soldier. So they died like flies too.
After three days the traitor Ephialtes revealed to Xerxes the Anopoea, the path by which the Greek flank could be turned. Leonidas saw he could retreat to a hopeless position further south or die where he stood: an easy choice for a Spartan. Leonidas sent most of the allies home, but his 300-strong bodyguard (along with 1,100 Boeotians, whose homelands would be first to suffer the tender mercies of Xerxes's army if Thermopylae fell) continued their delaying action until they were forced back to a small hillock. Wrote Herodotus: "They defended themselves to the last, such as still had swords using them, and the others resisting with their hands and teeth; til the barbarians... overwhelmed and buried the remnant left beneath showers of missile weapons." Leonidas, 300 Spartans and a thousand Boeotians died to the last man, an object lesson in Spartan military ideals.
The other half of the engagement, which rarely gets mentioned, was the naval Battle of Artemisium. A fleet of 271 Athenian ships had sailed to the northern tip of the island of Euboea, which sat like a gargantuan barrier reef off the Greek coast, and held the narrow channel between the island and the mainland against the 700-odd Phoenician warships of the Persian fleet. Like Thermopylae, the Persians could make no use of their overwhelming numbers and suffered colossal losses. Like Thermopylae, they could've sailed all the way around Euboea to take the Athenians from the rear, but for the third time summer storms came to the aid of the Greeks. The fleet was far too large to find safety in any of the local harbours, so in rough weather many had to ride it out: as a result many were wrecked. The squadron tasked with rounding Euboea was destroyed without completing its mission. But when news of the Greek defeat at Thermopylae filtered through the Athenians broke off the engagement: the strategy needed both ends to hold to do any good.
Salamis
Victory at Thermopylae meant all Boeotia fell to Xerxes, and Attika was next. The people of Athens were withdrawn to the islands of Aegina, Salamis and Troezen for safety, and the city abandoned to Xerxes, who burned it to the ground. His revenge for the Ionian Revolt was now complete, but that was no longer what this was about: Xerxes was here to conquer Greece. Knowing this, the Spartans and their Peloponnese cousins prepared to build a wall across the Corinthian Isthmus and hold it to the last man; the Athenians, however, were now led by a man worthy of Miltiades, a certain Themistokles. He'd been something of a rake in his youth, and turned to politics as his natural dishonesty was placed at the service of the state: "I shall enter politics and persuade my way to the top," he said in his 20s, and later added: "I cannot tune a harp, but I know how to take a modest city in hand and raise it to greatness." Accordingly he became an archon at the age of just 30. It had been Themistokles who suggested building the famous Long Walls that connected the city of Athens to the port of Piraeus; after the attack at Marathon, he was able to persuade the Assembly to finish it. When a rich silver vein had been found in the southern part of Attika, he also managed to persuade the Assembly to spend it on upgrading the navy, which grew to a full 200 triremes.
The conquest could not be completed as long as this fleet survived, so Themistokles argued for a sea battle fought in the cramped straights of Salamis. The rest of the Greeks, half-panicked and ready to disperse and defend their own cities, said hell no, they wanted the fleet moved to the western end of he Saronic Gulf, just offshore of the Corinthian Isthmus where the army was waiting. In the ensuing argument Themistokles won the admiration of the Spartans when one raised his staff to wallop him: "Strike," said Themistocles calmly, "but hear me."
They heard him. Themistokles sent his slave Sikinnus (pedagogue to his children) to the Persians with the message he was on their side, and by the way the Greek fleet was in a panic and planning to make their escape from Salamis before it was too late. Xerxes promptly dispatched his own fleet to block all exits from the straights, thus trapping the Greeks in a battle right where Themistokles wanted to fight it. The wind picked up, just as Themistokles had hoped, and it had a greater effect on the high-riding Phoenician ships of the Persians, who fell into disarray. Themistokles attacked and sent 200 of them to the bottom, then pursued and picked off stragglers as they retreated. For the Persians it had been a colossal rout, the waters were chocked with the wreckage of smashed ships and dead men, and the coast was piled with corpses.
(It was in this battle that we met Artemisia, the Greek princess who ruled Halicarnassus and was played by Eva Green and her boobs in 300: Rise of an Empire. She'd brought five ships of her own to the party, and watching from the shore, Xerxes saw some of the best fighting had been done by Artemisia, prompting him to lament: "My men have become women, and my women men." Despite that, she seemed to regard loyalty to either side as strictly optional. When pursued by an Athenian vessel, she deliberately rammed one and sank one of her own galleys; thinking she'd changed sides, the Athenians broke off and went after someone else.)
With his fleet out of action, Xerxes now had no way to defend the pontoon bridge he'd built across the Hellespont, and fearing the Athenians would destroy it he hot-footed it back to Persia. The remaining fleet was shadowed by the Greeks, still with some caution as even after such losses they were badly outnumbered. Xerxes's general Mardonius, a capable man who'd finally worked his way back into the Great King's favour, volunteered to stay behind and finish the job with the hard core of the Persian army, about 100,000 men; the rest went home with Xerxes. Wintering in Boeotia and Thessaly, Athens was free for its people to return for the winter.
Plataea
With the Spartans still refusing to send an army out of the Peloponnese and the Persians refusing to send an army into it, 479 seemed like it would be a year of stalemate. Mardonius went through Alexander of Macedonia to offer a peace deal, but the Athenians made sure there were Spartans in the room to hear them refuse it. Athens was thus evacuated again, and Mardonius marched back south and re-occupied it. Mardonius repeated his peace offer to the refugees on Salamis, who now, along with the cities of Megara and Plataea sent messengers to the Spartans asking would they please get off the fucking couch already, or so help us Zeus we're going to sign this treaty. Finally goaded into action, the Spartans gathered an 80,000-strong army from among the Peloponnese, put Leonidas's nephew and successor Pausanias in command, and marched north to meet the Persians.
They found them near the Boeotian city of Plataea. The ending of 300 portrays it as another Hollywood zerg rush, but the real battle actually opened with the exact opposite manouevre – a retreat. Both Pausanias and Mardonius were wise commanders who tried to tempt the other into attacking his well-prepared position. Both were playing a waiting game, but neither could afford to wait forever. Camping on the foothills of Mount Kithaeron so they couldn't be ridden down by Mardonius's huge cavalry arm, Pausanias nevertheless saw off an attack by the Persian cavalry under Masistius, who unusually wore a breastplate of gold scales under his scarlet coat (when they couldn't bring him down with body blows, the Greeks guessed his secret and struck at his face). The fighting was bloody, so Pausanias moved to another position further down onto the plain, still with a cluster of small hills protecting him from frontal cavalry attack. But this meant there was no water to be had, and all of it had to be brought up by porters. Still Mardonius did not attack, although he went out of his way to make life hell for Greek forage parties: Mardonius was calculating that time and hardship would see the Greeks start bickering among themselves and fracture the alliance against him.
This was not a futile hope: Pausanias waited ten days, but after that he could wait no more, and by night he tried moving back to a position nearer his old one, where water would be available and foraging easier. In the confusing and demoralising night march, which must've seemed a retreat to the soldiers themselves, the units of he Greek forces became separated and lost contact.
The following morning, when he beheld the Greek disorganisation, Mardonius thought his strategy had come to fruition and the Persians surged forward. But he'd misjudged their mood completely: the Greeks were still in good spirits and, when the Persians came out of their camp, they about-faced and charged. The Spartan main body, although separated from the rest of the Greek army, was able to meet an infantry attack on ground that impeded the use of Persian cavalry. This was the moment for which Pausanias had worked so hard and risked so much: in savage fighting Mardonius himself was killed, the Persian infantry was routed and their camp sacked. Here they were joined by other Greeks who had just defeated some Boeotian collaborators; no mercy was given to the few defenders in the camp, and almost none got away. A huge amount of Persian treasure, with which Mardonius had intended to buy provisions for his army, fell into Greek hands. The Battle of Plataea was won, and with it the Persian invasion of Greece was over.
The fighting went on – a Greek expedition dispatched to aid the Egyptians in their own revolt met with disaster, for example – but by 449 it was possible to sign a treaty by which Persia recognised the independence of Greece.
So in the wars with the Greeks we see the full glory and the fatal flaws of the Persian Empire. Their armies, though numerous, weren't especially good, and fought as disorganised mobs that relied on sheer weight of numbers to get the job done – not a foolish strategy when you're sitting on 44% of the world's population, but counterproductive in the cramped confines of Greece. Their leaders were formidable organisers and logistical masters - just imagine what it took to summon the warriors of a hundred nations and get them pointed in the same direction! - but they weren't especially good generals, and were stuck with the standard problems of alll absolutist monarchs: they relied on the Great King and his delegates (chosen by nepotism not merit) to make the right decisions 100% of the time. Despite that, a Great King was not a god-king, and every decision Darius and Xerxes made was made in the understanding that they'd one day have to answer for them. And as we've already seen, their bureaucracy was on a level unseen in the ancient world before – many think the Romans learned how to run an empire from them. I think it's fair to say that for all their territorial gluttony, they were better at peace than war. And that's about the highest compliment I can pay any society.
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