The Persian Wars

Herodotus counted 192 Athenians dead at Marathon in 490 BCE, and the mound raised over them still stands on the plain.

The largest empire of its time

In 550 BCE Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid Persian empire, and within a few decades it ran from the Aegean coast of Turkey to the Indus. Under Darius I it was divided into provinces called satrapies, each paying tribute in silver or goods. Darius improved a network of roads; the best known, the Royal Road from Sardis to Susa, had 111 posting stations with fresh horses. Mounted couriers could carry a message in days that took travellers about three months on foot. Herodotus wrote that nothing mortal travels faster than these Persian messengers, and that neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness stops them. A version of that line is carved over the old General Post Office in New York.

A revolt in Ionia

The Greek cities of Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor, were Persian subjects. In 499 BCE Miletus led them in revolt, and the next spring Athens sent 20 ships to help. The rebels burned Sardis, a provincial capital, in 498 BCE. Persia crushed the revolt and sacked Miletus in 494 BCE. Darius now had a reason to punish Athens, and in 490 BCE a Persian fleet crossed the Aegean and landed its army on the plain of Marathon, about 40 km from Athens.

Marathon, 490 BCE

The Greek Ministry of Culture’s Marathon exhibition gives about 9,000 Athenians and 1,000 Plataeans against a larger Persian force. The Athenian general Miltiades thinned the centre of his line and strengthened the wings. When the Persian centre pushed forward, the Greek wings beat their opponents, then turned inward and closed on the centre. Herodotus gives the dead as 192 Athenians and 6,400 Persians; he does not say how many Plataeans fell. The Athenian figure is probably the real count of bodies buried in the mound; the Persian figure is much less certain. The army then marched back to Athens fast enough to face the Persian fleet when it arrived off the city, and the Persians sailed home.

Xerxes invades, 480 to 479 BCE

Darius died before he could try again, and his son Xerxes led a far larger invasion in 480 BCE, crossing the Hellespont on two bridges of boats. Athens had prepared. In 482 BCE, on the advice of Themistocles, it had spent the profits of a rich silver strike at Laurion on a fleet of triremes, warships rowed by about 170 men in three banks. At the narrow pass of Thermopylae, King Leonidas of Sparta with his 300 Spartans and several thousand allies held the Persian army for three days before they were surrounded. Xerxes then burned Athens, whose people had fled to Salamis and other places. In September 480 BCE Themistocles drew the Persian fleet into the narrow strait of Salamis, where its numbers counted for little, and the Greeks won. The next year a Greek army led by Sparta defeated the Persian land forces at Plataea.

After the wars

In 478 BCE Athens and many island and coastal cities formed the Delian League to keep fighting Persia. Members paid ships or money into a treasury on the island of Delos. Over time Athens turned the league into an empire. In 454 BCE the treasury moved to Athens, and league money helped pay for the Parthenon. Sparta and its allies grew alarmed, and the rivalry ended in the Peloponnesian War of 431 to 404 BCE, which Athens lost. Most of what we know about the Persian Wars comes from Herodotus of Halicarnassus, who wrote his Histories a generation later and whom Cicero called the father of history.