Greco-Persian Wars

The Greco-Persian Wars, also called the Persian Wars, is the modern name for a series of conflicts in the first half of the fifth century BCE between the Achaemenid Empire of Persia and Greek communities. The Greeks themselves often called them ta Mēdika, “the Median affairs”, because they tended to call all Persians Medes.

The wars include the revolt of the Ionian Greeks against Persian rule (499–493 BCE), the first Persian expedition against mainland Greece that ended at Marathon (490 BCE), Xerxes' great invasion (480–479 BCE), and roughly thirty years of Greek counter-attacks in the Aegean, Cyprus and Egypt. Historians disagree about when to say the wars ended: Herodotus' story stops in 479/478 BCE, while the widest definition runs to a possible peace treaty around 449 BCE.

In the Greek imagination the wars became a story of freedom against tyranny, of a few defeating many. Seen from Persia they were a frontier war on the western edge of an empire that stretched to the Indus. Both views are needed to understand what happened.

In the mid-sixth century BCE Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid Empire. Around 547/546 BCE he conquered Lydia in western Anatolia, whose king Croesus had ruled the Greek cities of the coast, and those cities passed under Persian control. Under Darius I the empire was organized into provinces called satrapies, connected by royal roads and bound by tribute. Darius' inscription at Behistun lists the Yauna, the Ionians, among the peoples of the empire.

Persia ruled its Greek subjects largely through local tyrants loyal to the king. For many Greek cities this arrangement was tolerable, but it also created resentment, especially as political ideas of wider citizen participation were spreading in the Greek world.

Mainland Greece was a patchwork of independent city-states that often fought one another. Around 507 BCE, according to Herodotus, Athenian envoys seeking Persian help gave the satrap at Sardis “earth and water”, the traditional tokens of submission, although Athens disowned them on their return. Some historians think this helps explain why Persia later treated Athens as a rebellious subject rather than a foreign enemy.

In 499 BCE Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus, after a failed joint expedition with the Persians against the island of Naxos, led the Ionian cities in revolt. Tyrants were expelled across Ionia. Sparta refused to help, but Athens sent twenty ships and Eretria five. In 498 BCE the rebels and their allies marched inland and burned the city of Sardis, the seat of the satrap, including a temple of the goddess Cybebe. Herodotus says Darius ordered a servant to remind him three times at dinner, “Master, remember the Athenians”, a story that may be literary rather than literal.

The revolt spread to Caria, the Hellespont and Cyprus, but the Persians regained control step by step. In 494 BCE the Ionian fleet was defeated off the island of Lade, partly because contingents from Samos and Lesbos deserted. Miletus was captured: according to Herodotus most of the men were killed and the women and children enslaved, and survivors were deported to Ampe near the mouth of the Tigris. At Athens the playwright Phrynichus staged The Capture of Miletus; the audience burst into tears and he was fined a thousand drachmas for reminding them of their own misfortunes.

After the revolt, the Persian general Mardonius replaced several Ionian tyrannies with democracies, a surprising step that shows Persian policy was pragmatic. In 492 BCE Mardonius reasserted Persian control in Thrace and Macedon, but his fleet was wrecked in a storm off Mount Athos.

In 490 BCE a Persian naval expedition under Datis and Artaphernes crossed the Aegean, subdued Naxos and other islands, and besieged Eretria in Euboea. After six days the city was betrayed; its temples were burned and its people deported, according to Herodotus to Ardericca near Susa, where they still lived in his own day.

The Persians then landed at the bay of Marathon in Attica, guided by Hippias, the exiled former tyrant of Athens. About 9,000–10,000 Athenian hoplites, joined by roughly 1,000 Plataeans, attacked and defeated them; the Spartans arrived only after the battle because of a religious festival. Herodotus gives 6,400 Persian and 192 Athenian dead; the Athenian figure is probably accurate because the dead were buried and listed in a mound on the battlefield, while the Persian figure is harder to verify.

For Persia, Marathon was a limited setback for a punitive raid. For Athens, it became the founding legend of its democracy and of the hoplite class. (See the separate entry on the Battle of Marathon.)

Darius died in 486 BCE before he could launch a new expedition, and his son Xerxes first had to put down revolts in Egypt and Babylonia. Then he prepared an invasion on a far larger scale: a bridge of boats across the Hellespont, a canal cut through the Athos peninsula to avoid the dangerous cape, and supply depots along the route. Herodotus claims the army numbered over 2.6 million fighting men, more than five million with followers. Modern historians reject these figures as impossible; estimates for the land army usually fall somewhere around 100,000–300,000, with a fleet of several hundred to over a thousand ships.

Only a minority of Greek states resisted. An alliance led by Sparta was formed in 481 BCE (the victory monument later set up at Delphi lists 31 communities); many others, including Thessaly, Thebes and Argos, submitted to Persia or stayed neutral. In August or September 480 BCE a Greek force of several thousand under the Spartan king Leonidas held the pass of Thermopylae for about three days while the Greek fleet fought at nearby Artemisium. When the Persians found a mountain path around the pass, Leonidas sent most of the army away and stayed with his 300 Spartans, the Thespians and the Thebans; the Spartans and Thespians died fighting.

The Persians then occupied Attica. The Athenians, following Themistocles' interpretation of an oracle about a “wooden wall”, had evacuated their families to Troezen, Aegina and Salamis. The Persians burned the Acropolis, and the damaged sculptures that Athenians later buried there have been excavated by archaeologists. In September 480 BCE, in the narrow strait between Salamis and the mainland, the Greek fleet of around 370–380 triremes defeated the larger Persian fleet, which could not use its numbers in the confined waters. Xerxes watched from the shore and returned to Asia with much of his army, leaving Mardonius in Greece.

In 479 BCE Mardonius reoccupied Athens and offered the Athenians generous terms, which they refused. The largest Greek army ever assembled, led by the Spartan regent Pausanias, met him near Plataea in Boeotia. After days of manoeuvring, the Spartans and Tegeans broke the Persian centre and Mardonius was killed. According to Greek tradition, on the same day a Greek fleet landed at Mycale on the Anatolian coast and destroyed the remaining Persian forces there, sparking a new Ionian rebellion.

The Greeks then took the war to Persian territory. In 478 BCE, when Pausanias' arrogance alienated the allies, Athens organized the Delian League to continue the war and free the Greeks of Asia. Under Cimon the League won a double victory by land and sea at the Eurymedon river in southern Anatolia (around 466 BCE). An Athenian-led expedition to support a revolt in Egypt (c. 460–454 BCE) ended in disaster, but campaigns on Cyprus continued until around 450 BCE.

Later Greek writers say that around 449 BCE Athens and Persia concluded a treaty, the Peace of Callias, in which Persia agreed to keep its fleet out of the Aegean and Athens agreed to stop attacking the King's territory. Thucydides does not mention it, and its existence has been doubted since antiquity: the fourth-century historian Theopompus argued that the inscribed text was a forgery. Whether or not there was a formal treaty, large-scale hostilities stopped around this time.

In the short term, the wars saved the independence of the mainland Greek states and freed many Aegean and Ionian cities from Persian rule. The victory gave enormous prestige to Athens, whose fleet of triremes, rowed by poorer citizens, had been decisive. Many historians link this to the growing political weight of the poorer citizens in Athenian democracy.

The Delian League, founded to fight Persia, turned into an Athenian empire. Its tribute paid for the fleet and, from the 440s BCE, contributed to the building programme on the Acropolis, including the Parthenon, which replaced temples the Persians had burned. The rivalry this empire provoked with Sparta led to the Peloponnesian War.

For Persia, the defeats were real but not fatal. The empire lost the Aegean and some Anatolian coastline but remained the dominant power in the Near East for another 150 years. During the Peloponnesian War Persian money helped Sparta defeat Athens, and in the King's Peace of 387/386 BCE Persia regained control over the Greek cities of Asia. It was Alexander of Macedon, presenting his campaign in part as revenge for Xerxes' invasion, who ended the Achaemenid Empire in 330 BCE.

Hostility did not stop cultural exchange. Persian spoils such as tents, textiles and metalwork were displayed in Greek sanctuaries, and later writers claimed that the Odeion of Pericles in Athens imitated the tent of Xerxes. Margaret Miller's study Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century BC (1997) showed how Athenians adopted Persian luxury goods and fashions, such as parasols and certain drinking vessels, even while their public rhetoric condemned Persian “softness”.

The human costs fell heavily on non-combatants: the enslaved and deported people of Miletus and Eretria, the Athenians and others who lost homes and harvests, the many soldiers and rowers from the empire's subject peoples who died at sea, and the Greek communities that suffered for having taken either side.

The Greeks commemorated the wars intensely. Aeschylus, who had fought at Marathon, staged The Persians in 472 BCE, the earliest surviving Greek tragedy, which imagines the news of Salamis arriving at the Persian court. Epigrams attributed to Simonides honoured the dead of Thermopylae. The Persian defeat became a key theme in Greek ideas of freedom, and also in the growing stereotype of Asians as luxurious and servile “barbarians”, which the classicist Edith Hall analysed in Inventing the Barbarian (1989).

In modern Europe the wars were often told as the moment when “the West” was saved from “the East”. The philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in 1846 that Marathon was more important even for English history than the Battle of Hastings. Thermopylae has been invoked by very different causes, from the Greek War of Independence to Nazi propaganda after Stalingrad, and in popular culture by the comic and film 300 (2007).

In Iran, the Achaemenid past is a source of national pride centred on Cyrus, Darius and Persepolis, and the Greek wars are generally seen as a minor frontier episode. The film 300 drew official protests in Iran for its portrayal of Persians. Many historians today, in Iran and elsewhere, criticize the “West versus East” framing as anachronistic: many Greeks fought for Persia, Greek states often sought Persian help against each other, and the empire's diverse peoples had their own reasons for serving the king.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus, a Greek born in the Persian Empire around 484 BCE, wrote his Histories so that, as he says in his opening words, the great deeds of Greeks and barbarians would not lose their glory, and to explain why they fought. His work combines oral tradition, travel, lists of peoples and troops, and dramatized scenes such as Xerxes' councils. Cicero called him the father of history; others, from Plutarch's essay On the Malice of Herodotus onwards, questioned his reliability and fairness. Modern scholars generally find him more careful than his critics claimed, while recognizing literary shaping, patriotic bias and impossible numbers.

Other Greek sources include Thucydides' brief survey of the fifty years after 479 BCE, Ctesias' Persika (written by a Greek doctor at the Persian court but known only in fragments and considered unreliable), Diodorus Siculus, and Plutarch's lives of Themistocles, Aristides and Cimon. Inscriptions such as the Serpent Column, a victory monument dedicated at Delphi and later moved to Constantinople, list the Greek states that fought.

No Persian narrative of the wars survives. Achaemenid royal inscriptions present an ideal of universal order and never mention defeats. The Persepolis Fortification and Treasury tablets, administrative records in Elamite, reveal how the empire organized labour, food rations and travel, and thus how an army could be supplied, but they do not describe the Greek campaigns.

Since the 1980s the Achaemenid History workshops, initiated by Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Amélie Kuhrt, and Pierre Briant's synthesis From Cyrus to Alexander (French 1996, English 2002) have challenged the Greek-centred picture. They stress Persian sources and archaeology, reject the old image of a decadent, despotic empire in decline, and ask what Persian aims actually were: permanent conquest of Greece, or punishment and control of an unstable frontier.

Other debates concern numbers, logistics and chronology: how large Xerxes' forces could have been given water and food; the exact dates of Thermopylae and Salamis; whether a “Decree of Themistocles” inscription found at Troezen in 1959 preserves a genuine order to evacuate Athens or a later reconstruction; and whether the Oath of Plataea, in which Greeks supposedly swore not to rebuild temples burned by the Persians, is authentic.

Finally, historians discuss the meaning of the wars. Were they a clash of political systems, or an episode in which Greek communities divided according to local interests? The concept of a single “Greek” side is itself partly a product of the war and of later memory. Studies of Aeschylus and Herodotus show how the war helped to create Greek identity by defining it against the Persian “other”.