Greco-Persian Wars

The causes

In 499 BC, the Greek cities of Ionia, on the coast of present-day Turkey, rose up against Persian rule. Athens supported them and took part in the burning of Sardis, a Persian regional capital. King Darius I resolved to punish Athens and to conquer Greece.

Since the conquest of Lydia by King Cyrus II, around 546 BC, the Greek cities of Ionia have been under Persian rule. At the beginning of the 5th century, the empire, governed by Darius I, extended from Egypt to the Indus. The Persians let these cities manage their internal affairs, but they had to pay tribute and were sometimes ruled by tyrants supported by the king. Shortly before the revolt, Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus, failed in an expedition against the island of Naxos, led with Persian support. Fearing punishment from his protectors, he drew the Ionian cities into an uprising that mixed local ambitions with refusal of foreign tutelage.

The course of the war

In 490 BC, a Persian army landed near Marathon, in Attica. The Athenians, helped only by a few allies from Plataea, defeated it. Ten years later, Xerxes I returned with a much larger army and fleet. In 480, three hundred Spartans of King Leonidas and their allies held the Persians back at the pass of Thermopylae before being defeated, and then Athens was taken and burned.

But the Greek fleet, led by the Athenian Themistocles, destroyed much of the Persian fleet at Salamis in September 480. In 479, the Greek army led by the Spartans crushed the Persians at Plataea, while the Greek fleet won at Mycale, in Ionia.

After the Persian defeat at Mycale, the Greeks continued the war beyond mainland Greece. At Plataea, the Persian general Mardonius, who had kept part of the army in Greece, was killed, and his camp was plundered. Around 478 BC, the Spartan regent Pausanias retook Byzantium, on the Bosphorus, and carried out operations on Cyprus. Suspected of negotiating with the Persian king, he was recalled to Sparta, which then gave up leading the struggle, and Athens took over the leadership of the Greek allies.

The war then took on a maritime dimension along the coasts of the Aegean. Around 476 BC, Cimon, son of Miltiades, captured Eion, on the river Strymon, then the island of Scyros. Around 466, he defeated, at the mouth of the Eurymedon in Pamphylia, a Persian army attacked both by land and by sea in the course of a single day. Historians debate the scope of these successes: a so-called Peace of Callias, perhaps concluded around the middle of the 5th century BC, would have ended the hostilities, but its existence remains disputed, since it is attested only by late sources.

The battles of 480 relied on an exceptional civilian and military mobilization. The Athenians were evacuated to Salamis, Aegina or Troezen, under a decree attributed to Themistocles. The hoplites, heavily equipped with a round shield, a cuirass and a spear, fought in a tight phalanx, and the triremes, ships with three rows of oarsmen, carried a bronze ram. In Sicily, according to tradition, Gelon of Syracuse defeated the Carthaginians at Himera the same year, which makes 480 a year of war on several fronts.

The consequences

The Persians gave up conquering mainland Greece. Athens took the lead of the Delian League, a maritime alliance that gradually turned into an Athenian empire and fuelled the rivalry with Sparta, up to the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). The 5th century was Athens' golden age, with Pericles, the Parthenon and Athenian democracy.

Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, made these wars the founding account of the opposition between Greeks and Persians, but he mixed testimony, facts and legendary narratives, such as the speeches he attributes to leaders. Modern historians still debate the true extent of the invasion of 480 and the ambitions of Xerxes, which may have been more limited than tradition suggests. In Greek memory, the victory became that of freedom against an empire seen as despotic, a theme that Athenian orators took up in the 5th and 4th centuries. In 334 BC, Alexander the Great invoked this revenge to invade the Persian Empire.

Timeline

1. 499 BCThe Greek cities of Ionia revolt against Persia
2. 490 BCAthenian victory at Marathon
3. 480 BCLeonidas and his men hold out at Thermopylae
4. 480 BCGreek naval victory at Salamis
5. 479 BCGreek victory at Plataea drives off the Persian army

Key figures

• Darius I, Persian king who launched the first expedition against Greece
• Xerxes I, his son, who invaded Greece in 480 BC
• Leonidas, king of Sparta, who died at Thermopylae
• Themistocles, Athenian general, architect of the victory at Salamis