{"id":808,"date":"2019-11-12T22:25:11","date_gmt":"2019-11-13T03:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/?page_id=808"},"modified":"2026-07-31T00:26:29","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T00:26:29","slug":"persian-wars","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/illustrated-lectures\/greek-history\/persian-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"Persian Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The Classical Age begins with the monumental Greek victory over the Persians in what have become known to us as the Persian Wars. Pericles makes reference to these wars when he boasts about the previous generation of Athenians’ success in “stemming the tide of foreign aggression.” The Persian Wars were really a series of Persian versus Greek battles, in which Greek citizens from many city-states fought against the barbarian (as they saw it) invaders. The Persian Wars are said to have been provoked by the gradual rejection of Persian authority by the Greek colonies along the Ionian coast (across the Aegean Sea from Athens, on the shore of the continent of Asia) from 499-494 BC. Living in the shadow of the Persian Empire, and tired of paying tribute, some of the colonies (founded during the Archaic period during the Age of Expansion\/Colonization) tried flexing their muscles and were immediately and utterly trounced by the much more formidable Persians. Once the Persians invaded Eretria, one of the big naysayers, and enslaved her population, Athens (Persia’s next target) knew that trouble was coming down the pike and prepared as best she could… The Battle Of Marathon (490 BC) Herodotus assures us that the Greek victory that stunned both sides was the result of a shrewd battle plan: the great Athenian general Miltiades chose not to deploy his troops in the traditional way, with the bulk of his men in the middle of a phalanx of soldiers. Instead, he thinned out the ranks in the center, giving the Persians a false sense of imminent victory. After the Persians easily broke through the ranks, they were swarmed by Greek soldiers attacking from the flanks (Athenians from one side and Plataeans from the other). Herodotus also tells us that for the first time Athenian slaves were freed so that they could fight for the Athenian cause. After the battle, the Athenians built a treasury at Delphi to hold all their votive offerings to the oracle. The Battle of Marathon spawned legends immediately: witnesses swore that the ghost of Theseus (mythical king of Athens) loomed over the field, giving confidence to his countrymen; the messenger Pheidippides is said to have run into the god Pan on his way to ask for help from the Spartans and received the god’s help instead. The story of a victory run from Marathon to Athens first appears in Plutarch’s Moralia, over half a millennium later than the Persian Wars, and is probably a confused version of the even more astounding run that Herodotus tells us Pheidippides completed from Athens to Sparta just before the battle, seeking Spartan aid, covering 145 miles in two days (Hdt. 6.105-6). Pausanias tells us that the Persians were so sure of victory that they had brought with them a block of marble to be carved into a victory monument. Instead, the great Athenian sculptor Pheidias carved it into a statue of the god Nemesis, avenger of wicked actions, plainly indicating that the Persians got exactly what they deserved. See Book 6 of Herodotus’ History for a full report on the 490 BC Battle of Marathon. The soros at Marathon is the burial place for the 192 Athenian soldiers who died fighting the Persians in the battle. Schliemann originally incorrectly dated this site to the Bronze Age, but later excavations confirmed it to be the grave mound known from classical tradition, with evidence of mass cremation followed by animal sacrifices and a funeral banquet. Pausanias comments that even in his day (2nd century AD) the men who died at Marathon were worshipped as heroes. Because the small city of Plataea had sent their entire fighting force to help Athens at Marathon, their dead too were honored with a tomb on site, the Tomb of the Plataeans. An Interlude: Athenian Silver Strike at Laurion (483 BC) In 483 BC, the Athenians struck a rich vein of silver in one of their mines at Laurion (near Sounion). Once mined, the silver ore was washed in a vat: dirt is lighter than silver, and silver lighter than lead, making the metal easy to screen out. After lengthy arguments, the Athenians decided to invest their new-found fortune in a fleet of 200 ships, for the purpose of commerce and protection. It was this silver strike that enabled the Athenians to be the first Greek city-state to mint its own silver coins, and this new-found wealth is what allowed Athens to become the superior power among all Greek city-states in the fifth century. The new fleet, which Athens would turn against the Persians at Salamis, was composed primarily of triremes, replacing the older-style penteconters. The Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC) Thermopylae (called the “Hot Gates” because it marks a narrow passage beyond which lie hot springs) is situated along the road from northern to central\/southern Greece. All agree that the forces were not equally matched, although Herodotus’ numbers cannot be right: he would have us believe that several thousand Greeks stood against over five million Persians. It is more likely that the Persian forces numbered about 300,000 against the Greeks’ 7,000-8,000. With the help of a Greek turncoat, the Persians were able to side-step Greek precautionary measures and approach the pass in force. The Spartan commander Leonidas dismissed all allies present except the Thebans and his own band of 300 crack fighting men. The hand-to-hand combat grew so bloody that it is said Xerxes rose three times from his throne in horror at the losses. Leonidas and his band fought to the last man, the surviving Thebans were captured, and the Persians resumed their advance on Athens. A modern memorial to the men who died defending the pass, erected in 1955 with American funding, still stands at Thermopylae today. The Battle of Salamis (480 BC) It is due to Themistocles’ powers of persuasion that the Athenians suffered no loss of life when the Persians marched into Athens and burned it to the ground. The Oracle of Delphi had warned that everything Athenian would be burned to the ground except for what lay behind a “wooden wall”; some thought that meant the populace should huddle within the walls of the Acropolis, but Themistocles rightly concluded that the wooden wall referred to the battle-line of the great Athenian warships. So when the Persians marched into Athens and burned down the city, the women and children had already been transported safely to Troezen, the old men to the nearby island of Salamis, and only those few who remained behind the walls lost their lives. See Herodotus (8.70-94) and Aeschylus’ play The Persians for ancient accounts of this battle. Acting on false intelligence planted by the Greeks, the Persians positioned their fleet at the mouth of the Bay of Salamis, thinking to catch the Greek sailors before they could man their ships in the morning. But dawn caught them walking right into a Greek trap: as the Persian ships poured into the bay, the Greek ships, hiding in the channel beyond, rammed them broadside. The large number of Persian ships and the small diameter of the bay made it difficult for the Persians to maneuver. The Greek victory at Salamis forced Xerxes to retreat home, but the Persian threat wasn’t over yet. The Battle of Plataea (479 BC) In the Battle of Plataea (on the border between Attica and Boeotia), a combined Greek force from 31 different city-states helped ward off the Persians and their Greek allies the Thebans, who had “medised,” or “gone Persian,” during these wars against their own Greek brethren. In this final battle of the Persian Wars, the Spartans killed the Persian general Mardonius, and the Athenians decimated the Theban Sacred Band. Fifty years later, Thebes would exact retribution from the Athenian-allied Plataeans: theirs is one of the first cities ravaged by Thebes in the campaigns of the Peloponnesian War, the same war commemorated by Pericles in his famous Funeral Oration. Athens and Sparta, allies against a “foreign aggressor” in the Persian Wars, would soon become enemies in their own right. In Delphi, the base of the Tripod of the Plataeans still stands, erected to commemorate the victory of the Greek city-states at Plataea in 479 BC. Originally a golden victory tripod stood atop three twisted snake columns inscribed with the names of the 31 city-states who contributed to the victory. The Emperor Constantine the Great later removed the columns to Constantinople, where half of it remains today on display in the Hippodrome.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The Classical Age begins with the monumental Greek victory over the Persians in what have become known to us as the Persian Wars. Pericles makes reference to these wars when he boasts about the previous generation of Athenians’ success in “stemming the tide of foreign aggression.” The Persian Wars were really a series of Persian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":802,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/page_fullwidth.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-808","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=808"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1321,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/808\/revisions\/1321"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}