The Persian Wars (490–479 BC)

About 2,500 years ago, the kings of Persia ruled a huge empire, from today's Iran to Egypt and the coast of Turkey. Many Greeks lived on that coast, in a region called Ionia. In 499 BC these Ionian Greeks rebelled against the Persians, and two cities of mainland Greece, Athens and Eretria, sent ships to help them. The Persian king Darius did not forget.

Persia attacked mainland Greece twice. In 490 BC a Persian army landed at Marathon, near Athens, and the Athenians beat it. Ten years later, in 480 BC, Darius's son Xerxes came with a much bigger army and fleet. The Greeks lost at Thermopylae and the Persians burned Athens, but the Greek ships won the great sea battle, the ναυμαχία, of Salamis. In 479 BC the Greeks also won on land, at Plataea. The Greek cities stayed independent, and the Greeks remembered these wars as a fight for ἐλευθερία, freedom.

Once the Ionian Revolt was crushed, Darius sent a fleet across the Aegean; Herodotus speaks of 600 ships. The Persians, led by Datis and Artaphernes, captured Eretria on Euboea and landed in the bay of Marathon in early September 490 BC.

Athens sent a long-distance runner, Philippides (often called Pheidippides), to ask Sparta for help. Herodotus (6.105–106) says he reached Sparta the day after leaving Athens. The Spartans agreed to come, but their law did not allow them to march before the full moon. So the Athenians fought with only the Plataeans at their side: about 9,000 Athenian and 1,000 Plataean hoplites, ὁπλῖται, heavy foot soldiers, according to later ancient writers. The general, στρατηγός, Miltiades made the centre of his line thin and the wings strong. The wings won, then turned together against the Persian centre.

Herodotus (6.117) counts 6,400 Persian dead and 192 Athenians. The story of a runner who ran from Marathon to Athens to announce the victory appears only in much later writers, but it gave its name to the modern marathon race.

Darius died before he could try again, and his son Xerxes prepared a far larger expedition. Herodotus (7.186) gives an incredible total of more than five million people. Modern historians agree that this is impossible, but not on the real figure: their estimates for the army range from about 70,000 to 300,000 men.

Athens was ready at sea thanks to Themistocles. In 483/482 BC a rich vein of silver was found at Laurion, and instead of sharing the money among the citizens, the Athenians built warships. By 480 BC they had 200 triremes, τριήρεις: fast ships with a bronze ram and about 170 rowers each.

In the summer of 480 BC about 7,000 Greeks under the Spartan king Leonidas held the narrow pass of Thermopylae for two days, while the fleet fought an undecided battle at Artemisium. When a local man, Ephialtes, showed the Persians a mountain path, Leonidas sent most of the army away and stayed with 300 Spartans, 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans. The Persians then burned Athens, which its people had abandoned. In late September, in the narrow straits of Salamis, about 300 Greek ships (378 in Herodotus' list) defeated a Persian fleet of more than 1,000, which could not use its numbers in so small a space.

Xerxes went back to Asia but left his general Mardonius in Greece. In 479 BC a Greek army led by the Spartan Pausanias defeated and killed him at Plataea, and Herodotus (9.100) says that on the same day the Greeks also beat the Persians at Mycale, on the coast of Asia Minor. The invasions were over.

Most of what we know comes from Herodotus, who wrote his Histories a generation later, and from Aeschylus, who lived through the wars and staged his tragedy The Persians in Athens. Herodotus (7.228) also quotes the famous epitaph of the Spartans at Thermopylae, traditionally attributed to the poet Simonides. Ancient numbers are often too high, so historians compare the texts with archaeology: the burial mound of the Athenians at Marathon, or the statues damaged by the Persians and buried on the Acropolis.

The victory changed Greece. Athens became a sea power and led a league of allies whose treasury was first kept on Delos. The poorer citizens who rowed the triremes gained political weight, and Athenian democracy grew stronger. The wars also changed how Greeks saw other peoples: the Persians became the model of the βάρβαρος.