Persian Wars as the Nominal

Persian Wars

As the nominal subject of Herodotus, the great wars between the Persian Empire and the often-fractious city-states of the Greek world represent the first truly historic event of Western history. In Herodotus' wake, generations of historians have been moved to contemplate the implications of the conflict's origins as a struggle between an apparently implacable Eastern power and the small but individualistic polities of the emerging West -- polities that responded to aggression by discovering new modes of cooperating against a mutual adversary.

In fact, the wars began primarily because the Greek colonies of Asia Minor proved difficult to subordinate into the Persian Empire. These Ionian cities had briefly been united under the domination of Croesus and the Lydians, only to pass into the Persian sphere of influence when Cyrus conquered Lydia in 547 BCE (Herodotus 41). While the Ionians submitted relatively readily to Lydian rule, the Persian system of administration through local strongmen reporting to the satrap in Sardis proved inadequate in the long-term; by 499 BCE, Ionia was in revolt and soliciting allies on the Greek mainland.

The Ionian phase of the conflict was relatively short-lived. The Ionian cities had never been highly integrated even in the truncated Lydian period, and their fragile ability to coordinate their military efforts dissolved entirely in the face of aggressive Persian action. As De Souza points out, there was little precedent for cooperation among the Ionian cities, each of which had been founded as an independent colony:

The nearest thing the Ionians had to a common political organization was the koinon, a religious assembly that met annually at the Panionion, a sanctuary of Poseidon in the territory of Priene. This assembly was not meant to be a political one and it lacked the structures to produce a unified leadership (De Souza 17).

In fact, confusion over who would command the rebellion's naval efforts was likely a factor in the defeat of the outnumbered but likely better-trained and -equipped Ionian fleet at Lade, where desertion and the absence of unified leadership likely left Miletus and other revolting cities open to overland Persian attack. Herodotus sums up the debacle as the Greeks "refus[ing] to see reason," or as Gray and Cary more neutrally observe, "Thus Greek disunion and disloyalty presented the Persians with a crushing victory" (227).

By 493 BCE, the Ionian cities were more firmly under Persian rule than ever and Darius I was looking across the Aegean for new terrtories to add to his empire. Following Herodotus, historical convention attributes the 490 BCE invasion of Greece to a desire to punish Athens and Eretria in particular for sending 25 warships to aid their Asian cousins. As such, the revolt served as an immediate provocation for revenge, fueling an intensive three-year campaign of military and diplomatic intimidation.

However, there are historians who argue that the conduct of the Ionian war held the key to Greek survival in the face of this campaign and even (in a dramatic but somewhat unconvincing twist) actually gave Darius pause:

Far from hastening on the invasion of European Greece, the Ionian Revolt tended to delay it. The respite thus gained, and the lessons that the revolt conveyed, were precious. They enabled the European Greks to realize and secure the two conditions of success: control of the seas and unity of command (Gray & Cary 228).

Focusing on any "lessons" the Ionians taught Darius is probably overly idealistic. In fact, Herodotus alludes to plenty of pragmatic concerns that the Persians would have needed to resolve before turning their full attention to the conquest of Greece. First, the Persian possessions in Thrace had revolted along with their counterparts in Asia Minor and needed to be reconquered (Herodotus 365-7); this took at least several months to accomplish. In the meantime, bad weather around Mt. Athos appears to have damaged the Persian fleet; while Herodotus' claim (367) that 20,000 men were killed is controversial, such an event would have at least temporarily restricted the empire's further advance.

Historians are on surer ground when they argue that the Ionian failures taught "lessons" to the Greeks by encouraging cooperation against a culturally alien mutual threat. Still, these lessons were initially slow in coming when the Persian invasion of Greece eventually came in 491 BCE. Far from resisting the empire's diplomatic overtures, nearly every major Greek city effectively surrendered (De Souza 30). Even Athens failed to provide aid in practical terms to either of the Persians' initial targets: Karystos, a small town that had not aided the Ionians at all, and Eretria, which had. Both were ravaged. Then, famously, the Persians were already sailing toward Marathon by the time the Spartans were even approached; had the Athenians failed to hold Darius on their own, it is vanishingly unlikely that Spartan help would have arrived in time to save the city.

Rather, Marathon's real "lesson" for Greek civilization and, by extension, Western history emphasizes endurance, leadership, and courage over cooperation. The Athenians initially adopted a defensive posture in order to delay the Persian army until reinforcements arrived, but after successfully doing so for five days, seized the initiative on their own and went on the offensive. As a result, by the time the Spartans arrived, the Persians had already been forced back into the sea:

Marathon was a triumph of the intelligent use of tactics, discipline, and armament. The Athenians were proud of their own singlehanded [emphasis mine] victory, and in after times were prone to magnify it. A decisive battle in the military sense it obviously was not [but] it was a brilliant prologue (Munro & Walker 252).

This victory only fed Darius' desire to revenge himself on the Greeks, but significantly it also led him to proceed more cautiously against an opponent that had proved its ability to be dangerous. While the first invasion of Greece followed almost precipitously upon the end of the Ionian Revolt, plans for a second dragged on for several years before a rebellion in Egypt and Darius' death delayed the inevitable reprisal by a full decade.

But when Xerxes led his army back into Greece in 480 BCE, the seeds of Greek unity had already sprouted. Instead of Athens facing punishment on its own, the city was now allied to the other members of the so-called "Hellenic League" (for Herodotus, they are simply "the allies") formed in Corinth in 481 BCE. This association brought a permanent end to warfare between its members -- originally centered in the Peloponnese but eventually incorporating interests from as far away as Thessaly -- and focused their activities on common defense against Persian ambitions (Sealey 205-8). Sparta, Athens, and Corinth participated. Argos in particular, "aloof, sullen, and sinister" (Munro 278), did not.

Famously, the Spartan component of this alliance failed to defeat a massive Persian army at Thermopylae. Here, however, the tactical motivation for the defense of the "hot gates" of the pass was not by the self-preservation that the Athenians had demonstrated at Marathon, but the need to protect the allied cities as long as possible. If the Persians had not found the hidden path behind the pass, this effort might well have succeeded indefinitely, but betrayal -- Herodotus blamed a Malian named Ephialte (479-81) -- soon allowed them access to mainland Greece beyond.