The Great Invasion of 480-479 B.C.
Their newly-won confidence heartened the Athenians to join the resistance against the
gigantic Persian invasion which arrived in Greece in 480 B.C. Darius had vowed the
invasion as revenge for the defeat at Marathon, but it took so long to marshall forces
from all over the far-flung Persian kingdom that he died before it could be launched.
His son,
Xerxes I1 (*486-465)
led the massive invasion force2 of infantry and ships against the Greek mainland. So huge was
Xerxes'
army3, the Greeks later claimed,
it required seven days and seven nights of
continuous marching to cross the Hellespont4 strait between Anatolia and the Greek mainland on a temporary bridge lashed
together from boats and pontoons. Xerxes expected the Greek states simply to surrender
without a fight once they realized the size of his forces.
Many of them
did5, especially the ones in northern Greece along the route of the
Persian army's march.
A coalition of thirty-one Greek states6
decided to fight, however, with the Spartans chosen as leaders because they constituted
Greece's most formidable hoplite army.
Greek Courage at Thermopylae
The Spartans showed their courage when three hundred of their men, along with a few
other allied Greek contingents, held off Xerxes' huge army for several days at the
narrow pass called
Thermopylae7 (“Warm Gates”) in central Greece. The characteristic
Spartan refusal to be intimidated was summed up in the reputed comment of a Spartan
hoplite. A companion remarked that the Persian archers were so numerous that their
arrows darkened the sky in battle.
“That's good news,” said
the Spartan, “we will get to fight in the shade.”8 The pass was so narrow that the
Persians could not employ their superior
numbers to overwhelm the Greek defenders9, who were better warriors one-on-one. Only when a local Greek, hoping for a
reward from the Persian king, showed the Persian troops a secret route around the pass
were they able to massacre its Greek defenders by attacking them from the front and
the rear simultaneously.
The Naval Battle of Salamis
The Athenians soon after proved their mettle. Rather than surrender when Xerxes
arrived in
Attica10 with his army,
they abandoned their city for him to
sack.11 The Athenian commander
Themistocles12 (c. 528-462 B.C.) then
maneuvered the other Greeks into facing the
larger Persian navy13 in a sea battle in the narrow channel between the island
of
Salamis and the west coast of Attica.
Athens was able to supply the largest contingent to the Greek navy at Salamis because
the assembly had been financing the construction of warships ever since a rich strike
of silver had been made in Attica in 483 B.C. The proceeds from the silver mines went
to the
state14 and
at the urging of Themistocles, the assembly had voted to use the
financial windfall to build a navy for defense15, rather
than to distribute the money among individual citizens. As at Thermopylae, the Greeks
in the
battle of Salamis16 in 480 B.C. used topography to their advantage. The
narrowness of the channel prevented the Persians from using all their ships at once
and minimized the advantage of their ships' greater maneuverability. In the close
quarters of the Salamis channel, the
heavier Greek ships17 could employ their underwater rams to sink the less sturdy Persian craft. When
Xerxes observed that the most energetic of his naval commanders appeared to be the one
woman among them
Artemisia of Caria18
(the southwest corner of Turkey), he reportedly remarked, “My men have
become women, and my women, men.”
End of the Persian Wars
The Greek victory at Salamis in 480 B.C. sent
Xerxes back to
Persia19, but he left behind an
enormous infantry force
under his best general20 and
an offer for the Athenians21 (if only they
would capitulate): they would remain unharmed and become the king's overlords over the
other Greeks. The
assembly refused22, the
Athenian population evacuated23 its homes and city once again, and
Xerxes' general wrecked Athens24 for the second time in as many years. In 479 B.C., the
Greek infantry
headed by the Spartans under the command of a royal son25 named Pausanias (c. 520-470 B.C.) outfought the Persian infantry at the battle
of
Plataea26 in Boeotia, just north of Attica, while a Greek fleet caught the Persian navy
napping at
Mykale27 on the coast of
Ionia. The coalition of Greek city-states had thus done the incredible: they had
protected their homeland and their independence from the strongest power in the
world.
