Clash Between Greeks and Persians
The story of the genesis of the Athenian Golden Age begins chronologically with the
history of the wars between a coalition of Greek states and the
Persian
Kingdom1 that erupted just after 500
B.C. and continued intermittently for decades. The Persian Kingdom outstripped mainland
Greece in every imaginable category of material resources, from precious metals to beasts
of burden. But, above all, it had a preponderance of the ancient world's most precious
resource, human beings. No resource was harder to replace than people because the
populations of antiquity were constantly at risk from disease and regional scarcities of
food to a degree unknown in the modern Western world. Death was not a phenomenon expected
under ordinary conditions to afflict only the old, as today; illness, injury, and
malnutrition could and did carry off people at every age all the time. The imbalance in
demographic resources made the wars between Persians and Greeks seemingly into a contest
between an elephant and a mouse. No one could have reasonably expected the mouse to
prevail. The unexpectedness of the result—a Greek victory—contributed
mightily to the feeling of self-confidence that characterized the Athenian Golden Age, for
good and for ill.
Athenian Mission for a Persian Alliance
The greatest military danger ever to threaten ancient Athens began with a diplomatic
misunderstanding. In 507 B.C the
Athenians sent ambassadors2 to ask for a protective alliance with the king of Persia, Darius I (ruler
between 522-486 B.C.), because they feared that the Spartans would try to intervene in
support of the Athenian aristocratic faction opposed to democracy, which opposed the
political reforms of the time promoting added democracy at Athens that were the
brainchild of the Athenian Cleisthenes.3 This ill-fated diplomatic
mission unwittingly set in motion a sequence of events that culminated in invasions of
mainland Greece by the huge army and navy of the king of Persia, who could summon vast
numbers of fighting men from the many different peoples under his rule.
Mutual Ignorance
The motive of the
Athenian embassy to Persia4 was to seek added security for the
democratic reforms of
Cleisthenes5 against possible Spartan intervention. Seeking security
through an alliance with Persia made sense because the Persian Kingdom (or Persian
Empire, as it is more often called, despite its monarch being referred to as a king,
not an emperor) had become the richest, largest, and most militarily powerful state in
the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. Since Athens had never before had
any official contacts with the Persian Kingdom, the diplomatic mission necessarily had
to be sent off without precise instructions. The Athenian diplomats would simply have
to feel their way as best they could in dealing with the
Persians6because they had no idea what to expect. The Athenian emissaries met with a
representative of the king at Sardis, the Persian headquarters in western Anatolia
(today Turkey). When the royal representative, who served as the governor of the
surrounding territory for the king, had heard the Athenians' plea for an alliance to
help protect them against the Spartans, he first replied,
“But who in
the world are you and where do you live?”7
Sowing a Seed of Conflict between Athens and Persia
The reply of the Persian king's representative to the Athenian ambassadors revealed
that, from the Persian perspective, the Athenians were so insignificant that he had
never even heard of them before, despite his having been posted as a provincial
governor on the western fringe of the Persian Empire, as close to Greek territory as
Persians usually got. Still less would the king in the distant heartland of Persia
(modern Iran) far to the east know anything of Athens. The king's representative
immediately demanded of the Athenian ambassadors the
symbolic offerings of earth
and water8, which the king customarily required from all the peoples under his dominion.
These tokens symbolized submission to the king, who recognized no one as his equal; he
did not make alliances as if between partners, the kind of agreements that the Greek
ambassadors, ignorant of Persian diplomatic procedure, had naively assumed they could
make because that was how Greeks made alliances. Afraid to return to Athens
empty-handed, they complied with the demand for earth and water. When the Athenian
assembly (in Greek, the ekklesia, the body of
free-born male citizens over eighteen years old, who met regularly to make policy
decisions and laws for Athens) heard what its ambassadors had done,
it angrily
censured them9—but it sent no message to Sardis to repudiate their actions. The
outrage the Athenian assembly felt when their ambassador reported that they had
offered tokens of submission revealed the intensity of the feelings the Athenians had
developed for the political independence enjoyed by their city-state (polis in Greek—a political unit defined by an
urban center surrounded by countryside, which often also had smaller settlements
scattered throughout it). Although the Athenians had heard amazing tales of the
resources of the Persian king, they were unwilling to buy his protection at the cost
of yielding their freedom. The Athenians, then, continued to think of themselves as
independent, but as far as the king of Persia was concerned, they were foreigners who
had now voluntarily submitted to his representative and owed him the same loyalty he
expected from all his other subjects. The dynamics of this diplomatic incident expose
a sigificant source of the wider conflicts that would dominate the military and
political history of mainland Greece during the fifth century B.C.: failed diplomacy
emerging from mutual misunderstanding that opened the way to conflict.
The Kingdom of Persia
The growth of Persian power had begun when
Cyrus10 ( ruler
between 560-530 B.C.) established himself as the first Persian king. Previously, the
Persians had been ruled by the Medes11, a related people whose original territory occupied what is now northern Iran.
The Greeks indeed often used the term “Mede” to refer to Persians.
The ancestral homeland of the Persians themselves was found to the south of what is now
the country of Iran. The Iranian language of today remains a descendant of ancient
Persian, in contrast to the Arabic now spoken in neighboring Iraq and other countries of
the Near East. By the reign of
Darius I12 from 522 to 486, the Persian Kingdom had expanded to encompass a vast territory
of heterogeneous populations stretching east-west from what is now Afghanistan to
Turkey, and north-south from the southern territory of the former U.S.S.R. to Egypt and
the Indian Ocean. The Persian king governed this immense area through a system of
provincial organization, whose chief administrators were governors, called
satraps13, like the one whom the Athenian ambassadors met in Sardis. A satrap was a
powerful figure in his own right, ruling over his province like a monarch.
The Resources of Persia
By 500 B.C the Persian Kingdom had millions of subjects. The Persian kings exacted
taxes from their many subject peoples14 in different ways in different regions. Tax revenues could be levied in the
form of food stuffs, precious metals as bullion or coinage, and other valuable
commodities. The various provinces were also responsible for supplying soldiers to
staff the royal army. The material and human revenues of the immense kingdom made the
Persian kings wealthy beyond the Greek imagination. Although the Persians did not
regard their king as a god, everything about him was meant to emphasize his grandeur
and superiority to ordinary mortals. His purple robes were of the most splendid
fabric; red carpets were spread for him alone to walk upon; his servants held their
hands before their mouths in his presence to muffle their breath so that he would not
have to breathe the same air; he was depicted as larger than any other human being in
the sculpture adorning his palace. To display his concern for his loyal subjects, as
well as the gargantuan scale of his resources, the king provided meals for some 15,000
nobles, courtiers, and other followers every day, although he himself ate hidden from
the view of his guests. The Greeks, in awe of the Persian monarch's power and
lavishness, referred to him simply as “The
Great King.15”
Persian Religion
As absolute autocrats, the Persian kings believed they were superior to all human
beings. Neither they nor their subjects, however, considered the king to be a god but,
rather, the agent of the supreme god of Persian religion, Ahura Mazda.
Persian
religion16, based on the teachings of the prophet Zoroaster, was dualistic,
conceptualizing the world as the arena for a constant battle between good and evil.
Unlike the Greeks, the Persians avoided animal sacrifice. Fire, kindled on special
altars, formed an important part of their religious rituals. Although the language of
ancient Persia has survived in its homeland in the form of modern Iranian, the
religion of ancient Persia has been replaced in today's Iran by Islam. The religion
called Zoroastrianism, a descendant of the dualistic religion of ancient Persia,
survives to this day in the modern world. Contemporary Zoroastrianism has preserved
the central role of fire in its practice, and its sanctuaries are called fire temples.
The largest surviving population of Zoroastrians today resides in Bombay, India,
descended from Persians, who had emigrated from their homeland over a thousand years
ago.
Persian Religious Non-Interference
Despite their autocratic rule, the ancient Persian kings usually did not interfere
with the religious practices or everyday customs of their subjects. When the Persian
king
Cyrus overthrew the Babylonian kingdom17 in 539 B.C., for example, he permitted the Hebrews to return from exile in
Babylon to Palestine, which was designated as the province Yehud, from the name of the
southern Hebrew kingdom Judah. From this geographical term came the name Jews, the
customary designation of the Hebrews after the exile. Cyrus allowed the Jews to
rebuild their main temple in Jerusalem, which had been destroyed by the Babylonian
king Nebuchadnezzar II in 587 B.C., and to practice their religion. Like the rest of
the subjects of the Persian kings, the Jews were permitted to live as they pleased, so
long as they did nothing to foment revolt, impede the regular flow of taxes to the
royal treasury, or hinder the occasional dispatch of soldiers to the royal army.
The Beginning of the Persian Wars
The most famous series of wars in ancient Greek history—the so-called Persian
Wars which took place in the 490s and in 480-479—broke out when the Persian
king decided to punish Greek states he regarded as rebellious subjects. The trouble
started with a revolt in
Ionia18, on the west coast of Anatolia (modern Turkey), where the Greek city-states
had earlier come under Persian control.
Croesus of Lydia and the Ionian Greeks
The
Ionian Greeks19 originally lost their independence not to the Persians but when they were
overpowered by Croesus20 (*c. 560-546), king of
Lydia21. The
Lydians22 were a non-Greek people whose land bordered on Ionia on the east. Since
Croesus gained confidence from this conquest and was emboldened by his vast wealth, he
resolved to attack the Persian kingdom, whose territory lay to the east of Lydia.
Persia was just now becoming powerful and thus a potential threat to Lydia. Croesus
sent an emissary to request advice from the
oracle of the god Apollo at
Delphi23 in
central Greece on the advisability of the Lydian army attacking Persia. The
oracle responded,24 “If Croesus crosses into Persian territory, he will destroy a great
kingdom.” When
Croesus attacked the Persians in 546 B.C., his forces
were crushed by Cyrus25, the Persian king. Lydia, along with Ionia, fell to the Persians. Later,
Cyrus allowed Croesus, now his prisoner being treated with respect in honor of
his former royal status, to complain to the Delphic oracle26 that its advice had been wrong and that the god had not repaid the favor that
Croesus had earlier shown him by sending splendid gifts to his Delphic sanctuary. The
oracle pointedly replied to the complaint by answering that, if Croesus had been wise,
he would have asked a second question:
whose kingdom was he going to destroy
with his expedition, Cyrus' or his own?27
Revolt in Ionia
As overlords of
Ionia28, the Persian kings installed and supported tyrants in its city-states. By 499
B.C. the Ionians were tired of Persian-backed tyranny and suffered from internal
unrest. They rebelled, sending representatives to mainland Greece to ask for help in
their revolt against Persia. The Spartan king Cleomenes
declined to help29 after he saw the map the Ionian representative had brought and learned that an
attack on the Persian capital would entail a three months' march inland from Ionia.
He, like the other Spartans, had no idea of the geography of the Near East. The men of
the Athenian assembly responded differently to the Ionian plea.
They voted to
join the city-state of Eretria on the
neighboring island Euboea and send military
aid to the Ionians30. The combined
Athenian-Eretrian force actually got as far as Sardis31, Croesus' old capital, now the headquarters of a Persian provincial governor.
After burning Sardis to the ground, however, the
Athenians and Eretrians
returned home32 when a Persian counterattack caused the Ionian allies to lose their
coordination. Subsequent campaigns by the
Persian king's commanders crushed the
Ionian rebels33 by 494 B.C.
Persian Vengeance against Athens
King Darius was doubly furious when he learned that the Athenians had aided the
Ionian revolt: not only had they dared attack his kingdom, they had done so after
earlier
having offered him earth and water34, thereby signifying—in the king's eyes—their submission to
him in order to secure an alliance. Insignificant though Athens was in his opinion
because its resources were so puny compared to those of his kingdom, Darius vowed to
exact vengeance from Athens as punishment for its disloyalty to him. The Greeks later
claimed that, to keep himself from forgetting his vow in the press of all his other
concerns, Darius ordered one of his slaves to say to him three times at every meal,
“Sire, remember the Athenians.” 35 In 490 B.C.
Darius dispatched a flotilla of ships36 carrying troops to attack the disloyal Greeks.
After burning Eretria37, the
city-state on the island of Euboea whose troops had joined those of Athens in the
attack on Sardis,
the Persian expedition landed on the northeastern coast of
Attica near a village called Marathon38. The
Persians had brought with them the
elderly Hippias39, the son of the former tyrant of Athens named Pisistratus. Hippias had himself
been tyrant of Athens until he was forced into exile in 510 B.C. by an Athenian
democratic uprising backed by Spartan military force. The Persians expected to
reinstall Hippias as tyrant of Athens under their sway, in similar fashion to the
tyrannies they had once installed in Ionian city-states. Since the Persian troops at
Marathon outnumbered the citizen militia of Athenian
hoplites40 (heavily armored infantry men
armed with spears and swords, the principal component of Greek land armies), the
Athenians asked the Spartans and other Greek city-states for military help.
The
Athenian courier dispatched to Sparta41 became famous because he ran the hundred and forty miles from Athens to Sparta
in less than two days. By the time the battle of Marathon took place, however, the
only allied troops to arrive were a
contingent from the small, nearby city-state
of Plataea42.
The Battle of Marathon
Everyone expected the Persians to win at
Marathon43.
The Athenian and Plataean soldiers, who had never seen Persians
before44, grew afraid just gazing at their unfamiliar and (to Greek eyes)
frighteningly outlandish outfits. Nevertheless, the Athenian generals—the
board of ten men elected each year as the civil and military leaders of
Athens—never let their men lose heart. Led by the aristocrat
Miltiades45 (c. 550-489 B.C.) and carefully planning their tactics to minimize the time
their soldiers would be exposed to the fire of Persian archers,
the generals
sent their hoplites across the plain of Marathon at a dead run46 against the Persian line. The Greeks in their
metal armor47 clanked across the open space between the two armies under a hail of
Persian arrows48 fired like an artillery barrage. Once engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the
Persians, the Greek hoplites benefited from their superior, more protective armor and
longer weapons, which allowed them to strike their enemies while they themselves were
still out of reach. After a furious struggle, the
Greek infantry men drove the
Persians back into a swamp49, where the invaders who failed to escape to their ships could be picked off
safely at the attackers' leisure.
Announcing the Victory
At the end of the battle of Marathon an Athenian messenger ran the twenty-six miles
from the plain of Marathon to the city of Athens to report the victory and warn the
people in the city to guard against
a naval attack by the Persian fleet, which
was sailing around the peninsula of Attica50 (the territory of Athens as a city-state) to see if the
city could be taken by an approach from the coast to its west.
When the
Persians ended up sailing home without taking Athens51, the Athenians rejoiced in disbelief. The Persians, whom they had feared as
invincible, had retreated. For decades afterwards, the greatest honor an Athenian
man could claim was to say he had been a “
Marathon
fighter52.” The run
of the messenger who reported the victory is commemorated in today's marathon races,
whose name and distance are derived from this run in 490 B.C.
Aftereffects of the Battle of Marathon
The symbolic importance of the
battle of Marathon53 in 490 B.C. far outweighed its military significance.
The defeat of his
punitive expedition enraged Darius54 because it insulted his
prestige, not because it represented any threat to the security of his kingdom. The
Athenian men who comprised the city-state's army, on the other hand, had dramatically
demonstrated their commitment to preserving their freedom by refusing to capitulate to
an enemy whose reputation for power and wealth had made a disastrous Athenian defeat
appear certain. The unexpected victory at Marathon gave an unparalleled boost to
Athenian self-confidence, and the city-state's soldiers and leaders thereafter always
boasted that they had stood fast before the feared barbarians even though
the
Spartans had not arrived in time to help them.55
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 I56 (*486-465)
led the massive invasion force57 of infantry and ships against the Greek mainland. So huge was
Xerxes'
army58, the Greeks later claimed,
it required seven days and seven nights of
continuous marching to cross the Hellespont59 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
did60, especially the ones in northern Greece along the route of the
Persian army's march.
A coalition of thirty-one Greek states61
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
Thermopylae62 (“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.”63 The pass was so narrow that the
Persians could not employ their superior
numbers to overwhelm the Greek defenders64, 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
Attica65 with his army,
they abandoned their city for him to
sack.66 The Athenian commander
Themistocles67 (c. 528-462 B.C.) then
maneuvered the other Greeks into facing the
larger Persian navy68 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
state69 and
at the urging of Themistocles, the assembly had voted to use the
financial windfall to build a navy for defense70, rather
than to distribute the money among individual citizens. As at Thermopylae, the Greeks
in the
battle of Salamis71 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 ships72 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 Caria73
(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
Persia74, but he left behind an
enormous infantry force
under his best general75 and
an offer for the Athenians76 (if only they
would capitulate): they would remain unharmed and become the king's overlords over the
other Greeks. The
assembly refused77, the
Athenian population evacuated78 its homes and city once again, and
Xerxes' general wrecked Athens79 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 son80 named Pausanias (c. 520-470 B.C.) outfought the Persian infantry at the battle
of
Plataea81 in Boeotia, just north of Attica, while a Greek fleet caught the Persian navy
napping at
Mykale82 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.
Political Freedom and Greek Courage
The Greeks' superior armor and weapons and their adroit use of topography to
counterbalance the enemy's greater numbers explain their victories from a military
perspective. What is truly remarkable about the Persian Wars, however, is that the
citizen militias of the thirty-one Greek city-states decided to fight in the first
place. They could have surrendered and agreed to become Persian subjects to save
themselves. Instead, eager to defend their freedom despite the risks and encouraged to
fight by the citizens of their communities, these Greeks chose to strive together
against apparently overwhelming odds. Since the Greek forces included not only
aristocrats and hoplites (who had to be financially capable of supplying their own armor
and weapons), but also thousands of poorer men who rowed the warships, the effort
against the Persians cut across social and economic divisions. The decision by Greeks to
fight the Persian Wars demonstrated courage inspired by a deep
devotion to the
ideal of the political freedom83 of the city-state, which had emerged in the preceding Archaic Age.