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 Ionia ¹⁸, 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 Delphi ²³ 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 Sardis ³¹, 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 Eretria ³⁷, 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 Marathon ³⁸. 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 Plataea ⁴².

The Battle of Marathon

Everyone expected the Persians to win at Marathon ⁴³. 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 Hellespont ⁵⁹ 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 Thermopylae ⁶² (“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 Attica ⁶⁵ 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 Salamis ⁷¹ 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 Caria ⁷³ (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 Plataea ⁸¹ in Boeotia, just north of Attica, while a Greek fleet caught the Persian navy napping at Mykale ⁸² 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.

Thomas R. Martin An Overview of Classical Greek History from Mycenae to Alexander 8

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