The Persian War is the name generally given to the first two decades of the period of conflict between the Greeks and the Persians that began in 499 bc and ended around 450. However, in 480 and 479, a massive Persian invasion force was defeated and driven out of mainland Greece and Europe, never to return.
When they had gathered together all the spoils, the Greeks put one tenth aside for dedication to the god at Delphi. With this they set up the golden tripod resting on a bronze triple-headed serpent that is to be found very close to the altar. (Historia 9.811)
This ‘Serpent Column’ was 7m or 8m tall and crowned with a golden dish for sacrificial offerings to Apollo, its dedicatee. On its shaft were engraved the names of 31 city-states (poleis, singular polis) or peoples that had fought the Persians, one of the very few contemporary inscriptions to have survived as evidence of the war. The golden dish survived until only half-way through the following century, but, in the 4th century ad, Constantine the Great, Roman Emperor of the West and East, brought the column to Byzantium, the crossing point between Europe and Asia. The serpents (actually three of them, not one with three heads) were decapitated, allegedly by a drunken Mameluk soldier during the Ottoman era, but the twisted column still stands in the Hippodrome of Constantine, now Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Square. Beyond, reliefs at the base of a commemorative column show Theodosius I in his pomp as Emperor of the East in the late 4th century. The great basilica of Agia Sophia with its four minarets behind, and the Sultanahmet ‘Blue’ Mosque is close by. These are massive symbols of the glories of Greece, Rome, Christianity and Islam.
‘Alternate history’ is often little more than an entertaining game, but here the what-if questions are profound. If the Persian War had been lost in 479, would there have been the same golden flowering of Athenian culture and institutions in the decades that followed? If Greece had become part of a Persian empire with southern Italy now on its frontier, would Rome (which had turned republican at about the same time as the Athenians were taking their first steps towards democracy) have been allowed to grow into the world power that Constantine ruled? If not, what of Christianity? Without the bloodstream of the Roman Empire’s communications network to sustain its growth, Christianity might never have spread to become a world religion and the catalyst that brought another, Islam, into being. A Persian victory would have changed much more than the scenery at the centre of the site of ancient Byzantium. It could have profoundly redirected the subsequent evolution of the cultural, intellectual, political and religious landscapes of Europe and the Middle East.
The many modern accounts of the Persian War generally include numerous references to what the ancient authors wrote about it, but directly quote from them only a little. Herodotus is by far the most substantial and important source to have survived and this book is built around his entire narrative of the conflict with extracts interwoven from the other ancient sources. It brings together translations of the original texts that tell us almost all that can be known about this immense clash of arms and the events that led up to it.
These ancient voices speak for themselves and powerfully communicate the intensity and epic drama of ‘the great and marvellous deeds’ that culminated gloriously in Greek victory on land and sea. But they do raise questions in the minds of 21st-century readers who come to the text with knowledge and expectations very different from those brought to it by the writers’ contemporary audiences, who would mostly have been unconcerned by issues of omission, incompleteness, vagueness, bias or exaggeration that may exercise us now. I address such issues as these as they arise in my commentary on the ancient texts and make the case where necessary for my preferred interpretations. Any interpretation or amplification must take the written evidence that is gathered together in this book as its baseline; there is little else.
The translations are my own, and translation and interpretation go hand in hand. My aim has been to produce versions that are readable and also linguistically accurate (which all translations, as opposed to adaptations, need to be) with a consistent focus on the military-historical content and the language in which it is presented. At the same time, I hope I have succeeded in conveying something of the character and style of the more extensively quoted authors. They have a glorious story to tell and retell, and the process of mining their texts for military history should not be allowed to prevent us from enjoying them at this level.
The successful defence of Greece by a few city-states against the vast Persian Empire was an extraordinary military feat and it is the earliest war about which enough is known to attract the serious attention of military historians. However, the historical study of armed conflict is a relatively modern discipline, mostly concerned with much more recent times. At an overarching level, it addresses the causes, effects and consequences of war, and its political, social, economic and cultural impact; closer focus is brought to bear on topics such as strategy, tactics, logistics, technology, and leadership and other human factors; at the discipline’s most granular level, the subject matter embraces the specifics of campaigns, battles and battlefields, weapons and other equipment, and the study of individual combatants’ roles. However, for a researcher at any of these levels, the evidence that has survived from the ancient past is sparse. To quote Philip Sabin, Professor of Strategic Studies at King’s College, London:
Hence, whereas the mass of secondary writing on more recent conflicts like the Second World War is based on an even larger mass of primary material such as archives and personal accounts, the situation for ancient military historians is exactly the reverse – an inverted pyramid in which modern knowledge teeters unsteadily above a narrow and unsatisfactory evidentiary base. (Lost Battles p.xi)
The Persian War has its own and constantly growing ‘mass of secondary writing’ and, in my own efforts to contribute to this, I have become quite familiar with the queasiness this top-heavy teetering can cause. The only antidote is to return regularly to the body of textual evidence on which the point of that pyramid rests, valuing the solid information contained in it, but accepting and attempting to negotiate its limitations. All modern accounts of the Persian War refer to, summarize and paraphrase this body of material but quote from it only selectively, and it is often not clear at what point and how far the author is travelling beyond the ancient texts, as is necessary, to create a more rounded and coherent narrative. This book offers a narrative of the Persian War that has at its heart the most significant writing on the subject to be found in the ancient sources.
The foremost of these is Herodotus. But this is not to say that other ancient voices are less worth listening to, although nearly all of them were first heard decades or centuries later. Their differing versions of events may be reconstructions based on shared evidence or tap into other strands of a broader tradition, or they may be partly or wholly speculative and formed by the writer’s particular agenda or literary purpose. But most deserve to be taken as seriously as modern-day reconstructions and to be valued over them for the authenticity that is rooted in experience of a world much closer to Herodotus’ than our own. The extracts included from other ancient writers add value to Herodotus’ narrative in various ways: some offer fresh analysis and credible extra detail; some contradict him interestingly; some provide background illumination, sometimes in accounts of different wars; and some add drama and colour, probably imagined in most cases, but seen through the lens of the writer’s own experience, knowledge and beliefs.
For the rest of the evidentiary base, archaeology has turned up very few finds on the battlefields themselves, and the physical landscapes are known to have changed significantly over the millennia. Even if Herodotus had been much more systematic and precise in his identification of landmarks and measurement of distances, it would not be possible to pinpoint the armies’ positions and plot their movements with any greater degree of certainty. Doing the same for the opposing fleets on the waters off Artemisium and Salamis is an even more speculative process. There are the same problems of vagueness with Herodotus’ timing and dating of events as with his topography. But these would not, of course, generally have been regarded as problems in a world in which the necessary disciplines, techniques and instruments did not exist.
Herodotus provides the central narrative strand of this book and takes centre stage. Other ancient writers appear in supporting roles and are introduced when they make their first entrance. In linking sections I offer comment and interpretation and background information where I feel it is needed, in full awareness that, in this process of speculative reconstruction, Professor Sabin’s ‘inverted pyramid’ can quite legitimately be built up in a range of differing architectures. But my main purpose is to present the story of the Persian War as it was told by Herodotus and in other ancient voices, the textual base upon which that pyramid must rest, however constructed. This is indeed ‘narrow and unsatisfactory’ by the standards of modern military history. Nonetheless, it is possible to pick out many of the main building blocks from Herodotus and discern their positions in the structure, and to draw on other evidence to reinforce it in some places, and to add plausible detail in others where it is lacking.
Text references are given in the normal fashion so that passages can easily be found in other versions or the original language. I use footnotes to offer short answers to questions as they arise such as: who was Cynegirus son of Thrasyleus, where was Croton, what distance was a stade ... ? I also use them to comment briefly on points of narrative or linguistic detail where I think they are worth highlighting or clarifying. Spellings of Greek and Persian names are generally in their more comfortable latinized forms as found in The Oxford Classical Dictionary.
‘The fighting went on a long time’ is an elastic stock phrase that recurs several times in Herodotus’ battle descriptions. In the case of this book, the writing certainly went on a long time and I am very grateful to Marcus Cowper and other friends and former colleagues at Osprey Publishing for their patience and support. I owe special thanks to Paul Cartledge and Jeremy Mynott for generously agreeing to be distracted periodically from their own writing projects to give me so much invaluable advice on the manuscript at various stages in its long gestation; my thanks too to Hans van Wees for the help he gave me in my earlier work on the battle of Plataea, for his insights on ‘the hoplite question’, and for sharing with me his most recent work on Thermopylae ahead of publication; and to my son, Henry, for shrewd comments and sustained encouragement.
Finally, I dedicate this book with love to Netta, my wife, my children and my grandchildren.
Notes
1 From now on, references are assumed to be from Herodotus’ Historia unless otherwise stated.