Sharpn: History — Sharpen your mind

The Greek Wars, From the Other Side

Persia: Empire and Afterwards

Who Is Telling You This

Almost everything we know about the Persian Wars comes from Greek writers, chiefly Herodotus, working within a generation or two of a conflict their own cities had won. There is no surviving Persian narrative. That does not make the Greek account false, but it does mean the story arrives pre-shaped: an existential struggle of free men against a vast tyranny. Seen from Susa the same events look considerably smaller.

Why It Started

The Greek cities of Ionia, on the Anatolian coast, were Persian subjects. In 499 BC they revolted, and Athens sent ships to help. The rebels burned Sardis, the seat of a Persian satrap. The revolt was crushed by 493 BC. What followed was, in Persian terms, a punitive expedition against the two mainland cities that had intervened — not a war of conquest for Greece.

490 and 480

The first expedition ended at Marathon in 490 BC, a defeat. Ten years later Xerxes came in far greater force. A Greek holding force was destroyed at Thermopylae. The Persian army then marched into Attica and took Athens, and the city was burned — which was the stated purpose of the campaign. Then the fleet was beaten at Salamis, and the following year the land army was defeated at Plataea, and the invasion of the mainland was over.

The Uncomfortable Arithmetic

Persia lost the war for Greece and achieved the aim it had announced. Both are true. And the empire went on: the Achaemenids ruled for another century and a half after Salamis, and spent much of it manipulating Greek politics with money rather than armies, funding whichever side kept the Greeks fighting each other. Persian gold shaped the outcome of the Peloponnesian War more than any Persian soldier had.

Why Tell It This Way

Not to diminish what the Greek cities did, which was extraordinary against those odds. But an empire of that scale did not experience its western frontier as the centre of the world, and reading the war only from Athens makes the next two centuries of Persian history unintelligible.

Key Dates to Remember

499–493 BC — The Ionian Revolt; Athens helps burn Sardis in 498
490 BC — Marathon — the first expedition fails
480 BC — Thermopylae; Athens is taken and burned; Salamis
479 BC — Plataea ends the invasion
5th–4th c. BC — Persia shapes Greek politics with subsidies
330 BC — The Achaemenid empire ends

Fun Fact: Persia lost the war and achieved its stated objective: the campaign was announced as punishment for Athens' part in burning Sardis, and Athens was taken and burned in 480 BC.