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       Prequel: The First Persian War

      When the land-based Persian Empire, which had conquered everyone it could reach, from Pakistan to Egypt, came up against the seafaring Greeks, the Persians scooped up several Greek colonies on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Many years of quiet subservience passed, but then the Greek ruler of the Ionian city of Miletus got ambitious. He threw off Persian rule and asked for help from free Greek cities overseas—first Sparta (which refused), then Athens (which agreed). A joint Greek army of Ionians and Athenians marched inland and attacked the Persian provincial capital at Sardis, which they briefly occupied and accidentally burned down. Within a couple of years, however, the revolt was put down, and the Athenians hurried home to lie low and hope that the Persians hadn’t noticed them.

      Shah Darius of Persia, however, had not gotten where he was by letting insults pass unpunished, and he assigned a servant to remind him every day to remember the Athenians. Darius decided he needed to conquer the independent Greek states on the European mainland that were stirring up trouble among his Greek subjects; however, the first assault directly across the sea failed. The Athenians beat his army badly and drove it away at the Battle of Marathon.

       Second Persian War

      Ten years later, a new shah, Xerxes, gathered levies (peasant draftees) from all over the empire into the largest army ever seen,^a too large to move by boat. Taking the overland route up through the Balkans and down into Greece, he forced his way past all barriers, man-made and natural. He crossed the Dardanelles strait on a floating bridge made of boats; then his engineers dug a canal across the dangerous Acte Peninsula, home of Mount Athos.

      With the Persians bearing down on them, a scratch army of 4,900 Greeks under Spartan leadership tried to slow them at the mountain pass of Thermopylae, while the Greek fleet stopped an amphibious end run at the nearby strait of Artemisia. The Greek phalanx, the traditional Greek battle formation in which heavily armored spearmen lined up into a human wall of shields and spearheads, easily held against repeated Persian assaults. After a few days of tough fighting, however, the Persians found another way around Thermopylae, so they outflanked and slaughtered the last defenders blocking their way. The Persian army moved into the Greek heartland, taking Athens after the inhabitants had fled to nearby islands.

      When all seemed lost, the Athenian fleet met the Persian warships in the narrow channel between the island of Salamis and the mainland. In the confusing swirl of galleys darting, ramming, and splintering, the Persians lost over two hundred ships and 40,000 sailors. With the Greeks now in control of the sea, the huge and hungry Persian army was cut off from supplies.

      Xerxes returned to Persia with part of his army, leaving behind a smaller force to live off the land and finish the conquest. This army hunkered down for the winter in northern Greece and then moved south again in the spring, reoccupying Athens. After frantic diplomacy by the displaced Athenians, the Greek city-states finally agreed to combine their armies. The two forces met at Plataea, where the Greek phalanx overwhelmed the Persians. The survivors made their long, painful retreat back to Persia, losing thousands along the way. Meanwhile, the Athenian fleet shot across the Aegean Sea and finished off the remaining Persian ships with an amphibious attack on their naval camp at Mycale in Ionia.²

       Legacy

      Almost every list of decisive battles or turning points in history begins with something from the Persian Wars, so you might already know that Greek victory rescued Western Civilization and the concept of individual freedom from the faceless Oriental hordes who are the villains of Victorian histories and recent movies.

      On the other hand, let’s not get carried away. Being conquered by the Persians would not have been the end of the world. By the standards of the day, the Persians were rather benign conquerors. For example, they were one of the only people in history to be nice to the Jews. They allowed the Jews to return to Palestine and rebuild their temple, instead of massacring or deporting them as the Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Spaniards, Cossacks, Russians, and Germans did at various other junctures of history. Even with a Persian victory at Salamis, free Greeks would have remained in Sicily, Italy, and Marseilles. Greek civilization would later prove vibrant enough to survive—and eventually usurp—a half millennium of Roman rule. There’s no reason why the Greeks couldn’t get through a few generations of Persian rule intact.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

      Death toll: 500,000 died, including 250,000 civilians massacred¹

      Rank: 70

      Type:

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