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      Guerrilla leader Fidel Castro drives into the Cuban capital, Havana, following the victory of his irregular forces over the larger and better-armed Cuban army.

      An imbalance of resources or men can be misleading, since there are cases where sheer numbers manifestly fail to give the advantage. The vast numbers facing the British-Egyptian expeditionary force in the Sudan in 1898 were overcome by fire discipline and machine guns. Fidel Castro’s revolutionary fighters on Cuba in 1958 had none of the sophisticated weaponry available to Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista, but they prevailed in large part because the government forces they faced suffered from a loss of morale in the face of widespread popular hostility to the regime and the crumbling confidence of the dictator himself.

      Technical or moral factors can play an important, even decisive, part in tilting the balance back when, on paper, forces seem unevenly matched. This phenomenon is common in the development of asymmetric warfare during the course of the twentieth century, in which a notionally powerful state finds itself unable to bring that power to bear effectively against an elusive or determined enemy. This imbalance was evident in the struggles to liberate areas from colonial rule or post-colonial dictatorship. French failure in Algeria and Vietnam in the 1950s, for example, was not a product of military weakness in any formal sense, but a result of popular hostility to colonialism and growing uncertainty among the French people about whether empire was any longer worth the military cost of defending it. The United States has enjoyed the world’s largest military budget for decades, but that has not made it any easier to project that power in Vietnam or Somalia, or in the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan. Here, too, the odds against smaller and less sophisticated forces can be compensated for by a variety of factors that inhibit the full exercise of power by the dominant state. It is possible to be too powerful as well as too weak. Nuclear weapons might well have transformed the war in Vietnam but they were unusable given the prevailing political situation; drone strikes are supposed to wear down the resistance of Al Qaeda but they have failed to halt the terrorism and invite wide condemnation. The 4,000-year history of battles shows that an apparently weaker or outnumbered force can, under the right circumstances, achieve much against the odds.

      The Greek victory over the vast invading army and navy of the Persian emperor Xerxes in the late summer of 480 BCE is one of the great legends of the classical world. The famous 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, led by their king, Leonidas, has for centuries been a model for courage and discipline seldom exceeded in the modern age – and is now the subject of a blockbuster film. Though this was a battle lost, it was a costly victory for the Persians, and almost immediately following it, the huge Persian fleet, three times the size of the combined Greek vessels, was shattered at the great naval battle of Salamis. Greek independence was saved and Persia finally pushed back into Asia.

      The odds were stacked overwhelmingly in the Persians’ favour, for Xerxes could mobilize the soldiers and ships of his many vassal states. The Greek chronicler Herodotus, writing some forty or fifty years after the battles, numbered the Persian army at 1,700,000. Modern calculations suggest 180,000, including camp followers, and perhaps 130,000 soldiers, marines and sailors in a fleet that Herodotus numbered at 1,207 vessels, a figure more readily accepted today than his statistics on the army. The Greek alliance – those city-states in the peninsula not yet vassals of Persia – could muster only a fraction of this manpower, though in general they were more heavily armed and armoured than Persian soldiers. The Greeks depended on a navy that was for the most part newly built. The Athenian leader Themistocles had persuaded the citizens to use rich new supplies of silver, discovered at the mines of Laurium, 60 kilometres (40 miles) from Athens, in 483 BCE, to fund the building of a large fleet of trireme ships to guard against a Persian invasion. Athens had around 200 triremes by the time Xerxes began the invasion three years later; the rest of Greece supplied perhaps 170–80 ships.

      Xerxes’s strategy was simple. He would march his huge army into Greece, supported and supplied on the seaward flanks by his fleet, until he had defeated any city-state not sensible enough to send him the gifts of water and earth indicating submission. Unlike the failed invasion at Marathon ten years earlier, Xerxes bridged the Hellespont at the modern Turkish Straits so that his army could march overland to its objective. The Greeks met in council at Corinth in 481 BCE to decide their strategy. The Spartans and Corinthians favoured defending at the Isthmus of Corinth to guard the Peloponnesian peninsula. Themistocles, his arguments reinforced by a brand-new fleet, argued that the Persians could easily envelop the defending Greeks by landing troops from their fleet behind them. His strategy was to find a site further north to halt the Persian army while the Greek fleet

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