Ancient Greece

Mike Paine

• Publisher: Pocket Essentials
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781903047750
• eBook ISBN: 9781842435441
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

Western civilization began with the Greeks. From the highpoint of the 5th century BC through the cultural triumphs of the Alexandrian era to their impact on the developing Roman empire, the Greeks shaped the philosophy, art, architecture, and literature of the Mediterranean world. Beginning with the Homeric period, once believed to be a realm of myth, Paine takes the reader on a journey through more than 12 centuries of Greek culture. He shows what archaeologists have revealed of the Trojan Wars and Mycenae, outlines the glories of Athens at its height, and provides a gripping narrative of the struggle between the Greeks and the mighty Persian empire. The guide also highlights the careers of great political and military leaders, such as Pericles and Alexander the Great, and explores the importance of great philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle. Dramatists and demagogues, stoics and epicureans, aristocrats and helots all take their place in the unfolding story of Greek achievement.

Classical Greece

3. Classical Greece

The Persian Wars

While in the west, Greece continued with its quiet cultural revolution, in the east, empires were being forged. The Assyrians had enjoyed dominance over much of the Middle East for centuries. Now, to their east, two small kingdoms, Media and Persian Anshan, began to expand. Assyria's conquest of Egypt in 671 BC was its last major intervention in the affairs of the Ancient World. In 612 BC it was to fall before the Medes and a resurgent Babylon. Babylon smoothly passed over to the Persians in 539 BC. The Median Empire had already fallen to the Persians some ten years before that. One great Persian king, Cyrus, had been behind these recent acquisitions, eager to build an empire. In the process he swallowed up Lydia.

The Lydians generally enjoyed good relations with their neighbours to the west, the Greeks of Ionia. Lydia influenced the Greeks in many ways – their invention of metallic coinage soon spread to the west, for example. A common culture lay between both peoples. The reign of their last king, Croesus (who was proverbially wealthy), saw many Greek visitors to his court from both Ionia and the mainland. By the time of the fall of Babylon, Lydia was already in Persian hands. Sparta sent word to the Persians warning them that it would not remain uninvolved should Cyrus make a move on the Greek cities of Ionia. It was a hollow warning. Soon Ionia was also under Persian rule.

Cyrus's death led to his son Cambyses's succession in 529 BC. Cambyses carried on much as his father had done – he had conquered Egypt by 525 BC. The Persian Empire was arguably now the largest empire the world had ever seen. In another four years however Cambyses himself had died in uncertain circumstances and the throne had passed to a relative, Darius. Darius was as ambitious as his two predecessors. Persia was now on a collision course with Greece.

First, Darius attempted to deal with the Scythians to his north in central Asia. The route he chose took him across the Bosphorus, through Thrace and the eastern borders of Macedonia. Thrace was claimed as Persian; Macedonia, a little off the beaten track for the Persians, retained its independence, humbling itself before the might and glory of the great Emperor. The kingdom of Macedonia stood at the entrance to Greece. Its rulers claimed descent from the Greeks although the Greeks viewed them as occupying a position somewhere between backward cousins and barbarians. The Macedonians had no desire to become a province of Persia. They played a cunning diplomatic game from this point onwards, acquiescing to Persian demands in the hope of retaining their independence, while to their neighbours to the south they represented their actions as designed to prevent any further incursions into Greece by the mighty Persian army.

Sparta's complaints and threats regarding Ionia had already been brushed aside. Now the Persians befriended and gave support to the recently ousted Athenian tyrant Hippias, who arrived in Persian territory in 505 BC. The newly democratic Athenians were no more amused at this support for their enemy than the Spartans were at being belittled earlier.

The crunch came when conspiring in Ionia set off a rebellion there against the Persians. Individual cities attempted to cast off the Persian yoke. The degree of disorganisation and spontaneity of these revolts hampered an easy Persian response. It was not entirely obvious to Darius who was involved. The first city to declare independence was Miletos, whose appeal to Athens and Sparta for aid saw the dispatch of 15 triremes (warships) from Athens and a further 5 ships from Eretria in Euboea. As Darius subdued one rebellion in one city another would break out elsewhere. The revolt was put down finally in 494 BC after six years of sporadic conflict. Darius, still angry at the involvement of Athens and Eretria, sent envoys to numerous Greek city states insisting upon their submission to Persia. Many agreed to his demands. The twin leaders of the Greek world, Athens and Sparta, were made of stubborner stuff. They expressed their refusal by executing the envoys he had sent to them. Darius had had enough. His first attempts to deal with this opposition collapsed when the first fleet he sent in response was destroyed by a storm in 492 BC. Two more years passed and then finally the Persian plan to subdue the Greeks took shape as an army of 25,000 Persians landed unopposed at the Bay of Marathon. The first Greco-Persian War was underway. Darius was expecting little resistance.

Athens had had warning of what was coming. On the way there the Persians had attacked Naxos and burnt its capital. In return for the Eretrian support to the Ionian rebels Eretria was then sacked and much of its population captured and deported. The Athenians knew they couldn't face such a force alone. The Spartans, renowned for their military prowess, heard of the Persian army when a runner turned up, requesting aid for Athens. The Spartans, in the middle of a religious festival, claimed that they could not begin a war until the festival ended. The Persians were not about to wait. Athens, with a few men from its neighbour, Plataea, managed to put together an army of around 10,000 men who set off for the plain of Marathon.

The Persians were rumoured to have the ex-tyrant Hippias with them. Their hesitation over attacking the Athenians has been argued as due to a supposed coup that Hippias's supporters may have been about to launch in Athens in the Athenian army's absence. Whatever the reason, this delay was to be their downfall. The ten Athenian generals on arrival were unsure of what to do in the face of their opponent's superior numbers. Among them was an aristocrat by the name of Miltiades who had both served Darius in his campaign against the Scythians and after wards been involved with the Ionian revolutionaries in their failed struggle for freedom. Through these experiences, Miltiades knew that the absence of the Persian cavalry represented Athens' best chance and, convincing the Athenian polemarchos, Callimachus, of the same, was instrumental in launching the attack.

Miltiades was proved right. In a decisive engagement, the Persian force was beaten by the numerically inferior Greeks. The Greek army was spread along a wide front with their weakest part being in the centre of their line. Here the Persians broke through and the two now separate halves of the Greek army rushed in to envelop them. Soon the battle was over. Persian ships hurriedly made their way to rescue the remnants of the fleeing Persian army, the victorious Greeks in pursuit. Legend has it that the Greeks lost 192 men: the Persians over 6,000. The story goes that an Athenian messenger ran the 25 miles back to Athens, announced the victory, and then died of exhaustion – this being the origin of the marathon as a race.

When the Spartans appeared it was all over bar the shouting. The Athenians had won a tremendous victory on behalf of Greece, and strengthened their claim to be the leaders of the Greek world. The Greeks were left alone for the remaining five years of Darius's rule. Upon his death his son Xerxes took the crown. At first, he was occupied putting down revolts among the Babylonians and Egyptians. Soon, however, his attention turned to the Greeks, nearly ten years after his father's defeat. Xerxes did not aim to make the same mistake in underestimating them.

In the period between the end of the first Greco-Persian War and the start of the second, due to the conviction of one man, the Athenians had not been idle. That man was Themistocles, who had risen to prominence in public life as archon three years before Marathon. Through his foresight, cunning and determination, he was to become the man who saved Greece from the Persians in the second war.

The period after the victory at Marathon was one in which the increasingly democratic Athenian people flexed their political muscles. The most infamous example was in the practise of ostracism. Named after the fragments of pottery on which the voters inscribed the name of their nominee – ostraka – ostracism was ostensibly a method whereby the people could choose to exile without trial someone who they thought presented a danger to the state. This law had been first introduced in 508 BC by Cleisthenes, an archon and supporter of democracy. It is a measure of how extreme an act it was held to be that it was not until 487 BC that the first ostracism took place. Four more followed before the Athenian public came to their senses and issued a general amnesty in 481 BC. The arguments for ostracising an individual had become so debased that by the fifth ostracism, that of Aristides 'the Just', a local yokel is famously reported to have declared that he voted for Aristides's exile merely because he was tired of hearing him endlessly referred to as 'the Just'.

Through this political minefield stepped Themistocles. The lesson of Persian numbers was not lost on him. He realised that the best defence against a huge Persian force would be by hampering their ability to support that force in Greece – the Greeks therefore needed a strong navy. His was a lonely voice. It was only, in the end, the combination of a disagreement between Athens and the nearby Greek island of Aegina (a conflict that Themistocles has been accused by some of agitating for as an excuse to build his navy) and the discovery of a new vein of silver in the Athenian mines at Laurium that brought about the construction of a huge Athenian fleet of 200 triremes. He also managed to convince the Spartans. By the time the Persians did invade the Spartans were able to contribute another 150 ships to the cause. The combined navy of 350 ships was possibly only a third of the size of the Persian fleet but without them the second war would have been lost.

War finally came in 480 BC. Xerxes army was huge – somewhere in the region of 150,000 men. His navy shadowed this force as it made its way overland towards Athens. Half the Greek city-states chickened out, and made their peace with the Persian leader. The size and slowness of the force gave the Greeks who had decided to resist time to prepare. Under Themistocles the naval force sailed to meet the Persian ships at Artemisium. The Spartan king, Leonidas, led a force of around 7,000 men to hold off the Persian army at the narrow pass of Thermopylae (the 'hot gates' – a name derived from the hot sulphurous springs found there). For three days Leonidas kept the huge Persian force at bay. The next night, a contingent of Persian 'Immortals' (Xerxes's own fighting elite), aided by the Greek traitor Ephialtes, found a way through another pass to attack the Greeks from the rear. Leonidas managed to get the main body of the Greek force away in time but he himself elected to stay with a force of 300 Spartans, their helots (Spartan serfs occupying a place half-way between citizens and slaves), and somewhere in the region of 1,000 Boeotians to buy the Greeks some time with their lives. And die they all did, although many more Persians were killed in the battle to take the pass.

The story of the 300 Spartans and their stand against impossible odds became one of the great tales of military heroics. Herodotus writes that 'knowing that their own death was coming to them from the men who had circled the mountain, (they) put forth their very utmost strength against the barbarians; they fought in a frenzy, with no regard to their lives.' Their bodies were buried where they fell. An inscription above the mound that contained the Spartan dead read:

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
That here obedient to their words we lie.

The cost to Xerxes in men was substantial and embittered the Persian leader. He had his men search through the corpses on the battle field until they found the body of Leonidas, and finding him, had his head cut off and mounted on a pole. The Greeks had lost but the Spartan example in noble defeat was to spur them on.

The Greek fleet retreated from their battle with the Persian force once news of the defeat at Thermopylae reached them. More damage had been done by a tremendous storm striking the Persian ships while the Greeks were moored in port than was achieved by the triremes in the subsequent confrontation between the two. None the less the Persian fleet vastly out-numbered the Greeks.

Meanwhile, the Persian army carried onward towards Athens to the south. The Greek fleet, one step ahead, had evacuated most of Athens by the time the Persians got there. The Persians left the Acropolis, the ancient civic heart of Athens, burning.

Before the war had commenced, the Greeks had sent a deputation to the sanctuary at Delphi, hoping to receive a good omen from the oracle there. The first response to their request for advice had horrified them. It began 'wretched ones, why sit you here? Flee and begone to remotest ends of earth'. Desperate they petitioned for a second opinion – and this time received a slightly less bleak foretelling that the Greeks would lose a battle at Salamis, an island next to the Athenian port of Piraeus. Themistocles argued that the oracle could and should be interpreted as describing the Persians losing a battle there. He convinced the Greeks to station their ships in the narrow Strait of Salamis. The Persian navy was tricked, its greater number of vessels lured into the too narrow waterway after Themistocles sent a Greek to Xerxes during the night to convince him that the Greeks were intent on flight. Within the strait the Greek ships wreaked havoc. Xerxes sat on his throne on the mainland, expecting to watch the final destruction of the Greek navy. The dramatist Aeschylus, p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Introduction: The Geography of Greece
• Minoan and Mycenaean Greece
• Archaic Greece
• Classical Greece
• The Hellenistic Age and Afterwards
• Recommended Reading and Further Resources