The Super Summary of World History (12 page)

Figure 8 Battle of Marathon

Persia’s expansion took them to Anatolia in Western Turkey, and contact with Ionian Greek colonies. These Greeks were a tough bunch to govern, and a revolt against Persia was soon underway (the Ionian Revolt—there’s a creative name). The Ionian Greeks requested help, and Athens sent aid to their fellow Greeks. Persia crushed the revolt, but mighty King Darius, ruler of Persia, fumed about diminutive Athens giving aid to the uprising. Darius decided on a strong raid to teach Athens a lesson. The result: a most important battle, and the start of many unanticipated events.

The great battle took place at
Marathon
on the eastern shores of Greece in 490 BC. The Persians chose the place of battle, but they chose poorly. Sailing from Persia, the army headed west and decided to land at a beach near the town of Marathon, which was a relatively confined area; soon, an Athenian hoplite army opposed them. The Persians were accustomed to battling their foes on the open plains of the Middle East where swiftly moving cavalry could decide battles; but now, in this confined battlefield, cavalry maneuver was not possible. In addition, a Greek force of heavily armored men faced them with huge sturdy shields arranged like a wall in front of them, and this formation could repel Persian arrows that were a significant part of Persian tactics. The type of battle that developed was one in which the strengths of the Persians (maneuver and speed) were of little use. Instead, the strengths of the Greeks, the use of heavy infantry in defense and attack, were favored. The Greeks funneled the Persian attack into a narrow field and then quickly closed in on their flanks. After the Persians broke, the Greeks pursued the fleeing men, slaughtering many before they could regain their ships. It was a considerable victory by a very small force over a much larger one. After the victory, a runner named
Pheidippides
(these Greek names are tough!) ran from Marathon to Athens and declared, as he dropped dead from exhaustion, “Athens is victorious.” We still celebrate this run today in the Marathon—only the runners do not drop dead at the end (even though they may feel like it). This victory was significant in many ways, but most importantly,
it
saved
the
idea
of
democracy
from
extinction.
Free men defeated the Persian army seeking to enslave them and crush their beliefs.
[26]

What the Greeks could not know was the affair was beginning, not ending. Another king of Persia waited in the wings, with plans to overturn Greek miscalculations.
Xerxes
, son of Darius, eventually assembled an army and designed a powerful invasion to subjugate the Greeks. It turns out that angering people such as the Persians, possessing huge armies and vast resources, is a bad idea.

In
480
BC,
Xerxes marched against the Greeks. This time the Persian king assembled a huge army, so vast the chroniclers of the day said it was immeasurable.
[27]
With such a large army, a sea invasion was out of the question. The Persians crossed the Hellespont using a road constructed over a fantastic pontoon boat bridge, an engineering feat for all time, afterward marching around the Aegean Sea toward Athens alerting the Greeks that all of Asia was coming their way.

Figure 9 Persian Wars—Xerxes Attacks

The Greeks decided to unite against this invader from the east.
[28]
To impede the Persian’s progress, the Greeks sent a small force north to the narrow pass at
Thermopylae
(hell’s gate—thermo meaning hot, and pylae meaning gate) because this area was very tight, with the sea to one side and sharply ascending mountain cliffs to the other, and a small warrior group could buy their fellow Greeks time.

The resulting three-day stand comes down to us as one of the most noble and enduring clashes of arms in history. At Thermopylae, six thousand Greeks, including men from Athens and Thebes, accompanied three hundred Spartans in the defense of the pass. The Spartans certainly bore the brunt of the fighting, but to say they were alone is simply inaccurate.

The immense Persian army came upon the Greeks holding the narrow pass and began their assault. Because of the nature of the terrain, the fighting favored the Greeks. As at Marathon, maneuver here was impossible. Persian horses and archers were useless, and the heavily armored Greeks with their ponderous shields, stabbing spears, and cleaving swords were in their element. By necessity, the Persians attacked the Greek wall of shields and men head-on, and a slaughter resulted as the lightly protected Persians failed to penetrate the Greek line. The Persian shields were (probably) wicker, their swords light, and they wore little armor in keeping with their philosophy of speed and maneuver to win battles. Like the German Army at Stalingrad in 1942, the Persian army was committed to a battle it was not designed to fight; consequently, the Persians failed to breach the Greek line. Even after two days of hard fighting, the Spartans and their allies held against the gargantuan eastern army. The Persians needed a new approach or they would likely spend a long time, and lose men unnecessarily, fighting for the pass.

Then the Persians got a break. A Greek who knew the area came to Xerxes telling him of a sinuous mountain trail around the pass that would allow the Persians to surround the Greeks and defeat them quickly. Xerxes sent his troops by night through the mountains, but the Greeks discovered the move and most fled the trap. The Spartans, and about one thousand men from Thebes, stayed and prepared for death. The Persians surrounded the remaining Greeks demanding surrender, but the Spartans and their allies refused. Xerxes ordered his men forward. All the Greeks died, fighting to the last man. Legend claims the Spartans fought until their swords and spears were broken, finally dying while scratching and clawing at their assailants. No man surrendered, so he would die free rather than suffer slavery for even a moment. And so it ended after three days. Xerxes and his prodigious army marched on leaving the blood-soaked ground behind. The Greeks erected a marker at the pass, reading,
“O
traveler,
go
tell
the
Spartans
that
here
we
lie
in
obedience
to
their
commands.”

Movies and legends ignore the reality of historical situations. Xerxes was dependent on his navy to supply his army and keep him safe from sea raiders. The navy Xerxes brought was huge, in keeping with the way mighty eastern monarchs of the day liked to do things. He was trying to show the small and disjoined Greek states they were powerless against him. The Athenians seemed to agree, since they abandoned their city and fled to nearby islands—but things are not always as they appear.

The
Oracle
at
Delphi
played a large role in Greek society. This famous Oracle had the ability, it seemed, to foresee events and give advice about them. The city of Athens sent emissaries to the Oracle asking what to do about the Persian invasion. The answer was mystifying (as usual), “You will be saved only by the wooden wall.” What was that supposed to mean?

Themistocles
(another arduous Greek name), a brilliant Athenian commander, thought he knew—the
wooden
wall
was
ships
. He lobbied for an expansion of the Athenian navy. After a lot of haggling, common in democracies to this day, it was agreed and Themistocles set about preparing for the unequal battle. As the Persian army advanced on vacant Athens and burned it, the new and larger Athenian navy was setting a trap. In a narrow straight between the island of
Salamis
and the mainland, the Greeks awaited the Persians. The Greeks, under the command of Themistocles, managed to sucker the Persians into attacking into the narrow straight, where the faster and easier-to-handle Greek triremes destroyed a large part of the Persian fleet.
[29]

Salamis was THE victory of the Persian wars, more important than Thermopylae or the later victory at Plataea. Without his navy, Xerxes’ supply lines and lines of communication back to Persia were in danger of disruption by naval raids. Very large armies require very large amounts of supply, and cut supply lines were a grave danger to the Persian force. So, Xerxes quickly determined he had won the war. After all, he marched his army into the center of Greece, burned Athens, and beat up many other Greek city-states around the Aegean Sea. Athens, as the chief offender among Greek cities aiding the Ionian Revolt, and the victor at Marathon, was reduced to ashes and therefore suitably punished. Why wait around for the surrender of a bunch of individual cities?

Xerxes declared victory and went home with his huge army, but left a smaller army behind to hold the ground won. The next year, the Greeks assembled in concert against the reduced Persian army, smashing them at the
Battle
of
Plataea
in 479 BC. The Persian defeat freed the Greeks from Persian tyranny, and the individual remained greater than the state.

After
the
Persians—The
Peloponnesian
War

The Greeks would celebrate their victory over the Persians for centuries to come, but unity and cooperation dissolved with Persia’s retreat. Soon after the Persian threat departed, Athens decided to build an empire and formed the
Delian
League
. This league encompassed Greek cities around the Aegean, and involved trading partnerships and agreements for mutual defense. Athens was the three-hundred-pound gorilla in the organization, and it soon began to show. Athens raised taxes on their “partners” and generally started acting as if they owned the other city-states. Since Athens’ main rival was Sparta, some of the cities threatened to join with Sparta to escape from the “voluntary” league. Soon, Athens and Sparta were engaged in a long and especially brutal war for control of Greece and its many colonies.

The terrible
Peloponnesian
War
was fought between
431
and
404
BC
. Athens foresaw the war (well, they should have since they started it), and knew they could not defeat the Spartan Army in a straight up battle. To counter the Spartan Army, they constructed a walled corridor between Athens and their port of Piraeus (the long walls). When the Spartans invaded, the Athenians withdrew behind their walls and waited the Spartan Army out. The Spartans could not successfully storm the long walls; subsequently, the war degenerated into Athenian naval raids on the Peloponnesian peninsula (the area controlled by Sparta) and Spartan attacks into Athenian territory to burn crops and hold the Athenians inside the long walls.

Athens survived a ghastly plague and the Spartan raids, but they could not survive the death of their war leader,
Pericles
. A new leader,
Alcibiades
, advocated increasing aggressive action, eventually convincing Athens to launch an expedition to conquer the city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily. The Athenians put together a massive fleet and an impressive army; nevertheless, distance, mismanagement from the outset, a spirited defense by the citizens of Syracuse, and significant help from Sparta destroyed the imposing Athenian fleet and army.
[30]
After the debacle, Athens was without reserves or money. Ultimately, she surrendered to the Spartans, dropping the curtain on the magnificent intellectual and artistic pageant of ancient Greece.