The Greco-Persian wars
The "Key Events in History" project, fragment 1.
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As a result of the decline or fall of the great empires of the Late Bronze Age (Egypt, Babylon/Assyria, Hittite) a geographical shift occurred in the civilization pattern of Western Eurasia/North Africa: the emphasis that used to be on the Afro-Asian “Fertile Crescent” moved westward, and for the next millennium or more firmly settled on the Mediterranean.
New players, young and vigorous, started to appear in this region, notably Phoenicians and Greeks. Both cultures followed trends quite different from the Late Bronze Age empires, who attached themselves to rivers and large territories covered in fertile soil. Most significantly, these new cultures were seafaring and so tended to stick to coasts and islands, which allowed them to live off agriculturally worthless land and engage in trade more freely.
As a consequence, their settlement pattern and government was based on city-states and colonies rather than on large stretches of land encompassing many population centers and governed by the same entity. There was no point or, frequently, even technical possibility to keep tight control over the land (not to mention the sea) in between the cities. Often there was also no way for a city to spread to surrounding territory, so any unsustainable population or those who hoped for better luck had to look for their new home far from their birthplace. And difficulties in communication made certain that the new places quickly became semi-independent, bound by little more than common language and culture to their mother cities.
However, one of the new players had appeared in the Asian stomping ground of the great empires of old. In many respects it followed their civilization style rather than the new forces of Mediterranean. Those were, of course, the Persians. Having a much better material base and well-organized central administration, they not only conquered, but maintained tight control over very large territories, and seemed a gigantic unstoppable monster in comparison with puny city-states of Mediterranean coasts and islands.
No surprise that pretty soon many of those that were close to Asia became Persian vassals. In fact, at its peak the Achaemenid Empire of Darius I (end of the 6th - beginning of the 5th century B.C.) ruled over everything that belonged to all the Late Bronze Age empires of old — taken together! — and then some, from Indus valley to Libya. It seemed that absorbing more land across the Sea of Marmara and Aegean Sea was just a question of time…
So that is how one of the first key events in the history of humanity was set. If we like, we can identify the pinnacle of this event down to a day: 27 September 480 B.C. The day when not just Greece, but Europe won its independence from Asia, and from the old civilizational patterns that dominated the region for millennia.
Of course, the choice of that particular day is a bit arbitrary. There was about half a century of conflict, with the two most famous culminations, wars of about 490 and 480 B.C. There are lots of studies and stories about these, both ancient and modern. One must note though, that there are almost no non-Greek ancient sources, the whole narrative must be biased — but from the cultural point of view that IS the point, the account of these wars became semi-mythical and has been woven into the fabric of not only Greek, but all the European civilizations afterwards.
In really broad strokes the conflict can be outlined as follows.
It all started with the Ionian revolt of 499 to 493: Ionian Greeks (i.e. those that populated Asian coastal lands and islands nearby) were not very happy with their Persian overlords. The revolt was eventually crushed, all the Greek city-states that instigated it were re-subjugated. But it alerted the central Persian authorities to the immediacy of the “Greek problem” and the threat that the Greek way of life and thinking posed to Persia. So a number of campaigns followed in Greek lands proper.
In 492 Persian troops conquered the Greek “European North”, Thrace and Macedon. This operation was followed by demands of submission sent to all the Greek city-states, and most of them reluctantly agreed. Except, of course, for defiant Athens and Sparta, who killed the Persian ambassadors, and thus added insult to injury (or vice versa, if you prefer) that cannot possibly remain unpunished.
This led to the next campaign of 490, which started not so badly, but ended in an unmitigated disaster for Persians when they tried to attack Athens. Persians attempted to secure a staging area some 40 km from Athens1, and made a landfall in the plains of Marathon — only to be blocked by a clever maneuver of the Athenian army. Athenians had been severely outnumbered by Persians and cannot really fight them directly, but by occupying the dominant heights around the plains they could pin the Persians down and prevent them from doing anything. Persians tried to end this stalemate by returning to their ships, but when a part of their force was on board, Greeks attacked the remaining troops, who were in disarray. An impressive slaughter followed, with Persians dying in thousands and Athenians famously losing only 192 fighters. Moreover, right after the battle the Greeks regrouped and marched back to Athens, arriving before the Persian fleet and preventing them from attacking Athens directly. Persians still outnumbered Greeks, but were outmatched tactically and had to call it a year.
In spite being far from the decisive in the grand scheme of things, the ideological value of this victory is hard to overestimate. All the Greeks all over the Eastern Mediterranean learned that mighty Persians could be beaten even in direct confrontation, superiority in manpower and resources notwithstanding. Also, it did not help that various internal problems prevented Persians from launching another anti-Greek operation for the next decade.
But Persians were not exactly the types to simply forgive and forget their humiliation. In 480 the new supreme ruler himself, Darius I’s son Xerxes launched a new expedition into the impudent Attica and Peloponnese. The size of the force engaged was legendary, “drinking rivers dry, eating whole fields of wheat and herds of cattle” and all that. It is difficult to say for sure, but the numbers were definitely in hundreds thousands, possibly up to a million or more!
It seemed like the destiny of the Greeks, especially of their leading city-states of Athens and Sparta had been sealed. Even the heroic and still much praised stand-off at the pass of Thermopylae by the Spartan kind Leonidas2 and less famous simultaneous defense of the straights of Artemisium by a joint Greek naval force could not stop this onslaught. Boeotia fell to Persians, and Attica, the Greek “soft underbelly”, was swiftly invaded. Athens had to be evacuated, vengeful Persians murdered everyone who dared to stay and then razed the city to the ground.
This is where our chosen exact date finally comes into play. By a combination of a clever ruse — one of the Greek leaders, Themistocles, managed to persuade Xerxes that a large force of Greeks is ready to defect and thus provoked his attack at a prearranged place and time — and naval tactical superiority, the remaining Greek fleet defeated the three times larger Persian fleet in the straits off the island of Salamis. This happened on 27 September 480 B.C.3 and it changed everything.
Without a large part of his fleet and facing Greek naval superiority that would disrupt his supply lines — remember those rivers to be drank and herds to be eaten? It all had to come from somewhere, and poor in agricultural bounty Greek lands could hardly supply even a small fraction of what was needed! — Xerxes was afraid of being trapped in Greece and decided to flee with the bulk of his army. His remaining occupational forces fared badly and were vanquished in battles of Plataea and Mycale next year, which allowed the Greeks to secure the straits between Europe and Asia and prevent any further Persian invasions.
This effectively ended the Greco-Persian wars. There was some further action on the islands and even as far as the coast of Egypt in the next decades, but the Greek mainland was never threatened and the scale of any of the following clashes was down by orders of magnitude. Eventually a de-facto peace was achieved. Historians still argue if an official treaty was ever negotiated, but there certainly was a firm understanding between the sides along the lines “we don’t bother you, you don’t bother us”.
The rest of the 5th century in Greece was dominated by a major military conflict between Athens and Sparta (known as the Peloponesian wars) and there is more than ample evidence that this was encouraged by Persians, who decided thus to follow an indirect path of political subterfuge rather than military confrontation in their relationships with Greece.
So the day of 27 September 480 B.C. at the straits of Salamis was really a watershed event. But its main significance was not only the change of tide in the Greco-Persian wars, the whole thing brought with it much deeper cultural and civilizational consequences.
To understand this we must return to the difference in cultural paradigms that defined the Greek and Persian civilizations. There is a reason why we favor the Greeks when reading about those events 2.5 millennia ago: Ancient Greece became the first layer of foundation to our own modern civilization. Just to name a few main features that the ancient Greek civilization offered to humanity that are now essential to our way of life:
The way of thinking: “philosophy”. While it is true that one can distinguish something similar to philosophy in the patterns of thinking of many peoples, none of them had been so obsessed with trying to rationalize the surrounding world, social relationship and even the great and scary unknown of gods and other mystical forces, as the Classical Greeks did. Strangely enough and unlike many cultures that tended to dogmatize certain “right” truths, Greeks practiced it in more than one way: an important feature of this “philosophy” had been that nothing was postulated and solid, there were many different and often contradictory schools of thought — and this was considered business as normal! The consequences of developing this paradigm are so profound that one can write forever about it and still not cover everything. Modern science, mathematics, moral and ethics are just the most obvious of the areas that would have been impossible without adopting Greek philosophical thinking first.
Government. Another area that has been deeply influenced by the Greek peculiar “philosophical” way of thinking is the art of government. Unlike traditional Asiatic and North African empires, with the colonial pattern of settlement the question of establishing efficient local government was a top priority and could not be answered by some sacred centuries-old tradition. And this understandably led to much experimenting and thinking on the subject. While popularly mostly praised for inventing democracy, in fact Greeks put a lot of thought and practical effort to trying many forms of government, from despotic to liberal. They broke forever the myth that only one form of government (established by gods, ancestors or whatever) is possible.
Historiographical tradition. (Herodotus! — Say no more!) A lot of what we are discussing here we know thanks to “the father of history” Herodotus, the primary subject of his detailed and still very much read book being exactly the Greco-Persian wars. His novel approach to writing history as opposed to various official chronicles — which probably also makes him the father of investigative journalism — was to try to talk to witnesses, gather evidence, and then present it to the reader. He himself would often take purely neutral position when faced with contradictory opinions. Or, if trying to work out some consistent version of events, he would openly state his line of reasoning. This manner of writing about history has strongly influenced pretty much all the historians familiar with his work ever since.
Phonetical-based letter alphabet. Often forgotten because being so obvious, it may be the top thing that Greek civilization gifted us. Development of writing in the Mediterranean and Near East went by many different and often difficult paths, through ideograms and such, until it struck gold in Phoenician letter alphabet. But the final crucial step of designating not only consonants but also vowels by letters was made by Greeks, who borrowed and then improved the Phoenician system. Unlike hieroglyphic or cuneiform this provided a straightforward way of developing writing systems for any language ever since.
Aesthetics:
Visual (architecture, sculpture, ceramics, painting etc.) Does not need much comment, really.
Literary and theatrical. Similarly is quite self-explanatory.
Musical. Not as obvious and as definitive as the previous two, the Pythagorean theory of music is still fundamental to our ways of understanding music. And through various transmission channels (like Medieval Latin and Byzantine) at least part of the Ancient Greek musical culture definitely made it to our times.
Religion. It may come as a great surprise, because Greeks developed many of what we would call today “religious practices”, but Ancient Greeks never had a concept of “religion” per se. And it was another important and quite liberating feature of the way they thought about things. Just like with philosophical schools they easily allowed for all kinds of religious practices, including strange and foreign ones, and later were open even to something as alien as the Jewish religion. This proved to be both a blessing and a curse when they (and people who followed Greek philosophical ways, which in truth equals to pretty much all in Europe and around it) finally appropriated Christian theology, because while being able to develop it to great and illuminating depths, ultimately they could not agree on anything, leading to bitter divisions and constant struggle in the Church. But again, this puts Ancient Greeks much closer to our ways of thinking about religion than most of the cultures before or after them.
Motivation to travel and seek adventure. A natural consequence of the colonial settlement practices, it does not need much elaboration, enough to mention the Odyssey and Argonauts.
But there is an important consequence to this: unlike what was common in many other cultures, Greeks tended to spread the culture, rather than the rule, which ultimately led to persistent Hellenization of many originally very culturally-diverse lands as far in the East as western parts of India. And this, in turn, paved the way to a lot of future civilizational developments.
Role of a single person: “heroism”. Last but not least, unlike many eastern social concepts of sacrificing an individual to the benefit of all, where “benefit of all” can be treated as narrowly as the will of the king, the Greeks were firmly pro-individual will, sometimes even against the will of powerful gods. And in their myths notable heroes or even humble unremarkable individuals may play larger role than gods, while gods often also have individual wills of their own, quite contrary to the formal ruler of them all, Zeus, or the general “godly consensus”. Again, when compared to many cultures afterwards, Greeks prove to be closer to our modern way of thinking than most of those. Which, of course, in much more than a coincidence, we are “spirit of their spirit” whether we like it or not.
Of course, if Persians won and took the mainland Greece under their control, it would not have destroyed all the above-mentioned features completely. After all, much of Phoenician culture survived despite of submitting to Persian overlordship of the key Phoenician centers of Tyre, Sidon, Byblos etc. Later it saw some better days in Carthage.
However, winning in such a spectacular fashion against such visibly unsurmountable odds filled Greeks with additional pride and vigour, and added value to their culture in the eyes of all. We can be sure that Persians did for Greeks what Carthaginians later did for Romans: gave them strong belief in themselves and their worth as a valuable civilizational force that can and must thrive, replenish itself and spread as far as possible. As we know, after being conquered and enslaved by Romans Greeks managed to culturally “enslave” back their conquerors and, even in the thoroughly Latinised Medieval Western Europe, they eventually won their supreme place in all spheres of thought and culture.
And all this to large degree because the things went the way they did on 27 September 480 B.C.
You all know the legend of the runner who notified Athens of the victory and had to run this distance, which in turn led to the establishment of the famous eponymous type of running competition at the end of the 19th century. If you think about it, it is difficult to imagine a more curious commemoration of an ancient battle.
With a few of his loyal guardsmen and some allies, popularly counted as 300, but in reality closer to several thousand, which was still nothing against at least 100,000-300,000 Persians.
Some say 26 September, but 27 is a much nicer number, right?