The Battle of Mycale (479 BCE)

In the late summer of 479 BCE, on the Ionian coast below Mount Mycale, opposite the island of Samos, a Greek fleet under the Spartan king Leotychides landed and destroyed a Persian fleet that had been drawn up on shore behind a stockade, together with the land army left to guard it. It was the last battle of Xerxes' Greek expedition, fought in the same weeks as the land defeat of Mardonius at Plataea in Boeotia, and with those two engagements the bid to annex Greece was over. For the empire the more lasting consequence was not the wrecked ships but what the battle opened. The Greeks of the Ionian coast who stood in the King's own battle line turned on the Persians in the middle of the fight; Herodotus calls it the second revolt of Ionia; and within two years the cities and islands of the Aegean seaboard had gone over to the new Athenian-led alliance, the Delian League, and were lost to the King. This entry reads the battle from the imperial side, which means reading it against its one real source. Almost everything we know of Mycale comes from Herodotus, writing two generations later and from the winners' side, who wrapped the event in a providential design, that it happened on the very day of Plataea, so that the reader must first separate what the Persians did from the meaning the Greek tradition gave it.

The one source, and its design

There is no Persian account of Mycale, and after Herodotus there is very little of any kind: a compressed and partly garbled notice in Diodorus (drawing on the fourth-century Ephorus), a stray line in Ctesias, and later echoes in Plutarch, Pausanias and Strabo, all descending from the same Greek stream. The corpus of the sources states the general condition for the whole period, and it bites hardest here: for the political and military history "we are dependent on Graeco-Roman writers, with Herodotus' masterly narrative dominating the picture."^[1] Herodotus' account of the battle (9.90-107) is rich and circumstantial, full of named captains, omens and speeches, and it is also shaped throughout by his theme of free Hellas delivered from the barbarian. The most important thing it does to Mycale is to make it the twin of Plataea. He reports that the two victories fell on the same day, and draws the theological moral openly:

"Now by many signs is the divine power seen in earthly things, and by this among others, namely that now, when the day of the defeat at Plataia and of that which was about to take place at Mycale happened to be the same, a rumour came to the Hellenes here, so that the army was encouraged much more." (Herodotus 9.100, trans. Macaulay)^[2]

The synchronism is a device, and a systematic one. As the Companion's survey of the Greek image shows, Herodotus arranged the whole war into fatefully paired days: Thermopylae with Artemisium, Plataea with Mycale, and even the Sicilian victory of Himera with Salamis, each set "took place on one and the same day," a scheme so patently constructed that Aristotle himself denied any real connection between such events.^[3] The two battles cannot in fact have been simultaneous, and Herodotus half-admits it, placing Plataea in the early morning and Mycale in the afternoon of his one shared day, a stitch that betrays the seam.^[2] The modern judgement runs from the cautious to the blunt. Kuhrt notes that the same-day claim "is generally thought unlikely," while allowing that the two must have been fought close together in time, since the victory at Plataea is what freed the Greek fleet to act.^[4] Briant is willing to grant a rough coincidence, "if not the exact day"; Hyland treats the identical-day report as one Herodotus "implausibly" makes, and leaves the relative timing frankly uncertain.^[5][6] What matters for the Persian side is to lift the battle out of the providential frame in which it reaches us: Mycale was not a sign sent from heaven on the day of Plataea, but a defensive engagement on the Ionian shore whose date the sources do not actually fix.

Why the fleet was on the beach

After the loss at Salamis the previous autumn, the King's surviving fleet had wintered at Kyme and Samos, and in the spring of 479 it faced a Greek fleet gathering at Delos and then Samos under Leotychides. The Persian naval commanders made a decision that the Greek narrative treats as timidity and that the imperial reading should treat as policy: they refused battle at sea. Herodotus is explicit about the reasoning:

"The Persians, being informed that they were sailing thither, put out to sea also and went over to the mainland with their remaining ships... for deliberating of the matter they thought it good not to fight a battle by sea, since they did not think that they were a match for the enemy. And they sailed away to the mainland in order that they might be under the protection of their land-army which was in Mycale." (Herodotus 9.96, trans. Macaulay)^[7]

They sent the Phoenician squadrons home, beached the rest below Mycale, and built a stockade of stone and timber, incorporating the drawn-up ships into the wall, felling orchards for the palisade and preparing, in Herodotus' phrase, "either for being besieged or for gaining a victory."^[7] This was the deliberate avoidance of a second Salamis. Hyland argues, persuasively, that so comprehensive a stand-down cannot have been the commanders' own initiative: the presence of Xerxes' full brother Masistes near the site, though not in command, points to a royal decision, the King sending a trusted member of his inner family to inspect the fleet's new situation while keeping his own person at a distance and refusing to stake his charisma on another sea-fight.^[6] The covering army had been left in Ionia by Xerxes' own order for exactly this contingency; Herodotus numbers it at "six myriads," sixty thousand, under Tigranes, "who in beauty and stature excelled the other Persians," and Diodorus adds that it was reinforced by conscripts drawn up from Sardis and its district.^[7][5] The choice to fight a defensive battle on land, behind a wall, rather than risk the ships, was rational after Salamis. It also handed the initiative to the enemy, and it placed the outcome in the hands of the least reliable troops in the King's service.

The unreliable subjects

The deepest weakness at Mycale was internal, and the Persian command knew it before the fighting began. The army and fleet contained large Ionian Greek contingents, subjects of the King fighting against other Greeks, and their loyalty was suspect. Herodotus shows the commanders taking pre-emptive measures against their own men. The Samians were disarmed outright, because they had lately ransomed and sent home five hundred Athenian prisoners; the Milesians were sent away from the camp under a pretext, ordered to guard the mountain passes on the ground that they knew the country, "but their true reason for doing this was that they might be out of the camp."^[8] Leotychides, for his part, played on precisely this fracture, sailing along the shore and calling out to the Ionians in the enemy line to remember "first the freedom of all" when battle was joined, a stratagem, Herodotus notes, of the same kind Themistocles had used at Artemisium: either the Ionians would be won over, or the Persians would hear and distrust them, and either served the Greek purpose.^[9] When the fight turned, the fracture opened. The disarmed Samians did what they could against the Persians; the Milesians, posted on the passes to be rid of them, guided the fleeing Persians onto the wrong paths and then fell on them; and the rest of the Ionians, seeing the example, revolted in the middle of the battle. Herodotus draws the line that would echo for a century:

"But they did in fact the opposite of that which they were appointed to do... but also at last they themselves became their worst foes and began to slay them. Thus then for the second time Ionia revolted from the Persians." (Herodotus 9.104, trans. Macaulay)^[10]

Briant cautions against drawing too much from this: the behaviour of the Ionian contingents at Mycale is "too specific an example" to generalise into a claim that the empire's subject levies were everywhere disaffected, and Herodotus elsewhere stresses the loyal service of subject navies at Salamis under the King's eye.^[11] The point holds, but the specific fact is grave enough on its own terms: at the one battle where the empire committed Ionian Greeks against a Greek liberating fleet on Ionian soil, they changed sides. The decision to fight there, in that company, was the decision that lost the war's last engagement.

The battle

The fighting itself, on Herodotus' account, resembled a smaller Plataea. The Greeks landed and formed up; the Athenians and their neighbours had the level ground along the beach, the Lacedaemonians the broken ground of the ravine and hillside. So long as the Persians held their wall of wicker shields upright they had the better of it, but when the Athenian wing, eager to win the honour before the Spartans came round, pushed in with a rush, the shield-line was broken and the defenders driven back inside their stockade. Herodotus renders the end in the same terms he used for the Persian infantry at Plataea and Marathon, brave men whose tactics failed once the shield-fence was down:

"These pushed aside the wicker-work shields and fell upon the Persians with a rush all in one body, and the Persians sustained their first attack and continued to defend themselves for a long time, but at last they fled to the wall... and when the wall too had been captured, then the Barbarians no longer betook themselves to resistance, but began at once to take flight, excepting only the Persians, who formed into small groups and continued to fight." (Herodotus 9.102, trans. Macaulay)^[12]

Briant makes the tactical reading explicit and general: at Mycale as at Plataea, the moment the rampart of shields collapsed the Persian infantry had nothing but its courage to set against "the well-oiled machine of the phalanx," and the hoplites, once inside the range where the bow no longer told, won the day.^[13] There was, notably, no cavalry at Mycale to redress the balance, the arm on which the empire usually relied against Greeks in Asia.^[14] The camp was stormed, the ships and the wall burned once the spoil had been carried off, and the covering army destroyed or scattered toward Sardis. Of the four Persian commanders, Herodotus reports, two escaped and two fell: Artayntes and Ithamitres, the admirals, got away, while Mardontes and Tigranes, the general of the land army, were killed.^[12] Both of the dead may have been of the royal kin; Tigranes, in particular, is identified in the tradition as a son of Xerxes' uncle Artabanus, so that the loss, as after Salamis and Plataea, reached into the King's own family.^[15]

The reckoning at court

Herodotus follows the survivors up the road to Sardis and gives the aftermath its most telling Persian scene, a quarrel that shows how defeat was managed and blame apportioned at the top. Xerxes' brother Masistes fell to abusing the escaped admiral Artayntes for his generalship, and used the sharpest insult the court knew:

"Masistes the son of Dareios, who had been present at the disaster which had befallen them, was saying many evil things of the commander Artayntes, and among other things he said that in respect of the generalship which he had shown he was worse than a woman... Now with the Persians to be called worse than a woman is the greatest possible reproach." (Herodotus 9.107, trans. Macaulay)^[16]

Artayntes drew his sword on the King's brother and was wrestled down by a Halicarnassian, Xenagoras, who was rewarded by Xerxes with the governorship of all Cilicia, a strategically placed coastal command handed, at just this moment, to a proven loyal man, part of the empire's response to the collapse of the sea-frontier.^[17] The episode is instructive beyond its melodrama. Hyland reads the whole management of the news, the tension between "the realities of defeat and the royal wish to portray the campaign as a success," as running on a well-worn Near Eastern track: blame is loaded onto the dead Mardonius and the disgraced Artayntes, dissociating the King from their failures, while Ahura Mazda's continued favour to Xerxes and his house is asserted despite the god's evident denial of victory to such unworthy subordinates.^[6] The Greek sources, by contrast, prefer stories of a court sunk in cowardice, lust and vengeance; the sober point underneath is that a defeat was answered as defeats in the ancient Near East always were, by propitiation, the transfer of guilt to subordinates, and the redirection of attention toward the victory still hoped for.

Did Xerxes strike back?

One question divides the modern authorities and is worth setting out plainly, because it bears on how the empire actually behaved after Mycale. Xerxes did not flee Sardis in panic; he remained there for a time, directing affairs, before beginning the long march home. The dispute is over whether, in those weeks, he mounted a reprisal against the Milesians who had betrayed him at the battle. Ctesias reports that Xerxes, withdrawing from Sardis, sent to sack a great sanctuary, which the text names as Delphi but which many editors correct to Didyma, the oracle of Apollo attached to Miletus; and Pausanias states that Xerxes "blamed the Milesians for deliberate cowardice in the face of the Athenians in the Greek sea-battle," that is, at Mycale, and carried off the bronze Apollo of the Branchidae.^[18] Briant accepts the raid: Xerxes, he argues, was "mounting a counterattack against the rebellious Ionians, specifically the Milesians, after their treachery in the battle of Mycale," and the Branchidae who administered the shrine, having sided openly with Persia, fled to the King in fear of their fellow-citizens.^[19] Hyland is sceptical: the silence of Herodotus and Diodorus does not exclude such a raid, but the positive evidence, resting on an emended sentence of a Byzantine epitome of Ctesias and on a statue that may have been looted by Darius rather than Xerxes, is "not very compelling," and it is at least as likely that the King set out for home without a last-minute victory to salve the wounds of Mycale and Plataea.^[6] The disagreement is genuine and cannot be resolved on present evidence; what both sides agree on is the frame, that a punitive strike at a rebel sanctuary would have been entirely in character, the standard imperial answer to a city that had followed the Lie into revolt, and not evidence of any special cruelty or of a religious persecution.

What Mycale opened: the Ionian question and the Aegean

Here is the point that mattered from Susa, and it is not the ships. Mycale, with Plataea, ended the invasion; but Mycale in particular reopened the Ionian question that the empire had thought settled in 494, and set in train the loss of the whole Aegean seaboard. On the field of battle the Greek victors already faced the problem the revolt created: what to do with the Ionians they had freed. Herodotus reports the debate, the Peloponnesians proposing to evacuate the Ionians from Asia altogether and resettle them in Greece, since they could not be permanently garrisoned against the King; the Athenians refusing; and the compromise, that the islanders, Samians, Chians, Lesbians and the rest who had served, were bound by oath into the Hellenic alliance.^[20] This "conference of Samos," as it is sometimes called, is the seed of what became, after Sparta withdrew from the war in 478/7, the Athenian-led Delian League, whose declared purpose Thucydides gives as continuing the war "in revenge for the damage they had suffered" by ravaging the King's land.^[21] The Companion states the consequence flatly: "Athens thus became the leading power in the Aegean thanks to its fleet, especially after the Persian fleet was destroyed near the Mycale promontory in 479," and the defeats at Plataea and Mycale together "resulted in a Greek offensive" that acquired its institutional shape in the League.^[22] The Greek fleet sailed straight from Mycale to the Hellespont; over the next two years the strongholds by which Darius and Xerxes had moved armies from Asia into Europe fell one by one, Sestos to the Athenians in 479, Byzantium and much of Cyprus in 478, Eion on the Strymon around 476, until only Doriskos in Thrace still held for the King, its commander Maskames earning the King's lifelong gift-giving for refusing to yield.^[23] The coastal cities of Ionia, which had turned at Mycale, drifted or were driven into the Athenian orbit across the following decades. When Xerxes at last tried to reassert his "mastery of the seas" by sending a rebuilt fleet west, it was destroyed off the Eurymedon in Pamphylia around 466, and the western sea-frontier settled into the shape it would keep: an Aegean lost to Athens, an Anatolian interior still firmly the King's.^[23]

The imperial balance sheet

Set against the whole empire, the losses of 479 were real but bounded, and the distinction between what was lost and what was kept is the heart of the Persian-side reading. Briant draws the balance with care. The human losses, though the Greek sources (following Aeschylus) paint them as the ruin of a generation, cannot be measured, and "were not in any way decisive: the Persian people continued to thrive."^[24] Hyland's reconstruction puts the combined death toll of the whole campaign, Salamis, Plataea and Mycale together with storm and disease, in the tens of thousands, a painful blow comparable to Athens' Sicilian disaster or Rome's early losses to Hannibal, but one the empire's scale absorbed without lasting demographic harm; the naval casualties in particular fell on the Mediterranean coastlands, and the Iranian heartland's manpower was barely touched.^[25] Territorially the reckoning is sharper, and Briant states it exactly:

"If we compare the situation after Mycale to the territory governed by the Persians at the time of the death of Darius, the most important losses are in the Aegean, where the naval defeats left the field free for the Greeks... What Herodotus calls the Second Ionian Revolt is negligible alongside the First; this time, the mainland cities remained under Persian control." (Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander, 2002, p. 541)^[26]

That is the imperial verdict. The empire gave up the islands and, in time, the coastal cities of the Aegean fringe, the most recently and lightly held of its western acquisitions; it kept Anatolia, the satrapal system inland, and everything east of it. From Susa the wars against the Greeks did not end in the collapse that the victors' literature, and the modern memory built on it, would make of them. They ended in the manageable loss of a sea-frontier, while the state functioned in good order and the dynasty ruled on for another century and a half, until Alexander. Mycale is remembered by the Greeks as the day the eastern and the western threats to Hellas were broken together, a providential deliverance. Read from the other side, it is the moment the empire's grip on the Aegean was prised loose, an important loss on one maritime edge of a realm that still stretched from the Aegean it was losing to the Indus, and no more than that.

Why the reading matters

Mycale is a compact lesson in the method this compendium is built on. The battle was real and the defeat was real; so was its most important effect, the second defection of Ionia and the opening of the road to the Delian League and the loss of the Aegean. But the event survives in a single hostile narrative that has bent it to a shape, made it the twin of Plataea, dated it by a miracle, and read the Ionian revolt as the natural rising of Greeks against a despot rather than the defection of imperial subjects at a chosen moment. To recover the Persian side is not to deny any of the facts but to strip away that frame: to see the beaching of the fleet as a deliberate refusal of a second Salamis, the Ionian contingents' treachery as the predictable cost of committing suspect subjects, the court's response as the standard Near Eastern management of a setback, and the whole affair, from the imperial centre, as the loss of the western sea-fringe and not the fall of an empire that had a hundred and fifty years still to run.