Mardonius

Mardonius (Old Persian Marduniya, Greek Mardonios) was among the greatest nobles of the early Achaemenid empire and, for a decade, its most active commander on the north-western frontier. He was the son of Gobryas (Gaubaruva), one of the Seven conspirators who had killed the man Darius called the false Bardiya and set Darius on the throne, and he married a daughter of Darius himself; his mother was Darius's sister, which made him first cousin to Xerxes as well as the King's son-in-law by his own marriage. That double bond to the royal house is the fact around which his whole career turns, and it is the fact the Greek tradition most consistently obscures. For Mardonius comes to us almost entirely through Herodotus, who made him the ambitious hawk who talks Xerxes into the invasion of Greece and then, left behind to finish the war, is beaten and killed at Plataea; and Herodotus wrote him as a type, the reckless 'bad counsellor' whose ruin vindicates the moral of the whole war. To recover the historical Mardonius is to weigh that portrait against the office he held, and to set beside it the thin but real Persian evidence, an administrative tablet naming his royal wife, an estate in Babylonia that still bore his name, that the Greek narrative never had.

Family and standing: son of one of the Seven

Mardonius's importance began with his blood. His father Gobryas was one of the six who joined Darius in the coup of 522, and stands among the spear-bearers on the Behistun relief; Darius names him in the great inscription, "(one) called Gaubaruva, son of Marduniya, a Persian," among the men "who strove as my followers" when he killed Gaumata.^[1] (The grandfather, then, was another Mardonius, so the general bears the name of the coup-maker's own father.) Gobryas married a sister of Darius, and Mardonius was the son of that marriage; Darius in turn gave Mardonius one of his daughters, named by Herodotus as Artozostre. Herodotus records the marriage plainly at the head of the 492 campaign, calling Mardonius "a young man and lately married to Artozostra daughter of king Dareios."^[2] That union is one of the rare points where the Greek record and the empire's own paperwork touch: a Persepolis Fortification tablet (PFa 5) records rations for a woman described as "the wife of Mardonius, daughter of the king" (Mardunuya irtiri sunki pakri), an unnamed royal princess travelling in state, almost certainly Artozostre herself.^[3] Mardonius also appears by name in the glossary of the Fortification archive, so the man Herodotus dramatises was, on the ground, a documented great landholder of the realm, not merely a character in a Greek war-story.^[4]

The position this gave him was formidable but, it should be said, not unique. As one of Darius's chosen sons-in-law he stood in the innermost circle of the reign; under Xerxes, as royal cousin and brother-in-law, he was one grandee among several of comparable rank, a point that bears on the Greek claim that he alone drove the King to war (below).^[5] His father's generation had made the dynasty; his own task was to serve it in the field.

The expedition of 492: Thrace, Macedon, and the wreck at Athos

Mardonius first commands in the sources in 492, when Darius, the Ionian Revolt freshly suppressed, sent him west with a large army and fleet. Herodotus casts the expedition as aimed at punishing Athens and Eretria for their share in the burning of Sardis, and calls it a failure; but its real work, and its real result, was the reassertion of imperial control over the European foothold, Thrace and Macedonia, that the revolt had shaken. Herodotus's own narrative shows this, for the army's actual conquests are Thracian and Macedonian:

"Crossing over then from Thasos to the opposite coast, they proceeded on their way near the land as far as Acanthos... and then starting from Acanthos they attempted to get round Mount Athos; but as they sailed round, there fell upon them a violent North Wind, against which they could do nothing, and handled them very roughly, casting away very many of their ships on Mount Athos." (Herodotus 6.44, trans. Macaulay 1890)^[2]

The fleet's disaster at Athos, some three hundred ships lost by Herodotus's reckoning, became a byword, and it is the reason Xerxes' engineers would later cut a canal through the Athos peninsula rather than risk the passage again. On land Mardonius was mauled too, wounded in a night attack by the Thracian Brygi, though he would not withdraw until he had subdued them:

"Mardonios and the land-army while encamping in Macedonia were attacked in the night by the Brygian Thracians, and many of them were slain by the Brygians and Mardonios himself was wounded. However not even these escaped being enslaved by the Persians, for Mardonios did not depart from that region until he had made them subject... So this expedition departed back to Asia having gained no honour by its contests." (Herodotus 6.45, trans. Macaulay 1890)^[2]

Herodotus's verdict, "having gained no honour," reflects his framing of the campaign as a botched strike at Athens. Modern scholarship reads its aim and outcome differently. The reference-standard account judges that the expedition "merely succeeded to consolidate the Persian rule in Thrace and Macedonia," which is to say it did exactly what a frontier-restoration campaign was meant to do.^[6] The Companion is blunter still: Herodotus's claim that the campaign targeted Athens "is extremely unlikely"; the true intention "was presumably to reestablish their control over Thrace and Macedon," a reconquest that the revolt had interrupted.^[4] Kuhrt concurs that "Mardonius' subsequent action makes it plain that his aim was to consolidate Persian power in Thrace and adjoining regions."^[7] On this reading the storm at Athos and the wound from the Brygi were the real costs of a campaign that nonetheless achieved its strategic purpose; the "failure" is Herodotus's, imposed by treating a punitive raid on Athens as the goal. In the same period, or just after, Herodotus credits Mardonius with deposing the tyrants of the Ionian cities and setting up "popular governments" (demokratiai), a report long doubted and best read not as ideology but as the pragmatic non-reimposition of unpopular clients after the revolt.^[2]

The decision for war, and the 'bad counsellor'

When Darius died in 486 the reckoning with Greece passed to Xerxes, and here Mardonius enters the record in his most famous and most suspect role: the man who talks the King into the great invasion. Herodotus makes him the standing voice at Xerxes' side, urging vengeance on Athens and the conquest of a fertile Europe, and states his motive without disguise:

"Mardonios however, the son of Gobryas, who was a cousin of Xerxes, being sister's son to Dareios, was ever at his side, and having power with him more than any other of the Persians, he kept continually to such discourse as this... 'Master, it is not fitting that the Athenians, after having done to the Persians very great evil, should not pay the penalty for that which they have done.'" (Herodotus 7.5, trans. Macaulay 1890)^[8]

Herodotus then supplies the reason behind the reasons, and it is the charge that fixed Mardonius's character for antiquity:

"These things he was wont to say, since he was one who had a desire for perilous enterprise and wished to be himself the governor of Hellas under the king." (Herodotus 7.6, trans. Macaulay 1890)^[8]

In the war-council that follows, Mardonius alone speaks for the expedition and belittles the Greeks, while the wise elder Artabanus (Xerxes' uncle) counsels caution and is abused for it; then a dream overrides the King's better judgement. This is superb narrative and poor evidence, and the reasons it should be distrusted are not a matter of taste. Briant identifies the whole set-piece as a literary construction working post eventum: "It was standard practice to contrast two counselors, one ambitious and stupid, the other wise and deliberate," a pairing whose "result, if not the intention," is to portray Xerxes as weak, "which fits well with the traditional Greek presentation."^[9] Mardonius, cast as the ambitious fool, may indeed have had a poor name among the Persians themselves; but that is a fact about his later reputation, not proof that the invasion was his doing.^[9] John Hyland presses the point to its root: Herodotus "inadvertently reproduces a trope of apologetic royal ideology in the stock character of an evil adviser, whose deceptive counsel exempts the king from blame," a device visible in the very structure of the story, since after yielding to Mardonius the King is still free to change his mind, until a supernatural dream forces his hand.^[5] The specific detail that Mardonius wished to become "governor of Hellas" Hyland judges an inference read back from his later command and "implausible as the ambition of an Achaemenid courtier whose wealth and family power were rooted in the Persian heartland": a man whose estates lay in Persis and Babylonia had little reason to crave a satrapy at the far edge of the world, still less to send the King in person to win it for him.^[5]

What, then, drove the invasion, if not Mardonius? The modern answer locates it in the office of kingship rather than the whisper of a favourite. Xerxes' choice to lead a royal campaign in person, after suppressing the revolts of Egypt and Babylon that had greeted his accession, was a demonstration of effective kingship, a bid to match and exceed the marches of Cyrus and Darius and to renew in person the bonds of loyalty across the empire.^[5] Briant agrees that "for Xerxes the situation was very clear": he had to take up his father's unfinished plan, prove his ability to lead a victorious campaign, and show himself to his subject peoples along the way; the decision was structural, not the product of one man's ambition.^[9] Mardonius no doubt spoke for the war and helped plan the infrastructure in the region of his old command, but he "would not have been the only noble enthusiastic for the royal campaign."^[5] The war-hawk of Book 7 is, in large part, a figure the defeat required.

Field commander of the invasion

Whatever the truth of the council, Mardonius's actual place in the invasion of 480 is not in doubt: he was one of the senior commanders of the largest army the empire ever put in the field. Herodotus lists him first among the marshals who led the host out of Sardis, and assigns him, with Masistes, command of one of the three great columns of the march through Thrace.^[7] He was, in the Iranica article's phrase, Xerxes' "commander-in-chief" in the sense of the leading field officer under the King himself.^[6] Through the campaign of that summer, the forcing of Thermopylae, the drawn sea-fights off Artemisium, the occupation of Attica and the burning of the Athenian Acropolis, he is one of the men directing the war, though Herodotus, whose interest is in the King and in the Greek defenders, gives him few distinct scenes until the crisis after Salamis.

That crisis came at sea. Drawn into the narrows of Salamis in September 480, the empire's subject fleet was beaten while Xerxes watched from the shore. The defeat was a heavy blow to the royal image, but, as Briant stresses, "the military outcome was not catastrophic. The Persian army was practically intact."^[10] What followed was not the panicked flight of the Greek sources but a considered division of force, and Mardonius was its author and its instrument. Herodotus gives him the speech in which he offers to stay behind and finish the war, absolving the Persians of the naval disaster and asking for a picked army:

"Do not thou, O king, let the Persians be an object of laughter to the Hellenes; for none of thy affairs have suffered by means of the Persians... but if Phenicians or Egyptians or Cyprians or Kilikians proved themselves cowards, the calamity which followed does not belong to the Persians in any way... it must then be for me to deliver over to thee Hellas reduced to subjection, choosing for this purpose thirty myriads from the army." (Herodotus 8.100, trans. Macaulay 1890)^[11]

The speech is Herodotus's composition, but the strategy it recommends is sound and is the one adopted: Xerxes withdrew to Sardis with the fleet, from where he "was in constant communication with Mardonius, and he continued to oversee the entire operation," while Mardonius kept the army in Greece to force the decision on land.^[10] Delegating the completion of a war to a general while the King began his homeward progress had ample Achaemenid precedent; had Mardonius won, the victory would have added to the King's own credit exactly as the victories of Darius' lieutenants had at Behistun.^[12] Leaving Mardonius in Greece also pinned the Greek fleet in home waters and ensured that "the decisive battle would take place on Greek soil."^[10] The retreat, in short, was a plan, and Mardonius held the sharp end of it.

The campaign of 479: diplomacy, then Boeotia

Mardonius wintered his picked force in Thessaly and, in the spring of 479, opened not with a march but with an offer. Carrying instructions from Xerxes, he sent Alexander I of Macedon, the King's client and a guest-friend of Athens, to propose peace: autonomy, the rebuilding of the burned temples, and additional territory of Athens' choosing, in return for submission. Briant preserves the royal terms:

"The king's orders to him are, first, to restore to Athens her territory, and, secondly, to allow her to choose in addition whatever other territory she wishes, and to enjoy her liberty. Let Athens but come to terms with the king, and he has his instructions to rebuild the temples which have been destroyed by fire." (Herodotus 8.140, trans. after Rawlinson, in Briant 2002)^[10]

The overture was not weakness but strategy, a wedge aimed at splitting Athens from Sparta and dividing the Athenians among themselves; Mardonius could threaten the city again if it refused, which it did, twice.^[12] He then retook and razed the evacuated Athens, signalling the recapture to Xerxes by beacon-fires, and withdrew north to fight on ground of his own choosing. That choice, the plain of the Asopos in Boeotia, was deliberate and shrewd: "Attica is not cavalry country," and Mardonius fell back "to fight near a friendly city [Thebes] and in country suited to cavalry."^[7] The reconquest of Athens was itself, as Hyland notes, not the vanity Herodotus alleges but a required objective of the campaign, since the city's earlier submission made its resistance a rebellion demanding reassertion of royal authority.^[12]

The treatment of the Boeotian campaign belongs to the Plataea entry; here it is enough to record that Mardonius fought it well. His cavalry, the arm in which he held a clear advantage, harassed the Greek coalition under the Spartan regent Pausanias, cut off its supply column, and finally fouled its chief water source, so that on the eve of the battle, in Hyland's judgement, "Mardonios's cavalry was on the verge of winning the campaign."^[12] The old picture of a general blundering to his doom is a function of the outcome, not the conduct: Mardonius attended carefully to the pre-conditions for battle and gave it only when the enemy's retreat left it split, sleepless and short of water.^[12]

Death at Plataea

The battle turned on Mardonius himself. When the Persian infantry met the Spartans, the fighting held so long as he was in it, conspicuous at the head of his guard:

"In the place where Mardonios himself was, riding on a white horse and having about him the thousand best men of the Persians chosen out from the rest, here, I say, they pressed upon their opponents most of all: and so long as Mardonios survived, they held out against them... but when Mardonios was slain and the men who were ranged about his person, which was the strongest portion of the whole army, had fallen, then the others too turned and gave way before the Lacedemonians." (Herodotus 9.63, trans. Macaulay 1890)^[13]

He was killed by a Spartan named Arimnestos, and the Greeks read the death as the settling of an old score: "the satisfaction for the murder of Leonidas was paid by Mardonios according to the oracle given to the Spartans."^[13] The death was the hinge of the day. A Persian noble, unlike a king who could watch from a hillside, was expected to prove his courage in person, and riding a white horse at the head of the picked thousand made him conspicuous and made him a target; when he fell, the elite corps around him was destroyed and the army broke.^[14] In Persian terms his death would have read as the withdrawal of divine favour, and it turned a battle that might have been held into a rout. Hyland's reconstruction locates the defeat not in any inferiority of the Persian soldier but in a congested advance that brought only part of the army into action, plus tactical bad luck and the commander's chance death: "it is tempting to wonder whether the Persians could have rallied to secure a different outcome if Mardonios had only ducked."^[14] With him died the bid to add Greece to the empire; his rival Artabazus, who had held his division back, led the survivors on the long retreat to the Hellespont and was afterward rewarded by Xerxes with the satrapy of Daskyleion.^[14]

The estate that outlived him: a source-critical puzzle

Mardonius furnishes one of the neatest small puzzles in Achaemenid source-criticism, and it turns on the one kind of evidence the Greek narrative lacks: a Babylonian business document. A handful of cuneiform contracts, associated with a brickmakers' workshop, record large orders placed by one Ka-Bel, named as the household steward of a grandee called Mardonius; two of them are dated to the eighth regnal year of Xerxes, that is, to about a year after the general's death at Plataea.^[15] The question is obvious: how can a dead man's estate still be transacting business under his name? Three answers have been given, and they map the whole spectrum of how this evidence can be read. Matthew Stolper, who first published the texts, offered two: either they name a different, homonymous Persian grandee, or they involve the household of the famous Mardonius as "a posthumous mention of a man whose prerogatives and property had not been re-assigned or whose agent had not yet found a new affiliation."^[15] Kuhrt takes the first, cautious line, judging the owner "unlikely to be identical with the Herodotean Mardonius, as the text dates after Mardonius' death at Plataea."^[7] A third and bolder reading has been floated: that the estate did belong to the general, and that he therefore did not die at Plataea at all, the Greek account of his death being fiction. The Companion airs this possibility, noting that "the report on the death of Mardonius in the battle of Plataea might be fictitious if the noble Mardonius mentioned some years later in a Babylonian document by referring to his far-reaching estates is the general of the Persian Wars."^[4]

The bold reading does not survive scrutiny, and Hyland sets it aside decisively. To suppose Mardonius survived Plataea "would violate a strong source tradition and cause further problems of reconstruction," for it would require the Greek sources to have invented not only the death but the competition over his corpse and belongings, the reward his son Artontes offered to the man who claimed to have buried him, and the immediate succession of Artabazus to the command.^[15] Stolper's own prosaic explanation makes the fiction unnecessary: the survey and reassignment of a dead grandee's assets, and the sorting of crown grants from private property, was "a slow and laborious process," and in the interval local agents would have gone on cultivating the estate under their old master's title while they waited for the King to resolve its ownership.^[15] A great man's death did not instantly erase his name from the ledgers of his stewards. The puzzle, rightly handled, does not overturn the battle; it illustrates how a single documentary anomaly can be spun into a spectacular hypothesis, and why the weight of the tradition, checked against administrative realism, should hold.

The portrait and the office

Mardonius is the compendium's clearest case of a historical person all but replaced by a literary function. Herodotus needed a hawk to drive the war and a villain to bear its defeat, and Mardonius, royal kinsman, chief advocate, field commander, and the man who actually died on the losing field, fitted the part at every point; so the ambitious counsellor, the rejecter of wise advice, the vain general who forces a needless battle, took shape and held the Western imagination. Set the office beside the portrait and a duller, more credible figure appears. He was a great noble doing the ordinary work of the dynasty his father had helped to found: securing a frontier in 492, marshalling the invasion in 480, executing the considered decision to press the war on land after Salamis, fighting a shrewd cavalry campaign in 479 that he came close to winning, and dying, conspicuously and by the expectation of his class, at its head. His "desire for perilous enterprise" is Herodotus's gloss on a commander's ordinary willingness to give battle; his supposed craving for a Greek satrapy is an inference from his last command; his villain's death is the scapegoating a lost war demanded, shared, as Hyland notes, between the Persian court that needed someone to blame and the medizing Greeks who needed the same.^[12] The correction is not that Mardonius was blameless or brilliant, matters on which the evidence is silent, but that the confident Greek portrait of him rests on a narrative designed to make the Persian defeat a moral lesson, and cannot be trusted as a likeness. Between the war-hawk of legend and the son of Gobryas attested in a Persepolis tablet and a Babylonian ledger stands a real commander whom the winners' sources allow us to see only in outline.