Topic: reception (3)

• SourceAeschylus, Persae (The Persians)

  The earliest surviving account of any Achaemenid event by a contemporary, and the only Greek tragedy on a historical subject to come down to us: staged at Athens in 472 BCE, eight years after Salamis, by a poet who by tradition had himself fought the Persians. It stages the Persian defeat from the enemy's side, as the lament of the losers (Atossa, the ghost of Darius, Xerxes home in rags), and it is a founding text of the Greek 'barbarian' construct. It is drama, not history: Athenian civic self-celebration performed for the victors. Yet it preserves a near-contemporary image, a roster of genuine Iranian names, and a real sense of the fleet and the battle, and it must be weighed line by line for the few things it can be trusted for.

• EventThe Battle of Marathon (490 BCE)

  The seaborne expedition of 490 BCE, led by the Median commander Datis and Artaphernes the younger, which sacked Naxos and Eretria and then landed on the plain of Marathon in Attica, where it was defeated by the Athenians and withdrew. In Greek, and above all Athenian, memory it became the founding victory of a free people over a barbarian invader; from the imperial side it was a punitive raid at the far western edge of Darius's world, sent to chastise two cities that had helped burn Sardis, and its failure changed nothing about Persian control of the Aegean. The event is a test case for this compendium's method, because almost everything known about it comes from Herodotus, a Greek writing decades later, and the size of the Persian force, the aim, and the reasons for the defeat all have to be recovered against the grain of that one patriotic narrative.

• EventThe Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE)

  The forcing of the coastal pass of Thermopylae by [[xerxes-i|Xerxes I]] in high summer 480 BCE, during [[xerxes-invasion-of-greece|his invasion of Greece]]. A small allied Greek army under the Spartan king Leonidas held the defile for some days against the King's advance, was outflanked by a Persian column sent over the Anopaea mountain path, and was destroyed; the road into central Greece lay open. In later Greek memory, above all in [[herodotus|Herodotus]], it became the supreme tale of free men choosing death over submission, the '300 Spartans' against the countless horde. From the empire's side it was something far smaller and wholly successful: the costly but decisive forcing of a chokepoint by a king performing kingship, a victory the Greek sources bury under the glory of the men who lost. The gap between those two readings, and the near-total dependence on one patriotic Greek narrator, is this entry's governing problem.