Events (9)

• EventThe Accession of Darius (522 BCE)

  The violent, contested seizure of the Achaemenid throne in 522 BCE: the killing of a king held to be an impostor magus, the coup of the Seven that raised Darius, and the year of rebellion that followed. It is the founding case of the imperial ideology of the Truth against the Lie, and the single sharpest instance in this compendium of a source that must be read as an argument for its author rather than a record of what happened, because whether Darius told the truth about it is precisely what cannot be settled.

• 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 Mycale (479 BCE)

  The defeat, in the late summer of 479 BCE, of a beached Persian fleet and its covering army on the Ionian shore below Mount Mycale, opposite the island of Samos. Coming in the same season as the land defeat of [[warfare-and-the-army|Mardonius]] at Plataea, it ended [[xerxes-invasion-of-greece|Xerxes' invasion of Greece]] and, more consequentially for the empire, reopened the Ionian question: the Ionian contingents in the King's own line turned on their masters, Herodotus' 'second revolt of Ionia' began, and within two years the Aegean seaboard passed to the Athenian-led Delian League. The event is known almost entirely from [[herodotus|Herodotus]] (Book 9), who framed it around a providential motif, that it fell on the very day of Plataea; that synchronism is a Greek literary device, and the near-monopoly of one hostile source is the entry's governing problem. Seen from Susa, Mycale was not a catastrophe but the loss of the western sea-fringe, while the empire held its heartland and endured for another century and a half.

• EventThe Battle of Plataea (479 BCE)

  The land battle fought in the summer of 479 BCE on the plain of the Asopos river in Boeotia, near the ruined town of Plataea, in which the picked Persian army left in Greece under [[xerxes-i|Xerxes']] general Mardonius was beaten by a coalition of Greek states under the Spartan regent Pausanias, and Mardonius was killed. It was the decisive engagement of [[xerxes-invasion-of-greece|the invasion of Greece]]: after it the Persian army withdrew from Europe, and the bid to add the Greek mainland to the empire was over. Plataea is the one true land battle of the war, and so the sharpest test of the empire's army against the hoplite; yet it survives almost entirely through [[herodotus|Herodotus]], a Greek writing two generations later, whose account inflates Mardonius' force to 300,000, credits the outcome to Persian equipment and cowardice, and casts the whole as the just ruin of a villain. The Persian-side reading has to recover, against that one patriotic narrative, the real size of the force (some tens of thousands, with a large medizing-Greek component above all Thebes), the shrewd cavalry campaign that Mardonius nearly won, and the narrower, more contingent reasons the battle was lost.

• EventThe Battle of Salamis (480 BCE)

  The naval defeat of Xerxes' fleet in the straits between Attica and the island of Salamis, on a day near the end of September 480 BCE, watched by the King from a throne on the shore. It is the most famous single engagement of the Achaemenid wars against the Greeks, and one of the sharpest tests in this compendium of a rule taken almost entirely from the losers' enemies: our two witnesses are both Greek and both triumphal, Aeschylus' Persae (staged in Athens only eight years after, the earliest account of any Persian event by a contemporary) and Herodotus, with no Persian narrative surviving at all. The fleet that lost was not 'Persian' but the empire's subject navies, Phoenician, Egyptian, Cypriot, Cilician and Ionian Greek; the defeat did not end the war, which ran on a further year to Plataea and Mycale; and what Salamis broke was less the King's army than the image of a king who ruled the sea.

• 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.

• EventThe Fall of Babylon (539 BCE)

  The conquest of Babylon by Cyrus II in the autumn of 539 BCE: the last native Mesopotamian empire, ruled by the absent and religiously heterodox Nabonidus and his regent-son Belshazzar, fell to Persia after a decisive battle at Opis, the surrender of Sippar, and a near-bloodless entry into the great city itself. It is the event that made Cyrus lord of the ancient Near East and gave the Achaemenids the world's richest province and the tolerationist template Darius inherited. It is also a source-critical trap of the first order: the two fullest contemporary accounts, the Nabonidus Chronicle and the Cyrus Cylinder, were both composed by the Marduk priesthood that welcomed the conqueror, and both are propaganda in his service, so that our clearest witnesses to the fall are the least neutral.

• EventThe Ionian Revolt (499–494 BCE)

  The revolt of the Greek cities of the empire's north-western coast (Ionia, the Hellespont, Caria and Cyprus) against Darius I, from the failed attack on Naxos and the burning of Sardis in 499/8 to the sea-battle of Lade and the fall of Miletus in 494. From Susa and Sardis it was a provincial rebellion at the far edge of a realm that stretched from the Indus to the Aegean, put down city by city over five years and then rebuilt; in the hands of Herodotus, writing two generations later and without sympathy for the rebels, it became "the beginning of evils" and the first step on the road to Marathon and Xerxes' invasion. The near-total dependence on that one hostile Greek source is the entry's governing problem.

• EventXerxes' Invasion of Greece (480–479 BCE)

  The great expedition that [[xerxes-i|Xerxes I]] led against the Greek mainland in 480–479 BCE, the largest single enterprise the Achaemenid Empire ever mounted and the campaign around which the component battles (Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, Mycale) belong. This entry treats the campaign as a whole: its conception as a royal undertaking, the engineering that most impressed the Greeks (the twin pontoon bridges across the Hellespont and the canal cut through the Athos peninsula), the mustering and the long march, and above all its scale, where the modern demolition of Herodotus' "five million" fixes the credible order of magnitude at a land army of some tens of thousands. Because the campaign survives almost wholly through the patriotic Greek near-monopoly of Herodotus and Aeschylus, the received image of a countless horde punished for its pride is itself the central historiographical problem, and the Persian evidence, thin and non-narrative, tells a different and more limited story.