The Greco-Persian Wars

490–479 BCE — Aegean, Greece vs Persia

Today: Greece (Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis)

The Persian Empire, the largest on earth, moved to punish the Greek city-states for aiding a revolt against it. In 490 BCE Darius sent a force that Athens beat at Marathon; ten years later his son Xerxes returned with an army so large ancient writers gave up counting. Three hundred Spartans and their allies under Leonidas held the pass at Thermopylae long enough to matter and died there; Athens was evacuated and burned. Then the Athenian general Themistocles lured the Persian fleet into the narrow strait at Salamis, where its numbers became a liability, and destroyed it. The Greeks finished the invasion at Plataea the next year. Heavily armored citizen-hoplites and nimble triremes had beaten a subject levy — and reach had outrun grip even for the mightiest empire on earth.

Worth knowing: The marathon race honors a messenger who supposedly ran some 26 miles from the battlefield to Athens to gasp 'we won,' then dropped dead. The story is almost certainly a later invention.

Pattern: Military-technological disruption — A weapon or tactic upends the prevailing balance of power and renders an old defensive or offensive order obsolete.

Entry 47 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.