The Great Persian Invasion, 480–479 B.C.E.

Themistocles’ foresight proved valuable when Darius’s son Xerxes I (r. 486–465 B.C.E.) assembled an immense force to avenge his father’s defeat by invading Greece and adding the mainland city-states to the many lands paying him taxes. So huge was Xerxes’ army, the Greeks claimed, that when the invasion began in 480 B.C.E. it took seven days and seven nights for it to cross the strip of sea between Asia and Europe. Thirty-one Greek city-states (out of hundreds) allied to defend their political freedom.

Their coalition represented only a small sample of the Greek world. The allies desperately wanted the major Greek city-states in Italy and Sicily to join the coalition because they were rich naval powers, but they refused. Syracuse, for example, the most powerful Greek state at the time, controlled a regional empire built on agriculture in Sicily’s plains and seaborne commerce through its harbors serving the Mediterranean’s western trading routes. The tyrant ruling Syracuse rejected the allies’ appeal for help because he was fighting his own war against Carthage, a Phoenician city in North Africa, over control of the profitable trade routes.

The Greek allies chose Sparta as their leader because of its military excellence. The Spartans demonstrated their courage in 480 B.C.E. when three hundred of their infantry (and a few thousand other fighters) blocked Xerxes’ army for several days at the pass called Thermopylae in central Greece. Told the Persian archers were so numerous that their arrows darkened the sun, one Spartan reportedly remarked, “That’s good news; we’ll get to fight in the shade.” They did—to the death. Their tomb’s memorial proclaimed, “Go tell the Spartans that we lie buried here obedient to their orders.”

When the Persians marched south, the Athenians, knowing they could not defend the city, evacuated their residents to the Peloponnese region rather than surrender. The Persians then burned Athens. Themistocles and his political rival Aristides (c. 530–c. 468 B.C.E.) cooperated to convince the other city-states’ generals to fight a naval battle. Themistocles tricked the Persian king into attacking the Greek fleet in the narrow channel between the island of Salamis and the west coast of Athens, where Xerxes could not send all his fleet (twice the size of the Greeks’) into battle simultaneously. The heavier Greek warships won the battle by ramming the flimsier Persian craft. The battle of Salamis induced Xerxes to return home. In 479 B.C.E., the Spartans commanded victories over the Persian land forces.

The Greeks won their battles against the Persians because their generals had better strategic foresight, their soldiers had stronger weapons, and their warships were more effective. Above all, the Greeks won the war because enough of them took the innovative step of uniting to fight together to keep their independence. Because the Greek forces included both the social elites and the poorer men who rowed the warships, their success showed that rich and poor Greeks alike treasured political freedom.