Ancient Greece II: The Persian Wars and the Limits of Empire

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Head of a Persian guard · Achaemenid Persia, Persepolis, ca. 486–465 BCE
This guard was carved in the reign of Xerxes, the Persian king who invaded Greece in 480 BCE.

To understand the war, start with the Persian Empire. At the beginning of the fifth century BCE, Persia was the largest empire the world had yet seen, stretching from Egypt and the Aegean Sea to the Indus River, and it already ruled the Greek city-states of Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor. Mainland Greece, by contrast, was a patchwork of small, independent, and often rival city-states.

Darius the Great, who ruled from 522 to 486 BCE, organized this enormous empire with remarkable skill. He divided it into provinces called satrapies, each ruled by a governor called a satrap. To keep governors honest, he also appointed separate military commanders and tax inspectors, nicknamed the eyes and ears of the king, in each province. A standard system of gold coins and of weights and measures made trade and tax collection easier everywhere, and the Royal Road, about 1,600 miles long, carried messengers across the empire. These choices show a highly organized, centralized government built to control a huge territory.

Darius also ruled with tolerance. Conquered peoples were allowed to keep their own laws, languages, and religions as long as they paid taxes and stayed loyal. This was a practical decision as much as a generous one: people who could keep their customs were less likely to rebel, which made a vast and diverse empire easier to govern peacefully.

The Persian Empire, one of the largest and most powerful empires in the ancient world, first clashed with the Greeks after conquering the Greek city-states of Ionia in the mid-500s BCE. When the Ionian Greeks rebelled against Persian control in 499 BCE, Athens sent ships to help them. Persia crushed the rebellion by 494 BCE, but the Persian king Darius was furious that Athens had interfered, and he resolved to punish the city, setting the stage for a direct invasion of mainland Greece.

At the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE, an outnumbered Athenian army faced Darius's invading Persian force and drove it back to its ships. Ten years later, at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE, a small force of Greeks, mostly Spartans led by King Leonidas, held a narrow mountain pass against a much larger Persian army under King Xerxes for several days, buying critical time for the rest of Greece to prepare, before a traitor showed the Persians a hidden path around the pass.

Even though the Persians burned Athens after Thermopylae, the Greeks ultimately triumphed: the Athenian navy destroyed the Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, and the following year an allied Greek army crushed the remaining Persian forces at the Battle of Plataea. This unlikely victory of small, divided city-states over the mightiest empire of the age became a defining moment of Greek identity, and it directly paved the way for Athens's rise to power as it organized an alliance formed to continue defending against Persia.

Thermopylae became a lasting symbol of loyalty and sacrifice. Once they knew they were surrounded, King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans, along with several hundred allied Greeks, chose to stay and fight to the death rather than abandon their post. Spartan mothers were said to tell their sons to come home from battle with their shields or on them, and Leonidas's stand showed how highly Spartan society valued loyalty and sacrifice for the city above a soldier's own life.

The Greek victory had lasting results. Persia never again tried to conquer mainland Greece, so the Greek city-states kept their independence and their experiments in government. Athens took the lead of an alliance called the Delian League and grew wealthy and powerful, launching a golden age of art, architecture, philosophy, and democracy that produced the Parthenon. But Athens's growing power also alarmed Sparta, a rivalry that would soon lead the two greatest city-states into war with each other.

Persian rulers also left records in their own words. In the Cyrus Cylinder, a clay cylinder from 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great recorded his good deeds, claiming his troops entered Babylon peacefully and that he cared for the needs of its cities. Cyrus also allowed the Jewish people exiled in Babylon to return home and rebuild the temple at Jerusalem, and the Hebrew Bible's Book of Ezra honors him for it. On a cliff at Behistun, Darius carved an inscription saying the god Ahuramazda helped him because he ruled justly, showing how the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism supported the emperor's power. At the palace city of Persepolis, stone carvings show rows of people carrying offerings, subjects from across the empire paying tribute to the Persian emperor.

The Greek historian Herodotus, often called the father of history, wrote about Persia in detail. He noticed that Persians readily accepted foreign customs, wearing Median clothing and Egyptian breastplates. He described Darius dividing his territory into twenty satrapies, each with a governor and each required to pay tribute, and the Royal Road, lined with royal stations and inns, that ran through lands like Lydia and Phrygia. He admired the royal messengers who rode in relays, stopped by neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness, words later carved above a post office in New York City. Herodotus even traced the war between Greece and Persia back to the first contact between cultures, when Phoenician sailors carried Egyptian and Assyrian goods on distant voyages. When Xerxes invaded Greece by land and sea in 480 BCE, his goal was to expand the Persian Empire by conquering Greece.

Adapted from Studio Aletheia's World Builders Academy curriculum library, drawing on classical world history resources on the ancient Mediterranean world.