WARS OF THE GREEKS
THE PERSIAN WARS
=Origin of the Persian Wars.=--While the Greeks were completing the
organization of their cities, the Persian king was uniting all the
nations of the East in a single empire. Greeks and Orientals at length
found themselves face to face. It is in Asia Minor that they first
meet.
On the coast of Asia Minor there were rich and populous colonies of
the Greeks;[71] Cyrus, the king of Persia, desired to subject them.
These cities sent for help to the Spartans, who were reputed the
bravest of the Greeks, and this action was reported to Cyrus; he
replied,[72] "I have never feared this sort of people that has in the
midst of the city a place where the people assemble to deceive one
another with false oaths." (He was thinking of the market-place.) The
Greeks of Asia were subdued and made subject to the Great King.
Thirty years later King Darius found himself in the presence of the
Greeks of Europe. But this time it was the Greeks that attacked the
Great King. The Athenians sent twenty galleys to aid the revolting
Ionians; their soldiers entered Lydia, took Sardis by surprise and
burned it. Darius revenged himself by destroying the Greek cities of
Asia, but he did not forget the Greeks of Europe. He had decreed, they
say, that at every meal an officer should repeat to him: "Master,
remember the Athenians." He sent to the Greek cities to demand earth
and water, a symbol in use among the Persians to indicate submission
to the Great King. Most of the Greeks were afraid and yielded. But the
Spartans cast the envoys into a pit, bidding them take thence earth
and water to carry to the king. This was the beginning of the Median
wars.
=Comparison of the Two Adversaries.=--The contrast between the two
worlds which now entered into conflict is well marked by Herodotus[73]
in the form of a conversation of King Xerxes with Demaratus, a Spartan
exile: "'I venture to assure you,' said Demaratus, 'that the Spartans
will offer you battle even if all the rest of the Greeks fight on your
side, and if their army should not amount to more than one thousand
men.' 'What!' said Xerxes, 'one thousand men attack so immense an army
as mine! I fear your words are only boasting; for although they be
five thousand, we are more than one thousand to one. If they had a
master like us, fear would inspire them with courage; they would march
under the lash against a larger army; but being free and independent,
they will have no more courage than that with which nature has endowed
them.' 'The Spartans,' replied Demaratus, 'are not inferior to anybody
in a hand-to-hand contest, and united in a phalanx they are the
bravest of all men. Yet, though free, they have an absolute master,
the Law, which they dread more than all your subjects do you; they
obey it, and this law requires them to stand fast to their post and
conquer or die.'" This is the difference between the two parties to
the conflict: on the one side, a multitude of subjects united by force
under a capricious master; on the other, little martial republics
whose citizens govern themselves according to laws which they respect.
=First Persian War.=--There were two Persian wars. The first was
simply an expedition against Athens; six hundred galleys sent by
Darius disembarked a Persian army on the little plain of Marathon,
seven hours distant from Athens.
Religious sentiment prevented the Spartans from taking the field
before the full moon, and it was still only the first quarter; the
Athenians had to fight alone.[74] Ten thousand citizens armed as
hoplites camped before the Persians. The Athenians had ten generals,
having the command on successive days; of these Miltiades, when his
turn came, drew up the army for battle. The Athenians charged the
enemy in serried ranks, but the Persians seeing them advancing without
cavalry and without archers, thought them fools. It was the first time
that the Greeks had dared to face the Persians in battle array. The
Athenians began by turning both flanks, and then engaged the centre,
driving the Persians in disorder to the sea and forcing them to
reembark on their ships.
The victory of Marathon delivered the Athenians and made them famous
in all Greece (490).
=Second Persian War.=--The second war began ten years later with an
invasion. Xerxes united all the peoples of the empire, so that the
land force amounted, as some say, to 1,700,000 men.[75] There were
Medes and Persians clad in sleeved tunics, armed with cuirasses of
iron, bucklers, bows and arrows; Assyrians with cuirass of linen,
armed with clubs pointed with iron; Indians clad in cotton with bows
and arrows of bamboo; savages of Ethiopia with leopard skins for
clothing; nomads armed only with lassos; Phrygians armed with short
pikes; Lydians equipped like Greeks; Thracians carrying javelins and
daggers. The enumeration of these fills twenty chapters in
Herodotus.[76] These warriors brought with them a crowd equally
numerous of non-combatants, of servants, slaves, women, together with
a mass of mules, horses, camels, and baggage wagons.
This horde crossed the Hellespont by a bridge of boats in the spring
of 480. For seven days and nights it defiled under the lash. Then
traversing Thrace, it marched on Greece, conquering the peoples whom
it met.
The Persian fleet, 1,200 galleys strong, coasted the shores of Thrace,
passing through the canal at Mount Athos which Xerxes had had built
for this very purpose.
The Greeks, terrified, submitted for the most part to the Great King
and joined their armies to the Persian force. The Athenians sent to
consult the oracle of Delphi, but received only the reply; "Athens
will be destroyed from base to summit." The god being asked to give a
more favorable response, replied, "Zeus accords to Pallas [protectress
of Athens] a wall of wood which alone shall not be taken; in that
shall you and your children find safety." The priests of whom they
asked the interpretation of this oracle bade the Athenians quit Attica
and go to establish themselves elsewhere. But Themistocles explained
the "wall of wood" as meaning the ships; they should retire to the
fleet and fight the Persians on sea.
Athens and Sparta, having decided on resistance, endeavored to form a
league of the Greeks against the Persians. Few cities had the courage
to enter it, and these placed themselves under the command of the
Spartans. Four battles in one year settled the war. At Thermopylae,
Leonidas, king of Sparta, who tried to bar the entrance to a defile
was outflanked and overwhelmed. At Salamis, the Persian fleet, crowded
into a narrow space where the ships embarrassed one another, was
defeated by the Greek navy (480). At Plataea the rest of the Persian
army left in Greece was annihilated by the Greek hoplites; of 300,000
men but 40,000 escaped. The same day at Mycale, on the coast of Asia,
an army of the Greeks landed and routed the Persians (479). The Greeks
had conquered the Great King.
=Reasons for the Greek Victory.=--The Median war was not a national
war between Greeks and barbarians. All the Greeks of Asia and half the
Greeks of Europe fought on the Persian side. Many of the other Greeks
gave no assistance. In reality it was a fight of the Great King and
his subjects against Sparta, Athens, and their allies.
The conquest of this great horde by two small peoples appeared at that
time as a prodigy. The gods, said the Greeks, had fought for them. But
there is less wonder when we examine the two antagonists more closely:
the Persian army was innumerable, and Xerxes had thought that victory
was a matter of numbers. But this multitude was an embarrassment to
itself. It did not know where to secure food for itself, it advanced
but slowly, and it choked itself on the day of combat. Likewise the
ships arranged in too close order drove their prows into neighboring
ships and shattered their oars. Then in this immense crowd there were,
according to Herodotus, many men but few soldiers. Only the Persians
and Medes, the flower of the army, fought with energy; the rest
advanced only under the lash, they had come under pressure to a war
which had no interest for them, ill-armed and without discipline,
ready to desert as soon as no one was watching them. At Plataea the
Medes and Persians were the only ones to do any fighting; the subjects
kept aloof.
The Persian soldiers were ill-equipped; they were embarrassed by their
long robes, the head was poorly protected by a felt hat, the body
ill-defended by a shield of wicker-work. For arms they had a bow, a
dagger, and a very short pike; they could fight only at a great
distance or hand-to-hand. The Spartans and their allies, on the
contrary, secure in the protection of great buckler, helmet and
greaves, marched in solid line and were irresistible; they broke the
enemy with their long pikes and at once the battle became a massacre.
=Results of the Persian Wars.=--Sparta had commanded the troops, but
as Herodotus says,[77] it was Athens who had delivered Greece by
setting an example of resistance and constituting the fleet of
Salamis. It was Athens who profited by the victory. All the Ionian
cities of the Archipelago and of the coast of Asia revolted and formed
a league against the Persians. The Spartans, men of the mountains,
could not conduct a maritime war, and so withdrew; the Athenians
immediately became chiefs of the league. In 476[78] Aristides,
commanding the fleet, assembled the delegates of the confederate
cities. They decided to continue the war against the Great King, and
engaged to provide ships and warriors and to pay each year a
contribution of 460 talents ($350,000). The treasure was deposited at
Delos in the temple of Apollo, god of the Ionians. Athens was charged
with the leadership of the military force and with collecting the tax.
To make the agreement irrevocable Aristides had a mass of hot iron
cast into the sea, and all swore to maintain the oaths until the day
that the iron should mount to the surface.
A day came, however, when the war ceased, and the Greeks, always the
victors, concluded a peace, or at least a truce,[79] with the Great
King. He surrendered his claim on the Asiatic Greeks (about 449).
What was to become of the treaty of Aristides? Were the confederate
cities still to pay their contribution now that there was no more
fighting? Some refused it even before the war was done. Athens
asserted that the cities had made their engagements in perpetuity and
forced them to pay them.
The war finished, the treasury at Delos had no further use; the
Athenians transferred the money to Athens and used it in building
their monuments. They maintained that the allies paid for deliverance
from the Persians; they, therefore, had no claim against Athens so
long as she defended them from the Great King. The allies had now
become the tributaries of Athens: they were now her subjects. Athens
increased the tax on them, and required their citizens to bring their
cases before the Athenian courts; she even sent colonists to seize a
part of their lands. Athens, mistress of the league, was sovereign
over more than three hundred cities spread over the islands and the
coasts of the Archipelago, and the tribute paid her amounted to six
hundred talents a year.
STRIFE AMONG THE GREEK STATES
=The Peloponnesian War.=--After the foundation of the Athenian empire
in the Archipelago the Greeks found themselves divided between two
leagues--the maritime cities were subject to Athens; the cities of the
interior remained under the domination of Sparta. After much
preliminary friction war arose between Sparta and her continental
allies on the one side and Athens and her maritime subjects on the
other. This was the _Peloponnesian War_. It continued twenty-seven
years (431-404), and when it ceased, it was revived under other names
down to 360.
These wars were complicated affairs. They were fought simultaneously
on land and sea, in Greece, Asia, Thrace, and Sicily, ordinarily at
several points at once. The Spartans had a better army and ravaged
Attica; the Athenians had a superior fleet and made descents on the
coasts of the Peloponnesus. Then Athens sent its army to Sicily where
it perished to the last man (413); Lysander, a Spartan general,
secured a fleet from the Persians and destroyed the Athenian fleet in
Asia (405). The Athenian allies who fought only under compulsion
abandoned her. Lysander took Athens, demolished its walls, and burnt
its ships.
=Wars against Sparta.=--Sparta was for a time mistress on both land
and sea. "In those days," says Xenophon, "all cities obeyed when a
Spartan issued his orders." But soon the allies of Sparta, wearied of
her domination, formed a league against her. The Spartans, driven at
first from Asia, still maintained their power in Greece for some years
by virtue of their alliance with the king of the Persians (387). But
the Thebans, having developed a strong army under the command of
Epaminondas, fought them at Leuctra (371) and at Mantinea (362). The
allies of Sparta detached themselves from her, but the Thebans could
not secure from the rest of the Greeks the recognition of their
supremacy. From this time no Greek city was sovereign over the others.
=Savage Character of These Wars.=--These wars between the Greek cities
were ferocious. A few incidents suffice to show their character. At
the opening of the war the allies of Sparta threw into the sea all the
merchants from cities hostile to them. The Athenians in return put to
death the ambassadors of Sparta without allowing them to speak a word.
The town of Plataea was taken by capitulation, and the Spartans had
promised that no one should be punished without a trial; but the
Spartan judges demanded of every prisoner if during the war he had
rendered any service to the Peloponnesians; when the prisoner replied
in the negative, he was condemned to death. The women were sold as
slaves. The city of Mitylene having revolted from Athens was retaken
by her. The Athenians in an assembly deliberated and decreed that all
the people of Mitylene should be put to death. It is true that the
next day the Athenians revised the decree and sent a second ship to
carry a more favorable commission, but still more than one thousand
Mityleneans were executed.
After the Syracusan disaster all the Athenian army was taken captive.
The conquerors began by slaughtering all the generals and many of the
soldiers. The remainder were consigned to the quarries which served as
prison. They were left there crowded together for seventy days,
exposed without protection to the burning sun of summer, and then to
the chilly nights of autumn. Many died from sickness, from cold and
hunger--for they were hardly fed at all; their corpses remained on the
ground and infected the air. At last the Syracusans drew out the
survivors sold them into slavery.
Ordinarily when an army invaded a hostile state it levelled the
houses, felled the trees, burned the crops and killed the laborers.
After battle it made short shrift of the wounded and killed prisoners
in cold blood. In a captured city everything belonged to the captor:
men, women, children were sold as slaves. Such was at this time the
right of war. Thucydides sums up the case as follows:[80] "Business is
regulated between men by the laws of justice when there is obligation
on both sides; but the stronger does whatever is in his power, and the
weaker yields. The gods rule by a necessity of their nature because
they are strongest; men do likewise."
=Results of These Wars.=--These wars did not result in uniting the
Greeks into one body. No city, Sparta more than Athens, was able to
force the others to obey her. They only exhausted themselves by
fighting one another. It was the king of Persia who profited by the
strife. Not only did the Greek cities not unite against him, but all
in succession allied themselves with him against the other Greeks. In
the notorious Peace of Antalcidas (387) the Great King declared that
all the Greek cities of Asia belonged to him, and Sparta recognized
this claim. Athens and Thebes did as much some years later. An
Athenian orator said, "It is the king of Persia who governs Greece; he
needs only to establish governors in our cities. Is it not he who
directs everything among us? Do we not summon the Great King as if we
were his slaves?" The Greeks by their strife had lost the vantage that
the Median war had gained for them.
FOOTNOTES:
[71] Twelve Ionian colonies, twelve AEolian, four Dorian.
[72] Herod., i., 153.
[73] Herod., vii., 103, 104.
[74] 1,000 Plataeans came to the assistance of the Athenians.--ED.
[75] Herodotus's statements of the numbers in Xerxes' army are
incredible.--ED.
[76] Herod., vii., 61-80.
[77] vii., 139.
[78] The chronology of these events is uncertain.--ED.
[79] Called the Peace of Cimon, but it is very doubtful whether Cimon
really concluded a treaty. [With more right may it be called the Peace
of Callias, who was probably principal ambassador.--ED.]
[80] In his chapters on the Mityleneans.