The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis

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486 BC. The Persian Empire is the largest in the world, stretching from the borders of India to the Aegean Sea.
And a new king sits on its throne, eager to display his military might. With revolts and unruliness on the fringes of his large empire, this new young king has a lot to deal with.
But soon enough, he would turn his attention westwards to cities who had resisted and irritated his father before him. Greek cities like Athens, Sparta, and their allies.
This king's name was Xerxes, and he would launch the largest invasion of Greece ever seen to that point in history. It's the Ancients on History Hit.
I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we are continuing our deep dive into the Persian Wars with Dr.
Rul Kaninadyk from Oxford University and Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones from Cardiff University. In the previous episode we covered the story of the first pers Persian War, how Persia's expansion west into Anatolia, present-day Turkey, led them into contact with the Greek world, how Athens aided an Ionian Greek revolt against the Persians, which in turn led the Persians to launch a punitive expedition against the Athenians, culminating in the legendary Battle of Marathon, recorded by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus.
But although the Athenians won at Marathon, the Persians ultimately returned. A decade later, a new Persian king was on the throne seeking great conquests, and he, Xerxes, had his eyes set on Greece.
This second Persian invasion of Greece is the subject of today's episode. We'll explore the story of how Xerxes came to power, how he amassed a great force for this new invasion, wanting to surpass his father Darius.
We'll delve into the stories of famous battles such as Thermopylae and Salamis and explore famous myths surrounding them. This was a really entertaining discussion with both Rule and Lloyd.
It was a pleasure to listen to both of them. Let's get into it.
In the first episode, we covered the first Persian invasion of Greece, culminating in the Battle of Marathon. So that's 490 BC.
To get to the Persians returning, almost like the sequel, we go a few years later. So what's the setting in, let's say, the mid-480s BC that will ultimately spur the Persians to return to Greece? Well, we've got a new king on the throne of Persia, and that's an important thing to acknowledge.
Xerxes had come to the throne not ever guaranteed to be the heir of Darius. There was no primogeniture in Persia, so it was always a bit of a free-for-all.
But I think what Xerxes had in his favor is that he had the blood of Cyrus the Great and of his father Darius in his veins, so I think that pushed him into the purple. And one thing that all Achaemenid kings needed to do at their accession, really, was first of all bury their fathers and then show themselves to be militarily capable.
So Xerxes is already up for a fight. The first opportunity comes, actually, where there's a sort of mini-rebellion that goes on in Egypt.
And straight away, I mean, in the first months of his reign, he himself leads an army into Egypt and crushes whatever events are going on there in the Nile Delta, and then returns to Persia with a kind of, you know, his battle spirit up, really. It was a successful campaign.
Xerxes was clearly never been afraid of wars. He's been stationed, we know, as a young prince in places like Parthia on some of the border zones, just the arrival of Xerxes onto the scene in itself is enough of a momentum to start thinking about change.

Parthia, so that's kind of like the Caspian Sea area, isn't it?

That's right.

With like the horse swords and all that.

We have some cuneiform evidence now that he had been sent there by his father, probably

as a satrap.

Again, this is where kings learned their craft really really, was by doing jobs within the satrapies, variously around the empire. So Xerxes himself is not really involved in the first Persian invasion or expedition to Greece, is he? He's elsewhere in the empire at that time.
Yeah, he would have been still quite young at that time. So now he's into his early 20s, mid-20s, possibly at this point, and needing to show himself

as a capable king.

Because even though, as we said in the last episode, the empire itself was run as a kind

of family affair, in fact, there was constant infighting within that family.

And there were a myriad of brothers and half-brothers around Xerxes who were more than happy to take on the mantle of kingship and sit on the throne as well. So it was very important for Xerxes to get himself a family and get himself some victories.
Yeah, I think it's worth stressing that Xerxes really presents himself as a continuity candidate, which has a lot of grounding in the fact that Darius was a usurper, but we don't have time to get into that particular story. We've done an episode with Lloyd all about Darius the Great.
Oh, perfect. Don't worry.
I refer you back to Lloyd. But fundamentally, Xerxes then has all these royal inscriptions put up where he's essentially saying, you know, my dad was great and I am doing the same things that he's doing.
I'm continuing the work. I'm finishing the jobs that he left unfinished.
That is how he presents himself. And that obviously both cements his legitimacy by saying, you like to rise? Well, I am more of the same.
And also, it implies that Greece is going to feel this at some point. At one point, in one inscription which we found at Persepolis, he actually states, my father had other sons older than I, but I was the greatest.
Methishtah is the word he uses. So yeah, you like my father, see what I'm going to do.
You mentioned the Greeks there. And as you guys both highlighted in the previous episode, we shouldn't be imagining the Greek world at this time of just being mainland Greece.
You've got Greek city-states, Hellenic speaking in Western Anatolia, the Black Sea, all the way to Sicily and southern Italy, even southern France. And following the Athenian victory success, repelling the first Persian invasion of Greece in 490, Basel of Marathon and so on.
In the years following, do we know much about the Greek world in those immediate years when Xerxes immediately comes to the throne? Are the Athenians still bathing in the afterglow of their success? What do we know? Very little, actually. So that decade is really underreported, even in Herodotus, which is very frustrating.
We'd love to know what was going on. And he's our main source, just to highlight, he's our main source again, isn't he? Yeah, so Herodotus is the historian, is the main narrative source.
So obviously, there's other material that we can draw on, but fundamentally, we're relying on Herodotus to tell us what's going on. And he skips fairly lightly over this period.
He doesn't actually talk in much detail about almost anything that goes on. There's very few events that we can place within that period.
One of them possibly is this really devastating war between Phocis and Thessaly, which will become relevant later. But otherwise, there isn't really that much.
I mean, the big events of this period, Athens' war with Agenas in the 490s, actually before Marathon, Sparta's final defeat of Argos at Seppaea in 494, again before Marathon. These are some of the really big seismic shifts that are happening in the Greek world in this period.
So I think the main event that we place in the 480s that is actually going to affect things meaningfully is the expansion of the Athenian navy. So this is something that happens in 483, around that time when the Athenians essentially they have a mine at Laurion, a silver mine in their territory, in which they suddenly find a highly productive vein.
So they suddenly find a ton of silver, essentially. And then there's a decision of what are we going to do with it? And the story that's told is that initially, the idea was that they were just going to distribute it among the whole population.
So they were going to take that windfall and just sort of hand it out. But Themistocles, who is a new man, he's literally the son of a man named Neocles.
It's just sort of emphasizing the idea. He's the son of a man called New Glory.
We are assuming that he is not from one of the traditional sort of well-established families in Athens, but he is one of these people who get the opportunity to rise because of the democracy, because there's a more sort of open access to power. He convinces the assembly instead to invest it in building more ships, so warships.
And the argument there, according to Herodotus, is to fight Agena. So this is an island that is across the bay from them, so another Greek state, which has traditionally been very prominent in naval power as well as a rival to Athens in naval power.
And so they build more ships to try and defeat that. One story in Herodotus is that they build 200 triremes, which is the state-of-the-art warship of the period.

But another source, the Athenaeum Politeia,

which dates to a later period,

but preserves some good alternative information,

says they already had 100 ships and they built 100 more.

That's an important difference because in one of those stories,

Athens has no navy and suddenly decides,

let's become a naval power,

which sounds very convenient when they then end up sort of fighting the Persians at sea. The other story is that the Athenians already have strong naval interests and just decide to double down on them.
And that actually makes a lot more sense when you see that Athenians in this period have already been meddling in the Cersones, in the Hellespons, and they have overseas interests. they have had them for a very long time.
And there are several recent studies that have emphasized that Athenian imperial designs, especially in the North Aegean, especially in the Hellespont, so that the passage between the Aegean and the Black Sea are very, very long established by this point. So the Athenians already have, you know, huge interests in trade and naval power.
And Themistocles convinces them to say, okay, well, let's double down on that and become the greatest naval power in the Greek world. That's what happens around 4832, just in time, essentially, for that fleet to become an important factor in their resistance to Persia.
I think it's also important to add to this that while our literary sources might not be as forthcoming as we'd like, we can turn to archaeology for a bit more evidence of the continued presence of Persia, at least in

the Greek mind.

Because from late in the reign of Darius, we found within Athens hordes of Persian coinage,

for instance, both gold, daryx, and silver sigloy.

The Persians, of course, had minted coins in Asia Minor and parts of the Levant. And these were kind of being hoarded by wealthy Athenians for a rainy day, essentially.
And they carried on them, of course, a very important image, and that is the kind of preordained Persian image of the great king as a warrior. And he often shows himself, you know, armed with his spear and bows and arrows, or even on horseback as well.
So there's that that goes on, you know, we know that they're aware of the Persian king's image. But also we find in this period, and this really is thanks to the work of Meg Miller in Australia, she showed how from the reign of, late in the reign of Darius into the reign of Xerxes, we get Persianisms entering into Athenian culture.
So we should think of these as kind of like the Shinoiserie that entered into Europe in the 17th and 18th century. So elite Athenians were collecting Persian goods.
So we find very, very stylish Persian-formed tableware, for instance, drinking cups, bowls, jugs. But also, from this same period, we start to see Athenian potters emulating those precious silver metal tableware in clay as well.
So there's a vogue for Persian things.ian things so you know we should never think of the world in bipartisan terms as purely you know at war or at peace there's always elements of the both swirling around you know and now greece is very much within the orbit of the of the huge cultural sphere that is persia and to show show that you were anybody in Athens, you wanted Persian things too. So that trade that Roald talks about is certainly very apparent in the wealthy houses of Athens and permeating now down into lower echelons of Athenian society as well.
It's so interesting how you see again and again in ancient history how the higher-up members of certain societies will see goods from elsewhere. It's like the trendy thing to show that they have it and others can't.
But also, as you said, Lloyd, there, it does pass down into society as well. If we do return, though, to Xerxes, he's very new to the Persian throne, fighting in Egypt straight away.
How long is it before

he turns his attention to Greece? Because it feels like he probably has a big shopping list of things he wants to do. That's precisely right.
He does have. It's not the first thing on his agenda.
Having put down Greece, he has to turn his attention to Babylon too, because at the changeover succession, of course, Babylon always is an issue for him. So he has to go and stabilize Babylon first.
Now, of course, again, we don't have the Persian version of these accounts. But if you look at some of Xerxes' tribute lists from Persepolis and from Susa, you'll see that the Yauna are listed as part of his empire already.
So as far as he's concerned, they were never out of it.

And who are the Yauna, just to remind us,

who are the Yauna again?

It's the kind of all-inclusive Persian word for Greeks,

of Greeks of all sorts of people.

So they're there.

They're next to the Egyptians and the Parthians

and the Ethiopians.

The Yauna are there. So as far as Xerxes is concerned, well, they've never gone anywhere.
So it's hard to say from Xerxes' point of view when or why he decided to turn his attention to Greece. For that, I think we have to go back to the Greek sources.
And Rul, so what do the Greek sources then tell us, I'm presuming Herodotus but others as well, about why the Persians and Xerxes does ultimately decide, let's give Greece another go? For Herodotus, this is a huge thing, right? Because one of the main impulses of his writing, as he says at the beginning, is to figure out why the Greeks and barbarians went to war with each other. That is how he phrases it.
That is why he wrote this. And so when Xerxes decides to put the full might of the Persian Empire across and try and subdue the Greek mainland, that is for him this big moment when he has to try and sketch the causality.
So he puts out this huge imagined council scene in which Xerxes consults with his closest ones, mostly relatives, essentially, uncles and cousins and brothers-in-law and whatnot, to ask them, okay, should I evade Greece? And in that scene, essentially, there is a very sort of schematic thing where he has an uncle, Artabanus, who says, no, you shouldn't, this will end badly. You've already attacked the Scythians and it didn't go well.
And so there's definitely motivation for him to say, like, maybe stop it with the adventures and just consolidate. But he has an ambitious cousin called Mardonius, who immediately says, no, you should absolutely do this.
And it's going to be easy. It's going to be great.
And we're going to just take, you know, conquer the place and take all its riches. And it's going to be fantastic.
and in that scene it's made very clear both by what Mardonius says

and by what Artabanos

the uncle says in response

that we are supposed to think that Mardonius is wrong. Like he's lying about how easy this would be.
He's just telling, he's spinning fables that are going to be favorable to Xerxes. They're going to sound tempting to him.
This is the archetype of the bad advisor. He is basically trying to seduce him into bad decisions, presumably because of his own ambitions.
In this story, he wants to become satrap of Greece. And so he says, OK, that's what we got to do.
And this is all very literary. This is all very schematic.
We don't need to take this seriously as historians. But the arguments that are brought up are essentially just the idea that it is a Persian tradition to conquer.
We have to go conquer something. As Lloyd has explained, Xerxes has this imperative to try and achieve military victories and conquests in order to legitimize himself.
And the argument in Rod is it's going to be easy. The Greeks are an obvious and easy target.
You owe it to them, to the memory of your father, to avenge the kind of things that they have done, supporting the Aeonian revolt, beating the Persians of Marathon. And it's a great opportunity to establish yourself as king.
And so those are the kind of motivations that are there being put to the fore. And of course, it's worth reflecting as well that this is all make-believe, of course, on the part of Herodotus.
He was not in the conference room, nor any other Greek was there. And this is a typical Herodotian motif of inserting himself as the narrator into these closed council meetings so that he can hear the deliberation.
But of course, it's all scripted by him. Yeah, absolutely.
And in that sense, I mean, one of the most fantastical elements of that scene is that he presents it as if the Persians have no choice, because if they don't attack, then the Athenians will attack them. Magnificent.
He literally has a phrase like, we should either do or suffer. Like, we should expect that the Athenians will crush us if we don't crush them first.
So it feels like they're elevating the importance of the Greeks in the Persian minds. Yes, specifically what we have to bear in mind is this is being written in a time when the Persian had already been defeated.
And in the aftermath, the Athenians had developed their own empire. So they had seized control of the Aegean.
And so for Herodotus, it's natural to assume that this was either always on the cards or that in some way, you know, prescience of this, you know, premonitions about this informed decision-making at the time. This is a very sort of standard way for Greeks to think about things.
Teleologically, you already know what's going to happen, so let's plant that seed before it ever did. Which is why Herodotus also interwines ideas of dreams and omens into all of this as well, you know.
So Xerxes is plagued by dreams, you know, telling him to go forth and conquer, and, you know, and he doesn't know what to do. And so Artabanus, he asks at one point, I'll go and sleep in my bed.
And so in the royal bed and in the royal dressing gown, Artabanus gets exactly the same dream as Xerxes gets. Oh, yes, yes, our fate, our destiny is to go over to Greece after all.
So all of this is an integral part of the Heroditean system of creating these narratives.

There's a bigger divine concept that's going on here, fate, that can't be overlooked or can't be overcome.

And it also highlights, as this chat goes on, we will highlight, of course, the Heroditean narrative,

but then, of course, the Persian version, which, Lloyd, I know you're very, very on to highlight actually what's myth what's reality what's based on historical evidence and so on and so forth i must ask because when someone thinks of the second persian war you'll get names like thermopylae come up and then famous movies of the recent couple of decades like 300 which will i know you've done a film review of with history here on the youtube channel but But in that movie and in others, it seems to be conveyed that the army that Xerxes ultimately gathers is massive and it comes from all corners of the Persian Empire. Before we delve into numbers and actually the route he takes, logistically, to gather an army for Xerxes, I mean, do we know how long it takes for Xerxes to put together a force for ultimately returning to Greece and presumably bigger than the last one of his father? Yeah, we're told that he spent years gathering this.
So essentially, as soon as the revolt in Egypt is crushed, he starts gathering this army and it takes him about four years before it's ready. On the one hand, it's plausible to imagine that if he's really drawing in all these different contingents from all parts of the empire that it would take a considerable amount of time for them to just get there i mean if you're drawing in bactrians and indians which are supposedly involved in this according to erodotus and someone must have seen them because he describes them and ethiopians as well i mean they might have taken six months to get there just if they keep on marching all day long.

And so it would have taken time, absolutely.

The other problem there, though, is that if you're gathering an army like that, you are forced to upkeep it.

You are forced to essentially supply it while it's gathering and for years and years, apparently.

So that would have been an astonishing logistical operation.

So we could also imagine that the forces that have come from far away are fairly token and that the actual organization of this army happens on site, primarily with, so the core force that's described by Socrates in some ways of the army that moves with the king. So this is a small group of elite Persians who are sort of the core of the army.
And then whatever levies they can be, they can sort of bring along on the way. So as they go through the various satrapies, as they move west, there will be places where they will say, okay, this is the mustering part for this part of the empire here, we will gather the troops from Babylon, from Mesopotamia, from Kilikia, from other parts, and they sort of pick them up as they go.
Yeah, I agree with all of that. And I also think that that splendid description we have in Herodotus of the kind of multi-ethnic army that's been put together and all this wonderful description of the clothing and armaments, I really get a feeling that what Herodotus is drawing on here is the visual propaganda that the Achaemenids put forward themselves.
So, for instance, on his tomb, Xerxes shows himself on this taht, or this kind of divan throne, being uplifted by representatives of this whole empire. And underneath in an inscription, he says, if you want to know how many are the people who represent my empire, look at these people and they are named you know i am from maca i am from macedonia i am from sogdia i am from parthia and so forth and i think what erogenous is doing is just picking up on a very popular achaemenid motif of the display of the empire in that way so i i don't think it was as multi-ethnic as that, or if it was, they were bits and pieces, but not this vast force that Herodotus conjures up for us.
It's funny, isn't it, how we talked in the last chat about the trousers and how a big part of the story is the clothing that the Persians are wearing compared to the Greeks in the Herodotian narrative. And as you say, on inscriptions as well, my mind immediately goes to how they portray, I think it's the Eastern Scythians or the Saka, which even one day like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, they have massive pointed hats.
Huge smurf hats. Huge smurf kind of hats as well, right? So it just wants to mention the Saka hats too.
Yeah. So there's the beautiful piece on the Beirstone inscription, like the relief there has Skunkad is subjected to Saka King, who has this beautiful pointed hat, which almost doesn't fit the image.
So they had to move the text around because he got added in later. But those hats are apparently characteristic.
You know, I've just had sent to me from a colleague in Iran who's been digitally photographing Bisseton Relief right up high, right next to it, because there's scaffolding there for restoration at the moment.

And I've been able to do some line drawings of them, real sort of up close and personal. And while Darius and his two Persian officers, you know, look handsome and beautifully chiseled, it's really interesting to see how they portray the foreign kings, the liar kings in front of them.
They are really grotesque, you know, which we don't really see from far away. You know, they've got snubbed noses, you know, and thick lips and big sunken eyes.
And they're all wearing collars around their neck. And a little detail in this collar shows that there's a metal stud that actually presses into their throats as well.
So it's quite remarkable, the detail, you know. So yes, just really that emphasizes the fact that the Persians were very observant about peoples, and they liked to betray them accurately.
And I think that's what Herodotus is picking up. Well, I just want to sort of circle back to what we were talking about earlier with the causes of this war, because there is to some extent, although indirectly, there is a Persian version of this, which has to do with what Lois just described, the Bistun inscription in which it's very explicitly stated that the Persian king is essentially the king of all things.
He is the bringer of order to the world and the agent of the gods, the agent of Aramazda in particular in achieving this. And anybody who defies him is a rebel against the truth, right? There's a rebel against the natural order of the world and all that is good in it.

And so there is an understanding of the Persians

as being essentially the legitimate rulers

of the entire world.

And the existence of any autonomous state

outside of that system just cannot be allowed to continue

because that is a falsehood, right?

If you say Darius is not my king

or later Xerxes is not my king, you are lying, right? That is essentially a violation of the truth. Yeah, that's absolutely right.
So ideologically, for Xerxes, the war against the Greeks could very easily be justified by simply pointing at them and saying, they don't pay me tribute. That is all the justification in royal ideology that they need.
And that is also why it's important for them to bring all these people in, at least symbolically, to try and show to both the rest of the world, but also to their own subjects, we rule all of you, right? Like all of this is our domain. This is our sovereignty.
And of course, anybody else who exists outside of that, I mean, it's just a matter of time. Like they have to be included in this.
That is the way of things. And that is how everything is better.
Absolutely. In terms of Persian theology, the idea is that Ahura Mazda, the wise lord, is the creator of the world.
He is the supreme creator god. And in the way that duality works in Persian theological thought, there is good, truth, artha, and there is bad, the lie, drauga.
So because Hora Mazda brings his world into order, which of course is by definition a good thing. This is Zoroastrianism, is it? It's a kind of proto-Zoroastrianism.
There's elements of it, okay? But I wouldn't want to go that far. But certainly this creator god, who is a good god, establishes the king.
It's almost like he creates kingship in order to ensure that his goodness, his arta, continues on this earth. So you could say that every war fought by a Persian great king is a holy war.
That's how they would have seen it. So it's actually bringing the world into its proper place.
So these people who are outside of Persian control, who are forces of chaos, of drauga, therefore for their own good, as well as the good of the whole world, need to be brought under the control of Persia and of ultimately its god, Ahura Mazda. That's not to say they went out kind of proselysing and converting.
It's never about that. But for the sake of the harmony of the cosmos, everybody needs to be singing praises to Ahura Mazda, essentially.
Does this bring us nicely into that whole story of earth and water and what this actually is? Yeah. So we have a lot of, I mean, actually all from Greek sources, these ideas that, you know, the king demands earth and water.
And I do believe that if that was the case, and this is probably symbolically given to a king by a diplomat, you know, we have all these scenes of diplomatic tribute being brought to a king. And I wouldn't be surprised that at an initial point,

when a diplomat first arrives, then as his kind of diplomatic calling card, he possibly would have brought a bowl of earth and a dish of local water. It is an important part of the ideology of it.
We get spins on that as well. I think this story is in Herodotus.
I might be wrong, but there's one occasion where Xerxes

is proffered a dish of dates

and he said, oh, where does this come from? And he's told, oh, these are from Greece. And he says, oh, well, we will not eat them, not until we own it.
And then I'll eat Greek dates. So there's something there about actually the produce of the land itself and the king's right and access to it.
But I suppose in the theological term, then the idea of the land being under the control and the rivers being under control is important. There was a kind of like a strange nature connection between the great king and the earth.
He was seen very often as a gardener king, you know, letting the earth blossom. You know, the Persian word for garden is paradisa, the paradise.
But, you know, the earth itself is a paradise. When the Persian kings created their gardens at places like Pasargaday and Susa and Persepolis, they basically planted their gardens with the produce from across the

whole of their empire, bringing the empire into miniature here. So there is, and also the same

with waters as well, of course, which were paramount importance to this kind of nomadic

desert peoples. So I think there is something real in this demand for earth and water,

which would have been played out in court ceremonial, I think. and a wide range of investments.
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app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. so Xerxes has gathered this army but with the previous invasion under his father's lieutenants it had been kind of that island hopping going from western Anatolia taking each of the islands in their path and then Euboea and then being defeated at Marathon.
But how does Xerxes go about invading Greece this time round? Because Ruhl, is it quite a different route he takes? It's different from that island hopping campaign. I mean, he decides to take this army over land instead of shipping it amphibiously.
He also has a massive fleet, but they decide to move along the coast while the fleet shadows them. But this isn't necessarily a new idea.
I mean, crossing the Hellespont and moving the army over land is also what Darius did when he invaded a few decades before, then invaded Thrace and then moved north. So he moved into Scythia.
Xerxes now is going to move west. I'm sorry, my apologies.
What is the Hellesp Hellespont? Is that Gallipoli-Dardanelles area? Exactly, yeah. So the Hellespont is the narrow strip sort of at the south end of the Propontis, so the Sea of Marmaris.
So this is the bit where Gallipoli is now, sort of perhaps more notorious for that. But it's a strip of land where the Athenians have long had interest, but it's also the narrowest point where you can cross from Asia into Europe.
And so it's about two kilometers across. Darius and now again Xerxes build a pontoon bridge across.
So that's how they transport the army. And for Herodotus, I think this is very much one of those examples of Xerxes trying to prove that he can achieve things that no other human has achieved before.
Like he's subjecting nature and geography to his will. He's saying there's a sea here.
No, there isn't. Now there's a bridge.
I can walk here. I can walk wherever I want.
And similarly, later on, when they get to the peninsula at Athos, which is now Mount Athos, where they were the monasteries on it, is on a previous occasion, his cousin Mardonius had tried to lead an army there, but his fleet had suffered shipwreck around the Cape of Athos. And so this time Xerxes doesn't want his fleet to take the same route.
So he decides to dig a canal through the route of this peninsula, which is quite narrow. So again, for Herodotus, this is a moment to prove firstly, I mean, obviously that the Persians are fantastic engineers, both for the pontoon bridge and for the canal, in which they rely on a lot of Phoenician advice, but fundamentally, they're doing amazing logistical things.
But also because Xerxes at this point has turned sea into land and land into sea. So he is saying to geography, he's staring the world in the face and saying, I'm better than you, essentially, which is a sensibility that I think modern people, especially me as a Dutch person, I mean, it has something of this modern idea of technology overcoming nature that resonates with us.
Whether the Persians saw it that way, we have no idea. This is only in Greek sources and the traces that still exist.
So the canal through Mount Athos, you can still see it as a swampy strip that runs through the neck of the peninsula. But otherwise, we have no idea how they would have seen it or specifically why they would have done it other than to display their power.
But I do think that in those stories, there is, if we scratch the surface, something of the Persian version that goes underneath as well. And that goes back to what I was just saying about the great king being in harmony with nature as well.
It's kind of set on its head by Herodotus and other Greek writers as well. So we get, for instance, Xerxes beating the sea with whips and chains and so forth, because it will not kowtow to him at all.
But in fact, this is possibly a kind of reminiscence of a Persian water cult where gold and silver and precious metals were thrown into rivers and waters and canals and so forth. And likewise, there's a much later story, of course, very famously about Xerxes falling in love with a plane tree.
This is how crazy Xerxes is. He falls in love with this tree and he puts jewelry on it and so forth.
Well, it's no coincidence that one of the very rare images we have of Xerxes is a seal that was found at Susa, which shows him decorating a sacred tree with necklaces and jewelry. You know, it was a Persian thing to do.
It was a nature cult. It was a tree cult.
So I think, you know, sitting behind some of these Greek stories, which are, you know, frankly, they're laughable because, you know, it's hubris, it's excess, it's just pure craziness, sits perhaps an element of a Persian original. And I find that really fascinating.
He's been able to cross the Hellespont, he's been able to carve this canal through the Athos Peninsula, and the Persian army is slowly, and they'll be slowly making its way through northern Greece and down. Is it not a case of

every Greek city-state or kingdom they come into contact with is straight away putting up resistance

kind of in the idea of Marathon and the Athenians before? What should we be thinking of when they're

going past places like, well, the kingdom of Macedon, which will later be the homeland of

Alexander the Great in what is today northern Greece? What should we be thinking as this massive

army and navy starts wading its way, starts marching through these lands? Well, they didn't meet much resistance, to be honest, and that's because many of the Greek city-states in the north were pro-Persian and had been for some time. So the Macedonians, in fact, readily joined elements of their army and also entertained Xerxes and his generals.
And we know that as they marched right the way down through Boeotia, past Thebes, again, no resistance, and in fact, in the heartland of a pro-Persian world there as well. Herodotus gives us some fascinating insights into how the army is sustained, because here we are thinking, you know, as Xerxes has made this journey down,, I mean we must have thousands of soldiers and thousands upon thousands of camp followers and just maintaining this vast juggernaut which is moving through.
And there are great stories that if Xerxes settles for a night somewhere, then obviously it's the duty of the local inhabitants to feed him and his court and soldiers. And God forfend that he should like the place and stay for a second night, because basically they will be stripped of their resources for the next six months.
And I can see that there's a lot of sense that's being said in that. So here I think Herodotus understands the soldier's journey and tries to depict for us the scale of the invasion.
I think it's through those kind of anecdotes that it really

comes across very clearly. If you have many Greek city-states and kingdoms, like in Macedonia case,

siding with the Persians, which Greek city-states decide actually to resist this army and we

ultimately get to that famous place of Thermopylae? Rude, what do we know about that when there

finally is a standoff between the Persian, this Grand Arméan navy and an opposing Greek force?

Yeah, so we're told that Darius has already sent out these messengers to demand earth and water, which is the ritual that we talked about earlier. This is when the Athenians and the Spartans, we're told, sort of commit to this idea they reject that offer.
So both of them essentially kill their messengers. So the Spartans kick them into a pit and the Athenians kick them into a well.
Oh, okay. Yeah.
This is Sparta kind of thing. It literally is that story, except that in Herodotus, obviously, this is recognized as a tremendous sacrilege for which both of these communities are said to pay dearly because no one accepts this, right? The Spartans later send a couple of messengers to Xerxes to atone for this because they know they've committed a terrible sin in the eyes of everyone,

like the whole Mediterranean world, everyone they know. And so they send a couple of messengers to

Xerxes saying, please kill these men so that we're even. And Xerxes, according to Herodotus,

essentially laughs at them and says, no one is as evil as you. Like, I would never do that.

So in this sense, absolutely, the Spartans commit a horrible faux pas. But the idea there is that they are committing so strongly to that position, we will not bow down to the Persians, that they even reject the idea of communicating with them.
That's essentially what they're saying. And the Athenians likewise.
Now, exactly why they do this is kind of obscure. I mean, it's not really motivated, except that, obviously, the Greeks, they want autonomy, et cetera.
for the Athenians likewise. Now, exactly why they do this is kind of obscure.
I mean, it's not really motivated, except that obviously, the Greeks, they want autonomy, etc. For the Athenians, more likely is that they didn't expect any mercy.
They didn't want to bow down to someone who might reinstate the tyrant Hippias or in some other way, overthrow the Athenian democracy or endanger their interests. For the Spartans, most likely, they can't tolerate another hegemon on the block.
The Spartans are the most powerful Greek state in this period. They are used to ruling essentially the Peloponnese, that's their backyard.
They want to be top dog. They don't like the idea of anybody else coming in telling them what to do.
And that is very much more of a rivalry than an ideological resistance. And so in this period, the Greeks, those two states are essentially heading the resistance and they are the ones who are saying, okay, we will not bow down.
The states that are subject to Sparta are kind of necessarily involved in that. They have no choice.
The Spartans tell them who their friends and enemies are. That is the terms of the treaty they have with Sparta.
So most of the Peloponnese is on the side of the anti-Persian alliance, arguably not by choice, but they are part of it at least. But they reach out to a bunch of other states and most of them essentially say, we'll see what happens.
We'll wait it out. So the Arga have stayed neutral.
They plead that they've suffered losses that are too horrible in their war against the Spartans to face further conflict. So they decide to stay neutral.
They're later accused of being pro-Persian, actually. They go to Sicily, to those powerful Greek states there, but they're also turned down.
Other states like Kersaira, which is now the island of Corfu, also more or less decides to stay neutral. So they try to find more Greeks who are willing to help them in their resistance, but most of them just kind of say, like, you know, it doesn't look good.
And so they mostly just don't want to, you know, they don't want to put their chips down on the side of anti-Persian sentiment in case there might be reprisals. So most of these states try and stay out of it, with the exception of a couple of states that do try, that do maintain a sort of principled opposition, most of the time, because they fear that their own position within the Greek network of states will suffer.
So nowhere is this really, you know, an East-West war, as has been, you know, sold to us for generations now. It's simply not about that whatsoever.
And so what is this force then that ultimately does get sent up to the hot gates of Thermopylae, that there is so many legends around today, almost like the first clashing point between the Persian force and those Greeks that did decide to oppose Persia rather than either stay neutral or side with the Persians. So what we're told is they initially sent an army up north to Tempe, which is a pass in the shadow of Mount Olympus, north of Thessaly.
But then they hear, and this is a story, so we don't actually know if this all happened, or if it's just sort of Herodotus foreshadowing what's going to happen. They're told that they're going to defend a pass against the army of Xerxes, but they're told there's a way around it.
And so they abandon the position. And so they retreat, and they think about what they should do next.
There is an obvious geographical point where historically you stop an army moving south into Greece. That point is Thermopylae and it is important here and it continues to be important right down into the Second World War.
The last battle of Thermopylae that we know of is 1941. This is a continuous thing throughout history that if you want to stop that army marching into central Greece, Thermopylae, a narrow strip of land along the coast, is where you do it.
It's your last hope, isn't it, really? Yeah, exactly. So at that point, you're on the threshold of Boeotia.
So you're really going into the area of Greece that most urbanized, most highly developed, where all of the famous states essentially are. If Thermopylae falls, central Greece falls, there's no other position where you can hold an army.
So that is where you send your force. And helpfully, the sea alongside Thermopylae, there's a sort of inlet between the mainland and the island of Euboea, which is also quite narrow and also for a fleet quite defensible.
So what the Greeks agreed to do is send an army to Thermopylae and send a fleet to Artemision, which is where this sort of dual defense on land and sea is supposed to take place. but the army that they send to Thermopylae is, compared to the later army that they would send out the following year to Plataea, it's tiny.
It's very, very small. There's a small force of Spartans, a thousand strong, and then similarly sized contingents of the Spartan allies.
So they're really, really quite small forces, maybe about a tenth of their available strength, maybe as much as a third in some cases, but they're very, very small pieces of their levies. There's always been a question of why did they send so few troops? Why are these armies so small? The traditional argument has been, and it's already there in Herodotus, that this is because the Spartans expected to lose and they knew it was a suicide mission and so they'd only send a small force.

But then the big question is why they send so many, essentially.

And they send their king, Leonidas, right?

They send their king, Leonidas, with an army.

So it seems like a very official move,

but the later explanation is,

oh, they needed to lose a king to meet a prophecy

to save the rest of Greece.

That's the argument.

But it's very hard to explain

why they would send so large an army in that case. I mean, send three guys, for God's sake.
Send Leonidas himself alone. It doesn't matter.
Because this is something that happens with later Romans, right? They have a particular ritual where the general sacrifices himself, and that's supposed to be a good omen for victory. So let him do that by himself.
I don't know why they would send a thousand guys to go and die with him. In any case, that's the story.
What seems to be happening really is that Sparta continues before and after this to be very reluctant to send troops north of the Peloponnese. That is not their traditional territory.
They're not their traditional area of influence. And they seem very uncommitted to defending that against the Persians.
So they mostly want the local population to handle that. And they don't want to get too into it.
They don't want to risk their troops in this sort of very advanced forward position. And it's very informative to compare the Spartan commitment of a thousand men to Thermopylae to the Athenian commitment of almost 200 triremes, which is 40,000 men to the Battle of Artemision.
I mean, this is an enormous fleet which would have emptied Athens that is being sent to take part of the naval leg of this strategy. Whereas on land, the Spartans are half-hearted at best.
It's interesting that we haven't actually mentioned the number 300 there at all, Rule. You said it's 1,000 Spartans.
Yeah, it's the alternative tradition that I'm going with. Essentially, there are two different source traditions.
One says 300, the other says 1,000. And the best way to reconcile them is to assume that there were 300 full Spartan citizens, and then 700 other Spartans who are not citizens, but who are freeborn and fight as hoplites.
That's very common in later Spartan armies that they rely quite heavily on these other sort of Lacedaemonians who are not Spartan citizens. And that seems to be an easy way to reconcile the numbers.

But that means there's a thousand, because everywhere else, if you count the number of Spartans, quote-unquote Spartans in battle, you're always counting both Spartan citizens and

perioikoi and other classes within Spartan society that fight in a similar way.

Let's just talk through the overview of this clash between Xerxes and Leonidas and his allies,

and Themistocles with the fleet and so on. Because if it was important to the story, so what is the story of Thermopylae and Artemisium? I mean, the story is essentially that Xerxes tries to find a way to break through this position, which is very difficult.
Geographically, it's very strong, right? So any army could hold this against any other army indefinitely, unless there is some way to get around the position, essentially to outflank it. And so I'm very tempted by Geoffrey Ropp's theory that essentially Xerxes understood this very early on.
He has the Salians in his army by this point who have recently fought the Phocians on the other side of the path. So they have had to cross this position, which had been fortified by the Phocians.
And so they had found the ways around it. So they knew this and they were in his army.
So there's no reason why he wouldn't have talked them and say, look, how do you solve this issue? You did it recently. And so I will also focus that's a region just south of the pass and Fokin is the name given to people.
Hence, like Thessaly is the region to the north, hence why you get the name Thessalian for those people, just so you know. That's right.
So the Fokians are the people who actually have Thermopylae the pass in their territory, essentially. So that is part of their territory.
It is the boundary of their territory, which they have defended against the Thessalians in the recent conflict. And so the Thessalians got around it, and they would be in a position to inform Xerxes about this.
At the same time, he's doing the same thing with his fleet. He's sending a chunk of his fleet, 200 ships, around Euboea to try and outflank the Allied fleet, which is in the Straits.
So that's quite a long journey. It takes several days.
And so the land army isn't attacking while they're waiting for that chunk of the fleet to get into position. So for four days, they do nothing.
According to Herodotus, they're kind of waiting for the Spartans to just kind of melt away in fear. That doesn't happen.
So on the fifth day, they actually do have to attack. But that is in the story that we get.
It's this very huge sort of land battle, that utter carnage, when they try to dislodge the Spartans from the past by throwing everything in the kitchen sink at them. And it just doesn't get anywhere.
And everybody's getting sort of destroyed by their thousands, by this immovable Spartan line. But we have to bear in mind that we just got told by Herodotus that this is a fortified pass.
So they're defending a wall, which makes it on the one hand very easy to defend, but it also on the other hand makes it very easy for the attacker to avoid casualties by just keeping their distance and just sort of probing that defense of seeing how close they can get, seeing how far they can get with missiles before they actually commit to an all out assault.

It's also a narrow path. So you can't really commit that many.
You can't really lose that many.

It's really hard to actually get much out of the Persian numbers, which is exactly why the Greeks decide to defend that position.

But it also means that Xerxes can afford to essentially keep those Spartans and their allies locked in position while he's figuring out how to deal with this strategic problem. What supposedly happens is the first day the Medes attack, they don't get anywhere.
This is one of the larger Iranian peoples that the Persians rule over. Then the Persians themselves have a go in the form of the immortals.
They attack. They also don't get anywhere against the pass.
Obviously, the Greeks at this point are like, yeah, we're winning. The Persians are probably thinking, you know, you're still there.
Okay, good. That means we still have an opportunity to defeat you.
They're not committing in any sense an all-out attack by their army because firstly, geography doesn't allow it. And secondly, they are still trying to figure out how to get around this, right? How to just lodge the Greeks rather than just sort of trying to frontally sort of bash their heads against the wall.
And they find it eventually when somebody tells them, or so we're told, the traitor Aphialtes tells them that there is a path that leads up the mountain and around the position in the path. Geoffrey Rupp's argument has been that they knew this all along.
They heard it from the Thessalians. And so they were just waiting for their fleet to get into position so that they could outflang both forces simultaneously.
And exhaust the Greeks while they're doing so. Exactly.
And so this is basically how this path has always been turned in every occasion in history since. That path is always the way that you do that.
And that's what the Romans did against the Seleucids and many other peoples later. You always go around through the mountain and that always wins.
That always sort of succeeds. It's also a literary trope, isn't it? Because, you know, way, way back in the siege of Sardis, for instance, you know, Sardis and the Acropolis there is impenetrable.
And then suddenly, you know, some soldier drops a helmet down a path one day and then, ah, bingo, we can get into Sardis now. So there's also that going on.
But I think I'm in agreement that probably the Persians knew about this. Yeah, the problem is that that fleet that's been trying to encircle the Greeks at Artemision, it was lost in a storm.
So those ships just never arrive. And that is what drives the Persians to finally try and attack both at Thermopylae and at Artemision, is that that was just, it didn't work.
So they have to try and find a different way. But by that point, they figured out that there is a pathway that leads them around the Thermopylae Pass.
So in the night, they march the immortals over that path. The Phocians, who are themselves set to guard the path, don't act for reasons we don't quite understand, possibly just fear, possibly because they've made a deal with the Persians.
And so they let them through. And the immortals come down behind the pass.
And at that point, the allied position has become untenable, essentially. So then the big question is what the allies do.
It's often been argued that the Spartans are staying behind to kind of keep the Persians in a fight so that the rest of the allies can get away as a sort of rearguard defense. But the problem with that argument is that the Spartans hear in the night that the Persians are coming.
They have long advance warning that the Persians are over the pass and they're coming in behind. And all of the other Allies are already leaving at that point.
They know that they can't hold the position, so they're just gone. But Leonidas waits until the morning to make any kind of decision on what to do.
So it's not until well into the day that he actually decides when he hears from a messenger again, like they're really coming down the mountain. Now we should probably do something that he decides, no, actually, we're going to stay.
So he's already wasted all of his opportunities to extract his force safely. At that point, essentially, he's just doing it for the for the kudos.
I mean, he's just staying behind because he thinks's the right thing to do. It doesn't have any strategic merit.
It doesn't have any strategic motivation even. Even in Herodotus, it has no strategic motivation.
This is not done for good reasons. He is just doing that because he thinks it's right for a Spartan to not leave the position that he is assigned.
And that is something that comes back again and again in narratives of Spartan warfare. If somebody tells you to stand somewhere, you don't move from that place.
And Leonidas is thinking very much in those terms. He's saying, like, I was told to defend the Pass of Thermopylae.
I'm just going to do it, even if it's hopeless, even if there's no point. And so that's what he does, which is why he makes his final stand, together with a couple Greeks, Greek communities who decide also to hold

that line. It's quite remarkable, isn't it? You know, that his death, you know, serves both his legend, but also I think for Xerxes at the time, it would have been, you know, mission accomplished as well, because for Xerxes, the killing of a rebel king, one of these followers of Drauga, was absolutely what he needed.

And it's sad that we don't have any written record of the Persian version of this, but I've no doubt that the propaganda would have traveled far and very fast as well. Ahura Mazda had triumphed again through Xerxes, and now the world was in a better shape than it had been a couple of days ago because one of those liar kings has also disappeared.
It must have been an incredible boost for the person. Yeah, I mean, the Spartans essentially threw away their lives for no good purpose and gave them this huge propaganda coup, right? They gave them this opportunity to say, oh, I killed their king, I destroyed their army, rather than just sort of chasing it off to fight another day.
Precisely. And we know from the Byzantine inscription of Xerxes' father Darius that, you know, that the annihilation of rebel kings is what you're after.
You know, you don't keep them imprisoned at all. You lop off the head.
So this is all done for him, really, and it's a great victory. Yeah.
And the excuse has always been twofold. I think the justification in modern scholarship and modern ways of telling this story, firstly, that they inflicted a lot of losses on the Persians.
But there is a very difficult bit of evidence behind that, which is the story in Herodotus that he got people from the fleet to come and look at all the dead on the battlefield, to kind of survey the battlefield. Again, this idea of coming to see it for yourself and look at all the dead that are scattered here all these dead spartans but that he in order to make that a proper story and something that would that would that would work for him in terms of motivating his troops he hid most of his own dead so supposedly he left a thousand persian dead as a sort of credible figure and then hid the other 19 000 in a mass grave um we can imagine that this is true it's that Xerxes wants to do.
Or we can imagine that Herodotus got this story from the Ionians in the fleet who came to see this. And that they only saw 1,000 Persian dead because there were only 1,000 Persian dead against 4,000 Greek dead, right? It really does make more sense, doesn't it? When you're thinking about, as you describe the geography, we're going into this narrow past there's no way the whole persian force would have been brought down there there's simply no geographic room for them it's not a wood chipper right it's not like you can just keep feeding things into it i mean precisely if you take some losses at the front line you're going to pull back and reassess and especially the persians whose initial move in a battle is always to use missiles first yes and to see if they can soften up enemy to break them easily.
Oh, the so-called the arrows will blot out the sun, which is come down. That's right.
So what's happened to them? You know, what happened to the arrows? And obviously, arrows have been found in significant numbers on the battle site, the Colonos Hill at Thermopylae, although many of them actually don't date to the Persian wars, but they do have them on display in the museum in Athens.

I mean, archers would have been a very significant asset to the Persians in this. So we mustn't imagine them just sort of rushing into close combat to their deaths in huge droves.
Not at all. I mean, the success of the Persian military had always been about keeping the distance and letting the arrows do the work, really.
Quite right. There's even more to love.
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All right, guys. Okay, we can't do too much on Thermopylae or become a Thermopylae only episode, but it is so interesting.
I did have one question, and this was actually me thinking about it the last couple of days, which is that figure of Ephialtes in the story. But as you've mentioned, Rul, it may even be that there wasn't even a figure because people in the Persian army probably knew of that past.
But if there was a figure called Ephialtes, who was a local shepherd, you also mentioned that that army has been there for five or six days by that time. And the size of it would be taking up all of the food from the nearby area.
Is there any way you can feel a bit sympathetic if Ephialtes was there thinking, I just want this army or these armies off of my land. And the best way is just to get them round so that they can get through as quickly as possible.
So I can actually live in this area of the world. Yeah, absolutely.
But I mean, more than that, I think a lot of Greeks recognize that the Persians had a lot to offer them, you know, in terms of employment, in terms of rewards, there was absolutely an understanding. If you did the king assault it, then he would repay you in kind.
And that's something that, you know, is very much propagated by the Persians themselves, their generosity, their reciprocity, their understanding that, you know, good deeds earn rewards and bad deeds earn punishment. We have dozens of later Greek accounts, you know, of the Persian king showing his sort of largesse and beneficence by, you know, giving humble peasants silver cups full of coins and so forth.
You know, it is part of the Persian mission as well to do that. Absolutely.
And so, you know, these local people obviously wanted that army gone, no doubt. They don't want to be a battlefield.
Nobody wants to be a battlefield in the ancient times. But also, you know, it just makes obvious sense not to kind of try and see if the Fockeans will help you in any way, like, or see if local populations might be able to offer you something similar.
You just go to the richest person near you and say, how can I help? So somebody died for this, right? The story that we're told is that the Spartans invested some money to have this Ephialtes assassinated. So there was apparently someone who was accused of giving away the tale to the Persians.
But to my mind, it's completely unnecessary, this story, because as I said, they could have asked any local population they had already subjected who was now serving in their army for the information that they needed. But perhaps in narrative terms, you need the scapegoat, don't you? You need to tie it up somehow.
You need the villain after all. Yeah, that's true.
And indeed, you almost get the reverse of it with Alexander the Great in the Persian gates more than 100 years later, and a local shepherd showing him a route around a Persian defence there. But that's another story entirely.
So the fleet has retreated from Artemisium. Most of the Greek army has retreated from Thermopylae, apart from Leonidas and those who stayed with him.
Is that basically the floodgates have opened now, Xerxes' army is south of this pass, and now the Greek city-states, and especially those who stayed neutral as well up to that point, they've got a choice to make. This army is now in their lands, is going to be going through their lands, taking up the resources.
Delphi, sacred Delphi, will be under pressure too. Is this almost the floodgates have opened and there's a flurry of activity happening as soon as Xerxes gets south of that pass? Yeah, so the story that we get from Herodotus is that this was really quite horrific, like what happened to the peoples who were directly behind the pass who had resisted.
So he marches into Boeotia, he marches into Focus at the same time, he sacks some of these places, he really mistreats the populations because they resisted him, which is usually the carrot and stick of Persian conquest. If you don't resist, it's all good.
You get to keep your structures and positions of power, and usually nothing will happen to you. But if you resist, then all bets are off.
And so several of the communities of focus are really extremely roughly handled and get some very horrible anecdotes. And also some of the towns in Boeotia that were there at Thermopylae, so the Thespians and the Plataeans who were there at Marathon, are just razed to the ground.
So their entire city is destroyed. The Athenians hope that they can gather the entire army of the Alliance to try and stop them before they get to Athens.
So they're waiting. They pull the fleet back from Artemisia and they're waiting to see what the Spartans are going to do.
But in a very characteristic fashion, the Spartans are doing absolutely nothing. And as a result of that, the Athenians have to abandon Attica as well.
So the Persians then just march straight on down into Attica, the Athenian territory, and take the city because there's no one. All of the Athenians have been evacuated almost.
And there's no one resisting them because they knew that alone they would not be able to stop this force. and you really get a sense of the fear in Athens from the archaeological record in particular.

It's amazing, you know, all of those beauties. stop this for us.
And you really get a sense of the fear in Athens from the archaeological record

in particular. It's amazing, you know, that all of those beautiful marble statues we have of

Kourai and Kourai, these beautiful sort of naked males and beautifully dressed female figurines,

which were possibly grave markers. All of these were deliberately buried at the top of the

Acropolis in order to save them from the Persian attack. The Athenians were just bracing themselves

I don't know. markers.
All of these were deliberately buried at the top of the Acropolis in order to save them from the Persian attack. The Athenians were just bracing themselves for the kind of annihilation that they'd seen elsewhere.
Of course, this is why the population took ship, went over to the island of Salamis as quickly as they possibly could. And when Xerxes got there, yes, he did exactly as was forecast.
I mean, he raised the city to the ground and I suppose the population of the city in exile on Salamis, they would have seen their city burn. It's quite clear.
Although notably, he then also went up to the Acropolis and sacrificed to Athena. Yes, absolutely.
But only a Greek could write that. I doubt if a sacrifice to Athena.
Hedging his bets. But he certainly offered a sacrifice.
Well, it does fit this, what you've explained before about the way the Persians rule other places, right? I mean, they're perfectly happy to integrate in or assimilate into sort of local religious customs if it means that it makes them more acceptable. You know, that's why I think in the long run, you know, it's often been presented, isn't it? You know, the sack of Athens is, you know, and then the ultimate victory that comes after it over the Persians is the idea that we're saving democracy, we're saving world freedoms and all of this kind of thing.
I don't think the Persians would have had any problem with the burgeoning democratic state there.

And in fact, some of the cities of Asia Minor were already sort of miniature democracies going on anyway.

And I don't think there would have been, you know, the end of Greek culture. I think sculpture and art would have continued.
Probably, you know, tragedy and comedy would have continued with slightly different themes, perhaps. But, you know, this idea that Xerxes at that time threatened the entire beginnings of European culture is simply not true at all.
It's interesting as well. I don't think they sack Delphi, do they, the Persians? They kind of go to Athens, but that's...
Yes, they don't bother to go further inland. Well, so there's a very interesting story there, according to Herodotus, obviously, when they approached Delphi, the gods themselves, you know, Athena stood up and various heroes made an appearance.
there's these epiphanies of divine figures who are coming to the defense and there's landslides and things to stop them. Most likely that's covering a story where the Persians never actually wanted to sack Delphi because they understand the value of local sanctuaries.
When they captured Delos during the marathon campaign, they also made huge sacrifices there and tried to reassure the local population, which had fled to another island. Like, we don't mean you any harm.
We actually want to make sure that you understand. We respect your customs because that is how they knew they could be palatable as new overlords.
So they left Delphi well alone. I mean, they would have understood its value.

We've done Thermopylae and Artemisium, but then we get to Salamis. And this is almost, in which we was on par, if not more than Marathon, there's this kind of defining moment.
Because you've set it up so nicely, this idea that Athens has been sacked already, like they've been forced to go to this island nearby and they've seen their city burn. and then you have this massive titanic

sea battle

it's this Athenian victory, isn't it? So it's almost a victory from the jaws of defeat. I mean, what do we know about the Battle of Salamis? I mean, the Battle of Salamis is extremely messy.
It's very hard to say anything about it just because it is described to us in every source as just a mess of boats slamming into each other. And no one really knew what they were doing, except that the Persians had been dragged into a narrow strait, which was a plan of the Athenian commander Themistocles.
But it's not an Athenian victory so much as an allied victory, which the Athenians had about two thirds of the, or about half actually in Salamis, of the ships. But the overall commander is Euribides, who is a Spartan.
It's always sort of important to stress that Themistocles never commanded any allied fleet at any point in Greek history. He never did, because he was always under a Spartan supreme commander.
But the idea of that fight is essentially that the Spartans want to retreat to the Peloponnese. They want to get out of there.
They don't care about anything. It's already lost.
So they just want to go back, fortify the Isthmus, the connection of land between Athens and Corinth. And they want to pull the fleet back to guard those works.
So the fortification of the Peloponnese. And the Athenians point out to them that that means defending the Peloponnese in open waters against the superior Persian fleet, which would go badly.
And so everything will go to pieces if they do that. And they even threaten to leave the alliance and sail off to Italy, essentially leaving them all in the lurch because they just aren't finding that the allies are willing to help them to take back their own land.
And so they threaten to leave, which finally pulls the other allies over the line to say, okay, we'll find, we'll make a stand at Salamis. But he still has to trick the Persians into accepting that fight.
So he draws them into this narrow strait where the superior seamanship of the Phoenicians in the Persian fleet isn't going to come to their advantage. And the Phoenicians, they're from Lebanon, Tyre area, the eastern Mediterranean.
They've got a long history of being brilliant seafarers. Carthage and so on is our Phoenician heritage.
That's right. So they may or may not have invented the trireme.
It's a little bit obscure, but the Greeks certainly believe that if they didn't credit the Corinthians. So you have this fleet being drawn into the Narrows and then it just becomes a really messy bunfight.
Essentially, because there's no room to manoeuvre, you're really just going at whatever you can target, whatever you can. And it's very messy, but the Greeks managed to, or the Greek allies, I should stress here, because many of the ships in the Persian fleet were Greek.
They were the Greeks of Asia Minor, the Greeks of Western Turkey, who had been subjected and forced to commit to naval service for the king. So many of the allied Greeks actually managed to prevail over individual ships.
And this is how they end up winning this sort of attritional battle in the Straits of Salamis. What I find interesting about the narrative account of it is actually the use of the lie, liar, kings in this.
So Themistocles, of course, tells a whopping great lie, which convinces the Persians that they can win this thing. And I do think that Herodotus is very deliberate in presenting it in that kind of way, because as we know, the whole Persian idea is about truth and lie.
So this is a complete distortion of the Persian version of things. And because they are tricked in that way by the lie, by the ungodly, they lose their position.
So again, I think maybe sitting behind here as well, Herodotus has something of a Persian version going on too. I think it's just too much of a coincidence that the whole ruse is built on a lie of this kind.
Shall we cover quickly then also this really interesting figure of Artemisia, the queen of Halicarnassus, who's almost kind of one of these allies of the Persians of Xerxes' fleet. And she has a sizable contingent of ships, doesn't she? Five ships.
Five ships. She's only got five ships.
Okay, we'll just put up a hand with five fingers saying, she's only got five ships. Okay, fair enough.
But she seems to have a big role in the narrative that Herodotus tells us, doesn't she? Yes. For me, I'm not doubting her historicity, but the role that she takes, I think, is created to weaken Xerxes, that women are more capable of military command than he is.
And it's part then of the myth of anti-Persian propaganda that goes on for the next centuries, in which Persians are moulded into the figures of Amazons and other sort of, you know, it's the effeminisation of the East that we get going here. So I don't want to dismiss her as a historical figure, or the fact that she might have, you know, certainly offered some support to Xerxes.
But I think in the way that Herodotus creates the narrative, it's saying more about Xerxes than it is about Artemisia. And what is that narrative, by the way? Yeah, so the narrative is that one of the commanders of the fleet that Xerxes has drafted from his subjects in Asia Minor is the Queen Artemisia, who is Queen of Halicarnassus, which is actually Herodotus' hometown.
And so she leads a small contingent like five ships. I mean, many of these other states have dozens, if not more.
And so she has a very small contingent. But for Herodotus, she is massively interesting because he's interested in exceptions.
He's interested in exceptional things. And so when a woman commands a military force, that is something that he wants to talk about.
That is something that he's fascinated by. And he's very explicit about this.
He doesn't sort of want to give the impression that he's doing so unfairly. It's just like, this is great.
You know, look at this. Who could have imagined? Because in the Greek mind, which is very patriarchal, very sort of set in gender roles, this is something that could never happen.
You know, women aren't, in their view, cut out for that kind of work. You just don't have that in their nature.
And so for them, this is something that is spectacular and worth talking about in detail. And so he casts her as one of Xerxes' close advisors from the Salamis narrative, even before that, as somebody who really has the ear of Xerxes and also always has the right advice, even if he sometimes ignores it.
And so she is sort of inflated in that narrative as somebody who actually has her wits about her. And for Herodotus, she becomes one of the voices of reason within Xerxes's entourage.
And if you want to follow a kind of through thread with this, of course, his interaction with this woman, Artemisia, kind of heralds the interaction that he's going to have with his wife, Amestris, and with his mistress, Arta Yinti, in the last few books of the histories, which, of course, completely brings him down. We don't see Xerxes being assassinated in Herodotus, but we know that that's coming.
And it seems to be that this kind of woven storyline of women in Xerxes' world having his year actually is all played out from the Salamis narrative onwards. Well, it's so interesting.
And actually, we don't have time to do the story post-Salamis. That will have to be for another episode, because I know there's still more to the story with the Basil Plataea, which you mentioned earlier.
And I think there's Mykali as well. There's a lot more still to go.
However, if we kind of wrap up this episode by exploring kind of the importance of Salamis in this second Persian invasion by Xerxes, what is its importance? It is just a naval battle. The army of Xerxes is still there in its prime, having just sacked Athens, but the Persians have lost this naval battle.
Why is Salamis so significant in the course of this war? So initially, actually, the Greeks don't think it's significant. We are told in Herodes that they are essentially backing away to Salamis, expecting that the next day the Persians will just fight again.
They don't think that the losses they've inflicted are serious enough to knock the Persian fleet out of the war. But it turns out that they have, actually, that the Persian fleet is no longer willing to keep its advanced station, so they retreat back to Asia Minor.
So at that point, they more or less just abandon the attempt to try and have a simultaneous land and naval campaign, instead just sort of keep the land army where it is to mop up. At which point, obviously, the Greeks have, in a sense, reclaimed control of the sea, which gives them a lot of strategic options.
And one of the main ones that immediately becomes relevant in the narrative is, what if they sail up to the Hellespont and destroy this pontoon bridge that Xerxes had built in order to essentially cut off the Persian army and strand it in mainland Greece? For all the good it will do, but fundamentally saying like, oh, we are now actually free to operate in your rear areas, which animates a lot of modern strategic minds, because this is very much the kind of operation that, you know, Blitzkrieg, it's the kind of operation that we would like to imagine as being disproportionately effective because it affects logistics, supply, communications, rather than confronting the strength of an army. What we can say, though, is that Salamis very quickly enters into the Athenian imagination,

and it becomes a defining moment in the creation of Athenian-ness, really, because only seven, eight years after the battle is fought, Aeschylus, the great dramatist, puts that battle on stage, or at least a Persian messenger, you know, talks us through as an audience the narrative. And if you think about, you know, the old theatre of Dionysus, carved into the southern slopes of the Acropolis, there there would have been, you know, Athenians who had been at that battle, or there would have been families who had lost fathers or brothers or sons at that battle.
And it's really quite a remarkable thing that Aeschylus does in his play, Persi, the Persians, to basically create a tragedy out of modern history to begin with. This is not a fantasy mythical thing, even though we have ghosts and all of that kind of thing in it.
But also what he does in that is create this sense of Athenian-ness. And literally, these individuals sitting in the theatre would have been able to see each other across the auditorium, basically.
They would have recognised people and the names in there. But I think there's something even more remarkable going on in that incredible play.
Edward Said, back in 1979,

when he published his great book Orientalism, which was all about this kind of East-West divide, said that Orientalism starts with Aeschylus in Persians. I always wonder how much Said actually read the Persians.
Did he read it very deep at all? Because what comes over in that play is actually simply nobody benefits from war. What's incredible is these scenes of Persian women and Athenian women weeping for their sons and their husbands.
It is a great anti-war play. It's not the kind of table-thumping xenophobia we might have expected from an Athenian playwright writing about a victory over the dreaded enemy.
It's a much, much more subtle war play than Saeed or many other people who have studied it have ever seen. Now, many centuries later, that morphs.
And, you know, in later centuries, we have a guy called Timotheus, who creates this kind of narrative, which was probably sung like an opera aria about the Battle of Salamis. And there, he did all the voices, as it were, of the Persian soldiers drowning in the seas, of the screaming of the Persian soldiers on land and so forth.
And that is far more kind of tub-thumping bit of propaganda. But I find it really remarkable that in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Salamis, Aeschylus presented his city and his fellow citizens with an image of the Battle of Salamis that, in many respects, contradicts what Herodotus was going to say about it later on.
It is a cautionary tale more than a tale of bravado and warfare. And then, of course, the legacy of Salamis, like Marathon, becomes so entwined with the story of Athens, I guess with then the empire building, even down to that kind of idea of sea power.
Is Salamis always seen as kind of this focal point where it starts in a weird way, the Athenian empire and naval supremacy? Well, so I mean, it could arguably be seen as the start of the Athenian empire in the sense that at that point, there is no rival to Athens in the Aegean. So before that, obviously, Persia was an enormous rival to Athenian naval power, and they would never be able to claim that they control the Aegean.
So before that, obviously, Persia was, you know, an enormous rival to Athenian naval power, and they would never be able to claim that they control the Aegean sea in general. They just had a lot of naval interest, and they were building up their naval power, and they were expanding their reach across the Aegean.
But certainly from that point onwards, they are increasingly able to push the advantage that they have, because they just have more ships than anyone else, and they have more commitments to those naval investments than anyone else. The Spartans who are still in charge of the Navy, even in the following campaign seasons, 479, eventually just withdraw from it.
They essentially leave that leadership to the Athenians, or maybe there are different versions of this, the other allies elect the Athenians as their new leaders, essentially. But fundamentally, the Athenians get to take over that alliance, which then ends up being the bedrock of the Athenian Empire.
So it starts here in the sense that these are the forces that eventually form the Athenian Empire, but it takes a few steps to get the Spartans out of the way and for the Athenians to actually take over. Salamis is not the end of the Persian invasion of Greece.
As we've highlighted, there'll be another campaigning season. But Lloyd, for Xerxes himself, is this the end of his venture to Greece? Does he take quite a bit of the army back with him at that time? Yes, he does.
But it's a very pragmatic return. That's because we know that there is a huge rebellion that breaks out in Babylon.
And there's no way that Xerxes can afford to lose that jewel in the crown and really that means that he withdraws himself and with a great many forces from the theatre of war in the west and just moves it elsewhere. Well guys in the future we will cover the Bastard Plataea and what happens next with the forces that remain in Greece but you guys have been an absolute tour de force explaining Xerxes' invasion and Thermopylae, Salamis and so on.
Last but certainly not least, Lloyd, tell us a bit about your book on Xerxes and all the other Persians, Babylon as well. You've got books to plug, I think, right now.
Yeah, my book, Persians, The Age of the Great Kings, is available in all good bookshops and in paperback and in 15 languages. And my new book on Babylon, which includes a lot, obviously, on the Persian intervention in Babylonia, will be on sale early next year.
And Raul, for yourself, there will be in the future, no doubt, lots of big hitters on the ancient Greek world and ancient Greek warfare. You are a tour de force as well, and you're very popular on including on the history at youtube channel so people do check out rules critiques of 300 and ancient sparta and so on too guys once again thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today absolutely you're very welcome well there you go there was dr rule caninaedijk and Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones discussing the Second Persian War

up to the end of the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC.

Now, as mentioned, although this marked the time

when Xerxes decided to return to Asia

to deal with this big revolt in Babylon,

it certainly wasn't the end of the Persian invasion of Greece.

Xerxes would leave an army to continue the fight commanded by his general and relative Mardonius. Stay tuned as we will cover this final stage of the Persian invasion very soon.
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