The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon

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490 BC.

On the plain of Marathon, an Athenian army stands ready to do battle.

A sizable Persian force stands across from them, having sailed across the Aegean from Anatolia, intent on punishing the Athenians for a past foray into their lands, supporting an anti-Persian revolt. This battle would mark the climax of the first Persian invasion of Greece and become immortalised through the ages, as the day Athens defied the superpower.
It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

Today we're releasing the first of a series of episodes exploring the Persian Wars,

with not one but two leading experts in the field, Dr. Ruhl Knierendijk from Lincoln College,

Oxford University, and Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones from Cardiff University. In this first episode, we are covering the story of the First Persian War, think the Battle of Marathon of 490 BC.
We'll explore the run-up to the conflict, the emergence of the Persian Empire and how it came into contact with the Greek world in Western Turkey. We'll explore how the Persians viewed the Greeks and vice versa, before ultimately getting to the narrative of Marathon itself, preserved in the writings of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, known as the father of history.
You'll hear Herodotus' name quite a bit in today's chat. Every once in a while we release special episodes with two interviewees as we know how much you enjoy them.
With Rule and Lloyd being fan favourite guests of the podcast, brilliant experts and with this being such an interesting topic, well it felt like an easy winner and boy did they not disappoint. Enjoy.
Rule, Lloyd, it is a pleasure to have you both on the podcast. What a treat.
Well, thank you very much indeed. It's great to be here.
Yeah, it's wonderful to be part of it. Now, this is quite a big topic, the Persian Wars.
It feels straight away to highlight, doesn't it, with both of you, that it's much more complicated than Greeks versus Persians. Yes, I think that that kind of simple narrative has disappeared in scholarship.
It used to be played that way, it really did. And I think doing that has been particularly harmful, even for the way in which we name these wars, you know, and the Greco-Persian wars.
Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch in itself, I would say. It's that traditional idea is some kind of clash of civilisations or a replay of something that keeps on happening throughout history, that is really not the way that historians like to look at these events.
I mean, they are much more contingent, they are much more complex, they have all these different layers to them. We really wouldn't want to gloss over that.
But if we start with the background, what should we be imagining in around, let's say, 500 BC? What

does the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Central Asian world, what does it look like at

this time? That's a pretty big question. In terms of the Eastern Mediterranean, I mean, the big

factor is the rise of the Persian Empire, right? So this has happened fairly recently. This is

two generations ago, this empire suddenly emerged, within a very short period of time, conquered the entire Middle East. And so by this point, they've already conquered Cyprus and Egypt as well.
And so they are sort of the entire eastern half of the Mediterranean is dominated by a single new political entity, which is ruled by Darius the Great. And this is the Persian Empire, of course.
All the other societies in that region, obviously, have had to deal with them in some way, either because they faced conquest and other forms of sort of violence, but also because this is just the new big player. I mean, there's a superpower in the world all of a sudden, and obviously everybody has to kind of adapt to that.
Meanwhile, the Greek world is not in any sense political unity. It's an incredibly fragmented collection of small city-states and regional federations and groups that that are scattered about not just mainland Greece and the islands, but also sort of all around the Mediterranean, because they've been settling around everywhere they could for centuries.
There's Greek city in Egypt, there's Greek city in Libya, but also especially in southern Italy, Sicily, in Spain, France. Obviously, you know, you've heard from Owen Rees about Greek settlements in the north of Black Sea.
So the Greeks are everywhere, but they're not united. They're all quite small states.
And the main thing I think to know about this period is that in fairly recent memory, they have become larger and wealthier than they've ever been before. So this is a collection of states that are doing for the time being quite well for themselves.
They're becoming better at political organization, They're becoming more economically integrated. A lot of their economies are shifting to sort of market model.
So there is quite a bit of vitality in that world. There's obviously a lot of interconnectivity.
These people travel everywhere, trade everywhere, move everywhere. Their populations are growing.
Their cities are becoming more recognizable, like ancient cities, like the way we imagine them, more and more of them have city walls, things like that, big temples, public spaces, public buildings. That's all fairly recent in the Greek world.
I think a lot of that is still developing. But it is a different Greek world from the one that was there even 50 years ago, let alone 100, 200 years ago.
And it's quite interesting there, Lloyd. I mean, imagining the Persian Empire at, say, 500 BC, maybe in Greek eyes as well, is this seen as quite a new phenomenon, a new power emerging onto the stage? Or has it been there for some time as this kind of superpower idea?

I think in the Greek mind, it's something that's very new and something that has to be dealt with. So there's a really interesting little fragment we have of a poem, which must have been written around about probably 490, maybe 480.
But it looks back on the formative years of the Persian Empire. And the fragment says, basically, you know, there's a guy who's at home, an old guy, sort of an old war veteran sitting there.
And a visitor comes in to see him. and the questions you must put to the visitor are, where are you from? And how old were you when the Persians came? So there's something in the Greek memory about this new onslaught.
And I think for them, the fall of Sardis, which was, of course, a great Greek-speaking center in Asia Minor, was probably their kind of 9-11. It was a huge wake-up call that something drastic was going on on the fringes of their world.
And it's really interesting, around about 520-500 in Athens, we have the first attempts at visualizing the Persians. Not many people had seen Persians inreece at that point and so we have one black figure vase from about 525 bce which shows a kind of composite persian created by some athenian artist and the conspicuous thing is that they kind of look quite greek apart from the fact that they're wearing trousers it's the trousers yeah it's always in the trousers right it in the trousers, right? It's the thing that the Greeks really can't get their heads around at all.

And from there on in, really,

the Persians do not stop being the subject of attention for the Greeks.

Around about 500 BCE,

we get our very first attempt at writing a Persica,

a Persian things, a manual for what the Persians are. It's full of fantasy, but there we see a group of people trying to understand what it is they're coming up against.
What we don't have, unfortunately, is anything from the Persian point of view, thinking, I wonder who these islanders and people on the far- flung part of the world are. We don't have any speculation on that.
I'm sure those speculations were being made, but nothing survives. We have just the three distinctions in the Persian royal reliefs, right? So there's the Yauna, the Ionians, who are the Greeks as we know them, but they just classify them as those who live by the sea and those who live beyond the sea.
That's right. And sometimes they get a bit more specific as those who are wearing sun hats.
Oh, the sun hats. It's trousers one way, it's sun hats the other way.
Love that. But it sounds like there, I know, Lloyd, that you were involved in that exhibition at the British Museum recently in Persia and Greece, and you've done work on figures like Ctesias.
So even during the 6th century BC, was there a lot of contact or contact and trade between Greek cities and the Persian Empire? Well, at this point, you know, 500 into late 6th century into early 5th century, Persia is still sort of cranking up, okay? And it's taking advantage of the places it's conquered or the places who have, you know, sort of, you know, come over to them. So I don't think there's any yet any sense of like direct trading with the empire, as it were, but trade with the conquered peoples is still going on without a doubt, you know, that's all there.
And I suppose really, it's the use of these middlemen really as traders that would have grounded both the Persians and the Greeks in knowledge of one another. It must have been passed through by them.
I think it's hard at this particular stage to say, oh, there is a specific sort of Persian look or a Persian kind of artifact that is desirable in mainland Greece. That does develop by the middle of theth century, definitely.
Silverware and all this kind of thing is being either directly imported or being copied in cheap materials, knockoffs, and likewise with Persian textiles and all of this as well. But maybe at the beginning of this period, less so.
I mean, I think it's important, even though I just said there's a big sort of political entity that covers the entire East and Mediterranean, that we don't think of this as a sort of monolith.

I mean, this is a very loose administrative structure placed on top of a lot of pre-existing peoples who, of course, were already interacting with the Greeks in all sorts of ways. And were probably much more integrated into the Greek world than into the empire that ruled them.
So you have people like Lycians and Carians and Lydians and Phrygians who know the greeks for centuries and obviously trade with them interact with them mingle with them share languages and and places to live and the persians are just kind of the newcomers in that picture so the greeks don't just suddenly stop trading with these areas or moving to these areas just because the persians are in charge now so you really have to kind of on the, you have to kind of pull back on this idea that we imagine that, oh, once you colour the map, this region changes its nature. It actually is still just the same place, except that now they're paying tribute to some guy far away in Iran.
Well, that important tribute word there, isn't it? Yeah. Go on, Lloyd.
Absolutely. No, that's absolutely right.
And I think that, you know, one thing we can say is that by and large, the Persians had a very laissez-faire attitude to their conquered peoples. You know, if it wasn't broken, they didn't try to fix it.
And they certainly never imposed on their conquered peoples anything that, you know, we could see as a kind of real sort of heavy-handed imperialism of the kind that we see, you know, in the Roman Empire or the British Empire, for that means. So, you know, local languages just continued, local cults continued.
There was no attempt ever to force a Persian identity on other peoples. If they could merge, so much the better.
If they didn't and didn't cause any trouble, well, that was fine by the great kings as well. Now, Ruhl mentioned there in passing Lycians, Carians, Pamphylians, Lydians, so these were all peoples and regions in Western Asia Minor, Monde, Anatolia, Western Turkey.
So, Ruhl, is it therefore not surprising, if we go back to Lloyd's previous comment about this place of Sardis almost being a 9-11 equivalent for the Greeks, that for the beginning of the Persian Wars, should we be looking at Western Turkey and this interaction point between these various peoples, including Greeks and the Persian Empire? What's the story about how this is involved in ultimately the breaking out of the First Persian War? Herodotus is our main account for this, and he's very straightforward about mean, there are Greek cities in Asia Minor, so in Western Turkey, which are part of the Lydian kingdom. So they have been ruled from Sardis for some time by a king who is not Greek, but who obviously has been part of this sort of cluster of interacting peoples for a very long time.
They are paying tribute to the Lydians, and the Persians just come in and take that kingdom whole, which means that these Greek cities are now subject to the Persians. And so you mentioned Lydian there, and that's famously, it's like King Croesus, wasn't it, before the Persians came in? That's right, yeah, yeah.
Rich Croesus. Yeah, so that's a kingdom that covers sort of the western half of the Anatolian Peninsula.
So it's quite a large kingdom, quite a powerful kingdom, which is how you get the expression, richest Croesus is because he was the wealthiest king. The Greeks knew, right? This is the biggest power that they were directly in contact with beyond a place like Egypt, perhaps.
And the Persians just sort of gobble that up, essentially, as part of a much, much larger territorial empire. And so for the Greeks, suddenly, this is the arrival of something even greater, wealthier, more powerful than anything they've ever encountered.
And that is a big shift in their perception of where they are in the world, essentially. So what happens and why does it ultimately result in conflict breaking out between the Persians arriving on the scene and then the Greeks in Asia Minor, but I guess also other Greeks getting involved too?

Well, again, I mean, our main source is Herodotus.

And as you know, I am always a little suspect about just using him because I think, you know, if we were

to look at, you know, Rolls-Royce, I mean, the way that Herodotus creates this, you know, we have

this kind of Greek interest in Anatolia, right? But I'm not sure that Cyrus the Great, when he

invades Anatolia in that way, when he invades Lydia, would have seen that at all. I don't think

he was going for, you know, a Greek city at all. Anatolia was part of the ancient Near East,

I'll see you next time. invades Lydia, would have seen that at all.
I don't think he was going for a Greek city at all. Anatolia was part of the ancient Near East, and I think Cyrus would have just seen it as the next step in Near Eastern conquest, really.
We can see Croesus, if we want to see him, as a Greek-inspired king operating in this world of the Mediterranean, sending out messages to Delphi and so forth. But also, of course, he was absolutely intimately locked into the Near Eastern traditions of kinship too.
He was, after all, the brother-in-law of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and so forth. So I don't think Cyrus went into this thinking, ah,

I'm going to get some Greeks now, I'm going to get me some Westerners. I just think it was all about really, this is a logical continuation of my policy to subsume other Near Eastern kingdoms

into what I am building here. Sorry, I just thought of those stories in Herodotus where he kind of stresses that the Persians don't know who the Greeks are.
Yeah, exactly. Sorry, who? Yeah, no, literally.
I mean, the Spartans send them an embassy when they take the cities of Asia Minor and they say, like, you should let these people be free or else we're coming for you. Yeah.
And Cyrus's response apparently is just, who the hell are you? Sorry, who this? Lost number. Yeah who this lost number yeah exactly if you think about it in so many ways for the persians who are building an empire and building vast wealth you know they're you know the next thing they do is babylon for goodness sake that's what they take you know not not the western shores of greece what has greece got to offer stones and olives that's all it's got you know and that's of no interest whatsoever to the Persians.
So, in either of you, whoever wants to go first with this now, let's explore the story of the Ionian revolt then, because I feel we do need to tell this. What is then the story of this Ionian revolt and this early conflict before, I guess you could say, the main Persian wars? It's actually really hard to know.
This is one of the classic essay questions. What is going on here? So the Ionian cities, so the cities of the Greeks and Asia Minor, they initially thought that the Persian conquest was an opportunity for them to throw off this sort of foreign rule.
So they rebelled, but the Persians subjected them. And they apparently had to do this twice over.
But at that point, for several generations, they are just a part of the Persian empire. And that seems to be going fine until very suddenly in 499, they decide to mount a general rebellion.
And this is not just the cities of Ionia. Caria joins them.
Parts of the northern, further north of the coast of Asia Minor join them. Cyprus joins them.
So there's really quite an extensive stretch of the western fringe of the Persian Empire that joins together in rebelling against the Persians for reasons that we cannot figure out because the only account we have is Herodotus, and Herodotus is obsessed with the idea that this is just Aristagoras of Miletus, who decides that we should have a rebellion, and everybody thinks it's a great idea for essentially no motivation whatsoever. And so it's very difficult for us to understand why this is happening at that time.
But the important point historically is that Aristagoras then goes to Greece and says, I'm doing this thing. Do you want to help me? Because then we can defeat the Persians or at least push back their control.
He goes to the Spartans initially, they turn him down. Then he goes to Athens and they say, yeah, okay, we'll help you.
He also goes to Eretria and a couple of other places. So he gets help from Eretria and Athens, these two cities that have quite strong

naval interest in the Aegean anyway.

And they are the ones who send some support

to back this revolt, or at least its initial

campaigns. So they do a bit of looting,

they burn Sardis, or at least

the outskirts of the city, and then

the Athenians and the Eretrians are like,

that's great, we got our loot, we're going home.

But of course at that point they've already been

involved, and the Persians know this, and that's how, according to this story, the Greeks sort of get involved in the objectives of the Persian empire, because at that point, the Persians basically sort of come in, crush the revolt over several years. And afterwards, they have this sense of like, okay, there are clearly these Greeks across this sea, the Aegean, who are potentially a cause of destabilization of our Western frontier.
I mean, this is basically what they've done is they've said, oh, we can meddle in this, we can try and do something to arm Persian control of this region. And obviously, that's something that's not going to, they're not going to be able to let go.
Yeah, I think what we see growing there is this sense of, yeah, Greek infringement onto the Western coasts, of course. And if you think about how far away the west coast of Asia Minor is from the centre of Iran, where the great king and his court are based, then it does become something of a problem.
And of course, as happens throughout history, the more an empire expands and the more remote its borders get from the epicentre itself, the more troublesome they can be. What we don't get, unfortunately, is an understanding of what's going on in the eastern borders of the Persian Empire at the same time.
But I get the feeling that border zones are always problematic. And I think that another one of the myths that we get, therefore, about these great Greco-Persian wars is that the Persians put all of their thought into quelling these Greeks over the seas.
I don't think that could ever have been the case at all, because they had much bigger fish to fry as well. Babylon was in a constant state of rebellion and was just far too important to lose.
And so, so many, so much of the king's time and the troops, you know, were actually stationed in and around Egypt as well. And I really do think way, way off in Bactria, modern day Pakistan, Afghanistan, which was a huge satrapy as well.
That was probably equally as problematic. And we see that because the satraps who were installed in Bactria are usually king's brothers or king's, you know, uncles or something.
They send, you know, major members of the royal family to look after these places. So I think if we put all of the border zones into perspective, then Greece is just one more irritating zone of contact, but not this grand narrative.
Although I think you're right to say borders are always a problem, but then borders are also, to the imperial centre, sometimes so usefully unruly, right? Oh yes, absolutely, absolutely. And a little blurring of a border, it never does anybody any harm, right? Right.
And in fact, the Greeks themselves are already aware of the idea that although they see later Persian military actions against the Greeks as revenge, I mean, primarily they think of it as motivated by this avenging what the Greeks had done. That's right.
They also recognize that as a pretext. You know, even Aeschylus, who's writing in the 470s, is already thinking that actually this is all about conquest and they're just using this as an excuse.
So there's already this understanding that, you know, it's useful for an empire if somebody goes and provokes them at the border, which is in fact how the conquest of Lydia supposedly happened in the first place. Yes.
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I also find it so interesting, just a quick note from me, how so much of the action or important parts of that action that you guys have described there with the so-called Ionian revolt revolve around Sardis, which was such a prestigious city, wasn't it? Lloyd, we've talked in a previous episode how the Persian royal road, ultimately it will end at Sardis.
At one point, you can still see a bit of it today. I've talked about the birth of money in the past and how some of the earliest coinages from Sardis.
So I guess when the Athenians and the Eritreans, when they hear that the Persians have retaken Sardis, and Lloyd, is that what you were referring to as this kind of 9-11 equivalent moment or shock moment? Do they think, back in Greece, do they think that the Persians will make that next step of crossing the Aegean to them, or do they think they'll get away with it? I don't think that really crosses their mind at this point. I don't think they say, oh, invasion is imminent.
It's not that. But it's just the name Sardis must have been so evocative for them.
And it just evoked the end of something. Something had collapsed and couldn't be again.
I think that's the feeling that we get. I'm not, no, I wouldn't maintain that suddenly on the Greek mainland, there was this flurry to get the arms together and to make sure that they could defend themselves.
There's no sense of that whatsoever. It's just like the end of days, basically, is what the fall of Sardis was all about for them.
And that's why it's commemorated in that kind of way in things like popular poetry and in sayings, you know, how old were you when the Persians came? So, Roald, how do the Persians, I mean, why do they then decide to launch an invasion, or should we say expedition across the Aegean? And what do they do? We've talked about this a little bit, but it's basically, there's multiple different reasons why this happens. And even in Greek sources, which are basically what we rely on, we don't really have good Persian sources for any of this.
Just in general, we understand how the Persians sort of saw themselves, but we don't really know why they took specific actions like this. And so we're relying on Greek sources, but the Greek sources already massively overdetermined the invasion of Greece in the sense that they give more reasons than we need.
So they have this revenge motive, right? Because they supported, some Greeks supported the Ionian revolt. They have the expansion motive.
They think the Persians just want more and that it never ends. They have the legitimization motive, which is that each new Persian king needs to kind of justify and legitimize his rule by performing well militarily, so to launch some kind of campaign.
They're also driven by sort of the fates, essentially. They're being driven on in the Greek mind, by this idea that they must commit, you know, the crime that will undo them, which is this very tragedic pattern that exists in Herodotus, where, you know, Xerxes, when he's planning his campaign, he gets prophetic dreams and things like that about it.
So there's all sorts of ways in which they try to establish this. I think modern historians are much more inclined to think of this partly in terms of this strategic motivation that I've mentioned.
The Greeks are a problem. They are destabilizing the Western frontier.
If you want to settle that situation, you can either sort of heavily garrison and fortify your Western frontiers, which is something they do later on, or you can decide to go over and to cross that sea yourself and go and settle the business. And so that seems to be what they're doing.
And there's some reasoning that resources might have something to do with it. I mean, especially the Northern Balkans, very rich in timber, very rich in mines.
This is all great. The Greeks, mainland Greece itself doesn't have much to offer in that sense, but those things are obviously very valuable.
And you also have the, although the Greeks themselves are very small and not a credible threat to the Persian empire, there is the fact that, for instance, locally, regionally, places like Athens have a really long established strategic interest in the Hellespont. And so they are likely to keep on meddling in Persian affairs in that region, which is one of the things that might pull the Persians across the sea.

And so that's what they start planning. are likely to keep on meddling in Persian affairs in that region, which is one of the

things that might pull the Persians across the sea. And so that's what they start planning almost immediately as soon as the Ionian revolt is suppressed.
And it's not just in warships and things as well. I mean, there's also diplomacy that goes on across the Aegean as well.
And I really do find that of interest. And I think more and more attention is being paid to that in scholarship now.
So for instance, the strategy that the Persians took in Macedon is very interesting.

And Macedon essentially became a kind of non-authorized satrapy. I mean, the Persianization

of Macedon was really quite substantial. I'm always aware that when we look at Alexander

the Great and his life, he grew up in a court that was heavily Persianized, with

Thank you. was really quite substantial.
I'm always aware that when we look at Alexander the Great and his life, he grew up in a court that was heavily Persianized, with Persian speakers there and with Persian customs and everything. And this had been going on for almost 200 years, really.
The loyalty, actually, that the Macedonians showed to Persia during the conquest of Xerxes, for instance, was really notable, as was Boeotia as well. You know, as we're pushing down into central Greece itself, you know, the Boeotians were more than happy to give their allegiance to the Persians as well.
So that city tastes like Thebes, isn't it? That's right. Yeah, where great Thebes is, absolutely.
So, you know, the Persians dealt with that difficulty of the Greek world in diverse ways.

And part of it was through diplomacy, talking and bringing them into the empire. But actually, the point about diplomacy, another reason that the Greeks are also very keenly aware of is that there are many Greeks who essentially see the Persian Empire as an opportunity, right? They want to change the way things work in their own states, and they see Persia as the most powerful ally they could possibly find in order to achieve what they

want to achieve, regime change or the overthrow of their enemies or something similar. And so you

have many Greeks whose first recourse when they get thrown out of their own state or when they

lose a political battle or something like that is to flee to the Persian Empire, go to the court and

say, can you help me fix this? At which point, multiple of these advisors or courtiers,

effectively, or hangers-on, are pulling the Persians into the Greek world.

And do you have exactly that with the Persian expeditionary force that is assembled,

that will almost island hop across the Aegean to first target Eritrea in Euboea, the island of

Euboea, and then land just north of Athens? Do you have a similar case there?

Yeah, so this is the second attempt they make to cross the Aegean. So the first one with Mardonius doesn't get very far, it's destroyed in Thrace and by a storm around Mount Athos.
This will be important later. But basically, the first attempt in 492 doesn't work, but then in 490 they try again again.
They gather a big army in Cilicia. And then they sail across into the Aegean.
So they go island hopping. They take Naxos and Delos.
And the reason why the Athenians are nervous about this is that in that fleet is the tyrant Hippias that has been thrown out 20 years earlier by the Spartans. So they have gotten rid of their tyrants a little while ago with foreign help.
But this guy's still alive. And he is one of those people who just went to Asia Minor, started talking to the local powers that be, and tried to garner support to be reinstated.
Obviously for the Persians, this would be a great opportunity because if you have this guy who owes you, whose position relies on your support, then you have a reliable agent in the Greek mainland. So they want to reinstate Hippias the tyrant over the Athenians, and the Athenians obviously are not too keen.
This is one of those examples where the Persians are being guided into Greece by an agent who is Greek and who wants Persian help to re-establish himself in Greece. But for the Persian kings and satraps to work in that way was absolutely the Persian system.
That's what they were comfortable with always. And essentially, when they conquered parts of their empire, wherever it was, Egypt, Actria, whatever, their aim was always to work with the local rulers, never really to displace them at all.
So what was going on in several of these city-states in Greece at the time actually rang very true. It made a lot of sense to the Persians that this is actually the proper way to have a foothold within this area.
I'm not sure very often how much the Greeks themselves realised that they were actually playing into the hands of the Persians, but certainly from the Persian point of view, this seems to make sense to them. It's also interesting, isn't it? You mentioned the word, I mean, satraps there, Lloyd.
So with this Persian expeditionary force, shall we reimagine, is the great king there as well? Or has he kind of almost given this to subordinates to deal with? From this point, I think it's to do with diplomats. The Achaemenites had a tendency to use high-ranking members of the royal family or else those who were adjacent to the throne, so the nobles of Persia.
I can't see the great king getting involved in this himself just now. It's a little bit too early for that.
So certainly sending out satraps or diplomats, the people that we hear called the great king's eyes or the great king's ears. That's the kind of people that went over the kind of individuals that later get lampooned in the plays of Aristophanes and so forth.
I was speaking kind of pidgin Greek and all of this sort of thing. Well, you're very right to point out, I mean, this idea that they are always sort of close relatives, because I mean, I don't know if it was you, Lloydd or somebody else who compared the persian empire to a family business i mean it's yeah absolutely it was it really was family run enterprise you know and that's so that first expedition 492 is led by mardonius who's obviously he was cousin of darius or cousin of xerxes and also cousin of xerxes wasn't it yeah yeah yeah he'll come back later won't he yeah yeah and then um the ends in Marathon was led by Artafrenes and Datis.
And Datis, I don't think we know very much about, but Artafrenes was also like a brother-in-law of the king or something. That's right.
That's right. Absolutely.
They use the extended family particularly well, in fact. So, you know, if if a king was keen to bring a good noble or somebody who had a good reputation in war or a good reputation in diplomacy, then marriage to one of the royal women was a really good way of bringing them in to the orbit of the Achaemenid family itself.
So, yeah, I think the more we can think of the empire itself as a family firm, the better it gets, really. The squabbling, of course, goes within the family itself, but it kind of doesn't get rid of the firm at all.

So I think that's one of the reasons why there was why the empire lasted for so long really i remember playing as dartus and darty fernies in age of empires too although as many years ago um but rule mentioned the word there marathon which i'm sure many people will know the name marathon but i mean rule let's with you. So the Persians do eventually make it to the Greek mainland and Marathon, so that's north of Athens in Attica.
With the Battle of Marathon, before we get into it, what should we be imagining? What should we be seeing? Do we think we should be seeing on the Persian side in regards to numbers, if we know, I mean, troops? And what should we be seeing on the Greek side? Do we have any idea whatsoever? You're shaking your head, I guess. Do we not quite know? Yeah, I mean troops and what should we be seeing on the Greek side do we have any idea whatsoever you're shaking your head I guess we do we not quite know yeah no I mean numbers for the Persian side are never known I mean this is really just just a big question mark because the Greeks are our only source for it and the Greeks are not honest about it like they want to portray every Persian army as this sort of world conquering horde it's very stereotypical becomes a trope in on, and it never goes away.
I mean, even the most sober historians, the ones that we tend to think of as like the good historians of Alexander, for instance, Arian, he gives the largest number for the Persian army of Galgamela. So they like to imagine hundreds of thousands or even millions.
We don't buy that, but we don't have anything to replace it with. So our problem is we only have numbers we can't believe and we don't have anything good to put in their place.
So for Persians, we don't have numbers. We do know they landed on this coastal plain at Marathon because Hippias guided them there, partly because it was an old Pisistratid heartland.
So they had a lot of local support or they were hoping they might get some, and partly because it was good terrain for cavalry. So much of Attica is rocky and uneven, but that plain would have allowed the Persians to use their cavalry to their advantage.
So that was sort of dual benefit of that space. So the Persians land there, they encamp there, and the Athenians march out in full force to try and stop them.
So they have their Placian allies with them, who are a small town from Boeotia near Thebes. There's about a thousand of them and later sort of say about 9,000 Athenian hoplites.
So there's a grand army of 10,000. Plus, whoever else would have been drawn into this force, you know, by necessity.
Once there is an emergency great enough, the entire male population is essentially subject to military service, which means that very many people who couldn't afford necessarily any good armour and weapons would still be required to come along and do what they could. So this is potentially a much larger army, but it's the 10,000 number that is the only one that we can say reasonably fits what we know of other moments in this period when the Athenians go to war.
And Lloyd, I know it's a battle. We don't need to focus too much on it, but of course it's an important part of the First Persian War, or what is known as the First Persian War.
So what happens during this battle and what does it end up with? Why do people know the name Marathon now today? Well, they know it now because it's been the most integral part of Greek myth-making, really. I mean, as Roel says, as to the size of armies, as to the tactics, as to the event, we're really pretty much at a loss.
I mean, there is a narrative provided, but whether this is a true narrative, we just can't get close to at all.

But in a way, we know the result, right? Or at least we know something of the result. And we know more about the myth that grew around it.
And in a way, I'm far more interested in the myth than I am in what we can piece together of the battle itself. So for instance, in 330 BCE, a vase was painted or created or shipped to southern Italy, where it was unearthed in the 1830s.
And it shows, it's a huge red figure vase, we call it the Darius vase. And it shows the Persian great king hearing from a messenger about the failure of Marathon.
And we know that because there are gods in the register above. Zeus is there, for instance, and Athena, obviously representing Athens, is there.
And the figure of Hellas herself, Greece, is being upheld by the personification of retribution with a flaming torch and so forth. And below the scene,

underneath Darius and his court, we have a group of Persians who are clearly terrified at the news that's been brought to them. Now, this vase is 150, 200 years almost after the events of Marathon

itself, but it is still being activated in the Greek mind, in the Greek popular consciousness.

It's no coincidence that that vase about the overthrow of Persia was created at the time when Alexander himself was going into Persia as well. So, you know, this is history being used, again, revamped, you know, are we going to have another a a second marathon here? So, you know, I mean, I've never claimed to be a battle historian anyway, but I'm far more interested in the impact of the myth of marathon than I am of the real thing.
Roel, you know a bit more about the events themselves. Yeah, would you like to do a little bit on that, Roel? This is my chance to be boring for a little bit never boring we love it I completely agree with Lloyd I mean it is a very sort of tainted narrative it's very propagandistic and it only survives from a source that was interviewing people two generations after the fact when it had already become this huge thing in the mind of the Athenians in particular I mean sorry Roel, just to make that point, you know, which is a really good point.
We wouldn't take a Second World War narrative of, say, you know, what happened on Dunkirk from one side only, you know, where it's glorified. So why are we prepared to do this with the Battle of Marathon or any other of the Greek wars, you know, which we've been so been so tuned in to do.
It's just not right. Let's treat it for what we can, as a light, constructive, propagandistic narrative with a big myth that went behind it.
Sorry, Rob. No, no, no.
You're just completely right to make that point. I think historically, even if you're a battle historian, Marathon, it's so irrecoverable what really happened that it's really not that interesting.
What's interesting about it is that it is the first battle in Greek literature that is described, the first historical battle. So we don't have any accounts of actual events.
We have accounts of fighting in poetry and Homer, obviously, in Tertius, but we don't have an account of an actual battle that happened. And so in that sense, it's really interesting because the Herodotus is doing something that no other Greek has done before, which is to try and describe to us how a battle was won.
And even if the ways in which that has happened are very difficult to believe, we are still dealing with something that is interesting from a literary perspective and interesting from a historical perspective. In many ways, this is the beginning of what I do as a historian.
There are obviously earlier accounts of battles from the Near East in particular. I mean, the Battle of Kadesh is famously the first one to be described in any way.
But at this point, the Greeks are starting to do something that other traditions haven't done, which is to try and say, you know, not for the further glory necessarily of some king and describing how many people he personally killed, but rather to say, you know, okay, we understand that we all went into battle as a group, but how did we pull this off? I've never thought of that. So do you think therefore that is Herodotus creating a language of battle narrative in that case? Absolutely.
Yes, yes. I mean, this is obviously, it fits into an emerging tradition in the later fifth century when people are starting to write manuals and philosophical treatises and things like that.
So people are starting to try and write sort of causal analysis in all sorts of different fields. And he is clearly drawing on that.
But he is the pioneer of the idea of a battle description. And people often blame him for not being very precise, but you have to credit him for just trying to do it in the first place.
There's a lot of things... I suppose when we think about that in performance, right, so this is being, you know, read out to a group of people, then I suppose it must have been pretty gripping in that way, mustn't it? And it's, so Marathon, the narrative of Marathon, more than other battle accounts, and certainly more than the later standard of battle accounts that you get from Thacydides and Xenophon and Polybius and all the others.
It's very sort of littered with these cool anecdotes of things that are exciting and bloody and weird. So he has the story of Epizelos, right, who was blinded in battle when he saw this giant hoplite come at him.
Or we have the story of Callimachus, the polymark, who was stuck so full of javelins that he couldn't fall down when he died. And things like this, we're just like, this is a movie scene, right?

Wasn't there someone who one person decides to hold on to one of the ships?

And then his arm gets chopped off.

Brother of Aeschylus, I think, the playwright?

Yeah.

It's another famous, like he would have been a prominent Athenian, right?

So that's why the story survives, presumably,

because maybe Aeschylus or somebody else was telling this story that his brother had his hand cut off when he tried to grab onto a ship. That's right.
Yeah. So these kinds of stories and, you know, the glorification of Miltiades, the commander.
But so some of this is obviously very Homeric. That's the model that they're working with.
You're talking about a battle. You're talking about heroes.
You're talking about scenes in which something exciting happens that you can tell a story, that you can tell an anecdote. but he's also at the same time trying to start figuring out what this bus will look like in a sort of bird's eye view, which you don't really get in anything else in earlier Greek writing.
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Listen to Our Skin on the iHeartRadio app, is that the centre, even though the Persians have more numbers, but the centre is a bit weaker, but the Athenians have more troops on the flanks and they push push the flanks of the Persians, and then they kind of encircle whilst the centre holds. Is that the rough idea? Well, the centre breaks, actually.
Oh, the centre does break, does it? Okay. Persians crush the centre, but the wings overwhelm the Persian wings, and they sort of fold inwards and then crush the remains of the victorious part of the Persian army.
That is what we are told. And then the big question for a military historian is, was that the plan or did that just kind of happen? And I'm very much inclined to think, even though the protestations of the Athenians were obviously meant to do that, the thing is they never do anything like that ever again.
There is no other battle plan in Greek history that looks anything like this. And so even if it was something that happened because they thought that they might try it that way, I find that very implausible.
I think it's very likely that what they ended up doing was as a group, they sort of ran forward, right? And Herodotus is very adamant that they ran. And this is something that comes back in Aristophanes and other traditions as well.
There's a very important part of Marathon is that they were running into battle for a long, long stretch, a long distance, that maybe they're just kind of filling up the plane. So people are moving to the side to make sure they can't get outflanked.
And as they do so, more people are going to the side than staying in the middle, and the army just kind of turns into two big blobs that are moving slightly away from each other. But maybe even less deliberate than you're suggesting.
I mean, maybe just haphazardly clumping together, really. Absolutely.
I'm always a big advocate of seeing Greek warfare, especially in this very early stage, as being much more primitive than we assumed that it was. I mean, to be very, very simple, no one has sort of very clear direction in what they're doing.
Herodotus can't tell us the number of ranks in this formation, presumably because it didn't have any kind of fixed order until later when the Greeks actually started to think seriously about this. And so we have to imagine this as a sort of mobs charging forward and, you know, locally overwhelming by sheer force.
Parts of the Persian army, but other parts, the Persians managed to maintain control and break through. And here's the frustration as well, isn't it? I mean, we have no Persian perspective on this.
Nothing. Whatsoever, you know.
And as you know, I mean, Persian military is one of the least understood and least studied aspects of Persian history, which is a great shame. I mean, more work is being done on it now by Sean Manning and your good self than ever before, but we're way behind.
The main thing we have to bear in mind is that the Ionian revolt has shown that the Persians do not have any trouble defeating Greek armies. In principle, they can do it.
They have done it many times. And so this is not a foregone conclusion that is based on technology or tactics or anything like that.
The Greeks can lose, and they know this, right? Herodotus praises the Athenians for even just standing their ground, you know, being willing to fight when every other army previously that had faced the Persians had been terrified and had fled because the Persians have conquered the world. How do you have the hubris of thinking that you can beat them, you know? Herodotus also says that the Athenians were the first Greeks to endure the sight of Persian trousers.
Yes, exactly. That's the biggest thing.
That was the biggest thing of the day. That's how hard they were those trousers man that's real andrea that's real manliness that's why the spartans were still at home they were one they were just really annoyed and just that the persians had never answered their messages and two because of the trousers but you know roland you're absolutely right in saying that you know the persian empire so far had encountered a myriad of different fighting styles and a myriad of different kinds of armies and had coped brilliantly with all of them to great success.
Obviously, you know, the Egyptians went against them by sea and by land. No problem whatsoever.
You know, Cambyses basically marches in unopposed. So you're absolutely right.
I mean, you know, the Greeks shouldn't be seen as anything more difficult than any other army they encounter. And in that sense, I mean, since we don't have Persian sources, we really are sort of grasping for straws.
But one of the things that's really a strong theme in very small pieces of Persian iconography. So you have a couple of these tomb paintings as well as seals.
So seal impressions from the Persian Empire. That show just Persian warriors killing hoplites.
That's a common motif. And even though that doesn't tell a story, it's not actually something that we can extrapolate to battles or something.
But at the very least, we know that Persian grandees like to see and imagine themselves destroying Greeks as a particular way of expressing what made them powerful. They like to visualize that.
Most definitely. And in fact, we can now date a whole corpus of these seals from the middle of the fourth century, actually, as well.
So commemorative editions and all of this kind of stuff coming out. And you're right.
I mean, sometimes we see Persian nobles fighting trouser-wearing nomads, but very often we see them fighting Greek hoplites, which is the complete antithesis of what we see, of course, on so many vase paintings from Greece, isn't it? With the defeated Persians slumping into the corner of the dish. But here we see the roles reversed quite clearly.
I tell you what, Lloyd, you mentioned the Darius vase a little while ago, and I remember seeing that when at the Naples Archaeological Museum, and it is absolutely stunning. In one of the best galleries of the museum, I'd say the Magna Greccia or Magna Greccia gallery.
But I would like to actually go back to the point you mentioned, Ruel, about the kind of, you've got these epic stories within the Herodotus narrative of Marathon, and evident in the battle, as you've highlighted. But my mind will also naturally think today of the Marathon, the Great run, 26 miles, isn't it? And the figure of Pheidippides.
This story, is that also attached in Herodotus about this runner going from Marathon to Athens to alert them? Or was it from Athens to Sparta? I mean, what's the story of Pheidippides? Yeah, so Pheidippides is, so there is the story of the run from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens, which is only in later sources. And there's a story in Herodotus of this messenger called Pheidippides, who ran from Athens to Sparta to ask for help.
And those two things often get conflated, because we assume that Herodotus would have told us the story that we know, but he actually tells us a different story about a long run. Obviously, the distance from Athens to Sparta is something like 250 kilometers, so it's significantly further, which is why that's now like a super marathon or something like that.
I don't know exactly. An Ironman or even more than that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.
But the point is that those are separate stories of people doing incredible feats of endurance. That man, Pheidippides, is also described by Herodes as a hemerodromos.
He's a day runner. So there's apparently a function in Greek society of people who can run very far, most likely because over rough terrain, over long distances, without a sort of series of organized way stations, it's faster than a horse.
A human being will travel faster than a horse over that kind of terrain, unless there is some kind of infrastructure in place to support a messenger system like the Persians had. And so that is a separate story where he tried to call on the Spartans to come and help them because they thought they wouldn't be able to hack it alone.
And then after the battle, because they were obviously fighting at Marathon, which is a surprise, surprise, a marathon away from Athens, 42 kilometers. After the battle, they were afraid that the remaining Persians who fled onto their ships and sailed off would sail around Cape Sunion and attack Athens by sea while the army was away.
And so the army had to march as quickly as it could from the battlefield back to Athens to essentially garrison the city. And so that is why there is that story as well of the rush to get back home.
But later on, there is another story in which there is a messenger running from the battlefield of Marathon back to the city to alert them that they had won, but that the Persians might be coming by sea to essentially just warn them. And that is the story of the Marathon that is more famous, and that's given the name to Marathon as a race.
And this is where you see, I mean, the legacy of the battle, isn't it? You know, it's the myth-making process that we see in operation there. Obviously, you know, Herodotus' version is not the only version, you know, and there were probably many dozens of smaller versions of this doing the rounds as well, with more sort of localised heroes, localised action, all of this going on.
And what we see in the second account of the run to Athens is an elaboration, a counter-narrative to Herodotus' original. My mind also immediately goes to that famous painting, isn't there? And it shows Pheidippides, basically, that late story of him, his last breath when he gets to Athens and he shouts and he says, Nike, Nike, victory, victory, hence why you have the Nike shoe brand.
And then he dies on the spot, isn't it? That's another part of the great myth-making of the marathon story. Yeah, I mean, that's the story that I don't remember which source this is.
Is this also one of those things that's like in Lucian or something? This is something like this. I know the story.
Much, much later, definitely. Yeah.
I mean, some of these stories, I mean, the Achilles heel. I mean, this is only in Roman versions of the Trojan War story.
And we just take it completely for granted that that's always been part of the story. But it comes in very, very late.
And it's just sort of embellishments, which is fine. Obviously, everybody does that all the time with all the stories that they know.
But we have to recognise that for the Greeks, when they were telling the story of Marathon, this would not have featured. So the Persian force has been defeated at Marathon, and then the Athenians stopped them from taking Athens, if we believe that account from Herodotus.
Shall we do a quick mention of the Spartans here? So let's say they've got over the fear of the trousers and the Persian king not replying to their text messages. Is it that they do ultimately visit the battlefield, but only once all the Persians are dead? Yeah, they send an army out.
But of course, I mean, Sparta is not next door, as we've said, 250 kilometers. I mean, with a couple of thousand men marching along with their baggage train and their support, it's not going to be, you know, five minutes we're there.
So they just, they do show up, but they've been delayed by a religious festival. They're celebrating the Karnea, which is in the middle of the campaign season, very practical for the Spartans.
So they can't go out and fight during that period. They leave as soon as they can afterwards, or so we're told, but they arrive like two or three days late.
And then they survey the battlefield. They do go and see it, which is another day's march, so fair juice to them.
But they go and see it, and they're very amazed, we're told, and then they go home. And that's essentially it.
But if it's into this general, I think, herodity and pattern, right? If people go and see things because they want to see, you know, the amazing feats of others and the amazing achievements of the world. Absolutely.
I think on that point, it enters into something that we call pauma literature, isn't it? Amazement literature, you know, that seeing is believing kind of thing, which is how Herodotus is all about. After all, you know, I have seen with my own eyes.
This is what he likes to say. So I think it's part of that motif.
It's an extraordinary narrative and story that you guys have told, but also the archaeology too,

and why we need to be cautious when exploring the story of the first Persian war, of this expedition to Greece, and also what happens before and contacts between the Persian world and the Greek world. You both have kind of talked about this already with the mythologising of Marathon, but I would like to ask it again now as we kind of wrap up this first big engagement.
How significant would you both say the first Persian invasion of Greece is, both to Greece, then to Persia, but also then, of course, the later legacy of it? It's a massive question, I know. We can be brief about the Persians.
I mean, they would have thought that this campaign was a stunning success. I mean, they took all the islands, they took Euboea.
The only thing they failed in doing was subjecting Attica, which is already perhaps a bridge too far for the forces that they dispatched. Oh, they could paint it as a victory.
They could paint it as a success. Without a doubt, without a doubt.
Absolutely, I agree, Rul, completely. I think the only thing that would have niggled the great king is that he'd had to send much of his force to the west when he could have used it far more profitably, you know, subduing India.
So the Indian campaign kind of had to stop. They still got North India, but I think that was the only thing that, you know, really kind of annoyed Darius.
But otherwise, yes, this is a success. It's a great success.
And in fact, I mean, if we recognize that the Ionian revolt began because the Persians under, with the sort of advice of Aristagoras, failed to take the island of Naxos, which is very wealthy at this time, they did it this time. They just sort of went in and took it.
So in a lot of ways, they've sort of made up for previous failures. And so they're very happy with it, I'm sure.
So as far as they're concerned, it's all good. For the Greeks, I think this is a radical moment of self-reassessment.
I mean, especially for the Athenians, this is a moment with like, oh, we can actually beat them, like we can win, which is a huge deal for them. I mean, there's a variation of the verb.
So kindunäuäin, which means to take risks, is a verb that they use for fighting battles. And they specifically make an adaptation of this verb, prokindunöain, to be in front taking risks, to take risks before others, which the Athenians deploy in order to express what they had done in the Persian Wars.
They had done this before anyone else. They had actually managed to achieve a victory before the others even got involved.
They were already out there fighting and winning against the Persians. So they completely revised what it means to exist in a world with Persians, which is no longer just a story of terror and submission, or even just sort of using the Persians to inevitably sort of encroach on the Greeks in exchange for whatever favors they might do you.
But instead, you see the idea that, oh, actually, if we get together and resist them, this might actually work. And do they link that to democracy as well? If you had Hippias in the Persian ranks, it's kind of a win for democracy over tyranny, or their version of democracy, their new way of government.
Do they try to link that together too? Well, certainly Herodotus reflects on that question himself and kind of incorporates it into a very well-known passage in Book 3, where we have Darius and his counsellors kind of sitting together and thinking, what kind of government could we possibly be? Should we be an oligarchy? Should we be a democracy? Nah, not for us, but nice idea. Or should we be an absolute monarchy? Yes, that sounds like our thing.
So I think that, you know, if at the time, democracy was not really being upheld as part of the marathon experience, as the marathon myth, I think it starts to be built up in that way. Yeah, I mean, it is in some ways.
It's also one of the first occasions where we actually see some of the institutions of the democracy in action. So you see the board of generals, for instance, acting for the first time at Marathon.
So some of these institutions are new and the Athenians have clearly attached them to the Marathon story. They're very prominently involved in that and the tribal arrangement of the army.
So the reorganization of the state that followed from democracy is integral to the Marathon story. But I wouldn't necessarily think that they are saying, oh, it's because democracy, we managed to do this.
I don't think there is any source that specifically says that. It's just a broad association with Athens has become more effective at organizing its resources for war, which is something that Herodotus says, not only in the constitutional debate, but especially in book five, when he's talking about the rise of democracy.
He says, suddenly, everybody's got a stake in this. And so, they're much more inclined to do their best.
One last thing I must mention as well. Is there also this interesting, it could well be a fantastical story, and whoever wants to answer this, please do, of someone whispering in Darius' ear, the great king's ear, to remember the Athenians and to come back or there's this foreboding thing that the Persians will return yeah it's one of those great herodity and set pieces isn't it you know every night before Darius dines one of his you know right hand men will come in and say sire remember the Ath.
And of course, Darius then nearly chokes on his piece of sweetened honeyed lamb

and kind of says, darn them, I'll get them next time.

Of course, only an Athenian,

only Herodotus could have written such a thing.

I don't think the Athenians were much on the mind of Darius

or any other Persian after this.

I think this is very much to do with what I mentioned earlier,

this idea that for the Greek mind,

this is all about revenge, right?

I don't think I gave you permission. guys this has been fantastic.
And there's also kind of teeing up that the Persians will return. This is the first Persian invasion of Greece.
And there is a second one that we will cover in time. But for the moment, I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast together.
Absolutely. You're very welcome.
Well, was dr ruled canina dyke and professor lloyd luellen jones discussing the first persian war the first episode with these two experts on the persian wars the next episode will be dropping next week where we explore the persian return with king xerxes in 480 bc and legendary battles such as Thermopylae and Salamis. Stay tuned for that one, coming very soon.
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