Most of what we know about the Persian Wars comes from the Greek historian Herodotus, who finished his history of that war around 420 BC, some 60 years after the war ended; Herodotus is important for at least one other reason as well. He is, as far as we can tell, the first person to have written something we can recognize as an attempt to write real history. What qualifies Herodotus as a historian?

It is difficult to get a handle on the Persians as they saw themselves, for our main sources for their history continue to be the Greek historians, who are biased against them. What we do know of their early history (much of which comes from book one of Herodotus) goes something like this.

The Persians spoke, like the Greeks, an Indo-European language (thus one related, if rather distantly, to English); their homeland lies in southern part of Iran. Under Cyrus the Great, who began to lead them in 559 BC, they built an extensive empire, which ultimately reached from the edge of India in the east to Egypt in the west, and included Mesopotamia to the south; it also included the Greek cities in Asia Minor, known to the Greeks as Ionia. Cyrus himself is praised in most of our Greek sources as an able and just ruler; indeed he had to be able to form an empire composed of peoples with greatly different languages, cultures, and religions. The Persians had a gift, somewhat like that of the Romans later on, to hold different peoples together in a huge empire; the key to their success, perhaps, was the relative autonomy they granted most subject states, as would the Romans. The Greeks were not as good at maintaining empires. The Persians also had a rich culture in other regards. Their art and architecture was most impressive, for example. And their religion, Zoroastrianism, is still practiced by some thousands of people today; many scholars have argued that it had a major impact on early Greek philosophy and on the development of Judaism and Christianity.

The Greeks called the Persians "barbarians": but we must remember what this means for the Greeks: anyone who doesn’t speak Greek is a barbarian. Many barbarians in the Greek sense, then, were perfectly civilized, and the Greeks themselves recognized many of the achievements of their neighbors, including the Persians. This doesn't mean that they thought their neighbors were like them; the Greeks, as most peoples, usually though of other cultures as being somewhat strange and, on the whole, inferior. Thus the Persians, for all their artistic glory and massive empire, were not free; they were effeminate, over-fond of luxury, and, ultimately, no match for virtuous manly Greeks.

In the middle of the 6th century the Greek cities of Ionian were made subjects of the Persian empire. In 499 BC a number of these cities revolted from the Persians. The Ionians sought help in Sparta and Athens; only the Athenians, more adventuresome than the Spartans (and feeling a closer kinship with the Ionians, who spoke a dialect of Greek similar to their own) sent any help. The revolt had some initial success, getting as far as burning the regional capital, Sardis, but it was crushed by 494, when the city of Miletus, one of the leaders of the revolt was destroyed. The Persians were upset by the destruction of Sardis; the mainland Greeks were upset by the destruction of Miletus: things were set for a larger collision.

Darius, the King of Persia, was determined to punish Athens for supporting the Ionian revolt, and sent a large army over to Athens to do just that. But his army was met by the Athenians at Marathon outside of Athens where, in one of Athens' greatest moments, an outnumbered Athenian army managed to defeat a much larger Persian one. The details of the battle are obscure; it is likely that the Athenians won in large part because of their superior armor and weaponry, developed through all those decades of hoplite warfare as they fought their Greek neighbors. The news of the victory was announced, the story goes, by a runner who ran all the 26 miles from Marathon to Athens; the next Olympic Marathon will be run along this course.

The battle was of huge symbolic significance at Athens; the winners of the battle were revered as WWII vets have been following Saving Private Ryan. The gods and mythological heroes themselves helped, it was said. Aeschylus, author of the Oresteia, was one of them. He wrote his own inscription for his gravestone, we are told, and said nothing of his plays, but noted his role at Marathon.

Xerxes, son of Darius, took over in 485, and was eager to avenge the Persian defeat. Luckily for the Greeks he was distracted by a revolt in Egypt, and in the meantime the Athenians hit it rich, striking a large vein of silver. Themistocles, an Athenian general and statesman, convinced the Athenians to spend this money on triremes, the most powerful warship of the day; it is from this point on that Athens comes to have the most powerful navy in the Greek world.

In 481 Xerxes demanded that the Greeks submit to his rule; many did, especially those northern Greek cities closest to Persian controlled territory. But the most important Greek cities now, for once in their history, united against a common foe. Sparta, the leading land power, was given the leadership of the alliance, although Athenian ships would play as important a role as Spartan troops. In 480 the Greeks attempted to stop the Persians at Thermopylae, a point north of Athens where the was in antiquity a narrow pass between the mountains and the sea. At Thermopylae the Spartan King Leonidas, perhaps recognizing that the Greeks were too outnumbered to win, sent off most of the Greek troops, leaving behind a small force of but 300 Spartans, together with a few other Greeks. It took Xerxes’ army several days of hard fighting to defeat the Spartans, who are only overwhelmed when a Greek traitor from another city showed the Persians a short-cut around the pass, and allowed them to surround the Spartans. The Spartans died to the last man, killing many Persians in the process; the tactical value of their stand is disputed, but its symbolic value is not: by their brave stand against overwhelming odds the Spartans raised Greek morale, and cemented their reputation as the bravest of warriors.

Several stories are told of Spartan valor under fire. In one a Persian spy goes ahead to scout, and sees that the pass is defended by only a few Spartans. But those Spartans seem completely indifferent to their fate; they are leisurely exercising and combing their long hair. Xerxes, when told the news, thought the Greeks were acting absurdly: Didn’t they know that his huge army was about to overwhelm them? Xerxes’ Greek advisor tells him that this is the Spartan’s way: when they are about to enter battle to risk their lives they dress up in their finest. Xerxes is sure the Spartans will run away, and waits for days before attacking them, but they do not run away. In another story a Persian mocks the Spartans by telling them that they will shoot so many arrows at them that the sun’s light will be blotted out. A Spartan responds: Good; then we can fight in the shade. Thermopylae is the Greek Alamo, the Greek battle of Bunker Hill, the bravely fought battle which was lost thanks to overwhelming odds but inspired the losing side to the greater efforts that ultimately resulted in victory.

The first clear-cut Greek victory would be won largely by Athenian ships. The Greek alliance threatened to disintegrate as those northern Greek cities which were captured by the Persians lost interest in defending their comrades to the South, and the Peloponnesian cities wished retreat to defend the Peloponnese itself. The Athenians here took the brave and remarkable step of evacuating their city; realizing they could not hold it against the Persians (who were considerably more skilled at siegecraft than the Greeks were), they moved their people south, and set up their navy at the island of Salamis, just off the coast. The clever Athenian leader Themistocles managed to keep the Greek armada together (many of the Peloponnesians wanted to retreat to the south) and to lure Xerxes' fleet into fighting in the narrows, where their superior numbers would be of no avail. Themistocles had a tough time keeping the Greeks together at Salamis, and the Greek fleet seemed about to break up, with each contingent going home to defend its own city. Themistocles came up with a trick. Just when it seemed that the Greeks were going to retreat, he seems to have encouraged the Persians to attack by saying that the Greeks were on the run--as they would have been had the Persians not followed Themistocles' advice and attacked before the Greeks could decide to retreat. The Persian navy was crushed.

But this still left the Persian land forces intact. While Xerxes himself went back to Asia, fearful that the Greek navy would cut him off, he left a general in charge of a massive land army. This army camped out north of Athens, near Thebes, which, like many cities the Persians had conquered, had (naturally) medized, that is, gone over to the Persian side. But a Greek allied force with troops from some 31 cities defeated the Persian host, ending the Persian threat to mainland Greece.

There are many answers to this question. The Persian army, though much larger than that of the Greeks, was made up of numerous nationalities; few of its troops spoke the same language, few had the same sort of equipment. Both army and fleet were so big, in fact, that the Persians had trouble keeping them supplied. They may also have committed strategic blunders by fighting the Greeks in territory most advantageous to the Greeks. The Greeks, by contrast, spoke the same language and used the same sort of equipment. And their hoplite-phalanx style of fighting proved superior to the looser style of the Persians, at least in this war. The Persians fought a bit like one sees Indians fighting in westerns: they were brave as individuals, but did not wish to slug it out in infantry warfare but to weave and dart as individuals. In two key battles, at any rate, Thermopylae and Salamis, the Greeks managed to coax the Persians into fighting along a narrow front where they could not bring their superior numbers to bear, and where the hoplite style of fighting (or its naval equivalent) made sense.

For the Greeks, King Xerxes was the clearest example ever of the arrogant overconfidence called hubris. Xerxes ruled a huge empire, and had put together a massive fleet and massive army; according to our Greek sources, at any rate, he never even considered that he could lose. He surrounded himself largely with advisors who would tell him only what he wanted to hear, not what he needed to hear; and his arrogant way of treating his troops may have led them to fear him but hardly inspired them to fight as well as the Greeks would. He and his Persians were further weakened because they had grow rich and soft; used to luxury and always getting their way, they were in no shape for the rigors of war in Greece. So the Greeks.

The Greeks, according to the Greeks, were victorious because of their virtues. They believed their poverty relative to the richer Persians, was part of their strength: it toughened them for battle. They also had more than their fair share of wisdom, they tended to think, and were buoyed up by the strength of their laws and customs.

Much of this analysis is given in a conversation Herodotus puts into the mouths of Xerxes and his Greek advisor, the Spartan Demaratus. (For the full text, consult Herodotus book 7, chapters 101 and following.) The Greek advisor tells him that

But this puts things exactly backwards. Xerxes’ men (or at least many of them, especially the majority of his army that is made up of people ruled by Persians rather than Persians themselves) fight only because they are forced to--sometimes literally by officers standing behind them with whips. The Greeks chose to fight, freely, and thus fight far more bravely. This is what Demaratus says of the Spartans.

Thus the Greeks' virtues, the courage we especially associate with the Spartans, and the wisdom we associate particularly with the Athenians, are part of the fruits of their freedom. The fact that the men fighting in the Persian war on the Greek side considered themselves free men, i.e., men with a say in how the government was run, meant that they were that much the more willing to fight and die to ensure that Greece stayed free from foreign rule. The subjects of the Persian king, who had no say in how their government worked, were far less motivated to fight. Or so, at any rate, the Greeks would tell us.

For the Persians this defeat was a relatively minor affair. Their empire would last for 150 years more, and would often play a leading, if largely indirect, role in Greek affairs. For the Greeks the results were far more marked. They took great pride in their success against overwhelming odds, and became still more proud of their culture and conscious of the difference which they believed distinguished them from their "barbarian" neighbors. Athens in particular began a quick recovery from her war damage and, thanks to her navy, soon became the leading power in Greece. Athens would give birth to tragedy, comedy, and moral philosophy, and nurture the origins of history, rhetoric, and classical art. So great were her achievements that we consider the defeat of the Persians the dawn of a new age, the Classical Period, long considered by many to be the golden age of Greece. But of the most remarkable achievement of the Persian Wars, Greek unity, was quickly lost. Athens' rise would lead to tension with Sparta, still the leading land power, and the Greek honeymoon after the Persian Wars would prove depressingly brief. Soon the Greeks were at each other's throats again. In the long run it would not be the Persians who put an end to the Greek golden age but the Greeks themselves.