The great Persian War and its preliminaries

by G. B. Grundy

The huge numbers which Herodotus gives of the Persian army are not merely open to doubt; they are practically impossible; but there exists no evidence whatever which would justify the assumption that the numbers were aught but very large indeed. They must have amounted at the lowest estimate to several hundred thousand men. The expedition was a great effort by a great empire, by far the greatest empire of its time, and, during the short period of its vigorous life, one of the greatest that the world has ever seen. The difficulty of transporting such a force round the long circuit of the Ægean must have been enormous; and the bare fact that it was transported successfully over such a distance bears eloquent testimony to the military organization of the empire which despatched it.

The tendency, which is sometimes displayed, to belittle the Persia of this time is in violent disagreement with such evidence as is extant, and is due to an attempt to read her history in the fourth century into her history of one century earlier. If human ability is to be judged by what human power can do, the mere fact that the organizers of this expedition were able to bring a force of this magnitude over hundreds of miles of difficult country, to keep it adequately supplied with provisions, and to place it upon the field of operations in an efficient state, must be taken as convincing proof of ability of no ordinary kind.

HERODOTUS AS A TOPOGRAPHER.

As far as the commissariat is concerned, it is known from Herodotus that it was, to a certain extent at any rate, requisitioned from various regions through which the army passed; but it is also quite certain that, except at a few points along the route, the land traversed was not of a description that would render it possible for the supplies of more than a fraction of the huge host to be drawn from local resources, and that the victualling must have been largely dependent on the fleet.

As far as Therma the association of the two branches of the expedition was of a comparatively easy and unimpeded character; but from this point onward the physical difficulties to be met and overcome were infinitely greater. The land to be traversed was, on the whole, poorer than that already passed, and the land route lay, in many places, at some distance from the sea, so that co-operation would be much less easy than it had been hitherto. And yet, despite these difficulties, the commissariat seems to have been still adequately maintained.

Herodotus does not describe with any detail the course which the army followed in its advance southward until, at any rate, Thermopylæ had been passed. It is hardly likely that he possessed much information of the incidents of the rapid march through Thessaly, though his remarks about the physical characteristics of that peculiar region seem to emanate from the recollection of one who has actually seen what he is describing. When and how he went there cannot now be said, but the evidence which he himself gives in many portions of his history that he is describing from personal autopsy the scenes of the great events which he narrates is overwhelming. Herodotus was not only the most conscientious, he was also the best topographer among ancient historians. The almost childlike simplicity of his narrative is calculated to create a presumption that the writer would not be likely to inquire into the question of truth or falsehood in the determined fashion which a minute examination of the theatre of events implies. The presumption would, in his case, be eminently erroneous. As a traveller, as heir to the historio-geographers of Ionia, he did not look upon history as having been formed, as it were, in a vacuum. He saw, as a man of his insight must inevitably see, that it is the land that creates the man, not the man the land,—a fact which the marked characteristics of the Ægean region would impress upon a consciousness far duller than was his.

Long before Xerxes had arrived at Therma the question of the defence of Hellas had been the subject of anxious consideration and of violent discussion among the Greek States. It is perhaps impossible to realize to its fulness the alarm which the reported advance of the great expedition created throughout the Hellenic world in Europe. The great monarchy which some sixty years before had reached the Ægean; the great power which for more than a generation past had filled the whole eastern horizon of the Greek; the power which had subdued Asia, even beyond the limits of the known world, and had conquered lands unknown, whose terrors would certainly not be diminished in the myth and fable of those who knew them not, was now advancing upon their own homeland. The lack of unity at home, too, must have served greatly to increase the anxiety of the situation. New combinations had to be formed, to be sought; old enmities to be laid aside, for a while, at any rate; old enemies to be reconciled, before anything resembling a united front could be shown to the great Eastern power which was now putting forth all its strength against them.

In most respects everything had to be done in a hurry.

It had not been possible for those who knew what had been going on for some years past beyond the Ægean to rouse into action the lethargy of the self-centred life of the barrier-bound states of Greece. One phase of the situation was of peculiar irony. Athens, the state which seems to have seen most clearly the coming storm, and to have rightly apprehended its tremendous nature, had herself, consciously or unconsciously, created a myth peculiarly calculated to lull the more ignorant population of the country into a false sense of security. The tale of Marathon was less than ten years old; but under the fostering care of its parent, it had grown immensely during that period, and done great credit throughout Greece to those who were responsible for its origin and nurture. APATHY OF THE GREEKS. Its growth had been unimpeded by the deadly enemy of young and promising myths, independent evidence; for, owing to the fact that the Athenians had been practically alone at Marathon, this can hardly be said to have existed; and the history of the fight was only limited by the powers of its creators. The myth had done its work: it had raised the reputation of Athens in Greece generally to a great height, in singular, and, to the Athenians, in pleasing contrast to the relative obscurity of the past. But it had done more than this. It had, no doubt, created an impression in the Greek mind generally that the great power of Persia was not so great as had been imagined, if an army not by any means accounted the best in Greece could inflict on it a blow supposed to be so crushing as Marathon. To Athens alone was the falsity of this impression known; and yet, even in the face of this great danger, whose greatness she also could alone adequately gauge, she could not afford to dispel it. She stood between the devil of a reputation and the deep sea of the truth.

Such was the situation in the years preceding 480. No joint preparation was made, because its necessity was not apprehended. Men either did not believe that the expedition would come to anything; or, if they did believe it, they imagined that a power which had been successfully met by one of the states of Greece, and that not the most powerful, could be dealt with effectively by a combined force, without unnecessarily prolonged preparation.