The great Persian War and its preliminaries

by G. B. Grundy

H. ix. 70.

It is doubtless the case that the numbers of those who perished on the Persian side were very large, though much exaggerated in later tradition. On the Greek side the losses, as given by Herodotus, were ninety-one Lacedæmonians, seventeen Tegeans, and fifty-two Athenians. It is evident that this statement refers only to those who fell in the fighting of the last day of the battle; but, even so, it may be suspected that there is a considerable understatement. It is, indeed, the case that, throughout the history of the fifth and fourth centuries, the losses of Greek armies in victorious combats against Orientals are singularly small; but it is hardly credible that on the present occasion, when the Persian infantry and cavalry fought with all the confidence of success, that the large mass of their opponents, the majority of whom were light-armed, lost but ninety-one men in a somewhat protracted engagement; still less is it credible that the Athenian loss was so small when matched against an enemy armed like themselves.

Of the Greeks that took part in the fight, Herodotus considers that the Lacedæmonians distinguished themselves most, and after them the Athenians and Tegeans.

Any one who realizes the difficulties which must have faced the historian of the fifth century when seeking to discover the truth with respect to the incidents of a battle which had been fought years before he began even to collect his materials, must admire the success which Herodotus has attained in his description. At the same time, that description is of such a nature, and is so manifest in its limitations, that a careful reader can distinguish without difficulty the kind of sources from which it is drawn. There is hardly any trace whatever of any official record lying behind it; it does not even seem as if the historian drew his information with regard to any one of its incidents from any one who was acquainted with the design of those in command. The account, as it stands, seems to be mainly built upon a foundation of evidence furnished by some intelligent observer or observers present at the fight in some subordinate position. This fact would account for the entire absence of any mention of any plan, strategic or tactical, on the part of the Greek generals. Two motives continually brought forward for the movements of the Greek force are the want of water and the damage wrought by the Persian cavalry; and these are the very motives which would present themselves to the mind of a Greek soldier to whom the plans governing the battle were unknown. It is fortunate that sufficient details of a reliable character have been preserved to make it possible to see the general nature of the design entertained by those in command in what was certainly the greatest and most interesting of the Hellenic battles of the fifth century. But, while the major part of Herodotus’ narrative rests on the basis of information thus supplied, there are undoubtedly parts of it which are drawn from traditional sources. He seems to have interwoven into the main story incidents drawn both from Athenian and from Spartan, or possibly Pan-Hellenic traditions; for instance, the tale of the shifting of the positions of the Athenians and Spartans in the Greek line of battle, and possibly the tale of Amompharetos, together with passages here and there which show a bias in favour of some particular element in the Greek army. But, judged even by modern standard, there is but little to find fault with in the account, in so far as its fairness is concerned. The only section of it which shows signs of personal feeling on the part of the narrator himself, is that relating to the conduct of the Greek centre after the withdrawal from the second position. SURVEY OF THE BATTLE. In that case it may be suspected that what has appeared to him the reprehensible and selfish policy of the Peloponnesian states in the previous period of the war, has coloured his view of the conduct of their contingents on this particular occasion. His failure to appreciate the strategy and larger tactics is in accordance with what is found elsewhere in his history; and though it renders his narrative difficult to unravel, it makes the demonstrable accuracy of the tale which he does tell all the more remarkable.

A battle so great and so important must necessarily excite the imagination of any student of history. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that much of the environment of our daily life at the present day owes its existence to the issue of that struggle in the hollow beneath the temple of Eleusinian Demeter. Had the great battle turned out differently, as it so very nearly did, the whole history of the fifth century might have been altered. Surely it was one of the strangest battles ever fought; it was indeed more of the nature of a campaign within an extremely circumscribed area. The operations were spread over a period of certainly not less than three weeks, reckoning from the arrival in Bœotia up to the time of the capture of Thebes; and it is possible even to argue from Herodotus’ narrative that they covered a period of four weeks. But the most remarkable point with regard to them is not perhaps their protracted nature, but the extraordinary variations of success and failure which attended the operations of either side. It was eminently a battle in which the ultimate success was due, not to the excellence of the dispositions made by the victor, but to the mistakes made by the vanquished. Theoretically those mistakes were hardly greater than those which the victor made: practically they were fatal.

The Greeks arrived in Bœotia and took up their position with a general intention of striking at the Persian and his base of operations along the Dryoskephalæ-Thebes road. Finding this blocked by the Persian position, they were probably somewhat at a loss as to what course to pursue next. Opinions were, doubtless, divided as to the significance of that factor of unknown but suspected value in the Persian camp, the cavalry, for, owing to its absence at Marathon, the European Greeks had had no opportunity of testing its effectiveness. Mardonius was not slow in providing them with an experiment in his desire to win what would have been a striking success by piercing the Greek centre, and seizing the pass in its immediate rear, he made the mistake of using his cavalry against unbroken heavy infantry in a position which offered exceedingly restricted opportunities for such an attack, with the inevitable result that his men were beaten back with considerable loss. There can be little question that the Greek commanders misread the results of that experiment, and mistakenly assumed that what had occurred on the low ground in front of Erythræ gave satisfactory assurance of the capacity of the Greek army to face the enemy’s cavalry in the plain. It did not, apparently, occur to them that it was one thing to face that cavalry in a position where the attack could only be on their front, and, moreover, on but a small extent of that front, and quite another thing to meet it on the open plain, where its extreme mobility, compared with their own immobility, would render it able to assail front, flank, and rear at the same time.

Their immediate object of attack was Thebes. It is little short of absurd to suppose that a people such as the Greeks reversed without cause the whole system on which they had hitherto conducted the war, and entered Bœotia with a witless lack of design.

Their plan was to force the Persian to retire from Northern Greece, and from Bœotia first of all, and so to get rid of the danger which manifestly threatened them, the establishment of a new frontier of the great Empire within their own borders. If the enemy’s tenure of Thebes could be rendered impossible, he must retire northward; and against Thebes therefore their operations were directly aimed. The fatal weakness of their plan was their lack of cavalry; but it was the very form of weakness whose significance, from their lack of experience in that arm, they were least capable of gauging.

In spite of this, their design in moving to the second position might have been effective, had they been able to execute it before the Persians received information of what they were doing. STRATEGY AND TACTICS AT PLATÆA. A flank attack suddenly delivered by the whole Greek army could hardly have failed to lead to decisive results. With such an end in view, they moved along the side of Kithæron, and then, advancing into the plain, deployed the army in that depression which was hidden from the Persian camp by the northern ridges,[229] so as to be able to advance in battle array directly upon the Persian right flank. But on reaching the summit of the Asopos ridge, they found that their movement had been discovered by the enemy, and that he had also moved in such a way as to make a flank attack and a surprise alike impossible. The position was, for the time being, stalemate; and remained so for at least a week, neither side venturing on a direct frontal attack. But the situation began to develop rapidly so soon as Mardonius launched his cavalry against the short Greek line of communication with the passes. The position became desperate when he began to use his horsemen in the effective way in which that excellent Asiatic light cavalry could be used, to harass the Greek infantry by a form of attack which they were wholly unable to meet in adequate fashion.

The Greek force was obliged to retire from the Asopos ridge. Mardonius, if he had only known it, had won the battle, in the sense that he had rendered impossible all further offensive operations on the part of the enemy in the plains of Bœotia. He was too eager to convert the defeat into a rout, when, on seeing that the Greeks had evacuated their position during the night, he launched the whole of his infantry against them. The mistake was fatal, irremediable. The rout of his infantry was such that no effort on the part of his cavalry could restore the battle; all that it could do was to cover the retreat as far as the stockaded ramp. Marengo is perhaps the only other great battle in history which presents so startling a reversal of fortune. Platæa was lost and won. Truly the Persian was the rock on which he himself made shipwreck.