The great Persian War and its preliminaries

by G. B. Grundy

Thus, for all practical purposes, when the two races came into conflict in 480 they were, militarily speaking, unknown quantities to one another, and each had to learn how best to meet the strategy and tactics of the enemy. The consequence was inevitable. Both sides made grave mistakes of commission and omission; and it may be even said that the victors made more than the vanquished, though not of such a fatal character. The Corinthians were not indeed wrong when in later days they summed up the causes of the issue of the war by saying that “the Persian was the rock on which he himself made shipwreck;” for of the two main reasons which led to the final victory of the Greeks, one was undoubtedly the fatal nature of the mistakes which the Persians made. They seem, relying on their prestige, and on their enormous numbers, to have held their adversaries too cheaply; and from this fundamental error all their other errors were generated.

Knowledge after the event renders it very difficult to appreciate the circumstances of any particular date in history, and the difficulty is all the greater if the events of the time immediately succeeding be of such a nature as to completely change those circumstances. Such is markedly the case in the instance under consideration. The mental attitude of the Persian towards the Greek power after 479 is well known to the modern world; and it is recognized indeed that a great change must have been brought about in it by the events of that and the preceding year; but the extent of the change is not perhaps realized, because the very real nature of the grounds of confidence with which Persia entered upon the war are not sufficiently taken into consideration, and the efforts made by Herodotus to bring this confidence into prominence are too apt to be regarded as aiming at the greater glorification of his own race.

And yet the grounds for that confidence are plain. In a long and almost unbroken series of wars the Persian had conquered Western Asia. He had never met with the race which could face his own upon the set field of battle, and this, not in an experience of a few years, but of half a century. He might indeed feel that he had been tried in the balance of warfare and not found wanting. Man’s success against him had never been more than temporary.

It now remains to be considered why this confidence was ill-grounded.

The Persian had never seen the Greek heavy-armed infantryman at his best, well disciplined, and fighting on ground suited to his tactics, save perhaps at Marathon, when the test was probably regarded as unconvincing. ARMS AND THE LAND. Herodotus points out the superiority of his panoply to that of the comparatively light-armed Persian. There is much more of the empirical than of the scientific in the lessons of war; and the experience of all ages points to the fact that an army which enjoys a noticeable superiority over its enemy in respect to weapons will in all probability, if other things be equal, come off victorious. Such exceptions as history can adduce to this rule are rather apparent than real, and are, in the vast majority of cases, due to the possessor of the superior arms adopting tactics either unstated to them, or wholly at variance with the nature of the region wherein fighting is being carried on. The Greeks at Platæa made a mistake of the latter kind, which was only annulled by a greater mistake made subsequently by the other side.

In this great war, then, the two most efficient causes of its issue were (1) the undue confidence of the Persian, giving rise to fatal mistakes; (2) the great superiority of the Greek panoply. A third, of a negative character, may perhaps be added, namely, that the nature of the country did not permit of the invader making use of his most formidable arm,—the cavalry. The second and third causes may be included in that wider generalization which has been already discussed;—the West on its own ground must have prevailed over the East.

The immediate preliminaries of the actual invasion of Greek territory bring into prominence the high state of efficiency which must have been attained in the military organization of the Persian empire. Leaving out of consideration the difficulties to be overcome before the huge mixed force was collected at Sardes (which town became for the time being, in place of Susa, the prime military base of the empire), the organization which enabled this great army to be brought without accident, or, in so far as present knowledge goes, without a hitch of any kind, over the eight hundred miles of difficult country which separated its base from Middle Greece, must have been the outcome of a highly effective and highly elaborated system evolved by a people whose experience was indeed large and long, but who must also have been gifted with that very high form of mental capacity which is able to carry out a great work of this nature. The secret of success,—it may almost be said of possibility,—in the present instance was the employment of the fleet for commissariat purposes. It was a method of advance not new to Persian campaigning, the first instance of its employment going back as far as the time of the invasion of Egypt by Cambyses.

On the Greek side organization on so huge a scale was not called for. Numbers were smaller, and distances in comparison insignificant; and only at the end of the campaign, when the Athenian fleet was engaged in the blockade of Sestos, had a long period of absence from the commissariat base to be provided for. Still, what was done must have been done on a system; and the system cannot be supposed to have been a bad one, for there is no hint of its ever having broken down. It was in all probability most severely tried when it became necessary to keep up the supplies of the great host during the weeks it remained at Platæa. Such mention of it as occurs in Herodotus’ narrative is of a purely incidental character. It was a side of the war in which he was not likely to take any great interest, even if he could have obtained much information on the subject, or have appreciated the significance of such information as he did obtain. The disaster to the commissariat train in the pass of Dryoskephalæ is the most prominent of the rare instances in which Herodotus mentions anything connected with this department of the service. His reference to a signalling system extending through Eubœa at the time of Artemisium,—a line of communication which was in all probability carried to the Hellenic base in the Saronic gulf,—shows that there was a certain amount of elaboration in the organization on the Greek side.

STRATEGY AND TACTICS.

When it is borne in mind that the Greeks were in this war carrying on operations on a scale infinitely exceeding anything of which they can have had experience, it must be admitted as remarkable that, whatever the defects of their military policy, whatever the mistakes they made, they managed to evolve out of their experience of operations on a small scale a system of organization which was applicable to the great operations of this war, and which did not in any known instance lead to a breakdown which can be attributed to defect in the system itself.