One the most mythologized wars in the history of Western Civilization. The basis of the conflict was laid when Cyrus the Great founded the Persian Empire, in the process conquering several Greek colonies in Asia Minor. Under Darius I, several of these Asian Greek cities mounted the Ionian Revolt in 499 BC and enlisted the help of kinsmen across the sea, notably Athensnote . After crushing the rebellion, Darius dispatched two invasion forces against Athens in 492 and 490 BC, but the first of these was sunk in a violent storm off of Cape Athos while the second was defeated at the Battle of Marathon
In 480 BC Darius' successor, Xerxes, after he had persuaded the rest of The Empire to accept him as King, launched a massive second invasion of Greece. He was delayed by the Spartans at the mountain pass of Thermopylae and by the Athenian fleet at Artemisium, however Xerxes continued to march on until he arrived at Athens. Athens had been evacuated, which deprived the Persians of the human part of their Plunder when they sacked it. The Persians mused over their "capture" a little when they received a message that the Athenian politician Themistocles intended to defect. Xerxes took the offer, but Themistocles lured the Persian fleet into an ambush, resulting in its destruction in the Battle of Salamis. With his supply lines over the Bosporus now vulnerable, Xerxes took half of his army with him back to Persia and left the other half under his most trusted general, Mardonius, to winter in Greece and pick up the conquest the next year.
The next year, however, an allied Greek army drawn from several city-states (most notably Athens and Sparta) destroyed the remaining Persian forces at Plataea. A final victory of Greek forces at Mycale drove the Persians from the Aegean and pretty much secured the independence of Greece from Persia. After this, the Persians gave up on trying to control Greece militarily, instead opting to influence Greek politics with money and diplomacy.
One of the chief reasons for such an upset result in the war was the contrasting military practices between the Greek and Persians. The Persians had a massive army with a professional core (the so-called "Immortals") accompanied by large local levies. They were well-disciplined veterans whose tactics revolved around the "Sparabara" formation, essentially a mobile fort where wicker shield-holding spearmen provided a battle line to protect thousands upon thousands of lightly-armored, fast-moving archers: when a Greek soldier at Thermopylae claimed that Persian arrows "blotted out the sun," he wasn't kidding. Persian cavalry was also dominant, with lightly-armored horse archers raiding and softening enemy formations before heavily armored cataphracts charged in to break them up. Unfortunately for the Persians, the Greeks had in their attempts to mimic Homeric-style warfare created the "Phalanx" formation, a huge hedgehog of heavily armored spearmen that when properly organized was essentially immune to arrows and cavalry, at least from the frontnote .
The result was that Persian soldiers wearing linen cuirasses and armed with bows and axes quickly found their arrows bouncing off of thousands of charging Greeks clad head-to-toe in bronze and linothorax armor, the result of which was similar to a line of NFL quarterbacks slamming into a Girl Scout troop. Subsequent Persian military doctrine would attempt to counter Greek formations by improving their soldiers' hand-to-hand capabilities and adding in shock attack elements like armored chariots, battle elephants, and Greek mercenaries accustomed to phalanx warfare, though this latter element would end up being useless in the face of the even heavier Macedonian pike phalanx.
See Alexander the Great's campaign against Persia for the sequel, and The Peloponnesian War for the depressing spin-off featuring the most popular factions from the original turning on one another.
Depictions in fiction:
Comic Books
- 300 by Frank Miller, a Battle Epic at the Thermopylae from the Spartans' perspective, based on the account given by Herodotus.
- Democracy by Alecos Papadatos, Annie Di Donna and Abraham Kawa opens with Athens at war against Persia. While the central story has to do with the birth of Democracy, it ends with the Athenians charging into the Persian army.
- The Rat-Man series includes 299+1, a Spin-Off and Affectionate Parody of 300 by Frank Miller.
Film
- The 300 Spartans, a 1962 film about the Battle of the Thermopylae that inspired Frank Miller.
- 300, the live action movie adaptation of Frank Miller's comic book about the Battle of the Thermopylae by Zack Snyder.
- 300: Rise of an Empire, sequel to the above, about the naval battle of Artemisium and Salamis.
- The Persians, adaptation of the Aeschylus play.
Literature
- The Histories by Herodotus of Halicarnassus is the historical main source on the Greco-Persian Wars. While not "fiction" per se, it probably contains its share of legends and embellishments.
- Gates of Fire by Steven Pressman is a historical novel about the Battle of Thermopylae.
- Creation by Gore Vidal presents a rare Persian perspective of these events.
- Spartan is an historical fiction novel set during the Second Greco-Persian War with King Leonidas appearing as a character (along with Themistokles and other Historical Domain Characters). The protagonist is a Spartan boy abandoned by his family for being born a cripple and raised by Helots, the Slave Race of Spartans.
- The Long War hexalogy by Christian Cameron covers the period through the first-person narrative of Arimnestos of Plataea, who participates in key events of the war from its beginning with the Ionian Revolt to its finish at the Battle of Mycale.
Live Action TV
- The "One Against An Army" episode of Xena: Warrior Princess.
Podcast
- Dan Carlin makes frequent reference to this conflict in his Hardcore History series, being the focus of his Shield of the West and King of Kings episodes.
Theatre
- The Persians by ancient Greek tragic playwright Aeschylus, a contemporary of the Second Persian War, and the only extant Greek tragedy concerned with historical (as opposed to mythical) events. It is set at the Persian royal court in Susa and centers around the news from the Battle of Salamis being brought back to Xerxes' mother Atossa.
Video Games
- The Battle for Greece expansion for Age of Empires II covers the Ionian Revolt in its first act from the Achaemenid perspective. The wars themselves are covered in the second act from the Athenian perspective, complete with the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Artemisium and Salamis, and Plataea.
- Assassin's Creed: Odyssey begins with a depiction of the Battle of Thermopylae between Leonidas' 300 Spartans and the Persian army led by Xerxes. The rest of the game deals with the following Peloponnesian War, but with a few indications that scars from this war are still being felt. Additionally, Leonidas is also the grandfather of Alexios and Kassandra.
- Part of the Athenian campaign in Zeus: Master of Olympus has you fighting the Persians. The game having a less-than rigorous approach to history, the campaign ends once you conquer Persia and also features an episode where you fight centaurs over a bridal kidnapping.
