The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis

In 486 BC, King Xerxes ascended the Persian throne, inheriting its vast and glittering world empire. But his ambition didn’t stop there - he sought revenge on Greece. In this episode of The Ancients, the culmination of our two-part series on the Persian Wars, Tristan Hughes is joined once again by Dr. Roel Konijnendijk and Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones to explore Xerxes' massive invasion. From the assembling of his colossal army to the legendary battles of Thermopylae and Salamis featured in the accounts of Herodotus, discover the earth-shattering conclusion to the largest invasion ancient Greece had ever faced. Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 1:35Tristan Hughes?

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• 2:57Tristan Hughes?

  486 B.C. The Persian Empire is the largest in the world, stretching from the borders of India to the Aegean Sea. And a new king sits on its throne, eager to display his military might. With revolts and unruliness on the fringes of his large empire, this new young king has a lot to deal with. But soon enough, he would turn his attention westwards, to cities who had resisted and irritated his father before him: Greek cities like Athens, Sparta, and their allies. This king's name was Xerxes, and he would launch the largest invasion of Greece ever seen to that point in history.

• 3:40Tristan Hughes?

  It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today, we are continuing our deep dive into the Persian Wars with Dr. Rul Khananadiq from Oxford University and Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones from Cardiff University. In the previous episode, we covered the story of the First Persian War, how Persia's expansion west into Anatolia, present-day Turkey, led them into contact with the Greek world; how Athens aided an Ionian Greek revolt against the Persians, which in turn led the Persians to launch a punitive expedition against the Athenians, culminating in the legendary Battle of Marathon, recorded by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus.

• 4:23Tristan Hughes?

  But although the Athenians won at Marathon, the Persians ultimately returned. A decade later, a new Persian king was on the throne, seeking great conquests. And he, Xerxes, had his eyes set on Greece. This second Persian invasion of Greece is the subject of today's episode. We'll explore the story of how Xerxes came to power, how he amassed a great force for this new invasion, wanting to surpass his father Darius. We'll delve into the stories of famous battles such as Thermopylae and Salamis, and explore famous myths surrounding them. This was a really entertaining discussion with both Rul and Lloyd. It was a pleasure to listen to both of them. Let's get into it.

• 5:09Tristan Hughes?

  In the first episode, we covered the first Persian invasion of Greece culminating in the Battle of Marathon. And so, guys, so that's 490 B.C. To get to the Persians returning, almost like the sequel, we go a few years later. So what's the setting in, let's say, the mid 480s B.C. that will ultimately spur the Persians to return to Greece?

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Well, we've got a new king on the throne of Persia, and that's an important thing to acknowledge. Xerxes had come to the throne, not ever guaranteed to be the heir of Darius. There was no premiership in Persia, so it was always a bit of a free-for-all. But I think what Xerxes had in his favour is that he had the blood of Cyrus the Great and of his father Darius in his veins. So I think that pushed him into the purple. And one thing that all Achaemenid kings needed to do at their accession, really, was first of all bury their fathers and then show themselves to be militarily capable. So Xerxes is already up for a fight. The first opportunity comes, actually, with there's a sort of mini-rebellion that goes on in Egypt.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  And straight away, I mean, within the first months of his reign, he himself leads an army into Egypt and crushes. Whatever events are going on there in the Nile Delta and then returns to Persia with a kind of, you know, his, his battle spirit up really, it was a successful campaign. Xerxes was clearly not, never been afraid of wars, you know, he's been stationed, we know as a, as a young prince in places like Parthia on the border zones. Just the arrival of Xerxes onto the scene in itself is enough of a momentum to start thinking about change.

• 6:46Tristan Hughes?

  Parthia, so that's kind of like the Caspian Sea area, isn't it? We've got the horse lords.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  We have some cuneiform evidence now that he had been sent there by his father, probably as a satrap. Again, this is where kings learned their craft really was by doing jobs within the satrapies variously around the empire.

• 7:05Tristan Hughes?

  So Xerxes himself is not really involved in the, in the first Persian invasion or expedition to Greece, is he? He, he's elsewhere in the empire at that time.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, he would have been still quite young at that time. So now he's, you know, into his early twenties, mid twenties possibly at this point. And needing to show himself as a, as a capable king, because even though, as we said in the last episode, you know, the, the empire itself was run as a kind of family affair. In fact, there were, was constant infighting within that family and there were a myriad of brothers and half brothers around Xerxes. Who were more than happy to take on the, the mantle of kingship and sit on the throne as well. So it was very important for Xerxes to get himself a family and get himself some victories.

• 7:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's worth stressing that Xerxes really presents himself as a continuity candidate, which has

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely.

• 7:56Speaker 04

  Has a lot of sort of grounding in the fact that Darius was a usurper, but we don't have time to get into that particular story.

• 8:02Tristan Hughes?

  We've done an episode with Lloyd all about Darius the Great.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  Oh, perfect, brilliant. So I refer you back to Lloyd. But fundamentally, Xerxes then has all these royal inscriptions put up where he's essentially saying, you know, my dad was great and I am doing the same things that he's doing. I'm continuing the work. I'm finishing the jobs that he left unfinished. That is how he presents himself. And that obviously both cements his legitimacy by saying, you know, you like Darius? Well, I am more of the same. And also it implies that Greece is going to feel this at some point.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  At one point in one inscription which we found at Persepolis, he actually states, my father had other sons older than I. But I was the greatest. Methysta is the word he uses, you know. So yeah, you, you like my father, see what I'm going to do.

• 8:47Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned the Greeks there, and as you guys both highlighted in the previous episode, we shouldn't be imagining the Greek world at this time of just being mainland Greece. You've got Greek city-states, well, Hellenic-speaking in western Anatolia, Black Sea, all the way to Sicily and southern Italy, even southern France. And following the Athenian victory, success, repelling the first Persian invasion of Greece in 490, Battle of Marathon, and so on. In the years following, do we know much about the Greek world in those immediate years when Xerxes immediately comes to the throne? Are the Athenians still bathing in the afterglow of their success? What do we know?

• 9:26Speaker 04

  Very little, actually. So that decade is really under-reported, even in Herodotus, which is very frustrating. He loves to know what was going on.

• 9:33Tristan Hughes?

  And he's our main source. Just to highlight, he's our main source again, isn't he?

• 9:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Herodotus is the historian, is the main narrative source. So obviously there's other material that we can draw on, but fundamentally, we are relying on Herodotus to tell us what's going on. And he skips fairly lightly over this period. He doesn't actually talk in much detail about almost anything that goes on. There's very few events that we can place within that period. One of them possibly is this really devastating war between Phocis and Thessaly, which will become relevant later. But otherwise, there isn't really that much. I mean, the big events of this period, Athens' war with Aginaz in the 490s, actually before Marathon, Sparta's final defeat of Argos at Cepaya in 494, again before Marathon. These are some of the really big seismic shifts that are happening

• 10:18Speaker 04

  in the Greek world in this period. So I think the main event that we place in the 480s that is actually going to affect things meaningfully is the expansion of the Athenian navy. So this is something that happens in 483, around that time, when the Athenians, actually, they have a mine at Laurion, a silver mine in their territory, in which they find a suddenly find a highly productive vein. So they suddenly find a ton of silver, essentially. And then there's a decision of what are we going to do with it. And the story that was told is that initially, the idea was that they were just going to distribute it among the whole population. So they were going to take that windfall and just sort of hand it out. But Themistocles, who is a new man, he's literally the son of a man named Neocles, which is sort of emphasizing the idea, like he's the son of a man called New

• 11:01Speaker 04

  Glory. We are assuming that he is not from one of the traditional sort of well-established families in Athens. But he is one of these people who get the opportunity to rise because of the democracy, you know, because there's a more sort of open access to power. He convinces the assembly instead to invest it in building more ships, so warships. And the argument there, according to Herodotus, is to fight Agina. So this is the, an island that is across the bay from them, so another Greek state, which has traditionally been very prominent in naval power as well as a rival to Athens in naval power. And so they build more ships to try and, try and defeat that. One story in Herodotus is that they build 200 triremes, which are the state-of-the-art warship of the period. But another source, the Athenian Politaia, which dates to a later period, but preserves some, some good alternative

• 11:46Speaker 04

  information, says they already had 100 ships and they built 100 more. So that's an important difference because what, in one of those stories, Athens has no navy and suddenly decides, let's become a naval power, which sounds very convenient when they then decide, then end up sort of fighting the Persians at sea. The other story is that the Athenians already have strong naval interests and just decide to double down on them. And that actually makes a lot more sense when you see that, that Athenians in this period have already been meddling in the Cursanese, in the Hellespont, and they have overseas interests, they have had them for a very long time. And there are several recent studies that have emphasized that Athenian imperial designs, especially in the North Aegean, especially in the Hellespont, so that the passage between the Aegean and the Black Sea are very, very long established

• 12:31Speaker 04

  by this point. So the Athenians already have, you know, huge interests in trade and naval power. And Themistocles convinces them to say, okay, well, let's double down on that and become the greatest naval power in the Greek world. And that's what happens around 432, just in time essentially, for that fleet to become an important factor in their resistance to Persia.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  I think it's also important to add to this that while our literary sources might not be as forthcoming as we'd like, we do have, we can turn to archaeology for a bit more evidence of the continued presence of Persia, at least in the Greek mind, because from late in the reign of Darius, we found within Athens hordes of Persian coinage, for instance, both gold, daryx and silver siglois. The Persians, of course, had minted top coins in Asia Minor and parts of the Levant. And these were kind of being hoarded by wealthy Athenians for a rainy day, essentially. And they carried on them, of course, a very important image, and that is the kind of preordained Persian image

• 13:35Speaker 03

  of the great king as a warrior. And he often shows himself, you know, armed with his spear and bows and arrows, or even on horseback as well. So there's that that goes on, you know, we, we know that they're aware of the, of the Persian king's image. But also we find in this period, and this really is thanks to the work of Meg Miller in Australia, she showed how from the reign of, late in the reign of Darius into the reign of Xerxes, we get Persianisms entering into, into Athenian culture. So we should think of these as kind of like the, the chinoiserie that entered into Europe, you know, in the 17th and 18th century. So elite Athenians were collecting Persian goods.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  So we find very, very stylish Persian-formed tableware, for instance, drinking cups, bowls, jugs. But also from this same period, we start to see Athenian potters emulating those precious silver metal tableware in clay as well. So there's a vogue for Persian things. So, you know, we should never think of the world in bipartisan terms as purely, you know, at war or at peace. There's always elements of the both swirling around, you know, and now Greece is very much within the orbit of the of the huge cultural sphere that is Persia. And to show that you were

• 14:59Speaker 03

  anybody in Athens, you wanted Persian things too. So that trade that that role talks about is certainly very apparent in the wealthy houses of Athens and and permeating now down into lower echelons of Athenian society as well.

• 15:15Tristan Hughes?

  It's so interesting how you see again and again in ancient history how, you know, the the higher up members of certain societies will see goods from elsewhere is is like the trendy thing to show that they have it and and others can't. But also, as you said, Lloyd, there that it does pass down into society as well. If we do return, though, to Xerxes, he's very new to the Persian throne, fighting in Egypt straight away. How long is it before he turns his attention to Greece? Because it feels like he probably has a a big shopping list of things he wants to do.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  That's precisely right. He does have. It's not the first thing on his agenda. Having put down Greece, he has to turn his attention to Babylon too, because at the changeover succession, of course, Babylon always is a an issue for him. So he has to go and stabilize Babylon first. Now, if we, of course, again, we don't have the Persian version of these accounts, okay. But if you look at some of Xerxes' tribute lists from Persepolis and from Susa, you'll see that the Yawna are listed as part of his empire already. So like, as far as he's concerned, they were never out of it.

• 16:23Tristan Hughes?

  Who are the Yawna? Just just to remind us, who are the Yawna again?

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Is the kind of all inclusive Persian word for Greeks, of Greeks of all sorts of people. So they're there, they're next to the, you know, the Egyptians and the Parthians and the Ethiopians. The Yawna are there. So as far as Xerxes is concerned, well, they've they've never gone anywhere, you know. So it's hard to say from Xerxes' point of view when or why he decides to turn his attention to Greece. For that, I think we have to go back to the Greek sources.

• 16:53Tristan Hughes?

  And Rule, so what do the Greek sources then tell us, I'm presuming Herodotus, but others as well, about why the Persians in Xerxes does ultimately decide, let's give Greece another go?

• 17:04Speaker 04

  For Herodotus, this is a huge thing, right? Because one of the main impulses of his writing, as he says at the beginning, is to figure out why the Greeks and barbarians went to war with each other. That is how he phrases it. That is why he wrote this. And so when Xerxes decides to put the full might of the Persian Empire across and try and subdue the Greek mainland, that is for him this big moment when he has to try and sketch the causality. So he puts out this huge imagined council scene in which Xerxes consults with his closest ones, mostly relatives essentially, uncles and cousins and brothers-in-law and whatnot, to ask them, "Okay, should I invade Greece?" And in that scene, essentially, there is a very sort of schematic thing where he has

• 17:46Speaker 04

  an uncle, Artabanus, who says, "No, you shouldn't. This will end badly. You've already attacked the Scythians and it didn't go well." And so there's definitely motivation for him to say, like, "Maybe stop it with the adventures and just consolidate." But he has an ambitious cousin called Mardonius, who immediately says, "No, you should absolutely do this and it's going to be easy and it's going to be great. And we're going to just take, you know, conquer the place and take all its riches and it's going to be fantastic." And in that scene, it's made very clear, both by what Mardonius says and by what Artabanus, the uncle, says in response, that we are supposed to think that Mardonius is wrong, like, he's lying about how easy this would be. He's just telling, he's spinning fables that are going to be favorable to Xerxes, that

• 18:31Speaker 04

  are going to sound tempting to him. This is the archetype of the bad advisor, like, he is basically trying to seduce him into bad decisions, presumably because of his own ambitions. Like, in this story, he wants to become satirist of Greece, and so he says, "Okay, that's what we've got to do." And this is all very literary, this is all very schematic, right? We don't need to take this seriously as historians. But the arguments that are brought up are essentially just the idea that it is a Persian tradition to conquer, we have to go conquer something. As Lloyd has explained, Xerxes has this imperative to try and achieve military victories and conquests in order to legitimize himself. And it's the the argument in Herodotus is it's going to be easy, like the the Greeks are

• 19:12Speaker 04

  an obvious and easy target. You owe it to them, to the to the memory of your father to avenge the kind of things that they have done, supporting the Aeonian revolt, beating the Persians at Marathon. And it's a great opportunity to establish yourself as king. And so those are the kind of motivations that are that are there being put to the fore.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  And of course, it's worth reflecting as well that this is all make believe, of course, on the part of Herodotus. He was not in the the conference room, nor any other Greek was was there, you know, and this is a typical Herodotian motif of inserting himself as the narrator into these closed council meetings, so that he can hear the deliberation. But of course, it's it's all scripted by him.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. And in that sense, I mean, one of the most fantastical elements of that scene is that he presents it as if the Persians have no choice, because if they don't attack, then the Athenians will attack them. Magnificent. He literally has a phrase like, we should either do or suffer, like, we should expect that the Athenians will crush us if we don't crush them first.

• 20:14Tristan Hughes?

  So it feels like they're elevating the importance of the Greeks in the Persian minds.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  Yes, so it's specifically what we have to bear in mind is this is being written in a time when the Persian had already been defeated, and in the aftermath, the Athenians had developed their own empire. So they had seized control of the Aegean. And so for Herodotus, it's natural to assume that this was either always on the cards, or that in some way, you know, prescience of this, you know, premonitions about this, informed decision making at the time. This is a very sort of standard way for Greeks to think about things. Teleologically, you already know what's going to happen. So let's plant that seed before it ever did. Let's try and...

• 20:48Speaker 03

  Which is why Herodotus also interwines ideas of dreams and omens into all of this as well, you know. So Xerxes is plagued by dreams, you know, telling him to go forth and conquer and, you know, and he doesn't know what to do. And so Atabanas, he asks at one point, you know, I'll go and sleep in my bed. And like, you know, so in the royal bed and in the royal dressing gown, Atabanas gets exactly the same dream as Xerxes gets, you know, suddenly think, oh, yes, yes, that our fate, our destiny is is to go over to to Greece after all. So all of this is an integral part of the Herodotian system of of creating these narratives. There's a bigger divine concept that's going on here, fate, that can't be overlooked or can't be overcome.

• 21:30Tristan Hughes?

  And it also highlights, as this chat goes on, we will highlight, of course, the Herodian narrative, but then, of course, the Persian version, which Lloyd, I know you're very, very keen on to highlight, actually, what's myth, what's reality, what's based on historical evidence, and so on and so forth. I must ask, because when someone thinks of the Second Persian War, you'll get names like Thermopylae come up, and then famous movies of the recent couple of decades like 300, which Lloyd, I know you've done a film review of with History Hit on the YouTube channel. But in that movie, and in others, it seems to be conveyed that the army that Xerxes ultimately gathers is massive, and it comes from all corners of the Persian Empire. Before we delve into numbers, and actually, the route he takes,

• 22:12Tristan Hughes?

  logistically, to gather an army for Xerxes, I mean, do we know how long it takes for Xerxes to put together a force for ultimately returning to Greece, and presumably bigger than the last one of his father?

• 22:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're told that he spent years gathering this. I mean, essentially, as soon as the revolt in Egypt is crushed, he starts gathering this army, and it takes him about four years before it's ready. On the one hand, it's plausible to imagine that if he's really drawing in all these different contingents from all parts of the empire, that it would take a considerable amount of time for them to just get there. I mean, if you're drawing in Bactrians and Indians, which are supposedly involved in this, according to Herodotus, and someone must have seen them, because he describes them, and Ethiopians as well, I mean, they might have taken six months to get there, just if they keep on marching all day long. And so, it is, it would have taken time, absolutely. The other problem there, though, is that if you're gathering an army like that, you are forced to upkeep

• 23:07Speaker 04

  it, you know, you are forced to essentially supply it while it's gathering, and for years and years, apparently. And so, that would have been an astonishing logistical operation. So, we could also imagine that the forces that have come from far away are fairly token, and that the actual organisation of this army happens on site, primarily with, so the core force that's described by Socrates in some ways, the army that moves with the king. So, this is a small group of elite Persians, who are, who are sort of the core of the army, and then whatever levies they can be, they can sort of bring along on the way. So, as they go through the various satrapies, as they move west, there will be, you know, places where they will say, okay, this is the mustering part for this part of the empire. Here, we will gather the troops from Babylon, from Esputamia, from Kilikia, from other

• 23:52Speaker 04

  parts, and they sort of pick them up as they go.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree with all of that. And I also think that that splendid description we have in Herodotus of, you know, the kind of multi-ethnic army that's been put together and all this wonderful description of the clothing and armaments. I really get a feeling that what Herodotus is drawing on here is the visual propaganda that the Achaemenids put forward themselves. So for instance, on his tomb, Xerxes shows himself on this tacht or this kind of divan throne being uplifted by representatives of this whole empire. And underneath in an inscription, he says, "If you want to know how many are the people who represent my empire, look at these people below and they are named, you know,

• 24:39Speaker 03

  I am from Makkah, I am from Macedonia, I am from Sogdia, I am from Parthia and so forth." And I think what Herodotus is doing is just picking up on a very popular Achaemenid motif of the display of the empire in that way. So I don't think it was as multi-ethnic as that, or if it was, they were bits and pieces, but not this vast force that Herodotus conjures up for us.

• 25:06Tristan Hughes?

  It's funny, isn't it, how we talked in the last chat about like the trousers and how a big part of the story is the clothing that the Persians are wearing compared to the Greeks in the Herodotian narrative. And as you say, on inscriptions as well, my mind immediately goes to how they portray, I think it's the eastern Sapiens or the Saka, which even one day like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. And they have massive pointed hats.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Huge Smurf hats, yeah, yeah.

• 25:28Tristan Hughes?

  Huge Smurf kind of hats as well, right? So he just wants to mention the Saka hats too.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's the beautiful piece on the base to an inscription, like the relief there has Skun-kha, this subjected Saka king, who has this beautiful pointed hat, which almost doesn't fit the image. So they had to move the text around. Because he got added in later, right? But those hats are apparently characteristic.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  You know, I've just had sent to me from a colleague in Iran who's been digitally photographing Bistun relief right up high, right next to it, because there's scaffolding there for restoration at the moment. And I've been able to do some line drawings of them, real, sort of up close and personal. And while Darius and his two Persian officers, you know, look handsome and beautifully chiseled, it's really interesting to see how they portray the foreign kings, the Lyric kings in front of them. They are really grotesque, you know, which we don't really see from far away. You know, they've got snub noses, you know, and thick lips and big sunken eyes. And they're all wearing collars around their neck. And a little detail in this collar shows that there's a metal stud that actually presses into their throats as well.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  So it's quite remarkable, the detail, you know. So yes, just really that emphasizes the fact that the Persians were very observant about peoples and they like to portray them accurately. And I think that's what Herodotus is picking up.

• 26:48Speaker 04

  Well, I just want to sort of circle back to what we were talking about earlier with the causes of this war, because there is to some extent, although indirectly, there is a Persian version of this, which has to do with what Lois just described, this Bistun inscription, in which it's very explicitly stated that the Persian king is essentially the king of all things. Like he is the bringer of order to the world and the agent of the gods, in the agent of Aramazda in particular in achieving this. And anybody who defies him is a rebel against the truth, right? There's a rebel against the the natural order of the world and all that is good in it. And so there is an understanding of the Persians as being essentially, you know, the legitimate rulers of the entire world. And any, the existence of any autonomous state outside of that system just cannot be allowed to continue.

• 27:33Speaker 04

  Because that is, that is, that is a falsehood, right? If you say Darius is not my king, or later Xerxes is not my king, you are lying, right? That is essentially a violation of the truth.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's absolutely right, yeah.

• 27:44Speaker 04

  So ideologically, for Xerxes, the war against the Greeks could very easily be justified by simply pointing at them and saying, they don't pay me tribute. That is all the justification in royal ideology that they need. And that is also why, you know, it's important for them to bring all these people in, at least symbolically, to try and show to both the rest of the world, but also to their own subjects, we rule all of you, right? Like, all of this is our domain, this is our sovereignty. And of course, anybody else who exists outside of that, I mean, it's just a matter of time. Like, they have to be included in this. That is the way of things, and that is how everything is better.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Absolutely. In terms of like Persian theology, the idea is that Ahura Mazda, the wise lord, is the creator of the world. He is the supreme creator god. And in the way that duality works in Persian theological thought, there is good, truth, Artha, and there is bad, the lie, Drauga. So because Ahura Mazda brings his world into order, which of course is by definition a good thing.

• 28:46Speaker 04

  This is Zoroastrianism, is it?

• 28:49Speaker 03

  It's a kind of proto-Zoroastrianism, there's elements of it, okay, but I wouldn't want to go that far. But certainly, this creator god, who is a good god, establishes the king. It's almost like he creates kingship in order to ensure that his goodness, his Artha, continues on this earth. So you could, you could say that every war fought by a Persian great king is a holy war. That's how they would have seen it, you know, so it's actually bringing the world into its proper place. So these people who are outside of Persian control, who are forces of chaos, of Drauga,

• 29:27Speaker 03

  therefore for their own good, as well as the good of the whole world, need to be brought under the control of Persia and of ultimately its god Ahura Mazda. That's not to say they went out kind of proselyzing and converting, it's never about that. But for the sake of the harmony of the cosmos, everybody needs to be singing praises to Ahura Mazda, essentially.

• 29:50Speaker 04

  Does this bring us nicely into that whole story of earth and water and what this actually is?

• 29:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we have a lot of, I mean, actually all from Greek sources, these ideas that, you know, the king demands earth and water. And I do believe that if, if that was the case, and this is probably symbolically given to a king by a diplomat, you know, we have all these scenes of diplomatic tribute being brought to a king. And I wouldn't be surprised that at an initial point when a diplomat first arrives, then as his kind of diplomatic calling card, he possibly would have brought a, you know, a bowl of earth and a dish of local water. It is an important part of the ideology of it. We get, we get spins on that as well. I think, I think this story is in Herodotus. I might, I might be wrong.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  But there's one occasion where Xerxes is proffered a dish of dates. And he said, oh, where does this come from? And he, and he told, oh, these, these are from Greece. And he says, oh, well, we will not eat them, not until we own it. And then I'll eat Greek dates, you know? So there's something there about actually the produce of the land itself, you know, and the king's right and access to it. But I suppose in the theological term, then the idea of the, of the land being under the control and the rivers being under control is important. There was a kind of like a strange nature collection, connection between the great king and the earth.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  He was seen very often as a gardener king, you know, letting the earth blossom, you know, the Persian word for a garden is paradisa, from which we get The paradise is Paradise. But you know, the, the earth itself is a paradise. When the Persian kings created their gardens at places like Pasagidae and Susa and Persepolis, they basically planted their gardens with the produce from across the whole of their empire, bringing the empire into miniature here. So there is, and also the same with, with waters as well, of course, you know, which were paramount importance to this kind of nomadic desert peoples. So I think there is something real in this demand for earth and water, which would have been played out in court ceremonial, I think.

• 32:06Speaker 01

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• 32:37Speaker 05

  Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. There are new episodes every week.

• 33:34Tristan Hughes?

  So Xerxes has gathered this army, but with the previous invasion under his father's lieutenants, it had been kind of that island hopping, going from western Anatolia, taking each of the islands in their path and then Yubia, and then being defeated at Marathon. But how does Xerxes go about invading Greece this time round? Because, Rul, is it quite a different route he takes?

• 33:56Speaker 04

  It's different from that island hopping campaign. I mean, he decides to take this army over land instead of shipping it amphibiously. He also has a massive fleet, but they decide to move along the coast while the fleet sort of shadows them. But this isn't necessarily a new idea. I mean, crossing the Hellespont and moving the army over land is also what Darius did when he invaded a few decades before then, invaded Thrace and then moved north. So he moved into Scythia, Xerxes now is going to move west.

• 34:23Tristan Hughes?

  I'm sorry, my apologies. What is the Hellespont? Is that kind of Gallipoli, D'Artagnan's area?

• 34:28Speaker 04

  Exactly, yeah. So the Hellespont is the narrow strip sort of at the south end of the sea of the Protonis, so the Sea of Marmaris. So this is the bit where Gallipoli is now, sort of perhaps more notorious for that. But it's a strip of land where the Athenians have long had interest, but it's also the narrowest point where you can cross from Asia into Europe. And so it's about two kilometres across. Darius and now again Xerxes build the Pontoon Bridge across. So that's how they transport the army. And for Herodotus, I think this is very much one of those examples of Xerxes trying to prove that he can achieve things that no other human has achieved before. Like he's subjecting nature and geography to his will. He's saying, there's a sea here. No, there isn't. Now there's a bridge. I can walk here. I can walk wherever I want.

• 35:10Speaker 04

  And similarly, later on, when they get to the peninsula at Athos, which is now Mount Athos, where there were the monasteries on it. On a previous occasion, his cousin Mardonius had tried to lead an army there, but his fleet had suffered shipwreck around the Cape of Athos. And so this time, Xerxes doesn't want his fleet to take the same route. So he decides to dig a canal through the route of this peninsula, which is quite narrow. So again, for Herodotus, this is a moment to prove firstly, I mean, obviously that the Persians are fantastic engineers, both for the Pontoon Bridge and for the canal, on which they rely on a lot of Phoenician advice, but fundamentally, they're doing amazing logistical thing. But also because Xerxes at this point has turned sea into land and land into sea. So he is saying to geography, he's staring the world in the face and saying, I'm better

• 35:55Speaker 04

  than you, essentially, which is a sensibility that I think, you know, modern people, especially me as a Dutch person. I mean, it has something of this modern idea of technology overcoming nature that resonates with us. Whether the Persians saw it that way, we have no idea. This is only in Greek sources and the traces that still exist. So the canal through Mount Athos, you can still see it, a sort of swampy strip that runs through the neck of the peninsula. But otherwise, we have no idea how they would have seen it or specifically why they would have done it, other than to display their power.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  But I do think that in those stories, that there is, if we scratch the surface, something of the Persian version that goes underneath as well. And that goes back to what I was just saying about the great king being in harmony with nature as well. It's kind of... It's kind of set on its head by Herodotus and other Greek writers as well. So we get, for instance, you know, Xerxes beating the sea with wicks and chains and so forth, you know, because it will not kowtow to him at all. But in fact, this is possibly a kind of reminiscence of a Persian water cult where, you know, gold and silver and precious metals were thrown into rivers and waters and canals and so forth. And likewise, there's a much later story, of course,

• 37:13Speaker 03

  very famously about Xerxes falling in love with a plane tree. You know, this is how crazy Xerxes is, he falls in love with this tree and, you know, he puts jewellery on it and so forth. Well, it's no coincidence, you know, that one of the very rare images we have of Xerxes is a seal that was found at Suso, which is shows him decorating a sacred tree with necklaces and jewellery. You know, it was a Persian thing to do. It was a nature cult. It was a tree cult. So I think, you know, sitting behind some of these Greek stories, which are, you know, frankly, they're laughable because, you know, it's hubris, it's excess, it's just pure craziness, sits perhaps an element of a Persian original. And I find that really fascinating.

• 37:53Tristan Hughes?

  He's been able to cross the Helespan, he's been able to carve this canal through the Athos peninsula, and the Persian army is slowly and navy slowly making its way through northern Greece and down. Is it not a case of every Greek city, state or kingdom they come into contact with is straight away putting up resistance, kind of in the idea of Marathon and the Athenians before? What should we be thinking of when they're going past places like, well, the Kingdom of Macedon, which will later be the homeland of Alexander the Great in what is today northern Greece? What should we be thinking as this massive army and navy starts wading its way, starts marching through these lands?

• 38:30Speaker 03

  Well, they didn't meet much resistance, to be honest, and that's because many of the Greek city-states in the north were pro-Persian and had been for some time. So the Macedonians, in fact, readily joined elements of their army and also entertained Xerxes and his generals. And we know that as they marched right the way down through Boeotia, past Thebes, again, no resistance, and in fact, in the heartland of a pro-Persian world there as well. Herodotus gives us some fascinating insights into how the army is sustained. Because here we are thinking, you know, as Xerxes has made this journey down. I mean, we must have thousands of soldiers and thousands upon thousands of camp followers.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  And just maintaining this vast juggernaut which is moving through. And there are great stories that, you know, if Xerxes settles for a night somewhere. Then obviously it's the duty of the local inhabitants to feed him and his court and soldiers. And God forbid that he should like the place and stay for a second night. Because basically they will be stripped of their resources for the next six months. And I can see that, you know, there's a lot of sense that's being said in that, you know. So here, I think Herodotus, you know, understands the soldier's journey. And tries to depict for us the scale of the invasion. I think it's through those kind of anecdotes that it really comes across very clearly.

• 39:48Tristan Hughes?

  If you have many Greek city-states and kingdom, like in Macedonia case, siding with the Persians. Which Greek city-states decide actually to resist this army? And we ultimately get to that famous place of Thermopylae. Rude, what do we know about that? When there finally is a standoff between the Persian, you know, this grand Armee and navy and an opposing Greek force?

• 40:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we're told that Darius has already sent out these messengers to demand earth and water. Which is the ritual that we talked about earlier. This is when the Athenians and the Spartans, we're told, sort of commit to this idea. They reject that offer. So both of them essentially kill their messengers. So the Spartans kick them into a pit and the Athenians kick them into a well.

• 40:28Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, okay. Yeah, that's the this is Sparta kind of thing.

• 40:31Speaker 04

  It literally is that story. Except that in Herodotus, obviously, this is recognized as a tremendous sacrilege. For which both of these communities are said to pay dearly because no one accepts this, right? The Spartans later send a couple of messages to messengers to Xerxes to atone for this. Because they know they've committed a terrible sin in the eyes of everyone. Like the whole Mediterranean world, everyone they know. And so they send a couple of messengers to Xerxes saying, please kill these men so that we're even. And Xerxes, according to Herodotus, essentially laughs at them and says, no one is as evil as you. Like, I would never do that. So in this sense, absolutely, the Spartans committed a horrible faux pas. But the idea there is that they are committing so strongly to that position.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  We will not bow down to the Persians that they even reject, you know, the idea of communicating with them. That's essentially what they're saying. And the Athenians likewise. Now, exactly why they do this is kind of obscure. I mean, it's not really motivated, except that obviously, you know, the Greeks, they want autonomy, et cetera. For the Athenians, more likely is that they didn't expect any mercy. They didn't want to bow down to someone who might reinstate the tyrant Hippias or in some other way overthrow the Athenian democracy or endanger their interests. For the Spartans, most likely, they can't tolerate another hegemon on the block. The Spartans are the most powerful Greek state in this period. They are used to ruling essentially the Peloponnese, that's their backyard. They want to be top dog. They don't like the idea of anybody else coming in telling them what to do.

• 41:57Speaker 04

  And that is very much just more of a rivalry than an ideological resistance. And so in this period, the Greeks, those two states are essentially heading the resistance. And they are the ones who are saying, okay, we will not bow down. The states that are subject to Sparta are kind of necessarily involved in that. They have no choice. The Spartans tell them who their friends and enemies are. That is the terms of the treaty they have with Sparta. So that most of the Peloponnese is on the side of the anti-Persian alliance. Arguably not by choice, but they are part of it at least. But they they reach out to a bunch of other states and most of them essentially say, yeah, well, we'll see what happens, you know, we'll wait it out. So the Argai have stayed neutral. They plead that they have suffered losses that are too horrible for in their war against the Spartans

• 42:41Speaker 04

  to to face further conflict. So they decide to stay neutral. They're later accused of being pro-Persian, actually. They go to Sicily, to those powerful Greek states there, but they're also turned down. Other states like Chersira, which is now the island of Corfu, also more or less decides to stay neutral. So they try to find more Greeks who are willing to help them in their resistance. But most of them just kind of say like, you know, it doesn't look good. And so they mostly just don't want to, you know, they don't want to put their chips down on the side of anti-Persian sentiment in case there might be reprisals. So most of these states try and stay out of it, with the exception of a couple of states that that do try, that do maintain a sort of principled opposition.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Most of the time, because they fear that their own position within the Greek network of states will suffer.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  So nowhere is this really, you know, an east-west war, as has been, you know, sold to us for for generations now. It's it's simply not about that whatsoever.

• 43:39Tristan Hughes?

  And so what is this force then that ultimately does get sent up to the hot gates of Thermopylae? That there is so many legends around today, almost like the first clashing point between the Persian force and those Greeks that did decide to oppose Persia, rather than either stay neutral or side with the Persians?

• 43:56Speaker 04

  So what we're told is they initially sent an army up north to Tempe, which is a pass in the shadow of Mount Olympus, north of Thessaly. But then they hear, and this is a story, so we don't actually know if this all happened, or if it's just sort of Herodotus foreshadowing what's going to happen. They're told that they're going to defend a pass against the army of Xerxes, but they're told there's a way around it, and so they abandon the position. And so they they retreat and they think about what they should do next. There is an obvious geographical point where historically you stop an army moving south into Greece. That point is Thermopylae, and it continues to be, I mean, it is important here, and it continues to be important right down into the Second World War. The last battle of Thermopylae that we know of is nineteen forty-one.

• 44:36Speaker 04

  This is a continuous thing throughout history, that if you want to stop that army marching into central Greece, Thermopylae, a narrow strip of land along the coast, is where you do it.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  It's your last hope, isn't it, really?

• 44:47Speaker 04

  It's, yeah, exactly. So at that point, you're on the threshold of Biocia. So you're really going into like the the area of Greece that most urbanized, most highly developed, where where all of the famous states essentially are. If Thermopylae falls, central Greece falls, there's no other position where you can hold an army. So that is where you where you send your force. And helpfully, the sea alongside Thermopylae, there's a sort of inlet between the mainland and the island of Ibiza, which is also quite narrow and also for a fleet quite defensible. So what the Greeks agreed to do is send an army to Thermopylae and send a fleet to Artemisian, which is where this dual defense on land and sea is supposed to supposed to take place.

• 45:26Speaker 04

  But the army that they send to Thermopylae is, compared to the later army that they would send out in the following year to Plataea, it's tiny, it's very, very small. There's a small force of Spartans, a thousand strong, and then similarly sized contingents of the Spartan allies. So they're really, really quite small force, maybe about a tenth of their available strength, maybe as much as a third in some cases, but they're very, very small pieces of their levies. There's always been a question of why did they send so few troops? Why are these armies so small? The traditional argument has been, and is already there in Herodotus, that this is because the Spartans expected to lose and they knew it was a suicide mission and so they'd only send a small force. But then the big question is why they send so many, essentially?

• 46:09Tristan Hughes?

  And they send their king Leonidas, right?

• 46:11Speaker 04

  They send their king Leonidas with an army. So it seems like a very official, you know, move, but the later explanation is, oh, they needed to lose a king to meet a prophecy to save the rest of Greece. That's the, that's the argument. But it's very hard to explain why they would send so large an army in that case. I mean, send three guys, for God's sake. Like, send Leonidas himself alone, it doesn't matter. Because this is something that happens with later Romans, right? They have a particular ritual where the general sacrifices himself and that's supposed to be a good omen for victory. So let him do that by himself. I don't know why they would send a thousand guys to go and die with him. In any case, that's the story. What seems to be happening really is that Sparta continues before and after this to be very reluctant to send troops north of the Peloponnese. That is

• 46:53Speaker 04

  not their traditional territory, they're not their traditional area of influence, and they seem very uncommitted to defending that against the Persians. So they mostly want the local population to handle that and they don't want to get, they get too into it. They don't want to risk their troops in this sort of very advanced forward position. And it's very informative to compare the Spartan commitment of a thousand men to Thermopylae to the Athenian commitment of almost 200 triremes, which is 40,000 men to the Battle of Artemision. I mean, this is an enormous fleet which would have emptied Athens that is being sent to take part of the naval leg of this strategy. Whereas on land, the Spartans are half-hearted at best.

• 47:33Tristan Hughes?

  It's interesting that we haven't actually mentioned the number 300 there at all, Rul. You said it's a thousand Spartans.

• 47:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's the alternative tradition that I'm going with. Essentially, there are two different source traditions. One says 300, the other says 1,000. The best way to reconcile them is to assume that there were 300 full Spartan citizens and then 700 other Spartans who are not citizens but who are freeborn and fight as hoplites. That's very common in later Spartan armies, that they rely quite heavily on these other sort of Lacedaemonians who are not Spartan citizens. And that, that seems to be an easy way to, to reconcile the numbers. But that means there is a thousand, because everywhere else, if you count the number of, of Spartans, quote unquote Spartans, in battle, you're always counting both Spartan citizens and perioikoi and other classes within Spartan society that fight in a similar way.

• 48:18Tristan Hughes?

  Let's just talk through the overview of this clash between Xerxes and Leonidas and his allies and Themistocles with the fleet and so on, because it feels important to the story. So what is the story of Thermopylae and Artemisium?

• 48:30Speaker 04

  I mean, the story is essentially that Xerxes tries to find a way to break through this position, which is very difficult. Geographically, it's very strong, right? So any army could hold this against any other army indefinitely unless there is some way to get around the position, essentially to outflank it. And so I'm very tempted by Geoffrey Robb's theory that essentially Xerxes understood this very early on. He has the Thessalians in his army by this point, who have recently fought the Phocians on the other side of the pass. So they have had to cross this position, which had been fortified by the Phocians. And so they had found the ways around it. So they knew this and they were in his army. So there's no reason why I wouldn't have talked to them and said, like, look, how do you how do you solve this issue? You did it recently.

• 49:08Tristan Hughes?

  And so we're also focused, that's a region just south of the pass and Phocian is a name given to people. Hence, like, Thessaly is the region to the north, hence why you get the name Thessalian for those people, just so we know.

• 49:18Speaker 04

  That's right. So the Phocians are the people who actually have Thermopylae, the pass, in their territory, essentially. So that is that is part of their territory. It is the boundary of their territory, which they have defended against the Thessalians in the recent conflict. And so the Thessalians got around it and they would be in a position to inform Xerxes about this. At the same time, he he's doing the same thing with his fleet. He's sending a chunk of his fleet, 200 ships, around Euboea to try and outflank the allied fleet, which is in the straits. So that's quite a long journey. It takes several days. And so the land army isn't attacking while they're waiting for that fleet, that chunk of the fleet to get into position. So for four days, they do nothing. According to Herodotus, they're kind of waiting for the Spartans to just kind of melt away in

• 50:01Speaker 04

  fear. That doesn't happen. So on this, on the fifth day, they actually do have to attack. But that is in the story that we get. It's sort of this very huge sort of land battle, that utter carnage, when they try to dislodge the Spartans from the pass by throwing everything in the kitchen sink at them, and it just doesn't get anywhere. And everybody's getting sort of destroyed by their thousands, by this immovable Spartan line. But we have to bear in mind that we just got told by Herodotus that this is a fortified pass. So they're defending a wall, which makes it on the one hand very easy to defend, but it also on the other hand makes it very easy for the attacker to avoid casualties by just keeping their distance and just sort of probing that defence, of seeing how close they can get, seeing how far they can get with missiles

• 50:44Speaker 04

  before they actually commit to an all-out assault. It's also a narrow pass, so you can't really commit that many, you can't really lose that many. It's really hard to actually get much out of the Persian numbers, which is exactly why the Greeks decide to defend that position. But it also means that Xerxes can afford to essentially keep those Spartans and their allies locked in position while he's figuring out how to deal with this strategic problem. What supposedly happens is the first day the Medes attack, they don't get anywhere. This is one of the larger Iranian peoples that the Persians rule over. Then the Persians themselves have a go in the form of the Immortals. They attack, they also don't get anywhere against the pass. Obviously, the Greeks at this point are like, "Yeah, we're winning."

• 51:27Speaker 04

  The Persians are probably thinking, "You know, you're still there. Okay, good, that means we still have an opportunity to defeat you." They're not committing in any sense an all-out attack by their army, because firstly, the geography doesn't allow it, and secondly, they are still trying to figure out how to get around this, right? How to dislodge the Greeks rather than just sort of trying to frontally bash their heads against the wall. And they find it eventually when somebody tells them, or so we're told, the traitor Ephialtes tells them that there is a path that leads up the mountain and around the position in the pass. Geoffrey Robb's argument has been that they knew this all along. They heard it from the Thessalians, and so they were just waiting for their fleet to get into position so that they could outflank both forces simultaneously.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  And exhaust the Greeks while they're doing so.

• 52:11Speaker 04

  Exactly. And so this is basically how this path has always been turned in every occasion in history since, that that path is always the way that you do that. And that's what the Romans did against Seleucids and many other peoples later. You always go around through the mountain, and that always wins. That always sort of succeeds.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  It's also a literary trope, isn't it? Because, you know, way, way back in the siege of Sardis, for instance, you know, Sardis on the Acropolis there is impenetrable, and then suddenly, you know, some soldier drops a helmet down a pass one day, and then, "Ah, bingo, we can get into Sardis now." So there's also that going on. But I think I'm in agreement that probably the Persians knew about this.

• 52:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. The problem is that that fleet that's been trying to encircle the Greeks at Artemision, it was lost in a storm, so those ships just never arrive. And that is what drives the Persians to finally try and attack both at Thermopylae and at Artemision, is that that was just, it didn't work, so they have to try and find a different way. But by that point, they've figured out that there is a pathway that leads them around the Thermopylae Pass. So in the night, they march the immortals over that path. The Phocians, who are themselves set to guard the path, don't act for reasons we don't quite understand, possibly just fear, possibly because they've made a deal with the Persians. And so they let them through. And the immortals come down behind the pass. And at that point, the allied position has become untenable, essentially. So then the big question is what the allies do.

• 53:33Speaker 04

  It's often been argued that, oh, the Spartans are staying behind to kind of keep the Persians in a fight so that the rest of the allies can get away as a sort of rear-guard defence. But the problem with that argument is that the Spartans hear in the night that the Persians are coming. They have long advance warning that the Persians are over the pass and they're coming in behind. And all of the other allies are already leaving at that point. They know that they can't hold the position, so they're just gone. But Leonidas waits until the morning to make any kind of decision on what to do. So it's not until well into the day that he actually decides, when he hears from a messenger again, like, "They're really coming down the mountain now. We should probably do something", that he decides, "No, actually, we're going to stay."

• 54:16Speaker 04

  So he's already wasted all of his opportunities to extract his force safely. At that point, essentially, he's just doing it for the kudos. I mean, he's just staying behind because he thinks that's the right thing to do. It doesn't have any strategic merit, it doesn't have any strategic motivation even. He is really, even in Herodotus, it has no strategic motivation. This is not done for good reasons. He is just doing that because he thinks it's right for a Spartan to not leave the position that he is assigned. And that is something that comes back again and again in narratives of Spartan warfare. You're not, if somebody tells you to stand somewhere, you don't move from that place. And Leonidas is thinking very much in those terms. He's saying, like, "I was told to defend the pass at Thermopylae. I'm just gonna do it, even if it's hopeless, even if there's no point."

• 54:58Speaker 04

  And so that's, that's what he does, which is why he makes his final stand together with a couple of other Greeks, Greek communities who decide also to, to hold that line.

• 55:06Speaker 03

  It's quite remarkable, isn't it? You know, that, that his death, you know, serves both his legend. But also, I think for, for Xerxes at the time, it would have been, you know, mission accomplished as well because for Xerxes, the, the killing of a rebel king, one of these followers of Drauga was absolutely what he needed. And it's sad that we don't have any record, written record of, of, of the Persian version of this. But I've no doubt that, you know, the propaganda would have travelled far and very fast as well.

• 55:38Speaker 04

  Glorious triumph, yeah, absolutely.

• 55:39Speaker 03

  Ahura Mazda had triumphed again through Xerxes. And now the world was in a better shape than it had been a couple of days ago because one of those liar kings has also disappeared. It, it must have been an incredible boost for the Persian.

• 55:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, the, the Spartans essentially threw away their lives for no good purpose and gave him this huge propaganda coup, right? They gave him this opportunity to say, oh, I killed their king, I destroyed their army, rather than just sort of chasing it off to fight another day.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  Precisely. And we know from the Bisseton inscription of, of Xerxes' father Darius, that, you know, that the, that the, the annihilation of rebel kings is what you're after. You know, you don't keep them imprisoned at all, you, you lop off the head. So this is all done for him really, and it's a great victory.

• 56:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, and the excuse has always been twofold. I think the justification in, in modern scholarship and modern ways of telling this story. Firstly, that they inflicted a lot of losses on the Persians. But there is a very difficult bit of evidence behind that, which is the story in Herodotus, that he, he got people from the fleet to come and look at all the dead on the battlefield, to kind of survey the battlefield again, this, this idea of coming to see it for yourself. And look at all the dead that are scattered here, all these dead Spartans. But that he, in order to make that a proper story and something that would, that would, that would work for him in terms of motivating his troops, he hid most of his own dead. So supposedly, he left a thousand Persian dead as a credible figure and then hid the other nineteen thousand in a mass grave.

• 57:03Speaker 04

  Um, we can imagine that this is true and is something that Xerxes wants to do, or we can imagine. The Herodists got this story from the Ionians in the fleet who came to see this.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 04

  And that they only saw a thousand Persian dead.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 57:15Speaker 04

  Because there were only a thousand Persian dead against 4,000 Greek dead, right?

• 57:20Speaker 03

  It really does make more sense, doesn't it? When you're thinking about, as you described the geography, you know, we're going into this narrow path. There's no way the whole Persian force would have been brought down there. There's simply no geographic room for them.

• 57:31Speaker 04

  It's not a woodchipper, right? It's not like you can just keep feeding things into it. I mean, if you take some losses at the frontline, you're going to pull back and reassess. And especially the Persians, whose initial move in a battle is always to use missiles first.

• 57:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 57:45Speaker 04

  And to see if they can soften up the enemy to break them easily.

• 57:48Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, the so-called their arrows will blot out the sun, which is come down.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 57:51Speaker 04

  So what's happened to them, you know? What happened to the arrows? And obviously, arrows have been found in significant numbers in the, um, on the battle site, uh, the Kolonos Hill at Thermopylae. Although many of them actually don't date to the Persian wars, but they do have them on display in the museum in Athens. I mean, archers would have been a very significant asset to the Persians in this. So we mustn't imagine them just sort of rushing into close combat to their deaths in huge droves.

• 58:14Speaker 03

  Not at all. I mean, the success of the Persian military had always been about keeping the distance and letting the arrows do the work, really.

• 58:21Speaker 04

  Quite right.

• 59:02Speaker 05

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• 59:59Tristan Hughes?

  All right, guys. Okay, we can't do too much on Thermopoli or become a Thermopoli-only episode, but it is so interesting. I did have one question, and this was actually me thinking about it the last couple of days, which is that figure of Ephialtes in the story. But as you've mentioned, rule, it may even be that there wasn't even a figure because people in the Persian army probably knew of that past. But if there was a figure called Ephialtes, who was a local shepherd, you also mentioned that that army's been there for five or six days by that time, and the size of it would be taking up all of the food from the nearby area. Is there any way you can feel a bit sympathetic if Ephialtes was there, thinking, "I just want this army or these armies off of my land", and the best way is just to get them round so that they can get through as quickly as possible, so I can actually live in this area of the world?

• 1:00:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, more than that, I think a lot of Greeks recognised that the Persians had a lot to offer them, you know, in terms of employment, in terms of rewards. There was absolutely an understanding. If you did the king a solid, then he would repay you in kind. And that's something that, you know, is very much propagated by the Persians themselves, the generosity, their reciprocity, their understanding that, you know, good deeds earn rewards and bad deeds earn punishment.

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  We have dozens of later Greek accounts, you know, of the Persian king showing his sort of largesse and beneficence by, you know, giving humble peasants silver cups full of coins and so forth. You know, it is part of the Persian mission as well to do that.

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And so, you know, these local people obviously wanted that army gone, no doubt. They don't want to be battlefield. Nobody wants to be battlefield in the ancient times. But also, you know, it just makes obvious sense not to kind of try and see if the Phocians will help you. And I mean, in any way, like, or see if local populations might be able to offer you something similar. You just go to the richest person near you and say, like, how can I help? But so somebody died for this, right? The story that we're told that the Spartans invested some money to have this Ephialtes assassinated. So there was apparently someone who was accused of giving away the tale to the Persians. But to my mind, it's completely unnecessary, this story, because, as I said, you know, they could have asked any local population they had already subjected, who's now serving in their army for the information that they needed.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  But perhaps in narrative terms, you need the scapegoat, don't you? You need to tie it up somehow. You need the villain, after all.

• 1:02:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true. And indeed, you almost get the reverse of this with Alexander the Great in the Persian Gates more than a hundred years later, and a local shepherd showing him a route around a Persian defence there. But that's another story entirely. So the fleet has retreated from Arsiterium. Most of the Greek army has retreated from Thermopylae, apart from Leonidas and those who stayed with him. Is that basically the floodgates have opened now? Xerxes's army is south of this pass, and now the Greek city-states, like, and especially those who stayed neutral as well up to that point, they've got a choice to make. This army is now in their lands, is going to be going through their lands, taking up the resources. Delphi, sacred Delphi, will be under pressure too. Is this almost the floodgates have opened and there's a flurry of activity happening as soon as Xerxes gets south of that pass?

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the story that we get from Herodotus is that this was really quite horrific, like, what happened to the peoples who were directly behind the pass who had resisted. So he marches into Biocia, he marches into Phocus. At the same time, he sacks some of these places. He really mistreats the populations because they resisted him, which is usually the carrot and stick of Persian conquest. If you don't resist, it's all good. You get to keep your structures and positions of power, and usually nothing will happen to you. But if you resist, then, you know, the old bets are off. And so several of the communities of focus are really extremely roughly handled and get some very horrible anecdotes. And also, some of the towns in the Osha that were there at the Mopolis, so the Thespians and the Platians who were there at Marathon, are just razed to the ground, so their entire city is destroyed.

• 1:03:42Speaker 04

  The Athenians hoped that they can gather the entire army of the alliance to try and stop them before they get to Athens. So they're waiting, they pull the fleet back from Artemis, and they're waiting to see what the Spartans are going to do. But in a very characteristic fashion, the Spartans are doing absolutely nothing. And as a result of that, the Athenians have to abandon Attica as well. So the Persians then just march straight on down into Attica, the Athenian territory, and take the city, because there is no one, all of the Athenians have been evacuated almost. And there's no one resisting them, because they knew that alone they would not be able to to stop this force.

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  And you really get a sense of the fear in Athens from the archaeological record in particular. It's amazing, you know, that all of those beautiful marble statues we have of Curai and Corai, these beautiful sort of naked males and beautifully dressed female figurines, which were possibly grave markers. All of these were deliberately buried at the top of the Acropolis in order to save them from the Persian attack. The Athenians were just bracing themselves for the kind of annihilation that they'd seen elsewhere. Of course, this is why the population took ship, went over to the island of Salamis as quickly as they possibly could.

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  And when Xerxes got there, yes, he did exactly as was forecast. I mean, he razed the city to the ground. And I suppose the the population of the city in exile on Salamis, they would have seen their city burn. It's quite clear.

• 1:05:12Speaker 04

  I mean. Although notably, he then also went up to the Acropolis and sacrificed to Athena.

• 1:05:17Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. But only a Greek could write that. I doubt if he sacrificed to Athena.

• 1:05:21Speaker 04

  Hedging his bets.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  He certainly offered a sacrifice.

• 1:05:24Speaker 04

  Well, it does it does fit this, what you've explained before about the way the Persians rule other places, right? I mean, they're perfectly happy to integrate in or assimilate into sort of local religious customs, if it means that it makes them more acceptable, more.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  You know, that's why I think in the long run, you know, it's often been presented, doesn't it? You know, the sack of Athens is, you know, and then the ultimate victory that comes after it over the Persians is the idea that. We're saving democracy, we're saving world freedoms and all of this kind of thing. I don't think the Persians would have had any problem with the burgeoning democratic state there. And in fact, some of the cities of Asia Minor were already sort of miniature democracies going on anyway. And I don't think there would have been, you know, the end of of Greek culture. I think sculpture and art would have continued, probably, you know, tragedy and comedy would have continued with slightly different themes perhaps.

• 1:06:14Speaker 03

  But, you know, this idea that Xerxes at that time threatened the entire beginnings of European culture is simply not true at all.

• 1:06:25Tristan Hughes?

  It's interesting as well. I don't think they sacked Delphi, do they, the Persians? They kind of go to Athens, but that's a that.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  Yes, they don't they don't bother to go further inland.

• 1:06:32Speaker 04

  Well, so there's a very interesting story there where, according to Herodotus, obviously, when they approached Delphi, the gods themselves, you know, Athena stood up and various heroes made an appearance. So there's there's these epiphanies of of divine figures who are coming to the defence. And there's there's landslides and things to stop them. Most likely, that's covering a story where the Persians never actually wanted to sack Delphi because they understand the value of local sanctuaries. When they captured Delos during the marathon campaign, they also made huge sacrifices there. And tried to reassure the local population, which had fled to another island, like, we don't mean you any harm. Um, we actually want to make sure that you understand, we we respect your culture, your customs. Because that is how they knew they could be palatable as new overlords.

• 1:07:17Speaker 04

  So they left Delphi well alone. I mean, they they would have understood its value.

• 1:07:21Tristan Hughes?

  We've done Thummalion Artemisium, but then we get to Salamis. And this is almost, in which feels on par with not more than Marathon, there's this kind of defining moment. Because you've set it up so nicely, this idea that Athens has been sacked already, like they've been forced to go to this island nearby and they've seen their city burn. And then you have this massive Titanic sea battle, which is portrayed, i- i- it's this Athenian victory, isn't it? So it's almost a victory from the jaws of defeat. I mean, I mean, what do we know about the Battle of Salamis?

• 1:07:52Speaker 04

  I mean, the Battle of Salamis is extremely messy. It's very hard to say anything about it just because it is described to us in every source as just a mess of boats slamming into each other. And it's no one really knew what they were doing, except that the Persians had been dragged into a narrow strait, which was a plan of the Athenian commander Themistocles. But it's not an Athenian victory so much as an allied victory, which the Athenians had about two-thirds of the, or about half, actually, in Salamis, of the ships. But the overall commander is Euripides, who's a Spartan. It's always sort of important to stress that Themistocles never commanded any allied fleet at any point in Greek history, he never did, because he was always under a Spartan supreme commander.

• 1:08:33Speaker 04

  But the idea of that fight is essentially that the Spartans want to retreat to the Peloponnese, they want to get out of there, they don't care about anything, it's already lost. So they just want to go back, fortify the isthmus, the connection of land between Athens and Corin, and they want to pull the fleet back to guard those works, so the fortification of the Peloponnese. And the Athenians point out to them that that means defending the Peloponnese in open waters against the superior Persian fleet, which would go badly. And so everything will go to pieces if they do that. And they even threaten to leave the alliance and sail off to Italy, essentially leaving them all in the lurch, because they just aren't finding that the allies are willing to help them to take back their own land.

• 1:09:15Speaker 04

  And so they threaten to leave, which finally pulls the other allies over the line to say, "Okay, we'll fight, we'll make a stand at Salamis." But he still has to trick the Persians into accepting that fight. So he draws them into this narrow strait where the superior seamanship of the Phoenicians in the Persian fleet isn't going to come to their advantage.

• 1:09:34Tristan Hughes?

  And the Phoenicians, they're from like Lebanon, Tyre area, the eastern Mediterranean. They've got a long history of being brilliant seafarers, Carthage and so on is that Phoenician heritage, yeah?

• 1:09:44Speaker 04

  That's right, that's right. So they may or may not have invented the trireme, this is a little bit obscure, but the Greeks certainly believe that, if they didn't credit the Corinthians. So you have this fleet being drawn into the narrows, and then it just becomes a really sort of messy bunfight. Essentially, because there's no room to maneuver, you're really just going at whatever you can target, whatever you can see. And it's very messy, but the Greeks managed to, or the Greek allies, I should stress here, because many of the ships in the Persian fleet were Greek. They were the Greeks of Asia Minor, the Greeks of Western Turkey, who had been subjected and forced to commit to naval service for the king.

• 1:10:16Tristan Hughes?

  So many of the allied Greeks have actually managed to prevail over individual ships, and this is how they how they end up winning this sort of attritional battle in the Straits of Salamis.

• 1:10:24Speaker 03

  What I find interesting about the narrative account of it is actually the use of the lie, liar at kings in this, so Themistocles, of course, tells a whopping great lie, which convinces the Persians that they can, you know, they can win this thing. And I do think that Herodotus is very deliberate in presenting it in that kind of way, because as we know, you know, the whole Persian idea is about truth and lie. Okay, so this is a complete distortion of the Persian version of things. And because they are tricked in that way by the lie, by the ungodly, they lose their position. So again, I think maybe sitting behind here as well, Herodotus has something of a Persian version going on, too. I think

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  it's just too much of a coincidence that the whole ruse is built on a lie of this kind.

• 1:11:14Tristan Hughes?

  Shall we cover quickly then also this really interesting figure of Artemisia, the queen of Helicarnassus, who's always kind of one of these allies of the Persians, of Xerxes' fleet, and she has a sizable contingent of ships, doesn't she? Five ships. Five ships. She's only got five ships. Okay, Rul just put up a hand with five fingers saying she's only got five ships. Okay, fair enough. But she seems to have a big role in the narrative that Herodotus tells us, doesn't she?

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  Yes. For me, I'm not doubting her historicity, but the role that she takes, I think, is created to weaken Xerxes, that, you know, women are more capable of military command than he is. And it's part, then, of the myth of anti-Persian propaganda that goes on for the next centuries, in which Persians are molded into the figures of Amazons and other sort of, you know, it's the effeminization of the East that we get going here. So I don't want to dismiss her as a historical figure, or the fact that she might have, you know, certainly offered some support to Xerxes. But I think in the way that Herodotus creates

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  the narrative, it's saying more about Xerxes than it is about Artemisia.

• 1:12:24Tristan Hughes?

  And Rul, what is that narrative, by the way?

• 1:12:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the narrative is that that one of the commanders of the fleet that Xerxes has drafted from his subjects in Asia Minor is is the Queen Artemisia, who is Queen of Hala Karasas, which is actually Herodotus's hometown. And so she leads a small contingent, like five ships. I mean, many of these other states have dozens, if if not more. And so she has a very small contingent, but for Herodotus, she is massively interesting because he's interested in exceptions. He's interested in exceptional things. And so when a when a woman commands a military force, you know, that is something that he wants to talk about. That is something that he's fascinated by. And he's he's very explicit about this. He doesn't sort of want to give the impression that he's doing so unfairly. It's just like, this is great. You know, look at this. Who could have imagined?

• 1:13:09Speaker 04

  Because in the in the Greek mind, which is very patriarchal, very sort of set in gender roles, this is something that could never happen. You know, women aren't in their in their view, cut out for that kind of work. You know, they they just don't have that in their nature. And so for them, this is something that is that is spectacular and worth talking about in detail. And so he casts her as one of Xerxes's close advisers from the Salamis narrative, and even before that, as somebody who really has the ear of Xerxes and also always has the right advice, even if he sometimes ignores it. And so she is sort of inflated in that narrative as somebody who actually has her wits about her. And for Herodotus, she becomes sort of one of the voices of reason within Xerxes's entourage.

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  And if you want to follow a kind of through thread with this, of course, his interaction with this this woman, Artemisia, kind of heralds the interaction that he's going to have with his wife, Amestris, and with his mistress, Arteinti, in the last few books of of the histories, which of course completely brings him down. We don't see Xerxes being assassinated in Herodotus, but we know that that's coming. And it seems to be that this kind of woven storyline of women and in Xerxes's world having his ear actually is is all played out from the Salamis narrative onwards.

• 1:14:28Speaker 04

  Well, it's so interesting. And actually, we don't have time to do the story post Salamis. That will have to be for another episode, because I know there's still more to the story with the Basra Patea, which rule you mentioned earlier, and I think there's Mykali as well. There's a lot more still to go. However.

• 1:14:42Tristan Hughes?

  If we kind of wrap up this episode by exploring kind of the importance of Salamis in this second Persian invasion by Xerxes, what is its importance? It is just a naval battle. The army of Xerxes is still there in its prime, having just sacked Athens, but the Persians have lost this naval battle. Why is Salamis so significant in the course of this war?

• 1:15:05Speaker 04

  So initially, actually, the Greeks don't think it's significant. They, we are told in Herodotus, that they are essentially backing away to Salamis, expecting that the next day the Persians will just fight again. They don't think that the losses they've inflicted are serious enough to knock the Persian fleet out of the war. But it turns out that they have, actually, that the Persian fleet is no longer willing to keep its advance stationed, so they retreat back to Asia Minor. So at that point, they more or less just abandon the attempt to try and have a simultaneous land and naval campaign, instead just sort of keep the land army where it is to mop up. At which point, obviously, the Greeks have, in a sense, reclaimed control of the sea, which gives them a lot of strategic options. And one of the main ones that immediately becomes relevant in the narrative is, what

• 1:15:47Speaker 04

  if they sail up to the Hellespont and destroy this pontoon bridge that Xerxes had built in order to essentially cut off the Persian army and strand it in mainland Greece, for all the good it will do, but fundamentally saying like, oh, we are now actually free to operate in your rear areas, which, you know, animates a lot of modern strategic minds, because this is very much the kind of operation that, you know, blitzkrieg, it's the kind of operation that we would like to imagine as being disproportionately effective, because it affects logistics, supply, communications, rather than confronting the strength of an army.

• 1:16:17Speaker 03

  What we can say, though, is that Salamis very quickly enters into the Athenian imagination, and it becomes a defining moment in the creation of Athenianness, really, because only seven, eight years after the battle is fought, Ischylus, the great dramatist, puts that battle on stage, or at least a Persian messenger, you know, talks us through as an audience the narrative. And if you think about, you know, the, the, the old theatre of Dionysus carved into the southern slopes of the Acropolis, there, there would have been, you know, Athenians who had been at that battle, or there would have been families who had lost fathers

• 1:16:59Speaker 03

  or brothers or sons at that battle. And it's really quite a remarkable thing that Iscalus does in his play Persia, The Persians, to basically create a tragedy out of, of modern history to, to begin with, you know, this is not a fantasy mythical thing, even though we have ghosts and all of that kind of thing in it. But also what he does in that is, is create this sense of, of Athenian nests and literally these individuals sitting in the theatre would have been able to see each other across the auditorium, basically, you know, they would have recognised people and, and the names in there. But I think there's something even more remarkable going on in, in that incredible play. Edward Said, back

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  in nineteen seventy nine, when he published his great book Orientalism, which is all about this kind of east-west divide, said that Orientalism starts with Iscalus in, in, in Persians. I always wonder how much Said actually read The Persians, did he read it very deep at all? Because what comes over in that play is actually simply, nobody benefits from war. What's incredible is that these scenes of, of Persian women and Athenian women weeping for their sons and their husbands. It is a great anti-war play. It's not the kind of table-thumping xenophobia we might have expected from an Athenian playwright writing about

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  a victory over the dreaded enemy. It's a much, much more subtle war play than, than Said or many other people who've studied it have, have, have ever seen. Now, many centuries later, that, that morphs and, and, you know, in, in later centuries, we have a, a guy called Timothius, who creates this kind of narrative, which was probably sung like an opera aria, about the Battle of Salamis. And there, you know, he did all the voices, as it were, you know, of the Persian soldiers drowning in, in, in the seas, of the, the screaming of the, of the Persian soldiers on land and so forth. And that is far more kind of tab-thumping bit of propaganda. But I find it really remarkable that in the immediate aftermath...

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  Of the Battle of Salamis, Ischylus presented his city and his fellow citizens with an image of the Battle of Salamis that in many respects contradicts what Herodotus was going to say about later on. It was, you know, it is a cautionary tale more than a tale of bravado and warfare.

• 1:19:31Tristan Hughes?

  And then, of course, the legacy of Salamis, like Marathon, becomes so entwined with the story of Athens, with, I guess, within the empire building, even down to that kind of idea of sea power. Is it almost, is Salamis always seen as kind of this focal point where it starts in a weird way, the Athenian empire and naval supremacy?

• 1:19:49Speaker 04

  Well, so, I mean, it could arguably be seen as the start of the Athenian empire in the sense that at that point, there is no rival to Athens in the Aegean. So before that, obviously, Persia was, you know, an enormous rival to Athenian naval power, and they would never be able to claim that they control the Aegean sea in general. They just had a lot of naval interests and they were building up their naval power and they were expanding their reach across the Aegean. But certainly from that point onwards, they are increasingly able to push the advantage that they have because they just have more ships than anyone else and they have more commitment to those naval investments than anyone else. The Spartans, who are still in charge of the navy, even in the following campaign seasons, four, seven, nine, eventually just withdraw from it. They essentially leave

• 1:20:32Speaker 04

  that leadership to the Athenians, or maybe, there are different versions of this, the other allies elect the Athenians as their new leaders, essentially. But fundamentally, the Athenians get to take over that alliance, which then ends up being the bedrock of the Athenian empire. So it starts here in the sense that this is, these are the forces that eventually form the Athenian empire, but it takes a few steps to get the Spartans out of the way and for the Athenians to actually take over.

• 1:20:56Tristan Hughes?

  Salamis is not the end of the Persian invasion of Greece. As we've highlighted, there'll be another campaigning season. But Lloyd, for Xerxes himself, is this the end of his venture to Greece? Does he take quite a bit of the army back with him at that time?

• 1:21:10Speaker 03

  Yes, he does, but it's a very pragmatic return. That's because we know that there is a huge rebellion that breaks out in Babylon, and there is no way that Xerxes can afford to lose that jewel in the crown. And really, that means that he withdraws himself and with a great many forces from the theatre of war in the West, just moves it elsewhere.

• 1:21:31Tristan Hughes?

  Well, guys, in the future, we will cover the Battle of Plataea and what happens next with the forces that remain in Greece. But you guys have been an absolute tour de force explaining Xerxes' invasion and Thermopylae, Salamis, and so on. Last but certainly not least, Lloyd, tell us a bit about your book on Xerxes and all the other Persians, Babylon as well. You've got books to plug, I think, right now.

• 1:21:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, my book, Persians: The Age of the Great Kings, is available in all good bookshops, and in paperback, and in 15 languages. And my new book on Babylon, which includes a lot, obviously, on the Persian intervention in Babylonia, will be on sale early next year.

• 1:22:10Tristan Hughes?

  And Roy, for yourself, there will be, in the future, no doubt, lots of big hitters on the ancient Greek world and ancient Greek warfare. You are a tour de force as well, and you're very popular on YouTube, including on the History Hit YouTube channel. So people do check out Roy's Critiques of 300 and Ancient Sparta, and so on, too. Guys, once again, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 1:22:31Speaker 03

  Absolutely. You're very welcome.

• 1:22:37Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr. Roy de Cana, and Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones discussing the Second Persian War up to the end of the Battle of Salamis in 480 B.C. Now, as mentioned, although this marked the time when Xerxes decided to return to Asia to deal with this big revolt in Babylon, it certainly wasn't the end of the Persian invasion of Greece. Xerxes would leave an army to continue the fight, commanded by his general and relative Mardonius. Stay tuned, as we will cover this final stage of the Persian invasion very soon. In the meantime, thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us, and you'll be

• 1:23:18Tristan Hughes?

  doing us a big favour. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free, and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

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