Ancient Historians · Part 5 · Herodotus · B2
Herodotus III: The Persian Wars
Part 5 of Ancient Historians: the great story at the heart of Herodotus. The Persian Empire, the largest the world had seen, invades Greece twice, and is beaten: at Marathon, where the Athenians ran at the Persian archers; at Thermopylae, where three hundred Spartans held a narrow pass; and at Salamis, where a trick and a narrow strait won the war at sea. But how many Persians were there really? The passive in narrative (the pass was betrayed, the fleet was destroyed), hedging about numbers (it is claimed that, probably no more than, an estimated), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
You know the Persian Wars from Aeschylus’ Persians, seen through the eyes of the Persian queen. Tonight you hear them from Herodotus, who was born a few years after Salamis and talked to men who had fought there.
Thermopylae! The three hundred Spartans! That’s my favourite story.
It’s everyone’s favourite, Marcos. But Herodotus says the Persian army had more than five million people, including servants. That is impossible: no land could feed them, and they would have drunk the rivers dry, as he himself says they did. Tonight we tell the great story, and we ask how many there really were.
A good story and a bad number. The historian’s eternal temptation.
In 490 BCE, King Darius of Persia sent an army to punish Athens for helping the Ionian revolt. It landed at Marathon. The Athenians sent a runner, Pheidippides, to ask Sparta for help; he ran about 240 kilometres in two days. The Spartans were celebrating a festival and could not leave until the full moon. The Athenians and their allies from Plataea attacked alone, running at the Persians, and won. (The famous run from Marathon to Athens with news of…
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