The Ancients - The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

490 BC. On the plains of Marathon, Athens faced down the might of the Persia - the first world empire. It was an underdog clash that would echo throughout history. But how did it all begin?In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes kicks off an epic two-parter on the Persian Wars with experts Dr Roel Konijnendijk and Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. From the rise of the Persian Empire to the Ionian Revolt and the showdown at Marathon, uncover how this legendary clash became a turning point Greece, Persia and the wider ancient world.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

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Malcolm Gladwell. Go to audible.ca slash Unusual Suspects podcast and listen now. 490 BC On the plain of Marathon, an Athenian army stands ready to do battle. A sizeable Persian force stands across from them, having sailed across the Aegean from Anatolia, intent on punishing the Athenians for a past foray into their lands, supporting an anti-Persian revolt. This battle would mark the climax of the first Persian invasion of Greece and become immortalised through the ages as the day Athens defied the superpower. It's the Ancients on History hit, I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

Today we're releasing the first of a series of episodes exploring the Persian Wars, with not one but two leading experts in the field, Dr. Ruhl Knynenyk from Lincoln College, Oxford University and Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones from Cardiff University. In this first episode we are covering the story of the First Persian War, think the Battle of Marathon of 490 BC. We'll explore the run up to the conflict, the emergence of the Persian Empire and how it came into contact with the Greek world in western Turkey. We'll explore how the Persians viewed the Greeks and vice versa before ultimately getting to the narrative

of Marathon itself, preserved in the writings of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, known as the Father of History. You'll hear Herodotus' name quite a bit in today's chat. Every once in a while we release special episodes with two interviewees, as we know how much you enjoy them. With Ruhl and Lloyd being fan favourite guests of the podcast, brilliant experts and with this being such an interesting topic, well it felt like an easy winner and boy did they not disappoint. Enjoy. Roel, Lloyd, it is a pleasure to have you both on the podcast. What a treat. Well thank you very much indeed. It's great to be here. Yeah, it's wonderful to be part of it.

Now this is quite a big topic, the Persian Wars. It feels straight away to highlight, doesn't it, with both of you, that it's much more complicated than Greeks versus Persians. Yes, I think that that kind of simple narrative has disappeared in scholarship. It used to be played that way, it really did. And I think doing that has been particularly harmful, even for the way in which we name these wars, you know, the Greco-Persian Wars. Yeah, that's a bit of a stretch in itself, I would say. There's that traditional idea that this is some kind of clash of civilizations or a replay of

something that keeps on happening throughout history. That is really not the way that historians like to look at these events. I mean, they are much more contingent, they are much more complex, they have all these different layers to them. We really wouldn't want to gloss over that. But if we start with the background, what should we be imagining in around, let's say, 500 BC? What does the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Central Asian world, what does it look like at this time? That's a pretty big question. In terms of the Eastern Mediterranean, I mean, the big factor is the rise of the Persian Empire.

So this has happened fairly recently. This is two generations ago. This empire suddenly emerged, within a very short period of time, conquered the entire Middle East. And so by this point, they've already conquered Cyprus and Egypt as well. And so they are sort of the entire eastern half of the Mediterranean is dominated

by a single new political entity, which is ruled by Darius the Great. And this is the Persian Empire, of course. All the other societies in that region obviously have had to deal with them in some way either because they faced conquest and other forms of sort of violence, but also because this is just the new big player. I mean, there's a superpower in the world all of a sudden, and obviously everybody has to kind of adapt to that. the new big player. There's a superpower in the world all of a sudden and obviously everybody has to adapt to that. Meanwhile, the Greek world is not in any sense political unity. It's an incredibly fragmented collection of small city-states and regional federations and groups that are scattered about not just mainland Greece and the islands but also all around the Mediterranean because they've been settling around everywhere they could for centuries.

There's a Greek city in Egypt, there's's Greek city in Libya, but also especially in southern Italy, Sicily, in Spain, France. Obviously you've heard from Owen Reese about Greek settlements in the north of the Black Sea. So the Greeks are everywhere, but they're not united. They're all quite small states. And the main thing I think to know about this period is that in fairly recent memory, they have become larger and wealthier than they've ever been before. So this is a collection of states

that are doing for the time being quite well for themselves. They're becoming better at political organization, they're becoming more economically integrated. A lot of their economies are shifting to sort of market model. So there is quite a bit of vitality in that world. There's obviously a lot of interconnectivity. These people travel everywhere, trade everywhere, move everywhere. Their populations are growing. Their cities are becoming more recognisable, like ancient cities, like the way we imagine them more and more of them have city walls, things like that.

Big temples, public spaces, public buildings. That's all fairly recent in the Greek world. I think a lot of that is still developing, but it is a different Greek world from the one that was there even 50 years ago, let alone 100, 200 years ago. And it's quite interesting there, Lloyd. So, I mean, imagining the Persian Empire at say 500 BC, maybe in Greek eyes as well, is this seen as quite a new phenomenon, a new power emerging onto the stage? Or has it been there for some time as this kind of superpower idea?

I think in the, in the Greek mind, it's something that's very new and something that has to be dealt with. So there's a really interesting little fragment we have of a poem, which must have been written around about probably 490, maybe 480. But it looks back on the formative years of the Persian Empire. And the fragment says basically, you know, there's a guy who's at home, an old guy, sort of an old war veteran sitting there and a visitor comes in to see him.

And the questions you must put to the visitor are, where are you from and how old were you when the Persians came? So there's something in the Greek memory about this nuance, Lord, and I think for them, the fall of Sardis, which was of course a great Greek speaking center in Asia Minor, was probably their kind of 9-11 really. It was a huge wake-up call that something drastic was going on on the fringes of their world. And it's really interesting around about 525 hundreds in Athens, we have the first attempts

at visualizing the Persians. How many people had seen Persians in Greece at that point? And so we have one black figure vase from about 525 BCE, which shows a kind of composite Persian created by some Athenian artists. And the conspicuous thing is that they kind of composite Persian created by some Athenian artist. The conspicuous thing is that they kind of look quite Greek apart from the fact that they're wearing trousers. It's the trousers, isn't it? It's always in the trousers, right?

It's the thing that the Greeks really can't get their heads around at all. And from there on in, really, the Persians do not stop being the subject of attention for the Greeks. Around about 500 BCE, we get our very first attempt at writing a persica, a sort of like a Persian thing, you know, a sort of manual for what the Persians are. I mean, it's full of fantasy. But there we see, you know, a group of people trying to understand what it is they're coming up against. What we don't have, unfortunately, is anything from the Persian point of view, thinking, I wonder who these islanders and people on the sort of far-flung part of the world are. We don't have any speculation on that. I'm sure those speculations were being made, but nothing survives. We have just the three

distinctions in the Persian royal reliefs, right? So there's the the Ionians who are the Greeks as we know them but they just classify them as those who live by the sea and those live beyond the sea. That's right and sometimes they get a bit more specific as those who are wearing sun hats. Oh the sun hats! It's trousers one way, it's sun hats the other way. Love that. But it sounds like there are no load that you're involved in that exhibition at the British Museum recently in Persia and Greece and you've done work on figures like Cotisse so even during the sixth century BC what was there a lot of contact or contact and trade between Greek cities and the Persian Empire.

Well at this point you know 500 in the late sixth century into early fifth century, Persia is still sort of cranking up, okay, and it's taken advantage of the places it's conquered, or the places who have, you know, sort of, you know, come over to them. So I don't think there's any yet any sense of like, direct trading with the empire, as it were, but trade with the conquered peoples is still going on without a doubt. That's all there. And I suppose really it's the use of these middlemen really as traders that would have grounded both the Persians and the Greeks in knowledge of one another. It must have been passed through by them. I think it's hard at this particular stage to say, oh, there's a, there is a specific sort of Persian look or a Persian kind of artifact that is desirable in mainland Greece. That does develop by the middle of the fifth century, definitely, you know, silverware

and all this kind of thing is being either directly imported or being copied in cheap materials, knockoffs, and likewise with Persian textiles and all of this as well. But maybe at the beginning of this period less so. I mean I think it's important even though I just said like there's a big sort of political entity that covers the entire eastern Mediterranean that we don't think of this as a sort of monolith. I mean this is not at all a very loose administrative structure placed on top of a lot of pre-existing peoples who of course were already interacting with the Greeks in all sorts of ways and were probably much more integrated into the Greek world than into the empire that ruled them. So you have people like Lycians and Carians and Lydians and

Phrygians who know the Greeks for centuries and obviously trade with them, interact with them, mingle with them, share languages and places to live. And the Persians are just kind of the newcomers in that picture. So the Greeks don't just suddenly stop trading with these areas or moving to these areas just because the Persians are in charge now. So you really have to kind of on the ground, you have to kind of pull back on this idea that we imagine that, oh, once you color the map, this region changes its nature. It actually is still just the same place except that now they're paying tribute to some guy far away in Iran.

Well that important tribute word there isn't it? Go on Lloyd. Absolutely, that's absolutely right and I think that one thing we can say is that by and large the Persians had a very laissez-faire attitude to their conquered peoples. If it wasn't broken they didn't try to fix it. And they certainly never imposed on their conquered peoples anything that we could see as a kind of real sort of heavy-handed imperialism of the kind that we see in the Roman Empire or the British Empire for that means. So local languages just continued, local cults continued. There was no attempt ever to force a Persian identity on other peoples. If they could merge so much the better, if they didn't and didn't cause

any trouble, well that was fine by the great kings as well. Now we're all mentioned there in passing Lycians, Carians, so like Pamphylians, Lydians, so these were all peoples and regions in western Asia Minor, Monde, Anatolia, western Turkey. So Rul, is it therefore not surprising, if we go back to Lloyd's previous comment about this place of Sardis almost being a nine 11 equivalent for the Greeks that for the beginning of the Persian Wars, should we be looking at Western Turkey and this interaction points between these various peoples, including Greeks and the Persian Empire. What's the story about how this is involved in ultimately the breaking out of the First Persian War? Yeah, so for Herodotus is our main account for this, and he's very straightforward about it. There are Greek cities in Asia Minor, so in western Turkey, which are part of the

Lydian Kingdom. They have been ruled from Sardis for some time by a king who is not Greek but who has obviously been part of of cluster of interacting peoples for a very long time. They are paying tribute to the Lydians and the Persians just come in and take that kingdom whole, which means that these Greek cities are now subject to the Persians. So you mentioned Lydian there and that's like famously, King Croesus, wasn't it? Before the Persians came in. That's right, yeah. Rich Croesus.

So that's a kingdom that covers sort of the western half of the Anatolian peninsula. So it's quite a large kingdom, quite a powerful kingdom, which is how you get the expression richest creases is because he was the wealthiest king. The Greeks knew, right, this is the biggest power that they were directly in contact with beyond a place like Egypt, perhaps. And the Persians just sort of gobble that up, essentially, as part of a much, much larger territorial empire. And so for the Greeks, suddenly, this is the arrival of something even greater, wealthier, more powerful than anything they've ever encountered. And that

is a big shift in their perception of where they are in the world, essentially. So what happens then? Why does it ultimately result in conflict breaking out between the Persians arriving on the scene and then the Greeks in Asia Minor, but I guess also other Greeks getting involved too. Well again, our main source is Herodotus and as you know I am always a little suspect about just using him because I think if we were to look at... Rolls Royce, the way that Herodotus creates this, we have this kind of Greek interest in Anatolia, right? But I'm not sure that Cyrus the Great, when he invades Anatolia in that way, when he invades Lydia, would have seen that at all. I don't think he was going for a Greek city at all.

Anatolia was part of the ancient Near East, and I think Cyrus would have just seen it as the next step in Near Eastern conquest, really. We can see Croesus if we want to see him as a Greek-inspired king operating in this world of the Mediterranean, sending out messages to Delphi and so forth. But also, of course, he was absolutely intimately locked into the Near Eastern traditions of kingship too. He was, after all, the brother-in-law of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and so forth. So I don't think Cyrus went into this thinking, ah, I'm going to get some Greeks now.

I'm going to get me some Westerners. I just think it was all about really, this is a logical continuation of my policy to subsume other Near Eastern kingdoms into what I am building here. Sorry, I just thought of those stories in eroticist where he kind of stresses that the Persians don't know who the Greeks are. Yeah, exactly. And don't know who they are. Sorry, you?

Yeah, no, but literally, I mean, the Spartans send them an embassy when they take the cities of Asia Minor and they say like, you should let these people be free or else we're coming for you. Yeah. And Cyrus's response apparently is just, who the hell are you? Sorry, who this? Lost number. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. New Empire. Yeah. If you think about it in so many ways for the Persians who are building an empire and building vast wealth, you next thing they do is Babylon for goodness sake, that's what they take. Not the western shores of Greece. What has Greece got to offer? Stones

and olives. That's all it's got and that's of no interest whatsoever to the Persians. So, and either of you, whoever wants to go first with this now, let's explore the story of the Ionian revolt then because I feel we do need to tell this. What is then the story of this Ionian revolt and this early conflict before, I guess you could say, the main Persian wars? It's actually really hard to know. This is one of the classic essay questions. What is going on here? The Ionian cities, the cities of the Greeks and Asia Minor, they initially thought that the Persian conquest was an opportunity for them to throw off this sort of foreign

rule, so they rebelled, but the Persians subjected them and they apparently had to do this twice over. But at that point that for several generations they are just a part of the Persian Empire and that seems to be going fine until very suddenly in 499 they decide to mount a general rebellion and this is not just the cities of Ionia. Caria joins them, parts of the northern, further north, the coast of Asia Minor join them. Cyprus joins them. So there's really quite an extensive stretch of the western fringe of the Persian Empire that joins together in rebelling against the Persians for reasons that we cannot figure out because the

only account we have is Herodotus, and Herodotus is obsessed with the idea that this is just Aristagoras of Miletus who decides that we should have a rebellion and everybody thinks it's a great idea for essentially no motivation whatsoever. And so it's very difficult for us to understand why this is happening at that time. But the important point historically is that Aristagoras then goes to Greece and says, I'm doing this thing. Do you want to help me? Because then we can defeat the Persians or at least push back their control. He goes to the Spartans initially, they turn him down. Then he goes to Athens and they say, yeah, okay, we'll help you. He also goes to Eretria and a couple of other places. He gets help from Eretria and Athens, these two cities that have quite strong

naval interests in the Aegean anyway. They are the ones who send some support to back this revolt, or at least its initial campaigns. They do a bit of looting, they burn Sardis or at least the outskirts of the city and then the Athenians and the Eretrians are like, that's great and we got our loot, we're going home. But of course at that point they've already been involved and the Persians know this and that's how, according to this story, the Greeks sort of get involved in the objectives of the Persian Empire because at that point the Persians basically come in and crush the revolt over several years and afterwards they have this sense of like okay there are clearly these Greeks across this sea, the Aegean,

who are potentially a cause of destabilization of our Western frontier. I mean this is basically what they've done is they've said oh we can meddle in this we can try and do do something to arm Persian control of this region and obviously that's something that's not going to, they're not going to be able to let go. Yeah, I think what we see growing there is this sense of Greek infringement onto the Western coasts, of course, and if you think about how far away the West Coast of Asia Minor is from the center of Iran where the great king and his court are based, then it does become something of a problem and of

course, as happens throughout history, the more an empire expands and the more remote its borders get from the epicenter itself, the more troublesome they can be. What we don't get, unfortunately, is an understanding of what's going on in the eastern borders of the Persian Empire at the same time. But I get the feeling that border zones are always problematic. And I think that another one of the kind of myths that we get about these great Greco-Persian wars is that the Persians put all of their thoughts into quelling these Greeks over the seas. I don't think that could ever have been the case at all

because they had much bigger fish to fry as well. Babylon was in a constant state of rebellion and was just far too important to lose. And so, so many, so much of the king's time and the troops, you know, were actually stationed in and around Egypt as well. And I really do think way, way off in Bactria, modern day Pakistan, Afghanistan, which was a huge satrapy as well and I really do think way way off in Bactria, modern-day Pakistan, Afghanistan,

which was a huge satrapy as well. That was probably equally as problematic and we see that because the satraps who were installed in Bactria are usually king's brothers or king's uncles or something. They send major members of the royal family to look after these places. So I think if we put all of the border zones into perspective, then Greece is just one more irritating zone of contact, but not this grand, you know, narrative. Although I think you're right to say like borders are always a problem, but then borders are also, to the imperial center, sometimes so usefully unruly, right? Like there's... Oh yes, absolutely, absolutely. And a little glowering of a border never does anybody any harm, right?

Right. Yeah. And in fact, the Greeks themselves are already aware of the idea that although they see later Persian military actions against the Greeks as revenge, I mean primarily they think of it as motivated by this avenging what the Greeks had done. That's right. They also recognize that as a pretext, you know, even Aeschylus was writing in the 470s is already thinking that actually this is all about conquest and they're just using this as an excuse. So there's already this understanding that, you know, it's useful for an empire if somebody

goes and provokes them at the border, which is in fact how the conquest of Lydia supposedly happened in the first place. Yes. So we've arrived in winter, we're getting up in the dark, the commutes are stuffy, the person next to you is coughing. I've got just the thing for you, an excellent escape. I'm Dan Snow, host of the Dan Snow's History Hit podcast, where I whisk you away into the greatest stories in history. Join me on the Inca Trail in Peru,

where I'll tell you the story of Machu Picchu, or travel with me to the mighty Colosseum in Rome to find out just what the gladiatorial games were really like. Follow Thomas Cochrane, the real master and commander across the high seas. I take you round the world to where history happened. So check out Dan Snow's History Hit for the best historical escapism this winter, wherever you get your podcasts. I also find it so interesting, just a quick note from me, how so much of the action or

important parts of that action that you guys have described there with the so-called Ionian revolt revolved around Sardis, which was such a prestigious city, wasn't it? Lloyd, we've talked in the previous episode how the Persian royal Road ultimately it will end at Sardis one point you can still see bit of it today I've talked about the birth of money in the past and how some of the earliest coinage is from Sardis so. I guess when the Athenians in the Eritreans when they hear that the Persians have retaken Sardis and Lloyd is that what you were referring to is this kind of. When they hear that the Persians have retaken Sardis, and Lloyd, is that what you were referring to as this kind of 9-11 equivalent moment or shock moment? Do they think back in Greece, do they think that the Persians will make that next step of crossing the Aegean to them or do they think they'll get away with it? I don't think that really crosses their mind at this point.

I don't think they say, oh, invasion is imminent, you know, it's not that. But it's just the, you know, the name Sardis must have been so evocative for them. And it just evoked the end of something, you know, something had collapsed and couldn't be again. I think that's the feeling that we get. I'm not, no, I wouldn't maintain that suddenly on the Greek mainland, there was this flurry to get the arms together and to make sure that they could defend themselves. There's no sense of that whatsoever. It's just like the end of days, basically, is what the fall of Sardis was all about for them. That's why it's commemorated in that kind of way in things like popular poetry and in sayings.

How old were you when the Persians came? So, Rool, how do the Persians, I mean, why do they then decide to launch an invasion or should we say expedition across the Aegean and what do they do? We've talked about this a little bit, but it's basically there's multiple different reasons why this happens. And even in Greek sources, which are basically what we rely on, we don't really have good Persian sources for any of this. Just in general, we understand how the Persians saw themselves, but we don't really know why they took specific actions like this. We're relying on Greek sources, but the Greek sources already massively

overdetermined the invasion of Greece in the sense that they give more reasons than we need. They have this revenge motive because Greek support of the Ionian revolt. They have the expansion motive, they think the Persians just want more and that it never ends. They have the legitimization motive, which is that each new Persian king needs to kind of justify and legitimize his rule by, you know, performing well militarily, so to launch some kind of campaign. They're also driven by the fates, essentially. They're being driven in the Greek mind by this idea that they must commit the crime that will undo them, which is this very tragic pattern that exists in Herodotus, where Xerxes, when he's planning his campaign, he gets prophetic dreams and things like that about it.

So there's all sorts of ways in which they try to establish this. I think modern historians are much more inclined to think of this partly in terms of this strategic motivation that I've mentioned, the Greeks are a problem. They are destabilizing the Western frontier. If you want to settle that situation, you can either sort of heavily garrison and fortify your Western frontiers,

which is something they do later on, or you can decide to go over to cross that sea yourself and go and settle the business. And so that is seems to be what they're doing. And there's some reasoning that resources might have something to do with it. I mean, especially the northern Balkans, very rich in timber, very rich in mines. This is all great. The Greeks, mainland Greece itself doesn't have much to offer in that sense, but those things are obviously very valuable. And you also have the, although the Greeks themselves are very small and not a credible threat to the Persian

Empire, there is the fact that, for instance, locally, regionally, places like Athens have a really long established strategic interest in the Hellespont. And so they are likely to keep on meddling in Persian affairs in that region, which is one of the things that might pull the Persians across the sea. And so that's what they start planning almost immediately as soon as the Ionian revolt is suppressed. And it's not just in warships and things as well. I mean, there's also diplomacy that goes on across the Aegean as well. I really do find that of interest and I think more and more attention is being paid to that in scholarship now. So for instance, the strategy that the Persians took in Macedon is very interesting. And Macedon essentially became a kind of non-authorized satrapy.

The Persianization of Macedon was really quite substantial. I'm always aware that when we look at Alexander the Great and his life, he grew up in a court that was heavily Persianized with Persian speakers there and with Persian customs and everything. And this had been going on for almost 200 years, really. The loyalty, actually, that the Macedonians showed to Persia during the conquest of Xerxes for instance was was really notable as was Boeotia as well you know as we're pushing down into central Greece

itself you know the Boeotians were more than happy to give their allegiance to the Persians as well. So that city tastes like Thebes isn't it? That's right yeah we're great Thebeses absolutely. So you know the Persians dealt with that difficulty of the Greek world in diverse ways, and part of it was through diplomacy, talking and bringing them into the empire. But actually, the point about diplomacy, another reason that the Greeks are also very keenly aware of is that there are many Greeks who essentially see the Persian Empire as an opportunity. They want to change the way things work in their own states and they see Persia as the most powerful ally they could possibly find in order to achieve what they want to achieve, a regime change or the overthrow of their enemies or something similar. And so you have many Greeks whose first recourse when they get thrown out of their own state or when they lose a political battle or something

like that is to flee to the Persian Empire, go to the court and say, can you help me fix this? At which point multiple of these advisors or courtiers, effectively, or hangers-on, are pulling the Persians into the Great War. Toby So do you have exactly that with the Persian expeditionary force that is assembled that will almost island hop across the Aegean to first target Eritrea in Euboea, the island of Euboea, and then land just north of Athens. Do you have a similar case there?

Yeah, so this is the second attempt they make to cross the Aegean. So the first one with Mardonius, which doesn't get very far, it's destroyed in Thrace and by a storm around Mount Athos. This will be important later. But basically, the first attempt in 492 doesn't work. But then in 490, they try again. They gather a big army in Cilicia. And then they sail across into the Aegean.

So they go island-hopping. They take Naxos and Delos. And the reason why the Athenians are nervous about this is that in that fleet is the tyrant hippias that has been thrown out 22 years earlier by the Spartans. So they have gotten rid of their tyrants a little while ago with foreign help. But this guy is still alive and he is one of those people who just went to Asia Minor, started talking to the local powers that be and tried to garner support to be reinstated.

Obviously for the Persians this would be a great opportunity because if you have this guy who owes you, whose position relies on your support, then you have a reliable agent in the Greek mainland. So they want to reinstate Hippias the Tyrant over the Athenians, and the Athenians obviously are not too keen. This is one of those examples where the Persians are being guided into Greece by an agent who is Greek and who wants Persian help to re-establish himself in Greece. But for the Persian kings and satraps to work in that way was absolutely the Persian system, agent who is Greek and who wants to displace them at all. So what was going on in several of these city-states in Greece at the time actually rang very true. It made a lot of sense to the Persians that this is actually the proper way to have a foothold

within this area. I'm not sure very often how much the Greeks themselves realized that they were actually playing into the hands of the Persians. But certainly from the Persian point of view, this seems to make sense to them. It's also interesting, isn't it? You mentioned the word, I mean, satraps there, Lloyd. So with this Persian expeditionary force, should we imagine it is the great king there as well or has he kind of almost given this to subordinates to deal with? From this point, I think it's to do with diplomats. The Achaemenids had a tendency to use high-ranking members of the royal family or else those who were adjacent to the throne,

so the nobles of Persia. I can't see the great king getting involved in this himself just now. It's a little bit too early for that. I don't know if it was you Lloyd or somebody else who compared the Persian Empire to a family sort of thing. Darius, who were cousin of Xerxes. He'll come back later, won't he? Yeah, and then the campaign that ends in Marathon was led by Artofrenes and Datus. Datus, I don't think we know very much about, but Artofrenes was also like a brother-in-law of the king or something. That's right, that's right.

Absolutely, they used the extended family particularly well, in fact. So, you know, if a king was deemed to bring a good noble or somebody who had a good reputation in war or a good reputation in diplomacy, then marriage to one of the royal women was a really good way of bringing them into the orbit of the Achaemenid family itself. So yeah, I think the more we can think of the empire itself as a family firm, the better it gets really. The squabbling of course goes within the family itself, but it kind of doesn't get rid of the firm at all.

So I think that's one of the reasons why they empire lasted for so long really. I remember playing as Dardis and Dardifernes in Age of Empires too, although that was many years ago. But Rul mentioned the word there, marathon, which I'm sure many people will know the name marathon. But I mean Rul, let's start with you. So I'm sure many people will know the name marathon. But I mean, Rul, let's start with you.

So the Persians do eventually make it to the Greek mainland and marathons that's north of Athens and in Attica with the Basque marathon. Before we get into it, what should we be imagining? What should we be seeing? Do we think we should be seeing on the Persian side in regards numbers? If we know, I mean, troops and what should we be seeing on the Greek side? Do we have any idea whatsoever? You're shaking your head, I guess we do not quite know. Yeah, I mean, numbers for the Persian side are never known. I mean, this is really just

a big question, Mark, because the Greeks are our only source for it and the Greeks are not honest about it. Like they want to portray every Persian army as this sort of world conquering horde. It's very stereotypical, it becomes a trope in literature early on and it never goes away. I mean, even the most sober historians, the ones that we tend to think of as like the good historians of Alexander, for instance, Aryan, he gives the largest number for the Persian army of Gaugamela. So they like to imagine hundreds of thousands or even millions. We don't buy that, but we don't have anything to replace it with. So our problem is we only have numbers we can't believe and we don't have anything good to

put in their place. So for Persians, we don't have numbers. We do know they landed on this coastal plain at Marathon because Hippias guided them there, partly because it was an old Piscistor Tid heartland, so they had a lot of local support or they were hoping they might get some, and partly because it was good terrain for cavalry. So much of Attica is rocky and uneven but that plain would have allowed the Persians to use their cavalry to their advantage. So that was sort of a dual benefit of that space. So the Persians land there, they encamp there and the Athenians march out in full force to try and stop them. They have their Plasian allies with them, who are a small town from Boeotia near Thebes.

There's about a thousand of them and later say about 9,000 Athenian hoplites, so there's a grand army of 10,000. Plus whoever else would have been drawn into this force by necessity. Once there is an emergency great enough, the entire male population is essentially subject to military service, which means that very many people who couldn't afford necessarily any good armor and weapons would still be required to come along and do what they could. So this is potentially a much larger army, but it's the 10,000 number that is the only one that we can say recently fits what we know of other moments in this period when the Athenians go to war and I know it's a battle we don't need to focus too much on it But of course, it's an important part of the first Persian war

What is known as the first Persian war? So what happens during this battle and what does it end up with? Why is it? Why do people know the name mouth and now today? well, they know it now because it's been the most integral part of Greek myth-making, really. As Roll says, as to the size of armies, as to the tactics, as to the events, we're really pretty much at a loss. There is a narrative provided, but whether this is a true narrative, we just can't get close to at all. But in a way, we know the result, right? Or at least, we know something of the result. We know more about the myth that grew around it. And in a way,

I'm far more interested in the myth than I am in what we can piece together of the battle itself. So for instance, in 330 BCE, a vase was painted or created or shipped to Southern Italy where it was unearthed in the 1830s. And it shows, it's a huge red figure vase. We call it the Darius vase. And it shows the Persian great king hearing from a messenger about the failure of Marathon. We know that because there are gods in the register above. Zeus is there, for instance,

and Athena, obviously representing Athens, is there. The figure of Hellas herself, Greece, is being upheld by the personification of retribution with a flaming torch and so forth. And below the scene, underneath Darius and his court, we have a group of Persians who are clearly terrified at the news that's been brought to them. Now this vase is 150, 200 years almost after the events of Marathon itself, but it is still being activated in the Greek mind, you know, in the Greek popular consciousness. It's no coincidence that that vase about the overthrow of Persia was created at the time when Alexander himself was going into Persia as well. So, you know, this is history being used again revamped, you know, are we going to have another a second marathon here?

So, you know, I mean I never I've never claimed to be a battle historian anyway, but I far more interested in the Impact of the of the myth of marathon than I am of the real thing role You know a bit more about the events and so would you you like to do a little bit on that, Roel? Please, absolutely. This is my chance to be boring for a little bit. Never boring. Never boring. We love it.

I completely agree with Lloyd. I mean, it is a very sort of tainted narrative. It's very propagandistic and it only survives from a source that was interviewing people two generations after the fact when it had already become this huge thing in the mind of the Athenians in particular. I mean, sorry, just to make that point, which is a really good point, we wouldn't take a second World War narrative of say, you know, what happened on Dunkirk from one side only, you know, where it's glorified. So why are we prepared to do this with the Battle of Marathon or any other of the Greek Wars?

Which we've been so kind of tuned in to do. It's just not right. Let's treat it for what we can as a light, constructive, propagandistic narrative with a big myth that went behind it. Sorry, Rob. No, no, no. You're just completely right to make that point. I think historically, even if you're a battle historian, Marathon, it's so irrecoverable what really happened that it's really not that interesting. What's interesting about it is that it is the first battle in Greek literature that is described, the first historical battle. So we don't have any accounts of actual events. We have accounts of fighting in poetry and Homer, obviously, in Tertius, but we don't have an account of an actual battle that happened.

And so in that sense, it's really interesting because the Herodotus is doing something that no other Greek has done before, which is to try and describe to us how a battle was won. And even if the ways in which that has happened are very difficult to believe, we are still dealing with something that is interesting from a literary perspective and interesting from a historical perspective. In many ways, this is the beginning of what I do as a historian. There are obviously earlier accounts of battles from the Near East in particular. I mean, the Battle of Kadesh is famously the first one to be described in any way. But at this point, the Greeks are starting to do something that other traditions haven't done, which is to try and say not for the further glory necessarily of some king and describing how many people

he personally killed, but rather to say, okay, we understand that we all went into battle as a group, but how did we pull this off? I've never thought of that. So do you think, is Herodotus creating a language of battle narrative in that case? Absolutely. Yes. Yes. creating a language of battle narrative in that case. Absolutely, yes. This is obviously, it fits into an emerging tradition in the later 5th century when people are starting to write manuals and philosophical treatises and things like that. So people are starting to try and write sort of

causal analysis in all sorts of different fields and he is clearly drawing on that. But he is the pioneer of the idea of a battle description and people often blame him for not being very precise but you have to credit him for just trying to do it in the first place. That's the way we think about that in performance, right? So this is being you know read out to a group of people then I suppose it must have been pretty gripping in that way, mustn't it? And it's so Marathon, the narrative of Marathon more than other battle accounts and certainly more than the later standard of battle accounts that you get from Thucydides and Xenophon and Polybius and all the others. It's very sort of littered with these cool anecdotes of things that are exciting and bloody and weird. So he has the

story of Epizelos, right, who was blinded in battle when he saw this giant hoplite come at him. Or we have the story of Callimachus, the polymark, who was stuck so full of javelins that he couldn't fall down when he died. And things like this, we're just like, this is a movie scene, right? Wasn't there someone who one person decides to hold on to one of the ships and until... And his arm gets chopped off. And his arm gets chopped off. The brother of Aeschylus, I think? The playwright? Yeah.

Oh, yes. It's another famous, like he would have been a prominent Athenian, right? So that's why the story survives, presumably, because, you know because maybe Aeschylus or somebody else was telling this story, that his brother had his hand cut off when he tried to grab onto a ship. That's right, yeah. So these kinds of stories,

and the glorification of Miltiades, the commander, but so some of this is obviously very Homeric. That's the model that they're working with. If you're talking about a battle, you're talking about heroes, you're talking about scenes in which something exciting happens that you can tell a story, that you can tell an anecdote. But he's also at the

same time trying to start figuring out what this battle looked like in a sort of bird's-eye view, which you don't really get in anything else in earlier Greek writing. Very, very roughly, and I'm trying to remember when I studied the Basis of the Marathon at university is that the centre, even though the Persians have more numbers, but the centre is a bit weaker, but the Athenians have more troops on the flanks and they push the flanks of the Persians and they kind of encircle whilst the centre holds. Is that the rough idea? Well, the centre breaks actually. Oh, the centre does break, does it? Okay.

Persians crush the centre but the wings overwhelm the Persian wings and they sort of fold inwards and then crush the remains of the victorious part of the Persian army. That is what we are told. And then the big question for a military historian is, was that the plan or did that just kind of happen? And I'm very much inclined to think, even though the protestations of the Athenians were obviously meant to do that, the thing is they never do anything like that ever again. There is no other battle plan in Greek history that looks anything like this. And so even if it was something that happened because they thought that they might try it that way. I find that very implausible. I think it's very likely that what they ended up doing was as a group they sort of ran forward right and Herodotus is very adamant that they ran and this is something that comes back in Aristophanes and other traditions as well.

There's a very important part of marathon is that they were running into battle for a long, long stretch, a long distance. That maybe they're just kind of filling up the planes so people are moving to the side to make sure they can't get outflanked and as they do so more people are going to the side than staying in the middle and the army just kind of turns into two big blobs that are moving slightly away from each other. But maybe even less deliberate than you're suggesting, I mean maybe just haphazardly clumping together really. Absolutely. No, I'm always a big advocate of seeing Greek warfare, especially in this very early stage, as being much more primitive than we assumed that it was. To be very, very simple, no one has very clear direction in what they're doing. Herodotus can't tell us the number of ranks in this formation, presumably because it didn't have any kind of fixed order until later when the Greeks actually start to think seriously about this. And so we have to imagine

this as a sort of mobs charging forward and you know locally overwhelming by sheer force, parts of the Persian army but other parts the Persians managed to to maintain control and break through. And here's the frustration as well isn't it? I mean we have no Persian perspective on this. Nothing. Whatsoever you know and as you know, I mean, Persian military is one of the least understood and least studied aspects of Persian history, which is a great shame. I mean, more work has been done on it now by Shawn Manning and your good self than ever before, but we're way behind. The main thing we have to bear in mind is that the

Ionian revolt has shown that the Persians do not have any trouble defeating Greek armies in principle. They can do it. They have done it many times. And so this is not a foregone conclusion that is based on technology or tactics or anything like that. The Greeks can lose and they know this, right? Herodotus praises the Athenians for even just standing their ground, you know, being willing

to fight when every other army previously that had faced the Persians had been terrified and had fled because the Persians have conquered the world. How do you have the hubris of thinking that you can beat them, you know? Herodotus also says that the Athenians were the first Greeks to endure the sight of Persian trousers. Yes, exactly. That's the biggest thing. That was the biggest thing of the day. That's how hard they were. Pitch. Yes, exactly. That's the biggest thing. That was the biggest thing of the day. That's how hard they were. Those trousers, man. That's real Andrea. That's

real manliness. That's why the Spartans were still at home. They were, one, they were just really annoyed and just that the Persians had never answered their messages. And two, because of the trousers. But you know, Roland, you're absolutely right in saying that, you know, the Persian Empire so far had encountered a myriad of different fighting styles and a myriad of different kinds of armies and had coped brilliantly with all of them to great success. Obviously, the Egyptians went against them by sea and by land. No problem whatsoever. You know, Cambyses basically marches in unopposed. So you're absolutely right. I mean, you know, the Greeks shouldn't be seen as anything more difficult than any other army they encountered. And in that sense, since we don't have Persian sources, we really are sort of grasping for

straws. But one of the things that's really a strong theme in very small pieces of Persian iconography – so you have a couple of these tomb paintings as well as seals, so seal impressions from the Persian Empire – that show just Persian warriors killing hoplites. That's a common motif. And even though that doesn't tell a story, it's not actually something that we can extrapolate to battles or something. But at the very least, we know that Persian grandees like to see and imagine themselves destroying Greeks as a particular way of expressing we see Persian nobles fighting trouser-wearing nomads, but very often we see them fighting

Greek hoplites, which is the complete antithesis of what we see, of course, on so many vase paintings from Greece, isn't it? With the defeated Persians slumping into the corner of the dish. But here we see the roles reversed quite clearly. I tell you what, Lloyd, you mentioned the Darius vase a little while ago, and I remember seeing that when at the Naples Archaeological Museum and it is absolutely stunning. In one of the best galleries of the museum I'd say the Magna Graecia or Magna Graecia gallery.

But I would like to actually go back to the point you mentioned, Ruhl, about the kind of, you've got these epic stories within the Herodotus narrative of Marathon and evident in the battle as you've highlighted, but my mind will also naturally think today of the Marathon, the Great Run, 26 miles, isn't it, and the figure of Pheidippides. Is that also attached in Herodotus about this runner going from Marathon to Athens to alert them, or was it from Athens to Sparta? What's the story of Pheidippides? BD Yeah, so Pheidippides is… There is the story of the run from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens, which is only in later sources, and there's a story in Herodotus of this messenger called Pheidippides who ran from Athens to Sparta to ask for help.

And those two things often get conflated because we assume that Herodotus would have told us the story that we know, but he actually tells us a different story about a long run. Obviously the distance from Athens to Sparta is something like 250 kilometers, so it's significantly further, which is why that's now like a super marathon or something like that. I don't know exactly. An Ironman or even more than that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. But the point is like that those are separate stories of people doing incredible feats of endurance. That man Pheidippides is also described by Herontas as a hemerodromos, he's a day runner. So there's apparently a function in Greek society

of people who can run very far, most likely because over rough terrain, over long distances, without a sort of series of organized way stations, it's faster than a horse. A human being will travel faster than a horse over that kind of terrain, unless there is some kind of infrastructure in place

to support a messenger system like the Persians had. And so that is a separate story where he tried to call on the Spartans to come and help them because they thought they wouldn't be able to hack it alone. And then after the battle, because they were obviously fighting at Marathon, which is a surprise, a marathon away from Athens, 42 kilometers, after the battle, they were afraid that the remaining Persians who had fled onto their ships and sailed off would sail around Cape Sunion and attack Athens by sea while the army was away. And so the army had to march as quickly as it could from the battlefield back to Athens to essentially garrison the city. And so that is why there is that story as well of the rush to get back home. But later on there is another story in which there is a messenger running from the

battlefield of Marathon back to the city to alert them that they had won, but that the Persians might be coming by sea to essentially just warn them. And that is the story of the Marathon that is more famous and that's given the name to Marathon as a race. And this is where you see, I mean, the legacy of the battle isn't it? You know, it's the myth-making process that we see in operation there. Obviously, you know, Herodotus' version is not the only version. And there were probably many dozens of smaller versions of this doing the rounds as well, with more sort of localized heroes, localized action, all of this going on.

And what we see in the second account of the run to Athens is an elaboration, a counter-narrative to Herodotus' original. My mind also immediately goes to that famous painting, isn't there? And it shows the Phaedipides, basically that late story of him, his last breath when he gets to Athens and he shouts and he says Nike, Nike, victory, victory, hence why you have the Nike shoe brand. And then then he dies on the spot, isn't it? That's another part of the great myth-making of the the marathon story. Yeah, I mean, that's the story that I don't remember which source this is.

Is this also one of those things that's like in Lucian or something? This is something like this is that I know the story much, much later. Definitely. Yeah. I mean, some of these stories, I mean, the Achilles heel, I mean, this is only in Roman, Roman versions of the Trojan war story. And we just take it completely for granted that that's always been part of the story. Right.

But it comes in very, very late and it's just sort of embellishments, which is fine. Obviously, everybody does that all the time with all the stories that they know. But we have to recognise that for the Greeks, when they were telling the story of Marathon, this would not have featured. So the Persian force has been defeated at Marathon and then the Athenians stopped them from taking Athens, if we believe that account for Herodotus. Shall we do a quick mention of the Spartans here? So let's say they've got over the fear of the trousers and the Persian king not replying to their text messages. Is it that they do ultimately visit the battlefield, but only once all the Persians are dead? Yeah, they send an army out, but of course, I mean, Sparta is not next door,

as we've said, 250 kilometres. I mean, with a couple of thousand men marching along with their baggage train and their support, it's not going to be five minutes we're there. So they do show up, but they've been delayed by a religious festival. They're celebrating the carnea, which is in the middle of the campaign season, very practical for the Spartans. So they can't go out and fight during that period. They leave as soon as they can afterwards, so we're told, but they arrive like two or three days late.

And then they survey the battlefield. They do go and see it, which is another day's march, so fair due to them. But they go and see it and they're very amazed, we're told, and then they go home. And that's essentially it. But if it's into this general, I think, heredity and pattern, right? If people go and see things because they want to see, you know, the amazing feats of others and the amazing achievements of the world. Absolutely, I think on that point, it enters into something that we call poma literature, isn't it? Amazement literature, you know?

That seeing is believing kind of thing, which is how Roditus is all about after all, you know, I have seen with my own eyes. This is what he likes to say. So I think it's part of that motif. It's an extraordinary narrative and story that you guys have told, but also the archeology too,

and why we need to be cautious when exploring the story of the first Persian war, of this expedition to Greece, and also what happens before and contacts between the Persian world and the Greek world. You both have kind of talked about this already with the mythologising of Marathon, but I would like to ask it again now as we kind of wrap up this first big engagement. How significant would you both say the first Persian invasion of Greece is? Both to Greece, then to Persia, but also then of course the later legacy of it. It's a massive question, I know. Ben Hickman We can be brief about the Persians. I mean, they would have thought that this campaign was a stunning success. I mean, they took all the

islands. They took Euboea. The only thing they took all the islands, they took Ubia. The only thing they failed in doing was subjecting Attica, which is already perhaps a bridge too far for the forces that they dispatched. I mean, they were painted as a victory. They could paint it as a success. Oh, without a doubt, without a doubt. Absolutely. I agree ruled completely. I think the only thing that would have niggled the great king is that he'd had to send much of his force to the west when he could have used it far more profitably, subduing India. So the Indian campaign kind of had to stop. They still got North India, but I think that was the

only thing that really kind of annoyed Darius. But otherwise, yes, this is a success. And in fact, I mean, if we recognize that the Ionian revolt began because the Persians under with the sort of advice of Aristagoras failed to take the island of Naxos, which is very wealthy at this time. They did it this time. They just sort of went in and took it. So in a lot of ways, they've sort of made up for previous previous failures. And so they're very happy with it, I'm sure.

So as far as they're concerned, it's all good for the Greeks. Greeks, I think this is a radical moment of self-reassessment. I mean, especially for the Athenians, this is a moment with like, oh, we can actually beat them, like we can win, which is a huge deal for them. I mean, there's a variation of the verb. So, kindu noain, which means to take risks, is a verb that they use for fighting battles. And they specifically make an adaptation of this verb, prokindu neain, to be in front taking risks, to take risks before others, which the Athenians deploy in order to express what they had done in the Persian wars. They had done this before anyone else.

They had actually managed to achieve a victory before the others even got involved. They were already out there fighting and winning against the Persians. So they completely revise what it means to exist in a world with Persians. It's no longer just a story of terror and submission, or even just using the Persians to inevitably encroach on the Greeks in exchange for whatever favors they might do you. But instead you see the idea that, oh, actually, if we get together and resist them, this might actually work. And do they do they link that to democracy as well? If you had hippies in the Persian ranks, it's kind of a win for democracy over tyranny, or their version of democracy, their new way of government.

Do they try to link that together too? Well, certainly Herodotus reflects on that question himself and incorporates it into a very well-known passage in Book 3 where we have Darius and his counsellors sitting together and thinking of what kind of government could we possibly be? Should we be an oligarchy? Should we be a democracy? No, not for us, but nice idea. Or should we be an absolute monarchy?

Yes, that sounds like our thing. So I think that, you know, if at the time, democracy was not really being upheld as part of the marathon experience, as the marathon myth, I think it starts to be built up in that way. Yeah, I mean, it is in some ways, it's also one of the first occasions where we actually see some of the institutions of the democracy in action.

So you see the board of generals, for instance, acting for the first time at Marathon. So some of these institutions are new and the Athenians have clearly attached them to the Marathon story. They're very prominently involved in that. And the tribal arrangement of the army. So the reorganization of the state that followed from democracy is integral to the marathon story. But I wouldn't necessarily think that they are saying, oh, it's because democracy, we managed to do this. I don't think there is any source that specifically says that. It's just a broad

association with Athens has become more effective at organizing its resources for war, which is something that Herodotus says, not only in that in the constitutional debate, but especially in book five, when he's talking about the rise debate, but especially in book five, when he's talking about the rise of democracy, so suddenly everybody's got a stake in this. And so they're much more inclined to do their best. One last thing I was about to mention as well, is there also this interesting, it could well be fantastical story, and whoever wants to answer this, please do, of someone whispering in Darius's ear, the great king's ear, to remember the Athenians

and to come back, all this foreboding thing that the Persians will return? Yeah, it's one of those great herodotty and set pieces, isn't it? Every night before Darius dines, one of his right-hand men will come in and say, Sire, remember the Athenians. And of course, will come in and say, Sire, remember the Athenians. And of course, Darius then nearly chokes on his piece of sweetened honeyed lamb and kind of says, damn them, I'll get them next time. Of course, only an Athenian, only Herodotus could have written such a thing. I don't think the Athenians were much on the mind of Darius or any other Persian after this. I think this is very much to do with what I mentioned earlier, this idea that for the Greek mind this is all about revenge, right? That's how they frame it. And so they have to

have this kind of narrative that, oh, it really mattered to the Persians, like it was a big thorn in their side. I mean, if you did this to Darius, he'd probably been like, firstly, who are the Athenians? Secondly, why are you so close to me? I don't think I gave you permission. Secondly, who are the Athenians? And secondly, why are you so close to me? I don't think I gave you permission. Guys, this has been absolutely fantastic. And this is also kind of teeing up that the Persians will return. This is the first Persian invasion of Greece and there is a second one that we will cover

in time. But for the moment, I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast together. Absolutely. You're very welcome. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Ruled Kananediq and Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones discussing the First Persian War, the first episode with these two experts on the Persian Wars.

The next episode will be dropping next week, where we explore the Persian return with King Xerxes in 480 BC and legendary battles such as Thermopylae and Salamis. Stay tuned for that one coming 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 doing us a big favour. If you want more Ancient History videos and clips in the meantime, then be sure to follow me on Instagram at ancientstristin. Don't forget you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts at free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe.