PLATAEA

2,500 years ago an alliance of a few Greek city-states defeated the invading army of the mighty Persian empire, saving Greece and securing the future of European civilisation

- WILLIAM SHEPHERD

In the summer of 480 BCE, the Great King of Persia, Xerxes, led an immense army and fleet into Europe with the goal of conquering Greece. Fifteen years earlier the Athenians had played a minor part in the five-year revolt of his Greek subjects spread across the western fringe of his empire, and in 490 BCE they had added injury to insult at Marathon by comprehensively defeating a punitive expedition launched by Darius, Xerxes’ father. Darius had planned a second expedition in overwhelming force, but this was delayed by insurrection in Egypt and his death in 485 BCE. It was Xerxes’ duty as Darius’ successor to execute the plan.

In strategic terms, the conquest of mainland Greece and the islands and northern seaboard of the Aegean would stabilise the empire’s western frontier. Then, as ‘Great King, King of Kings, Ruler of the Lands’, Xerxes or his successors might have turned their thoughts beyond Greece to Sicily and Italy. More would then be at stake even than Greece’s future and the golden age of classical civilisation.

Herodotus, our foremost source for these critical years, puts these words into Xerxes’ mouth in a speech to his council of leading Persians: “If we conquer the Athenians and their neighbours, we shall extend the territory of Persia to the very edge of the earth, even where it joins with God’s heaven. When I have passed through Europe, there will be no lands under the sun that lie outside our borders, because I will make all lands one land.” The speech is invented, but it plausibly represents Xerxes’ vision and sense of destiny.