The First Clash

by Jim Lacey

  These constant wars had led to at least three battles that Athens won decisively. Although it is hard to estimate the total numbers of enemy casualties, we know that seven hundred Thebans were captured in one battle, and consequently one may safely assume that twice that number were killed. Moreover, the Athenians had beaten Chalcis’s army so severely that the city immediately withdrew from the war. As Athens no longer rated Chalcis a threat, it must have demobilized most of its military establishment—that is, turned over its armor and weapons. Megara, a city about the same size as Chalcis, was able to field three thousand hoplites in 480 BC, so that is probably a fair estimate of the size of Chalcis’s army. Finally, one thousand Argive hoplites and an unknown number of Aeginetans were killed in battle against the Athenians in the year before Marathon. A conservative guess is that over the years, Athens easily collected enough armor from its enemies to outfit approximately eight thousand hoplites. From this, it would seem that the normally expensive hoplite panoply was probably available in Athens at drastically reduced prices.9

  However, this is not the end of Athens’s mobilization. As the Battle of Marathon was fought after the harvest, the rest of the male population of Attica was also available for military duty. These were mostly the thetes class of poorer citizens and often used as light troops.10 Herodotus does not mention these light troops as being present at Marathon, but it is unlikely they would have remained behind, particularly as an even lower class—slaves—did fight in the battle. Like the contemporary accounts of medieval battles, which habitually left out the contributions of peasants and foot soldiers in favor of the deeds of the heavy cavalry (knights), Herodotus probably did not believe the participation of these citizens of any account. Yet any reasonable reconstruction of the events of the battle requires their presence and active participation in critical roles.

  Although slaves were normally forbidden from participation in combat, they were present at every major battle, and in emergencies they could be freed and permitted to fight in the ranks.11 Under any circumstances, slaves would have been present to prepare food, rescue wounded men, serve as attendants, and most important act as baggage carriers and caretakers for the hoplites’ armor.12 However, if Athens ever faced an emergency, Marathon was it. It is likely that in this crisis the Athenians would have released at least a portion of their slaves for combat duties, and evidence for this exists. Pausanias states that during his travels he saw the common grave of the Plataeans and “servants” killed at Marathon.13 There is no way to know the number of slaves and recently freedmen who traveled with the army, but several thousand would seem a reasonable estimate.

  So in practical terms, Athens could field a fighting force at least numerically equal to what the Persians were capable of throwing at Greece in 491 BC. Most important, the core of the Athenian army consisted of nine thousand heavily armored hoplites. The key point that deserves emphasis is that this was a veteran force. In recent years, it had humbled Thebes, Chalcis, and Aegina and faced down a Spartan army, which in itself was no mean achievement. For almost twenty years Athens had been a nation in arms, surrounded by enemies waiting to pounce—the Israel of its age. One should not underestimate the confidence this would have given the average Athenian hoplite. Furthermore, the Athenian army’s high level of training allowed its leaders to plan a maneuver even the Spartans would have found difficult, if not impossible—one that would make them victorious at Marathon.

  The Athenian victory was indeed stunning. However, any reasonable assessment makes it clear that as long as Athens stood on the strategic defensive, the deck was not as stacked against it as is typically assumed.

  Chapter 14

  PERSIAN WARFARE

  Mesopotamia was more than the “cradle of civilization.” It was also the “cradle of war.” From the moment humans first settled into organized communities, civilization and warfare have found themselves inextricably entwined. Along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, great empires rose and fell based on the fortunes of battle and the tides of war. Unfortunately, most of the tales of these three millennia of unrelenting carnage have disappeared into the mists of history. But despite all that has vanished, the story of one empire still reaches across the chasm of three thousand years as the embodiment of what can be built through a policy of blood and iron and maintained through war and savage cruelty—Assyria.1

  Even at the zenith of its power, with all of the great Mesopotamian states under its dominion, Assyria remained continuously at war either against new threats on its expanding frontiers or putting down revolts among the restless people within its empire. Between 900 and 650 BC, the height of Assyrian power, the empire engaged in no fewer than 108 conflicts as well as innumerable punitive expeditions against neighboring peoples and to punish for internal revolts.2 Their brutal method of warfare is best described by their own words. King Sennacherib (704–681 BC) describes a battle with the Elamites in 691 BC:

  At the command of the god Ashur, the great Lord, I rushed upon the enemy like the approach of a hurricane.… I put them to rout and turned them back. I transfixed the troops of the enemy with javelins and arrows.… I cut their throats like sheep.… My prancing steeds, trained to harness, plunged into their welling blood as into a river; the wheels of my battle chariot were bespattered with blood and filth. I filled the plain with the corpses of their warriors like herbage.… As to the lords of the Chaldeans, panic from my onslaught overwhelmed them like a demon. They abandoned their tents and fled for their lives, crushing the corpses of their troop as they went.… In their terror they passed scalding urine and voided their excrement into their chariots. Attack by foot soldiers, using mines, breaches as well as sapper work. I drove out of them 200,150 people, young and old, male and female, horses, mules, donkeys, camels, big and small cattle beyond counting, and considered them booty. Himself I made a prisoner in Jerusalem, his royal residence, like a bird in a cage.3

  When Cyrus began his campaigns of conquests, he did not have anything approaching the financial or material resources required to build a professional organized force along the Assyrian model. Rather, he had the kara, which loosely translated meant the warriors of his tribe, his friends, and any other warriors his kin were able to gather. However, soon after Persia absorbed the Median Empire, Cyrus immediately reorganized the kara along the lines of the professional Median army (called the spada). By integrating the Persian kara into the Median spada and adopting most of the Medes’ battle methods, the Persians became the inheritors of all the Assyrians had learned of warfare.

  Cyrus’s new spada consisted of cavalry, horse archers, foot archers, and infantry. This appears to be the same organization that the Median king Cyaxares had copied from the Assyrians, who were the first to organize regiments based on their specific arms.4 Moreover, by taking advantage of Assyria’s experience and knowledge in terms of how to take a fortified city, the Persians built and maintained a superb siege train for use in any prolonged campaign. Although not mentioned in Herodotus’s account, this siege expertise and technology was instrumental in crushing the Ionian revolt, as it made short work of the Ionian walls. This army sufficed to conquer a sprawling empire, but after having seen firsthand the combat power of the Greek phalanx, no later Persian army was complete without a formidable core of Greek mercenaries.

  For victory in battle, the Persians relied on archery, from both foot archers and those on horseback, and their excellent cavalry. The infantry was less important and generally found its most worthwhile employment in finishing off an enemy force already decimated by the archers and scattered by the cavalry. As their approach to war did not require it, the Persians never built a truly effective heavy infantry force. Some would immediately object and claim that Persia’s elite ten-thousand-man Immortals fit this bill.5 However, this force wore only light protection and was never able to stand toe-to-toe with heavily armored hoplites. Herodotus describes the Persian Immortals as follows:

  They wore soft felt caps on their heads, which
they call tiaras, and multicolored tunics with sleeves covering their bodies, and they had breastplates of iron fashioned to look like fish scales. On their legs they wore trousers, and instead of shields they carried pieces of wicker, which had quivers hung below them. They were armed with short spear, long bows, and arrows made of reeds. From their belts they fastened daggers, which hung down their right thigh.6

  Herodotus further tells us that this “elite” Persian force tended to make campaigning as easy as possible on itself:

  The most impressive dress and equipment were displayed by the Persians.… Their dress and equipment was conspicuous because of the lavish amount of gold that they wore. And they had brought along covered wagons which carried their concubines and large retinues of well dressed servants.7

  Herodotus further relates that the Persians armed their cavalry like the infantry, except that some wore bronze helmets. According to Xenophon, they also carried two javelins. Other elements of the Persian army fought with their traditional equipment and weaponry.

  The Persian army, weighed down with baggage, moved slowly, and it did not march or fight at night.8 When it eventually did come up against a foe, it relied on the coordinated action of its combined arms, centered on massed archery, to inflict sufficient losses to shatter an enemy’s cohesion. The infantry would form on the center, with the cavalry on each flank. Once arranged, the infantry would stick their shields into the ground to create a field-expedient palisade, behind which the mass of archers would shield themselves. As the archers pinned down the enemy force and thinned its ranks, the cavalry would start moving off in a series of flanking or encircling movements. As long as the enemy remained unbroken, the cavalry would keep its distance and join the foot archers in pouring arrows into the enemy formation. Periodically, masses of more heavily armored knights would charge in and discharge a volley of javelins. This would continue until their opponents could stand it no longer and their lines began to waver.

  This was the signal for the heavily protected Persian shock cavalry, armed with spears and swords, to close with the enemy. While unbroken infantry could hold off cavalry indefinitely, once an infantry formation began wavering, it was useless. A thousand pounds of charging flesh with a screaming rider wielding a deadly spear or sword was a terrifying sight. Under such an attack, a decimated line that was already stepping back always broke. At this point, the infantry, which had remained standing at the wicker palisade to protect the archers from a sudden rush, started forward. Armed with their akenakes (short swords) and short spears, they delivered the coup de grâce.

  This army comprised a hodgepodge of national identities, fighting styles, and equipment that made it impossible for Persia to forge a fully integrated fighting force—one trained on the same weapons, doctrine, and tactics. Throughout the two hundred years of the Achaemenid dynasty, the Medes and Persians remained the army’s fighting nucleus, with tenuous support provided by a relatively unsophisticated mob. If this Persian core faltered, the army was in serious trouble regardless of its size. As Persia’s enemies on the Asian plains were themselves relatively unsophisticated, the Persians were under no disadvantage on any Central Asian battlefield. In Asia, the elite Persian core was the decisive instrument of war. However, when it faced Greek hoplites, it foundered. This is most easily explained by Persia’s inability to develop first-class heavy infantry. Armed only with short swords and spears, they were unable to outrange the longer spears of a Greek phalanx. Moreover, the Persians never anticipated having to fight a close battle against organized infantry, as they expected their archers would break up enemy formations long before they could close for a hand-to-hand fight. Arrows were particularly ineffective if the enemy sprinted through the kill zone and closed rapidly—the Athenian tactic at Marathon. Arrows never made much of an impression on a phalanx that maintained its order and discipline. It is instructive, in this regard, to take note of the Spartans at the Battle of Plataea in 480 BC. Here the Spartans stood motionless under showers of arrows, while their leaders made repeated animal sacrifices in the hopes of eventually getting good omens.

  As the Persians never expected to fight a hard, close battle, they would be at a decisive disadvantage once the hoplite battle line was upon them. The Persians themselves, at least, wore some scaled armor for protection. But most of their polyglot army did not have even this much. There were the Sagartians, who fought with lassos; some of the Indians went into battle carried on donkeys; the Colchians wore wooden helmets and carried short spears; the Thracians wore fox on their heads and fawn pelts on their feet; and so it went for the entire army. It was a mark of Persian military genius that they could weld these disparate troops into something approaching a coherent force.

  In any case, the protection provided by scaled armor paled in comparison with that offered by the Greeks’ bronze breastplates. And there was no comparison between the heavy Greek shield and the wicker of the Persians. These Persian shields, apparently constructed of sticks threaded through a wet shield of leather, were almost the height of an average man and just a bit wider than the human frame.9 They may have sufficed to stop or slow an arrow, but against a charging hoplite they were close to useless, as they could not stop a spear thrust.

  Much worse for the Persians was the fact that as they expected to be fighting an already shattered infantry, they had no training on how to handle a formation that fought as a single unit. A Greek phalanx was a single fighting formation, and if still intact on impact, it would have no trouble cutting its way through any Persian force to its front. As Herodotus relates about the Battle of Plataea:

  The Persians were not inferior in courage or strength, but they did not have hoplite arms, and besides, they were untrained [in this kind of warfare] and no match for their opponents in tactical skill. They were dashing out beyond the front lines individually or in groups of ten, joining together in larger or smaller bands, and charging right into the Spartan ranks, where they perished.

  In head-to-head combat during this era, the only thing that could hope to halt a Spartan or Athenian phalanx was another phalanx.

  However, the most formidable weapon the Persians had was the cavalry, mounted on superb Nesaian horses. As Paul Rahe states: “For control of their realms, vast plains and steppes, the Achaemenids depended less on their archers and charioteers [and infantry] than on their cavalry—the last including horse archers capable of firing volley after volley as they circled the enemy, knights in light armor who hurled javelins into the enemy ranks, and shock cavalry equipped with spears and sabers.”10 Caught in the open, a Greek phalanx would have found itself doomed against such a force, unless it could find a way to keep the cavalry at arm’s length. This it usually accomplished by the employment of slingers, archers, peltasts, and its own cavalry—or, as Alexander did at Gaugamela, by placing heavy infantry in reserve to cover an exposed flank.

  It is important to note that the Greek phalanx possessed an overwhelming advantage on a narrow front in a battle fought in a box—a perfect description for the Plain of Marathon. For there is one thing that a horse will not do: It will not run head-on into a wall of spear points. Some historians make much of the fact that medieval knights often ran down infantry. This is the case only because the infantry wasn’t disciplined, unbroken, or armed with pikes. Even as late as Waterloo, the allies gained victory only because even the most courageous of French horses would not throw themselves on a bayonet. So when the British troops formed squares with bristling bayonets facing in every direction, they became impervious to the swirling masses of French cavalry.11 When it comes to cavalry charging a phalanx, human bravery counts for nothing. It was the courage of the horse that mattered, and in this case Persia’s fabled Nesaian mounts proved no braver than any other horse.

  Through recent popular books and movies such as 300, the Persians, and particularly their rulers, have entered the public imagination as a collection of particularly obnoxious effetes. As a result of Greek writers such as Xenophon and orators
such as Isocrates, who in the decades after Marathon fed their audiences a constant diet of tales of Persian feebleness, even the ancient Greeks believed the Persians were inferior warriors. If the Persians did lose some of their warlike character in the later days of the empire, it certainly was not the case in the empire of Darius and his immediate successors. As Herodotus describes, “From the age of five to the age of twenty, they teach their sons just three things: to ride horse, to shoot the bow, and to speak the truth.…”12 The Persian forces that the Greeks fought at Marathon and then again, a decade later, at Thermopylae and Plataea were not soft. They were seasoned warriors within a culture that prized warriors above all else. The example began with Darius himself, who despite his undoubted achievements in consolidating the administrative infrastructure of the empire was most proud of the fact that he was a king on horseback—a true warrior.13

  It is important to understand that the Persian army the Greeks faced at Marathon was considerably different from the typical Persian force generally depicted. First of all, it was a veteran army, inured to hardship and the terror of battle by six years of fighting in Ionia and Thrace. While no Persian army ever approached Greek levels of tactical integration, this one probably came the closest. Six years of war would have seen to that. Over time, national differences within the army eroded, as common experiences and the natural adaptation that takes place on the battlefield brought about a convergence of fighting methods and equipment. Furthermore, this force was superbly disciplined and probably possessed a high level of tactical flexibility as a result of training and fighting together over a long period of time. The only time Persians may have ever seen massed hoplites was when the Milesians marched to the assistance of the Carians, and the Persian army possessing that experience was massacred in a later ambush.