Greco-Persian Wars
The wars in which small Greek city-states twice repelled invasion by the vast Persian Empire, later mythologized as the West's founding stand for freedom.
Twice in a single generation, a scatter of quarrelsome Greek city-states threw back the largest empire on earth. The Greco-Persian Wars, fought between 499 and 449 BC, pitted the Achaemenid superpower against a coalition of poleis that could barely agree on anything, and the Greeks won. It is one of history's great upsets, and the West has been telling stories about it ever since.
How it started
The spark was a revolt. Around 499 BC the Greek cities of Ionia, on the coast of Anatolia and under Persian rule, rose against their overlords. Athens sent ships to help and joined in the burning of Sardis, a Persian regional capital. The rebellion was crushed by 494 BC, but Persia's king Darius I did not forget who had meddled. In 490 BC he sent a punitive force across the Aegean. It landed at Marathon, a day's march from Athens, where a heavily outnumbered Athenian army charged and routed it. The legend of a runner carrying news of the victory to Athens later gave the modern marathon its name and its distance.
Xerxes' invasion
Darius died before he could avenge Marathon; his son Xerxes finished the job on a colossal scale. In 480 BC he crossed into Greece with an army and fleet so large that Herodotus's figures, since doubted, ran into the millions. At the narrow pass of Thermopylae, King Leonidas of Sparta and a small rearguard, remembered as the 300, held for three days until a betrayed mountain path let the Persians surround and kill them. The delay bought time but not safety: the Persians took and burned an evacuated Athens. Then the war turned. In the straits of Salamis, the Greek navy lured the bigger Persian fleet into cramped water and shattered it. Xerxes went home. The next year, 479 BC, the allied Greek army destroyed the Persian force left behind at Plataea, and the invasion was over.
The father of history
Almost everything we know comes from one man. Herodotus of Halicarnassus, writing a few decades later, gathered the stories into his Histories, the first work of its kind, which earned him the title father of history and the rival jibe father of lies. He mixed genuine inquiry with tall tales and inflated numbers, and modern historians read his troop counts with heavy skepticism. But his central achievement holds: he tried to explain why the war happened, not just record that it did.
The founding myth of the West
The wars became a story bigger than themselves. Later Greeks, and Europeans after them, cast the conflict as free citizens defeating Eastern despotism, the birth cry of a distinct West standing for liberty against tyranny. The framing is powerful and not simply false: Athens really did prize citizen self-rule, and the victory protected the space in which classical Greek culture flowered. But it flattens the reality. Persia was a sophisticated, comparatively tolerant empire, not a horde; many Greeks fought on the Persian side; and Sparta, the poster child for freedom, ran a slave society. The wars are worth remembering as a stunning military upset, and worth watching as a myth that later ages bent to their own purposes.