Second Persian Invasion

The last videos we saw a dominant Persia have to put down a rebellion by the Ionians in the Anatolian Peninsula, and they were really, really mad that these Ionians were helped by the Athenians and the Eritreans. So, Darius, the King of Kings, goes off to try to conquer and put down the Athenians and the Eritreans.

The first time he sends a fleet in 492 BCE, it's destroyed by a storm. And we'll see this is not the last time that, at least part of a Persian fleet, is destroyed by a storm. Then, in 490, he sends a fleet again, and then he is defeated by the Athenians at Marathon. We saw that right over there.

Let me do that in a color you can actually see. But, as I mentioned in the last video, the Persians were not done. Darius would not live to see another round with the Greeks, but his successor, Xerxes, would not only try another attempt but he would amass a huge, huge force against the Greeks. In his mind, he would finally take them over, and he wants it done so badly that he leads the forces himself.

So, we are now 10 years after the first Persian invasion. We are now at 480 BCE, where Xerxes is going to land and going to try to invade Greece by land and by sea. But, as we will see, he is also not going to be successful. This second invasion is the stuff of legend, and once again, the historical accounts come to us primarily from Herodotus, who was Greek and who was not a direct observer of this. So, you might want to take all of this with a grain of salt because it does make the Greeks look awfully good.

But we do think that most of this happened, but, you know, obviously, Herodotus probably added a little bit of bias there. We are likely to never know. So, let's think about or let's see what Xerxes attempted to do. We see this magenta line; this is the line of attack of Xerxes in 480. You can see there's one magenta line that is going by sea, and another magenta line that is going by land.

Let's zoom in a little bit more. I have another map here, so let's zoom in to this map right over here that gives us a clearer picture of what's about to happen in this next Persian invasion. Just to reorient ourselves: here are the land forces, and according to Herodotus and historians of that time, they numbered this force in the potentially millions of soldiers. Modern historians think it was closer to 50,000 to 300,000.

We really don't know, but we think it's in the approximately hundred thousand or a few hundred thousands, not millions. But by any measure, that is a huge, huge military force. So, you know, this is the hundreds of thousands right over here. So, hundreds of thousands, or let me write this, one hundred hundreds of thousands, maybe between 50 and 300,000, they're coming this way, the Persian forces.

They also have a fleet of approximately 1,200 ships. Now the Persians really are not having good luck with weather. Whatever they try to attack Greece, they face a storm, and about a third of their fleet is destroyed. And so, up here, they're left with about... and these are all approximate, remember, this happened over 2,000 years ago, roughly 2,500 years ago, so it's amazing that we know anything about it at all.

But, obviously, we have to rely on Herodotus and whatever historical accounts we can find. So, the Persians are invading by land and sea, and the Greeks have a strategy of: let's try to stop them by land at Thermopylae and stop them by sea at the Strait of Artemisium right over here.

There's some historical debate of, you know, was this a big grand strategy to eventually try to defeat the Persians at Salamis, which eventually happens, or were they, you know, genuinely trying to stop them there? Because they couldn't, they had to retreat back to Salamis, as we'll see. That second narrative is what actually happens.

Well, I guess, on some level, both of those narratives happen: that they are able to at least slow down the Persians at both of these places, and the Persians are eventually defeated at the Strait of Salamis. Now, Thermopylae is the stuff of legends. It is, if you've ever seen the movie "300," it is about the Spartan, the 300 Spartan soldiers led by King Leonidas, along with roughly 7,000 other Greeks that they're able to collect to stop the Persians at Thermopylae.

Thermopylae is in this coastal area where there's a very limited area for this massive Persian army to be funneled through. The Greeks are trying to stop them at the pass of Thermopylae, and you could see this. You can see that right over there. By Herodotus's accounts, they are actually quite successful because they're funneling that Persian army into a very narrow space.

The Spartans, along with the other Greeks, are able to push back. This is a massive outnumbering: roughly 7,000 versus many tens or hundreds of thousands. But, as Herodotus's accounts go, there was a traitor amongst the Greeks who goes to the Persians and tells them and shows them another way around.

And so the Persians are essentially able to not only get around the Greeks, but by surrounding them, are able to defeat the Greeks at Thermopylae and continue their march. Remember, they were able to get to Eritrea before, 10 years before, but they really want to seek their revenge on Athens. They are able to go to Athens and, by the time they go there, they see that the town has been, for the most part, evacuated.

The Athenians, when they saw that the Persians were coming, went to Salamis right over here. So, even though Athens was sacked and destroyed, the Athenian people were not destroyed. Now, simultaneously with Thermopylae, you had a naval battle happen in the Strait of Artemisium. Once again, even though there were about 600 Persian ships in this battle, there were on the order of about 200 or 300 Greek ships.

So, the Greeks were once again outnumbered, and they were able to slow down the Persians but not stop them. The Persians kept having bad luck, especially with these storms. Even we had these first ships get destroyed; they sent some 200 ships around Euboea, I'm probably not pronouncing it perfectly right, over here, but then they get destroyed by a storm.

So now you have the ships that engaged the Greeks in the Straits of Artemisium. The Greeks pull back because they know they're outnumbered, and they essentially retreat, or what the Persians think is a retreat. So, the Persians follow the Greek fleet all the way back to the Strait of Salamis, and it’s over there that the Greek fleet is able to plan a defeat of the Persian fleet.

The Persian fleet gets destroyed decisively at Salamis. You have the Persian army still in Athens is able to destroy Athens, but the Athenian people have not been destroyed. So, there's a question for Xerxes: what to do at this point. This is all, now, in 480 BCE.

So, what does Xerxes decide to do? He says, "Hey, I don't want to get stranded in Europe at the edge of my empire." So, Xerxes heads back, but he leaves some of his ground forces there, and they eventually face a decisive defeat at Plataea, I should say right over here.

That is the last significant threat of the Persians against the Greeks. From then, the Greco-Persian Wars continue for the next several decades, for the next 20 or 30 years. But at that point, it's more of the Greeks on the offensive. This really is the beginning of the growth of the Golden Age of Greek civilization.