Ancient Greece

Lesson 2: Herodotus and the Persian Wars

Xerxes and the invasion of Greece

Darius was succeeded as Great King by his son Xerxes in 486 BC.

On his accession to the throne, Xerxes was faced by revolts in both Egypt and Babylonia. He spent the first few years of his reign putting down these revolts. Having attended to these matters, he decided to lead his army to mainland Greece to finally settle what to the Persians would have been seen to be ‘the Aegean Problem’.

Herodotus' estimates of the size of the army that Xerxes put together for his invasion of Greece are so exaggerated that very few modern scholars take them seriously. He claims that the army alone (excluding the naval contingent) numbered 1.7 million men. The total of Xerxes land and sea forces he estimates at exactly 2,317,610.

In other words, Xerxes’ total invading force would have been slightly larger than the entire German Armed Forces at the beginning of the First World War.

Modern estimates of the size of Xerxes army run from about 60,000 to 250,000 men.

Xerxes led his forces across the Hellespont in 480 BC.

As the invading Persians approached, a general panic took hold of the Greek city-states. Some of the Greeks decided to throw in their lot with the Persians. Among these were the Thebans and the Thessalians.

But thirty-one of the Greek city-states, including Athens and Sparta, formed a league to resist the invaders. A force was despatched to hold the Persians at a narrow pass called Thermopylae, under the command of the Spartan king, Leonidas.

The traditional account of the following battle (which derives mainly from Herodotus’ version) is a highly romanticised version of how a small number of defenders held off the vastly superior Persian army, thereby saving Greece and all of ‘Western’ civilisation.

Whatever the real events, the actual result was that the defenders were massacred and the Persian army continued on its slow but unstoppable march southwards.

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