On the invasion of Greece

[conon394]

@Conon Not grazing. Watering. A few thousand? Quite a few newer historians put the figure in hundreds, if they consider it at all. The truth is, we don't have enough reliable evidence to give ANY estimates that are not based on endless assumptions and conjecture. Hence why the whole argument is pointless.

Of course the evidence is incomplete and fragmentary and contradictory and you can spin it five ways from Sunday... but that goes for just about every ancient battle reconstruction.

But on balance what is clear is the Persians did bring some cavalry and enough to be important - at least they thought so.

On grazing and watering, my point was that the Persian had absolute control of the sea at the time and had obviously had enough hay and fodder to feed the horses in transit, being right at there landing its a bit silly argue they suddenly had to be away grazing while an enemy army was right across the way. Watering could be an issue but again I would assume the Persians would prioritize that for night and not when the Greeks were getting ready to offer battle.

I also think a lot extreme downward estimates are based a little too much on Athenian practice. The problem is Persia had horses and wealth to burn - Athens raised a cavalry force only with very much difficulty a no great reserve of horse to replace loss, as such it was a force that was only sent by ship with care. Before and after the Democracy without massive state subsidy Athens only had ~100 cavalry men. By comparison the King had both the capital and the Royal horse farms to afford the risk to send horses by ship if that is what he wanted.

[Blatta Optima Maxima]

Of course the evidence is incomplete and fragmentary and contradictory and you can spin it five ways from Sunday... but that goes for just about every ancient battle reconstruction.

Indeed. But Marathon is especially so, because of the lack of any contemporary mention of the numbers involved - only the 600 triremes, an ambiguous figure in itself. We can argue all day long, and historians have been arguing for years, but we'll never know the truth unless we get a time machine and watch the battle.

But on balance what is clear is the Persians did bring some cavalry and enough to be important - at least they thought so.

Yes, some mounted troops must have been there. But we cannot argue about their numbers.

On grazing and watering, my point was that the Persian had absolute control of the sea at the time and had obviously had enough hay and fodder to feed the horses in transit, being right at there landing its a bit silly argue they suddenly had to be away grazing while an enemy army was right across the way. Watering could be an issue but again I would assume the Persians would prioritize that for night and not when the Greeks were getting ready to offer battle.

We don't really know enough about how large the army was and how many horsemen there were to make any conclusions about their thought process. Watering was apparently done at a nearby lake, but we can't know if they really thought too much about when they did it. An attack could just as well come at night, and then there are infinite other ways we can spin this. Who knows what the hell they were thinking, if we don't even know what they were doing?

I also think a lot extreme downward estimates are based a little too much on Athenian practice. The problem is Persia had horses and wealth to burn - Athens raised a cavalry force only with very much difficulty a no great reserve of horse to replace loss, as such it was a force that was only sent by ship with care. Before and after the Democracy without massive state subsidy Athens only had ~100 cavalry men. By comparison the King had both the capital and the Royal horse farms to afford the risk to send horses by ship if that is what he wanted.

We don't know who the cavalry were. They could just as well be the retainers of the commanders, Datis being a powerful Satrap and all. They could be mercenaries, they could be from Anatolia. We don't know who they were, how many they were, who they belonged to, where they were from, where they were at the time of the battle, before it and afterwards. All we know is that they were there.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

We're gonna take Time Commanders to a whole new meaning.

[conon394]

An attack could just as well come at night

Not really a night attack was a very risky affair and no rational commander would consider it any where near as likely as a day battle.

[Blatta Optima Maxima]

I was just saying that one can churn out endless arguments about this. We simply don't know what the thought process was, because we've got no idea what happened there.

[Spartan JKM]

Happy holidays, everybody

Hey Duptar. Boy, I'm sorry - I owe you some contributions to a few of your terrific threads. I don't have my books nor articles with me, so I'll have to throw out some thoughts all on my own (yikes!). When I mentioned 'a week' to you last summer, forgive me - I meant I needed a week off to contribute in the manner I desire to. Let's see...

I think Darius I did intend to conquer 'Greece' (viz. the main poleis) after dealing with the Ionian Revolt - he was simply carrying it out with a stick and carrot policy by the time of his death. His show of force would have probably augmented without the submissions of earth and water, as the extension of power is the consequence of power.

It is not borne out amid Herodotus that Leonidas took too few men to Thermopylae - Herodotus indeed tells us that the 4,100 Peloponnesians were the 'forerunners' of a larger army expected any day (Book 7.203). However, it is reflected in Diodorus (following Ephorus), Pompeius Trogus (abbreviated by Justin), and Plutarch (in his Malice of Herodotus). The latter three on whole require more caution than Herodotus, but certainly not automatic dismissal.

Regarding the critical issue of supply for the campaign of Plataea, posters often allude to what Herodotus tells us at 9.45.2 while overlooking what he ascribes to Artabazos (probably based on fact, if not verbatim) exactly four chapters earlier - an apparent contradiction. A great amount of supplies had been stocked in nearby Thebes (some 5 miles north of Mardonius' camp), to which supply lines were secure and open; by choosing to fight in Boeotia (Attica was not, despite common opinion, inferior as 'cavalry country'), Mardonius had been able to marshal his forces back on his own supply lines while forcing the Greek allied force to run theirs dangerously through a range of mountains from the Peloponnese; Attica had been too ravaged to serve as a supply-source, hence he could indeed wreck havoc on their main water-source and supply lines (cf. Peter Connolly, Greece and Rome at War, p. 30, I believe). Did Alexander I of Macedon, in apprising the Athenians during that peculiar mission of his at night, that Mardonius had but a few days left of provisions, mean the Persians were overall low on supplies, or just that they were low on provisions in their proximate camp off the Asopus River (seems the latter)? The statements of Artabazos and Alexander I may actually represent no contradiction, but rather the distinguishing aspect that Persian supplies were running low off the Asopos, but were plentiful in nearby Thebes directly behind them. Mardonius did not, in all likelihood, outnumber the Greek coalition force in 479 BCE, did not suffer from a supply problem any more than they were, and possessed a superior logistic capacity to draw on his supplies. However, Thucydides does impute to Hermocrates of Syracuse a partisan speech in rousing the Syracusans (as well as effecting a coalition) to oppose Athens in 415 BCE, stating that great expeditions seldom succeed because they are not more numerous than the defenders at home (alluding to the invading Persians vs. the Greeks), and that they suffer from a scarcity of supplies (Book 6.33). He may have been half-right, in terms of Mardonius.

Indeed, amid the preliminary actions leading up to the great fight the last day, Mardonius 'had won hands down' (cf. John Lazenby, The Defence of Greece: 490-479 B.C., in his fine chapter The Dorian Spear). However, I do not agree that Mardonius was being too rash; his diplomatic and martial actions once he was charged with command by Xerxes do not at all reflect a hawkish fire-eater, as the tradition Herodotus uncritically reported would have posterity believe. I think he was forced into that great clash the last day against his own circumspect strategy. He could win with his superior cavalry and light forces with harassing sniping tactics so long as he did not get drawn into the close-quarter melee against hoplites which did finally occur. The Greek allied force held up splendidly to not be separated into mobs amid the Persian harassing and archery fire, etc. Whatever both sides had planned, the culmination was the result of the participants being drawn into clashes as the maneuvering action and reaction dictated. As for the maritime aspect, it is clear the Persian navy had hardly been eliminated at Salamis so as to have no continued effect if Mardonius had won. Plataea was indeed one of history's truest 'decisive' battles of all time (Mycale, however, was a small engagement monstrously magnified to glorify the victory over the 'Barbarian', as George Cawkwell lucidly reveals in his powerfully thought-provoking The Greek Wars: The Failure of Persia), in terms of the political landscape which would shape in the subsequent centuries. From a certain point of view, the King's Peace of 387 BCE resulted in Persia the real winner against the Greeks, as Artaxerxes II essentially offset the prior victories of Greek coalition forces with his political might (Alexander the Great of Macedon represented a new era, from another perspective). But Achaemenid sway never materialized directly over 'Europe' because of Xerxes' failure.

Regarding night salvos, well - true, night attacks carried out in antiquity were very risky and unlikely if the circumstances afforded no advantage with such a risk. But things should be judged on their intrinsic merits, and Ephorus' (via Diodorus, Book 11.10) account of the night operation at Thermopylae - the one major and irreconcilable aspect where Ephorus differs from Herodotus - should not be dismissed so swiftly and curtly (Polyaenus with some detail, though not necessarily lucid, writes of a raid by Leonidas against Xerxes which involved a shrewd use of inclement weather, including darkening clouds used as cover; this could be an example of an embellished story drawn from a grain of truth). If Ephorus merely fabricated the night attack of Leonidas on Xerxes' camp whole cloth concerning one of the most famous battles in Greek history to his time (and even ours!) without citing a plausible source, why would he expect his readers to so readily believe him? There exists a consensus of bias amid modern scholarship against Ephorus, and this could be for two reasons other than they're being overall correct in dismissing him, of which there is no solid proof (though that is slight of hand with these backdrops, when looking for details): firstly, because our familiarity with Ephorus is mainly mediated through the much abridged accounts of Diodorus (which is still not grounds per se to be automatically discarded due to discrepencies with Herodotus), and because of his alleged intellectual subservience to his reputed master Isocrates. As for the former, any carelessness or confusion on Diodorus' part should not be held against his sources (which can work both ways); as for the latter, the tradition linking Ephorus with the rhetorical school of Isocrates was likely an invention of some Hellenistic literary biographer, such as Hermippus of Smyrna, and even then elaborated with entertaining anecdotes over the subsequent centuries.

The night attack in Ephorus' context of Thermoplyae is not, IMHO, as improbable as modern historians and students seem to rigidly claim (both Plutarch and Justin, which means Pompeius Trogus, account for it); many of Leonidas' picked 300 Spartiatai surely accomplished their rite of passage through the krypteia, which involved young men being sent out into the countryside, armed with only a dagger, hiding by day, and by night hunting down and killing as many helots as they could find (however, this was indeed carried out in more familiar territory). If so, a night-time offensive amid the seemingly hopeless struggle Leonidas found himself in upon learning of the Persian turning march may not have seemed such an impetuous gamble. But did they definitely deem their situation totally hopeless? That the Greeks with Leonidas did not think their fate a foregone conclusion can be inferred by the fact that the messenger galley, under the Athenian Abronichus, did not sail for Artemisium until the fighting was over (cf. Herodotus, Book 8.21). Although the Thermopylae and Artemisium positions were clearly strategically interdependent, no effective tactical coordination between them could be expected.

Thucydides gives an account of a night battle fought in 413 BCE, at Epipolae (the high ground above Syracuse, where some soldiers did kill each other due to the confusion, but that it was attempted deserves an instructive attention of comparison), and we read that Parmenio advised Alexander the Great to attack Darius III's army at Gaugamela at night (precisely because their army was so badly outnumbered by Darius, as was Leonidas against Xerxes). The master of stratagem, Hannibal, on a couple of occasions attacked the Romans at night in precise manners to stymie them (notably near Casilinum, upon the new dictator Marcus Junius Pera). Just as the general confusion we read in Thucydides of the night fighting caused the Athenians to end up fighting with each other, so too the Persians killed one another in ignorance in Ephorus' account of Leonidas' attempt to assassinate Xerxes with a night salvo once he realized he was going to be turned (compare Thucydides 7.44 with Diodorus 11.10 and note the verbal similarities; sorry, I can't recall the exact sub-chapters, though I think it's 11.10.2 with the latter). It must also be worth something that Pompeius Trogus and Plutarch, regardless of what rhetorical incentives they may have had, accepted Ephorus' account, and Plutarch may well have known the entire text of Simonides' poem on Thermopylae - which Diodorus seems to have quoted only in part (at the end of 11.11) - as well as being familiar with Ephorus. This raises an important question. Did one of the logographers writing before Herodotus (eg., Charon, Damastes, Stesimbrotos, or Xanthus) provide some details on the 'Great Event' ('great' to the Greeks who opposed Xerxes) not found in Herodotus? It seems that Diodorus, Trogus, and Plutarch all followed a common source on many points absent in Herodotus.

It is also very likely that Herodotus knew the poem of Simonides relating to Thermoplyae; but even if he did not, he surely would have known of the night attack tradition had it been as old as Simonides. Why, then, did he choose to ignore it, if it was told to him as factual? It may be because he rejected it as unhistorical (it most certainly was a fancy regarding the Persian navy's attempt to circumvent Euboea on its eastern side, and sail up to take the Greek allied fleet in their rear, which he may have simply accepted uncritically), or it may be that he omitted it for literary reasons. Nor are these mutually exclusive propositions. Herodotus simply followed his witnesses uncritically for the most part, wanted us to know what they told him, and emphasized personally he didn't feel inclined to always believe them.

To add to what is understood about this momentous backdrop, we must recognize that what we know about the history of the Graeco-Persian Wars represents only a fraction of the traditions that were current in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. It has plausibly been argued by the great Albert B. Bosworth that the 4th century BCE philosopher Heraclides of Pontus preserves a factual anecdote about the family history of the notorious spendthrift Callias, son of Hipponicus, which involves a Persian landing on Euboea in 499 BCE. One would never guess that such an attack occurred from Herodotus' account of the Ionian Revolt, because Herodotus does not exclusively preserve all of the traditions, either oral or poetic, about the Persian Wars which had survived into the mid-5th century BCE and beyond. Moreover, as this thread has been revealed by some, we should keep in mind that literary and artistic concerns indeed influenced the presentation and selection of material in any historical narrative. In Diodorus' narrative of the final struggle, all of the significant action takes place at night.


Food for thought, James

[Manuel I Komnenos]

Claudius spent a mere 16 days in Britain and Darius had too left Mardonius to mop up resistance in Thrace after the initial stages of the campaign. Salamis was a fiasco, sure, but it was strategically not very important. The Persian fleet had already safely brought the cargo vessels, who had already discharged the supplies at Athens. The Greeks weren't even sure if they had won at the end of the day, so the Persian fleet can hardly have been anihilated, the Egyptian division was intact for sure, and the Phoenicians still enjoyed superiority in open sea. How many defeats did the Athenian navy suffer at Syracuse because being incpacitated? The Persian fleet didn't need sail home if the consensus was that it was still necessary for the campaign.

The Persian fleet hadn't been annihilated, quite the contrary, despite big casualties especially on the Phoenician flank, it still seems to have maintained a numerical superiority over the Greek fleet. What's more important though is that the Greek fleet (and especially the Athenians with their 180 ships) had shown a tactical and technical superiority over the Persian fleet. The Athenian ships were lighter than their Asian counterparts as there was no upper deck in their triremes. The Greek fleet was more maneuverable and it utilized its rams with great success in both Artemisium and Salamis. The Persians had probably understood that for the time being, victory in the sea was nearly impossible and it was preferable for the Persian fleet to return back to Asia where the costs for maintenance and supplies would be lower since the Persians were in friendly waters with plenty of bases available. But what's interesting is that the fleet was not dismantled after returning back to Asia and I suspect that the Persians intended to reinforce it with additional ships and return back to Greece. The Persian fleet remained near Samos and then retreated to Mycale, when the allied Greek fleet arrived in the area. Finally, the Persian fleet was decimated in a land engagement (!). The Greek 'epibatai' landed on the beach, surprised the Persians and defeated them. Before departing, they burned the Persian ships and thus ended any Persian hopes for return in Greek waters.