The Battle of Plataea and the End of the Invasion (479 BCE)

The Battle of Plataea was fought in late summer 479 BCE in southern Boeotia, between the Persian army left in Greece under Mardonius and the largest Greek army yet assembled, led by the Spartan regent Pausanias. After days of manoeuvring, the Persians attacked a Greek army in the middle of a confused retreat, were beaten back, and lost their commander. Together with the Persian defeat at Mycale on the Ionian coast in the same season, Plataea ended the invasion of Greece begun by Xerxes the year before.

Mardonius’s last year

After Salamis Xerxes went back to Sardis and left Mardonius in Greece with a picked army, which included the Persian, Median, Saka and Bactrian troops who were the best in the empire. Mardonius wintered in Thessaly. In 479 he tried to split the Greek alliance by diplomacy, offering Athens generous terms through Alexander I of Macedon. When Athens refused, he reoccupied the city and then, as the Spartan army marched north, burned it again and withdrew into Boeotia. The plain there suited his cavalry, and the Thebans and other Boeotians were his allies.

He built a fortified camp of timber on the Asopus River. The Greek army, gathered from about two dozen states, came over the passes of Mount Kithairon and took up a position on the foothills facing him.

Days of manoeuvre

The two armies watched each other for about eleven days. Both sides’ seers reported unfavourable omens for attacking, which reflects a real tactical problem: the Greek hoplites did not want to fight on open ground against cavalry, and Mardonius did not want to attack heavy infantry uphill.

The Persian cavalry did the most damage. In the first clash their commander Masistius, conspicuous in gold armour, was unhorsed and killed by Athenian troops, and the Greeks carried his body along the lines; Herodotus says the Persians mourned him with loud lamentation across Boeotia. After that the horsemen changed tactics. They attacked the Greek supply trains in the passes behind the army and then choked the spring of Gargaphia, which was the Greeks’ main water supply.

The night retreat

Short of water and food, the Greek commanders decided to fall back at night to a better position nearer Plataea. The withdrawal went badly. The centre moved too far and ended up near the town; a Spartan officer, Amompharetus, at first refused to retreat, calling it shameful; and at dawn the Spartans and Tegeans were still on open ground, separated from the Athenians.

Mardonius saw the Greeks apparently in flight and ordered a general attack. The Persian infantry set up a wall of wicker shields and shot volleys of arrows at the Spartans, who held their position, under fire, until the sacrifices turned favourable. Then the Spartans and Tegeans charged.

The death of Mardonius

Herodotus says the Persians were not inferior in courage or strength, but they lacked armour and the training to fight against massed hoplites. They grabbed the Greek spears and broke them, and rushed out singly or in small groups. Mardonius, on a white horse with a thousand chosen men around him, fought in the front line, and while he lived the Persians held. When a Spartan named Arimnestus killed him, the Persian line broke and fled to the stockade.

Elsewhere, the Athenians fought the Boeotians, who were on the Persian side and fought hard; the Thebans lost about 300 of their leading men. Artabazus, who had disagreed with Mardonius’s decision to fight, led his corps away from the field and marched north towards the Hellespont. The Greeks stormed the Persian camp and killed many of those inside. Herodotus says the Greeks lost only 159 men in the main fighting, a figure that later writers raised to over 1,300; the Persian losses he gives are too large to believe.

The rich tents of the Persian camp became part of Greek legend. Herodotus says Pausanias had Mardonius’s cooks prepare a Persian banquet beside a plain Spartan meal and laughed at the folly of men who lived like that and came to rob the Spartans of their poor fare.

Mycale and the coast of Ionia

Herodotus places on the same day the battle of Mycale, on the mainland of Asia Minor opposite Samos. A Greek fleet under the Spartan king Leotychidas and the Athenian Xanthippus sailed east, and the Persian navy, unwilling to fight at sea, beached its ships under the protection of an army. The Greeks landed and attacked. The Samians and other Ionians in the Persian army turned against it, the Persian commander Tigranes was killed, and the ships were burned. The revolt of the Ionian cities that followed ended the system set up after the Ionian Revolt.

The victory monument

From a tenth of the spoils the Greeks dedicated a golden tripod at Delphi on a bronze column of three twisted snakes, with the names of the 31 states that had fought on the Greek side inscribed on the coils. The gold was later melted down, but the column survived. In the fourth century CE Constantine moved it to his new capital, and it still stands, damaged and headless, in the former Hippodrome in Istanbul.

How the war looks from Persia

No Persian text mentions Plataea, Mycale or the loss of the European province. The royal inscriptions were not war reports, and the kings had no reason to record defeats. From Xerxes’s point of view, the war cost him a leading general and the European conquests of Darius, and it brought Greek fleets to the coasts of Asia Minor. But it did not threaten the empire itself. In the following decades Persian policy towards Greece changed from conquest to diplomacy, money and alliances, and by the end of the fifth century Persian gold was deciding the wars between Athens and Sparta; see Darius II and the Peloponnesian War and The King’s Peace.

For Herodotus, whose history ends soon after Plataea and Mycale, the battles closed the story he had set out to tell. His account was written by a Greek for Greeks, and he relied on the memories of the victors. The Persian army appears through their eyes: brave, numerous, poorly armoured and badly led. The broader conflict, which did not formally end for another thirty years, is summarised in The Greco-Persian Wars: An Overview.