The Persian Capture of Athens (480–479 BCE)

In September 480 BCE, a few weeks after Thermopylae, the army of Xerxes entered an almost empty Athens, stormed the Acropolis and burned its temples. Mardonius occupied the city again in the summer of 479 and destroyed much of what was left. For the Persians it was the punishment Darius had promised for the burning of Sardis in 498; for the Athenians it was a wound they kept visible for generations and later used to justify their own empire.

An empty city

When the Greek fleet withdrew from Artemisium and the army of Xerxes came through Boeotia, the Peloponnesian allies decided to defend the Isthmus of Corinth rather than Attica. Athens was left alone. On Themistocles’s advice the Athenians evacuated the city: women, children and the old went to Troezen in the Peloponnese, to Aegina and to Salamis, and the men of fighting age went to the fleet.

An inscription found at Troezen in 1959, known as the Themistocles Decree, records an order to evacuate the city and man the ships. It was carved in the third century BCE, long after the event, and historians still debate whether it preserves a genuine decree, a later reworking, or a patriotic invention. Herodotus describes a hasty evacuation after the retreat from Artemisium; the decree implies a plan made earlier.

The siege of the Acropolis

Not everyone left. A small group, which Herodotus describes as temple treasurers and poor men, stayed on the Acropolis behind a wooden barricade, believing that this was the “wooden wall” promised by the Delphic oracle. Persian archers took up position on the Areopagus, the hill facing the western entrance, and shot arrows wrapped in burning tow at the barricade until it caught fire. Exiled members of the family of Peisistratus, the old tyrants of Athens, who were with Xerxes, offered the defenders terms, which they refused.

The Acropolis was finally taken from an unexpected side. Some Persian soldiers climbed a sheer cliff on the far side from the entrance, near the shrine of Aglauros, where no guard had been posted because nobody thought it could be climbed. Seeing them on the summit, some defenders threw themselves from the walls and others fled into the temple. The Persians opened the gates, killed those who had taken refuge, plundered the sanctuary and set the whole Acropolis on fire.

A message to Susa

Herodotus says Xerxes at once sent a rider to Susa to tell his uncle Artabanus of his success. The next day he ordered the Athenian exiles in his camp to go up to the Acropolis and offer sacrifice in their own way. Herodotus adds a story that the sacred olive tree of Athena, burned in the fire, had already put out a new shoot a cubit long.

The order to sacrifice is significant. It suggests that Xerxes did not intend to wipe out Athenian religion, but to show that the city now belonged to the king and that its gods would be served by Athenians loyal to him. Exiles such as the Peisistratids had served the same purpose for Darius at Marathon. From the Persian side, the capture of Athens fulfilled the stated aim of the war: the city that had helped burn Sardis had been burned in return. Herodotus himself reports that the Persians cited the temples of Sardis as their reason.

Mardonius returns, 479 BCE

After the defeat at Salamis Xerxes went back to Asia, and Mardonius wintered in Thessaly. In 479 he tried diplomacy first, sending Alexander I of Macedon to offer Athens self-government, restoration of its territory and the rebuilding of its temples in exchange for an alliance. The Athenians refused. Mardonius marched south and occupied Athens again in early summer; the population had once more crossed to Salamis. A final offer was also refused. When the Spartan army at last marched north, Mardonius withdrew to Boeotia, where the ground suited his cavalry, and before leaving he burned the city and pulled down whatever walls, houses and temples were still standing. This second destruction was more systematic than the first. The campaign ended weeks later at Plataea.

What archaeologists found

The destruction is visible in the ground. When the Athenians returned, they buried broken statues and building pieces in pits and used them as fill when levelling the Acropolis. Archaeologists call this material the Perserschutt, German for “Persian debris”. Excavations in the 1880s uncovered many of the painted marble maidens (korai) now in the Acropolis Museum, preserved because they had been buried after the sack.

The Athenians also chose to leave reminders in plain view. Column drums from the unfinished temple known as the Older Parthenon, which had been under construction on the site of the later Parthenon, were built into the north wall of the Acropolis, where they can still be seen from the city below. Ancient writers report an oath, said to have been sworn by the Greeks before Plataea, not to rebuild the burned temples but to leave them as a memorial of the barbarians’ impiety. Its authenticity was already questioned in antiquity, but the major temples of the Acropolis were indeed not rebuilt for about thirty years, until Pericles began the Parthenon in 447 BCE.

A memory that lasted

The Persians also carried off the bronze statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the tyrant-slayers who were symbols of Athenian freedom. The Athenians quickly commissioned replacements. Later Greek and Roman writers say the originals were eventually sent back from Persia, though they disagree on whether it was Alexander or one of his successors who returned them.

The burning of the Acropolis became part of how Greeks explained their relationship with Persia. Athens used the threat of another invasion to lead the Delian League, which grew into an Athenian empire. A century and a half later, Alexander’s propaganda presented his campaign as revenge for the temples of Athens, and when his troops set fire to the palaces in 330 BCE that same justification was offered; see The Burning of Persepolis. In both cases, a city’s burning was answered by the burning of another.

All of this comes from Greek sources. No Persian text describes the capture of Athens, though for a king who could claim to have taken and punished a rebel city, it would have been a fitting close to the campaign. On the reliability of Herodotus for these events, see Herodotus and the Persians.