← Dan Snow's History Hit
Dan Snow's History Hit
The Greeks vs Persia: The War that Changed the Ancient World
01:04:10
The conflicts that brought the Persian and Greek worlds closer together and reshaped the ancient world.
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- [00:01]
Dan Snow
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- [00:28]
Coach Prime
To everyone else, this is a desk, but to you, it's Launchpad, your starting block.
- [00:35]
Dan Snow
This ain't a desk, this is opportunity.
- [00:38]
Coach Prime
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Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here for I guess my hundredth Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, don't. No, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited to Premium Wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming. Here, give it a try@mintmobile.com switch whenever you're ready.
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Unknown
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Patrick Wyman
C Details the new Boost Mobile network.
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Dan Snow
Is offering unlimited talk, text and data.
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Ryan Reynolds
For just $25 a month for life.
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Patrick Wyman
That sounds like a threat.
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Dan Snow
Then how do you think we should say it? Unlimited talk, text and data for just.
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Patrick Wyman
$25 a month for the rest of your life? I don't know. Until your ultimate demise.
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Dan Snow
What if we just say forever? Okay, $25 a month. Forever. Get unlimited talk, text and Data for.
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Unknown
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Patrick Wyman
With Boost Mobile Forever, after 30 gigabytes, customers may experience slower speeds.
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Dan Snow
Customers will pay $25 a month as.
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Patrick Wyman
Long as they remain active on the Boost Unlimited plan.
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Dan Snow
In northern Greece, the river Sperkios reaches the Aegean, having carved a valley through high limestone mountains that line the coast. Over the millennia, that river has spewed out alluvial deposits. So now between the mountains, like Mount Caledromo that towers 1500 meters tall, and the sea, there is an area of flat sediment. Today it's a couple of kilometers, it's quite wide. Two and a half thousand years ago, it really was a narrow sliver. And along that narrow sliver between the mountains on one side and the sea on the other wound the great north south road of ancient Greece. In fact, even today it remains only one of two major roads leading from the Balkans into Greece. The ancient Greeks were very struck by the sulphur springs nearby and they believed it was one of the entrances to the underworld. And together the narrowness of that roadway and the hot springs nearby meant that it became known as the hot Gates Thermopylae. It was here that one of the most celebrated battles in history was fought. In 480 B.C. at the very dawn of recorded history in Europe, Leonidas, king of Sparta, led a force of Spartans and allied Greeks which held off the king of kings, the most powerful man in the world at the time, Xerxes of Persia at the head of an enormous host. It's a battle that you will all have heard of. It's a battle that's given us some of the greatest moments in history. There's one or two that I can't help mentioning. When one breathless messenger arrived and told the Spartans that when the enemy shoot with their bows the sun was hidden by the multitude of arrows, one Spartan wit shouted out, he brings us good news, for if the Medes hide the sun, we shall fight them in the shade. Another great line comes from the mouth of Leonidas, we're told. A Persian emissary shouted, they should hand over their weapons. Leonidas simply shouted back, come and take them. Finally, the battle that followed lasted for days. Sorry about the spoiler here. But eventually the Persians stopped trying just to bulldoze their way along this narrow road along the coast. They realized that the was a mountainous track which would take them round to the rear of the Greek position. And when that happened, there was a last stand. Leondas and his 300 Spartans and a few allies stood and sold their lives dearly, we are told. Many of them were thrust into the sea and there drowned, and more by far were trodden down bodily by each other. None regarding who it was that perished. For inasmuch as the Greeks knew they must die by the hands of those who came round the mountain, they put forth their very utmost of their strength against the foreigners in recklessness and frenzy. There in that melee fell Leonidas, fighting most gallantly in that place. They defended themselves with swords as many as had such ay with fists and teeth, till the foreigners overwhelmed them with missile weapons. These words and really everything we know about the battle, in fact these words I've just quoted are reported by the first historian we have in the western tradition. He's called Herodotus and so Thermopylae is one of the first battles for which we have anything approaching a proper account. Because he, in the Greek world realized that something special had happened. He didn't want it to be forgotten, as nearly everything before him had been forgotten. So he wrote it down. Here are presented the results of the inquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. And the word inquiry is important because the ancient Greek word for inquiry was historia. A new discipline was born. He goes on to say the purpose of his history is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non Greeks. He decided to start writing because he wanted to tell the story of the Greco Persian wars, which had occurred a few decades before he wrote, and in which the world's greatest superpower had tussled with a troublesome, fractious, inventive people at and beyond its far western fringe, the Greeks. On this podcast, we're going to gallop through those wars, from the rise of Persia and its first contact with the Greeks to the Persian attempt to conquer and absorb the Greeks. We're going to talk about the great battles, Marathon, Thermopylae, Artemisium, don't forget about that. Salamis, Plataea. And to help us do all that, we're going to hear from the very brilliant Patrick Wyman. He's a podcast legend and he is a wonderful historian. Big book coming out soon. We'll have him on talk about that as well. I'll be doing some deeper dives, I think, in some of these battles and events over the next few months, but let's get us started. Let's get the big picture here with Patrick Wyman. Enjoy.
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Patrick Wyman
T minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
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Dan Snow
God save the King.
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Coach Prime
No black white unity till there is first some black unity.
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Patrick Wyman
Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.
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Dan Snow
Patrick, great to have you back on the podcast, buddy.
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Patrick Wyman
Hey, thank you so much for having me. It's my pleasure.
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Dan Snow
Let's get into it. First of all, I guess give me the political geography of the Aegean, the eastern Mediterranean, taking back to the Greek and Persian worlds. Was there a clear delineation today? We think of that west coast of Turkey as being the real strong dividing line, linguistically and even politically and religiously. Was there a line of that type in the late 6th century, the beginning of the 5th century BCE?
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Patrick Wyman
So not at all. And this is one of the fundamental Things that we have to understand if we're going to make sense of these conflicts is that thinking about it in terms of quote the Greeks versus quote the Persians is going to mislead us. Those are very much later ways of understanding what was going on here. I mean, I suppose think about it in terms of the Persians is okay, but still we're going to need to qualify that. But definitely as far as the Greeks are concerned, the Greeks did not prior to this period have a really strong sense of collective identity of something that made them Greeks versus an outside world instead. That's very much a product of this period, of the encounter between a kind of eastern capital o other and the Greek world. At this point, and for most of Greek history too, but especially prior to this point, Greeks were much more likely to understand themselves as residents of their polis, as citizens of a specific place that they are deeply connected to by generations. It's a kind of a blood and soil, like you're born here, this is who you are. You couldn't just go from one Greek city to another and transfer citizenship. It didn't work like that. Your citizenship was a matter of birth of the gods of that specific place, of a really kind of generational deep seated connection to the land and a specific set of political institutions that go along with that specific place. So the Greeks were much more likely to hate each other than they were to see any sort of commonality or common interest or common goal versus these outside forces. And in fact, at the time of the Persian invasion in 480 BC, there were somewhere over 300 independent political units in the Greek world that we might call police or city states. Only a tenth of those joined the anti Persian coalition at its very largest. So the vast majority of the Greeks were not involved fighting for the Greeks in the Persian wars.
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Dan Snow
Nice killer point. And tell me, where were the vast majority of those city states? Many of them weren't in what we now would think of as Greece, were they?
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Patrick Wyman
Exactly. Yeah. So a great many of the Greeks are actually under Persian rule and have been under Persian rule for half a century or more. By the time of the outbreak of the Persian war is proper, there are Greeks all over the place. This is one of the fascinating things about the Greeks is that they are a demographic success story of the Iron Age. In around a thousand B.C. there are not that many Greeks. In fact there are far fewer Greeks than there had been a couple of centuries before. The population of Greece, of what we consider to be Greece during the Bronze Age collapse drops by Anywhere between a third and a half. There's huge out migration from Greece. That's a kind of a debatable thing in the scholarship. But Greece is not a place where people want to be between about twelve hundred and a thousand B.C. and then once you get into the ninth century B.C, between nine hundred and eight hundred, the kind of the core Homeric period, populations in Greece just explode. Populations are doubling every 25, 30 years in some places. So for whatever reason, there's this tremendous burst of fertility in Greece. And what that means is that there are a lot of Greeks. By around 800 BC, Greece is overflowing with people. And some combination of that demographic burst plus wanderlust, wide ranging trade routes, a sense of competitiveness among themselves, the Greeks start going all over the place. So even though the Greek world is politically fragmented in what we might consider ethnic and cultural terms, the Greek world is enormous. So there are millions and millions and millions and millions of Greeks by 500 BC. It's just that they're fragmented among hundreds of different, usually very small political units.
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Dan Snow
You mentioned Persian, you said some of those political units are living under Persian rule. They're the ones in what we'd call Turkey's de Asia Minor. Talk to me briefly about the rise of Persia and you're so good at all this stuff. Is it the world's first super empire?
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Patrick Wyman
Yes. So it is impossible to overstate the scale of the Persian accomplishment in the second half of the 6th century BC. So the Persians around 550 BC are a minor people. They have kings, but they're not especially powerful kings. They're living on the fringes of the large Mesopotamian empire. So by this point there is a long imperial tradition in Mesopotamia, present day Iraq, that goes back thousands of years. There are very well developed ideas of how the world is supposed to work and what the role of an over king is supposed to be in that particular world. The Persians are outsiders to that world. They're living up kind of in the mountains on the fringes of the Iranian plateau. They don't even control what we consider to be one of the core heartlands of later Persia, the Susiana Plain. That is beyond Persian control that until a couple of centuries before it belonged to the Elamites, who were a non Indo European speaking people. The Persians come come out of nowhere under the rule of a guy called Cyrus the Great. Cyrus conquers more territory than anybody in human history to that point had ever conquered. He's only barely surpassed by Alexander the Great a couple of centuries later. Cyrus Is of all the world conquerors, the most underrated in terms of the scale of his accomplishment, what he was able to do, where he started from, the rapidity of it. It takes him only a couple of decades to conquer everywhere. From basically the edge of South Asia all the way into Asia Minor. So this is most of Eurasia Cyrus is ruling over. It's an incredible accomplishment. And what makes it all the more fascinating is that it didn't collapse with his death. Lots of conquest states, which is what the early Persian Empire is, fall apart when their founder dies. This is what happens to Alexander the Great's empire. It's more or less what happens to Genghis Khan's empire. It's what happens to Tamerlane's empire. This is a very common phenomenon. But the Persians were able to put down some institutional roots. They were able to draw on those long traditions of Near Eastern kingship that I talked about to cement their rule in places like Babylonia. They were highly flexible in how they approached integrating with local elites across this vast space. Because the Persian Empire is not a tightly controlled, centralized administrative state. You can't rule half of the world by sending bureaucrats out to every corner of the countryside in the premodern world and expecting to impose some sort of rule over them. You have to rule through local partners, and you have to rule through a governing elite that is closely tied to the king's interests. And that's what the Persians do. They develop this highly talented coterie of people around the great king. They're usually his relatives, their cousins, nephews, brothers in law, and they go out, each of these guys gets a big chunk of land that's called a satrapy, and they are given more or less free rein to do whatever they want there. And they develop their own networks of local alliances. They develop spy networks. The Persians are wonderful intelligence gatherers. So every one of these satraps is an immensely powerful figure in his own right. There's a satrap in Western Asia, and that is mostly going to be who the Greeks are dealing with, not the great king himself. It's this fascinating world empire. It's certainly gentler than its predecessors. The Persians are like, if you compare them to the Assyrians and the Babylonians, who were their immediate predecessors in the Near East. The Persians are far gentler. That doesn't mean there's no iron fist inside the velvet glove. But they're not doing things like raising Jerusalem to the ground and deporting all the Jews into the Babylonian captivity. They're not Razing Israel the way the Assyrians did. That's not how the Persians operated. They much preferred to rule through cooperation. And that turned out to be a much more lucrative and more durable mode of imperial rule.
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Dan Snow
Towards the end of the 6th century, or the second half of the 6th century B.C. the Persians keep expanding west and they conquer Lydia. Croesus, the richest Croesus guy, he falls to the Persians. His mighty empire falls the Persians. And then all these Greek city states along the coast of what is now Turkey will fall to Persia. When do the Greeks and the Persians really start coming to blows, this generational struggle? What's the genesis?
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Patrick Wyman
So this really starts to happen toward the end of the sixth century B.C. our sense for how all this happened is pretty hazy. We have one major source, Herodotus, the father of history. And Herodotus is just a wonderful, wonderful writer. You can read Herodotus histories profitably today from a whole bunch of different perspectives. It's an unbelievably rich text and he is deserving of his title, Father of History. The problem is Herodotus is writing decades after all these events took place. He is quite often our only source for them. And there's. I really like the way the recent scholarship talks about Herodotus, where they say he might have been faithfully reporting what people were saying kind of in the middle of the 5th century BC 50, 60 years after these events took place in his part of the world. He comes from one of the Greek speaking cities in Asia Minor. Not one that's in Ionia technically, but one that's very nearby, shares a lot in common with it. So what he's telling us, the stories he's saying are probably things that people were saying and agreed on in the middle of the fifth century. But if you wait 50 years with a whole lot of stuff that happens in the interim, and you got a whole lot of stuff that you got to try and explain if you're an important Greek speaker in one of these cities, what relationship your account of those events bears to the actual events can be pretty hard to suss out. Now, with that said, where all this seems to come from is the internal politics of the Greek world. And there's a fundamental conflict between the way the Greeks did politics and the way the Persians did politics. And a lot of what leads up to the Greco Persian wars is misunderstandings, misapprehensions, and kind of broad scale cultural conflict between these two very different political modes. So in the Greek world, politics are a highly volatile, temporary and chaotic thing. Every Greek City state has its own internal politics. Every Greek city state's internal politics are connected to external politics because there are oligarchs who are really important in these Greek cities. Most Greek cities, I would say, are ruled by a kind of an oligarchy of greater or lesser size. Just the rich and important people make the decisions. And each of those oligarchs, in addition to being powerful in their own place, is looking to make alliances with other oligarchic families elsewhere. So it's really easy for a conflict among the ruling elite of one Greek city to turn into a quote, unquote international conflict between Greek cities. And then the next year those alliances will shift. Allies one year can be enemies the next. Enemies one year can be allies the next. It's unbelievably hard to keep track of. Even if you were a Greek living in this world, you could be confused by these twists and turns. This is the opposite of how the Persians do politics. The Persians, because they have these satraps who have these positions for years or decades at a time, they're very much permanent positions. These guys are smart operators. They sit, they watch, they wait, they cultivate allies, they, they have intelligence gathering networks, as I mentioned before, and they're constantly looking to advance their interests, but they're doing so on a timescale of years or decades rather than season to season, alliance to alliance. And what the Persians value as a kind of a bedrock element of their political culture is order at a really fundamental level. They see the world as a place that needs capital o order. It is the basic role of the most powerful political figures, especially the great king, to defeat chaos and bring order. So in the Persian worldview, if you make an oath of alliance or you offer submission, that is binding forever. Not because the seasons change, not because a new group of people comes to power in your city. Can you just get rid of that? That oath is binding forever. This is the genesis of the conflict. In around 510 BC, we have the birth of Athenian democracy. Watershed event in the history of what we call Western civilization. Right. There's actually a really complex local political context in Athens that gives us this. Athens is ruled by a tyrant, a guy named Hippias. Hippias is overthrown. We don't immediately get Athenian democracy. We get a temporary oligarchy led by a family called the Alkmaeonidae, who are tightly connected to oligarchs in Sparta. So the Alcmaeonidae bring in the Spartans to try to cement their oligarchic rule over Athens.
- [20:43]
Dan Snow
Yeah, that's going to be super popular, isn't it?
- [20:45]
Patrick Wyman
Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. So you can see the kind of the basic tensions that are running through Greek political life here. Right then, so there's a popular uprising. The people take control in Athens with the guidance of a guy named Cleisthenes, the father of Athenian democracy. This brand new popular regime in Athens goes looking for allies. Where do you go looking for allies? Well, right across the Aegean is the satrap of the Persian provinces in the far west. Immensely wealthy, immensely powerful. He's got hundreds of ships, thousands of soldiers. If you're looking to head off Spartan intervention in your internal politics, you find a bigger batter ally, right? And this is what they do. So they send envoys to this Persian satrap. His name is Artifurns. And at some point in their negotiations and conversations, the Persians believe that the Athenians offer them submission. They believe that they offer them earth and water, which in Persian terms is a binding forever oath of submission to the great king. That means that when the great king calls you do what the great king tells you. You violate that, you are in the biggest of big trouble. This is where the trouble starts because these envoys get back to Athens, the public assembly absolutely excoriates them, is on the verge of either exiling them or having them executed for treason. They repudiate the deal. They say we have no deal. We offer no submission to the great king. And then they kind of forget about it. Because politics in Athens move fast. Great king doesn't forget about it. In 498 BC we have the outbreak of what is known as the Ionian revolt. So this is a major revolt. It's actually not just the Ionian city states, which are, which are one small group of cities along the Aegean coast of Turkey. It's actually a kind of a broad rebellion of much of the western provinces of the Persian Empire. There's also a rebellion in Caria, which is a non Greek speaking area just down the coast. There's a rebellion of Greek speakers in Cyprus. So this is actually kind of a general rebellion in the west of the far west of the Persian Empire. The rebels send for aid to mainland Greece. Nobody responds except the Athenians and one other small group. The Athenians send like 20 ships. So this is probably, you know, 600, 1,000 men somewhere in that range. They don't think too much of it. They go, they burn a Persian city. The Athenians get caught, there's a battle, they're defeated, they run back to their ships they go back to Athens and again they forget about it. Because you got other fish to fry next year in Greek politics. Again, the Persians don't forget about it.
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Dan Snow
They've poked the bear.
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Patrick Wyman
They have quite literally poked the bear. But because the Persians are thinking in terms of years and decades, the Greeks aren't going anywhere. They'll get around to them when there's time. 492 BC, the Ionian Revolt is finally crushed. And now after this, they've got the Persians, have Asia Minor back under their control. Now they can turn to the Greeks. And this is where we get the battle of Marathon. In 490, this is a Persian expeditionary force that goes to Greece. They succeed in destroying the other minor Greek city that had aided the Ionian rebels. And then they make for Athens. They land about 17 miles northeast of the city of Athens on the plane of Marathon.
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Dan Snow
And so, and so this expedition, like you're saying, this is a kind of surgical strike aimed at the two cities that sent help to the Ionians or sent help to this, these rebels in the west, the Persian Empire.
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Patrick Wyman
Yes, that's exactly what it's about. There's a later tradition mostly that we get thanks to Herodotus who says that the Persians were always aimed at the conquest of all the Greeks. And so Herodotus presents every single thing that happens in this back and forth relationship from the Persian perspective as being aimed at the conquest of the Greeks. That's not at all the case. We need to ditch that assumption. First and foremost, you're exactly right. You classify this as a surgical strike. That is 100% what it is. They're not intending to stay. They're going to go. They're going to punish what they see as rebels, Then they're going to go home, have it proclaim victory, and everybody can move on with their lives. So they show up, the Athenians march out, nobody comes to aid them, except for a small force from the city of Plataea. By themselves, the Athenians defeat the Persians. They say they slay thousands of them. Probably not. It's probably a more rather more reasonable victory. We know that 192 Athenians died. That number is very certain because the Athenians honored them forever. And in fact this becomes a really defining moment for Athenian self understanding. So the playwright Aeschylus, very famous playwright, all the stuff Aeschylus accomplishes over the course of his life. What he chose to remember on his epitaph was how bravely he'd fought at Marathon. This was a huge thing for Athenians to have been part of this great battle, standing up to the evil empire across the sea. This becomes a really important moment for them. If we're looking at the grand geopolitical scheme of things in West Asia and the Aegean at this point in time, it's not a particularly important battle. The Persians go home again. They're like, we probably could have done that better, but we've got other things to worry about. And for the next 10 years or so, they do have other things to worry about.
- [25:44]
Dan Snow
Listening to Dan Snow's history here, we're talking about the Persians and the Greeks and why they More coming up. Hi folks. This episode is sponsored by hims. There comes a painful moment in every man's life where he realizes he's not going to play first base for the Yankees. And I found that moment came to me around about the same time that I noticed that my hair was falling out. It was a double blow. But thankfully HIMS exists and HIMS could help you. It could arrest hair loss. It could even reverse it. Try HIMS Hair Loss Solutions and you'll be joining hundreds of thousands of subscribers who got their flow back. HIMS makes this very simple. There's a whole range of services that you can do from the comfort of your own home. It's 100% online. There's none of those awkward visits that the young Dan had to go and do is answer a few questions. A medical provider will determine if the treatment is right for you. If prescribed, that treatment is sent directly to you in discreet packaging, which is important. So start your free online Visit today@hisss.com dansnow that's H I M S.
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Patrick Wyman
For.
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Dan Snow
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Patrick Wyman
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Ryan Reynolds
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- [29:14]
Dan Snow
We need to dwell on Marathon just for a second. I mean, how on earth did the Athenians manage to pull off this victory? I mean, it's so hard to see given the paucity of sources. But what's your hunch?
- [29:24]
Patrick Wyman
My hunch is that the speed with which the Athenians were able to mobilize really took the Persians by surprise. That a it wasn't an enormous Persian force to start with. I would guess it was in the single digit thousands, not even above 10,000. It's a force that's designed to go and inflict punishment. Like if they go and ravage Attica, they don't even need to take Athens. If they ravage Attica, they have done everything they were supposed to do.
- [29:47]
Dan Snow
Yeah, it's a punitive raid.
- [29:49]
Patrick Wyman
Yeah. This is not a huge scale invasion of the kind that we'll see 10 years later. That's an entirely different beast. Because of the nature of military service in Greek city states, the soldiers are just there. They all have their own weapons and armor. These are citizen soldiers. They're what Greeks called hoplites. They're heavily armored infantry. They're. They're not professionals. They are well equipped. They are pretty experienced. Like they go, the Greeks are going out and fighting all the time. This is a pretty regular thing. But they're not professional soldiers. So all you need to do, put out the word, and within a few hours, you can have a pretty substantial force, especially if you are in extremely close proximity to the city itself. So you put out the call in the countryside in Attica, and every farmer has a shield, a spear, a sword, and a helmet. You tell them to get their armor on. They get their armor on, they show up. They may have actually had numerical superiority in this battle. I would actually kind of be surprised if they didn't. You have heavily armored infantry fighting close to home that's been quickly assembled. Kind of takes the opponents by surprise after they've been busy, they've been up to stuff. They've been. They've already been burning. And, you know, burning is. Is tiring business. So the Persians have already been at this for a while. I don't think it's actually an unexpected outcome that the Greeks won at Marathon. They liked to present it that way. And the same is true of what happens about 10 years later, too. I don't think the Greeks winning is nearly as unexpected as people make it out to be. But Marathon, yeah, it's an important battle. It's an important battle for the Greek understanding of themselves. It's an important battle for the Athenians. It puts Athens on the map as a power. Athens is not a major force prior to this, for a variety of reasons. This is the battle that makes Athens what it is. For the Persians, it's not all that important.
- [31:38]
Dan Snow
So this idea that we've maybe grew up with, which is this civilizational clash, the wellspring of everything we believe is sort of to be Western in our politics and our culture and our philosophy. You're not buying that?
- [31:53]
Patrick Wyman
No, I don't really think so. I mean, I think that there is a lot of really interesting cultural miscommunication and cultural clashing that goes along with this. But I think to set it up as a battle of civilizations really misstates the dynamics. And there's this long tradition of seeing this as a battle of Greek freedom versus Persian despotism. Right. This is the civilizational narrative that we get out of it. And that's not really the case. What the Greeks understood to be their freedom was their local autonomy. And that is not something that the Persians, quite frankly, ever really would have threatened. The Persians were not all that interested in that, except insofar as it impinged on the broader currents of empire. Right. So if the Persians asked for tribute, and you provided tribute. They didn't care whether you had a democracy, an oligarchy, a tyranny, whether you were a tribal people. They didn't care whether you were ruled by women or men. It didn't matter to them so long as you did what you were asked at a specific time. And in fact, some of the earliest democracies in the Ionian cities were supported by the Persians because they had run into trouble with the oligarchies and tyrannies that existed in those cities prior. And they found that the democracies were easier for them to work with. The Persians were just looking to work with whoever would work with them. They preferred tyrannies because it's easier to understand one person as a political actor. That's easier than an oligarchy. And oligarchy is often the most difficult thing because you've got so many different competing power figures. Democracy and tyranny are your two best bets if you're looking to, if you're looking to work with someone. Most of the Greek cities do not have anything like a broad franchise. Women are denied political participation. It's not like the Greek world in 500 BC is on the cusp of becoming, you know, 20th century Western modernity. It's, it's just not that. And for that, for that part, the Persians are not oriental despots who are going out and trying to crush all opposition and tell people how they have to live every aspect of their. They don't care. They frankly don't. As long as you're not actively rebelling against them. And even honestly you can be rebelling against them. And as long as you say you're sorry, eventually they'll probably let it go. They're not a benevolent empire, but they're not the Nazis. That's not what they're doing here. There is a really interesting parallel that I want to talk about here for a second. I think there's a lot of commonalities between the Battle of Britain and the Battle of Marathon in terms of understanding the kind of self definition of a group of people that if you're British, you can point to the Battle of Britain and say, look at what we did. Standing up against all these odds. Even if you take a step back and you look at the numbers of it and you look at straight up, how many fighters could you put in the air? What was the quality of those planes? Who was being aided by whom? Was Hitler ever actually going to be able to cross the Channel in force? Those are all valid questions, but the battle itself is Tremendously important for self understanding in Britain. And the same is true for self understanding in Athens.
- [35:01]
Dan Snow
Okay. In really nice peril. Thank you. But as you say, the Persians have trouble elsewhere in the empire, which is inevitable when you have such a vast empire. There's a bit of trouble in Egypt, I think, and in the 480s, so it takes a while for their gaze to flicker back to Greece. Why does it in 480 BC? What's bringing Persia back round to the Greeks?
- [35:21]
Patrick Wyman
So simply the fact that at this point there is time and what we might call royal bandwidth to deal with the Greeks. So the great king Darius, who is probably every bit as great a conqueror as Cyrus was, Darius rules for 36 years. He rules from 522 to 486 BC. He finally dies in 486 BC. And immediately this happens pretty much every time a great king dies in the Persian empire there are rebellion. These are two very serious rebellions for the Persians to deal with. One is in Egypt, which is the richest, most densely populated province of the empire. The other is in Babylonia, which is probably the second richest, most densely populated province of the empire. And also right next to the Persian heartland. These are the two economic core areas of the empire. Essentially, if you're the successor to Darius, his son Xerxes, you can't do without those two areas. You have to put those down first. So that's what he does. And then eventually by the late 480s, Xerxes gets around to dealing with the Greeks from the Persian perspective. Because they ruled the Ionian Greeks, they already ruled the Greeks as a whole. Anything else was just confirming a state of affairs that already existed. They didn't make distinctions between the Greeks of Ionia and the mainland Greeks, not really. They called them all Yauna, which is derived from Ionian. And to the great king. If you ruled one group of a people, you as good as ruled the whole group. So from their perspective, this was not a campaign of conquest. It was to reinforce a state of affairs that already existed. And that's how we have to understand Xerxes expedition is not as a campaign of conquest, but as something much more like a royal progress, a heavily armed one, mind you, but it's a royal progress. And that's why the descriptions of Xerxes army always read like a description of the Persian empire in miniature. That he's got soldiers from this place and this place and this place and this place. It highlights the diversity of the Persian empire. That's intentional. If they just wanted to invade Greece, they would draw soldiers and ships from the satrapies of Western Asia. Right. Like there's perfectly good armies and mercenaries right there. You don't need to bring troops, troops from Central Asia or the Indus Valley or Egypt to invade Greece. They do that because this expedition to Greece that's going to take place in 480 is about showing the great king to his subjects and showing the great king's subjects to the rest of the world. So you. You intentionally create this enormous multiethnic army, not because it's the most efficient instrument of conquest. This is not Alexander the Great's army, which is a lean, mean fighting machine. This is designed to, we might say, perform victorious kingship.
- [38:06]
Dan Snow
Okay, interesting. So it's a raid, an invasion, a royal progress, a flex. And he will lead it himself. This new king of kings, the new ruler of the Persian Empire, Xerxes is going to lead it himself?
- [38:19]
Patrick Wyman
Yes, and Xerxes is an interesting guy. Xerxes has gotten a tremendously bad rap for the past 2,500 years for some justified and some unjustified reasons. There's a tendency to portray him as either like a kind of a callow youth or a decadent incompetent. And that's not true. He's 35 years old when he comes to the throne, which makes him about 40 by the time the invasion takes place. He was the favored son and heir of one of history's greatest conquerors, Darius I. He had been prepared to rule his entire life. And a lot of the critiques that we see of Darius are really either Greek cultural misunderstandings of Persian political culture and how great kings were expected to behave. A lot of it is that, and a lot of it is just, frankly, after the fact, making stuff up. Whenever Herodotus reports what he presents as a speech or a dialogue between Persian elites, he's making it up. He doesn't know what Persian elites were saying to each other in camps 50 years before. He doesn't know. So really, Persians talking about Persians in Herodotus is Greeks talking about Persians. And so we don't know what the internal dialogues were like. If we, instead of looking at Herodotus, look at the longer traditions of Near Eastern kingship in which Xerxes was operating, we can come to a much better understanding of what the intention of the expedition was. If you've ever seen the fantastic wall relief carvings at Nineveh made by the Assyrian kings, these incredible, incredible images of kings going out and, like, doing stuff with capital D, capital S, doing stuff that's What Xerxes is going to Greece to do. He's going to do stuff. And what's the important thing that he needs to do there? It's not conquer all the Greeks, reduce them all to submission, raise Greece to the ground. None of that. What he needs to do is be seen being victorious.
- [40:20]
Dan Snow
Interesting. And part of the way he does that, I guess, is through his engineering. He famously throws a bridge of boats across the Hellespont. That is as important, I guess, as he's overcoming nature. It's as important as overcoming a Greek city.
- [40:32]
Patrick Wyman
Exactly. Yeah. In Herodotus, this episode appears as kind of a symbol of the hubris of the great king. So, like his, their first attempt at building the bridge is destroyed. And Xerxes has the waves whipped for their insolence at destroying his bridge of boats and defying the great king. If you put it in those terms from a Greek perspective, yeah, it looks kind of ridiculous. From the Persian perspective, the king's job is to be the guarantor of order and to fight against the forces of chaos. The king upholds capital T truth against the capital L. Lie. And the capital T truth is that nature obeys the great king. When the great king says, build a bridge, the bridge gets built. This is a foundational piece of how the Persians understand what the king is supposed to do. So building the bridge is every bit as big an accomplishment as burning Athens, which they'll do shortly. Building the bridge, demonstrating mastery over nature, moving an army from one place to the next. Again, royal progress. It is. It is the king being seen doing stuff. It is nature being seen to obey the king's will. This is what this expedition is about. Much more than battlefield victory.
- [41:38]
Dan Snow
Okay, so the Persian plan is there's a huge, huge army. Goodness knows what the actual numbers were. It's tiresomely off debated. We will never know for sure. It apparently dried rivers as they passed, so great was their thirst for fresh water. And then a big fleet as well, guarding their maritime flank. So they're going to march through what is now past the Hellespont and into what is now Greece and along the coast there, and then down the coast towards Athens with a fleet shadowing them. What is the Greek plan here?
- [42:06]
Patrick Wyman
Well, there is no Greek plan because there is no Greece. There are individual city states and political units, each of which makes its own decisions about what to do in this extraordinarily stressful situation. Right. Like having an army of at least 100,000 men, which is by far the largest army anyone has ever seen. In this part of the world ever bearing down on you is going to, let's say, bring out the stresses inside every individual political unit. So it fits very neatly into the context of Greek politics as it exists. In 480 BC, what you have are individual factions within Greek cities fighting one another. Some favoring resisting the Persians, others favoring supporting them, depending on, not on principle, but on what they think will benefit them. So the Thessalians go over to the Persians because they hate their neighbors, the Phocians. And the Phocians have decided to resist. So the Thessalians use this as an opportunity to go and burn out Phocian villages and take revenge for, you know, decades of feuds across a neighboring border. The people of Thebes very famously side with the Persians. They medized, or medized, as the term goes. And this was something that the other Greeks didn't let them forget. Literally 200 years later, literally 200 years later, other Greeks were still giving the Thebans crap about not having fought against the Persians. So even among those who are determined to resist the Persians, the Athenians and the Spartans, they don't agree on what they're going to do. The Athenians have spent the 10 years between marathon and the Persian invasion building a massive fleet. Almost overnight, Athens becomes a naval power. They. They build 200 triremes, they take 40,000 citizens and turn them into skilled rowers and sailors for this fleet. The Athenians want to fight them at sea. The Spartans, of course, want to fight them on land. And most of the resistors to the Persians are located in the Peloponnese. So if you're them, why would you want to march north to fight? You've got the Isthmus of Corinth, which is an incredibly easily defensible spot. You build a wall across the Isthmus of Corinth. Go behind the wall, make them attack the wall. This is just basic military strategy, right? Like, why would you want to go out and fight a much larger army in the field in unsuitable terrain? Why would you want to do that? So the Athenians are kind of left out to dry. They're forced to evacuate Athens after the Spartans send a token force north. So they send a king, the very famous 300 Spartans, and rather less often remembered, several thousand allies, to go man the Hot Gates at Thermopylae, which gives us the often discussed battle of the Hot Gates there, where the 300 Spartans stand up against the combined might of the Persian Empire. King Leonidas says, you know, that the great king will Fire off so many arrows that it'll blot out the sun. Well, we'll have our battle in the shade then. Which is one of the great lines in all of history, obviously. The Spartans lose. The Persian army continues on its way south. And the Persians burn Athens. They attack Athens, they burn it to the ground. The Athenians are forced to evacuate across the straits to the island of Salamis.
- [45:14]
Dan Snow
So there's this heroic but futile stand at the Hot Gates at the battle of Thermopylae. I always think it gets lost in the telling, the sea battle at Artemisium, which feels. Well, a couple of things. There's a terrible storm which helps to winnow the Persian strength down a little bit. And then there's a sea battle off the coast, effectively, of Thermopylae. So this is their kind of first stop line, isn't it? The first stop line. And the Persians do manage to blast through this.
- [45:40]
Patrick Wyman
Yeah. So it's a very complicated sequence of events that leads to the sea battle. There's a lot of maneuvering, and you're exactly right that it's overshadowed by what happens on land at Thermopylae and then what happens again at sea shortly after this at Salamis. But I'd say Artemisium is probably the largest naval battle in history to that point. We're talking about hundreds of ships that are engaged with one another in this naval battle. It's a huge, huge number of ships and men that are. That are engaged in this battle. And it's almost completely forgotten. But, yeah, it's a holding action. They're trying to slow them down. The Spartans are trying to get time to build their wall across the Isthmus of Corinth that they can hide behind and let the Persians wear themselves out attacking it. The Athenians are trying to buy time to evacuate from Attica. It has become clear to the Athenians that they're not going to be able to hold Athens. It's an unwalled city at this point in time. It is not highly defensible, aside from the Acropolis, which some people think that they should try and defend because of a prophecy from the Oracle of Delphi. The Oracle of Delphi tells the Athenians Athens will be saved by its wooden walls. The most influential man in Athens, a guy named Themistocles, takes that to mean the wooden walls of the fleet that they've just spent all this time in money building. Some Athenians take it to mean the Acropolis. So they restore this, like, kind of pitiful palisade around the high ground of Athens, where all the important temples are, and they go back there and they defend it. The Persians sweep through this in a matter of moments. It takes them effectively no time. And Athens burns.
- [47:08]
Dan Snow
The Persian army sweeps south. The wooden walls of the Acropolis are no use whatsoever. Athens burns. But as you say, on the little island that you can see from the Acropolis. Right. Salamis is just across there. The population of Athens are hanging out well. And a few other islands. But critically, the Athenian fleet is drawn up on the beaches there and. Well, tell me about the decision that is made where to fight the Persians. In terms of what, the next naval battle.
- [47:34]
Patrick Wyman
Yeah. So after a tremendous amount of cajoling back and forth, argumentation and negotiation over who's going to lead the fleet, eventually the decision is made. I think that's the best way to put it because our sources are so unbelievably biased at this point that reconstructing the exact course of events that leads us to the battle is pretty tough because, again, Herodotus didn't know who said what to who. He is our source for this, and he really didn't know. Again, he may have been reporting what people were saying 40, 30, 40, 50 years after the fact. But whether that's actually what happened is difficult to say. What we can say is eventually the decision was reached to fight at sea against the Persian fleet. Why the Persians agreed to the fight, I think, is a much more interesting question. We know why the Greeks wanted to. We know why the Athenians wanted to, why the Persians agreed to. You can make the argument right. Let's imagine you're a experienced military man and political operator at the Persian court. You're here with the great king. What's your advice to him? Think about what we've talked about. The purpose of this expedition is to punish the Greeks to perform victorious kingship. You've just burned Athens. You killed a Spartan king. You can probably claim a victory at Artemisium. It wasn't really a victory, but. But for the sake of argument, let's say you've crossed into Europe. You've built this bridge of boats. You can just go home. You don't need to do anything more. You have done exactly what you're supposed to do on this campaign to be able to call it a victory. And I would be very surprised. This is me speculating, but I would be very surprised if there were not many people in the Persian camp who made exactly that argument on the eve of the Battle of Salamis. Why fight here? Why do you need to do this. You've already, for all intents and purposes, won according to the definitions that you've laid out. But for whatever reason, the Persians did decide to fight. I mean, I think their reasoning is probably the Greeks have a fleet here. If anything goes wrong for us, we could be cut off in unfriendly territory with our root home threatened. And you're thinking, okay, we have superiority in ships, we have superiority in men. It's risky. But the risk of being cut off in Attica without supplies over the winter and no way of bringing more in is worse. This is probably the Persian reasoning. And so they make the decision to agree to battle. Out they go. It is one of the most epic battles in human history. I think it's fair to say one of the most decisive battles in human history. One of the things I find fascinating about it is that people would be arguing about a exactly what happened and be what it meant for decades afterward. There is no single story of the Battle of Salamis or of what it meant. There are multiple different stories told by multiple different people, each of whom have their own reasons for wanting to portray those events the way that they did in contexts that made sense not so much at the time, but like decades afterward. That's what I find so fascinating about it.
- [50:38]
Dan Snow
Listening to Dan Snow's history here, we're talking about the Persians and the Greeks and why they fought more Coming up.
- [50:47]
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- [51:58]
Dan Snow
Well, what we do know is that the Persians sailed into this tricky stretch of water with a narrow entrance, which of course the Athenians and many of the other Greeks would have known like the back of their hands. The Persians were in unknown waters and they were utterly crushed. It was a complete humiliation, a rout of the great King's navy.
- [52:19]
Patrick Wyman
Yeah, it is a crushing victory for the Greeks. That's not to say the Greeks got out unscathed. The Greeks also lost a lot of ships and they lost a lot of men. And one of the really interesting things about the battle is because of the way the currents and the winds were going that day, it pushed a lot of the wreckage away from the battle site. So it was probably not clear to the Greeks just how decisively they'd won until a couple of days after the battle. So there's a question. The Greeks go out, they win this battle, they manage to get the Persians into this narrow stretch of water where their numerical advantage doesn't do as much for them in a pretty wild fight, an immense scale. It's the largest naval battle in history up to that point. And for quite some time afterward, it's just not clear to the Greeks that they have won as thoroughly as they did. The wreckage drifts away, the bodies wash up on shore. If you're looking at wreckage and bodies between two fleets that are pretty similarly set up, in fact, a lot of the same people are on both ships. A lot of the Persian ships are manned by Greek sailors, whether those are from Cyprus or Ionia or one of the many other Greek speaking places that's subject to the great king, the Greeks are pretty sure that they've won. But whether this is, oh my God, we've managed to hold them off, if that's the sense in the camp, which is what it seems to be based on the sources we have, you can see why they didn't immediately go out the next day and try and finish the job. It's only a few days afterward when they realize, oh wow, we really won this one. It's probably clear to the Persians right away that they've lost. And so the Persians before too long, start making preparations to leave.
- [53:51]
Dan Snow
Well, particularly Xerxes, he heads home. He doesn't want to be trapped in Greece and let that all important bridge across the Hellespont get destroyed. And so, like Napoleon in Egypt, Xerxes decides he might leave his army behind and head for home. The Persians occupy much of what we now know as Greece. As you say, they're In a very strong position. They leave an army there over the winter. Right. And it's funny, we all talk about Thermopylae, Salamis, but actually it's the following year is arguably the decisive battle. Is it?
- [54:20]
Patrick Wyman
Yes. So this is the Battle of Plataea. It's fought in 479 BC between the army that Xerxes left behind, which, to be fair, even though it's smaller than the army that he brought, is probably a more effective battlefield fighting force. Because what he left behind was the cream of the army. He left behind his most experienced, highest quality soldiers. You can see this is no longer a royal progress. Right? Xerxes leaves. And Xerxes, as far as we know, claimed victory in all of this. So this is getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. But he gets back home. And we don't have a lot of Persian sources talking about this, but those we have say that he was like, yeah, I went, I killed some yawna, I burned Athens, we killed a Spartan king. No real mention of the Battle of Salamis because it didn't serve the propagandistic purposes of the exercise. But then you can see the emphasis kind of shift to, okay, this is a more military campaign. He leaves behind a career soldier in charge of that army. He leaves behind the highest quality forces. It's much more of a straightforward military campaign. They overwinter, they march back south, they burn Athens again, poor Athens gets burned again. Before that army retreats back to the north, they catch up with them at a place called Plataea. And the fact that we think so much more about Salamis than the Battle of Plataea, which is every bit as crushing a victory, it's just, it's a land victory instead of a sea victory. It's a Spartan, largely a Spartan victory and not an Athenian victory. And that's why we know so much more about it. The Athenians win the public relations battle over the next century and a half, all the way up until Alexander the Great's time. The Athenians never stop crowing about their role in driving off the Persians and the Spartans for reasons that will make sense if you're familiar with the story of the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath. The Persians did not win that battle. Battle. They weren't as interested in winning the PR battle in the first place. And they also weren't as good at it. The memory of the Greco Persian wars and the central place that Salamis gets in, that and the relegation of an arguably more important and more decisive Land battle to second place has everything to do with how people remembered these conflicts and very little to do with their objective importance in military terms.
- [56:33]
Dan Snow
And plateaus also had really complicated battle. Right. They stand off for days. There's skirmishes and marches that go wrong and retreats that go wrong, that then go right. Because the other side make. I mean, it's a classic military engagement where there's just the side that makes the fewer mistakes is going to win.
- [56:51]
Patrick Wyman
Yeah. And one of the things I love about Plataea is that there's even room for skullduggery in there and that you have a really wonderful supporting role played by one of Alexander the Great ancestors, the king of Macedonia, who has sided with the Persians and has openly supported the Persians, but has also, at various points, like, given information to the Greeks. So there's a story probably circulated by the propagandists of this Macedonian king that he went and gave away the battle plan the night before the battle to the Greeks. And so the Greeks were prepared because this Macedonian king, who was only superficially a Persian supporter like you, could very clearly see how in the aftermath when the Persians are driven out, everybody wants to have been on the winning side. Everybody wants to have always opposed the Persians. So there's a Macedonian king who pays to get a story around that he was. That. That he was secretly on the Greek side the whole time. I find that very amusing about the battle. But yeah, it's. It's a fascinating clash between very different ways of organizing an army, very different ways of equipping an army, very different ways of carrying out campaigns, the goals of those campaigns. One of the peculiarities of the Greek world is that there is a substantial emphasis on decisive land battles, which makes perfect sense in the context of Greek politics and culture, because you have small armies of citizen soldiers who you can't keep under arms for months at a time. They go out, they meet the other army at a fairly defined place, they fight a battle, the winner raises a trophy, they go home. I'm pretty sure it's Herodotus who says the Greeks just fought all the time over small amounts of not particularly good land. So the Greeks, when they fight a battle, are used to going and seeking out decisive battle. Plataea is exactly that, just on a much larger scale than the Greeks normally fight the Persians. It's not that they never fought battles or anything like that, but this was not the kind of engagement in the kind of terrain that suited them them. And so the Greeks all credit to them, and credit to the Spartans who commanded Them, they found a spot that highlighted their areas of superiority. They forced the Persians essentially into fighting an uphill battle after crossing a river. And even so, it was a very close run thing. If the Persian commander and his highest ranking subordinates hadn't been killed by the Spartans, then very could have been a very different outcome. Parts of the Greek line did come under serious pressure and did collapse. The Thebans who were fighting for the Persians, the part of the battlefield where the Thebans met other Greeks could have easily gone the Persians way had the Persian cavalry been able to get around the flank, which was what they were more or less trying to do. Outcome could have been very different. But it's a fascinating battle, just not one that we think about all that much. The Athenians, for their part, who did send infantry to fight on the Greek side, always thought that they never got enough credit for everything that they'd done at Plataea. And for decades afterward they were still complaining about it.
- [59:57]
Dan Snow
I love that you can be sure that, well in fact we not just complaining. The victorious allies were soon at each other's throats, as is the way in Greece, like you said out right at the beginning of the podcast, after the battle of Plataea, the Persians do evacuate most of what we now know of as Greece. What, what is the impact on the Greek world? Again, I was brought up to believe this was the start. Pistol. Western civilization is saved. It grows confident, realizes its own potential and strength, and from there, boom, you're away. Looking at it now, more dispassionately looking at it through Persian sources. Well, what do you think this really means?
- [60:32]
Patrick Wyman
This marks the beginning of a much more intensive engagement between the Greek world and the East. I think that at the most basic level is how we should understand the sequence of events. Rather than viewing this as the end of something, I think we should view the Greco Persian wars as the beginning of that relationship. And it's a relationship that culminates in Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persian Empire 150 years later. That is the logical endpoint of the sequence of events that starts with Xerxes invasion, not just for the obvious kind of reversal of it, which makes for a wonderful narrative trick and a wonderful story, but because everything that happens between those two points in Greek politics in some way involves Persia. The Persians are not sitting off there uninvolved in what we consider internal Greek affairs. There is no distinction between internal Greek affairs and the interests of the Persian empire. And so at every point between 480 BC and 330 BC we see Persian involvement in what we think of as internal Greek politics. The outcome of the Peloponnesian War is mostly decided by Persian intervention on the Spartan side, which was not Persian intervention because they wanted the Spartans to win. It was Persian intervention because the crown prince of the Persian Empire happened to be assigned the westernmost satrapies and knew that he was going to have to fight a succession war and wanted Greek support in this succession war. So he throws his support behind the Spartans not because he thinks that the Spartans are better, but because he thinks they'll be more pliable allies for him in the war to come. So what we think of is this massive world defining conflict. The Peloponnesian War is also profitably viewed as an adjunct to a Persian succession struggle.
- [62:20]
Dan Snow
Wow.
- [62:21]
Patrick Wyman
So the March of the 10,000, the Anabasis, this is the army that Cyrus the Younger has assembled, made up mostly of Greek mercenaries through the personal connections that he has developed over the past decade. Getting that army was why Cyrus the Younger intervened in the Peloponnesian War for as long as he did. And that changes your spin on the Peloponnesian War. Right. If you think about it not as being a conflict between Athens and Sparta, but as a regional conflict that has a larger, call it global dimension that changes how we understand it. And that's true of most of what we think of as internal politics in the Greek world between those two points. So Athens is empire. The proximate cause of the Peloponnesian War only came about as the result of taking back what had been Greek speaking Persian possessions in the Aegean in the aftermath of the Persian war. They know the Persians could come back at any time. So what do you do? You go on the offensive when you need allies to go on the offensive. You can't do it by yourself. So well, if you can't assemble allies willingly, you force them to pay you taxes or tribute in order to maintain a military machine that can continue fighting the Persians. This is the genesis of the Athenian Empire. It's not an internal development. It's in the face of what they see as an external threat. Like, well, if they won't pay for their own defense, we'll make them pay. And this is what makes Athens an imperial power. So there's no separation between the Greco Persian wars, the development of the Athenian Empire, the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, the outcome of the Peloponnesian War, and then in the post Peloponnesian War, decades, when Sparta is desperately trying to maintain its hegemony The Persians are involved in that, too. They're picking winners, they're sending money, they're hiring mercenaries. What Persia wants in Greek politics is more or less what it gets between the end of the Peloponnesian War and the rise of Macedonia.
- [64:16]
Dan Snow
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to hear you talk about this because we traditionally have thought about the Greeks as foundational for our Western tradition. But as you're describing this, it feels a bit like the way that great empires from the Romans to the British Empire have dealt with their peripheries. Right. Client states, the idea of people using gifts, using diplomacy on the frontiers, or also the Chinese empires. And then occasionally those clients get too troublesome, and occasionally they even burst into the empire and destabilize it or even conquer it. But the Greeks are inhabiting this kind of role that feels like perhaps some of those Germanic tribes beyond the Rhine started to inhabit during the Roman period.
- [64:56]
Patrick Wyman
I think that's a really excellent parallel. And the part that makes it difficult for us to wrap our head around is not the fundamental dynamic which, as you've pointed out, exists in a whole bunch of different times and places in history. It's that from our perspective as a story, we're so used to thinking of the Greeks as the protagonists, as the people with agency in this story, that they're the ones who are making decisions, and others are. And others, namely the Persians, are responding to the decisions the Greeks make. If we take a step back and think about it in terms of the dynamics of a world empire and the states that exist along its periphery, then, yeah, this perspective makes perfect sense. It's just that we're not used to thinking about things from that perspective. If you're the great king of Persia and you've got Scythians on your northern frontier, and you've got these troublesome Babylonian priests who won't stop talking about the prophecies and how if you don't give them money to maintain the temples, the world's going to end. You've got that, and you've got some sacred bull in Egypt that the priests there are mad about. Are you really going to spend all your time thinking about what the troublesome Yona and their yearly political upheavals all the way on your western frontier are doing? It's just not your top priority. And the figures that we find involved in Greek politics are not great kings. I think this is part of the reason why we tend to underestimate the Persian contribution to Greek political life in those centuries is because it's not Darius I did this, or Xerxes did this, or Artaxerxes II did this. It's this kind of rotating door of rather more under the radar satraps who as part of their job are like, God, I got to manage affairs that are happening over here so it doesn't infect my territories. Like, I can't have a hegemonic state appearing in Greece, not because I particularly care about the hegemonic state in Greece, but because I don't want them stirring up trouble in my cities. This is their reasoning. It's not that they particularly care about the Greeks or they have some civilizational dispute with them. It's that they're a problem. And a good governor of the westernmost satrapies of the Persian Empire has to figure out how to keep them under control with a minimum of time, money and military investment. And so that's why you get this really intimate relationship that develops between Persian satraps and Greek city states.
- [67:15]
Dan Snow
Interesting. Just reminds me of that song, you're so Vain. You probably think this song is about you. And maybe sometimes, maybe sometimes it's not about us.
- [67:23]
Patrick Wyman
Maybe that's very much it. And it's. It can be a kind of a tough pill to swallow because we're so used to this story of the Greeks and Western civilization and its inherent fundamental opposition to something more Eastern. Right. But that's not the reality of the 6th and 5th century BC world. Though I will say this. I think I always kind of underestimated the Greeks and kind of downgraded them. I don't think that anymore. I am much more impressed by the Greeks and their accomplishments than I used to be. I'm much more taken by the kind of weird dynamics of their civilization in this period. I don't think this makes what they did any less impressive. It just changes your perspective on it because it's much more local. Like we, we provide this big, like capital G, Greek kind of sense of this, this Greek world. But Greek life was extraordinarily local. It was rooted in local concerns, local conflicts, local enmities, a very profound sense of belonging to a specific place. And if you view Greek participation in the Persian wars as being kind of a transcendence of that unbelievable localness of the Greek world, I think that makes it a much more impressive kind of thing than if they already knew that they were Greeks and all they had to do was embrace their Greekness to beat the Persians. No, they, they didn't see themselves that way at all. They like, for an Athenian to say, I am going to leave my city behind because I know we can't win here. To cross the straits to watch your city burn and still nevertheless be willing to go out and fight and fight hard, and then roar back even harder after that. To build an empire like that's an extraordinary accomplishment. It's just not quite the one that we've been led to to think is the actual product of this period.
- [69:20]
Dan Snow
Yeah, well, thank you so much, Patrick. You're a legend, as always. Coming on the podcast. What do you want people to know about that you're doing at the moment?
- [69:28]
Patrick Wyman
So I just completed the draft of my second book. It's entitled Lost the Rise and Fall of Human Societies from the Ice Age to the Bronze Age. Small topic, very short book, as I'm sure you can tell.
- [69:43]
Dan Snow
I mean, I'm glad you. I mean, that's a hell of a thing to take on and we're looking forward to reading it, buddy. But that's a hell of a thing.
- [69:49]
Patrick Wyman
Yeah, it should be out sometime in 2025. I'm very excited about it. And I just started writing some historical fiction too, which I never thought I would do, but it seems like fun.
- [69:58]
Dan Snow
Well, I'm glad. I mean, I would be terrified to write that. I mean, how do you do the romance bits? I can't bear it. It's too embarrassing. I'd be so bad at that.
- [70:04]
Patrick Wyman
I'll be honest with you, I'm having a little trouble with that. Not an amorous man here.
- [70:13]
Dan Snow
Well, hey, I mean, at least you know the history, man. So that bit will be absolutely perfect. Thanks for coming on the podcast, dude. Much appreciated.
- [70:20]
Patrick Wyman
Hey, thanks so much for having me. It is my absolute pleasure. You're wonderful to chat with.
- [70:33]
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