Who won the Battle of Plataea?
In 479 BC, a year after Thermopylae and Salamis, the Greek city-states united to face the Persian army that Xerxes had left behind under his general Mardonius. Near Plataea in central Greece they assembled the largest hoplite army the Greek world had ever fielded. After days of standoff, the Spartans and their allies broke the Persian infantry in close combat, killed Mardonius, and stormed the enemy camp. It was the decisive land victory that ended the Persian invasion of Greece.2
Salamis had saved Greece at sea, but the Persian army was still on Greek soil, and until it was beaten nothing was settled. In the summer of 479 BC the Greeks did what they had so rarely managed: they put aside their quarrels, gathered under a single command, and marched out to finish the war on land.3
The invasion unfinished
In 480 BC the Persian king Xerxes had invaded Greece, forced the pass at Thermopylae and burned Athens, only to see his fleet beaten in the narrows of Salamis. Xerxes went home, but he left a powerful army in Greece under his kinsman and leading general, Mardonius, who wintered in Thessaly and prepared to finish the conquest the next year. Herodotus says Mardonius kept 300,000 men, a figure no modern historian accepts.4
In the spring Mardonius tried diplomacy first. Through King Alexander I of Macedon he offered the Athenians generous terms if they would change sides. They refused, and in the summer he marched south and occupied Athens a second time, while its people again took refuge on Salamis. Only then did Sparta, prodded by the Athenians, send its army north. Under the regent Pausanias came 5,000 Spartan citizens, each attended by seven helots, and 5,000 more Lacedaemonians.5 › Battle of Salamis, 480 BC
The largest Greek army
Mardonius pulled back into Boeotia, the territory of his Theban allies, where the plain suited his cavalry, and built a fortified camp of timber by the River Asopus. The Greeks gathered on the lower slopes of Mount Kithaeron near the little city of Plataea. Herodotus lists them city by city: 10,000 Lacedaemonians on the right wing, 1,500 Tegeans beside them, 5,000 Corinthians, 3,000 Megarians, 600 Plataeans and 8,000 Athenians under Aristides on the left, among two dozen contingents, for a total of 38,700 hoplites and 110,000 men in all once the light troops were counted.6
Modern historians treat the Greek figures as plausible, if generous, and the Persian figures as wildly inflated. Britannica's summary puts the armies at about 40,000 Greeks against some 100,000 on the Persian side. Whatever the true numbers, it was the largest force the Greek city-states ever put in the field together.7
Twelve days of waiting
Neither side wanted to fight on the other's ground. The Greeks would not come down into the plain where the Persian horse could ride around them; Mardonius would not climb into the hills. His cavalry opened the contest, and its commander, Masistius, splendid in golden armor, was unhorsed and killed by the Athenians in an early clash, to Persian grief. The Greeks then moved down to a ridge closer to the river, and for eight days the armies faced each other across the Asopus.8
The waiting favored the Persians. Their mounted archers harried the Greek lines with javelins and arrows, cut off a supply column coming over the mountain passes, and finally fouled and choked the Gargaphian spring on which the whole Greek army depended for water. Short of food and water, Pausanias and the other generals decided to move by night to a new position, called the Island, between two branches of a stream nearer Plataea.9
The night withdrawal
The move went badly wrong. The center of the army, harassed all day by the cavalry, set off in the dark and went too far, ending up by the temple of Hera in front of Plataea itself. On the right, a Spartan company commander, Amompharetus, refused to retreat before the barbarians and disgrace Sparta, and Pausanias lost hours trying to persuade him. The Athenians on the left waited to see what the Spartans would really do. When dawn came the Greek army was strung out in three separate pieces.10
Mardonius saw an enemy in flight. Mocking the Spartans' famous courage, he led the Persians across the Asopus at a run, aiming at the Spartans and Tegeans, the only Greeks he could see, and the rest of his army followed without order. Livius suggests that some of the earlier Greek moves may have been meant to lure him across the river in just this way.11
The break
The Spartans and Tegeans, some 53,000 men by Herodotus's count, light troops included, stood alone, while the Athenians were held up by the Thebans and other Greeks fighting for Persia. The Persians set up a wall of wicker shields and poured arrows into them. The Spartans sacrificed, and the omens would not come right; men fell while they waited. At last Pausanias turned toward the temple of Hera and prayed, the Tegeans charged, the omens turned favorable, and the Spartans went in.12
The fight at the wicker shields turned into a long, brutal struggle by a temple of Demeter. Herodotus says the Persians were not inferior in courage or strength, and seized the Spartan spears and broke them off with their hands, but they had little armor and less training, and they rushed out singly or in small groups to their deaths. Around Mardonius on his white horse fought his 1,000 picked men, and they held until Mardonius fell, killed by a Spartan named Arimnestus. Then the Persian center broke.13
On the other wing the Athenians beat the Thebans, killing 300 of their best men. The Persian commander Artabazus, who had always opposed giving battle, never committed his corps; seeing the rout, he marched it straight off toward Phocis and the Hellespont.14
The storming of the camp
The routed Persians fled to their timber stockade and manned the walls, and the Spartans, who knew little of siege fighting, could not get in. When the Athenians came up, they broke through after a long struggle, and the Tegeans were first inside, plundering Mardonius's own tent and carrying off the bronze manger of his horse. What followed was a massacre of men packed into a small space. Herodotus claims that fewer than 3,000 of the Persians survived, apart from those who had left with Artabazus; Britannica's estimate of 30,000 Persian dead is far lower, but either way the army was destroyed.15
Greek losses were light by comparison. Herodotus counts 91 Spartans, 16 Tegeans and 52 Athenians killed in the main fighting, plus 600 Megarians and Phliasians caught in the open by Theban cavalry as they hurried to the battle; Plutarch later gave 1,360 Greek dead.16
The end of the invasion
By Greek tradition, on the same day a second Greek force won at Mycale, on the coast of Asia Minor, destroying the remains of the Persian fleet and its army in Ionia. Together Plataea and Mycale ended the Persian invasion of Greece. The fighting would go on for decades, but the Persians never invaded Greece again.17
The victors set aside a tenth of the spoils for the gods. At Delphi they dedicated a golden tripod standing on a bronze column of three intertwined serpents, inscribed with the names of the cities that had fought; at Olympia a bronze statue of Zeus, and at the Isthmus one of Poseidon. Thebes, which had fought for Persia, was besieged and gave up its pro-Persian leaders. Within a few years leadership of the Greek war passed from Sparta to Athens, and the confidence born of survival would shape the golden age of Athens that followed.18 › Battle of Marathon, 490 BC
Memory and the man who won it
Herodotus called Plataea the most famous victory of all those he knew of, and the Serpent Column still survives: the emperor Constantine moved it to the hippodrome of Constantinople, and it stands today in Istanbul. The general who won the battle fared worse. Pausanias fell from grace soon after, and Livius notes how little credit Herodotus gives him, though he was one of the few Greeks ever to defeat an imperial Persian army in open battle.19 › Battle of Thermopylae, 480 BC
The date of the battle is uncertain. Britannica places it in July 479 BC, while dates derived from Plutarch's Greek calendar point to late July or early August; HistoryOfWar gives 27 August. All agree it was the late summer of 479 BC.20
