Analyse the causes, course and consequences of the Greco-Persian Wars, 490-479 BCE

What this dot point is asking

The wars grew out of the expansion of the Persian Empire under the Achaemenid kings. By the late sixth century BCE Persia controlled the Greek cities of Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor. When these cities rose in the Ionian Revolt (499 to 494 BCE), Athens and Eretria sent help, and the revolt was crushed, with Miletus sacked in 494 BCE. The Persian king Darius I then resolved to punish the mainland cities that had interfered. According to the historian Herodotus, our main source, Darius had a servant remind him daily to remember the Athenians.

The first invasion came in 490 BCE. A Persian force landed on the plain of Marathon in Attica. The Athenians, with a small contingent from Plataea and led by the general Miltiades, charged the larger Persian army and won a decisive victory. Herodotus reports around 6,400 Persian dead against 192 Athenians, figures that may be exaggerated but capture the scale of the upset. Marathon became central to Athenian pride and the legend of the runner who carried news of victory to Athens.

The second invasion, led by Darius's son Xerxes I in 480 BCE, was far larger. Herodotus gives wildly high numbers, but modern estimates suggest a Persian army of perhaps 100,000 or more, with a great fleet. A combined Greek force, organised through the Hellenic League and led on land by Sparta, made a famous stand at the pass of Thermopylae. King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans, with allies, held the pass for several days before being outflanked by a mountain path and destroyed. The delay was a moral victory, but Athens itself was captured and burned. The turning point came at sea: in the narrow straits of Salamis the Greek fleet, partly through the cunning of Themistocles, destroyed much of the Persian navy.

The following year, 479 BCE, the Greeks won the decisive land battle at Plataea under the Spartan regent Pausanias, and tradition links it with a naval victory at Mycale on the same day, which freed the Ionian cities. The Persian threat to the mainland was over. The consequences were enormous. The victory gave the Greeks, and especially Athens, a powerful sense of having defended freedom against tyranny, a theme repeated in art, drama and oratory. Athens used its fleet to lead the Delian League from 478 BCE, an alliance that gradually became an Athenian empire and funded the cultural golden age of the fifth century.

The evidence centres on Herodotus, writing a generation later, who is invaluable but mixes oral tradition, anecdote and patriotic bias, and who gives implausible Persian numbers. Other sources include the play The Persians by Aeschylus, who fought at Salamis, inscriptions, and archaeology of the battle sites. For a TASC response, treat Herodotus critically as a source whose reliability varies, and explain the wars as a turning point that both saved the independent city-states and set Athens on the path to empire.