Greco-Persian Wars

The Greco-Persian Wars by Peter Green, 287 pages

In 480 BC, the Great King Xerxes, ruler over much of the known world in the form of the Persian Empire, crossed a pontoon bridge his engineers had laid across the Bosporus with an army larger than any Europe had ever seen.  His target was the city-states of southern Greece, particularly Athens, which had supported attempted revolts among the Greek city-states of Asia Minor and defeated a prior Persian invasion at the battle of Marathon in 490 BC.  The story of the Persian invasion and how it was ultimately defeated by a shaky Greek alliance is the subject of The Greco-Persian Wars, originally published in 1970 as The Year of Salamis.

The original title was more appropriate.  Green only passingly covers the conflicts between Greeks and Persians before and after Xerxes' invasion.  His description of that momentous year, however, is excellent, combining a thorough knowledge of the primary sources with an easy familiarity with the Greek landscape and classical military strategy.  Green manages to find a mean between the tedious minutiae of an academic history and the too-tidy narrative of too much popular history, admitting where there is uncertainty and explaining the reasons for his choices of alternatives.  Above all, Green is very aware that even before the war had ended, the legend of the Greek victory became almost as important as the fact of the victory.  The struggle over the meaning of the war - freedom against slavery, Greek identity against Persian cosmopolitanism - and the causes of victory - the Spartan army and the Athenian navy - would help shape the history of the world for centuries to come, even as the names of the great battles of 480 - Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea - continue to resonate down through the millennia.