factor with regard to logistics: for, toward the end, the Persians ran short of supplies.15 Athens was evacuated before being captured and sacked by the Persians. Later on, the Athenian memory of the Persian conflagration of the Acropolis and temple of Athena (in revenge for the destruction at Sardis) was kept alive as an everlasting reminder of the courageous Athenian stand in the Persian Wars. Pausanias (1.27.6) attests that even in the second century CE Athens’ damaged and blackened statues of Athena were on public display, allegedly the very artifacts burned by Xerxes’ Persians and left as memorials by the Greek warriors. The story that Xerxes stole the statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, one first attested by the Alexander historians, is likely to be a propagandistic invention. These historians wished to credit their hero with the return of the statues.16
The Persian fleet was defeated off Salamis in 480, in a battle the Athenians claimed as their own victory.17 Xerxes left Greece, entrusting affairs to Mardonius. In 479, the Persians lost the battles both at Mycale in Asia Minor and Plataea in Boeotia where Mardonius was killed in action (Hdt 9.46.1–63.2; 9.101.3–102.3). Sparta contributed the lion’s share to this victory. Hence, in Athenian cultural memory, Plataea played a minor role, particularly in comparison to Salamis (cf. Thuc. 1.73.4–74.3).
For the Persian side, the campaign was an annoying waste of lives, time, finances, and resources—surely a blow to Xerxes’ image but neither so serious nor the devastating setback the Greek sources make it out to be. Firmly establishing Achaemenid control over the rich satrapy of Egypt was much more important than the trouble in peripheral Greece.18 Indubitably, the Persian Wars meant much more to the invaded Greeks, and particularly the Athenians, than to the invading Persians.
The Persians withdrew from northern Greece, attacked by the Thracians and spared by the Macedonians (Hdt. 9.89.4). They left a power vacuum. Thracian ethnoi, Argead Macedonia and Athens tried to annex as much territory as possible, apparently based on mutual arrangements.19 The Athenians under Cimon cleared the territory by eliminating the last Persian strongholds at the Thracian coast (such as Eion) and Chersonese.20 In the Aegean, they gained control of most islands and the Hellespont. In the (early?) 460s, at Eurymedon in Pamphylia, under Cimon, they damaged the Persian fleet severely by destroying the important Phoenician force (Thuc. 1.100.1). Persia lost control of the Ionian coast. Athens followed them in the leadership over the Greeks of Asia Minor. As the Ionian Revolt had made clear, dominion over the Ionian cities depended on the naval supremacy in the coastal areas of Asia Minor.21
While the Persians showed no ambition to return to Greece with fresh troops, there was common fear in Greece that they would. As a reaction, and as a way to glorify their own role in the Persian Wars, the Athenians convinced other Greek to join their first naval confederacy, the Delian League, founded in 478/477 (Thuc. 1.96.1–2). They proclaimed they were the only power capable of securing their League’s members from future Persian attacks (Hdt. 7.139–140). By developing their hegemonic methods, Athens seems to have learned from the enemy.22
The Persians failed to return, and meanwhile the Delian League alienated its members by its rigid hegemonic politics and a strict no-exit clause. The Athenians were deemed oppressive. The consequence was a widespread wish among their symmachoi to be set free. In the Peloponnesian War, Athens’ opponent Sparta exploited this discontent.
It is a matter of debate whether in the early 440s, after Cimon’s campaign against Cyprus (451), the Peace of Callias (named after the Athenian ambassador) was settled between Athens and Artaxerxes I (465–424/423). Reportedly, it restricted the areas of naval action: Whereas the Persian fleet was excluded from the zone between the Bosporus and Lycia, the confederate Greek fleet renounced action in the Levant and in Egypt.23 In view of the lack of explicit contemporary evidence, some scholars suggest that the Peace was invented in the fourth century to highlight Athens’ past glory. If the Peace existed at all, perhaps it was not a formal treaty but an informal arrangement.24
Persia and Greece from the Peloponnesian War to the King’s Peace
Persia intervened only in the second phase of the Peloponnesian War (from 412). There was common ground with the Spartans who wanted to end the Athenian supremacy in the Aegean. In the name of Darius II (423–405), Tissaphernes, the satrap in Sardis, stereotypically depicted as a deceitful liar by Thucydides and Xenophon, negotiated Sparta’s consent to the renewed Persian claim to coastal cities in exchange for Persian subsidies to build and maintain a fleet able to match that of the Athenians. Thus, when the Spartan commander Lysander outwitted the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami in 405, he had about 200 triremes at his disposal.25 Athens’ position in the Hellespont was crushed, the Athenian Empire
The Spartans’ victory that had ended the Peloponnesian War confronted them with new requirements difficult to meet. Stepping into the power vacuum left by Athens meant that they had to adopt the role of the hegemon of Greece and the eastern Greeks. Consequently, a conflict between Sparta and the Persian king concerning Greek Asia Minor was inevitable.
Factional strife in Sparta and a lack of both manpower and finances increased the problem of coping with Athens’ “legacy.” Additionally, Karl-Wilhelm Welwei points to the Spartan failure to create a clear concept of how to handle the new situation that discredited Sparta as a stabilizing factor.26
The cause of the coastal Greeks put Sparta’s relationship with Artaxerxes II (404–359) to the test several times. Early in his reign, Sparta and the Greeks supported the failed attempt of his rebellious brother Cyrus the Younger to overthrow him. Cyrus was on good terms with Lysander and had backed the Spartan establishment of short-term oligarchic dekarchies in Asia Minor. After Cyrus’ defeat and death at the battle of Cunaxa near Babylon in 401 (Xen. Anab. 1.8.23–9.1), Artaxerxes II ordered Tissaphernes to collect tribute from Cyrus’ Ionian supporters, openly demonstrating who was in charge. These cities called upon the aid of their Spartan protector (Xen. Hell. 3.1.4–8). In 400/399, the Spartan commander Thibron was sent to Asia to “liberate” the Ionian Greeks. However, in 397, Sparta, then represented by Dercylidas, ended up settling an armistice with Artaxerxes II whose claim to the coast remained unchallenged (Xen. Hell. 3.2.12–20).
In 396–394, the next Spartan liberator of the Greeks, Agesilaus II, pointed at the Persian naval threat and invaded Asia Minor.27 In fact, he plundered the rich satrapies Phrygia, Lydia, Paphlagonia, Mysia, and Cappadocia.28 Agesilaus wanted to acquire finances for further Spartan wars necessary to consolidate the hegemony in Greece. Plutarch’s claim that Agesilaus wanted to overthrow the Persian king (Ages. 15.3) is an unreliable Second Sophistic retrospective, colored by Plutarch’s regret that in the end not a Greek but a Macedonian accomplished this. Agesilaus’ actions, number of troops, and lack of siege equipment suggest that he set his mind on plundering and probably on securing a permanent income from Spartan control over western Asia Minor.29
The Persian side used the discontent of Sparta’s opponents in mainland Greece to get Agesilaus out of Asia Minor and weaken Sparta’s hegemony. Artaxerxes II gave subsidies to an alliance of Corinth, Argos, Athens, and Thebes (Diod. Sic. 14.82) that confronted Sparta in the Corinthian War (395–387/386). Agesilaus was forced to return to Greece. Xenophon’s comment that only Persian bribery prevented Agesilaus from liberating the Ionians who “mourned his departure as though they were saying good-bye not only to a ruler, but to a father or a hetairos” (Ages. 1.38) is biased by his admiration for his hero to whom he might have owed his Peloponnesian rural estate. Reportedly, Agesilaus made a numismatic joke saying that he was driven from Asia by 30,000 archers of the Persian king (Plut. Art. 20), referring to the iconography of Achaemenid (gold) coins showing a royal archer on the obverse.
In
