The Battle of Mycale (479 BCE)

There is no Persian account of Mycale, and after Herodotus there is very little of any kind: a compressed and partly garbled notice in Diodorus (drawing on the fourth-century Ephorus), a stray line in Ctesias, and later echoes in Plutarch, Pausanias and Strabo, all descending from the same Greek stream. Kuhrt states the general condition for the whole period, and it holds with special force here: for the political and military history the account depends on Graeco-Roman writers, with Herodotus' narrative dominating the picture.^[1] Herodotus' account of the battle (9.90-107) is rich and circumstantial, full of named captains, omens and speeches, and it is also shaped throughout by his theme of free Hellas delivered from the barbarian. The most important thing it does to Mycale is to make it the twin of Plataea. He reports that the two victories fell on the same day, and draws the theological moral openly:

Now there are many clear proofs of the divine ordering of things; seeing that at this time, the Persians' disaster at Plataeae falling on the same day as that other which was to befall them at Mycale, the rumour came to the Greeks at that place, whereby their army was greatly heartened and the readier to face danger.

Herodotus 9.100, trans. Godley^[2]

The design is built from concrete omens, not asserted in the abstract. As the Greeks advanced, Herodotus reports, a herald's staff was found lying on the beach and a rumour ran through the army that Mardonius was already beaten in the north; and the two armies, he adds, were fighting beside a precinct of the Eleusinian Demeter at Mycale exactly as at Plataea, the same goddess presiding over both fields.^[2] How and Wells took the tradition of the Rumour and the washed-up staff to be "a genuine tradition, however we explain it", a real memory of the day later dressed in the miraculous.^[3]

The same-day report is widely read as a literary device. In the Companion, Bichler places it within a systematic arrangement of fatefully paired days: Thermopylae with Artemisium, Plataea with Mycale, and the Sicilian victory of Himera with Salamis, each pair, on Herodotus' telling, falling "on one and the same day".^[4] Aristotle had denied that the western and eastern victories, Himera and Salamis, shared any common purpose or telos (Poetics 23).^[4] Herodotus himself offers the timing as corroboration rather than bare assertion: he places the defeat at Plataea early in the day and that at Mycale in the afternoon, and reports that the Greeks confirmed the coincidence of the day when they examined the matter afterwards.^[2] The modern judgement runs from the cautious to the sceptical. Kuhrt reports that the same-day claim "is generally thought unlikely," while allowing that the two must have been fought close together in time, since the victory at Plataea is what freed the Greek fleet to act.^[5] Briant grants a rough coincidence, "if not the exact day"; Hyland treats the identical-day report as one Herodotus "implausibly" makes, and leaves the relative timing uncertain; How and Wells, for their part, held the underlying tradition of the news reaching Mycale to be genuine, however later dressed.^[6][7][3] For the Persian side the point is to read the battle apart from the providential frame in which it reaches us: a defensive engagement on the Ionian shore whose date the sources do not securely fix.

After the loss at Salamis the previous autumn, the King's surviving fleet had wintered at Kyme and Samos. In the spring of 479 a Greek fleet gathered at Delos under the Spartan king Leotychides, hesitant to press east into waters it did not know. What drew it on was an appeal from the subjects themselves. A secret embassy reached the Greeks from Samos, sent without the knowledge of the Persians or of Theomestor, the man they had installed as tyrant of the island; its spokesman Hegesistratus argued that the Ionians would rise the moment the fleet appeared, and that "the Persian ships are unseaworthy and no match for yours".^[8] Leotychides fastened on the envoy's own name, which means army-leader: "I accept the omen of your name, Sir Samian", he answered, and bound the Samians by oath before sacrificing for favourable omens through his diviner, Deiphonus of Apollonia.^[8] The promise that the Ionians would change sides was thus made, and believed, before a blow was struck, and it is the thread that runs through the whole battle. The fleet crossed to Samos and moored off the temple of Hera, ready to force a sea-fight.

Facing the Greek advance on Samos, the Persian naval commanders made a decision that the Greek narrative treats as timidity and that the imperial reading should treat as policy: they refused battle at sea. Herodotus is explicit about the reasoning:

It was determined by them in council that they would not do battle by sea ... the reason of their making for the mainland was, that they might lie under the shelter of their army at Mycale, which had been left by Xerxes' command behind the rest of his host to hold Ionia.

Herodotus 9.96, trans. Godley^[9]

They sent the Phoenician squadrons home, beached the rest on the shore below Mycale, by the precinct of the Eleusinian Demeter near the Gaison stream, and built a stockade of stone and timber, incorporating the drawn-up ships into the wall, felling orchards for the palisade and preparing, in Herodotus' phrase, "for siege or victory, making ready of deliberate purpose for either event."^[9] This was the deliberate avoidance of a second Salamis. Hyland argues that so comprehensive a stand-down cannot have been the commanders' own initiative: the presence of Xerxes' full brother Masistes near the site, though not in command, points to a royal decision, the King sending a trusted member of his inner family to inspect the fleet's new situation while keeping his own person at a distance and refusing to stake his charisma on another sea-fight.^[7] The covering army had been left in Ionia by Xerxes' own order for exactly this contingency; Herodotus numbers it at sixty thousand, under Tigranes, "the goodliest and tallest man in Persia," and Diodorus adds that it was reinforced by conscripts drawn up from Sardis and its district.^[9][6] The sixty thousand is not to be pressed: How and Wells judged that Herodotus "may well be mistaken in assigning a whole Persian army corps (60,000 men)" to the camp's defence, just as he probably undervalued the Ionian help the attackers received, and they doubled his Greek marines to some six thousand to make the storming credible.^[3] The choice to fight a defensive battle on land, behind a wall, rather than risk the ships, was rational after Salamis. It also handed the initiative to the enemy, and it placed the outcome in the hands of the least reliable troops in the King's service.

The deepest weakness at Mycale was internal, and the Persian command knew it before the fighting began. The army and fleet contained large Ionian Greek contingents, subjects of the King fighting against other Greeks, and their loyalty was suspect. Herodotus shows the commanders taking pre-emptive measures against their own men. The Samians were disarmed outright, because they had lately ransomed and sent home five hundred Athenian prisoners; the Milesians were sent away from the camp under a pretext, ordered to guard the mountain passes on the ground that they knew the country, though "their true reason for so doing was, that the Milesians should be away from the rest of their army."^[10] Leotychides, for his part, played on precisely this fracture, sailing along the shore and calling to the Ionians in the enemy line that, when battle was joined, "let a man remember first his freedom", a stratagem of the same kind Themistocles had used at Artemisium: either the Ionians would be won over, or the Persians would hear and distrust them, and either served the Greek purpose.^[11] When the fight turned, the fracture opened. The disarmed Samians did what they could against the Persians; the Milesians, posted on the passes to be rid of them, guided the fleeing Persians onto the wrong paths and then fell on them; and the rest of the Ionians, seeing the example, revolted in the middle of the battle. Herodotus draws the line that would echo for a century:

But they did wholly contrariwise to the charge laid upon them; they misguided the fleeing Persians by ways that led them among their enemies, and at last themselves became their worst enemies and slew them. Thus did Ionia for the second time revolt from the Persians.

Herodotus 9.104, trans. Godley^[12]

Briant cautions against drawing too much from this: the behaviour of the Ionian contingents at Mycale is "too specific an example" to generalise into a claim that the empire's subject levies were everywhere disaffected, and Herodotus elsewhere stresses the loyal service of subject navies at Salamis under the King's eye.^[13] The point holds, but the specific fact is grave enough on its own terms: at the one battle where the empire committed Ionian Greeks against a Greek liberating fleet on Ionian soil, they changed sides. The decision to fight there, in that company, was the decision that lost the war's last engagement.

The fighting itself, on Herodotus' account, resembled a smaller Plataea. The Greeks landed and formed up; the Athenians and their neighbours had the level ground along the beach, the Lacedaemonians the broken ground of the ravine and hillside. So long as the Persians held their wall of wicker shields upright they had the better of it, but when the Athenian wing, eager to win the honour before the Spartans came round, pushed in with a rush, the shield-line was broken and the defenders driven back inside their stockade. Herodotus renders the end in the same terms he used for the Persian infantry at Plataea and Marathon, brave men whose tactics failed once the shield-fence was down:

While the Persians' shields stood upright, they defended themselves and held their own in the battle; but when the Athenians and their neighbours in the line passed the word and went more zealously to work, that they and not the Lacedaemonians might win the victory, immediately the face of the fight was changed. Breaking down the shields they charged all together into the midst of the Persians, who received the onset and stood their ground for a long time, but at the last fled within their wall ... But when the walled place was won, the foreigners made no further defence, but took to flight, all save the Persians, who gathered themselves into bands of a few men and fought ... with whatever Greeks came rushing within the walls.

Herodotus 9.102, trans. Godley^[14]

Briant makes the tactical reading explicit and general: at Mycale as at Plataea, the moment the rampart of shields collapsed the Persian infantry had nothing but its courage to set against "the well-oiled machine of the phalanx," and the hoplites, once inside the range where the bow no longer told, won the day.^[15] The suspicion that these details merely repeat Plataea was answered long ago by How and Wells: fights shaped by "the Persian methods of fighting and of fortification must of necessity recur," and at Mycale, unlike Plataea, the Greeks were the attackers throughout.^[3] Herodotus describes no cavalry engaged at Mycale, the arm on which the empire usually relied against Greeks in Asia; the shield-wall, Tuplin and Jacobs observe, disappears from the record after the battle.^[14][16] The camp was stormed, the ships and the wall burned once the spoil had been carried off, and the covering army destroyed or scattered toward Sardis. Of the four Persian commanders, Herodotus reports, two escaped and two fell: Artayntes and Ithamitres, the admirals, got away, while Mardontes and Tigranes, the general of the land army, were killed.^[14] Both of the dead may have been of the royal kin; Tigranes, in particular, is identified in the tradition as a son of Xerxes' uncle Artabanus, so that the loss, as after Salamis and Plataea, reached into the King's own family.^[17]

Herodotus follows the survivors up the road to Sardis and gives the aftermath its most telling Persian scene, a quarrel that shows how defeat was managed and blame apportioned at the top. Xerxes' brother Masistes fell to abusing the escaped admiral Artayntes for his generalship, and used the sharpest insult the court knew:

Masistes son of Darius, who had chanced to be present at the Persian disaster, reviled the admiral Artayntes very bitterly, telling him (with much beside) that such generalship as his proved him worse than a woman ... Now it is the greatest of all taunts in Persia to be called worse than a woman.

Herodotus 9.107, trans. Godley^[18]

Artayntes drew his sword on the King's brother and was wrestled down by a Halicarnassian, Xenagoras, who was rewarded by Xerxes with the governorship of all Cilicia, a strategically placed coastal command handed, at just this moment, to a proven loyal man, part of the empire's response to the collapse of the sea-frontier.^[19] The episode is instructive beyond its melodrama. Hyland reads the whole management of the news, the tension between "the realities of defeat and the royal wish to portray the campaign as a success," as running on a well-worn Near Eastern track: blame is loaded onto the dead Mardonius and the disgraced Artayntes, dissociating the King from their failures, while Ahura Mazda's continued favour to Xerxes and his house is asserted despite the god's evident denial of victory to such unworthy subordinates.^[7] The Greek sources, by contrast, prefer stories of a court sunk in cowardice, lust and vengeance; the sober point underneath is that a defeat was answered as defeats in the ancient Near East always were, by propitiation, the transfer of guilt to subordinates, and the redirection of attention toward the victory still hoped for.

One question divides the modern authorities, and it bears on how the empire actually behaved after Mycale. Xerxes did not flee Sardis in panic; he remained there for a time, directing affairs, before beginning the long march home. The dispute is over whether, in those weeks, he mounted a reprisal against the Milesians who had betrayed him at the battle. Ctesias reports that Xerxes, withdrawing from Sardis, sent to sack a great sanctuary, which the text names as Delphi but which many editors correct to Didyma, the oracle of Apollo attached to Miletus; and Pausanias states that Xerxes "blamed the Milesians for deliberate cowardice in the face of the Athenians in the Greek sea-battle," that is, at Mycale, and carried off the bronze Apollo of the Branchidae.^[20] Briant accepts the raid: Xerxes, he argues, was "mounting a counterattack against the rebellious Ionians, specifically the Milesians, after their treachery in the battle of Mycale," and the Branchidae who administered the shrine, having sided openly with Persia, fled to the King in fear of their fellow-citizens.^[21] Hyland is sceptical: the silence of Herodotus and Diodorus does not exclude such a raid, but the positive evidence, resting on an emended sentence of a Byzantine epitome of Ctesias and on a statue that may have been looted by Darius rather than Xerxes, is "not very compelling," and it is at least as likely that the King set out for home without a last-minute victory to salve the wounds of Mycale and Plataea.^[7] The disagreement is genuine and cannot be resolved on present evidence; what both sides agree on is the frame, that a punitive strike at a rebel sanctuary would have been entirely in character, the standard imperial answer to a city that had followed the Lie into revolt, and not evidence of any special cruelty or of a religious persecution.

What mattered from Susa was not the wrecked ships. Mycale, with Plataea, ended the invasion; but Mycale in particular reopened the Ionian question that the empire had thought settled in 494, and set in train the loss of the whole Aegean seaboard. On the field of battle the Greek victors already faced the problem the revolt created: what to do with the Ionians they had freed. Herodotus reports the debate, the Peloponnesians proposing to evacuate the Ionians from Asia altogether and resettle them in Greece, since they could not be permanently garrisoned against the King; the Athenians refusing; and the compromise, that the islanders, Samians, Chians, Lesbians and the rest who had served, were bound by oath into the Hellenic alliance.^[22] This "conference of Samos," as it is sometimes called, is the seed of what became, after Sparta withdrew from the war in 478/7, the Athenian-led Delian League, whose declared purpose Thucydides gives as continuing the war "in revenge for the damage they had suffered" by ravaging the King's land.^[23] The Companion states the consequence flatly: "Athens thus became the leading power in the Aegean thanks to its fleet, especially after the Persian fleet was destroyed near the Mycale promontory in 479," and the defeats at Plataea and Mycale together "resulted in a Greek offensive" that acquired its institutional shape in the League.^[24]

The Greek fleet sailed straight from Mycale to the Hellespont; over the next two years the strongholds by which Darius and Xerxes had moved armies from Asia into Europe fell one by one, Sestos to the Athenians in 479, Byzantium and much of Cyprus in 478, Eion on the Strymon around 476, until only Doriskos in Thrace still held for the King, its commander Maskames earning the King's lifelong gift-giving for refusing to yield.^[25] The coastal cities of Ionia, which had turned at Mycale, drifted or were driven into the Athenian orbit across the following decades. When Xerxes at last tried to reassert his "mastery of the seas" by sending a rebuilt fleet west, it was destroyed off the Eurymedon in Pamphylia c. 469–466 BCE (the date is disputed), and the western sea-frontier settled into the shape it would keep: an Aegean lost to Athens, an Anatolian interior still firmly the King's.^[25]

Herodotus does not close with the victory but follows the Athenians north to the Hellespont, and ends the whole of the Histories at Sestos. The town, the strongest fortress of the region, held the cables of Xerxes' bridges and a Persian garrison under Artayctes, the governor of the province, whom Herodotus calls "a cunning man and a wicked", and who had earlier plundered the tomb-sanctuary of the hero Protesilaos at Elaeus by tricking the King out of it.^[26] Artayctes had told Xerxes that the shrine was "the house of a certain Greek, who met a just death for invading your territory with an army", and asked for it as plunder, a lie that turned, Herodotus notes, on the Persian premise that all Asia and everything in it belonged to the reigning King.^[26] Besieged into the autumn and starved until the defenders "boiled the thongs of their beds for food", the garrison broke out by night and was hunted down; Artayctes was nailed to a plank above the very crossing-place of Xerxes' bridge, and his son was stoned to death before his eyes.^[26] The Histories then end, without ceremony, on a remembered exchange from the founder's day, when the Persians asked Cyrus to move down from their poor and rugged country into a softer land:

Thereat the Persians saw that Cyrus reasoned better than they, and they departed from before him, choosing rather to be rulers on a barren mountain side than slaves dwelling in tilled valleys.

Herodotus 9.122, trans. Godley^[27]

Griffin reads the closing episodes as conspicuously placed. The war that opened with the bridging of the Hellespont ends at that same crossing, on a Persian governor nailed above it, and the account of Persian greatness closes on Cyrus' warning that soft lands breed soft men.^[28] Bichler makes the same point for the whole design: the great narrative of the Persian Wars "concludes with the consequences of the victories at Plataea and Mycale".^[4]

Set against the whole empire, the losses of 479 were real but bounded, and the distinction between what was lost and what was kept is the heart of the Persian-side reading. Briant draws the balance with care. The human losses, though the Greek sources (following Aeschylus) paint them as the ruin of a generation, cannot be measured, and in Briant's judgement did no decisive harm, the Persian people continuing to thrive.^[29] Hyland's reconstruction puts the combined death toll of the whole campaign, Salamis, Plataea and Mycale together with storm and disease, in the tens of thousands, a painful blow of the order of Athens' catastrophe in Sicily or Rome's early defeats by Hannibal, but one the empire's scale absorbed without lasting demographic harm; the naval casualties in particular fell on the Mediterranean coastlands, and the Iranian heartland's manpower was barely touched.^[30] Territorially the reckoning is sharper, and Briant states it exactly:

If we compare the situation after Mycale to the territory governed by the Persians at the time of the death of Darius, the most important losses are in the Aegean, where the naval defeats left the field free for the Greeks... What Herodotus calls the Second Ionian Revolt is negligible alongside the First; this time, the mainland cities remained under Persian control.

Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander (2002), p. 540^[31]

That is the imperial verdict. The empire gave up the islands and, in time, the coastal cities of the Aegean fringe, the most recently and lightly held of its western acquisitions; it kept Anatolia, the satrapal system inland, and everything east of it. From Susa the wars against the Greeks did not end in the collapse that the victors' literature, and the modern memory built on it, would make of them. They ended in the manageable loss of a sea-frontier, while the state functioned in good order and the dynasty ruled on for another century and a half, until Alexander. Mycale is remembered by the Greeks as the day the eastern and the western threats to Hellas were broken together, a providential deliverance. Read from the other side, it is the moment the empire's grip on the Aegean was prised loose, an important loss on one maritime edge of a realm that still stretched from the Aegean it was losing to the Indus, and no more than that. Seen whole, the beaching of the fleet was a deliberate refusal of a second Salamis, the Ionian contingents' defection the predictable cost of committing suspect subjects, and the court's response the standard Near Eastern management of a setback.