Topic: warfare (27)

• SourceAeschylus, Persae (The Persians)

  The Persae of Aeschylus, "The Persians", produced at Athens in 472 BCE, is the earliest surviving account of any Achaemenid event by a contemporary, and the only Greek tragedy on a historical rather than mythological subject to survive complete. It was staged eight years after the sea-battle at…

• PersonArtaxerxes I

  Artaxerxes I (Old Persian Artaxšaça, "whose rule is through Truth"), the fifth Achaemenid King of Kings, reigned from 465 until late 424 or early 423 BCE. A younger son of Xerxes I and Amestris, he came to the throne through the murder of his father and the killing of his elder brother, and held…

• PersonArtaxerxes II

  Artaxerxes II (Old Persian Artaxšaça, "whose rule is through Arta"; throne-name of a prince born Arsaces), the seventh Achaemenid King of Kings, reigned from 405/4 to 359/8 BCE. His forty-six years on the throne are the longest of the dynasty, and the Greeks who wrote of him called him Mnemon,…

• PersonArtaxerxes III

  Artaxerxes III (the throne name of Ochus; Babylonian Umakuš or Umasu, Greek Ôchos) was the Achaemenid King of Kings from 359/8 to 338 BCE. The son and successor of Artaxerxes II, he came to the throne late in a century the Greek sources present as one of dynastic murder, over-mighty satraps and…

• PersonCyrus the Younger

  Cyrus the Younger (Old Persian Kūruš; died 401 BCE) was a son of Darius II and Parysatis and a younger brother of Artaxerxes II. His epithet distinguishes him from Cyrus the Great, the sixth-century founder whose name he shared. In the last years of Darius II, the younger prince governed Lydia,…

• PersonDarius II

  Darius II (Old Persian Dārayavauš), born Ochus and remembered by the Greeks as Nothus, "the bastard", was King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire from 424 to 405/4 BCE. A younger son of Artaxerxes I by a Babylonian concubine, he reached the throne through the most tangled succession the dynasty had…

• PersonDarius III

  Darius III (Old Persian throne name Dārayavahuš; personal name Artašata, the form recorded in the Babylonian diaries; called Codomannus by the Roman epitomator Justin) was the last King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire, reigning from 336 to 330 BCE. He came to the throne from a collateral branch…

• SourceHerodotus, The Histories

  Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 484 to after 430 BCE) wrote the Histories, the earliest surviving work of history in the Western tradition and the fullest classical account of the Persian empire. Its announced subject is the great collision of Greeks and barbarians that culminated in Xerxes'…

• PersonMardonius

  Mardonius (Old Persian Marduniya, d. 479 BCE) was a Persian noble of the first rank: son of Gobryas, one of the Seven who put Darius I on the throne, and himself married to a daughter of Darius. He commanded the expedition of 492 that re-secured Thrace and Macedonia for the empire (his fleet…

• PlaceSardis

  Sardis, the old royal capital of Lydia at the foot of Mount Tmolus on the river Pactolus, became after its capture by Cyrus in 547 or 546 BCE the chief seat of Persian power in the west, and held that place for two centuries until it surrendered to Alexander in 334. Under the Mermnad kings it had…

• EventThe Battle of Cunaxa (401 BCE)

  The Battle of Cunaxa (401 BCE) was the decisive clash between the royal army of Artaxerxes II and the coalition raised by his younger brother, Cyrus the Younger, somewhere north of Babylon. It was a civil war fought by two mixed royal armies, not a simple contest between Greeks and Persians.…

• EventThe Battle of Marathon (490 BCE)

  The seaborne expedition of 490 BCE, led by the Median commander Datis and Artaphernes the younger, which sacked Naxos and Eretria and then landed on the plain of Marathon in Attica, where it was defeated by the Athenians and withdrew. In Greek, and above all Athenian, memory it became the founding…

• EventThe Battle of Mycale (479 BCE)

  The defeat, in the late summer of 479 BCE, of a beached Persian fleet and its covering army on the Ionian shore below Mount Mycale, opposite the island of Samos. Coming in the same season as the land defeat of Mardonius at Plataea, it ended Xerxes' invasion of Greece and, more consequentially for…

• EventThe Battle of Plataea (479 BCE)

  The land battle fought in the summer of 479 BCE on the plain of the Asopos river in Boeotia, near the ruined town of Plataea, in which the picked Persian army left in Greece under Xerxes' general Mardonius was beaten by a coalition of Greek states under the Spartan regent Pausanias, and Mardonius…

• EventThe Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE)

  The forcing of the coastal pass of Thermopylae by Xerxes I in high summer 480 BCE, during his invasion of Greece. A small allied Greek army under the Spartan king Leonidas held the defile for some days against the King's advance, was outflanked by a Persian column sent over the Anopaea mountain…

• EventThe Conquest of Egypt by Cambyses

  The conquest of Egypt by Cambyses II, conventionally dated to 525 BCE, brought the Nile valley under Achaemenid rule. Cambyses II, the son and successor of Cyrus II, crossed the northern Sinai with Arabian assistance, defeated the forces of Psammetichus III near the Pelusiac mouth of the Nile, and…

• EventThe Egyptian Revolts and Reconquest (405/4–343/2 BCE)

  The Egyptian revolts and reconquest were the staggered secession of Egypt from Achaemenid rule between 405/4 and 400/399 BCE, roughly six decades of native dynastic independence, and the campaigns that restored Persian control of the Delta and Memphis in 343/2. Its exact seasonal course across the…

• ConceptThe Immortals

  The Immortals were the 10,000-strong standing corps of elite Persian foot that guarded the King of Kings and formed the professional heart of the field army, famous under the Greek name Herodotus gave them, 'the Immortals' (athanatoi): Herodotus says the corps was held always at ten thousand, a…

• EventThe Ionian Revolt (499–494 BCE)

  The revolt of the Greek cities of the empire's north-western coast (Ionia, the Hellespont, Caria and Cyprus) against Darius I, from the failed attack on Naxos and the burning of Sardis in 499/8 to the sea-battle of Lade and the fall of Miletus in 494. From Susa and Sardis it was a provincial…

• EventThe Retreat of the Ten Thousand (401–399 BCE)

  The Retreat of the Ten Thousand was the withdrawal and subsequent dispersal, from 401 to 399 BCE, of the Greek force that had marched with Cyrus the Younger after he was killed at Cunaxa. The soldiers first joined Cyrus's Asian troops under Ariaeus and negotiated with Artaxerxes II through…

• PeopleThe Saka (Scythians)

  The Saka (Old Persian Sakā), the horse-riding nomad peoples of the Eurasian steppe, were the empire's whole northern and eastern horizon: fought at the frontier, enrolled in the royal armies, carved on the monuments, and never wholly ruled. The name itself is the first problem. "Saka" was the…

• PlaceThe Xerxes Canal

  The Xerxes Canal was a navigable channel cut through the neck of the Athos peninsula in northern Greece on the orders of Xerxes I, during the regional preparations made over roughly the three years before his invasion of Greece in 480 BCE (see the invasion of Greece). Herodotus describes conscript…

• PersonTissaphernes

  Tissaphernes was a Persian royal commander whose long western career crossed the reigns of King Darius II and King Artaxerxes II. He first emerges among the officers sent against the rebel Pissuthnes, then took over authority centred on Sardis and helped defeat Pissuthnes’s son Amorges. In 413/12…

• Survey essayWarfare & the Army

  The Achaemenid army was the fighting force of the first Persian empire, under Darius I and his successors: the seasonal levy of the subject nations set beside the standing royal guard the Greeks called the Immortals; the shield-and-bow files, the bow as the national weapon, the cavalry and the…

• SourceXenophon

  Xenophon of Athens (c. 430–353 BCE) is the one classical writer on the Achaemenid empire who had actually been inside it, marching to Babylonia in 401 BCE with the rebel prince Cyrus the Younger and leading the stranded Greek survivors home. His Anabasis is the best first-hand look at the empire's…

• PersonXerxes I

  Xerxes I (Old Persian Xšayāršā, "ruling over heroes"), the fourth Achaemenid King of Kings, reigned from 486 to 465 BCE. Son of Darius I and of Atossa the daughter of Cyrus the Great, he was the heir in whom the two royal lines met, and he inherited a state his father had already made the largest…

• EventXerxes' Invasion of Greece (480–479 BCE)

  The great expedition that Xerxes I led against the Greek mainland in 480–479 BCE, the largest single enterprise the Achaemenid Empire ever mounted and the campaign to which the component battles (Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, Mycale) belong. The campaign is best taken as a whole: its…