Salamis & Plataea

A History of Mankind (106)

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After the victory against the Three Hundred at the Thermopylae, the road to Attica was open for the Persians, and the imperial army marched all the way to Athens, raping[1] and murdering along the way.

Since the largest Greek city had been abandoned by almost all men of fighting age, the Persians stormed the Acropolis, protected only by a small garrison that was slaughtered. Thebes, possibly Greece’s second-largest city at the time, opened its gates to the enemy. Like Thespiae and Plataea, the only Boetian cities to resist the Persians, Athens was sacked and burned down; as they would do again in 1941 AD, some Athenian defenders committed suicide by jumping from cliffs.

Xerxes I was, in a way, victorious. But he wasn’t all that elated. He had destroyed the main Greek city, and managed to get the submission of many others, and yet his massive army was suffering desertion and hunger. Greece, never a breadbasket, didn’t have the resources to maintain hundreds of thousands of extra mouths. A policy of mass requisition to obtain food from poleis that had accepted the Persian yoke might lead to uprisings in difficult mountainous terrain.