Mycale

The rumour on the beach

As the Greeks went in to attack, a herald's staff was found on the shore and a rumour ran through the army that the Greeks had won in Boeotia. Herodotus takes it as a sign from the gods: both battles were fought the same day.

In the game: At Plataea a strip follows Mycale, fought the same afternoon.

Herodotus 9.100-101

The stockade

The Persians had beached their ships behind a wall of stones and stakes. They disarmed the Samians, whom they did not trust. In the battle the Ionians changed sides, the camp was taken and the ships burned.

Herodotus 9.96-106

The cables of the Hellespont

The Greeks sailed to break the bridges and found them already down. The Athenians besieged Sestos into the autumn, took it, and carried the cables home to dedicate in their temples.

Herodotus 9.114-121

The siege of Sestos

Artayctes, the King's governor, held Sestos with the Persians of the Chersonese. The Athenians under Xanthippus besieged it into the autumn, until the defenders were boiling the straps of their beds. Artayctes slipped out by night, was caught, and was put to death on the shore.

In the game: After the epilogue, Sestos is a field of its own: hold the town inside its walls.

Herodotus 9.114-120

Xerxes at home

Xerxes went on building at Persepolis: the Gate of All Lands, his palace, the Hall of a Hundred Columns begun. His inscriptions never mention the war in Greece. In 465 he was murdered in his palace; the accounts of the plot differ.

Persepolis inscriptions XPa, XPf; Diodorus 11.69; Ctesias

Who won what?

To the Greeks it was freedom saved. To the King it was a frontier war lost; the empire kept everything east of the Aegean but the Ionian coast. Within a century Persian gold was paying Greek cities to fight each other, and in 387 the King dictated the peace of Greece.

Xenophon, Hellenica 5.1.31; Briant (2002) chapters 13-16

The empire's long run

The empire Cyrus founded and Darius ordered held from the Aegean to the Indus for another century and a half, until Alexander took it between 334 and 330. Its roads, satrapies and ration tablets outlived the wars with Greece.

Arrian, Anabasis 3.18, 6.29