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Land battle during the second Persian invasion of Greece (479 BC)
the battle of the Lamian War

The Battle of Plataea was the final land battle during the second Persian invasion of Greece. It took place in 479 BC near the city of Plataea in Boeotia, and was fought between an alliance of the Greek city states (including Sparta, Athens, Corinth and Megara), and the Persian Empire of Xerxes I (allied with Greece's Boeotians, Thessalians, and Macedonians). The previous year, the Persian invasion force, led by the Persian king in person, had scored victories at the battles of Thermopylae and Artemisium and conquered Thessaly, Phocis, Boeotia, Athens, Euboea and Attica. However, at the ensuing Battle of Salamis, the allied Greek navy had won an unlikely but decisive victory, preventing the conquest of the Peloponnesus. Xerxes then retreated with much of his army, leaving his general Mardonius to finish off the Greeks the following year. In the summer of 479 BC the Greeks assembled a huge army and marched out of the Peloponnesus. The Persians retreated to Boeotia and built a fortified camp near Plataea. The Greeks, however, refused to be drawn into the prime cavalry terrain around the Persian camp, resulting in a stalemate that lasted 11 days. While attempting a retreat after their supply lines were disrupted, the Greek battle line fragmented. Thinking the Greeks were in full retreat, Mardonius ordered his forces to pursue them, but the Greeks (particularly the Spartans, Tegeans and Athenians) halted and gave battle, routing the lightly armed Persian infantry and killing Mardonius. A large portion of the Persian army was trapped in its camp and slaughtered. The destruction of this army, and the remnants of the Persian navy allegedly on the same day at the Battle of Mycale, decisively ended the invasion. After Plataea and Mycale the Greek allies would take the offensive against the Persians, marking a new phase of the Greco Persian Wars. Although Plataea was in every sense a resounding victory, it does not seem to have been attributed the same significance (even at the time) as, for example, the Athenian victory at the Battle of Marathon or the allied Greek defeat at Thermopylae.

According to modern estimates based on the order of battle described by Herodotus, the detailed composition of the Achaemenid army consisted in about 40,000 Persian troops on the left of the battle line, facing the Spartans, about 20,000 Bactrians, Indians and Sakae in the centre, facing various Greek states, and about 20,000 Greek allies of the Persians (Macedonians, Thessalians, Beotians, Thebeans), positioned on the right wing facing the Athenians. The cavalry, which also consisted of Persians, Bactrians, Indians and Sakae, would total about 5,000.

In some ways the run up to Plataea resembled that at the Battle of Marathon; there was a prolonged stalemate in which neither side risked attacking the other. However, Lazenby believed that Mardonius' actions during the Plataea campaign were not consistent with an aggressive policy. He interprets the Persian operations during the prelude not as attempts to force the Allies into battle but as attempts to force the Allies into retreat (which indeed became the case). Mardonius may have felt he had little to gain in battle and that he could simply wait for the Greek alliance to fall apart (as it had nearly done over the winter). Since he did not expect the Greeks to fight, the tactical problems were no longer an issue and he tried to take advantage of the altered strategic situation he thought he had produced.

Once the Persians discovered that the Greeks had abandoned their positions and appeared to be in retreat, Mardonius decided to set off in immediate pursuit with the elite Persian infantry. As he did so, the rest of the Persian army, unbidden, began to move forward. Pausanias sent a messenger to the Athenians, asking them to join up with the Spartans. However, the Athenians had been engaged by the Theban phalanx and were unable to assist Pausanias. At this point, as Greek soldiers began to fall under the barrage of arrows, the Tegeans started to run at the Persian lines. The numerically superior Persian infantry were of the heavy (by Persian standards) sparabara formation, but this was still much lighter than the Greek phalanx. According to Plutarch, Arimnestus killed him by a blow to the head with a stone, a form of death which had been foretold to Mardonius by an oracle; some modern historians have called it unlikely that a Spartan would use such a weapon. With Mardonius dead, the Persians began to flee; although his bodyguard remained, they were annihilated. However, Artabazus (who had earlier commanded the Sieges of Olynthus and Potidea), had disagreed with Mardonius about attacking the Greeks, As the rout commenced, he led these men (40,000, according to Herodotus) away from the battlefield, on the road to Thessaly, hoping to escape eventually to the Hellespont. British Museum.]] On the opposite side of the battlefield the Athenians had triumphed in a tough battle against the Thebans. The other Greeks fighting for the Persians had deliberately fought badly, according to Herodotus. The Greeks, reinforced by the contingents who had not taken part in the main battle, then stormed the Persian camp. Although the Persians initially defended the wall vigorously, it was eventually breached; the Persians, packed tightly together in the camp, were slaughtered by the Greeks. Of the Persians who had retreated to the camp, scarcely 3,000 were left alive. while both Ephorus and Diodorus Siculus tally the Greek casualties to over 10,000.

Herodotus recounts several anecdotes about the conduct of specific Spartans during the battle. Amompharetus: The leader of a battalion of Spartans, he refused to undertake the night time retreat towards Plataea before the battle, since doing so would be shameful for a Spartan. Herodotus has an angry debate continuing between Pausanias and Amompharetus until dawn, whereupon the rest of the Spartan army finally began to retreat, leaving Amompharetus' division behind. Not expecting this, Amompharetus eventually led his men after the retreating Spartans. However, another tradition remembers Amompharetus as winning great renown at Plataea, and it has thus been suggested that Amompharetus, far from being insubordinate, had instead volunteered to guard the rear. Preferring to return to Sparta, Aristodemus was branded a coward and suffered a year of reproach before Plataea. Although the Spartans agreed that he had redeemed himself, they awarded him no special honour, because he failed to fight in the disciplined manner expected of a Spartan. Herodotus also recounts that King Alexander I of Macedon (an ancestor of Alexander the Great), who was allied to the Persians and present in their camp, secretly rode to the Greek camp with a warning that the Persians had decided to attack, and that before the main battle Mardonius issued a challenge to the Spartans to fight a special battle between equal numbers of Spartans and Persians, which was declined. Some historians have called these stories improbable.

According to Herodotus, the Battle of Mycale occurred on the same afternoon as Plataea. A Greek fleet under the Spartan king Leotychides had sailed to Samos to challenge the remnants of the Persian fleet. The Persians, whose ships were in a poor state of repair, had decided not to risk fighting and instead drew their ships up on the beach at the feet of Mount Mycale in Ionia. An army of 60,000 men had been left there by Xerxes and the fleet joined with them, building a palisade around the camp to protect the ships. Seeing the small size of the Greek force, the Persians emerged from the camp but the Greek hoplites again proved superior and destroyed much of the Persian force. After the victory at Mycale, the Allied fleet sailed to the Hellespont to break down the pontoon bridges, but found that this had already been done. The Peloponnesians sailed home, but the Athenians remained to attack the Chersonesos, still held by the Persians. Herodotus ended his Histories after the Siege of Sestos. Over the next 30 years the Greeks, primarily the Athenian dominated Delian League, would expel (or help expel) the Persians from Macedon, Thrace, the Aegean islands and Ionia. The reason for this discrepancy is not entirely clear; it might, however, be a result of the circumstances in which the battle was fought. The fame of Thermopylae certainly lies in the doomed heroism of the Greeks in the face of overwhelming numbers; and Marathon and Salamis perhaps because they were both fought against the odds, and in dire strategic situations. Taking on this lesson, after the Greco Persian Wars the Persian empire started recruiting and relying on Greek mercenaries. One such mercenary expedition, the "Anabasis of the 10,000" as narrated by Xenophon, further proved to the Greeks that the Persians were militarily vulnerable even well within their own territory, and paved the way for the destruction of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great some decades later.

A bronze column in the shape of intertwined snakes (the Serpent column) was created from melted down Persian weapons, acquired in the plunder of the Persian camp, and was erected at Delphi. It commemorated all the Greek city states that had participated in the battle, listing them on the column, and thus confirming some of Herodotus' claims. Most of it still survives in the Hippodrome of Constantinople (present day Istanbul), where it was carried by Constantine the Great during the founding of his city on the Greek colony of Byzantium.

The main source for the Greco Persian Wars is the Greek historian Herodotus. Herodotus, who has been called the 'Father of History', was born in 484 BC in Halicarnassus, Asia Minor (then under Persian overlordship). He wrote his 'Enquiries' (Greek – Historia; English – (The Histories) around 440–430 BC, trying to trace the origins of the Greco Persian Wars, which would still have been relatively recent history (the wars finally ending in 450 BC). Nevertheless, Thucydides chose to begin his history where Herodotus left off (at the Siege of Sestos), and therefore evidently felt that Herodotus's history was accurate enough not to need re writing or correcting. A negative view of Herodotus was passed on to Renaissance Europe, though he remained well read. However, since the 19th century his reputation has been dramatically rehabilitated by archaeological finds which have repeatedly confirmed his version of events. The prevailing modern view is that Herodotus generally did a remarkable job in his Historia, but that some of his specific details (particularly troop numbers and dates) should be viewed with scepticism. The Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century BC in his Bibliotheca Historica, also provides an account of the Battle of Plataea. This account is fairly consistent with Herodotus's, but given that it was written much later, it may well have been derived from Herodotus's version. The Battle is also described in less detail by a number of other ancient historians including Plutarch, Ctesias of Cnidus, and is alluded by other authors, such as the playwright Aeschylus. Archaeological evidence, such as the Serpent Column, also supports some of Herodotus's specific claims.

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