Notes for the First Persian invasion of Greece video

 

6.101: I'm not showing the three landing places of Eretria (Temenos, Chioreai, Aigilea) because historians can't seem to agree about what they are. Most translations replace Temenos with Tamynai, a place deep inland and out of place for an invasion of Eretria city, and Aigilea with the Aigleia of 6.107, but that's an island of Styra, not Eretria. I would assume that all 3 landing places are on the coastal plain of Eretria city.

For the issues with the modern day Marathon and Spartathlon routes see my previous post.

The role played by Aristeides in the battle of Marathon is from Plutarch's Life of Aristeides. Arimnestos is named as the Plataiai leader by Paus. 9.4.2. Herodotos only names Miltiades and Stesileos of the ten generals. Plutarch also calls Cynegeirus and Polyzelus generals, but the wording in Hdt 6.114 contradicts this, and it would be really strange if the Athenians lost 4 of their 11 leaders when they only had 192 casualties (with the 2 confirmed losses they are already 10x over-represented). Themistokles is placed at the battle by Plutarch (and Justin) but he isn't explicitly called a general yet. So I display the names of only 3 of the 10 generals and leave the rest unnamed.

There are countless competing theories about the detailed reconstruction of the Battle of Marathon, and what I show is just one possible interpretation. I tried to stay close to the text of Herodotus, and simplified the battle as much as possible. I have the Persians initiating the battle, and I show the armies forming a 1.5 kilometer long line with its center at the Soros tumulus and perpendicular to the coast. I ignored the location of the so called "Tumulus of the Plataeans" as it's not convincing that it had anything to do with the battle, and I also ignored the often cited "11 casualities from Pataiaia" because of this. I placed the town of Marathon at Plasi, and the Herakleion where its related inscriptions were found. I don't show the Brexiza marsh because historians can't seem to agree about whether it existed or not at this time. I assume the trophy marked the place of the final defeat of the Persians, which has to mean that after the rout near the tumulus the battle moved from the west end of the plain to the edge of the marsh. I also don't try to determine the size of the infantry that actually engaged the Athenians (most of the hundreds of thousands of Persians were oarsmen and support staff) since that's another hopeless debate. 

The Persians drowning in the marsh is from Pausanias 1.32.7

6.118: That the Persians stole a statue from Delion of Thebes shows that they raided places outside the main invasion route, even states that weren't targeted by the campaign.

6.119: The location I show for Arderikka is just a guess, Herodotus only provides the distance from Susa, not the direction. The Ki-rab region usually identified with Arderikka is north-north-east of Susa, but it's too far to fit with Herodotus's numbers: I show it in the same direction but with the distances from Herodotus.

Kyklades

Hdt 6.99 doesn't specify which islands were conquered by the Persians between Delos and Karystos, but it's obvious from looking at the map that Tenos and Andros must have been among them. Mykonos shows up later in 6.118 when the Persians are retreating, and we learn that Paros joined the Persians in 6.133. Aeschylus's Persians also lists the islands of Darius the Great, and the ones belonging to this region are Naxos, Paros, Mykonos, Tenos, and Andros, which fits prefectly with Herodotus, only the two tiny islands (Delos and Rhenaia) are missing. So my reconstruction of the 6.99 invasion route is Delos/Rhenaia-Mykonos-Tenos-Andros-Karystos.

Were there any other islands in the Kyklades conquered by the Persians? Hdt 8.46 states that Melos, Siphnos, and Seriphos never joined the Persians, so they clearly didn't conquer the entire island group. Keos shows up on the Athenian side early in 480, and Herodotus doesn't mention them switching sides (compared to Naxos, Tenos, or Lemnos where he makes a big deal out of it), so if the island chain west of the known invasion route stayed independent, then the only plausible candidates left are Gyaros and Syros. The first one is too insignificant to be mentioned, and as for Syros, modern sources like to claim that it was captured, but I couldn't find any evidence for this at all, although it's hard to look up references to Syros because the ethnic name is "Syrian", so I might have missed it. So I only show the islands mentioned in the previous paragraph as becoming part of the Persian empire.

The Kyklades also appear in 5.31 where Herodotus states that Naxos controlled some of the neigboring islands in 500 BC, but he only names Paros and Andros. Modern historians usually dismiss this claim, and the Athenian tribute lists show that Paros was multiple times wealthier than Naxos in the 450s and later decades. But I'm going with a literal interpretation of Herodotus, and in 5.28 he calls Naxos the wealthiest island of all in 500 BC, so I assume it never completely recovered from the destruction it suffered in 490 BC. Naxos is also named as the dominant sea power (thalassocracy) by Eusebius from 515 to 505 BC. Accepting Andros and Paros as dependencies of Naxos requires adding the smaller and less wealthy (based on tribute payments) islands between them, namely Tenos, Mykonos, Delos, and Rhenaia. These must have been the islands that the Persians planned to capture in 499 BC (5.31), but this list is exactly the same as the islands that were actually captured nine years later in 490. So I'm showing Naxos's islands in the same color to mark that they were some kind of political unit, then they all become Persian in 490. Here again, it's possible that some of the other neigboring islands belonged to Naxos too, but it's impossible to find out from the ancient sources.

Rhodos

The siege of Lindos is from the Lindos Chronicle, which names Datis as the attacking general, and places it at the time "when Darius sent out great forces for the enslavement of Greece", which has to mean the 490 BC campaign. In this story the Persians fail to capture Lindos, and Datis even makes a treaty of friendship with them. In spite of this, modern historians and maps usually include Rhodos as part of the Persian empire. The island is completely missing from Herodotus's narrative of the Greek-Persian wars, but Diodoros 11.3.8 has the Rhodians sending ships to Xerxes's campaign in 480, and Aeschylus's Persians lists it among the islands of Darius the Great. But Darius died before he could launch another campaign against Greece (486 BC), so if he couldn't take Lindos in 490, then it couldn't have been part of his empire. 

My solution to this paradox is to cut Rhodos in half, and show half of it joining the Persians, but the part belonging to Lindos as remaining independent. Rhodos at this time was divided into 3 independent city-states (Lindos, Kamiros, Ialysos), and it's safe to assume that the Persians wanted to conquer the entire island, not just Lindos, and that requires capturing all 3 cities separetly. But we never learn what happened to Kamiros and Ialysos - if they were captured by the Persians that could explain the Diodoros and Aeschylus references without contradicting the Lindos Chronicle.