Robert Graves, probably best known as the author of I, Claudius, once wrote a jokey little poem about the Persian Wars that began:
Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
The poem played with the fact that the Persian Wars, which loom so large in Greek (and therefore Western) history, go completely unmentioned in Persian sources.
Historians have speculated about why these wars are so important in Greek sources while being entirely ignored in Persian ones.
Graves’ poem assumes that the issue is one of pride. In his account, the Greeks — who won the wars, after all — exaggerate the size of the Persian armies and the importance of the wars. Meanwhile, he writes, in the “Persian version,” the invasions were “a mere reconnaissance in force.” Maybe the war doesn’t show up in the Persian sources because kings like Darius and Xerxes wanted to downplay or even erase their failures in Greece.
It’s also possible that the Persian Wars simply weren’t that big a deal to the Persians. After all, their empire was immense — far larger than any political entity in the history of the world up to that point. Perhaps battles like Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis were just not that important to them. While these may have been key moments in Greek history and identity, Persians may have genuinely seen them as insignificant border skirmishes.
There may be a more prosaic answer to this question, as well. We just don’t have as many sources from ancient Persia as we do from Greece, and those that we do have don’t narrate historical events in the same way that Greek sources do. There wasn’t a tradition of historical writing in Persia like there was in Greece.
Whatever the reason, we have to rely on Greek sources like Herodotus to understand what happened in the Persian Wars. Herodotus, to his credit, spends quite a bit of time discussing Persian history and culture as an antecedent to the wars. He seems to admire some things about their culture, such as the fact that they are scrupulously honest. He finds some things about Persian culture odd, like their religion:
They have no images of the gods, no temples nor altars, and consider the use of them a sign of folly. This comes, I think, from their not believing the gods to have the same nature with men, as the Greeks imagine. Their wont, however, is to ascend the summits of the loftiest mountains, and there to offer sacrifice to Zeus, which is the name they give to the whole circuit of the firmament. They likewise offer to the sun and moon, to the earth, to fire, to water, and to the winds. These are the only gods whose worship has come down to them from ancient times.
Though Herodotus is mostly respectful of and curious about Persian culture, later Greeks were not so kind. They believed that the Persian culture must have been inherently inferior to Greek society. Their men were weak, effeminate, and servile. Aristotle sums up the consensus when he writes, “The Asiatic races have both brains and skill but are lacking in courage and willpower; so they have remained enslaved and subject.” This image of the Persians is meant, of course, as a contrast to the free, brave, and manly Greeks.
Greeks used the Persian Wars — and therefore the Persians — as a way to define themselves. Many Greeks believed that the victories over Persia were their culture’s greatest accomplishment and that they won because of the superiority of their culture.
Interestingly, Greeks didn’t portray the Persian Wars all that much in their art. Instead of depicting historical events, they made mythological allegories. Often, the stand-ins for the Persian soldiers were Amazons, fierce female warriors who came from a mysterious land to the east. Amazons fit with one of the Greeks’ most frequent criticisms of Persian men — that they were unmanly.
Here’s a vase from 420 BCE on which Theseus fights the Amazons, who are wearing patterned clothing — including pants, which the Greeks found bizarre — similar to what Persians might have worn.
Here’s another from 450 BCE, with an Amazon mounted (the Persians were well-known for their cavalry) and wearing distinctive patterned pants:
The western side of the Parthenon — the great temple to their patron goddess that the Athenians built after the Persian Wars — also featured a battle between Greeks and Amazons, although they’re too damaged to transmit much detail these days:
Occasionally, however, the Greeks did portray events from the actual Persian Wars.
On this drinking cup, created about twenty years after the war, we see a Greek hoplite defeating a Persian warrior. The Greek is more heavily armed, with a large, round shield. He’s bare-legged, in simpler-seeming clothes (the Greeks tended to view themselves as living a more hardy, wholesome life than the decadent Persians). The Persian, on the other hand, wears heavily patterned garb, including pants, as he falls under the hoplite’s sword.
Another vase, made around the same time, showed a Greek soldier pursuing a Persian, with the Greek on one side of the vase:
And the Persian, armed more lightly, with a bow instead of a spear and in tight-fitting striped clothing, on the other:
Some Greek art was more disdainful toward the Persians. The Eurymedon Vase, also dating to about 460 BCE, depicts a sexualized chase scene. It shows a Persian man, again, in patterned clothing, bent slightly forward.
On the other side of the vase, we see a Greek, penis in hand, chasing the Persian:
The text on the vase reads, “I am Eurymedon; I stand bent forward.” Though interpretations of the vase differ, one of the most common is that the vase is meant to show a sexually dominant Greek and a passive Persian, fitting with some of the stereotypes about the Persians’ manliness that emerged after the wars.
Though we have no textual sources from the Persian side about the war, we do have a few Persian artistic depictions of warfare against the Greeks. Unsurprisingly, the Persian images show the Persians experiencing a little more success in combat than the Greek ones do.
This cylinder seal shows a Persian soldier (not wearing pants, by the way) stabbing a Greek soldier under the watchful eye of the winged disk of the sun, representing the Persian god Ahuramazda. The Greek soldier should have used his shield!
Many of the Persian works of art show combat not between Persian soldiers and Greek hoplites, but between Persian royals and Greek soldiers, as on this cylinder seal:
This little scarab-like carving shows a similar scene, with a Greek soldier (naked except for his helmet and shield) falling underneath an attack by a Persian monarch:
The Getty Museum helpfully created an impression where it’s a bit easier to tell what’s happening:
I doubt Persians really thought that their kings engaged in hand-to-hand combat on the battlefields of Greece, but the king here likely stands in for the nation. I find it telling that where the Greeks would choose to represent themselves with anonymous soldiers — the Greek people — the Persians represented their nation with the monarch himself.
Okay, now for my favorite part. The Persian Wars weren’t just a conflict, they were an exchange. As they clashed, the two sides swapped cultural ideas. One of the best examples of this is in their wine vessels.
You see, Persians often used vessels called rhytons to hold and serve wine. The fancy ones looked like this:
Noblemen or even the king himself would distribute wine from these vessels to their subjects, often through a little hole at the bottom of the rhyton.
When the Athenians defeated the Persians, they came into possession of a bunch of these. They thought that they were really nice, but a bit too fancy for the more egalitarian Greeks. So they adapted the style, making ceramic animal-headed cups that often had a touch of humor to them.
Right after the Persian Wars, we get cups like this donkey-headed one (the donkey was associated with Dionysus, god of wine):
Or this one, which had a donkey on one side and a ram on the other:
I really like this ram’s-head:
By drinking out of these cups, the Greeks would sort of put on a mask — the animal’s face would cover their own. It was a very Greek thing to do — a playful, democratic adaptation of a hierarchical Persian custom.
The Persian Wars loom large in historical memory, but we don’t actually have many images of them. We don’t know as much as would like to about what the Greeks and Persians thought of each other, or what they took from one another when they clashed.
But there are little clues here and there, which tell us what the wars meant to each side in the years after the clash. While the Persian Wars may not have been all that important to the Persians themselves, the Greeks used their images of the Persians — whether or not they were accurate — to define what was special about their own culture.