Current Events > How was Sparta able to beat achaemenid empire during the Greco-Persian Wars?

(+) Yeah! (+)

When pretty much that was the biggest empire the world had ever seen?

Still baffles me to this day.

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Sparta sent trained soldiers to fight against slaved troops forced to fight. And most the battles took place in narrow passages giving the Spartans and their style the advantage.

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Do not forget Salamis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Salamis?wprov=sfla1

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They had anime powers

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IIRC:
Sparta is only a fraction of the force fighting the Persians.
the naval fleet of Greece play more vital role in the wars.
Sparta lost, but the Greece alliance wins.

in short, 300 was romanticized bullshit.


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Smackems posted...

They had anime powers

Lets see Peter Chung/Reign the Conqueror style Persian War -- better yet Peloponessian War anime. Hell. Makes me want to see the Trojan War in that style.

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Ricemills posted...

IIRC:
Sparta is only a fraction of the force fighting the Persians.
the naval fleet of Greece play more vital role in the wars.
Sparta lost, but the Greece alliance wins.

in short, 300 was romanticized bullshit.

Pretty much.

Marathon is a better example if we are looking for decisive land battles.

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Salamis routed the Persian navy and prevented another invasion. Plataea and Mycale sent the Persians onto the defensive and they never recovered.
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If you're referring to the movie 300, then stop thinking about it.

A group of 300 soldiers no matter how badass and elite no matter what sort of terrain advantage will ever defeat an army numbering millions.

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DD Divine posted...

Sparta sent trained soldiers to fight against slaved troops forced to fight

Sparta's armies were almost always supplemented by a lot of slave soldiers and other non-citizens, which is not surprising considering Sparta's population was somewhere from 70-85% slave and only around 7% of its people were ever citizens

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Great responses

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DD Divine posted...

Sparta sent trained soldiers to fight against slaved troops forced to fight. And most the battles took place in narrow passages giving the Spartans and their style the advantage.

The Persians probably weren't fielding much of "slaved" troops. Their army would have been a diverse collection of troops pulled from every corner of their vast empire at the behest of satraps and client rulers looking to get in on the glory of the empire's latest conquest. The core, of course, were the Persians themselves, including their elite infantry, the so-called Immortals.
This would have made their army unwieldy(lots of sub-commanders, all giving orders in different languages, who had varying levels of understanding of classical Persian) and uneven in quality. My (limited) understanding is that they generally weren't heavily-armed or armored and that their infantry generally fought in looser formations emphasizing mobility and flexibility. Thus they had great difficult against quality hoplites, who were generally heavily-armored(for the time) with metal shields and fought in a tight formation(though not as tight as a phalanx).

Salamis, I believe Themistocles tricked the Persians into believing a good portion of the Greek fleet would flee, and it appeared to, but it in fact rowed around Salamis and hit the Persian fleet in the rear as it engaged the rest of the Greek fleet in a narrow channel, which created panic in the Persian fleet(the backbone of which were Phoenician and Ionian Greek sailors) and led to a large portion of it becoming trapped and being destroyed. By then, it was already late in the campaign season, so not long after a lot of the army(along with Xerxes) went home, leaving a smaller force behind to winter in the portions of Greece which had submitted or been conquered. That was defeated the next year at Plataea, after which the Persians decided the whole affair wasn't worth pursuing further.

Spartans get way to over hyped

ElatedVenusaur posted...

The Persians probably weren't fielding much of "slaved" troops. Their army would have been a diverse collection of troops pulled from every corner of their vast empire at the behest of satraps and client rulers looking to get in on the glory of the empire's latest conquest. The core, of course, were the Persians themselves, including their elite infantry, the so-called Immortals.
This would have made their army unwieldy(lots of sub-commanders, all giving orders in different languages, who had varying levels of understanding of classical Persian) and uneven in quality. My (limited) understanding is that they generally weren't heavily-armed or armored and that their infantry generally fought in looser formations emphasizing mobility and flexibility. Thus they had great difficult against quality hoplites, who were generally heavily-armored(for the time) with metal shields and fought in a tight formation(though not as tight as a phalanx).

Salamis, I believe Themistocles tricked the Persians into believing a good portion of the Greek fleet would flee, and it appeared to, but it in fact rowed around Salamis and hit the Persian fleet in the rear as it engaged the rest of the Greek fleet in a narrow channel, which created panic in the Persian fleet(the backbone of which were Phoenician and Ionian Greek sailors) and led to a large portion of it becoming trapped and being destroyed. By then, it was already late in the campaign season, so not long after a lot of the army(along with Xerxes) went home, leaving a smaller force behind to winter in the portions of Greece which had submitted or been conquered. That was defeated the next year at Plataea, after which the Persians decided the whole affair wasn't worth pursuing further.

From my understanding Persian infantry fought by putting a barricade of shields in front of them while units armed with bows would fire from behind. Persian infantry did stand their ground, and according to Herodotos the Persians held the upper hand at Mycale as long as their barricade stayed up. But in a prolong melee the Persians could have been left without shields if the opposing infantry broke through their shield wall. At Plataea when the Immortals faced off against the Peloponnesians, including Spartans, they would've been very outnumbered since Herodotos heavily implies that each spartiate had with him seven helots and he implies that these helots fought in the same battleline as the spartiates.

Persian infantry was just one arm of the combined arms employed by the Persians. The infantry held their ground and pinned the enemy down while the Persian cavalry finished them off. This is how the Persians conquered the Ionian Greeks and crushed the Asiatic Greeks once again during the Ionian revolt. It's one of the big reasons Marathon was considered a big victory, it was the first time the Greeks had triumph over the Persians in a land battle and even at Marathon the Persian center still broke thought the Greek center. One of the big reasons the Greeks generally did not fight the Persians in pitched battle at the open plains, the Greeks were smart enough to realize the Persians would have crushed them there and they instead fought the Persians by guarding passes, using uneven terrain or using ambushes and trickery against the Persians. Xenophon records that his friend and king of Sparta Agesilaus II refused to fight the Persians in the open plains without proper cavalry support and instead turned to "skulking warfare" during his incursion at Asia Minor.

As for armor I don't really know being honest. Most hoplites wouldn't have been decked out in the full "men of bronze" get up since that was reserved for the rich that could afford it and being ad-hoc forces each man supplied himself with his armament. By the peloponnesian war most hoplites are depicted as simply wearing their tunics, a conical shaped helmet called the pilos and their aspis shield. Apparently the Greek mercenaries of Cyrus the Younger only wore their tunic, shield, pilos helmet and greaves but no body armor.

Since I'm typing this from mobile I can't look it up exactly but I believe Herodotos hints that the Persians had a better system of organization than the Greeks at the time. IIRC most Greek city-states, aside from Sparta, never had anything below the rank of Lochagos when it came to organization. These were ad-hoc forces with very minimal organization and training, if any, who favored aggression over organization. By the time Xenophon is writing about the battle of Cunaxa the Persians had learned to march in step in a calm and silent manner while the Greek forces had trouble organizing themselves and not causing a holler.

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DD Divine posted...

Sparta sent trained soldiers to fight against slaved troops forced to fight. And most the battles took place in narrow passages giving the Spartans and their style the advantage.

This

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Piplup_Sniper posted...

DD Divine posted...

Sparta sent trained soldiers to fight against slaved troops forced to fight. And most the battles took place in narrow passages giving the Spartans and their style the advantage.

This

Except that none of it is true
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UnholyMudcrab posted...

Except that none of it is true

Prove it

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I don't know if it matters, but I'm sure after the Peloponnesian war was over I'm sure Sparta became much more experience in naval combat. And an actual fleet. Not sure how there alliance with Italy stood after all that.

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Here's a couple good videos on the subject.

https://youtu.be/ZlwIKh2Qk14

https://youtu.be/FSh80uVYb8k

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Ricemills posted...

in short, 300 was romanticized bullshit.

Ilishe posted...

If you're referring to the movie 300, then stop thinking about it.

A group of 300 soldiers no matter how badass and elite no matter what sort of terrain advantage will ever defeat an army numbering millions.

Was there some sort of extended cut of the movie? Because in the version I saw they lost, badly. Everyone died. The whole point was buying enough time for the rest of Greece to get off their asses and take the threat seriously.

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Pogo_Marimo posted...

Here's a couple good videos on the subject.

https://youtu.be/ZlwIKh2Qk14

https://youtu.be/FSh80uVYb8k

Are these pop history or legitimate historians

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DD Divine posted...

Sparta sent trained soldiers to fight against slaved troops forced to fight. And most the battles took place in narrow passages giving the Spartans and their style the advantage.

Persians didn't have slaves.

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Piplup_Sniper posted...

Prove it

Well you might want to read some Thucydides and about the Pelopponesian War. Sparta and its allies fought more than slaves and ended the Athenian Hegemony.

Read up on Spartan general Lysander. Forgot Brasidas too somehow.

I mean yeah they fought slaves. But they also fought traditional Greek warfare.

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slaves is just the wrong term--the right term, levies, does describe the difference between an army of drafted soldiers and an army of professional soldiers

salamis was probably the most significant victory, but plataea is not far behind

plataea was driven by a strategic retreat without engagement into rough terrain that was misinterpreted by the persians as a general retreat, and they issued an infantry charge

the persian infantry--even their elite professional soldiers--was totally outmached by greek hoplite equipment. the greeks did not rout, and the persian levies broke when their commander was killed

that led to a sort of dunkirk type situation, except with the opposing army attacking the evacuating soldiers

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I presume slaves is being used to refer to the Helots and not general levies. My bad if I got the context wrong.

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There's something funny about that post and at the same time it's also pretty sad. The Persians weren't using slaves warriors in their armies. The Persians generally levied their conquered people into a "show off" army as a means for the Great King to show his prestige. Herodotos tells us that during Darius' Scythian campaign he erected a monument listing all the conquered people in his army. The Persian King would proceed to do something that could be called a success and than leave with most of the army and leave the real army behind to finish the rest of the operation like Darius did with Megabazus or Xerxes did with Mardonius. A point made by the late George Cawkwell in The Greek Wars: The Failures of Persia is that Salamis wasn'tas important as Herodotos paints it out to be because by his account the Persian fleet at Salamis wasn't decisively beaten, the Greeks fully expected the Persians to fight them again even when giving chase, and Xerxes leaving with most of the army after destroying Athens and slaying a king of Sparta fits with Persian practice.

But most important is that the Spartans did in fact use their slaves as warriors at this time. Herodotos claims that each spartiate had with him seven helots and he claims that both spartiates and their helots dead were mixed in at both Thermopylae and Plataea. While he doesn't outright say it Herodotos implies that the helots were fighting in the same battle line as the Spartans. Basically think of it as a group of heavy infantry mixed with light infantry unlike of a homogeneous group of heavy infantry. And worse of it all these men were forced to die a pointless death with their Spartan masters at Thermopylae.


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