Greece Versus Persia

You know the legend: three hundred Spartans, a lone runner, a noble last stand. The true story is stranger, harder, and a good deal less noble.

Around 500 BCE, a rider could leave the Persian king's palace at Susa, ride west for three months on a guarded royal road, and never once leave his master's land. Close to one in three people alive answered to that one man. At the far western edge of it all lay a few hundred quarreling Greek cities that couldn't agree on anything. Twice the empire reached across the sea to crush them. Twice it burned their chief city to the ground. And twice it went home beaten.

*Greece Versus Persia: The True Story Behind the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, the First Marathon, and the Fleet That Saved Greece* tells the dramatic story of the war that the legends have nearly buried.

From a bronze map unrolled on a Spartan king's table to the narrow strait at Salamis, this narrative history brings the Persian Wars to life through the people who fought them. Behind the legends were a king who had the sea whipped, a queen who escaped a battle by ramming her own side, a general starved to death inside a temple, and a short, sleepless, dishonest Athenian named Themistocles who built the fleet that saved Greece.

• Why the famous runner from Marathon didn't die, and ran the other way

• How the whole Athenian army, still in armor, made the real marathon

• Why the three hundred weren't three hundred, and weren't alone

• How Leonidas held the Hot Gates, and how a goat path undid him

• Why Xerxes had the sea chained and lashed before his army crossed it

• How Themistocles talked Athens into building a fleet without ever mentioning Persia

• How a single lie, rowed across the water in the dark, trapped the Persian fleet at Salamis

• How a thrown stone killed the Persian commander on the last battlefield of the war

• Why the men who saved Greece ended in exile, disgrace, or walled up in a temple

The Greeks didn't win because they were braver, freer, or loved by the gods. They got through on a storm, a lie, a morning wind in the right strait, and a stubborn refusal to kneel.

The Persian Wars produced some of the most famous courage in history. They also destroyed the men who won them, and set Athens on the road to an empire of its own.

Step onto the plain at Marathon, into the pass at Thermopylae, and aboard the warships at Salamis, and meet the kings, generals, and schemers behind the legends you thought you knew.