John Hyland: Persiaʼs Greek Campaigns

Abstract

Persia’s Greek Campaigns: Approaches to Historical Reconstruction and Political Myth

Achaemenid Persia’s expeditions against the Greek city-states in the early 5th century BCE are the most (in)famous events in the empire’s history, crucial to Greco-Roman stereotypes of the “Barbarian” and misleading narratives of Persian decadence and decline. In the absence of Achaemenid narratives to counter the Greek source tradition, the so-called “Persian Wars” are widely perceived as failures of an over-extended empire against outnumbered, but militarily superior Greek defenders. Modern receptions have transformed the memory of these events into a powerful political myth, which represents Greek victories over Persia as origin points for European civilization and symbols of liberty’s ability to overcome imperial despotism. France, Britain, the United States, and other world powers, not to mention modern Greece, have vied to represent themselves as heirs to this ancient Greek heroic tradition, while depicting their enemies as heirs to Xerxes’ Persia and its ultimate failure. Modern Iran, in turn, has grappled repeatedly with problems of external perception rooted in hostile Persian War myth. The current war adds particular urgency to the challenge of disentangling the complex ancient history from its modern ideological representations.

Fortunately, disciplinary progress and emerging evidence now permits more critical historical approaches to Achaemenid contexts and perspectives on Persian-Greek conflicts. Drawing on the speaker’s recent book, Persia’s Greek Campaigns (Oxford, 2025), this talk will demonstrate the possibilities for historical reconstruction. Examining Xerxes’ effective use of campaign “spectacles” to project imperial power, problematizing the sources’ depictions of Greek military superiority, and highlighting iconographic evidence that the Achaemenids represented their Greek campaigns as victories, the talk will offer a more complex picture of imperial frontier interactions that challenges the modern uses and abuses of the Persian War tradition.