Plataea

Stand still for a moment and listen. Wind moves through the wheat and the olive trees. Somewhere a dog barks from a farmhouse. To the south, the long grey shoulder of Mount Kithairon rises above the plain. The ground under your feet is dry and stony, and the light here is wide and open. Nothing about this quiet farmland tells you that one of the decisive battles of the ancient world was fought across it.

This is Plataea, in the region the Greeks called Boeotia, a few kilometres from ancient Thespiae. The modern village nearby still carries the old name, Plataies. In antiquity, Plataea was a small city. It never ruled an empire and never had a large army. Yet its name appears again and again in the pages of the ancient historians. The reason is simple: Plataea kept choosing sides, and its choices were brave and often very costly.

The first choice came at Marathon, in 490 BCE. When the Persian army landed on the coast of Attica, the Athenians stood almost alone. Only one Greek city sent its full force to fight beside them — Plataea. The Plataeans marched over the mountains and stood on the Athenian left wing. The Athenians did not forget this. For generations, they remembered Plataea as the friend who came when no one else did.

Eleven years later, the war came to these fields. In 480 BCE, the Persian king Xerxes invaded Greece with an enormous army. His forces broke through at Thermopylae, burned Athens, and also burned Thespiae and Plataea. The fleet of the Greek allies then won a great sea battle at Salamis, and Xerxes returned to Asia. But he left behind a large land army under his general, Mardonius. That army spent the winter in the north and came south again in the spring.

In the summer of 479 BCE, the two armies faced each other here, along the river Asopos. Look toward the low ground and the streams that cross the plain. The Persians camped on the northern side, with friendly Theban territory behind them. The Greeks held the foothills of Kithairon. The Spartan commander was Pausanias, regent for the young son of King Leonidas, the king who died at Thermopylae. It was the largest Greek army ever gathered against a single enemy.

For days, neither side wanted to attack. The Persian cavalry rode out again and again. They harassed the Greek lines and fouled the spring the Greeks depended on for water. Herodotus, the historian who described the battle, tells us that thirst and hunger pushed the Greeks to move their camp at night. The retreat went badly. Some units got lost in the dark. By dawn, the Greek army was split into separate groups across the slopes.

Mardonius saw his chance and attacked. Here is the surprise. The great victory came out of a confused, half-finished retreat, not out of a clever plan. The Spartans and the men of Tegea took the main charge. They held their ground, then pushed forward. Herodotus says that Mardonius himself was killed in the fighting. When he fell, the Persian line broke. The Persians never again sent a land army to conquer mainland Greece.

The men of Thespiae were also part of this story. A year earlier, their hoplites had stayed with Leonidas at Thermopylae and died there. According to Herodotus, at Plataea the Thespians who remained fought as light-armed troops. The two neighbouring cities, both burned by the Persians, both stood in the Greek line here. If you came from the direction of Thespiae, you travelled the same short road their soldiers walked.

After the battle, the Greeks gave thanks to the gods. From the captured bronze, they made a tall column of three twisted serpents and set it up at Delphi. The names of the allied cities were written on its coils. Now another surprise: part of that column still exists. Centuries later, the Roman emperor Constantine moved it to his new capital. Today its battered bronze stands in the old Hippodrome of Istanbul, far from this field.

Plataea's loyalty to Athens later brought disaster. In the Peloponnesian War, the long conflict between Athens and Sparta, Spartan and Theban forces surrounded the city in 429 BCE. The historian Thucydides describes the siege in detail. In one winter night, a group of defenders escaped over the enemy walls in a storm. To plan their ladders, they counted the layers of bricks in the siege wall. Many soldiers counted at once, so the final number would be correct.

The defenders who stayed were not so lucky. In 427 BCE, the starving city surrendered. Thucydides writes that the Spartans held a kind of trial, and the prisoners were put to death. The city was then destroyed. Plataea was rebuilt later, and the Thebans destroyed it again in the fourth century BCE. It was only restored once more after the rise of Macedon. Few small cities in Greece were wiped out and rebuilt so many times.

What remains today is modest, so walk slowly and look closely. Archaeologists have traced the line of the ancient fortifications, and sections of stone wall still run through the fields. Notice how the blocks fit together without mortar. Notice too how the city sits on gently rising ground, between the mountain and the plain. From the higher points, you can see why armies valued this place. It controls the routes between Boeotia, Attica, and the Peloponnese.

Let your eyes follow the plain north toward the river and the distant hills. This landscape has not changed as much as the cities around it. The streams still cut shallow lines through the fields. The mountain still blocks the southern sky. In the late afternoon, the shadow of Kithairon slowly moves across the ground where the Greek units became separated. It is easy to imagine the dust, the sound of horses, and the shouts in many dialects.

Before you leave, take one more look at the quiet farms and the low stone walls. A small city stood here and paid a high price for keeping its word. The wheat grows over the place where an empire's last army in Greece was broken. As you walk back to the road, listen again to the wind in the trees. It is the same wind that blew across this plain in the summer of 479 BCE.