THEME: The Persian Wars, part II After all, if an army massing three, ten, or even 100 times more men was defeated by the Greeks, did it matter how they were commanded and what decisions were made? The result would always be the same: their destruction by the more tactically effective Hellenes. In fact, however, Mardonius showed himself a superior commander to Pausanias at Plataea, who forced the Greek army to retreat and split into three separate bodies. Yet, in the end, he was defeated and killed. How was this possible? What really happened here and in other battles between Greeks and Persians? In contrast to the Greeks, the Persians had no poet to sing of them, or at least, no cohesive narrative survives.
The Persians were a group of…
