Fernando Echeverría Rey | Session 6 of the Battle of Plataea Conference
Channel: The Center for Hellenic Studies
Date: 2022-06-29

The Greeks at Plataea. Managing ‘Multinational’ Armies in the Classical Period

Fernando Echeverría Rey (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

At the battle of Plataea, the Greek alliance faced the Persian forces under Mardonios with the largest army ever assembled on Greek soil. Never before (or after) the Greeks were able to congregate so many allies under the same banner and gather so many troops for a concerted effort. They had previous experience of multinational enterprises, but never on such scale, so the mobilization, organization, and deployment of such vast numbers of men from dozens of different communities proved to be a serious challenge for the Spartan leaders of the campaign. Then, as it is widely known, coordination failed at the battle and the Greek formation faced the Persians with a battlefront broken in multiple pieces and barely operative. This has been generally regarded as an example of poor leadership on Pausanias’ part and of the lack of discipline on the part of the Greeks, but that is not completely fair to the nature of military alliances and Greek military leadership at the beginning of the fifth century BC. Considering how the Greeks conceived and approached their collaboration with their allies is instrumental to understand why events unfolded the way they did at Plataea and why it was a pretty much expected (or at least a very likely) scenario, not only during the Persian Wars but also throughout the whole Classical period.