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Updated: June 18, 2025
The valor of their troops in the great combats of Platsea and Thermopylae extorted the admiration of their enemies, who have left on record their belief that, "in boldness and warlike spirit, the Persians were not a whit behind the Greeks," and that their defeat was "wholly owing to the inferiority of their equipment and training."
Henceforth the immense superiority of Greek troops to Persian was well known on both sides; and nothing but the distance from Greece of her vital parts, and the quarrels of the Greek states among themselves, preserved for nearly a century and a half the doomed empire of Persia. The immediate result of the defeats of Salamis and Platsea was a contraction of the Persian boundary towards the west.
The Athenians concentrated on the expansion of their naval armaments, left the open country undefended and gathered within the city walls, and landed forces at will on the Peloponnese. Platsea, almost their sole ally on land, held out valiantly for some time, but was forced to surrender; and Athens herself suffered frightfully from a visitation of the plague.
On the skirts of Citheeron, near Platsea, a hundred and eight thousand Greeks confronted more than thrice their number of Persians and Persian subjects; and now at length the trial was to be made whether, in fair and open fight on land, Greece or Persia would be superior. A suspicion of what the result would be might have been derived from Marathon.
However, on the whole, it seems undeniable that even at Platsea, much more at Marathon, the Persians had the advantage in numbers. If, besides this numerical advantage, they had another in qualities of bodily structure, the inference was the greater to the Grecian merit.
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