David Yates | Session 7 of the Battle of Plataea Conference

After Plataea: The Politics of Hegemony and the End of the Persian War

David Yates (Millsaps College)

In popular imagination (both then and now), the victory over the Persians at Plataea marked the end of the Persian War. Its place as the final battle of the war can seem deceptively obvious. Plataea witnessed the defeat of a massive Persian army that halted the offensive launched by Xerxes the year before. But the conflict with Persia did not end at this point. Rather, it continued for at least a year under Sparta’s leadership and then for decades more under that of Athens. How then did a battle that manifestly did not end the Persian War come to be given that distinction in memory? I argue that Plataea became the most recognized endpoint of the war because it served to isolate the glorious defense of Greece from its messy aftermath. Our surviving evidence speaks to the particular role of Sparta and Athens in this process. Both had a vested interest in giving the Persian War the sharp break it lacked in reality. From the start, Sparta’s campaign against the now penitent Medizers demanded a moment at which the true test of loyalty – the real war – had ended. The subsequent failure of its hegemony in the Aegean only served to reinforce the need to isolate earlier heroics from what followed. The Athenians proudly continued to prosecute the war, but were wary of emphasizing the awkward transition from Spartan to Athenian leadership. In the battle of Plataea, both Sparta and Athens found a convenient way to obscure the inconvenient realities that followed.