If you’re looking for a quick, one-word answer to who won the Persian Greek War, the Greeks did. But "Greeks" is a bit of a stretch since Greece wasn't even a country back then, and "won" is a word that carries a lot of heavy baggage when you look at the smoking ruins of Athens.
History isn't a sports scoreboard.
It was more of a gritty, decades-long endurance match that started because of a tax revolt in what is now Turkey and ended with a superpower deciding that a tiny, rocky peninsula just wasn't worth the headache anymore. Most people think of 300 or the Battle of Marathon and figure it was a clean sweep. It wasn't. It was a series of chaotic invasions, massive logistical failures, and internal betrayals that changed the trajectory of Western civilization forever.
The Short Version of a Long Fight
The Greeks won. Specifically, the loose coalition of city-states led by Athens and Sparta successfully repelled two massive Persian invasions between 490 BCE and 479 BCE.
Persia was the heavyweight champion of the world at the time. Led by the Achaemenid dynasty—first Darius the Great and then his son Xerxes—the Persian Empire stretched from the Indus Valley to the Balkans. They were organized, wealthy, and used to getting what they wanted. When the Ionian Greeks (living on the coast of modern-day Turkey) rebelled against Persian rule, Athens sent some ships to help. They even burned down a regional Persian capital called Sardis.
Darius didn't take that lightly. He wanted revenge, but more importantly, he wanted to secure his western border.
The first attempt ended at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. The Persians got outplayed on the beach. Ten years later, Xerxes came back with a force so large it supposedly drank rivers dry. That’s the era of Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. By the time the dust settled in 479 BCE, the Persian land army was shattered, their navy was at the bottom of the Aegean, and the King was heading back to Susa to focus on other problems.
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Why the Persian Defeat Wasn't a Total Loss for Them
We often view this through a lens of "Freedom vs. Tyranny," thanks to Herodotus, the guy who basically invented history (and maybe embellished a few things). But if you were a Persian administrator sitting in Persepolis in 478 BCE, did you feel like you'd lost everything?
Probably not.
The Persian Empire remained the dominant global power for another 150 years. They didn't collapse. They didn't lose their core territories. Honestly, Greece was a fringe province to them—a tiny, mountainous region filled with people who couldn't stop fighting each other.
While the Greeks celebrated their "victory," the Persians realized they could just buy the Greeks instead of fighting them. For the next century, Persian gold did more damage to Greece than Persian spears ever did. They funded Sparta to fight Athens, then funded Athens to fight Sparta. It was brilliant, cynical geopolitics.
The Moments That Decided Who Won the Persian Greek War
The turning point wasn't just one battle. It was a sequence of catastrophic errors on the Persian side and sheer, stubborn luck on the Greek side.
Marathon: The Ego Check
Darius thought he could just show up, intimidate the Athenians, and install a puppet tyrant. He sent a relatively small expeditionary force. When the Athenian hoplites charged—literally running at the Persian line—the Persians panicked. It proved the "invincible" empire could bleed.
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Salamis: The Naval Gamble
This is the one that actually saved Greece. The Persian fleet was massive but clunky. The Athenian general Themistocles tricked Xerxes into bringing his big ships into the narrow straits of Salamis. The Persians couldn't maneuver. They ended up ramming each other while the smaller, faster Greek triremes picked them apart. Xerxes watched from a golden throne on a nearby hill as his navy—and his hopes of a quick conquest—sank.
Plataea: The Final Blow
A year after Salamis, the largest hoplite army ever assembled met the remaining Persian land forces. It was a meat grinder. The death of the Persian general Mardonius broke the morale of his troops. After this, the Persians never tried a full-scale invasion of mainland Greece again.
The Cost of Victory
Athens was burned. Twice.
When people ask who won the Persian Greek War, they often forget that the Athenians had to flee their city and watch it go up in flames. The Parthenon you see today? That was built as a "victory" monument decades later using money that was supposed to be for a common defense fund.
The war also created a massive power vacuum.
Without a common enemy, Athens and Sparta turned on each other almost immediately. The "Golden Age" of Greece was fueled by the spoils of the Persian War, but it also led directly to the Peloponnesian War, which left Greece so weak that Philip II of Macedon (Alexander the Great's dad) eventually just walked in and took over.
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Misconceptions That Mess Up the Story
We need to talk about the numbers. Herodotus claimed Xerxes brought millions of soldiers. Modern historians, like Tom Holland (the historian, not the actor) and Peter Green, suggest it was more like 150,000 to 200,000. Still huge for the time, but not "millions."
Also, the "Greeks" weren't a united front. Many Greek city-states actually fought for the Persians. Thebes, for instance, sided with Xerxes. It wasn't "West vs. East"; it was a complicated web of shifting alliances where plenty of Greeks thought the Persians were the better bet for stability.
Expert Take: The Semantic Victory
According to Dr. Victor Davis Hanson and other military historians, the Greek victory was a victory of the "Hoplite" system—heavy infantry and citizen-soldiers—over the conscript-heavy armies of the East. This created a Western military tradition that emphasized decisive, head-on battles.
But if you look at the diplomatic records, the Persians eventually got what they wanted through the Peace of Callias. There is still debate among scholars if this treaty was even a real thing, but by 449 BCE, both sides basically agreed to stay in their own lanes. Persia kept their empire; Greece kept their independence.
What This Means for You Today
Understanding who won this war isn't just about trivia. It’s about how we frame success.
- Strategic Overreach is Real: The Persians lost because they tried to project power too far from their supply lines. Even the biggest empire has a breaking point.
- Unity is Fragile: The only reason the Greeks won was a rare, temporary moment of cooperation between Athens and Sparta. As soon as the threat vanished, they destroyed themselves.
- Soft Power Trumps Hard Power: The Persians eventually controlled Greek politics more effectively with bribes and diplomacy than they ever did with the "Immortals" (their elite guard).
Next Steps for the History Buff
If you want to dive deeper into the gritty details of these battles, your best bet is to move past the movies.
- Read Herodotus: Take him with a grain of salt, but his Histories are the primary source.
- Look up the Delian League: See how Athens turned a defensive alliance into a mini-empire that eventually annoyed everyone enough to cause another war.
- Study the Battle of Mycale: It happened the same day as Plataea and is often ignored, but it was the nail in the coffin for Persian naval power in the region.
The Persian Greek War didn't end with a trophy ceremony. It ended with a tired, broken region trying to rebuild while the shadow of the Persian Empire continued to loom over the horizon for another century. Victory is almost always more expensive than it looks on paper.