Battle of Plataea
Greek victory at Plataea ends Xerxes' land invasion
View full image ↗ How was this image made?
The creative brief sent to the image model. These are instructions, not a record of what actually happened.
Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The Greek withdrawal was not a feint. It broke down, scattered the contingents, and convinced Mardonius that he was watching an army run away.
479 BCE: a blocked spring and a failed night move
Persian cavalry blocked the Gargaphian spring and intercepted provisions, so in 479 BCE the Greek commanders ordered a night move toward Plataea. The withdrawal broke down, leaving contingents scattered rather than repositioned.
Mardonius read the disorder as flight and attacked the separated Lacedaemonian and Tegean forces. The Athenians could not reinforce them, because they were fighting Greek troops allied with Persia.
Mardonius among his thousand
Pausanias, the Spartan regent, commanded the Lacedaemonians with the Tegeans beside them. Under Persian arrow fire he reportedly kept sacrificing and waiting for a favorable omen before appealing to Hera and ordering the attack.
They then closed with the Persian infantry. Mardonius fought among a picked guard of 1,000 Persians, and when the Spartan Aeimnestus killed him, the resistance around him collapsed.
The wall the Spartans could not break
Routed Persian troops fled behind their camp's wooden defenses. The Spartans could not get in; the Athenians breached the wall and the allied Greeks entered, the Tegeans reportedly first through.
Artabazus, who had opposed fighting, led his contingent away as the battle began and escaped through Thessaly, Macedonia and Thrace to Asia. Herodotus reports 159 Greek dead among the three contingents he says bore the main fighting: 91 Lacedaemonians, 52 Athenians and 16 Tegeans.
The battle ended Xerxes' invasion of mainland Greece, not the Greco-Persian wars, which continued for decades. Herodotus wrote decades afterwards, and his totals are one named source's claims rather than counts.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 2 audit passes
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
What the sources leave uncertain
- The year 479 BCE is secure, but the exact day is reconstructed from later calendar evidence. August 27 or 28 is often given; ancient calendars and the battle’s festival traditions do not support that precision with certainty.
- Herodotus is the principal surviving narrative and wrote decades later. His enormous army and casualty totals are not accepted at face value.
- Herodotus says Plataea and Mycale occurred on the same day, but that synchronism is a literary and chronological tradition rather than an independently established fact.