The Battle of Marathon: Part 1 - Astyages and Media

This is pretty typical for the Persians
in 300.

You know, you have to feel for Persia. The 300 movies - the original and Rise of an Empire - don't really give them a fair shake. Their armies are ruled by Xerxes, a gold-speedo wearing god-villain whose sole purpose seems to be to make the viewer feel uncomfortable, and in the later, they're led by Eva Green, whose sole purpose is to reveal as much as possible while still technically wearing armour. Their soldiers are not referred to as cannon fodder strictly because cannons have not yet been invented. It makes you wonder how these men seemingly made of paper and a battle plan that consists of hopefully drowning their opponents by flooding the battlefield with their blood ever came to be a force that would ever possibly defeat the Spartans and Athenians that are seemingly made of stone. Perhaps they just thought paper covers rock?

Persia's rise to power is actually pretty dang interesting, filled with violence, betrayals, and possible baby-eating. Therefore it seems fair to give a bit of background on the combatants in the Battle of Marathon before we get to all the fighting.

First, a bit of geography here. Greece is across the Aegean Sea from four important territories; Lydia, Persia, Media and Ionia. Lydia became super rich (largely due to the fact that they likely created the first coin) and powerful enough that Greece was paying tribute to it. Media and Persia were closely linked ethnically, culturally and geographically, but Persia was smaller and somewhat of an underdog. Ionia was a Greek controlled city state but on the same side of the Aegean as the rest of them. That's the basics of what you need to know to understand all this.

This is a depiction of Astyages' dream. I'd be
a paranoid freak-show if I dreamt crap like this too.

However, none of those places yet matter without a little character development. The king of Media, Astyages, is where this all begins (sort of). He was more than a little paranoid, certainly a fair lot cruel, and definitely not opposed to the occasional murder. He also dreamed in what must be rather nightmarish fashion, as he foresaw a his daughter leading to his eventual death and downfall while she rises up and takes the throne. His dream-seers (or interpreters, fortune tellers, what have you) told him that it could be the husband of his daughter, so he got her to pretty much just go out and marry a wimp. Problem solved on that front. However, she had a son, and that son may just prove to be the usurper after all. The reasonable progression of thought here for Astyages was it would be easiest to bump off the usurper if he had not yet mastered the art of crawling yet, and ordered a commander of his army, Harpagos, to kill the child. Yes - Astyages ordered the death of a baby because he felt threatened.

Harpagos, likely having some sort of, well, pretty darn reasonable qualms with murdering infants, tricked Astyages. He found a few Persians who just had their infant die and convinced them to do the old switcharoo. Yes, he switched out the babies and took the dead one to present to Astyages - and it worked. The name of the saved baby and son of the daughter of Astyages was Cyrus - born into a world where he narrowly avoids his murder and prophesied to go take the throne from his gramps. It's like a thousand year old episode of Maury. 

Herodotus; the guy just looks like
a historian.

Here's where it gets a little less PG-13 and falls more into the horror genre. Astages got word of the trick Harpagos played on him and invited him for dinner where he (I warn you, this is not for the faint of heart) chopped up Harpagos' son and fed it to him. (As a side-note, Astyages had those dream-readers impaled.) I believe it's safe to say that Astyages is the villain of this story. At this point it seems fair to remind everyone that all of these stories have to be taken with a grain of salt. Astyages reined from 585-550 BC. They weren't exactly recording all this. The majority of the information comes from archaeological evidence and the reports of Herodotus, a Greek historian. There's only so much value you can put on the accuracy, but unfortunately, it's what we've got. To his credit, plenty of the physical evidence left behind, as little as there may be, seems to match up fairly well with his reports.


So here's where we stand thus far; Cyrus is now separate from Media and surviving the wrath of Astyages. Harpagos is most certainly down in the dumps. Astyages is working through his severe psychological issues that have led to his war on infancy. Stay tuned for part two - the revenge of Cyrus!