Soon after the battle Xerxes ordered the remainder of his fleet — still a large force, but demoralized and in disarray — to return to the Hellespont to protect his supply lines, and especially his escape route.[14] His main army set fire to Athens as they withdrew northward to Thessaly,[15] while the Great King took a large contingent of troops and marched hastily back to his own territory.[16] Although he left a large remnant of his army in central Greece, he would not stay with his army now that the outcome was in doubt. He had never imagined his overwhelming numbers could be beaten in battle.
The great danger for the Persians now was not battle but starvation. The huge host that had invaded Greece had picked the country clean, drunk up whole rivers (Greek rivers were small, after all), and had left nothing for their remaining army to live on. They had even burned the croplands of those cities that had resisted, which now rendered those lands barren to Persian occupiers. “The land itself,” says the ghost of Darius in Aeschylus’ commemorative play The Persians, “is their ally. . . It wastes with famine an over-numerous foe.”[17] Soldiers ate grass, bark, and leaves in their hunger. Disease, until modern times the worst threat to encamped armies, began to ravage the Persian force.[18] For provisions, the army needed a navy to protect a supply-line hundreds of miles long, but there was no longer a safe road to bring supplies nor a Persian navy in position to guard the route. An early cold snap froze the Strymon river and added to the misery of the refugees trying to cross it.[19]
The next summer, in 479, combined Greek forces led by the formidable Spartan infantry met the remaining Persian army at Plataea, not far from Athens. The Spartan contingent broke the enemy line, and the Greeks crushed the Persian force and scattered its survivors.[20] Simultaneously the Greek fleet crossed the Aegean Sea to the island of Samos and, encouraged by Ionian Greeks eager to cast off their Persian yoke, attacked a Persian army at Mycale on the mainland opposite.
The Persians pulled their ships onto shore to fight a land battle, compelling their Ionian auxiliaries to fight at their sides. When the fighting began the Ionian conscripts deserted or turned against their Persian oppressors, who were decisively defeated and their ships captured. The whole coast of Ionia now rose in revolt to join the victorious Greek forces.[21]
[14].Herodotus 8.107.1.
[15].Herodotus 8.113.
[16].Herodotus 8.115.
[17].Aeschylus Persians 792, 794, trans. Smyth.
[18].Herodotus 8.115.2-3; Aeschylus Persians 488-91.
[19].Aeschylus Persians 495-507.
[20].Herodotus 9.59-71.
[21] Herodotus 9.96-104.