The Persians … had many men, but few soldiers

From War! What Is It Good For? by Ian Morris. Page 64.

The Greeks had a word for it,” the saying goes, and one of the words they gave us is “chaos.” In Greek mythology, chaos was the disordered void that existed before the gods created the cosmos; in Greek warfare, it was the kind of scene that greeted the Persian general Mardonius one August morning in 479 B.C. as the sun came up over the country town of Plataea. For a week, a dense mass of armored Greek infantrymen had lined the hills overlooking Mardonius’s camp. During the previous night, they had started withdrawing but had made a monumental mess of it. Some had refused to pull back, insisting that retreat would be cowardly. Some had followed orders but gone in the wrong direction. And some had disappeared altogether.

It was Mardonius’s moment. He led his best men in a charge straight at the Spartan contingent, which was cut off from the other Greeks by a steep ridge. Within moments, the rest of the Persian host had broken ranks and rushed forward too, swamping the heavily outnumbered Spartans. The fifth-century Greek historian Herodotus tells what happened next: “The Persians were as brave and strong as the Greeks, but they had no armor, no training, and nothing like the same skill as their enemies. Sometimes one at a time, sometimes in groups of ten or so, they rushed at the Spartans. But regardless of whether there were more or less of them, they were cut down.

“Wherever Mardonius was, riding round on his white horse and surrounded by his thousand crack troops, they would attack fiercely. While he was still alive, they held their own, fighting hard and killing many Spartans. But as soon as he went down, and his personal bodyguard was destroyed, then all the other Persians broke, turned, and ran.” The harsh truth, Herodotus concluded, was that “the Persians … had many men, but few soldiers”