A series of conflicts, fought roughly between 499 and 449 BCE, in which the Achaemenid Persian Empire tried twice to bring the Greek city-states of the Aegean under its control and failed — producing the Athenian victory at Marathon, the famous stand at Thermopylae, the naval triumph at Salamis, and the rise of Athens and its Delian League, while seeding a lasting Western myth of free Greeks against an Eastern despot that the historical record only partly supports.
Almost everything famous about these wars comes to us through one man, a Greek named Herodotus, writing a generation or two after the fighting and far from neutral. He gives us Persian armies of millions, a king of kings lashing the sea in rage, three hundred Spartans dying to the last man. The numbers are wildly inflated, the speeches invented, the moral plain: free men beat slaves of a tyrant. That story has done more political work over twenty-five centuries than the wars themselves ever did. The harder task is to recover what actually happened, and to see how a sequence of raids, revolts, and sea battles on the edge of a vast empire became the founding legend of a 'West' that did not yet exist.