The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

The Athenians’ predicament seemed desperate. The Persian army was enormous, some 80,000 men strong, transported by hundreds of ships; it had excellent cavalry and the best archers in the world. The Athenians, meanwhile, had only infantry, some 10,000 strong. They had sent a runner to Sparta urgently requesting reinforcements, but the Spartans were celebrating their moon festival and it was taboo to fight during such a time. They would send troops as soon as they could, within a week—but that would probably be too late. Meanwhile a group of Persian sympathizers within Athens—mostly from wealthy families—despised the democracy, looked forward to Hippias’s return, and were doing their best to sow dissension and betray the city from within. Not only would the Athenians have to fight the Persians alone, but they were divided into factions among themselves. The leaders of democratic Athens gathered to discuss the alternatives, all of which seemed bad. The majority argued for concentrating the Athenian forces outside the city in a defensive cordon. There they could wait to fight the Persians on terrain they knew well. The Persian army, however, was large enough to surround the city by both land and sea, choking it off with a blockade. So one leader, Miltiades, made a very different proposal: to march the entire Athenian army immediately toward Marathon, to a place where the road to Athens passed through a narrow pass along the coast. That would leave Athens itself unprotected; in...