Sean Manning | Session 5 of the Battle of Plataea Conference

Professionalism at Plataea
Sean Manning (independent scholar)
Herodotus’ account of the Persian wars is full of bumbling, indecision, and selfishness. Yet in modern discussions of the Persian Wars, the concept of professionalism comes up again and again. To some scholars, the Spartans are stand-ins for heroic Latin Christians facing down natives and orientals, while to another group of writers, the Persians are a mighty imperial war machine prepared to roll over the free cities of Greece. Recent research has showed that this picture of the Spartan army is hard to reconcile with the evidence, especially the evidence before Thucydides and Xenophon. There has been less discussion of why researchers compare the Persians to these later armies, and whether this analogy is useful.
In this talk, I will show that while Xerxes’ armies had an impressive range of capabilities, these capabilities did not come from anything like the European armies of the 19th and 20th centuries (or from something exactly the same as the army of the Roman emperors). The discourse about professionalism comes from the politics of the Atlantic world in the 19th and 20th centuries, and from the use of the Persian Wars in political rhetoric. If we see Achaemenid armies as part of the Achaemenid world, and not as stand-ins for our own armies or enemies, we can understand them better. But we can also understand armies better, and the many different ways in which societies build and maintain military capabilities.