Pausanias then moved his army from the foot of Cithaeron to the ridge just across the Asopus from the Persians. This was not an ideal position. Its chief advantage was copious water, especially at the Gargaphia spring a little to the south. But by moving so far forward the Greeks were no longer able to protect the passes through which essential food supplies were transported. Also the Persians could outflank the ridge, enter the plain unopposed, and cut Pausanias’s line of communications. In theory, Mardonius could interpose his entire force between the Greeks and the hills.
Neither side made a move for more than a week, and then the worst predictably happened. The Persians destroyed a party of five hundred draft animals carrying provisions as it came down a pass from Megara to Plataea and blocked future convoys. Mardonius launched another great cavalry attack against the ridge and had the spring fouled and choked. Hoplites had no answer to mounted archers and the Greeks did not have any cavalry with which to counter the enemy horse. If they wanted to eat and drink the allied forces would have to quit the ridge.
Mardonius was not without troubles himself. Under cover of darkness Alexander king of Macedon rode from the Persian lines to tell the Greeks that the Persians too were suffering from shortages. He wanted to make sure that, whoever won the imminent battle, he was on the winning side.
Pausanias decided to shift his position for a second time to high ground two miles south in front of Plataea. Surrounded by streams, it was nicknamed the Island and water was plentiful. To avoid the enemy cavalry this complicated maneuver was conducted by night, a difficult feat.
Of course, things went wrong. The center (comprising small contingents from many poleis) seems to have lost its way in the dark and eventually found itself standing outside the walls of Plataea. We do not know whether this was where it was meant to be, but it was able to protect the traffic coming down the passes, no bad thing.
For some reason the Spartans and Athenians on the two wings did not move, and by first light they were still on the ridge. Herodotus explains that, for reasons of honor, the commander of a Spartan battalion refused to obey the order to retreat. Pausanias spent the night trying to make him change his mind. More probably, he learned that the center had gone astray and was not sure exactly where it was. Much wiser to await the clarification of dawn. Once he had located the mislaid troops, he gave the belated order for the Athenians and Spartans to march, with the supposedly recalcitrant Spartan battalion acting bravely as a rear guard to ward off any Persian attempt to interfere.
Mardonius was in the best of humors. Like the Great King at Salamis, he misinterpreted what he saw as disunity, low morale, and incompetence, and ordered an immediate general advance across the Asopus. Were the confusions on the Greek side an accident or a trick? We can never be certain, but it is at least possible that Pausanias wanted to give an impression of disarray. This would encourage Mardonius to take a risk and attack an enemy satisfactorily established on high ground.
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Pausanias was devout and at every stage of the campaign he sacrificed to the gods and made a move only when the omens allowed it. Now of all moments, as the Persian troops marched up towards his line, the omens stayed resolutely unfavorable. His men were under instructions to sit quietly with their shields in front of them, and await the order to advance. The priest killed victim after victim to no effect and Pausanias turned his face, all tears, to a nearby shrine of Hera, queen of heaven, and begged her intercession. In the nick of time the sacrifices turned propitious and the Spartan general unleashed his men just before they were overrun.
The lines met and clashed, and the Spartans soon found themselves hard-pressed. They sent for help from the Athenians. They would have come, but had just been attacked by Mardonius’s Ionian Greek division (which included medizing Thebans, who knew what fate awaited them if the battle was lost). The Spartans with support from the men of Tegea, an aggressive city-state in the Peloponnese, fought dourly on. The Persians discharged innumerable arrows from behind a barricade of wicker shields.
It slowly became clear that lightly armored Persians were no match for bronze-encased hoplites. The terrain sloped downwards to them and (it seems) it was not possible to deploy the cavalry. The wicker shields were overturned and, although they fought bravely, the men were pushed back. Mardonius on a gray was very visibly in the thick of things, but he was struck down by a flung rock. His wing turned around and fled back en masse to the stockade camp. On the left, the Athenians endured a fierce attack from their fellow-Greek opponents, but in the end, after a bitter resistance, these too gave way and ran straight to Thebes. The troops outside Plataea, which had originally been the Greek center, did not enter the battle before its closing stage.
The cautious Artabanus, who had escorted Xerxes to the Hellespont and returned to Mardonius, had held his forty-thousand-strong force in reserve on the Asopus ridge, from where he could watch the entire field of operations. Once he saw that all was lost, he faced about and marched without stopping until he reached Asia. He outstripped the news of his defeat and nobody attacked him on his journey home.
The Greeks captured the camp inside which tens of thousands of men were trapped in a confined space and spent hours methodically killing them all. They took no prisoners and by the end of the day, it was claimed, nine tenths of the enemy lay dead. Hellenic losses amounted to a modest 1,360 together with an unreported number of wounded.
Pausanias ordered his helots to collect everything of value they could find inside the stockade and on the field. According to Herodotus, they
spread out through the whole camp. Treasure was there in profusion—tents adorned with gold and silver; couches gilded with the same precious metals; bowls, goblets, and cups, all of gold; and waggons loaded with sacks full of gold and silver basins. From the bodies of the dead they stripped anklets and chains and golden-hilted daggers, but they took no notice at all of the richly embroidered clothes which, amongst so much of greater value, seemed of no value.
Someone suggested that the body of Mardonius should be given the same treatment that had been meted out to Leonidas—namely, that his head should be cut off and impaled on a pole. Pausanias replied angrily: “That is an act more appropriate to barbarians than to Hellenes. Don’t ever make a suggestion like that again and be thankful that you are leaving without being punished.”
The Spartan general visited an elaborate, richly furnished tent that Xerxes had left behind for Mardonius, perhaps as a token of his intended return. He ordered the Persian chefs to cook a meal and was astonished by the lavish banquet they produced. He contrasted it with the simple fare his staff prepared for him. “What a fool Mardonius was,” he reportedly remarked. “This was his lifestyle and he came to deprive us of our poverty-stricken way of life!”
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King Leotychidas of Sparta had been sitting tight on the island of Delos with his 110 ships. He was joined at last by the rest of the fleet—namely, the two-hundred-odd Athenian triremes, under the command of the Alcmaeonid Xanthippus. These had been held back until Sparta and her allies had done the decent thing and marched out of the Peloponnese bound for Boeotia and victory at Plataea.
Some envoys from the Greek island of Samos came secretly to see the king and persuade him “to deliver the Ionians from slavery and expel the barbarian.” After some thought, he agreed and set sail for Asia Minor.