After Xerxes I was crowned the emperor of the Achaemenid Empire, he quickly resumed preparations for the invasion of Greece, including building two pontoon bridges across the Hellespont.

A congress of city states met at Corinth in late autumn of 481 BC, and a confederate alliance of Greek city-states was formed, generally referred to as the Allies.

[1] In August 480 BC, after hearing of Xerxes's approach, a small Allied army led by the Spartan king Leonidas I blocked the Pass of Thermopylae, whilst an Athenian-dominated navy sailed to the Straits of Artemisium.

[6] The Greeks would hesitate to sail farther than Delos; because they were unfamiliar with the lands which lay there, thought they were full of armed peoples and believed the journey was too long.

[d][16] The route he took probably began from the Cyclades, then sailing for approximately 40 kilometres (22 nautical miles) in the open ocean, passing Icaria and Coressia to finally land near Mount Ampelus in Samos.

[10] The historian John Barron argues that their retreat was not absurd: the channel was just about 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) wide at its thinnest point, which would not let the Greeks send their entire fleet after the Persians.

[17] The historians Michael Flower and John Marincola argue that the Greeks may have decided to sail to Samos only because they were told about a potential Ionian revolt and about the disrepair of the Persian fleet.

[6] The historian Marcello Lupi also notes that the Greek fleet had sailed at the insistence of the Samians and had been unwilling to chase the Persians after Salamis, hesitating to move out of Delos.

[23] Hignett argues that Leotychides was taking the risk of fighting a naval battle where the location and circumstances would be picked by the Persians, who could thus maximize their advantages.

[46] When the Persians heard that the Allied fleet was approaching, they set sail from Samos towards Mycale in the Ionian mainland, possibly because they had decided they could not fight a naval battle.

[48] To the south of these passes, on the beaches on the route from Samos, the Persians moored their fleet behind the cover of rocks, and built abatis (field fortifications) with the wood they had cut recently.

[50] The historian Jan Zacharias van Rookhuijzen suggests Güllübahçe, Söke, the modern day site of the ancient city of New Priene, as another potential location for the battlefield of Mycale.

The Greeks then sailed farther and their soldiers landed in a location beyond the line of sight of their opponents,[47] which Shepherd estimates was 3,000–4,000 metres (9,800–13,100 ft) inside the bay and to the immediate west of the city of Priene.

On the left were the Athenians, Corinthians, Sicyonians and Troezenians; around half of the army, who took up positions starting from the shore and ending at the foothils of Mount Mycale.

[62] Green argues that sending only the flank led by the Athenians at first was actually a tactical move by Leotychides, who wanted the Persians to think they had a large advantage in numbers.

Moreover, the threat of a future invasion was abated; although the Greeks remained worried that Xerxes would try again, over time it became apparent that the Persian desire to conquer Greece was much diminished.

The Peloponnesians suggested a population exchange, where the Greeks who did not want to live under Persian rule would be relocated in northern Greece, on the properties of the medizers who would be expelled.

[68] In the spring of 488 BC, the tyrant of Cilicia, Xenagoras of Halicarnassus,[86] recently appointed by emperor Xerxes, would raid the temple of Apollo at Didyma and seize the bronze idol of the deity, in revenge for the Milesians switching sides at Mycale.

He further argues that the resultant defection of the Aegean states facilitated Greek marine campaigns, thus leading to the establishment of the naval empire of the Delian League and Athens.

[g] They observe that many of the predictions made by Hegesistratos did not materialise: the Ionians did not revolt when the Greeks arrived in Ionia, and did so only after the people of Samos and Miletus rebelled first.

The historian George Cawkwell argues that the major military lesson of both Mycale and Plataea was the repeated confirmation of the superiority of the hoplite over the more lightly armed Persian infantry, as had first been demonstrated at Marathon.

He further argues that the Persian hesitation to fight a naval battle, despite their numerical superiority, indicated that either the morale of their commanders was shaken, or that they believed the soldiers in their army drawn from their Greek vassals would mutiny.

[110] The historian Amir Mehdi Badi [fa] wonders why the Spartans, forever hesitant of embarking on naval campaigns to remote places, immediately agreed to sail to Samos after the visit of the envoys.

[112] Badi also questions the narrative of the allied Greek fleet mobilizing and sailing from Delos to Samos in one day, and argues that even a modern navy cannot move so quickly.

[123] Flower and Marincola find the account of Mycale given by Diodorus Siculus to be unreliable and mixed with arbitrary claims by Ephorus of Cyme, his primary source.

[126]The historian David Asheri found other similarities between Plataea and Mycale: the issue of defending the mountain passes, the deployment of the Athenians in the plains and the Spartans in the hills, the concluding heroic resistance of the few remaining Persian fighters and the delayed arrival of other Greek contingents on the battlefield.

Badi argues that the Athenian victory at Mycale was also given more prestige in Herodotus' account because the victor had not been forced previously to retreat from their position, unlike at Plataea.

[134] Immerwahr observes how the divine was the key element in the accounts of Plataea and Mycale given by Herodotus, whose narrative of the latter battle did not focus at all on military matters.

[68] In the works of the tragic poet Phrynichus, the naval victories at Salamis and Mycale were the results of policies crafted by the Athenian commander Themistocles.

[142] The historian Franz Stoessl [de] notes how Phyrnichus formed his opinions on the Persian Wars by emphasizing the two triumphs of the Greek navy at Salamis and Mycale.