Mardonius
Mardonius ( Old Persian: Marduniya, Persian: Mrdunya, Latin: Mardonius; † 479 BC) was a Persian general of the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century BC.
He was a son of the conspirator Gobryas and a maternal nephew of the Great King Darius I. He married a daughter of the great king named Artazostre and thus became a brother of his cousin Xerxes I.
Life
Mardonius led the first Perserzug 492 BC against Thrace and Macedonia. He was sent with a fleet and a land army to subdue the Greeks the Persian Empire. Having to win the Greeks through amicable means and friendship, had restored the democratic constitutions in the Ionian cities, he moved across the Hellespont to Macedonia. On the coast of which his fleet foundered on Mount Athos, while the land army suffered great losses due to the Bryger what Mardonius returned to Asia.
During the second Persian war under Xerxes I, his cousin, in the year 480 BC, he sat down - as Herodotus reports - strongly and, against the advice of Xerxes ' uncle Artabanus experienced for the campaign, the third Perserzug one, he also planned.
He was given the command of the Persian land army, which invaded Greece. After the defeat of the Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis Mardonius remained with a large army in Thessaly, where he wintered. 479 he moved again to Hellas, a destroyed Athens a second time, but was defeated in September by the Greeks under the leadership of the Spartan Pausanias in the battle of Plataea, and fell by the hand of the Spartan Aeimnestes.
Swell
Herodotus: nine books on the history. Books VII.-IX.