Oracles, Omens and an Uncertain Death Toll

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

No scholarly synthesis totals the Greco-Persian Wars' dead across the full half-century of conflict, from the Ionian Revolt through the last engagements in Asia Minor decades later. Herodotus records figures for Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea and Mycale, but modern historians regard many of his numbers, including the reported size of the Persian invasion force itself, as unreliable, and no revised total reconciling the individual battles into one war-wide figure has ever been produced by later scholarship on the wars.

The Greek states repeatedly consulted the oracle at Delphi before and during the mainland invasion, most consequentially the two Athenian responses of 481 BCE naming Salamis directly as the place where the invasion would be decided. Both sides also read omens and portents through the campaign, and later suspicion that Delphi had made its own accommodations with the advancing Persian court shadowed the oracle's reputation for a full generation afterward, a suspicion later writers attached squarely to the priesthood administering the shrine rather than to the god it served.