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Persian Wars were wars fought between the Persian Empire and Greek city states in the 5th century BCE. The Persian Empire under Darius was expanding westward into Europe, and had targeted the powerful Greek states, particularly Athens, in order to capture what was the major power in the region at the time. The Greeks were able to hold their territory, and as a result they were able to preserve their civilization.The Persian Empire was probably the largest and most powerful at the time. The empire has spread across Asia Minor, Thrace and Macedonia, and was targeting peninsular Greece. The Persians led a cosmopolitan force, emblematic of their empire, which had religious freedom, tolerance, and incorporated many cultures. The Greeks, however, were a strong culture in their own right, and resisted the idea of subjugation by the Persians. Darius had requested that the Greeks submit to his rule, but Athens and Sparta agreed to work together to rebuff the Persians (Cartwright, 2016).
The Persians had numerical superiority, and had captured a number of Greek islands on their way to the mainland. However, their arrows were light, and largely ineffective against Greek armor. The Greeks held disciplined...
This allowed the Greeks to achieve several victories during the war, notably at Marathon. At Thermopylae, the Spartans held off the forces of King Xerxes, which allowed the Greeks time to prepare for a longer siege at the hands of the Persians.
After the Greeks won a naval battle at Salamis, and the Persians had sacked Athens, the final battle would come at Plataea (Nagle, 2013). The Greeks again won with ground superiority of the hoplites. This battle essentially ended Persian ambitions to take peninsular Greece, and Xerxes basically called of the invasions of Greece at this point (Cartwright, 2016).
The outcome of the Persian Wars was profound on Greece. First, the Greeks brought back the Ionian islands into their field of influence, but perhaps more important they targeted Byzantium as a key holding. So the Greeks were motivated to work with each other more than prior to the invasion, and this allowed for a few things. First, it allowed for a greater Hellenistic culture to emerge (Cartwright).
While many sources cite that a flowering of Greek art and culture followed the…
Persian Wars (490 BCE to 479 BCE) between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire were predicated by various circumstances, ranging from cultural ideologies to political connivances. For the Greeks, particularly the Ionians and the Athenians, Persian rule was unwanted and unacceptable. The Persian leaders Darius and his son Xerxes, however, following in the example of Cyrus the Great, saw the Greek city-states as puny colonies that were to be
The Greeks initiated the process of retaking their cities previously conquered by Persians and set tributes. Under the lead of Alexander the Great, Greece enlarged its spatial boundaries "from southern Egypt to the gates of China." (Robert Morkot, Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Greece) Ending the war Twenty years after the commence of Persian attacks, Greek military general Themistocles managed to obviate the Persian threat over Greece. "The Greek victory was
Also, from Herodotus's books we see that some of them, obeying the famous oracle of Delphi, or using its predictions as an excuse, decided to surrender, and give "earth and water." This is particularly relevant on the influence of religion in that period. It was not uncommonly for wars to be delayed or even abandoned because of the predictions of oracles and the one in Delphi, which had a primary
Athens and Sparta -- Was War Inevitable? Between 500 and 350 BC the area now known as Greece was but a collection of separate and unallied city-states. Today, we often view cultures and political conflict in terms of nations, and take the view that since city-states were geographically close, culture was the same. This, however, was untrue, particularly in the case of the two most powerful and well-known city states of
The Greco-Persian Wars were still in their early stages at this point, but it would be Xerxes, not Darius, that continued and stepped up efforts to invade and conquer the Attic Greeks. If the Battle of Marathon had turned the other way, as many at the time expected it to and as many historians and tacticians believe it easily could and by all rights should have, the entire course of
In the end, the Spartan/Greek army's superior armor and weapons and clever use of topography to counterbalance the Persian's greater numbers helps to explain their victories on a military level. Unfortunately, Leonidas and his fellow Spartans were massacred after a local Greek revealed to Xerxes a secret route around the narrow pass, allowing the Persians to attack the Spartans from the front and the rear at the same time. At