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…