History of
Ancient Greece (3)

The Greeks, especially the Ionians, rebelled against the Persian rulers who had taken them over after the Persian Cyrus defeated the Lydian King Croesus (see timeline). King Darius I of Persia swore to punish for himself, and the uprisings were at first successful. He re-established his absolute control over Ionia after defeating the army Miletus and putting down the revolt in 493 BC. Darius sent advisers to Greece at the same time. Sparta and Athens refused and killed the Persian advisers as a signal of spite although most of the smaller states agreed. Darius, mad at the Greek abuse moved on to the plain of Marathon near Athens. Spartans stopped leaving, because the message arrived during a religious festival. The message was about the Atheanian leaders sent to Sparta for aid. Nevertheless, the Athenian army, under Miltiades, won an awesome victory over a Persian army three times as large, and the Persians left Greece.

Darius soon began to get ready for a third expedition. One of the largest armies in ancient history was brought by his son, Xerxes I, who succeeded him in 486 BC. The Persians crossed the Hellespont Strait over a bridge of boats and marched south in 481 BC (see map).

The Greeks made their first stand in 480 BC at the Battle of Thermopylae. Here the Spartan leader Leonidas I and several thousand soldiers defended themselves heroically in a narrow pass. An unfaithful Greek showed the Persians another path which allowed the invaders to enter the pass from the rear. Leonidas allowed most of his men to withdraw, but he and an army of 300 Spartans and 700 Thespians opposed to the end and were destroyed. The Persians then moved on to Athens burning the deserted city.

Meanwhile, the Persian followed the Greek ships to Salamis, an island in the Gulf of Aegina. In the naval battle that occurred, fewer than 400 Greek ships under the Athenian general Themistocles had beaten 1,200 Persian ships. Xerxes, who watched the battle from a golden royal seat on a hill above the harbor of Salamis, escaped to Asia. In the following year, 479 BC, the rest of the Persian armies in Greece were defeated at Platea, and the enemies were finally driven out.

Alexander the Great became King of Macedonia when his father, Phillip II was assassinated in 336BC. He immediately tried to stop insurrections--both inside Grecce and internationally and established himself as a powerful leader. In campaigns against Greece, Egypt and the Persian Empire, Alexander and his troops had conquered most of the civilized world by the time he died in 323 BC at the age of 33. His military genius was as big as his ego and his ruthlessness.

Following the death of Alexander, the Macedonian generals began to share his unlimited empire among themselves. The disagreements which started from this division started a series of wars from 322 to 275 BC, which took place in Greece. So, one of the characteristics of the Hellenistic period (which lasted from the death of Alexander until the addition of Greece as a Roman province in 146 BC) was the decline of the Greek city-states as political units and the regular decline of Greek political freedom as a whole. Still, the Hellenistic period was known for the joy of Greece as the cause of culture, and its way of life was shared, and as a result of Alexander's conquests throughout most of the ancient world.