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Persian Wars In 519 BC Darius I ascended the throne of the expanding empire of Persia. A group of people called the Ionians, lived along the coast of Asia Minor. They were under Persian rule, having been conquered by Emperor Cyrus (ruled 550 - 530 BC), and at this time were unhappy about their conditions. In 499 BC Aristagoras, the leader Miletus, one of the city-states, organized a revolt of all the rest of the city-states along the coast. Dariusmanaged however, to subdue things in a five-year campaign.
After this long sought victory, Darius became bent on revenge against Athens, one ofthe few states outside the area that had helped the rules. He appealed to Sparta to attack Athens from behind, but the Spartans saw straight through his planned conquest of Greece and threw his envoy in a well. The Persian army then landed at Marathon in 490 BC. The 10, 000 Athenian infantry were supported only by a small group of soldiers from Plataea (Sparta procrastinated because it was in the middle of a festival), but nevertheless the Athenians defeated the Persian archers and cavalry through a series of ingenious maneuvers.
Darius died in 485 BC before his plans for another attempt reached fruition, so it was left to his son Xerxes to fulfill his fathers ambition of conquering Greece. In 480 BC Xerxes gathered men from every nation ohio far-flung empire and launched a coordinated invasion by army and navy, the size of which the world had never seen. The historian Herodotusgave five million as the number of Persian soldiers. No doubt this was across exaggeration, but it was obvious Xerxes intended to give the Greeks more than a bloody nose. The Persians dug a canal near present-day Ierissos so that their navy could bypass the rough seas around the base of the Mt.
Athos peninsula (where they had been caught before). They also spanned the Hellespont with pontoon bridges for their army to march over. Some 30 city-states of central and southern Greece met in Corinth to devise a common defense (others, including the oracle at Delphi, sided with the Persians). They agreed on a combined army and navy under Spartancommand, with the Athenian leader Themistokles providing the strategy.
The Spartan king Leonidas led the army to the pass at Thermopylae, near present-day Lamia, the main passage from northern into central Greece. This bottleneck was easy to defend, and although the Greeks were greatly outnumbered they held the pass until a traitor showed the Persians a waiver the mountains. The Greeks were forced to retreat, but Leonidas, alongwith 300 of his Spartan elite troops, fought to the death. The fleet, which held off the Persian navy north of Euboea (Even), had no choice but to retreat as well.
The Spartans and their Peloponnesian allies fell back on their second line of defense (an earthen wall across the Isthmus of Corinth), while the Persians advanced upon Athens. Themistokles ordered his people to flee the city: the women and children to Salamis, the men to sea on the Athenianfleet. The Persians razed Attica and burned Athens to the ground. By skillful maneuvering, however, the Greek then ensnared the large Persian Ships in the narrow waters off Salamis, where they became easy pickings for the agile Greek vessels. Xerxes, who watched the defeat of his mighty fleet from the shore, returned to Persia in disgust, leaving his general Mardonius to subdue Greece with the army. A year later, the Greeks under the Spartan general Pausanias obliterated the Persian army the Battle of Plataea.
The Athenian navy sailed to Asia Minor and destroyed what was left of the Persian fleet at Male, freeing the Ionian city-states there from Persian rule.
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Research essay sample on Asia Minor City States
