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3. Caused and Consequences of Greek Wars

Greco-Persian Wars 1 2

The Persian Wars 1

  • A series of conflicts, from 499-449 BCE, between the Achaemenid Empire of Persia and city-states of the Hellenic world.
  • The Persian Wars led to the rise of Athens as the head of the Delian League.
  • These wars began in 499 BC when the Ionian Greeks revolted against the Persian Empire.
  • Greeks were defeated in 494 BC, but the Persians were defeated in 490 BC during the Battle of Marathon.
  • Hoplite was a Greek citizen-solder primarily armed with a spear and shield.
  • In 553 through 550 BCE, the Persian prince Cyrus led a successful revolt against the last Median king Astyages and founded the Achaemenid Empire.
  • The Ionians sought to maintain autonomy under the Persians as they had under the Lydians and resisted the Persians militarily for some time.
  • Darius vowed to exact revenge against Athens and developed a plan to conquer all Greeks in an attempt to secure the stability of his empire.
  • In 492 BCE, the Persian general, Mardonius, led a campaign through Thrace and Macedonia. He won, but he lost his 1200-ship fleet in a storm. That’s the First Persian Invasion.
  • Darius sent ambassadors to all Greek cities to demand full submission in light of the recent Persian victory, and all cities submitted, with the exceptions of Athens and Sparta, both of which executed their respective ambassadors.
  • In 486 BCE, Darius’s Egyptian subjects revolted, postponing any advancement against Greece. During preparations to march on Egypt, Darius died and his son, Xerxes I, inherited the throne.
  • In 482, the Greeks, under the Spartan Pausanias, defeated the Persian army at Plataea.
  • In 480 BCE, Xerxes sent a much more powerful force of 300,000 soldiers by land, with 1,207 ships in support, across a double pontoon bridge over the Hellespont. What’s called the Second Persian Invasion.
  • The battle of Thermopylae was a significant defeat for the Greeks, but it delayed the Persian advance and allowed the Greek navy to prepare for the next Battle. This is where the famous 300 Spartans fought.
  • Xerxes advanced into Attica, where he captured and burned Athens. But the Athenians had evacuated the city by sea, and under the command of Themistocles, defeated the Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis.
  • After the second Persian invasion of Greece was halted, Sparta withdrew from the Delian League and reformed the Peloponnesian League with its original allies.
  • Naxos was the first member of the Delian League to attempt to revolt, in approximately 471 BCE.

Misunderstood moments in history - why the Persians failed to conquer Greece 2

  • The Persian Empire was expanding till it reached the borders of Greece in 546 BC under the rule of Cyrus the Great.

Peloponnesian War 3 4 5

The Peloponnesian War 3

  • The Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE) was fought between Athens and its empire, Known as the Delian League, and the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta.
  • This is what is known as the Second Peloponnesian War in other sources.
  • During the first phase, known as the Archidamian War, Sparta launched repeated invasions of Attica while Athens took advantage of its naval supremacy to raid the Peloponnese coast.
  • The Peace of Nicias was signed in 421 BCE, concluding the first phase of the war. Due to the loss of war hawks in both city-states during the previous conflict, the peace endured for approximately six years.
  • The Battle of Mantinea was the largest land battle fought within Greece during the Peloponnesian War.
  • During the 17th year of war, Athens received news that one of their distant allies in Sicily was under attack from Syracuse. The people of Syracuse were ethnically Dorian like the Spartans, and Sicily and their allies, the Athenians, were ethnically Ionian.
  • In 415 BCE, Athens dispatched a massive expeditionary force to attack Syracuse in Sicily. The Athenian force consisted of more than 100 ships, approximately 5,000 infantry, and lightly armored troops.
  • This ushered in the final phase of the war, known as the Decelean War, or the Ionian War.
  • Democracy in Athens was briefly overthrown in 411 BCE as a result of its poor handling of the Peloponnesian War. Citizens reacted against Athens’ defeat, blaming democratic politicians for the city’s misfortunes.
  • The Spartan army encouraged revolt, installing a pro-Spartan oligarchy within Athens, called the Thirty Tyrants, in 404 BCE.
  • During the Thirty Tyrants’ rule, five percent of the Athenian population was killed, private property was confiscated, and democratic supporters were exiled.
  • A group of exiles led by Thrasybulus, a former trierarch in the Athenian navy overthrew the Thirty Tyrants in 403 BCE.
  • After the end of the Peloponnesian War, Lysander established many pro-Spartan governments throughout the Aegean.

Causes of the Peloponnesian War 4

  • What has become known as The First Peloponnesian War (c. 460-446 BCE) was less intense than the second and fought mainly between Athens and Corinth with occasional intervention by Sparta.
  • The second Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE) started by the Spartan king Archidamos invading Attica.
  • The heavily armed hoplite in the phalanx formation (lines of closely packed Hoplites protecting each other with their shields) still dominated the Greek battlefield but the phalanx did become deeper (more rows of men) and wider (a longer front of men) during the Peloponnesian War.
  • The principal Spartan strategy was to annually attack Athenian lands, starting in 431 BCE, creating as much destruction as possible such as burning farms, and chopping down olive trees and vineyards.

Athens vs Sparta (Peloponnesian war explained in 6 minutes) 5

  • First Peloponnesian War (460-445 BC).
  • Spartans defeated Athenians in 457 BC during the Battle of Tanagra.
  • After that, Athenians built strong walls around the city and a passage to the sea through the city of Piraeus.
  • Thirty Years Peace (445-431 BC), a treaty between Athens and Sparta, that only lasted 14 years.
  • In 431 BC, the Peloponnesian War began with Corinth, Sparta, and other Peloponnesian states against Athens and its allies.
  • Pericles planned the war to be a naval war, but the plague hit Athens in 430 BC, killing ⅓ of the population, including Pericles.
  • The Peace of Nicias (421 BC) was a treaty that lasted 6 years.
  • In 415 BC, Athenians attacked Sicily, but the expedition failed as Athena lost ⅔ of its ships and thousands of trained soldiers.
  • The Ionian War (413-404 BC) was the final phase of the Peloponnesian War, as the Ionian states revolted against Athens and refused to pay tribute.
  • The Persians supported the Spartans, and the Athenians were defeated in 404 BC.

The Downfall of Athenian Democracy 6

  • The father of Athenian democracy was Solon, the great statesman and lawgiver who first drew up a plan for a government intended to eschew monarchy and represent the will of the people by allowing all Athenian male citizens to participate in the workings of the state.
  • In 431 B.C. Pericles started a war to distract attention from his political and economic problems as he was accused of corruption.
  • In 421, Alcibiades, seeking to distract from a political scandal in which many of his rivals were calling for his arrest and trial, led a huge Athenian expeditionary force to Syracuse. But when word reached him that he had been relieved of command and ordered to return to Athens for trial, he promptly defected to Sparta and encouraged them to send aid to Syracuse. The Athenians ultimately suffered a terrible defeat at Syracuse, with most of their force wiped out.
  • Lycurgus had risen through the ranks and assumed command over Spartan forces in the final years of the war as he wiped out the once-formidable Athenian navy at the Battle of Aegospotami.
  • After the victory, the allies in the Peloponnesian League pushed towards destroying Athens and dividing its wealth among themselves. However, the Spartans refused to destroy the city and kept all the wealth for themselves which weakened Sparta as the other allies turned against them.
  • This was a good time for Athens to restore its democracy and throw off the rule of the Thirty Tyrants.

References

  1. Boundless World History: Lumen Learning: Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming: Internet Archive. (2024). Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/boundless-world-history/boundless-world-history/page/n631/mode/2up ↩↩

  2. Invicta. (2019, December 23). Misunderstood moments in history - why the Persians failed to conquer Greece [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/ZlwIKh2Qk14 ↩↩

  3. Boundless world history 1: Ancient civilizations – enlightenment - Version 35. (2022). Boundless.com. https://my.uopeople.edu/pluginfile.php/1849566/mod_book/chapter/501517/7.06__The_Peloponnesian_War.pdf ↩↩

  4. Cartwright, M. (2018, May 02). Peloponnesian war. In World History Encyclopedia. https://www.worldhistory.org/Peloponnesian_War/ ↩↩

  5. Epimetheus. (2018, June 5). Athens vs Sparta (Peloponnesian war explained in 6 minutes) [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/GjbfS8RDoYo ↩↩

  6. Scaliger, C. (2021, December 13). ATHENS: A cautionary tale of democracy’s failures: The Athenian experiment with democracy, including the Greek state’s rise to prominence and its eventual fall, provides valuable lessons for Americans today. The New American, 37(23). https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&u=lirn17237&id=GALE|A688150472&v=2.1&it=r&sid=bookmark-ITOF&asid=52b779a0 ↩