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World history
Course: World history > Unit 2
Lesson 2: Classical Greece- Classical Greece
- The Greek polis
- The Greek polis
- State-building: the Greek polis
- Greco Persian Wars
- Second Persian Invasion
- Classical Greek Society and Culture
- Philosophy: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
- Classical Greek society
- Classical Greek culture
- Classical Greek society
- Classical Greek culture and society
- Classical Greece
- Prelude to the Peloponnesian War
- The Peloponnesian War
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Greco Persian Wars
What were the Greco Persian wars and how did they start? Sal explains.
Want to join the conversation?
- How does one know where to look to find out about the primary sources? Is there a list of passages related to this topic?
Thank you!(9 votes)- Yes there is, the histories revised by Penguin Books is an excellent source for you to get information. The bias of Herodotus is somewhat made balanced by the revisor's notes. The Greeks by Roy Burnell gives a colorful depiction of Greek life with intricate illustrations by Peter Connolly. Don Nardo has many books about the Greeks and Persians published by Lucent books. In his books Don Nardo creates a less biased view of the relationship between the Greeks and Persians. Then there is Paul Cartledge's The Spartans which talks about Spartan life and culture from Lycurgus to Augustus.
You can get The Histories, The Greeks and books written by Don Nardo at the library , while The Spartans you have to buy at the bookstore. That is all I know of now. I hope this is helpful. By the way good question!(17 votes)
- Does the Greco Persian War happen during Cyrus the Great?(5 votes)
- Cyrus the Great ruled before this, he conquered the Greeks in modern day Turkey (but this is not usually considered part of the Greco-Persian wars).
He made the Persian (Achaemenid) Empire much more powerful(6 votes)
- Why did the persian send there first flet up to Thasos when they wanted to take over athens(5 votes)
- Good question @Doctormacjuice! It isn't clear exactly why they went that way. They may have been going to pick up supplies, more troops, or possibly they were trying to avoid the storm that eventually took their fleet.(4 votes)
- after the Persian wars, which greek city-states was dominats(4 votes)
- During the Greco-Persian wars the Greeks engaged Persia as a unified entity. However, Athens was the city-state to really emerge as the dominant force in Greece after the wars. Sparta (which had the best trained military force in the Greek peninsula) was a rival with Athens and also wanted to exert its might and influence. The increasing tensions between these two city-states would lead to the eventual Peloponnesian wars.(2 votes)
- How did Persia influence Greek culture?(3 votes)
- Here's an excellent article on the subject. I found it by searching for "Persian influence on Ancient Greek Culture".
https://www.livius.org/articles/misc/persian-influence-on-greek-culture/(4 votes)
- This was one of my favourites lessons, so Thanks a lot.
Are there any evidences of how Athenians managed to defeat Persians? Did they have a strategy or anything like that? If yes, wich were those?(2 votes)- Hey, sorry that no one has gotten to your question yet! Lucky you, I'm here!
So the Athenians were a quite small force compared to a massive empire like the Persians. Also, you may want to also add the fact that the Spartans helped the Athenians win, which represented a victory for all of Greece. What they ended up doing, as forerunners in the field of battle strategy, was recognizing the scale of Persia's army. They knew that they were an extremely small group compared to the empire's broad armies, and that they would need to get Persian troops to be somewhere where their size wouldn't matter. What they ended up doing was aligning themselves at the other mouth of Thermopylae, where two canyons met in a tight corridor passing through towards Athens. There, Persian warriors wouldn't be able to take advantage of their size. The Spartans and Athenians together ended up winning this battle because of their strategy and beat back thousands of warriors, which greatly increased morale.
Hope this helped, and sorry for the wait :)(6 votes)
- Why is it called the "Greco" Persian wars? Also, where does the word "Greco" come from? I can tell it is similar to Greek or Greece. I was just curious.(3 votes)
- Greco means of or relating to Ancient Greece(4 votes)
- Why must we take the accounts of Herodotus with a "grain of salt"(3 votes)
- Why would they send a runner all the way from Athens to Sparta? Wouldn't it be much faster and easier to give the guy a horse?(2 votes)
- At, Sal did say a runner was sent as a messenger and it is true. Horses were considered a luxury and were highly prized in Ancient Greek society. They were sacrificed for gods, used for chariots for important soldiers or as a method of travel for rich Greeks. They were not used for running errands. 8:58(2 votes)
- Are there more theories besides this one on the battle between these two? Is just my opinion but since heredotus was greek doesn't his story seem kind of biased? And bce is another term for BC right?(3 votes)
- Of course Herodotus was biased in favor of his own people. Hondurans write the history of their war with El Salvador differently than Salvadoreans write it.
BCE (Before the common era) has replaced BC (before Christ) as being of a more ecumenical and inclusive spirit.(0 votes)
Video transcript
- [Instructor] This right here is a map of the Persian empire in 490 BCE, before the Common Era. And you see that it is
an extensive empire. It was established by Cyrus the Great and then this successors. We talked about it in previous videos how they were able to conquer
the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 539 BCE and then go on to conquer much of the middle east. They were able to conquer the
long-lived Egyptian empire. They seemed somewhat unstoppable
at this point in 490 BCE. At this point, we have Darius is ruler of the Persian Empire, the Achaemenic Empire, as
it's often referred to. And they're able to keep expanding until they come across some unexpected, unexpectedly resistant people, and that's the Greeks. This is probably one of the most famous and legendary stories
in history, the rivalry, the conflicts between the
Persians and the Greeks. You should maybe take it with
a little bit of grain of salt, because what we know of it, the history that I'm about to give you, comes to us from Herodotus. And Herodotus who's often
known as the father of history, he was Greek. And he also lived after a lot
of these conflicts happened and he wrote about these conflicts, his adult life was well
after these happened, so he had to talk to people
who were around that time and obviously, he is getting
the Greek side of the story. There are no surviving
Persian accounts for it, so you might want to take
it with a grain of salt because the accounts of Herodotus do tend to make the Greeks look pretty good. But let's just talk about what happened, because taking it with a grain of salt, it is a fascinating series of stories. So you have Darius as king, you can see the extent of
the Persian Empire in 490 BC or really at the turn of the century if we were to go back 10 years to 500 BCE, but they are in control of some folks who are are a little bit more rebellious than most of the people that
are within the Persian Empire. And they are in this
region right over here, known as Ionia, where
you had Greek settlements that are now under Persian control. From 500 BCE to about 494 BCE, so kind of the first 10 years
of the fifth century BCE, you have a series of revolts in Ionia. Let me zoom in on that a little bit, so we can see that, you can see our timeline, right over here. So this area, we're now zoomed in, this area is referred to as Ionia. This would be modern-day, the coast of modern-day Turkey. We're out here on the Anatolian Peninsula. And these rebellions in 498 BCE, the rebels are able to take
over and burn down Sardis which is under Persian control. The Persians under Darius
are not happy about this. So they send a force to, to take back control and also to get a little bit of revenge, because when the rebels were
able to take over Sardis, they had help from some
of their Greek brethren. It's important to note
that the the Greeks weren't some type of a unified state. They weren't a unified Empire
like the Persians were. They were a fragmented
group of city-states. You have the famous
Athens, Corinth, Sparta, all of these city-states, they shared a common language. They shared similar religion, but they were not one unified Empire. But when their brethren, the Greek rebels, these Ionic rebels, I guess you could say, rose up against the their Persian rulers, they had assistance from Athenians and from folks in Eritrea. So when Darius finds out about this, not only does he want to take
back what the rebels had, he wants to suppress them, he wants to put down that rebellion. He also wants to have
revenge on the Athenians and the Eritreans. So the first thing he does is he sends out a fleet in 492 BCE. You see his fleet here in green. This fleet that I am tracing. He sends it out in order to in order to, in order to seek revenge on the Athenians and the Eritreans. But he is unlucky and once again, these are the accounts of Herodotus. His fleet, his large
fleet, runs into a storm and is mostly destroyed, and is mostly destroyed. And so in 492 BCE, the
Persians are unsuccessful. But they are not satisfied. Darius is not happy with that idea that we are the largest empire known, we should be able to take
on these fragmented Greeks, with a much smaller population, much less wealth than
the mighty Persians do. So in 490 BCE, he sends out another attempt to take over, to seek revenge and to subjugate the
Eritreans and the Athenians. This time he is a little
bit more successful. His fleet is not destroyed. So this is in this brown color, I'll try to color it in. This brown color right over here, you can see the path
of the fleet this time. And he is eventually, he is able to subjugate
and take over Eritrea, but as he's going to Athens, which you can see right here, they decide to stop at Marathon. That word might be familiar to you and we'll talk about
in a second why it is. That is where they're
engaged by the Athenians. The Athenians are able
to defeat the Persians. This is a very big deal in history. Once again, this is Herodotus' account, but up to that point, the
Persians seemed invincible. But now the Athenians were able to actually destroy them in a battle. And the Persian fleet, they
go back to their boats, they run back to their
boats according to Herodotus and many of them are killed
as they as they retreat. They're going to go back
around the peninsula, potentially to go attack Athens. but they decide not to and they retreat. Now the word Marathon, this is a very big deal
in history first of all, is that this mighty empire
is put back in this battle. It oftentimes, historians will mark it as the beginning of a
kind of Greek ascendancy, the ascendancy of Greek civilization, at the end of these Greco-Persian Wars. We're really just in the
beginning periods of right now that's really the beginning
of the Greek golden age. But as we'll see, the Greco-Persian wars are not over with the battle at Marathon. That was just the first major interaction over the next few decades. Now one thing that you might be saying is, hey, that word marathon,
that seems familiar. Maybe some of you have run a marathon or you want to run a
marathon going 26.2 miles. You might say, is there any
relation to this battle, to this location in
Greece called, Marathon. The simple answer is, yes. So there's an apocryphal story, and when people say
apocryphal, they're like, "Well, we're not sure
if it really happened, "or maybe it didn't happen." And this one, people are
pretty sure it didn't happen. The story goes something like, when they had the battle, a messenger was sent
from Marathon to Athens and the distance from Marathon to Athens is roughly the distance
of a modern marathon, around 25 or 26 miles. The apocryphal story goes, they went to deliver the
message of the Persian attack and the success of the Athenians, and then when the messenger
gave that message, he just passed out and died. So when the modern Olympics
that we've set up now, over the last hundred and something years, they said, "Hey, let's have an event "that celebrates that run
from Marathon to Athens." That's where our modern
marathon actually comes from. Now the actual story as
best, as I can figure out, and I encourage you to
look up primary documents to figure this out for yourself, is it's mixing up a few stories. After the victory at Marathon, the Athenian army did quickly mobilize and go back to Athens
and cover that distance in order to defend Athens. Because remember it looks
like the Persian fleet were coming around this
peninsula right over here to get to Athens. The story of that runner is there was runner named, Filipides, who was sent from Athens to Sparta to convey a message. That's actually a much further distance. In a lot ways it's much more impressive, but those two stories
were mixed up together into the story of Marathon, which is where we get our modern-day distance of the marathon. Hey, let's all run roughly the distance from Marathon to Athens. In the next video, we'll see
that the Persians are not done. Darius will not be able
to seek the revenge that he wants in his lifetime, but his son Xerxes is
going to keep going at it.