Download The Greek Classical Period included two wars: the Persian Wars

The Greek Classical Period included two wars: the Persian Wars with the
Achaemenid Empire and the Peloponnesian War between Athens and
Sparta.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES [ edit ]
Explain the consequences of the Peloponnesian War
Describe the general course of the Peloponnesian War
Describe the significance of the Persian Wars during Classical Greece
KEY POINTS [ edit ]
The Persian Wars began in 499 BCE, when Greeks in the Persian­controlled territory rose in
the Ionian Revolt. Athensand other Greek cities sent aid, but were quickly forced to back down after
defeat in 494 BCE.
The following decades in the Persian Wars saw various Persian defeats at the hands of the Greeks,
led by the Athenians. Silver mining contributed to the funding of a massive Greek army that was
eventually able to rebuke Persian assaults and eventually defeat the Persians entirely.
The end of the Persian Wars led to the rise of Athens as the leader of the Delian League.
The Peloponnesian War can be divided into three phases: a period of Athenian raids on the
Peloponnese, the failure of an Athenian attack on Syracuse and the destruction of its entire fleet, and
the eventual defeat of the Athenians at the hands of the Spartans in the Decelean War.
The Peloponnesian War saw the decline of Athens and the rise of Sparta in the Greek Classical world.
It also brought widespread poverty to Greece and made civil war a common occurrence.
TERMS [ edit ]
Persian Wars
a series of conflicts between the Achaemenid Empire of Persia and city­states of the Hellenic world
that started in 499 BCE and lasted until 449 BCE.
Peloponnesian War
an ancient Greek war fought by Athens and its empire against the Peloponnesian League led by
Sparta.
Plateans
residents of Platea, an ancient city, located in Greece in southeastern Boeotia, south of Thebes.
Platea was the location of the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC, in which an alliance of Greek city­states
defeated the Persians. Plataea was destroyed in the Peloponnesian War by Thebes and Sparta in
427 BC and rebuilt in 386 BC.
Give us feedback on this content: FULL TEXT [ edit ]
The Greek Classical period saw two major wars: the Persian Wars (499­449 BCE) with the
Achaemenid Empire, and the Peloponnesian War (431­404 BCE) between the Delian League,
led by Athens, and the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta. The first war saw the rise of
Athens and led to itsGolden Age, while the second led to the defeat of Athens and the rise of
Sparta in Greek city­state power and politics.
The Persian Wars
In Ionia (the modern Aegean coast of Turkey), the Greek cities were unable to maintain their
independence and came under the rule of the Persian Empire in the mid­6th century BCE. In
499 BCE, Greeks in the region rose in the Ionian Revolt. Athens and other Greek cities sent
aid, but were quickly forced to back down after defeat in 494 BCE at the Battle of Lade. Asia
Minor returned to Persian control.
In 492 BCE, the Persian general Mardonius led a campaign through Thrace and Macedonia.
While victorious, he was wounded and forced to retreat back into Asia Minor. He
additionally lost his 1200­ship naval fleet to a storm off the coast of Mount Athos. In 490
BCE, Darius the Great, having suppressed the Ionian cities, sent a fleet to punish the Greeks.
Around 100,000 Persians landed in Attica intending to take Athens, but were defeated at the
Battle of Marathon by a Greek army of 9,000 Athenian hoplites and 1,000Plateans led by the
Athenian general Miltiades. The Persian fleet continued to Athens but, seeing it garrisoned,
decided not to attempt an assault.
Ten years later, in 480 BCE, Darius' successor, Xerxes I, sent a much more powerful force of
300,000 by land, with 1,207 ships in support, across a double pontoon bridge over the
Hellespont. This army took Thrace, before descending on Thessaly and Boetia, whilst the
Persian navy skirted the coast and resupplied the ground troops. The Greek fleet, meanwhile,
dashed to block Cape Artemision. After being delayed by Leonidas I, the Spartan king of the
Agiad Dynasty, at the Battle of Thermopylae (a battle made famous by the 300 Spartans who
faced the entire Persian Army), 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.In 483 BCE, during the time
of peace between the two Persian invasions, a vein of silver ore had been discovered in the
Laurion (a small mountain range near Athens), and the hundreds of talents mined there had
paid for the construction of 200 warships to combat Aeginetan piracy. A year later, the
Greeks, under the Spartan Pausanias, defeated the Persian army at Plataea. Following the
Battle of Plataea, the Persians began withdrawing from Greece and never attempted an
invasion again.
The Athenian fleet then turned to chasing the Persians from the Aegean Sea, and defeated
their fleet decisively in the Battle of Mycale; in 478 BCE, the fleet then proceeded to capture
Byzantium. In the course of doing so, Athens enrolled all the island states and some
mainland ones into an alliance called the Delian League, so named because its treasury was
kept on the sacred island of Delos. The Spartans, although they had taken part in the war,
withdrew into isolation afterwards, allowing Athens to establish unchallenged naval and
commercial power.
The Peloponnesian War
Alliances in the Peloponnesian War
This image depicts the alliances and strategies at the start of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE. The
extent of Athens and the Delian League is shown in red, while Sparta and the Peloponnesian League are
shown in blue.
The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) was an ancient Greek war fought by Athens and its
empire against the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta. Historians have traditionally
divided the war into three phases. In the first phase, the Archidamian War, Sparta launched
repeated invasions of Attica, while Athens took advantage of its naval supremacy to raid the
coast of the Peloponnese attempting to suppress signs of unrest in its empire. This period of
the war was concluded in 421 BCE, with the signing of the Peace of Nicias. That treaty,
however, was soon undermined by renewed fighting in the Peloponnese. In 415 BCE, Athens
dispatched a massive expeditionary force to attack Syracuse in Sicily; the attack failed
disastrously, with the destruction of the entire force, in 413 BCE. This event ushered in the
final phase of the war, generally referred to either as the Decelean War, or the Ionian War. In
this phase, Sparta, now receiving support from Persia, supported rebellions in Athens'
subject states in the Aegean Sea and Ionia, undermining Athens' empire, and, eventually,
depriving the city of naval supremacy. The destruction of Athens' fleet at Aegospotami
effectively ended the war, and Athens surrendered in the following year.
The Peloponnesian War reshaped the ancient Greek world. On the level of international
relations, Athens, the strongest city­state in Greece prior to the war's beginning, was reduced
to a state of near­complete subjection, while Sparta became established as the leading power
of Greece. The economic costs of the war were felt all across Greece; poverty became
widespread in the Peloponnese, while Athens found itself completely devastated, and never
regained its pre­war prosperity. The war also wrought subtler changes to Greek society; the
conflict between democratic Athens andoligarchic Sparta, each of which supported friendly
political factions within other states, made civil war a common occurrence in the Greek
world.
Greek warfare, meanwhile, originally a limited and formalized form of conflict, was
transformed into an all­out struggle between city­states, complete with atrocities on a large
scale. Shattering religious and cultural taboos, devastating vast swathes of countryside, and
destroying whole cities, the Peloponnesian War marked the dramatic end to the fifth century
BCE and the golden age of Greece.