A series of wars fought by Greece and Persia between 492-449 BC—best remembered in the Battle of Marathon, the Battle of Thermopylae, and the fateful story of Leonidas and the 300—often retold as a moral lesson of the indomitable Greek will of freedom over Persian tyranny.
Ever since Cyrus II the Great had founded the Achaemenid Empire in 559 BC, the Persians had been on an ever expanding conquest of new lands. By the beginning of the 5th Cent, their territorial command extended from Bactria in the east to Asia Minor in the west which was peppered with numerous Greek colonies. These city-states were then placed under the rule of tyrants appointed by Persia. In 499 Aristogoras, the tyrant ruler of Miletus, sensing he would soon be removed for a major debacle of his own doing, together with his father-in-law, Histiaeus, (as whose deputy he was ruling Miletus, had once been imprisoned for similar offences) decided to incite the Greeks of the Ionian regain to rebel against their Persian master. Into this so-called "Ionian Revolt" the Greeks city-states on mainland Greece piled with their aid and support. Though the revolt was soon subdued, Darius I vowed to teach the mainland Greeks a lesson for their support of the revolt. He also saw in this an opportunity to expand his territorial ambitions into the Greek mainland. In 491 BC he sent ambassadors to the Greek cities to ask for a gift of "earth and water" as a token of their submission to his power. Many of the Greek cities complied. Athens and Sparta, however, showed their disdain by ditching the Persian emissaries into wells. So followed the most famous of the battles at the peak of the wars at Marathon (490 BC), Thermopylae and Salamis (480 BC), and Platea (479 BC). (Darius died in 486 BC, and the prosecution of the war was carried on by Xerxes I, who took Esther as his queen.) Despite being largely outnumbered, the Greeks managed to repel the Persians. While the conflict continued even after Platea, the worse was over for the Greeks, who could now return to their hobby of bickering with one another.
Most of what we know about the Greco-Persian wars come from the writings of Herodotus (Histories) and Xenophon (Anabasis), and Diodorus Siculus (Bibliotheca Historica).
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