Persian Wars Research Paper

The first battle of the Persian War, the Battle of Marathon, took place in 490 BC. King Darius sent troops to Greece which stopped at each Greek island along the way demanding "earth and water," which both literally and symbolically represented submission to the Persian empire. The Battle of Marathon exemplifies the heroic action of the Greeks. The Athenians, led by one of their ten generals, Miltiades, unflinchingly faced the Persians, an army over twice the size of theirs, and triumphed. The Athenians won the Battle of Marathon because they employed superior military strategy. There are some discrepancies, however, between different literary sources about how the Greeks fought the Battle of Marathon. For instance, Herodotus claims that the ten Athenian generals could not decide whether to go into battle. He writes that Miltiades talked the other generals into fighting. Herodotus writes that they waited for days for Miltiades to lead the army, and then they went into battle (Hdt. 6.110-111.2). According to Nancy Demand, however, Herodotus, unaware of the right of the polemarch to make all final decisions, wrote that Miltiades decided when to lead the men into battle, because the longer they delayed the battle, the better chance the Athenians had that the Spartans would make it in time to help. Regardless of any conflict between sources, the heroism of the Athenians cannot be denied. Marathon represents "the victory of a small contingent of men fighting

The victory that sealed the deal for the Greeks was the Battle of Plataea. It took place the following spring after the Persian general Mardonius wintered in Thessaly with the Persian army. Hoplites from Athens and Pelopennesia combined to make the largest army in Greek history. A Spartan king, Pausanias, who routed the Persian army and killed their general, led them.

Themistocles was aware that the only way to defeat the Persians was to cut of their naval power, so he devised a plan. He sent a slave to the Persians with a message that they were escaping, and the Persians sent ships to meet there escapees. The Athenian ships were prepared to face them. Their specialty in sea battles, along with the narrowness and swirls of the sea gave the Athenians an advantage. This strategy is what ultimately brought victory to the Greeks, as it left the Persians without a supply line and weakened their forces. The two events, the battle at Marathon and the battle at Salamis, showed that Athens was a great contributor to the war, both land and sea.

The first Battle of the Persian War was the Battle of Marathon. The Persian king Xerxes led 100,000 troops into battle against 10,000 Greeks. The Persians outnumbered the Greeks ten to one, but the Greeks had strategy and their terrain on their side. They were led by the brilliant strategist Miltiades, who had a plan. The Persians charged at the Greeks. Then, Miltiades sent his men to the sides, surrounding the Persians. This is known as the pincer movement, or double envelopment, because the soldiers from the flanks envelop the enemy. The Persians were trapped, and were soon defeated. Miltiades’ maneuver is still regarded as one of the greatest strategies of all time.

The Persian Wars were a series of conflicts fought between the Greek states and the Persian Empire from 500-449 BC. It started in 500 BC, when a few Greek city-states on the coast of Asia Minor, who were under the control of the Persian Empire, revolted against the despotic rule of the Persian king Darius. Athens and Eretria in Euboea gave aid to these Greek cities but not enough, and they were subdued by the Persians. The Persians became determined to conquer Hellas and make Athens and Eretria pay for helping the Ionian cities. In 492 BC, the first Persian invasion had its fleet crippled by a storm before it could do any damage. King Darius sent another Persian expedition in 490 which destroyed

The pre-eminence of the Greek soldier proved decisive in the Battle of Marathon. Although only ‘citizen soldiers’, the Greek hoplites were far more disciplined than their Persian counterparts and also better protected, with their bronze-visored helmets, solid bronze breastplates, shields and javelins. The Persians on the contrary were generally lightly dressed, with wicker shields and bows and arrows and sometimes had body armour of scales sewn to leather vest. Herodotus states that the Persians were “deficient in armour, untrained and greatly inferior in skill”. This crucial element destabilized the Persian assault as they fell at the hands of a much more skillful, better equipped and tactically superior Greek army. With their unprecedented use of battle strategy and intimate knowledge of their surroundings, the Greeks were able to defeat their Persian enemy.

The Battle of Thermopylae was fought between an alliance of Greek city-states, led by King Leonidas of Sparta, and the Persian Empire of Xerxes I over the course of three days, during the second Persian invasion of Greece. It took place simultaneously with the naval battle at Artemisium, in August or September 480 BC, at the narrow coastal pass of Thermopylae. The Persian invasion was a delayed response to the defeat of the first Persian invasion of Greece, which had been ended by the Athenian victory at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC.

One of the most significant battles in antiquity was fought on the narrow, tree strewn plain of Marathon, in September, 490 BC. There, the Athenian army defeated a Persian force more than twice its size, because of superior leadership, training and equipment. The battle of Marathon has provided inspiration to the underdogs throughout history. In 490 BC, the Athenians proved that superior strategy, and technology can claim victory over massive numbers.

The Persian Wars (499-479 BC) put the Greeks in the difficult position of having to defend their country against a vast empire with an army that greatly outnumbered

The Persian wars were a group of wars between the Persians (the largest empire) and the Greeks (city-states philosophers) from 492 bc to 449bc. The history is told in great part by Herodotus, a Greek historian, considered to write historical bias in regards to Greek & Persian history. Herodotus was said to investigate the Persian war, going through different lands and collecting personal inquiries, myths, legends and accounts of the Persian Wars. He was praised and honored for his recollection of the events, which were both factual and fictional. Herodotus wanted to pass down a history of why these two great people came into battle from a personal point of view.

The Battle of Thermopylae took place simultaneously with the naval battle at Artemisium, in August 480 BC, at the narrow coastal pass of Thermopylae, which was also known as "The Hot Gates". The Persian invasion was in fact a delayed response to the defeat of their first attempt, it ended with the Athenian victory at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. It was made clear with his strategy that Xerxes' expedition was undoubtedly directed towards Athens. However, his actual intent was to succeed in the conquest of Greece, and if it were to come into fruition, the Persian Empire could effortlessly spread into Europe. At the Battle of Marathon, King Darius attacked the Athenian and Ionian armies.

The First Persian War took place at the Battle of the Marathon near Athens and it was known as one of the infamous battle between the Athenians and the Persians. In 501 B.C.E., a Greek tyrant named Aristogorus provoked the Persian rulers by instigating an uprising in Miletus and Ionia to revolt against the Persian Empire. In order to ward off the Persian Empire’s wrath, Aristogorus reached out to his compatriots on the mainland in Greece of Athens and Sparta. “Sparta refused, but Athens sent twenty ships-enough just to anger the Persians, but not to save Miletus.” Nevertheless, the Athenians conquered the Persian’s capital of Lydian in Sardis in order to steal the golds, but they accidentally ended up burning down the richest capital of Sardis.

Moreover, in the Battle of Thermopylae, Persian forces led by Xerxes outnumbered the Greeks yet again. However, the militant Spartans took up arms and were able to defeat the large Persian army. Thermopylae allowed the Greek forces to come up with various tactics and strategies in order to defeat Persia. Next, the Battle of Salamis was a naval battle between several Greek city-states and Persia. This battle forms the turning point of the Greco-Persian Wars since it ultimately “saved Greece from being absorbed into the Persian Empire and ensured the emergence of Western civilization as a major force in the world.” The ending of the Battle of Salamis left the Persian army trapped in Greece, which paves the way for the final battle of the war, the Battle of Platea. In the battle, the “Greek army came and defeated the weakened Persians, the Persian Wars were over”. The mark of the ending of the Greco-Persian wars gave way to Athens arising from the ashes as the dominant and central city-state of Greece, which then provides political and cultural advancements during its golden age.

“The Persian Empire was the most powerful and aggressive power in the eastern Mediterranean at the time.” (Many Europes; pg 51). Before expanding the land, The Persian Empire had land that expanded west of Asia and included Egypt. With the defeat of the Assyrians Empire around 550 BCE with the leadership of King Cyrus, this gave them the name of the Persian Empire. That’s when the Empire began to expand its land and power with overtaking many different city-sates, like Lydians, Mesopotamians, and Babylonians, and incorporating them into the Persian Empire. It wasn’t until King Darius, who ruled from 521 BCE to 485 BCE, started to rule that the invasions were directed to the Greece. Now many of the Greeks thought that the Persian Empire was different and that was for a good reason. Not only did the empire have a

So, the Athenian soldiers and some of the people of Euboia who did not want to surrender scurried back to Athens. The Persians vigorously attacked the rest of the people in Euboia ending in many lives being lost on both sides and the enslavement of the remaining survivors (Souza, 30). Furthermore, the Persians next move was to gain ground in Attika by navigating through the Euboian Straight and docking at the Bay of Marathon (Brown, 3). Here they would have access to a lot of resources and have enough room to deploy their army.