Ancient Greece · Part 5 · Wars and empire · B2
The Persian Wars
Part 5 of Ancient Greece: in 490 and 480 BCE, the largest empire in the world invaded mainland Greece, and lost. For the Greeks it was the greatest story they ever told; for the Persians, it seems to have been a frontier war. Narrative tenses: past simple, past continuous, past perfect and past perfect continuous, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the war the Greeks never stopped talking about: Greeks against Persians.
Marathon! The runner who ran all the way to Athens and died!
A wonderful story, which Herodotus never tells. Let us see which parts we can trust.
In 499 BCE, the Greek cities of Ionia, on the coast of Anatolia, rebelled against Persia. Athens sent ships to help, and the rebels burned the Persian city of Sardis. The revolt was crushed, and King Darius decided to punish Athens.
In 490 BCE, a Persian force landed at Marathon, near Athens, and was defeated by the Athenians and their allies from Plataea. Ten years later, Darius’s son Xerxes invaded Greece with an enormous army and fleet. The Greeks lost at Thermopylae, the Persians burned Athens, but the Greek fleet won at Salamis in 480, and the Greek army at Plataea in 479.
Almost everything we know comes from Greek writers, above all Herodotus. Not all Greeks fought against Persia: many cities, including Thebes, joined Xerxes, and Greeks from Ionia rowed in his fleet.
Or try our free games and lessons.