Invading Ancient Greece
In 493 BC, the playwright Phrynichus filled the theater of Athens with a single terrible scene. The Capture of Miletus showed the fall of a Greek city across the sea — its men killed, its women and children led away in ropes. The audience did not applaud. They wept. They wept so hard, and so long, that the city fined Phrynichus 1,000 drachmas and banned the play forever.
Key Terms
- Earth and Water
- The gift of soil and seawater a Greek city could hand a Persian governor — meaning total submission, not friendship.
- Darius
- The Great King who ordered a servant to repeat three words at every meal — "Master, remember the Athenians" — after Greeks burned one of his cities.
- Sardis
- The Persian city Ionian rebels burned in 498 BC, an act that sealed a king’s vow of vengeance against Athens.
- Miletus
- The heart of Ionia that Persian armies crushed and erased in 494 BC, ending the Ionian revolt.
- Miltiades
- The Athenian general who thinned his center to four ranks and stacked his wings eight ranks deep before a charge across open ground.
- Marathon
- The plain a day’s march from Athens where 6,400 Persians died in 490 BC against just 192 Athenians.
- Pheidippides
- The runner who covered 150 miles to Sparta in under two days seeking help before a battle on a nearby plain.
- Hoplite
- A Greek foot soldier who fought in heavy bronze armor, carrying a large round shield and a long spear.
- Xerxes
- The Persian king who, after a storm wrecked his bridge of ships, ordered the sea whipped and fetters thrown into the waves.
- Hellespont
- The strait of open sea that Persian engineers bridged by lashing hundreds of ships side by side into floating roads.
- Othismos
- The brutal, shield-against-shield shoving match that decided the outcome of a hoplite land battle.
- Themistocles
- The Athenian strategist who argued that a prophecy about a "wooden wall" from the oracle meant ships, not timber walls.
- Trireme
- A fast Greek warship rowed by three banks of oarsmen, built with a bronze ram fixed to its nose.
- Thermopylae
- The narrow coastal pass, nicknamed the "Hot Gates," so tight that in places only a single cart could fit between mountain and sea.
- Leonidas
- The King of Sparta who sent his allies home but stayed with 300 chosen men, each already the father of a living son.
- Dienekes
- The Spartan who answered a warning that arrows would blot out the sun by saying, "Then we will fight in the shade."
- Salamis
- The cramped straits where a Greek trick lured a huge Persian fleet so its tall ships had no room to turn.
- Serpent Column
- A bronze victory monument, melted down from captured Persian weapons, carved with the names of 31 cities that stood together.
- Plataea
- The land battle of 479 BC where Spartan-led hoplites crushed the Persian general Mardonius.
- Mycale
- The Greek naval victory in 479 BC that, together with a Spartan-led land victory the same year, ended the Persian invasion for good.