In 484
BC the successor of the King of Persia Dareios, Xerxes, started the preparations for
another huge attack on Greece. As
a result, Corinth, Sparta
and Athens
signed the Anti-Persian Alliance or Hellenic Alliance
under the leadership of Sparta.
In
480
BC,
the Persians attacked again and defeated
Leonides' troops in the first battle in the North of Greece, near Thermopiles,
clearing like this their way down to Attica. As soon as they knew it,
the Athenians decided to leave their homes and everything behind them to
clear the whole region of Attica. They would go to the strait of
Salamina to give the decisive battle. The Persian burned down almost all
Athens and, what still remained standing, got destroyed on their way
back from Boethia. However, in the strait the agile ships from Athens
had better cards than the Persians and soon put them on the flight.
These returned then to the north of Greece, where they suffered another
terrible defeat. The fights in the Plataion plains under the leadership
of the Spartan Pausanias went on for some weeks.
At the same time, a Greek naval unit defeated the
rest of the Persian army in Mykale, the peninsula opposite to Samos,
definitively finishing with the Persian danger.
After the
victory, the opinion of the members of the
Hellenic Alliance were
completely different. The Spartans wanted to return to the mainland and
to stop their activities in Minor Asia. The Athenians felt really
encouraged and offered themselves to protect the cities of Minor Asia.
These were the seeds of the future naval alliance of Attica that would
be the basis of the great power achieved by Athens in the 5th century
BC. In 479/80 BC, the Athenian built a wall around Piraeus and Athens
without the approval of Sparta originating the first of the disputes
between both cities.
Early History / Archaic Age / Classical Age / Hellenic Age / The Army / Timeline
