These city-states were not unified and thus were in danger if King Darius ever decided to conquer Greece. In B. Darius easily crushed the revolt. He then retaliated against Athens by mounting a massive seaborne invasion of Greece in B. The Athenians with a few allies defeated Darius at the battle of Marathon. Herodotus described how the Athenians finally won:.
In their victory there, they allowed the barbarian troops that they had routed to flee and then. His son, Xerxes, succeeded him in B. A few years after Darius died, Xerxes decided to lead a second invasion of Greece. Herodotus quoted a long speech Xerxes made to the Persian nobles, stating his reasons and intentions. This speech, like others that Herodotus quoted in The Histories, probably never took place. Persians, I am not about to introduce a new custom to you, instead I shall follow the tradition handed down to me.
I was struck by the realization that we could gain glory; take possession of lands fully as extensive, productive, and fertile as those which we have now; and at the same time obtain vengeance and retribution, too.
He also assembled a navy that consisted of war ships from subject states. As the massive army and navy moved toward Athens, Spartans held a key pass in the mountains at Thermopylae.
Xerxes asked an exiled Spartan if his countrymen would fight the overwhelming Persian army. For though they are free, they are not free in all respects, for they are actually ruled by a lord and master: law is that master, and it is the law that they inwardly fear—much more so than your men fear you.
They do whatever it commands, which is always the same: It forbids them to flee from battle, and no matter how many men they are fighting, it orders them to remain in their rank or perish.
Xerxes laughed at this, wrote Herodotus, but was stunned when the Spartans repelled three assaults by his army. The Spartans were defeated only after a Greek betrayed them by showing the Persians a concealed path through the mountains. The Athenian leader Themistocles persuaded the others that this meant the Athenians should fight at sea with their wooden ships.
The Athenian navy destroyed the Persian fleet as Xerxes looked on in horror. The Spartans went on to win a great land victory over the Persian army, forcing it to march back across the pontoon bridge to Persia, never to return. After the defeat of Xerxes, many Greek city-states joined a league, headed by Athens with its superior navy, to defend Greece from any further Persian invasions.
Athens, however, began to demand tribute—money, soldiers, or warships—from league members. In addition, Athens forced other city-states to join the league and prevented any member from leaving it.
It also pressured league cities to adopt a democratic government like its own. The combination of tribute and expanded trade created a wealthy Athenian Empire. This, in turn, enabled Pericles, the leader of the Athenian democracy, to launch a major building program in the city. One of his projects included the famous Parthenon, a temple to the goddess Athena.
Pericles admitted that the Athenian Empire was a tyranny but argued the benefits it brought to Athens outweighed its evils.
Meanwhile, the Spartans with their dominant land army withdrew to their homeland of Peloponnesus, a wide peninsula connected to the Greek mainland by a narrow strip of land. Sparta differed greatly from Athens. It was a regimented, militaristic society.
All Spartan males, ages 20—60, were soldiers. Women and slaves performed most other tasks in Sparta. Its government was an oligarchy, drawn from the professional warrior class. As Athens gathered more Greek city-states into its empire, the Spartans began to view the Athenians as a threat.
Sparta formed its own defensive league, and before long sporadic fighting broke out with Athens and its allies. A peace treaty between Athens and Sparta did not last long, and in B.
Fighting in Greece continued for most of the next 27 years. Herodotus was still alive at the start of the Peloponnesian War, but another Greek, Thucydides , would write its history. Thucydides was born into a wealthy Athenian family about B. Little else is known about the first 30 years of his life. Assigned to command a fleet off the coast of Thrace, he failed to prevent the Spartans from capturing an Athenian colony.
As was the custom, Athens punished Thucydides by exiling him from Athens for 20 years. With lots of time on his hands, Thucydides decided to write a prose account of the war as it happened, almost like a modern news reporter.
He traveled extensively into the war zones, observed battles, interviewed Athenian and Spartan military and political leaders, and read documents relating to the war. He was the first to analyze human behavior in wartime. He concluded that war was rooted in human nature and would be repeated in the future.
Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides rejected telling crowd-pleasing stories and concentrated on the facts of important events. He avoided writing about myths, oracles, and superstitions. He recognized that even eyewitnesses could not always be reliable sources. In general, he tried hard to be accurate, fair, and unbiased. Like Herodotus, Thucydides quoted speeches, but these actually took place. Thucydides heard some of them himself. Typically slow to act, Sparta finally agreed to lead the fight against Athens, demanding that it restore independence to the Greek cities under its control.
Thucydides wrote that only an honest leader like Pericles could make Athenian democracy work. Open Access. Open Access for Authors.
Open Access and Research Funding. Open Access for Librarians. Open Access for Academic Societies. About us. Stay updated. Corporate Social Responsiblity. Investor Relations. Review a Brill Book. Reference Works. Primary source collections. Open Access Content. Contact us. Sales contacts. Publishing contacts. Social Media Overview. Terms and Conditions. Privacy Statement. Login to my Brill account Create Brill Account. Author: Tim Rood. Herodotus is perhaps quasi-scientific in his account; he is at least approaching it rationally.
Why is this wrong? But this does not happen. So the winds cannot be the cause. Melting snows fill up the Nile at its source, and these overfill the river.
Herodotus main claim: The Greeks took their gods from the Egyptians and not vice versa. This, for Herodotus, does not show that the Greek gods are any less real. Herodotus is agnostic about the ultimate origins of the gods, since the Greeks simply do not have knowledge of the ancient past.
The legendary fight occurred because the treasure and Helen were all detained in Egypt. Another interesting methodological note: Herodotus comparatively evaluates the stories of the Egyptians and the Iliad, and declares the Egyptian story more likely. The modern historian has to sift through evidence as well. His book is called The History of the Peloponnesian Wars. This war was a year conflict between Athens and her allies and Sparta and hers, starting in , ending in Sparta was the eventual victor.
He was actually a general in the war for a time, but was exiled from Athens and discharged from his service in for failure to obey commands from his commanding officer. So he wrote his history as a contemporary observer; perhaps we should say that he was a historian of the present if there can be such a thing , or that Thucydides was a journalist with a taste for uncovering the big picture and basic causes. His book is, far and away, our greatest source of evidence for the Peloponnesian War; virtually no other information exists beyond scattered archeological finds.
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