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The second Persian invasion of Greece (480–479 BC) occurred during the Greco-Persian Wars, as King Xerxes I of Persia sought to conquer all of Greece. The invasion was a direct, if delayed, response to the defeat of the first Persian invasion of Greece (492–490 BC) at the Battle of Marathon, which ended Darius I's attempts to subjugate Greece.
Fearing the Greeks might attack the bridges across the Hellespont and trap his army in Europe, Xerxes now retreated with much of the Persian army back to Asia, [128] though nearly all of them died of starvation and disease on the return voyage. [129] He left a hand-picked force, under Mardonius, to complete the conquest the following year. [130]
Xerxes is a central character of Aeschylus' play The Persians, first performed in Athens in 472 BC, only seven years after his invasion of Greece. The play presents him as an effeminate figure and his hubristic effort to bring both Asia and Europe under his control leads to the ruin of both himself and his kingdom.
However, the Athenians did not have the manpower to fight on land and sea; and therefore combatting the Persians would require an alliance of Greek city states. In 481 BC, Xerxes sent ambassadors around Greece asking for earth and water, but made the very deliberate omission of Athens and Sparta. [23]
The destruction of Athens, took place between 480 and 479 BCE, when Athens was captured and subsequently destroyed by the Achaemenid Empire.A prominent Greek city-state, it was attacked by the Persians in a two-phase offensive, amidst which the Persian king Xerxes the Great had issued an order calling for it to be torched.
The military history of Greece between the end of the second Persian invasion of Greece and the Peloponnesian War (479–431 BC) is not well supported by surviving ancient sources. This period, sometimes referred to as the pentekontaetia ( πεντηκονταετία , the Fifty Years ) by ancient writers, was a period of relative peace and ...
This is a list of known wars, conflicts, battles/sieges, missions and operations involving ancient Greek city states and kingdoms, Magna Graecia, other Greek colonies (First Greek colonisation, Second Greek colonisation, Greeks in pre-Roman Crimea, Greeks in pre-Roman Gaul, Greeks in Egypt, Greeks in Syria, Greeks in Malta), Greek Kingdoms of Hellenistic period, Indo-Greek Kingdom, Greco ...
The Battle of Artemisium or Artemision was a series of naval engagements over three days during the second Persian invasion of Greece.The battle took place simultaneously with the land battle at Thermopylae, in August or September 480 BC, off the coast of Euboea and was fought between an alliance of Greek city-states, including Sparta, Athens, Corinth and others, and the Persian Empire of ...