Topic: politics (12)

• PersonArtemisia I of Halicarnassus

  Artemisia I of Halicarnassus was a widowed subject-dynast of Xerxes I who ruled Halicarnassus and several neighbouring Carian and Dorian communities. She brought five ships to the invasion of Greece and fought at Salamis in 480 BCE. Almost everything known about her comes from Herodotus, a later…

• PersonMardonius

  Mardonius (Old Persian Marduniya, d. 479 BCE) was a Persian noble of the first rank: son of Gobryas, one of the Seven who put Darius I on the throne, and himself married to a daughter of Darius. He commanded the expedition of 492 that re-secured Thrace and Macedonia for the empire (his fleet…

• EventThe Accession of Darius (522 BCE)

  The violent, contested seizure of the Achaemenid throne in 522 BCE: the killing of a king held to be an impostor magus, the coup of the Seven that raised Darius, and the year of rebellion that followed. It is the founding case of the imperial ideology of the Truth against the Lie, and the single…

• EventThe Battle of Marathon (490 BCE)

  The seaborne expedition of 490 BCE, led by the Median commander Datis and Artaphernes the younger, which sacked Naxos and Eretria and then landed on the plain of Marathon in Attica, where it was defeated by the Athenians and withdrew. In Greek, and above all Athenian, memory it became the founding…

• EventThe Battle of Mycale (479 BCE)

  The defeat, in the late summer of 479 BCE, of a beached Persian fleet and its covering army on the Ionian shore below Mount Mycale, opposite the island of Samos. Coming in the same season as the land defeat of Mardonius at Plataea, it ended Xerxes' invasion of Greece and, more consequentially for…

• EventThe Battle of Plataea (479 BCE)

  The land battle fought in the summer of 479 BCE on the plain of the Asopos river in Boeotia, near the ruined town of Plataea, in which the picked Persian army left in Greece under Xerxes' general Mardonius was beaten by a coalition of Greek states under the Spartan regent Pausanias, and Mardonius…

• EventThe Battle of Salamis (480 BCE)

  The naval defeat of Xerxes' fleet in the straits between Attica and the island of Salamis, on a day near the end of September 480 BCE, watched by the King from a throne on the shore. It is the most famous single engagement of the Achaemenid wars against the Greeks, and one of the sharpest tests…

• EventThe Fall of Babylon (539 BCE)

  The fall of Babylon in October 539 BCE was the conquest of the last native Mesopotamian empire by Cyrus II of Persia. Ruled by the absent and religiously heterodox Nabonidus and his regent-son Belshazzar, Babylonia fell in a campaign of a few weeks: a decisive battle at Opis, the surrender of…

• EventThe Ionian Revolt (499–494 BCE)

  The revolt of the Greek cities of the empire's north-western coast (Ionia, the Hellespont, Caria and Cyprus) against Darius I, from the failed attack on Naxos and the burning of Sardis in 499/8 to the sea-battle of Lade and the fall of Miletus in 494. From Susa and Sardis it was a provincial…

• PeopleThe Ionians

  The Ionians were the Greeks of western Asia Minor, the twelve cities of the central Aegean seaboard from Miletus in the south to Phocaea in the north, with Samos and Chios offshore (the islands’ effective subjection came later, and its date is disputed), who spent the better part of two centuries…

• ConceptThe Seven

  The Seven are the seven Persian nobles, Darius among them, who in September 522 BCE killed the man ruling the empire as Bardiya, son of Cyrus, and made Darius king. They are unique in Achaemenid history in being attested by two versions of the same list, set down separately, in different languages…

• EventXerxes' Invasion of Greece (480–479 BCE)

  The great expedition that Xerxes I led against the Greek mainland in 480–479 BCE, the largest single enterprise the Achaemenid Empire ever mounted and the campaign to which the component battles (Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, Mycale) belong. The campaign is best taken as a whole: its…