Topic: reception (8)

• SourceAeschylus, Persae (The Persians)

  The Persae of Aeschylus, "The Persians", produced at Athens in 472 BCE, is the earliest surviving account of any Achaemenid event by a contemporary, and the only Greek tragedy on a historical rather than mythological subject to survive complete. It was staged eight years after the sea-battle at…

• PersonDarius III

  Darius III (Old Persian throne name Dārayavahuš; personal name Artašata, the form recorded in the Babylonian diaries; called Codomannus by the Roman epitomator Justin) was the last King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire, reigning from 336 to 330 BCE. He came to the throne from a collateral branch…

• 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 Thermopylae (480 BCE)

  The forcing of the coastal pass of Thermopylae by Xerxes I in high summer 480 BCE, during his invasion of Greece. A small allied Greek army under the Spartan king Leonidas held the defile for some days against the King's advance, was outflanked by a Persian column sent over the Anopaea mountain…

• ConceptThe paradise garden

  The enclosed, well-watered royal park of the Persian king and his satraps, and the single most resonant word the Achaemenids gave to the languages of Europe. In its own tongue the name was concrete and unromantic: Old Iranian pairi-daiza-, 'a walled enclosure', from pairi- 'around' and *daiza-…

• EventThe Retreat of the Ten Thousand (401–399 BCE)

  The Retreat of the Ten Thousand was the withdrawal and subsequent dispersal, from 401 to 399 BCE, of the Greek force that had marched with Cyrus the Younger after he was killed at Cunaxa. The soldiers first joined Cyrus's Asian troops under Ariaeus and negotiated with Artaxerxes II through…

• PlaceThe Xerxes Canal

  The Xerxes Canal was a navigable channel cut through the neck of the Athos peninsula in northern Greece on the orders of Xerxes I, during the regional preparations made over roughly the three years before his invasion of Greece in 480 BCE (see the invasion of Greece). Herodotus describes conscript…

• PersonTomyris

  Tomyris (Greek Τόμυρις; fl. c. 530 BCE) is, in the account of Herodotus, the queen of the Massagetae, the nomad people beyond the Araxes against whom Cyrus the Great led his final campaign. Ruling alone after her husband's death, she refused Cyrus's offer of marriage, seeing that his suit aimed at…