Events (13)

A catalogue view: every article filed as event. For the encyclopaedia arranged by subject, see the themes.

• 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 Cunaxa (401 BCE)

  The Battle of Cunaxa (401 BCE) was the decisive clash between the royal army of Artaxerxes II and the coalition raised by his younger brother, Cyrus the Younger, somewhere north of Babylon. It was a civil war fought by two mixed royal armies, not a simple contest between Greeks and Persians.…

• 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 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…

• EventThe Conquest of Egypt by Cambyses

  The conquest of Egypt by Cambyses II, conventionally dated to 525 BCE, brought the Nile valley under Achaemenid rule. Cambyses II, the son and successor of Cyrus II, crossed the northern Sinai with Arabian assistance, defeated the forces of Psammetichus III near the Pelusiac mouth of the Nile, and…

• EventThe Egyptian Revolts and Reconquest (405/4–343/2 BCE)

  The Egyptian revolts and reconquest were the staggered secession of Egypt from Achaemenid rule between 405/4 and 400/399 BCE, roughly six decades of native dynastic independence, and the campaigns that restored Persian control of the Delta and Memphis in 343/2. Its exact seasonal course across the…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…