The Greek and Persian Wars Parts I & II
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The Greek and Persian Wars Parts I & II Professor John R. Hale THE TEACHING COMPANY ® PUBLISHED BY: THE TEACHING COMPANY 4151 Lafayette Center Drive, Suite 100 Chantilly, Virginia 20151-1232 1-800-TEACH-12 Fax—703-378-3819 www.teach12.com Copyright © The Teaching Company, 2008 Printed in the United States of America This book is in copyright. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of The Teaching Company. John R. Hale, Ph.D. Director of Liberal Studies, University of Louisville John R. Hale, Director of Liberal Studies at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, is an archaeologist with fieldwork experience in England, Scandinavia, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, and the Ohio River Valley. At the University of Louisville, Dr. Hale teaches introductory courses on archaeology and specialized courses on the Bronze Age, the ancient Greeks, the Roman world, Celtic cultures, Vikings, and nautical and underwater archaeology. Archaeology has been the focus of Dr. Hale’s career from his B.A. studies at Yale University to his doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, where he received his Ph.D. The subject of his dissertation was the Bronze Age ancestry of the Viking longship, a study that involved field surveys of ship designs in prehistoric rock art in southern Norway and Sweden. During more than 30 years of archaeological work, Dr. Hale has excavated at a Romano-British town in Lincolnshire, England, as well as at a Roman villa in Portugal; has carried out interdisciplinary studies of ancient oracle sites in Greece and Turkey, including the famed Delphic Oracle; and has participated in an undersea search in Greek waters for lost fleets from the Greek and Persian wars. In addition, Dr. Hale is a member of a scientific team developing and refining a method for dating mortar, concrete, and plaster from ancient buildings—a method that employs radiocarbon analysis with an accelerator mass spectrometer. Dr. Hale has published his work in Antiquity, Journal of Roman Archaeology, The Classical Bulletin, and Scientific American. Most of Dr. Hale’s work is interdisciplinary and involves collaborations with geologists, chemists, nuclear physicists, historians, zoologists, botanists, physical anthropologists, geographers, and art historians. Dr. Hale has received numerous awards for his distinguished teaching, including the Panhellenic Teacher of the Year Award and the Delphi Center Award. He has toured the United States and Canada as a lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America and has presented lecture series at museums and universities in Finland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Dr. Hale is the instructor of another Teaching Company course, Classical Archaeology of Ancient Greece and Rome. ©2008 The Teaching Company. i Table of Contents The Greek and Persian Wars Professor Biography.....................................................................................................................................................i Course Scope................................................................................................................................................................1 Lecture One The First Encounter ............................................................................................................2 Lecture Two Empire Builders—The Persians..........................................................................................4 Lecture Three Intrepid Voyagers—The Greeks.........................................................................................6 Lecture Four The Ionian Revolt ...............................................................................................................8 Lecture Five From Mount Athos to Marathon.......................................................................................10 Lecture Six Xerxes Prepares for War...................................................................................................12 Lecture Seven The Athenians Build a Fleet .............................................................................................14 Lecture Eight Heroes at the Pass .............................................................................................................16 Lecture Nine Battle in the Straits............................................................................................................18 Lecture Ten The Freedom Fighters.......................................................................................................20 Lecture Eleven Commemorating the Great War........................................................................................22 Lecture Twelve Campaigns of the Delian League......................................................................................24 Lecture Thirteen Launching a Golden Age ..................................................................................................26 Lecture Fourteen Herodotus Invents History................................................................................................28 Lecture Fifteen Engineering the Fall of Athens .........................................................................................30 Lecture Sixteen Cyrus, Xenophon, and the Ten Thousand.........................................................................32 Lecture Seventeen The March to the Sea........................................................................................................34 Lecture Eighteen Strange Bedfellows...........................................................................................................36 Lecture Nineteen The Panhellenic Dream.....................................................................................................38 Lecture Twenty The Rise of Macedon........................................................................................................40 Lecture Twenty-One Father and Son ..................................................................................................................42 Lecture Twenty-Two Liberating the Greeks of Asia...........................................................................................44 Lecture Twenty-Three Who Is the Great King? ....................................................................................................46 Lecture Twenty-Four When East Met West ........................................................................................................48 Maps ...........................................................................................................................................................................50 Overview of Major Phases ........................................................................................................................................69 Timeline......................................................................................................................................................................70 Glossary......................................................................................................................................................................74 Biographical Notes.....................................................................................................................................................77 Bibliography...............................................................................................................................................................81 ii ©2008 The Teaching Company. The Greek and Persian Wars Scope: This course presents a rare opportunity to survey the entirety of the two-centuries-long conflict between the Greeks and the Persians: the greatest military contest in antiquity and one that forever changed the patterns of human history. Ruled by such Great Kings as Cyrus II (known as Cyrus the Great), Darius III, and Xerxes, the Persian Empire’s extraordinary military might, bottomless treasury, and innovative engineering skills made it seem almost inconceivable that any nation could long resist conquest. Resilient opposition, however, came from the Greeks— first from the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, then from the leagues of city-states led by Sparta and Athens, and finally, from the kingdom of Macedon under its fabled rulers King Philip II and his son Alexander III (better known as Alexander the Great). Beginning with the first Persian capture of Greek cities in the mid-6th century B.C. and concluding with the burning of the Persian royal city of Persepolis in 331 B.C., this tumultuous period was punctuated with some of history’s most dramatic battles: the violent clash of soldiers on the plains at Marathon, the defiant last stand of 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, the crucial naval battle in the straits of Salamis, the march of the Ten Thousand under Xenophon, and the astonishing victories of Alexander at Granicus River, Issos, and Gaugamela that finally brought the wars to an end. The story of the Greek and Persian wars, however, involves far more than epic battles; tales of heroism, treason, and martyrdom; decisive (and indecisive) rulers; and strategic military tactics. The wars proved integral to the cultural and political development of much of the ancient