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The vast majority of cities did as asked, fearing the wrath of Darius. In Athens, however, the ambassadors were put on trial and then executed; in Sparta, they were simply thrown down a well. [47] This firmly and finally drew the battle-lines for the coming conflict; Sparta and Athens, despite their recent enmity, would together fight the Persians.
There were not many city-states that refused. [5] In Book 7, he recounts that when the Persians sent envoys to the Spartans and to the Athenians demanding the traditional symbol of surrender, an offering of soil and water, the Spartans threw them into a well and the Athenians threw them into a gorge, suggesting that upon their arrival at the ...
In 481 BC, Xerxes sent ambassadors around Greece requesting "earth and water" but very deliberately omitting Athens and Sparta. [42] Support thus began to coalesce around these two leading cities. A congress met at Corinth in late autumn of 481 BC, [ 43 ] and a confederate alliance of Greek city-states was formed.
In Greece, the First Peloponnesian War between the power-blocs of Athens and Sparta, which had continued on/off since 460 BC, finally ended in 445 BC, with the agreement of a thirty-year truce. [206] However, the growing enmity between Sparta and Athens would lead, just 14 years later, into the outbreak of the Second Peloponnesian War. [207]
Sparta achieved a series of land victories, but many of her ships were destroyed at the Battle of Cnidus by a Greek-Phoenician mercenary fleet that Persia had provided to Athens. The event severely damaged Sparta's naval power but did not end its aspirations of invading further into Persia, until Conon the Athenian ravaged the Spartan coastline ...
The Battle of Sphacteria was a land battle of the Peloponnesian War, fought in 425 BC between Athens and Sparta. Following the Battle of Pylos and subsequent peace negotiations, which failed, a number of Spartans were stranded on the island of Sphacteria. An Athenian force under Cleon and Demosthenes attacked and forced them to surrender.
When Cleomenes attempted to make Isagoras tyrant in Athens, Demaratus tried to frustrate the plans. In 491 BC, Aegina was one of the states that gave the symbols of submission (earth and water) to Persia. Athens at once appealed to Sparta to punish that act of medism, and Cleomenes I crossed over to the island to arrest those responsible. His ...
Pan asked why the Athenians did not honor him and the awed Pheidippides promised that they would do so from then on. The god apparently felt that the promise would be kept, so he appeared in battle and at the crucial moment he instilled the Persians with his own brand of fear, the mindless, frenzied fear that bore his name: "panic". After the ...