chapter twenty-four: The Wars of the Greeks (7)

Athens and Sparta didn’t have much in common except for

their language and their gods. As a matter of fact, they fought

with each other. Sometimes the Athenians attacked Sparta.

Sometimes Sparta attacked Athens. They went on fighting, off

and on, for years.

But then something frightening happened. The Persians

started to invade Greece. After all, the Persians had conquered

almost all the rest of the land around them! Greece was one of

the few countries that didn’t obey the Persian empire. And the

Persians wanted Greece too.

At first, the Persians just sent messengers to Greece. The

messengers came to Athens and Sparta and announced, “We

are from the great king of the Persians! He wants you to be part

of his empire. If you agree, send him back some earth and some

water from your cities. Then he won’t attack you.”

The Athenians and the Spartans were furious. How dare

the king of the Persians demand that they surrender without

even a fight? So they grabbed the messengers and threw them

down a well. “There!” they said. “There’s plenty of earth and

water for you down there!”

After that, Persia was determined to attack. The Persian

army advanced on Greece. Athens and Sparta decided that

they had better stop fighting each other, and become friends

and allies so that they could defend themselves against the

Persians.

The war against Persia began around 500 BC/BCE. It

dragged on for years and years. Athens and Sparta fought battle

after battle against the Persian invasion.

One of the most famous battles of the war was the Battle

of Marathon. Marathon was a little village near the coast of

Greece, close to the Aegean Sea.

One day in the year 490 BC/BCE, a ship came to Athens

with frightening news: The Persians were coming! They were

sailing from Asia Minor across the Aegean Sea, straight for the

village of Marathon. The Athenians knew that if the Persians

could land all of their soldiers at Marathon, they could march

into Athens and destroy it. So the Athenian army sent a message

to Sparta, saying “Come and help us!” But the Spartans were

having a religious festival, and refused to leave Sparta until the

festival was over.

The Athenians were outnumbered. There were too many

Persian soldiers for the army of Athens to defeat alone. But the

men of Athens had no choice. They marched from Athens to

Marathon and waited for the Persians to land.

When the Persian army landed, they launched thousands

of arrows at the Athenian army. But the men of Athens charged

through the arrows and attacked the Persians. The Persians were

so startled and disorganized that they lost the battle. They were

forced to retreat.

When the Athenians saw that they had won the battle,

they sent a runner back to Athens, to tell the people who were

anxiously waiting at home that the Persian threat had been

driven back. The runner, Pheidippides, ran over twenty-six

miles, up steep hills and through rough country, to reach Ath-

ens. When he arrived at the city, he gasped out, “We have won!”

And then—according to legend—he died of exhaustion.

Today we have a race named after the village of Marathon.

The race is a little over twenty-six miles long, and it is called

the marathon. It is run in the Olympics in honor of the brave

Athenian who ran from Marathon to Athens with the good

news of victory.

The Battle of Marathon didn’t end the war, though. The

Persians and Greeks went on fighting until the Greeks finally de-

feated the Persians, once and for all, in a great sea battle at a place

called Salamis. After the Battle of Salamis (which took place in

480 BC/BCE) the Persians finally gave up attacking Greece. The

Greek cities would remain free and independent from Persia.

The Greeks Fight Each Other

Now Greece was at peace. Instead of putting all their time

and energy into fighting the Persians, the Greeks were able to

do other things. They became famous for their architecture—the

way they designed and built buildings. The Greeks built enor-

mous buildings from marble. One of the most famous Greek

buildings is called the Parthenon. The Parthenon was a temple

built in honor of Athena, the Greek goddess of war. Its ruins

still stand in Greece, in the city of Athens, on a hill called the

Acropolis.

Inside the Parthenon were pictures, carved in marble, of

different Greek battles. These pictures were called friezes. One

of the friezes shows a legendary battle between the Greeks and

an army of centaurs. Centaurs were imaginary creatures that

were half man and half horse.

The soldiers and centaurs on the friezes look very real.

You can see the muscles in the arms of the soldiers, and the

expression on the faces of the soldiers. The Greeks tried very

hard to make their pictures and statues look like real people.

The faces of their statues look like the faces of real men and

women. And the folds of their clothing look like they are

made from real cloth. It is hard to believe that they are carved

from stone.

With the Persians defeated, Athens and Sparta no longer

had to fight. The Greeks could have gone on making their

beautiful buildings and creating their statues in peace.

But they didn’t. Sparta and Athens were both afraid that the

other city would become too powerful. So instead of remain-

ing on friendly terms, Sparta and Athens began to fight with

each other again. The war between Sparta and Athens began

in 431 BC/BCE. It had a very long name—the Peloponnesian

War. And the Peloponnesian War went on for a long time,

over 25 years.

At first, Sparta gathered all its armies together and marched

towards Athens to invade it. But the Athenians decided that

the Spartan soldiers were too strong to fight. They didn’t march

out to meet the Spartan army. Instead, they stayed inside the

walls of Athens and waited for the Spartan army to go away.

“We will fight with the ‘Long Walls’ of Athens!” the people

said. Instead of fighting with swords, they would let the strong

walls of the city protect them.

The Athenians waited and waited. Maybe their strategy

would have worked—if something terrible hadn’t happened.

The plague broke out, inside the city walls.

The plague was a sickness spread by the fleas that lived

on rats. But the Athenians didn’t know this. They just knew

that people were getting sick and dying all over the city. They

couldn’t leave the city, because of the Spartan army camped

outside. And inside the city, sickness was everywhere. The great-

est Athenian general, a man named Pericles, and many of the

strongest young men of Athens died. The Athenians panicked.

How could they defeat the Spartans now?

Finally one Athenian decided that he was tired of waiting

for the siege to end. His name was Alcibiades, and he wanted

to be the king of Athens. He thought to himself, “If I can

defeat the Spartans, the Athenians will want to follow me!”

So he called out to the Athenians, “Follow me! Let’s get rid of

these Spartans once and for all. We’ll attack the Spartan army

and defeat it!”

Alcibiades led the Athenians outside the city walls and at-

tacked the Spartan camp. But the men of Athens were sick and

weak, and the Spartans defeated them. The survivors straggled

back into Athens, angry and embarrassed. “Let’s get rid of

Alcibiades!” they shouted. “He led us into defeat!”

But Alcibiades was nowhere to be found. When he saw how

angry the Athenians were, he deserted the city and went over

to the Spartan camp. “Follow me back into Athens!” he told

the Spartan general. “I know a secret passageway into the city.

We can sneak in after dark and take over before the Athenians

know what has happened to them!”

The Spartans agreed to follow Alcibiades. So late one night,

the traitor led the Spartans into his own city. The Spartan army

captured Athens and took over. Sparta became the strongest

city in Greece.

But most of the Athenian men and many of the Spartan

soldiers had died in the long, long Peloponnesian War. Now

Greece no longer had the men they needed to keep other invad-

ers away. The Greeks had spent all their energy fighting each

other; they had none left to defend themselves.

And soon, invaders would come.