The Trojan War

before I write this I am just saying that the wooden horse of Troy is not real its a legend.

There was a city-state off the coast of Turkey across the sea of Sparta. The city-state is named Troy. At one time Troy and the other Greek city-states were friends but that was before the battle of Troy. The city of Troy was protected by a wall 20 feet high. There was gates in the walls to let people in an out. It gave the Trojan warriors a safe place to stay while they would shoot arrows down on the attackers. The Greek warriors tried to break into Troy for about ten years with no success. Odysseus a Greek general had a plan. His plan was  was showed to the king. They tried his plan. They made a hollow wooden horse put thirty men in it and pretened that they were defeated and left the horse there as a present. The Trojan's took it in the gates and at night the Greeks got out of the horse and attacked Troy and killed everyone and burnt down the city.  They got the princess and Odysseus got paid a lot of money.

                                                    Above: Ancient Greek Pottery showing a scene from the Trojan War

                              Above: The earliest known depiction of the Trojan Horse, from the Mykonos vase.. 670 BC

The Persian Wars

In the first stage of the war between Persia and Greece the Persian armies were led by king Darius I (550-486 B. C.). The Persians lost to the Athenians and their Greek allies. In the famous land battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. the Persians were defeated by the Athenians and the Plataeans. News of the victory was delivered by a messenger who ran the 26 miles from Marathon to Athens, and who died afterwards. This is the origin of the modern Olympic event of the marathon.

The second stage of the war saw the Persians arrive on the Greek shore with perhaps as many as 2,000,000 men, between their army and navy, under the command of king Xeres I (519-465 B.C.), son of the deceased Darius I. An advance party of only 5,000 Greeks, including Spartans, Phocians and Locrians, under the command of one of the Spartan kings, Leonidas (a descendent of Hercules), held off the advancing Persian forces at the narrow pass between the cliffs and the sea at Thermopylae (the famous "Pass of Thermopylae"). They were eventually defeated after the Persian soldiers were shown a secret mountain way around the pass, although every last Spartan fought until he was killed. However, the in naval battle at Salamis in 480 B.C., which was masterminded by the Athenian general Themistocles, the Athenian navy defeated the Persian navy. Then, in the land battle at Plataea in 479 B.C., the Spartan-led army defeated the Persian army. The Persians were driven from Greece.

                                                                                    Map of the Persian Empire