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Alexander the Great may have been inspired to greatness by reading about the struggles of the Aecheans and the Trojans in the Iliad

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the historical experience of the Greeks, however, had often been defined by violent encounters with their neighbor to the East, the kingdom of the Persians

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one of these encounters provided Alexander justification for his war against the Persians

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480 BCE: King Xerxes of Persia

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Herodotus wrote that the Persians led an army and an armada of 12,000 ships and 5 million men across the Bosphorus

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Herodotus surely exaggerated about the numbers in this conflict but there is evidence that it was large

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150,000 soldiers

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900 ships

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the Persians pressed westward then south into Northern part of Greece

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demanded earth and water from the Greeks

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earth and water were ancient tokens of submission

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at the pass in modern Greece known as Thermopylae

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small group of Greek soldiers commanded by the Spartan king Leonidas [lay-OH-ni-das]

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blocked Xerxes path

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for seven days the Persians attacked to no avail

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but eventually killed all the resisting Greeks

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eventually the Persians passed over the mountains and came up behind the Greeks

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killed them through a barrage of arrows

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although Leonidas lost the battle, they achieved a kind of psychological victory for the Greeks

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before they stood in that pass, no one had been willing to face the Persians

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set an example for other Greeks: they stood, they fought, they died

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Xerxes and his enormous army then made their way down to Athens

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at his approach, the Athenians had abandoned their city

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the only people left were some temple treasurers and old men who went up on the Acropolis and stayed there to defend the temples of the gods

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unfortunately for them, Xerxes and his soldiers soon found a way up the Acropolis

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proceeded to massacre the temple treasurers and all the old men

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looted the temples and burned them all to the ground

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to this day, you can still see some of the marks where the fires burned some of the columns

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this was in retribution for the support Athens had given to some of their kinsmen living on the coast of Asia Minor twenty years before

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the Athenians saw the destruction of the temples as one of the greatest sacrileges possible

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the temples on the Athenian Acropolis did not belong to the Athenians

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they were the homes of the gods

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the Persians, therefore, had burned down the homes of the gods including the home of the patron deity of Athens, Athena

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such sacrilege required vengeance

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Athenians swore an oath not to rebuild the temples until they had exacted revenge from the Persians

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for almost half a century they perused the Persians back into Asia Minor before they began to rebuild the temples

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447 BCE: began to rebuild the Temple of Athena

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made a peace with the Persians

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there were some that said vengeance had not been gained

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150 years after Xerxes destroyed the temples on top of the Acropolis

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a 26 year old king of Macedon settled accounts with the Persians

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exacting revenge

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burned down the palaces of the Persian kings in Susa