Quick questions on The Greek world and Persia c. 500 BC: HSC Ancient History

The Achaemenid Persian Empire was the largest and most administratively sophisticated state the ancient world had yet seen, and its expansion under three successive kings brought it to the edge of the Aegean just as the Greek world was reshaping its own politics.

The Ionian Greek cities of Asia Minor, the wealthiest and most culturally advanced part of the Greek world, had passed from Lydian to Persian control in 546 BC. Rather than governing each polis directly, the satrap based at Sardis typically installed or confirmed a local Greek as tyrant in each city, a client ruler whose position depended entirely on Persian backing.

A polis was a self-governing community of citizens (politai) with a defined territory, an urban centre, and shared religious institutions. By 500 BC there were perhaps 1,000 poleis in the Greek world. They shared a common Greek identity (language, gods, panhellenic sanctuaries at Olympia and Delphi) but no political unity, a fragmentation that would shape, and complicate, the Greek response to Persia.

In 508/7 BC the aristocrat Cleisthenes had reformed the Athenian constitution after the fall of the Peisistratid tyranny in 510 BC.

Sparta was the leading military power on the mainland in 500 BC.

The Greek cities of Asia Minor (Ionia) had been founded in the migrations of the eleventh and tenth centuries BC. By 500 BC they were the most prosperous and culturally advanced part of the Greek world: home to the philosophers (Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus), the historians (Hecataeus, later Herodotus from Halicarnassus), and the major poets. Miletus was the largest. The Ionian cities had been subjects of Lydia under Croesus, then of Persia after Cyrus's conquest of Lydia in 546 BC, governed thereafter through client tyrants answering to the satrap at Sardis (see "Ionia under Persian rule" above).

Herodotus, Histories, is the principal source for this period, and his strengths, methods, and biases all need to be weighed together. Born at Halicarnassus (a Greek city under Persian influence) around 484 BC, he travelled widely across Egypt, the Levant, and the Black Sea region collecting oral tradition, and Books 1 and 5 cover the rise of Persia and the Cleisthenic reforms respectively. His method often presents competing versions of a story side by side ("some say...

Cyrus founded the empire by uniting the Persians and Medes, then conquering the wealthy kingdom of Lydia under Croesus in 546 BC, which brought the Greek cities of Ionia under Persian rule for the first time. He went on to conquer Babylon (539 BC), creating an empire stretching from Asia Minor to Central Asia.

Cyrus's son Cambyses added Egypt to the empire in 525 BC after defeating Pharaoh Psamtik III at Pelusium, extending Achaemenid rule to Nubia's border. His reign ended in a succession crisis, and Darius, a member of a collateral branch of the royal family, seized the throne in 522 BC.

Darius consolidated and reorganised the empire rather than merely expanding it. He divided the territory into around 20 satrapies (provinces), each governed by a satrap who collected a fixed tribute, raised troops, and administered justice, while royal inspectors ("the King's Eyes and Ears") and a royal secretary attached to each court reported directly back to the king, a check against any satrap becoming an independent power. Darius standardised coinage (the gold daric), built the royal road (about 2,500 km, Susa to Sardis) with its angareion courier relay described by Herodotus (8.98), and commissioned the Behistun inscription (c.

Each citizen was assigned to one of ten new tribes (named after Attic heroes), made up of three trittyes (thirds) drawn from coast, plain, and city. This cut across the old regional and aristocratic loyalties.

The local village (deme) was the basic administrative unit. Around 139 demes registered the citizens of Attica. Citizenship was hereditary through the deme.

Fifty councillors from each tribe, chosen by lot annually from those over thirty, prepared business for the Assembly. The boule sat in the bouleuterion in the agora.

All adult male citizens could attend, debate, and vote. The Assembly met on the Pnyx hill.

A procedure by which the Assembly could exile a citizen for ten years without loss of property or status. Introduced around 508 BC and first used in 487 BC against Hipparchus son of Charmus, a relative of the Peisistratids.