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

Mainland Greece is mountainous and broken into small fertile plains separated by ranges. The Aegean is studded with islands. This geography produced the polis system: hundreds of small independent city-states, each with its own constitution, army, coinage, and patron god. The major regions of 500 BC were Attica (with Athens), the Peloponnese (with Sparta, Corinth, Argos), Boeotia (with Thebes), Thessaly, and the islands.

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.

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.

Thebes. The leading Boeotian polis, dominant in the Boeotian League.

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.

Persia was the largest empire the ancient world had seen. Founded by Cyrus the Great (559 to 530 BC), expanded by Cambyses (530 to 522 BC, who conquered Egypt), and organised by Darius I (522 to 486 BC), the empire ran from the Indus valley to the Aegean coast and from the Caucasus to Nubia.

Persian expansion reached the Aegean in 546 BC when Cyrus conquered Lydia and inherited the Greek cities of Ionia. By 513 BC Darius had crossed the Bosphorus and campaigned in Thrace and Scythia, bringing Persian power to the edges of Europe. Athens and Eretria sent envoys to Persia around 507 BC seeking an alliance against Sparta; the envoys offered "earth and water" (tokens of submission). On their return the Athenians repudiated the gift, but Persia regarded Athens as a subject.

Herodotus, Histories. Books 1 and 5 cover the rise of Persia and the Cleisthenic reforms. Herodotus (born at Halicarnassus c. 484 BC) is the dominant source for the period.

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.

Two hereditary kings, one from the Agiad house and one from the Eurypontid, commanded the army and held religious functions.