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Huge and diverse, the Persian Empire was founded by Cyrus the Great (reigned 559-530 BCE) who conquered nearly the whole territory you see on the map. He overthrew the ruling Median dynasty to establish Persian control: his conquest of Lydia and Babylonia vastly increased Persian territory. The Kings of Persia descended from a very small group of families descended from Cyrus' family. Each one was called "the Great King" and was the supreme ruler of the Persian Empire. The king who will be of special interest in this lesson is Xerxes (reigned 486-465 BCE), son of Darius I "the Great" (reigned 522-486 BCE). It is important to remember that the Great King was the central figure of the Persian Empire. His word was the source of religious, legal, and political life. Revolts against the King were ruthlessly suppressed, and the goals of the Great King were universalistic: like the Assyrian and Sumerian Kings before him, the Persian King believed that he was appointed by god to rule the world. During the reign of Darius the Persian royal family had adopted the Zoroastrian religion, according to which there was only one god, Ahuramazda, who controlled all fates.

While 6th and 5th Centuries BCE Persia was huge, Greece was small (see map). Modern scholars estimate the population of the Persian Empire at 70 million people, spread over 1 million square miles of territory. Greece, with about 50 thousand miles of territory, had fewer than 2 million inhabitants. Furthermore, in contrast to the Persian Empire, Greece was not a unified nation or country, but a dispersed group of individual city states, each with its own government. At the time of the Persian Wars the two most powerful states were Athens and Sparta, and they were the ones offering the greatest resistance to Xerxes and leading a small coalition of other city states in resisting the invasion. The Athenians were the primary source of Greek naval power; the Spartans of their land forces.

The Spartans were famous for their disciplined army, their law-abiding citizenry, and their plain-spoken ways. It is less well known that the Spartans combined different institutions in order to arrive at a stable government that survived for about 500 years between 750 and 250 BC. The government had four parts:

a citizen assembly with limited power (but which could, for instance, refuse to go to war),

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