What were Athens' and Sparta's contributions to the Persian Wars?

Answer 1

Athens provided the main component of the war fleet which defeated the Persian fleet at Salamis, so eliminating the Persian amphibious threat to the Greek cities and allowing them to concentrate a land army at Plataia the following year to defeat the Persian army and its Greek allies. It also exposed the Persian sea supply fleet, which forced Xerxes to take half his army home before the crucial battle. Sparta provided only a few ships, its principal contribution was leadership, and at the land battle of Plataia, perhaps the most effective component of the Greek land force.

Answer 2

In the Persian War, for the first part Sparta led a coalition of southern Greek city-states resisting the Persian invasion of Greece; In the second part, Athens took the lead aginst Persia.

In the Peloponnesian War, Athens and the empire it had gained from organising the second part of the war against Persia fought the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta.

Answer 3

Sparta was elected to command the resistance of the Greek city-states, and provided naval and army force contributions.

Athens, exposed to immediate attack, sent its population to refuge in the Peloponnesian cities and embarked its forces into its ships and fought at sea. When the sea war was one, its soldiers joinedd the land forces for the land battles the following year.

Answer 4

In the second half of the war, after the invasion had been rpulsed in 479 BCE under Spartan leadership, Sparta withdrew to solve its internal problems of a restive population, and Athens took over leadership of the 200 city-states in Asia Minor and the Islands (Delian League).

When the Persians finally agreed to not interfere in the Greek cities, Athens kept the League going and converted it into an empire, and lived high on the proceeds. It also used this strength to interfere in the rest of the Greek world, and the Peloponnesian cities urged Sparta, leader of their Peloponnesian League, to stop this. An overconfident Athens persisted, leading to a 27-year which devastated Greece.

Athens lost, was stripped of its empire, and became a second rate power. Sparta took leadership of the Greek world, but its cumulative battle losses had so weakened it that it was overturned by Thebes and Sparta became a second rate power. This ongoing weakening of the two main players opened the way for the rise of Macedon, which destroyed Thebes and the Greek cities were thereafter dominated by Macedonia and later Rome.

Answer 5

Sparta was the acknowledged main land power, fielding 40,000 armoured and light infantry, compared with Athens' 15,000. and was ceded land leadership of the southern Greek alliance. Athens had the major fleet, and after the Persian invasion of peninsula Greece was driven off and the war shifted to the eastern Mediterranean littoral, it led the 200 Greek cities seeking to maintain their freedom from Persian rule, forming the Delian League. Sparta, with internal problems of a restive serf population, retired from the war to look after its own internal problems.

Answer 6

Allies and Greek leaders in the Persian War, adversaries leading the opposing sides in the Peloponnesian War.