HISTORY 319 



themselves, nor even their children, till they were made 

 citizens. 



Sparta retained the name of king for two of its 

 hereditary magistrates, who exercised their power simul- 

 taneously. The two States north of what was at first 

 alone deemed true Greece namely, Macedonia and 

 Epirus retained the old kingly system of government. 



Besides these forms of government, local disputes and 

 disorders sometimes enabled an influential citizen to seize 

 supreme power. Such a man was called a tyrant, and 

 his system a tyranny ; though such expressions did not 

 originally denote the way in which such power was used, 

 but only its form. The last notable tyrant in Greece itself 

 was Pisistratus, whose sons were expelled about the end 

 of the sixth century before Christ. In the colonies, 

 however, especially in Sicily, they existed much later. 



The expulsion from Athens of Hippias, son of 

 Pisistratus, was the occasion of the first of the famous 

 Persian wars. The Persians who, under Cyrus, in the 

 sixth century B.C., took the great and powerful city of 

 Babylon, also conquered a domain which included Greek 

 colonies on the coast of Asia Minor, and thus became 

 involved in disputes with Greece itself. Later, the 

 Persian king, Darius, desiring to force the Athenians to 

 take back Hippias, sent; an expedition which landed in 

 Attica, but was utterly defeated B.C. 490, in the celebrated 

 battle of Marathon, by a relatively insignificant for.ce of 

 skilled and well-disciplined troops. Ten years later, the 

 Persian king, Xerxes, came by land with a vast army ? 

 only to be routed at Thermopylae, and soon the Persians 

 were forced to withdraw for a time even from the Greek 

 cities of Asia. 



These efforts led to a great ascendency of Athens in 

 Greece. It was a very democratic State, under the 



