Pericles was the leading statesman of Athens for forty years, outlining their highest point of power and glory achieved. He wiped the last traces of aristocratic institutions, which more and more lost one after another since the reforms of Solon. It was Pericles' Athens, the same time in a higher realm status. The maritime allies, they voted for their leader in the war against Persia had been gradually reduced to the position of the subjects.

Darius I, called The Great (558?-486 bc), king of Persia (522-486 bc), son of the Persian noble Hystaspes, and a member of a royal Persian family, the Achaemenids. In 522 bc, on the death of King Cambyses II, a group of Magian priests tried to give the throne to one of their number, the usurper Gaumata; he pretended to be Smerdis (died about 523 bc), the murdered brother of Cambyses II.
Darius, a member of the Achemenides family, raised to the throne of the kingdom of Persia by taking part, in 522, in a plot to assassinate Smerdis, who had assumed the kingship that same year at the death of his brother Cambyses on his way back from Egypt. Both Cambyses and Smerdis were sons of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire.

Philip II of Macedon was a king (basileus) of Macedon from 359 BC until his assassination in 336 BC. He was the father of Alexander the Great and Philip III.
Philip was the youngest son of the king Amyntas III and Eurydice I. In his youth, (c. 368–365 BC) Philip was held as a hostage in Thebes, which was the leading city of Greece during the Theban hegemony. While a captive there, Philip received a military and diplomatic education from Epaminondas, became eromenos of Pelopidas,and lived with Pammenes, who was an enthusiastic advocate of the Sacred Band of Thebes. In 364 BC, Philip returned to Macedon. The deaths of Philip's elder brothers, King Alexander II and Perdiccas III, allowed him to take the throne in 359 BC. Originally appointed regent for his infant nephew Amyntas IV, who was the son of Perdiccas III, Philip managed to take the kingdom for himself that same year.