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.

The Battle of Thermopylae was fought between an alliance of Greek city-states, led by King Leonidas of Sparta, and the Persian Empire of Xerxes I over the course of three days, during the second Persian invasion of Greece. It took place simultaneously with the naval battle at Artemisium, in August or September 480 BC, at the narrow coastal pass of Thermopylae ('The Hot Gates').