Hot answers tagged classical-greece
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Herodotus' Histories is the primary source for the second Persian invasion of Greece, which started with the famous1 Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. Herodotus describes the battle in Book 7 (Polymnia) of the Histories, starting at paragraph 175:
The Greeks, on their return to the Isthmus, took counsel together concerning the words of Alexander, and ...
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The Peloponnesian War (431 to 404 BC) was a testing time for the Athenian judicial system, every victory brought forth new heroes and every loss new scapegoats. The Athenians had lost their strongest asset, the leadership of Pericles, when the plague hit the city in the first year of the war, the lack of an experienced successor and the physical and mental ...
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Plato in the Timaeus attempts to give plausibility to the story by attributing it to Critias, who heard it from his grandfather Critias, who heard it from the legislator Solon, who heard it from an aged Egyptian priest during his travels.
Benjamin Jowett's notes on Timaeus comment thus:
Did Plato derive the legend of Atlantis from an Egyptian source? It
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While you phrased your question as "how did he know" I think your actual question is whether or not this happened, because there is no way to know where Plato got this information from, though I would assume it was verbal or some manuscript that is long since gone.
Now in regards to whether or not this is true, I doubt it due to the fact that Athens is ...
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There were actually about 70 towns (by Plutarch's count) named after Alexander, but he didn't found and name all those places himself. He was the founder of the various Greek states (even if mostly by virtue of conquest), so it would be perfectly natural for the Greek ruling classes to want to pump up his reputation, including naming a lot of things after ...
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