What 2 actions angered Darius in the Persian war?

Answer 1

1. The Ionian Revoly by the Greek city-states within his empire.

2. The intervention in that revolt by the mainland Greek city-states of Eretria and Athens which ended up burning his provincial capital of Sardis.

3. Failure of the punitive expedition he sent against the two cities at Marathon, which led him to plan to bring all peninsular Greece within his empire to keep these cities quiet.

Answer 2

During the Ionian Revolt of Greek cities in Asia Minor against Persian rule, Eretria and Athens sent armies to support the rebels in 498 BCE. They captured his provincial capital of Sardis and burnt it. Darius decided to bring these two cities in Greece under Persian control of tyrants to keep them from supporting disruption in his empire. He sent a punitive expedition to do this in 490 BCE, however this was defeated at the Battle of Marathon.

The other thing was that when Athens and Eretria had helped the Ionians capture Sardis, they smashed the statues of the Persian gods to rub salt into the wound. When Persia captured Athens in 480 BCE, they smashed the Athenian gods in retaliation. When the Athenians reoccupied their city the following year after the Xerxes invasion was turned back, they wondered what to do with the broken gods, so they stashed them in a ravine beside the Parthenon waiting for the gods to tell them what to do with the pieces. These were covered up over time and forgotten until an archaeological expedition in the early 1920s CE discovered them, and found them covered in gaudy colours. This is the way the Greeks and romans decorated their buildings and statues - they lived in a riot of colour, not the dull marble we thought and copied today. See the TV series Rome, which has tried to do justice to this.