Paros (Ionian Greek) city-state of

Páros, by tradition first colonized by Arcadians, is now colonized by Ionians.

The end of the Dark Ages is traditionally dated to 776 BCE, the year of the first Olympic Games.

The Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational texts of Western literature, are believed to have been composed by Homer in the seventh or eighth centuries BCE.

With the end of the Dark Ages, there emerge various kingdoms and city-states across the Greek peninsula, which spread to the shores of the Black Sea, Southern Italy ("Magna Graecia") and Asia Minor.

These states and their colonies reach great levels of prosperity that result in an unprecedented cultural boom, that of classical Greece, expressed in architecture, drama, science, mathematics and philosophy.

The mainly Ionian inhabitants of Páros send colonists in either 720 or 708 BCE to …

…Parium on the Sea of Marmara and to Thasos, a large, wooded island of the northernmost Aegean Sea.

The island had been colonized at an early date by Phoenicians, attracted probably by its gold mines; they founded a temple to the god Melqart, whom the Greeks identified as "Tyrian Heracles", and whose cult was merged with Heracles in the course of the island's Hellenization.

The temple still existed in the time of Herodotus.

An eponymous Thasos, son of Phoenix (or of Agenor, as Pausanias reported) was said to have been the leader of the Phoenicians, and to have given his name to the island.

Cleisthenes in 508 BCE institutes the world's first democratic system of government in Athens.

By 500 BCE, the Persian Empire controls the Greek city states in Asia Minor and Macedonia.

Attempts by some of the Greek city-states of Asia Minor to overthrow Persian rule fail, and Persia invades the states of mainland Greece in 492 BCE, but is forced to withdraw after a defeat at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE.

A second invasion by the Persians follows in 480 BCE.

Following decisive Greek victories in 480 and 479 BCE at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale, the Persians are forced to withdraw for a second time, marking their eventual withdrawal from all of their European territories.

Led by Athens and Sparta, the Greek victories in the Greco-Persian Wars are considered a pivotal moment in world history, as the fifty years of peace that follow  are known as the Golden Age of Athens, the seminal period of ancient Greek development that lays many of the foundations of Western civilization.

Athens' fleet in 489 BCE, though surely bigger than it had been a decade earlier, consists of only seventy ships, of which twenty have been borrowed from Corinth.

The reason Athens has borrowed these (actually it is a sale at nominal charge) is Athens' war, or series of wars, with Aegina, which has caused it to build a fleet.

Following the Athenian victory over the Persians, Miltiades sets out with the fleet in the spring of 489 BCE on an expedition to conquer those islands that had supposedly sided with Persia.

He attempts to conquer the island of Páros, whose government had aided the Persian invaders.

He fails, and on his return to Athens, there is an outcry of indignation, ably exploited by his rivals, the Alcmaeonids.

Miltiades is prosecuted, fined fifty talents and, unable to pay a large fine imposed on him, imprisoned, although the Alcemeonid faction had demanded the death penalty.

He dies shortly thereafter of gangrene from a leg wound sustained during the expedition.

His son Cimon, after arranging the marriage of his sister to the richest man in Athens, is able to discharge the debt.

The Achaemenid army, regrouping after the delay at the pass and aided by northern Greeks who have joined it, marches on Athens—whose citizens have fled to nearby islands—and burns the city, the Greek army having withdrawn to the Isthmus of Corinth.

The Persians destroy the temples on the Acropolis and carry off the statues of Harmodius and Aristogiton, the two men who in 514 had assassinated the tyrant Hippias' brother Hipparchus.

Páros, although a Persian ally in both 490 BCE and 480 BCE, becomes a member of the Delian League.

…the Messenians, who have entrenched themselves at Mount Ithome and successfully resist Spartan efforts to dislodge them. (Ithome, together with the Acrocorinth, the citadel of Corinth, was described by a Hellenistic ruler as one of the “horns of the Peloponnesian ox” that a would-be conqueror must seize.)

Possibly, the occupiers of Ithome plan not only an act of secession but, in fact, an attack on the famously unravaged city of Sparta itself.

The earthquake not only shakes Spartan nerve but must also have serious demographic effects (though how long-term these are is disputed).

The Parians of the wealthy and fertile northern Aegean island of Thasos have exploited the island's gold mines and founded a school of sculpture.

Athens, which, like all ancient states, wishes to get their hands on as much precious metal for coinage as possible, covets the island's trading stations and mines along the mainland area just opposite it.

Thasos, faced with the naked economic aggression of Athens, had in 465 seceded from the Delian League.

After a siege of two years by the Athenians and a naval defeat at Cimon's hands, it is forced to demolish its walls, surrender its fleet, its mines, and its mainland possessions, and pay an indemnity and an annual contribution to the league.