In 480 B.C. Xerxes, son of Darius, attempted another land and sea invasion of Greece. The Athenians met the Persian fleet in the great naval battle of Salamis, and won, and although the Greek land forces under Spartan leadership were defeated and wiped out at Thermopylae, the Greeks over-came the Persians the following year at Plataea and forced the invaders out of Greece. The hegemony of Athens was consolidated and the following half century of peace was a brilliant period in Athenian history. This city of Pericles and Socrates became the center of democratic and intellectual development. Mathematicians were attracted from all parts of the Greek world. Anaxagoras, the last eminent member of the Ionian school, settled there. Many of the dispersed Pythagoreans found their way to Athens, and Zeno and Parmenides, of the Eleatic school, went to Athens to teach. Hip-pocrates, from the Ionian island of Chios, visited Athens and is reputed by ancient writers to have published the first connected geometry there.