480 BC

Year 480 BC was a year of the pre-Julian Roman calendar.

• May – King Xerxes I of Persia marches from Sardis and onto Thrace and Macedonia.
• A force of 10,000 Greeks goes to the Vale of Tempe.
• August 11 – The Battle of Thermopylae ends in victory for the Persians under Xerxes.
• Pausanias becomes regent for Leonidas' son, Pleistarchus, after Leonidas I is killed at Thermopylae.
• Phocis and the coasts of Euboea are ruined by the Persians. Thebes and most of Boeotia join Xerxes.
• King Alexander I of Macedon must join Xerxes in a battle through Greece.
• August – The Persians win over the Greeks in the Battle of Artemisium.
• September 21 – The Persians sack Athens. The people leave to Salamis and then Peloponnesus.
• September 28 – The Battle of Salamis brings victory to the Greeks.

• Roman troops march against the Veintes.

• Xerxes wants the Carthaginians to attack the Greeks in Sicily. Carthage sends across a large army.
• The Greek city of Himera asks for Carthaginian support in its fight with Akragas. With the help of Gelo, the Carthaginians are defeated in the Battle of Himera. After the defeat, Hamilcar kills himself.

• The Imperial treasury at the Persepolis Palace is completed after a building time of thirty years.

• The archaic period of sculpture ends in Greece. The Severe (Early Classical) period starts(approximate date).
• A sculpture of a Dying warrior is made in the left corner of the east pediment of the Temple of Aphaea in Aegina (approximate date). Today, it is kept at the Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek in Munich, Germany.
• The sculpture of a Kritios Boy is made on Acropolis, Athens (approximate date). It is now kept in the Acropolis Museum in Athens.
• Work begins on the detail Musicians and Dancers on a wall painting in the Tomb of the Lionesses in Tarquinia. It is finished about ten years later.

• Euripides, Greek playwright (d. 406 BC)
• Antiphon, Attic orator (d. 411 BC)
• Philolaus, Greek mathematician and philosopher (d. c. 405 BC)

• August 11 – Leonidas I, Agiad King of Sparta (died at Thermopylae)
• Xenophanes, Greek philosopher (b. 570 BC)
• Hamilcar, Carthaginian general