Ephialtes of Trachis

Okay kiddo, so Ephialtes of Trachis was a man from a long time ago in ancient Greece. He did something that changed the course of history. You know how sometimes you have really bad dreams and wake up feeling scared or like something is holding you down? Well, Greeks believed that these bad dreams were caused by little creatures called "ephialtes" and that's where Ephialtes of Trachis got his name from.

Now, let's talk about what Ephialtes of Trachis actually did. You know how sometimes in games, there are two teams fighting against each other, right? Well, the ancient Greeks had something similar. Two different teams or city-states, as they called them, were called Athens and Sparta. They had something called an alliance, which is like when friends work together to achieve a goal.

Ephialtes of Trachis was a member of the Athens team and he did something that changed the alliance forever. You see, Sparta was more powerful and had more soldiers than Athens, but the alliance between them meant that they still worked together. Ephialtes gave some secret information to Athens' enemies, the Persians. This information was something that only Athens and Sparta knew about: a secret path that would allow the Persian army to sneak up on the Spartans and attack them from behind when they weren't expecting it.

This was a really bad thing to do, and it caused a lot of problems. Sparta and Athens started fighting each other instead of working together, and that made it easier for the Persian army to attack and conquer them both. Later on, Ephialtes was killed by his own people because they saw him as a traitor.

So, Ephialtes of Trachis did something really sneaky and bad that caused a lot of trouble for his city-state and for Greece as a whole. That's why he's remembered as a person who did a very bad thing, even though he didn't have any creatures like the ephialtes in his own name.