Greeks and Persians: Volume 1 (Patreon)

Persia enters the Game with a Bang

When some argue that great men do not exist, that history is dictated purely by economics and demographics, comfortable and understandable sciences, they clearly have not heard of Cyrus the Great. He was a man who was great in every single way, personally honorable, a great gentlemen, tolerant of others, a talented general and a genius administrator. He led his people, the Persians, from a subdued desert tribe of the Medes into a world empire that controlled nearly half of the world’s population and who’s descendants still exist rule today in Iran.

We’ve already been introduced to the Persians. They were an Eastern branch of the Indo-Europeans that came out of central Asia of what is today Iran. They were related to the Aryans who invaded India and in fact the name Iran comes from the same root. In culture they were practically identical to the early Aryans of India. They were practically identical culturally to the Medes in the north who tore down the Assyrian Empire. Growing out of the old Elamite heartland, they changed from being Assyrian to Median vassals with the passing of empires.

The land was mountainous and arid. In Iran, the only inhabitable land is the in the mountains, with the lowlands being uninhabitable deserts or salt flats. Waters coagulates in oases in the mountains and the climate is wet enough for farming cultures. The land is low in trees and green grass, meaning that the pastoral nomads gradually turned to the ways of irrigated agriculture although a few survive in the desert even today. There were no central rivers and so society never settled down in the same way as the valley folk, herding and the like remained common. They had a social system not unlike feudal Europe with a class devoted to war and ruling, priestly activities, and the tillers of the land and workers.They already reached a half civilized state when they were welded into a nation by Cyrus. In this half civilized state, nations are the most dangerous, they have the vigor and strength of barbarism while having the technique and technology of civilization.

Without the oppressive priest classes that spoiled Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Persians were more open to religious innovation, which they did have. In the fertile plains of North-Eastern Iran, around 1000 BC, Zoroaster was born. He was the founder of a religion that still exists today, albeit barely in pockets in Pakistan and India. He initially believed in a single God from which everything radiates, called Ahura Mazda. This was taken very badly by the people and so he altered his message so there was also a second evil god called Ahriman who was the reason for all evil in the world. The world was the constant battle between the two. At the end of time, Ahura Mazda would defeat the forces of darkness in a final battle and lead his followers into a paradise. Humans could tilt the balance in one of the two faction’s favor by good or bad actions. In fact, every action was one that could indirectly help the forces of evil or good. Zoroaster was ignored during his life, however the philosophy was later taken up as the official religion of the Persian Empire. It had evolved quite a bit. An example of this is that Zoroaster said that the forces of good had 6 good qualities that made up goodness. Over time these separate qualities almost became gods unto themselves. The religion was quite an active one, promoting productive values like hard work and breeding and thus a good one from the perspective of a ruling class. It was not the duty of the good Zoroastrian to ignore the world in search of God, but instead to be part of it. The Zoroastrian priesthood, or Magi, were expected to be active participants in the world, beget children, plant trees and be politically involved. Other interesting parts of Zoroastrianism is the emphasis it placed upon dogs, with Persian law making the injury of dogs illegal and public dog feeding, the supposed moral superiority of the wealthy, and the worship of fire as symbolic of the struggle of light against dark. The Magi became right hand men of the Emperors of Persia and Iran verged on theocracy for much of its history. The priests of Ahura Mazda built universities and many great temples.

As mentioned before, the Persians were originally vassals of the Medes, cousins of theirs to the north. The Medean king was a cruel one, oppressing the Persians and his other subjects. This came to a brief change when the Cyrus led the Persians in rebellion and personally killed the king of Medea and ascended the throne of both nations. From then on, Medea and Persia would be considered a single nation and practically the same people. The king of Medes and Persians was considered the same title, as the two peoples were inseparable. The culture of the Medes was so like that of the Persians and thus they easily assimilated and became stalwart allies. It would be as if Canadians and Americans were to unite and form the same North American people. This also had the effect of bringing the extent of the Median kingdom into the Persian fold, spreading it from the Persian gulf to the Black Sea.

The Persians then turned on the Medes’ old ally, Babylon. The king of Babylon was similar to Akhenaten in that he was trying to destroy the old religions, possibly to weaken the stranglehold of the clergy on society. He was an intellectual figure who took great delight in archaeology and may have been close to a deist. However, as was the case with Akhenaten as well, the priesthood was in fact more popular than the monarchy and thus we has hated by the people. Cyrus was in fact able to portray himself as the savior of the Babylonian gods and the real protector of Babylonian civilization.

The Persians were able to trounce the Babylonian militaries. The accounts are confused, with people not sure if the Assyrian vassal of Babylon flipped sides to the Persians for example, but it all climaxed when the Persians wiped out the Babylonian armies at the battle of Opis. We are unsure if the war was a brief matter of months or a lengthy multi year campaign.The armies of Babylon were so defeated that they were unable to even defend their capital, with it falling peacefully to the invader. Cyrus’ propaganda worked and he was greeted as a savior. Unlike the Assyrians, who burned the city into a pulp, the Persians peacefully destroyed nothing and did not ransack the city. Cyrus even went to the effort of praying to the religions of all his conquered peoples. The Persians were always generous conquerors, allowing the conquered peoples to maintain their cultures and worship their gods in peace without molestation.

Part of this generous occupation was allowing the Jews to return to their homeland. Only a small group actually did so, most Jews were happy in Babylon, likely wealthier than they ever were at home and with Israel only a distant memory of centuries distant. Until the 14th century and to a lesser extent, the 20th, the Near East had a large Jewish population left over from this captivity. The Jews who did return rebuilt the temple and their old nation. His generosity to this small people resulted in forever respect from the Abrahamic religions. He was one of the few pagans that was considered to have reached heaven in Christianity and was known as one of the very few holy gentiles in Jewish mythology.

Ironically, the limp generosity of the Persians resulted in the death of Mesopotamian civilization. The civilization only existed because of the priesthood. When the Persians got rid of the political power that supported the priesthood, their theological power collapsed. Without the institutionalized power of the Babylonian church, the peasants slowly drifted away from their constricting priest class. The direct chronology is unclear since no one was recording cultural history but the Babylonian gods were likely shown to be weak by the Persian conquest and all the institutional bureaucracy that held up the religion came tumbling down. Without the priest class passing on the traditions, the state culture of Babylon, and the thousands of years of history and civilization fell away. Ironically, had the Persians been crueler rulers, the priests would have been able to rally the people around the state culture against the oppressor, but with kind rulers, this could not be done. The peasants of course kept worshipping their nature Baal, but they stopped thinking of themselves as part of a great civilization, instead of merely a peasant from a certain town. This was the fate of Mesopotamia for over a thousand years, the disempowered peasant toiling the soil with a Persian landlord watching over and taking his taxes, using that wealth to make Persian culture great. The Mesopotamians were able to make a flourishing civilian culture created by merchants, prophets, scientists (I mean this very loosely) and peasants, but never again would Babylonian kings or soldiery matter. From 541 BC to 1958 AD, the native population would never again control Mesopotamia, drifting from one foreign conqueror to another. The region became a cash box for foreigners and never again was a decisive force on the world stage.

Horse Tribes fight Each Other

In the north, the endless faucet of violent nomadic horse tribes continued. The Scythians were the newest rendition of the many tribes to pour from Central Asia’s Sea of Grass. They controlled a belt of land stretching from the Danube river in Romania to Western China, almost all the steppe. They started their menacing of the civilized world during the chaos of the fall of the Assyrian empire. The power vacuum in the north created by the fall of Urartu and the Cimmerian defeat allowed them to pour into the Near East. Their horse archers raided the entire region, even reaching the outskirts of Egypt. The pharaoh of Egypt paid a handsome price to keep them from raiding and quite possibly conquering his land. The stability that came with the rise of the Medes and Babylonians however kept them in check for around a century. When Cyrus came to power, they started their destructive ways again, this time threatening the Persian empires’ East, in modern day Eastern Iran.

Cyrus invaded the main Central Asian tribe that was threatening him, the Massagatai, and their lands in central Asia. They are an interesting people, long haired horseback warriors who supposedly loved freedom, engaged in free love and smoked marijuana. They were lead by the mighty warrior queen Tomis who fought a brilliant guerrilla campaign. He supposedly offered her a proposal of marriage, combining the two of their realms into one, but she denied. Cyrus led massive army after massive army into the steppe to be defeated each time. The Persian armies were dragged into the grasslands, only to be showered in a hail of arrows by the mobile cavalry. The Persians were the dupes of the game they were once expert in. Huge numbers of Persians died in the war, including Cyrus himself, shot down in an arrow storm, thus passing one of the greatest kings. The Persians did eventually establish a border deep into Central Asia, reaching what would become the city of Samarkand not the Syr Darya river, deep in the “Stan countries.” From this early branch would spring the entire tree of Central Asian civilization.

Persia Ascendent

Cyrus’ son Cambyses continued his father’s process of conquest, however this time to the West, in Egypt. Egypt was brought under the heel of Persian rule. Unlike his father, he did not respect the native cultures and wrecked many ancient Egyptian temples. Cambyses’ reign was short, he was known for his cruelty above all things, being a needlessly wrathful man. With the Persian conquest of Egypt, a very similar process occurred to that in Mesopotamia. The priesthood may have been more loved in Egypt, but it was still an equally constrictive of the society. The long decline of Egypt had been taking place for over 600 years and finally it went out with a whisper. From 525 BC, to 1952, Egypt would also be ruled by one group of foreigner by another and not exert great geopolitical influence.

A highly complex and suspect set of events took place after this, in which historians are quite unsure of what exactly happened. Cambyses may have been murdered and possibly a man pretending to be his brother took the throne. Afterwards, a distantly related palace guard named Darius seized the throne and named himself King of Kings. We are unsure if this line of events is accurate or if there if it was later propaganda by Darius and his descendants. It is possible that the pretender was in fact the genuine and Darius merely pretended he was the pretender to justify his control of the throne. Such is the lot of a historian of the ancient world, no clear answers. Once Darius seize the throne, he immediately married the daughter of the Old Emperor, thus conferring legitimacy upon him and his descendants. Darius became one of the ablest administrators in history and an invaluable asset to the Persian Empire.

Persian rule and especially Darius’ conferred immense benefits on the region. For the first time ever, the Near East and a literal majority, or around 51 percent of the totality population of the Earth lived under one government. Judging purely by percentage of the world’s population under their control, the Persian Empire was the most successful in history. The Persian rule encouraged unity. They built massive highways across the empire that connected the frontiers to the heartland of the empire that were used for both the military and trade. Aramaen, the language of the Assyrians and the Syrians became the official language of the empire. An efficient system of inns and policemen kept the roads safe for trade and travelers. They made a fair and singular coin system and even maintained legislation on axle size on carts to keep the road size right for the carts. Agricultural reform resulted in a population surge and growing wealth in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The tax rate was no more oppressive than the previous regimes that came before, with the Greek city states sometimes basing their tax policies off the Persians. The Persian Empire was the wealthiest the region had ever been, with the Persian Upper Classes living lifestyles of progressively extreme epicureanism.

The Persians were also respective of regionalistic rights. The Persians allowed all faiths to worship freely and allowed natives to follow their own cultures. For example, when the Persians went to war, they relied on the strengths of the regional specialities of their Empire. Nubians fought in Nubian garb with boys for Persia, as did Phoenicians build Phoenician ships for Phoenician captains for the Persians. The language of the Empire was in fact Aramaic, the language of the Syrians, not than Persian. Local governors, or satraps were given massive independence and leeway. They were even allowed to wage private wars against other satraps in exchange for not making them large enough to disturb the integrity of the Empire. Beneath these satraps, at least in Iran, were a proud and martial warrior aristocracy who provided the crack cavalry for the empire. These lords in turn controlled most of the land that the peasants tilled. This massive regional conceit was balanced by a central government which kept a very close eye on the provinces. The Great King had a large spy network all over the empire to see that his plans were being followed and his servants were being loyal.

All this peace was supported by absolutism. The Great King, with his power supporting by the priests of Zoaraster had complete authority. His subjects were expected to prostrate themselves in front of him and not make direct eye contact. There was once a story that when a noblemen had his opinion asked when the Emperor shot one of his sons, the noblemen merely remarked at the Emperor’s good aim with the bow for fear of his own life. There was no counterbalancing force and the Emperor lived in great decadent splendor. Persia likely fits the perfect definition of an enlightened despotism.

Darius invaded India, taking over the Western part of it, as far as the Indus River, naming it Sind, from which the name India eventually comes. Even today, the Indus practically remains the boundary between the India that looks west (Pakistan) and that which remained firmly nativist. The Persians fit into the caste system, not disrupting the local way of life and simply assimilating into India, like so many invaders after them. The Indians called the Westerners Yavanas (a term strangely derived from the Greek Ionions)and began their long tradition of being conquered by people from the North-West mountains. He also got involved in a conflict started by Cyrus that would embroil him and his descendants of centuries of conflict with another people.

Over the hundreds of years, Lydia, in Anatolia, had become an incredibly wealthy nation. Positioned between Greece and the Near East, Europe and Asia, it was open to many different trade routes. They were the first people to make printed coins. They inspired the legend of king Midas, the king who was so wealthy that everything he touched turned into gold. They were part of the Greek cultural world, with them being considered nearly indistinguishable from their cousins to the West.

The King of Lydia felt he could use the Rise of Persia as an opportunity to expand his own empire and so consulted the Oracle of Delphi, a prophet in Greece who was said to predict the future, on what should be done. Legend says that she told him that if he invaded Persia an empire would fall. He did, and unfortunately it was his, Lydia was conquered by Persia. The Lydians were supported by the Greek Ionian cities on the Eastern shores of the Aegean, which meant that the Persians in turn invaded them. This resulted in a series of earth shattering wars lasting decades between separate civilizations. However, to understand the true meaning of these events, one must look at the Greeks and the achievements to understand the stakes of the civilizational battle that was about to take place.

The Greeks

The Greeks slowly pulled themselves out of their Dark Ages, but in many separate and different ways, especially regionally.The mountainous nature of the country has always promoted disunity, with each valley ruling itself. The jagged peninsulas, islands and the like have also disunited Greece but the sea also served as the only unifying force in the long run. Power was held on the city state level, with each town and the surrounding countryside being independent. This meant that Greek civilization evolved in many independent directions, with each city state and region taking a slightly different route. The Ionians of the coasts and islands started to blend with the Dorians of the valleys and interior, forgetting some of their original ethnic hatred and blending to become Greeks. The first area to rise out of the Dark Ages, likely due to its proximity to Asia was the Ionian shore, on the Western coast of what is today is Turkey. This area was the most Near Eastern of all the Greek areas. Great city states like Miletus and Ephesus became centers of trade and prosperity. The region became famous for its philosophers, such as Hippocritus and Thales. They were for the most part rationalists and materialists, not seeing any gods except the physical world around them, doubting everything that could not be rationally deduced. They made some remarkable discoveries at a disturbingly early age, such as atom theory, the fact that the earth revolves around the sun and even hinting at evolution. However, they were equally wrong in many other ways, such as believing that everything was made of water or that two forces, love and strife drove everything in the universe.

Further West in Greece itself, the progress took many different directions. As civilization once again restored itself, the old tribal chieftains became kings. As always occurs, the rise of civilization always comes with the rise of inequality. Most farmers became serfs on the great estates of the horse based nobility. As the nobility grew wealthier, they felt threatened by the power of the kings, and so in many cases, the nobility took power from the kings and replaced him with a government run by the nobles, or an oligarchy. This did nothing to mediate the growing class tensions of the newly dispossessed tribesmen. At this stage, the city states of land based Corinth and Thebes were dominant on the peninsula. Different city states dealt with the class tensions differently. Let us look at two extreme and most important examples in all of Greece, Sparta and Athens.

The Spartans were a small people in the the Northwest of the Peloppenesian peninsula of Southern Greece. They were lucky enough to conquer the much larger Laconian people and thus give them control of most the peninsula. However, the Spartans were a puny part of the population and so to keep the Laconians down, they knew that they had to resort to the extraordinary. To maintain their dominance, the Spartans designed a war obsessed culture in which every male child was taken from his family at age 7 to go into military training. Then from ages 20 to 60, he would be expected to serve in the military. This incredible warrior society obsessed with training made the Spartans the best soldiers in Greece by far and possibly the world. Women, who were brutally treated in most of Greece, were given almost full rights in Sparta. Women were given military training and were expected to run society while the men were off at war. The government was elected by the male citizens who would vote on two kings to manage the nation, one for peace and another for war. All men lived in commune until marriage at age 30 and simplicity was the norm. Fatness was the ultimate sin and even eugenics was encouraged as a way of making the blood of the Spartan race stronger. The Spartans loved to say that they were the freest men on earth, without government, foreign tyrants or lords to oppress them, but the clever foreigner retorted that for the Spartans, their ethics and laws turned them into the most controlled slaves that have ever existed.

It was once said that Sparta was the perfect nation for a philosopher, practical, content in simplicity and in some ways egalitarian, but that in practice was terrible. The Spartans themselves only formed around 10 percent of the population while the most of the rest were downtrodden Helot peasants, the descendants of the Laconians. These people were forced to give a criminal percentage of their crop to their Spartan lords in exchange for tilling the land. The idea of a Helot revolt was the stuff of nightmares for the Spartans. There are stories that the Spartans several times had competitions for rewards among the Helots and once they had found the cream of the Helot population, killed them so that they would wipe out the potential Helot leadership. The craft jobs were done by foreigners, people with no political rights and scorned, shoved into the small towns and hoped they would go away.

Sparta never achieved a higher level of civilization, travel outside Sparta was discouraged heavily and no philosophers or artists or any of that sort were allowed to exist. The currency of Sparta for a long time was iron so that gold wouldn’t be able to infect the economy. Sparta had absolutely no economy or development to speak of in any development besides war. Sadly, that was a development the Spartans were very good at. Ultimately the blessings of civilization aren’t that valuable unless they can be protected from those who want to take them, and an army is needed for that

When we look at Athens, we find a society diametrically opposed to anything Sparta stood for. Unlike the Spartans, who were a conquering people, the Athenians were a simple people who occupied a peninsula jutting out into the Aegean with precious little else. The lands around them were the fertile fields of Attica, fertile and flat by Greece’s mountainous standards, but not by practically anyone else’s. The city was named after the goddess Athena, who was known for wisdom and strategy due to the presence of springs that were associated with her. Unlike the Spartans, who were Dorians, the Athenians were Ionians, pushed out onto the peninsula of Attica by the Dorians. Athens followed the path of starting with monarchy and then moving into oligarchy.

Athens had the class tensions of many of the ancient Greek states. In Athens there was division between the merchant-urban folk, the people of the wealthy farmlands, and the poor hill people. The urban poor existed but had no representation. The land and most property were coming to be controlled by a few wealthy families, and the poor over time became enslaved, much like the process that had taken place in Judea hundreds of years before. These groups had several coups against each other and power jostled back and forth. Athens teetered on civil war. Into this maelstrom of competition and struggle the lawmaker Draco stepped in to create peace between the classes. However, the legal code he designed was so (to use the exact perfect term), Draconian, that it had to be repealed. Almost any offense ranging from stealing an apple to simple sloth was punishable by death. Draco grieved that there was nothing worse than death to divert people from crime. Then after Draco came Solon, who created an enlightened code for Athens that would last for hundreds of years.

He turned Athens from a cabal of a few aristocrats into a democracy. The representatives of the people would be randomly chosen from the citizenry every year. Everyone who could afford armor and shield to to serve in the military could vote. Issues would be decided upon in a public vote by all male citizens. Anyone who had been enslaved in the years before were freed and new protections were created to prevent small farmers from falling back into the trap that existed before. Athens had become the first civilized democracy in history. With the brief punctuation of 30 years of tyranny under Peistratus starting in 540, this democratic model lasted for hundreds of years. Ironically, for a democracy, Peistratus’ rule was quite enlightened and helped establish Athen’s dominance and wealth in the region.

Most Greek states were neither Sparta nor Athens, most were somewhere in between the extreme of the two. Of all the states in Greece, most fell into one of three separate categories, oligarchies like Thebes, monarchies like Macedonia and democracies like Athens. Many had tyrants, leaders who would pander to the lower and middle classes in exchange for dictatorial power over on average, a few decades. The word tyrant did not start out with a pejorative connotation and merely denoted a style of leadership, which many people looked well upon. In fact, the leadership of the tyrants was not always “tyrannical”, with them sometimes ruling in enlightened manners that actually helped their poor and disenfranchised constituencies.

Greece beyond Greece

Greece is a land wedged between the mountains and the sea, with precious little fertile valley land in between. This meant that the Greeks suffered overpopulation very quickly after they started as a developed civilization. Also, the many islands and peninsulas of Greece made the people natural sailors, meaning that they took well to the seas. The logical conclusion was that the Greeks made colonies across the Mediterranean to deal with their excess population. The Greeks always searched for climates that were similar to Greece along the Mediterranean coast, with one actually able to predict the location of Greek colonies by the Mediterranean climate group.

The largest concentration of Greek settlements were in Southern Italy and Sicily. The area became so Hellenized that it became known as Magna Graeca, or Greater Greece. The city of Syracuse became the largest city in the Greek world and became a powerful state, at one point, possibly the most powerful and wealthiest in the Greek world. Sicily was also much more fertile than Greece itself, giving the natives a better baseline to work from. A string of Greek states came to exist along coast of Italy such as Tarentum, Rhegium, Croton and Capua. In fact, the name Greek comes from the Graii people from the isle of Eubeoa, near Athens, who settled near Rome. The Romans came to call all Hellenes (as the Greeks called themselves) as Graii, which morphed into Greek. In civilizational development Magna Graeca may have been more developed then Greece itself, it was likely wealthier before the Wars with Persia. Syracuse was known for the Philosopher Pythagoras, who is today known for his geometric proofs. He founded a school of philosophy known for belief in reincarnation as well as vegetarianism and the asceticism of the practically monks who followed it.

On the shores of Africa, in what is today Eastern Libya, the small island of Thera created the colony of Cyrene. Overpopulation was so rampant on that isle that 1/3 of all the population had to be forcibly sent outwards to Cyrene to deal with it. Cyrene came to be a wealthy city on the banks of the Sahara desert, although it was conquered by the Persians when they conquered Egypt. Cyrene always struggled to maintain independence due to its proximity to Egypt and alternated between native rule and the rule of whoever controlled Egypt at the time.

Further west than Sicily, the Greeks founded other colonies. In Southern France, they founded the city of Massalia, or what would become Marseille, for trade with the native Gallic Celtic population. In Spain they founded Tarraco. To the East they forged through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea, founding colonies in Crimea. Here they trained with the Scythians, exporting wine and other civilized produced good in exchange for slaves and grain, the goods that kept Athens alive. Herodotus once described the Greeks as frogs around the pond, as they were all huddled all around the Mediterranean, a people who controlled the sea in the same way that the Persians controlled the land world of the Near East.

The War between the two Civilizations

Now that we have elucidated the Greeks and who they are, we can move onto the man story and see how they will interact with the Persians. The Persians, upon conquering Lydia, continued to invade and conquer the Ionian states. The Ionian states rebelled after this conquest and the Persians then went about crushing them. After the conquest, the Ionian states remained wealthy, but lost all cultural impetus. The center of Greek civilization was no longer the Eastern shores of the Aegean, but the Western ones. No more philosophy or great art came out of this region. The Athenians, relatives to the Ionians in both blood, culture and trade, sent ships to aid the Ionian rebels. The Persians did not forget this, legend tells that Darius had his servant remind him of Athens every night so that one day he would get around to finally crushing the fly.

In the following years, the Persians continued to drive into Europe, subduing Thrace, the province of Europe that lies nearest to Asia and encompasses modern day European Turkey and parts of Bulgaria, but was then inhabited by Balkan tribes. Macedonia, the northernmost, half-barbaric Greek kingdom become a vassal state. The Persians turned these into provinces in the empire and built up their governmental institutions. The ironic thing is that Alexander the Great’s ancestor’s power was greatly solidified and established by the Persians. Unity and organization he then used to conquer the Persian Empire. This brought them into war with the Scythians, however the far Western rather than the far Eastern edge, this time inhabiting the grasslands to the north of the river Danube. The Persians recruited a massive army and built large bridges over the Danube, crossed it, and invaded the land of the Scythes, or modern day Ukraine. However, like all the future invasions of Russia, there was no central target the Persians could strike and the tribes pulled into the endless grasslands. The sheer distance of the grasslands and the arrows of the tribes wore the Persians down, just as their Eastern cousins had under by Tomis. To make matters worse, Militides, an Athenian allied officer, burned the bridges over the Danube that supplied the Persian army. Thus ended a disgraceful campaign that forced the Persians to retreat in ignominy.

Darius did finally get around to sending a fleet to conquer Athens in 490. The Athenian forces, outnumbered two to one were able to surprise the Persian forces when they were still preparing for battle on the beaches. The Greek infantry, or Hoplites, that normally marched in disciplined order towards their enemies made an insane charge that caught the enemy off guard. The Persians were not able to gain order and were smashed. To make the wound even worse, the Athenian leader was the same Militides that burned the bridges over the Danube, returned to defend his homeland. This has been known as one of the decisive battles of history, in which if the Persians had won, the Greeks and thus Western civilization as we know it would never have existed. This may or may not be accurate, Darius’ intentions were probably just to conquer Athens, but if that had been successful, the Persians would probably have used Athens as a stepping board to conquer the rest of Greece. Without Athens and with Greece split in half, they would have won. This incredible victory actually brought greater pain upon the Greeks. It hurt the pride of the great Persian nation and put the Greeks, a previously obscure and unimportant people, on the map for the King of Kings.

Themistocles, the leader of the Athenians, worried that the Persians would return and so decided to invest in the Athenian navy instead of the army. He understood that in Greece, sea is more important than land and that Athens, so close to the sea would be reliant upon it. This was not taken well, naval work was considered unmanly by the Athenian gentlemen and as an investment in it was considered worthless. However, he commissioned a large navy of Triremes, or three decked ships to the Athenian navy, thus making it by far the most powerful naval force in Greece. The rowers, entirely freemen, were given political privileges for their service in the military and thus the franchise was extended to even the poorest Athenian freemen.

The Persians fought in a style very representative of what they were, a nomadic tribe that conquered a large empires. The Persians had crack cavalry and archers, combining the two very well as well. Their empire supplied them with large amounts of infantry of various quality. Almost all were unarmored. The different regions of the empire sent different kinds of troops as befitted their regional variety. The Sudanese sent amazing archers, the Indians sent Elephants, the Babylonians, low quality infantry and the Phoenicians furnished the navy. The Persians themselves were known for their bravery and skill in combat. The Greeks meanwhile were only good at the one thing the Persians could not master, heavy infantry. Every Greek citizen was expected to serve in the militia, or Hoplites. These troops were heavily armored spearmen and were incredible in frontal combat, but had trouble maneuvering. The poorer Greek citizens who could not afford armor were expected to serve as auxiliary archers and slingers to the main Hoplites. In general the quality of the auxiliaries, be they horseman or archers went up the further north one was in Greece. Proportionally, the quality increased for Hoplites the further south one would be in Greece, ending with the Spartans. Similarly, traditional aristocracy became more powerful with aristocracy as one went North in Greece. The Greeks were the first real high quality heavy infantry culture the Persians faced. The Persian mastery with the bow meant little to the heavily armored Greeks, who were adept at blocking them. This allowed the Greeks to take advantage for the first few wars they fought with the Persians.

Ten years after the previous invasion, the Persians tried to reconquer Greece once again, this time under a new King of Kings, Xerxes. He wanted to surely finish the job his ancestor started and so brought a massive army of between 120,000 and 300,000 men and an equally spectacular fleet, created by his Phoenician, Ionian and Egyptian subjects. The force built an incredible bridge across the Hellespont between Europe and Asia to transport the force. Legend says that Xerxes whipped the sea itself for insubordination when the first attempt at the bridge was destroyed by a storm. They dug a canal across the Salonikan peninsula of Northern Greece so they wouldn’t have to sail around the storm ridden peninsula.

More Greek states submitted immediately, knowing the Persian rule to be moderate and just than actually resisted. The North of Greece immediately pledged allegiance to the King of Kings. The Athenians and Spartans, normally rivals, knew that there was no way that they survive divided and so united their forces to form a coalition of Southern Greece against the invader. Northern Greece is split off by Southern Greece by the a puny impasse of land stuck between the sea and mountains. 300 elite Spartans, led by their king Leonidas, held this position with 7,000 Thebans. In this impasse the Greeks were able to use their superior armor and infantry to hold the entire Persian army off for 7 days. After a week of failed charges against the shield wall, a local shepherd showed the Persians a pass around the mountains, upon which they outflanked the Greeks and slaughtered them. However, the Spartans and Thebans gave the rest of Greece valuable time and the legend of their deeds today still lives on. After this, the Persians pushed down the Greek peninsula. The Athenians, knowing they would be unable to hold their city, evacuated their population to the neighboring island of Salamis. The Persians torched the city. The Spartans meanwhile built a small wall across the Corinthian isthmus north of the Peloponnesus, unsure if the war for the rest Greece was one worth fighting.

The Athenian investment in the navy finally paid off. The Persian fleet was looming large off the coast of Greece. The Athenian ships threatened battle with the Persian fleet. The Athenians retreated and the Persians following them were pulled into the tiny gulf of Salamis between the isle of Salamis and the Greek mainland. Then the Greeks rowed the opposite direction and another Greek detachment bottled the Persians in the channel. The Persian ships were large almost naval-castles that were not very maneuverable, as opposed to the nimbler but thinner Greek vessels. The Greeks were able to butcher the Persian fleet like sheep corralled into a pen.

The loss of their fleet crippled the Persian force. The fleet was the main supply chain for the this massive force and thus the Persians had to retreat all of their army with the exception of 40,000 men back to Asia upon the dashing of their naval powers. The Spartans moved onto the offensive and met them at the fields of Platea, the Spartans were then able to crush them and finally drove the Persians out of Greece. A fatal weakness in the Persian strategy was the sheer size of their force. Their armies were so large that they were incredibly difficult to supply and lost coordination. This created the opportunities for mistakes, mistakes the nimbler and more adaptable Greeks maximized to the fullest possible extent.

The Golden Age of Athens

The war with Persia didn’t stop there. The Greek war of Independence continued by driving the Persians out of Europe itself and back across the Hellespont. They reconquered the Ionian states for the Greeks as well. Athenian expeditionary forces even tried to help the Egyptians in a failed attempt at a war of Independence.

The war with Persia had several effects upon Greek civilization, the many Greek city states were forced to pool strength against the Persians, the small city states joined coalitions to fight the Persians and those coalitions remained after the Persians were defeated. The two most powerful Greek states, the Athenians and Spartans, had many smaller city states fall under their sway. The Spartans maintained an alliance among most of the peoples of the Greek mainland. The Spartans, an isolationist people, did not ask much of their allies and returned to their homes, lest the Helots revolt. The Athenian navy meant that the Athenians were able to control the isles of the Aegean, forcibly as often as consensually. In fact the alliance was nearly racial, with the Ionians standing with the Athenians and the Dorians with the Spartans. The provinces of this new Athenian empire gave tribute to Athens in exchange for “protection”, but in reality had more in common with a gang. This created an enormous amount of wealth in Athens, which in turn sparked the flowering of Greek civilization and the one of the springtimes of the human mind.

The Greeks never had a strong priest class to confine their thoughts of philosophy and the universe. Also, they viewed the world as ruled by underlying nature and chaos that even the gods were subject to, unlike almost all other faiths in which the gods are in control of the universe. In Athens, the government was the people, thus meaning there was no central force to say what was allowed and what was heresy. The democracy in Athens resulted in a massive forum of public debate. The people had to make decisions and thus had to educate themselves. This combined with a feeling of incredible smug superiority caused by the defeat of the Persians and the great wealth pouring in caused the Athenian Golden Age. Almost every field of thought flourished. Western philosophy was practically founded when Socrates, an annoying man who referred to himself as the gadfly, asked people why they believed their basic misconceptions. He created no philosophy of his own, just poked holes in that of others and helped develop a school of rational reasonable debate. His student, Plato believed that the world was made up of ideal forms that everything in existence is merely a poor reflection of. Supposedly basing his opinions of the underlying nature of man, tried to design a perfect society. One in which the childrearing was not done by the parents, society was controlled by a small ascetic class who were tempered by years of hardship and art was tightly controlled for state purposes. A society too close to Sparta for the comfort of people at the time. Interestingly enough, Plato left Athens for Syracuse due to his political unpopularity and there became involved in local politics, becoming advisors to certain kings and almost killed by others before he had the good sense to return to Athens.

The subject of history was invented. Herodotus wrote a massive volume on the world and the histories’ of its peoples. It likely contained as many inaccuracies and tall tales as true events, but it was a noble start. Thucydides wrote a brilliant history of the Peloponnesian wars that is still considered one of the greatest history books ever written 2,500 years later. Before this was only court chronicles that only stated the facts, never giving beauty or explanation. The artists and architects discovered mathematical equations to find beauty, in both the form of architecture and the human body. These discoveries put them thousands of years beyond the surrounding world and their work seems eerily modern when surrounded on all sides, both geographically and in time by stiff, blockular designs, be they medieval, Byzantine, Egyptian, Iranian or Mycenaean. The Athenians made the massive and gorgeous Parthenon temple in honor of the goddess Athena and the victory at Salamis. A thousand gorgeous nude men, women, and beasts adorn the museums of the present from this era. Until the postmodern movement of out time, the standards developed by the Greeks were still held to be the highest in the Western world. A visit the cities of the Western world will find pillars, nude statues and high stepped buildings everywhere.

The Greeks practically invented the play and modern drama. Of course man has mimed the stories that have seemed important to him ever since the Stone Age, but the Greeks brought it to a whole new level. Their plays were a quality of writing not to be seen until Shakespeare and incorporated music in ways that we cannot appreciate even today. The plots were however mainly fan fiction or in more precise terms the retelling of the previously popular myths as were part of the cultural cannon. Modern western medicine, based off Egyptian ancestors, was also founded in ancient Greece by Hippocrates. It broke away from the magical cures that dominated almost the entire world and tried to be logical. It failed more than it succeeded, but was still a noble attempt and was the first of its kind in Europe. Truly with all these mental contributions coming out of a few decades in a single city it was the best time to be a thinking intelligent person.

Before we look to fondly upon this Golden Age too fondly, let us look upon what allowed it to exist. As stated before, Athens’ wealth was caused by the oppression of the client states scattered across the Aegean. Also, so much creativity was allowed because the citizens were cleared up from labor by their slaves. Between a third and a majority of Athens’ population were slaves, shipped in from all over the world, but especially from the Scythes of the Southern Steppe alongside the wheat that maintained Greece. The Greeks shipped out manufactured goods like pottery and olive oil in exchange for food and slaves to sustain them. Interestingly enough, commerce was despised by the Upper Classes, who viewed it is ungentlemanly and not befitting a decent person. In the real world, this in no way kept the Upper Classes from involvement in trade, which they did so to a great extent.

The Greeks felt little guilt for slavery , but instead thought it the norm or even preferable. The Greeks believed that people naturally accrued to the position that they were capable of. The citizens who were capable of self government and thought should rule and not dirty their hands with labor, while the slaves, who theoretically could not (and who were non Greek barbarians and thus barely human), should instead work to support the citizens. The Greeks, unlike the Romans, universally treated their slaves poorly and disrespectfully. The slaves would be shipped into Athens by boat, worked until they were no longer useful and then the next boatload would come in. A humorous scene comes from an Athenian play in which a pro to-communist party which wanted to divide the wealth of the few among the many is asked who would do the work in said equal society. The communists reply “The slaves, of course”. Thankfully, slaves were banned from the countryside, thus preserving the Athenian farmer from ruin due to their cheap competitive labor, an issue that destroyed the Roman Republic. Foreigners were given no political rights either and worked mainly as artisans. Women were never to leave the house or have interactions with males outside their families, an ancestor of the purdah system in Islam today. They were denied education of any sort and were expected to only perform menial tasks. This led to widespread institutional homosexuality, as males wanted lovers who they could relate to and didn’t seem intellectually like a different species. In all of Greece, especially Sparta, love with pre pubescent boys was considered morally fine and encouraged. Only around 20 percent of the population could vote in general in Athens. For a comparison, Apartheid South Africa had a higher voter registration rate.

Before we judge Athens too terribly, as many historians on the left have in recent years, we must remember the world they were in. They were surrounded on all sides in a world not of modern progressive states, but by headhunting barbarians and theocracies dominated by god kings. They gave civilization too many things to be discounted or disrespected. They were possibly the most democratic state in all of history and were masterful traders. They were men, who had to live with greed, lust, generosity, hope, vanity and empathy and should be judged as thus, not just as good or evil.

Meanwhile, the rest of Greece continued as much as it had before. Any Spartan Plato or Socrates would have been bullied into submission at age 8 and Thebes didn’t have the money or the freedom of though due to the oligarchy to go down Athen’s road. The small islands of the Athenian empire shuddered under the taxation and Athenian posing, waiting until they could be left alone once again.

It was good when it lasted

Athens had grown to become a mighty trade power, its economy grew and the Athenian anaconda strangled more and more small Greek states. This worried the Spartans, who’s only resource or reason to exist was its crack military and thus their power remained stagnant. The Spartans worried that if they did nothing the Athenians would grow more powerful and conquer all of Greece. The naturally isolationistic Spartans wondered if they should use their military superiority to their advantage while they still had it while the Athenians grew aggressive and arrogant. Pericles, Athens’ leader, purposely tried to prevent war with the Spartans for most of his reign, hoping Athens’ continuous rise in power would place it in a more advantageous position with the passing of time. This was a struggle in bellicose Athens in which elections were normally won by aggressive warmongers who gained popularity by flattering the power and rightness of the Athenian people or by continually threatening war to demonstrate the superiority of Athens. However, as he aged, Pericles’ mind lost the agility it had before and so, like the First World War, a struggle between two small allied states resulted in a greater struggle between Athens and Sparta.

The war was as one would expect it to be. The Spartans dominated the land and the Athenians, the sea. The Spartans burned the fields of Attica and the Athenians fell behind the long walls that connected them with the port of Piraeus. The war quickly entered an equilibrium, the Athenians were unable to drive the Spartans off the land while the Athenians supplied themselves by the sea with control of their port and the seas. The Spartans were unable to storm the walls and the war dragged on for 30 years. Both sides had many near misses and battles in which they could have won, but a turn of fate kept the war going. In fact, the Persians, loving to see the Greeks kill each other, funded whatever side happened to be losing to continue the war as long as possible. In this way, the Persians were able to pick apart the Greek states and reconquer the cities of Ionia. The cities of Greece were ravaged both by enemy attacks and taxation for these three decades. The length of the war meant that the armies were no longer town militias of freemen, but instead mercenary hirelings. Thus, the basis of democracy was eroded.

The conflict finally came to a close with a combination of variables. The city of Syracuse, still one of the powerful states in the Greek world was a promising prize for the Athenians and would give them resources to defeat Sparta. The Athenians supported a small Italian city state against Syracuse and tried to conquer it. The Athenians, due to issues in command structure, bungled the invasion, and thus gave time for the Spartans to ally with Syracuse. The Athenians invested more and more resources into what became an impossible campaign and when they were finally defeated, the flower of Athens was cut down. The crowding of the entirety of Attica into the city of Athens also resulted in very unhygienic conditions. This resulted in a great plague, likely bubonic, that killed half of Athens’ population, thus permanently weakening it. Finally, the Persians, knowing the Spartans to be isolationist, knew that they weren’t a real threat to Persia. Thus the Persians favored the Spartans in their subsidies, although of course supporting Athens when it appeared as if Sparta was winning. Whenever the Spartans ran out of money or energy, Persian gold would reinvigorate them. Thus, Sparta was able to outlast the Athenians and when the Athenian fleet was unable to win a battle, Athenian civilization came to an end. The Spartans were originally lax in their peace treaty, only forcing the Athenians to remove their walls and burn their fleet. However, continued Athenian resistance resulted in the Spartan removal of their democracy, replacing it with an aristocratic council of elders, like Sparta.

After 30 years, the war was over, but at what cost? Greece was ravaged by war and taxation. The conditions that produced the Athenian Renaissance in creativity were as far away as the moon and so were the results. The Persians meanwhile stood standing on the side, chuckling to themselves. The Persians were never able to defeat the Greeks, the Greeks were. The Persians were in turn able to devastate with coin while the sword failed. However, not all the Greeks were defeated, only the south was ravaged by the war and the north was stronger than ever before. Meanwhile, the saga of the Persians and Greeks and their battle for the civilized world would continue for another thousand years.