This blog was originally supposed to talk only about Byzantine history, but it’s clear I should be including all of Greek history, especially ancient in my blog posts.
According to this article by Greekreporter.com, it is stated by the author that the Battle of Marathon helped save Western civilization. That is something I hold to be true. Consider how powerful the Persians were. They had territories stretching from Asia Minor all the way to the Indus River Valley. They had an incredibly fearsome and formidable army at their command. It should been a shoe-in for the Persians.
However, the Greek were smarter than their enemy. They also had the ideology of egalitarianism incorporated into their army. Each soldier had their own land, clan and wealth. They thought about themselves in individual way. This meant that the greek soldiers were able to understand the ideas that they were fighting for. Unlike the Persians, there was no great weight of a ruler telling them what to do. They chose to be there at Marathon and they knew what was on the line, the survival of the entire Greek Classical antiquity.
The article then goes on to talk about the important phalanx formation, in which heavily armored hoplites were tightly packed together. Important manuvers are also mentioned, and how the Greeks managed to completely outmaneuver the Persians.
Had the Persians won, there would have been no experiment in participatory politics. Everything that we hold dear from politics to theatre would have been altered by the conquest of Greece by the Persians. What would one expect? A polity that is screaming out for the blessings of liberty would be the cry that would be heard by the subjects of the Persian Empire.
Byzantine-Empire.com 