"The flower of western civilization burst into full bloom five centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ. Never before or since has an outpouring of cultural development on such a grand and far-reaching scale been realized on earth. It was, however, just as Charles Dickens said of Revolutionary France, the best of times and also the worst.
On the eve of its golden age, Greece was in peril. Xerxes, king of kings and ruler of the Persian Empire, which stretched from the Indus River to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and from the Caucasus to the Indian Ocean, had turned his attention toward the Europeans who dared to resist his will.
Persia was, in the truest sense, the greatest superpower of its day. Cyrus the Great launched the era of Persian expansion in the 6th century BC, and his successors held dominion of much of the known world for nearly three centuries. With Persia at the height of its glory, Xerxes ruled peoples of great diversity. Phoenicians, Egyptians, Medes, Cypriotes, Syrians, Levantines and Ethiopians were his subjects, as were those Greeks who had ventured forth from their mainland and established cities on the islands of the Aegean Sea, along the coasts of the Black Sea and Asia Minor.
The Greek city-states, foremost of which were Sparta and Athens, maintained curious relationships with one another. Strained those these relations were from time to time, the Greeks recognized their ancestral ties, and that mutual defense was their best and only hope against outside aggression from such an overwhelming force as Xerxes could place in the field and on the sea. At the time of the Persian threat, that tenuous alliance was all that stood against Persia's domination of Greece and thereby all of Europe.
To place the situation in perspective, consider that during an average lifetime a citizen of Athens might have known Socrates, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Themistocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. The heirs of western culture in philosophy, medicine, mathematics, drama and democracy owe their existence to such men. Therefore, the names of Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis are remembered with reverence…"
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