Greco-Persian Wars

"O sons of the Greeks, go on! Free your fatherland, and free your children, your wives, and the shrines of your paternal gods, and the tombs of your ancestors! Now the struggle is for all!"

"September of the year 490 B.C. was to my mind a more cardinal moment of fate for Europe than August 1914. Western civilisation, as we know it with its merits and its faults, was saved in its infancy at Marathon, and ten years later by Leonidas and by the men of Salamis. Rome was then in her in fancy; and had it not been for that decade there would have been nothing to prevent Eastern Europe being orientalised and the ultimate fight for the hegemony of Europe would have been left to the Persians and the Carthaginians. But for the Greeks there would have been no civilisation as we know it, and we should all have been dark-skinned people with long noses."

"The great conflict between Greece and Persia – or, to be more accurate, between a handful of states in mainland Greece and the whole might of the Persian empire at its zenith – must always remain one of the most inspiring episodes in European history. As Aeschylus and Herodotus clearly saw (despite the obfuscations of national pride and propaganda) this had been an ideological struggle, the first of its kind known to us. On one side, the towering, autocratic figure of the Great King; on the other, the voluntary and imperfect discipline of proudly independent citizens. In Herodotus's account, Xerxes' soldiers are driven forward to fight under the lash; the recurrent Persian motif of flogging, mutilation and torture throughout his narrative repays study. The Greeks, on the other hand, fought because they had a personal stake in victory: their struggle was to preserve a hard-won and still precarious heritage of freedom."

"The whole concept of political and intellectual liberty, of the constitutional state – however individually inefficient or corrupt – depended on one thing: that the Greeks, for whatever motive, decided to stand out against the Oriental system of palace absolutism, and did so with remarkable success."

"Common resistance and sacrifice in the face of a profoundly alien invader had begun, however slowly and imperfectly, to forge a sense of what afterwards came to be known as the Panhellenic ideal, of an identifiable and unique Greek spirit which no other race could share. This was perhaps the best and most lasting legacy of the Persian Wars."

"There has never been a war fought for purer motives than the war against Persia. Marathon and Salamis are still words that "send a ringing challenge down through the generations." Their victories still seem a miracle as they seemed to the men who won them. The mighty were put down from their seats and those of low degree exalted, and for fifty years and more Persia could do nothing to Greece. What followed was one of the most triumphant rebirths of the human spirit in all history, when the bitter differences that divide men were far in the background and freedom was in the air — freedom in the great sense, not only equality before the law, but freedom of thought and speech."