"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."