What if xerxes had won

The Greeks, on the other hand, desired to protect the land they owned against invaders. If the Persians had been victorious in the Greco-Persian Wars, the Persians might have created the first world empire and required Greek city-states to submit to the Persian monarchy, not allowing the ideas of democracy and freedom to flourish. Although the Persians showed more clemency than other ancient empires like the Assyrians, governors accountable to the king ruled the different regions or satrapies.

While the Greeks could have kept their customs and religion, it would have been more challenging to maintain their unique governments since the Greek satrapies would be required to pay taxes to the Persian Empire.

Rather than existing as separate entities, the Greek poleis would have been absorbed by the invasive Persian government.

As a part of this empire, the Persians would have emphasized coercion over free will. Whips were only for slaves, not free men; they were appropriate for a barbarian master to use on his slave subjects, but out of the question for the citizen soldiers of a free Greek polis. Such an action would have turned the Greeks into barbarians and slaves instead of freemen, thus eliminating the distinction between the Greek poleis and the Persian Empire.

In fact, the Greeks might even change their understanding of key virtues like freedom since they would be treated like slaves. The ideals that motivated the Spartans to fight against the Persians at Thermopylae would have died under the Persians. Americans can thank the Greeks, and especially the Spartans, for things they love and sometimes take for granted like the Constitution, Chick-fil-a, and capitalism.

Had the Spartans not stood up, there may not have been enough freedom-loving Greeks left to defend against the Persians. I always end up with a cultural victory or grab a UN victory at the last minute since time is about to expire. I'd have to dig out the Republic to quote it, but in his heirarchy of the four government types, democracy is in third, ahead of tyrrany.

So he certainly believed things could be better than democracy. In any event, my core point is that our belief that democracy was the central element of Greek civilization is heavily distorted and that democracy wasn't even the dominant form, let alone basis.

Plato was the master of the mind-fuck. A member of a noble and venerable family, Pericles led the Athenians against Cimon for harboring autocratic intentions. Pericles had been the leader of the democratic faction of Athenian politics since BC.

Ephialtes was the Athenian leader who had finally divested the Areopagus of all its power; Athens was now solely governed by the council and the democratic Assembly. Pericles quickly brought forward legislation that let anyone serve as the archon one of the nine central leaders of the country despite birth or wealth.

The Assembly became the central power of the state. Consisting of all the free-born no freed slaves male citizens of Athens, the Assembly was given sole approval or veto power over every state decision. The Assembly was not a representative government, but instead consisted of every male citizen. In terms of numbers, this still was not a democratic state: women weren't included, nor were foreigners, slaves, or freed slaves.

Pericles also changed the rules of citizenship: before the ascendancy of Pericles, anyone born of a single Athenian parent was an Athenian citizen; Pericles instituted laws which demanded that both parents be Athenian citizens.

So, in reality, the great democracy of Periclean Athens was in reality only a very small minority of the people living in Athens. It was, however, the closest human culture has come to an unadulterated democracy.

The Assembly was given unprecedented power over the selections of officials; elected officials, such as military generals, were not chosen by the Assembly, but the Assembly did hire and fire all other public officials.

In addition, the Assembly served as a law court hearing major cases. Any decision made in a court of law could be appealed to the Assembly where a court of free citizens would hear the case. There was no standing army, either, as there was in Sparta; free citizens could choose to serve in the military. And still there remains the figure of Pericles himself.

There is no question that the democratic reforms of the Age of Pericles owe their existence to the energy of this political figure. He was a man of immense persuasiveness and an orator of great power.

Although he was eventually ostracized by the Athenians he later returned , he dominated the democratic government of Athens with his formidable capacity to speak and to persuade.

He had two central policies: democratic reform and the maintenance of the empire. Source compared with the Spartan form of gov't: quote:. Spartan society was divided into three main classes.

At the top was the Spartiate, or native Spartan, who could trace his or her ancestry back to the original inhabitants of the city. The Spartiate served in the army and was the only person who enjoyed the full political and legal rights of the state. Below the Spartiates wer the perioeci , or "dwellers around or about. Because of this vital function, they were accorded a great deal of freedom. Most of the trade and commerce carried out in Sparta were performed by the perioeci.

At the bottom, of course, were the helots. Spartan government was an odd affair, but its overwhelming characteristic was stability. The Spartans, in fact, had the most stable government in the history of ancient Greece some historians call this stability, "political stagnation". At the top of government was the monarchy; the monarchy, however, was a dual monarchy. Below the monarchy was a council which was composed of the two kings plus twenty-eight nobles, all of whom were over sixty, that is, retired from the military.

The council debated and set legislative and foreign policy, and was the supreme criminal court. Below the council or above it , was an assembly of all the Spartiate males a democracy, in other words that selected the council and approved or vetoed council proposals. Above them all, however, was a small group of five men known as the ephorate.

For all practical purposes, Spartan government was the ephorate, for these five men led the council, ran the military, ran the educational system, ran the infant selection system, and had veto power over everything coming out of the council or the assembly. They even had power to depose the king; however, they needed powerful divine proof in the form of omens or oracles to exercise this power.

So what kind of government was Spartan government? It was a democratic timocratic monarchical oligarchy. Chew on that a few times. Here These rudimentary forms of 'democracy' are the basis upon which successive governments in the West were founded.. Slavery is an economic phenomenon, economic value produced versus the cost of production.

In pre-machinery settings, it is quite often the work i. While it is true that the human brain is the only computer that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor, slaves were rarely utilized for their mental abilities, but rather their physical ones. The development of a steam engine would have eventually resulted in economic displacement of slavery in Greece, just as it did in more modern times.

Except they didn't have the background to really develop one. They could make a toy, but they lacked the theory and machining skills to develop a working one. True, but which isn't to say that such wouldn't have developed because of a working model, in Greece or elsewhere possibly Egypt , partly as a result of such a 'toy'. Tin was being imported from Denmark, and possibly the British Isles.

Metallurgy was being developed. Of course, if Xerxes has won, we'd likely be discussing what would have happened if he hadn't. Erm, not exactly. Obviously you're speaking about the Roman Republic here, since the Senate held practically no power during, and after, Augustus's reign. First of all, Senators were never elected by the people.

Indirectly, yes - anyone who held the office of quaestor I believe or higher automatically became a Senator for life. So the end result is the same, but it's still misleading to call Senators "elected". Second, the Senate actually had little real power - up until Sulla's consulship, the Senate had no actual legal basis for its power. It was solely an advisory body, with no power to make laws, and no power to pass them.

In time, though, the Senate came to hold auctoritas , which is basically a form of unspoken authority. Third, power was most certainly not evenly distributed - it was held by very few people. The power granted to Roman officials was called imperium , which was basically the "kingly power". Only consuls and praetors held imperium, and praetors were very limited in their use. Plebeian tribunes also had much power, which became the cause of great consernation for the Senate and, in the end, great political unrest.

The Senate had no real power, and thus could be ignored, though pushing that too far would result in you being assassinated aka Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus. Which in turn, of course, was to cast Darius himself, not as a murderer, not as a usurper, but as a defender of truth. No more honorable role could possibly have been imagined, for the Persians knew, as more benighted peoples did not, that a universe without truth would be one undone and lost to perpetual night.

Back in the beginning of time, when Ahura Mazda, greatest of the gods, first summoned creation into being, he had engendered Arta—Truth—to give order to existence. Without it, the universe would have lacked all form and value and beauty. Yet the work of Arta was never done—for perpetually it was shadowed by its opposite, Drauga, the Lie. Two orders—one of perfection, the other of falsehood, each the image of the other—were coiled in a conflict as ancient as time.

What else could Darius worthily have done, then, but take the side of Arta against Drauga, Truth against the Lie, lest the universe itself should totter and fail? So it was that he came to justify his usurpation by means of an innovative and fateful claim: that he, and he alone, was the appointed lieutenant of Ahura Mazda on earth.

The global dominion of which he made himself the master was henceforward to be regarded as nothing less than a sacral image of the order of the universe, a beacon of truth and order lit to illumine all the world.

Here was a formulation no less profitable than it was original, for what it provided, in effect, was a license to engage in conquest without limit. If it was indeed the god-given destiny of Darius to bring peace to a bleeding world, then what could those who opposed him be reckoned, if not the agents of anarchy and darkness—of an axis of evil?

In BC, when an ever fractious people named the Elamites rose for a third time in revolt, Darius, driven to fury, anathematized them in new and startling terms. The Elamites were crushed with a peremptory, almost dismissive, speed. Never again would they dare to challenge the awful might of the Persian king. Yet Darius, unlike the kings of Assyria or Babylon, had no interest in dwelling upon the specifics of his victory.

What mattered to him was not the war, but the fact that the war had been won; not the bloodshed, but the fact that the blood had dried, and that an eternal age of peace had dawned. To be sure, the victory over Gaumata and his supporters had been a great and a terrible one, and because it proved that Darius was indeed the champion of Ahura Mazda—the great truth on which he founded his empire—the new king had ordered its details to be recorded and proclaimed.

Never again, however, would he permit himself to be shown enclosed within mere events. Just as the Lord Mazda dwelt beyond the rhythms of the world, so did his proxy, the King of Persia, transcend space and time. Which is why, essentially, there were no war correspondents at the court of the King of Kings, no chroniclers of all his many victorious campaigns.

From the point of view of Darius—and of his son and heir, Xerxes—history had been brought to a glorious close. The empire of the Persians was both its end and its summation—for what else could a dominion be that contained within itself all the limits of the horizon, if not the bulwark of a truly cosmic order?

Such a monarchy, redeemed as it had been from the Lie, surely could be expected to endure for all time, infinite, unshakable, the watchtower of the Truth. The King of Kings did not dwell upon diurnal banalities such as battles. And yet there was an irony. A vision as imperious as that formulated by Darius naturally needed to be broadcast to the entire globe—and what better way to do that than by leading the empire to war? Thus, in the judgment of Xerxes, Greece had to be invaded.

To shrink from risk, to confess that Persian power might be susceptible to overstretch, to abandon to the Lie the terrorist states of Athens and Sparta and the continent beyond them would constitute an abject betrayal of Darius and, even more unforgivably, of Ahura Mazda. Xerxes, as he prepared to conquer the West, aimed to triumph not merely as the King of Persia, but as the agent of Arta, of truth and order.

So it was, in defiance, it seems, of his military advisers, who had urged him to lead a strike force composed only of elite units, that he insisted upon summoning the peoples of even the obscurest frontiers to pay him the tribute of their sons: a grand and extravagant coalition of the unwilling. Strategic folly it might have been, but war, for the King of Kings, had long ceased to be simply a matter of strategy.

Rather, it served him as a vehicle of propaganda, as a means of flaunting his global mastery. The result, of course, was catastrophe. Bogged down in a remote and inhospitable backwater, the King of Kings was forced, humiliatingly, to cut his losses and run.

Jihads and crusades, wars fought in defense of democracy, UN resolutions, even human rights; all, in the end, and however indirectly, owe something to it.

Perhaps the future of human conflict, after all, is no less Persian than it is Greek.