Thalassocracies, 550 BC–400 BC

The Mediterranean coasts might be expected to serve as the natural limit to imperial expansion by the great powers of the Middle East – the Hittites, Assyria, even Pharaonic Egypt. The Assyrians did occasionally try to browbeat Cyprus into submission, as did the Egyptians, for its resources in timber and metal were too precious to ignore. But no attempt to gain mastery over the eastern Mediterranean matched the Persian conquests in Anatolia and the Levant during the sixth century BC, and the Persian attempt to invade Greece; the defeat of Persia would be celebrated as the greatest Greek victory since the fall of Troy. The achievement was not just military but political, since a great many cities in Greece proper and the Aegean islands collaborated in the struggle against the Persians, and even Syracuse was asked to help (though it fought off a threat from Carthage, possibly instigated by Persia). The Greeks commemorated their triumph by erecting victory monuments such as the bronze serpent from Delphi, now in the Hippodrome at Istanbul; there, they inscribed the names of thirty-one cities that had helped resist the Persians at the great battle of Plataia in 479 BC, and even that list was not complete. A ‘Congress of the Hellenes’ came into existence, and the name of Hellene, originally assigned by Homer to the followers of Achilles, was increasingly understood to refer to a common identity expressed through language, the cult of the gods and style of life. The story that emerged, most resoundingly in the spirited account of these events by Herodotos, was that of the defence of Greek liberty against Persian tyranny. In his play The Persians, performed in Athens in 472, Aeschylus assumed that the future of Hellas directly depended on the fate of his home city: . . . QUEEN ATOSSA : Say where, in all this peopled world, a city of men called Athens lies? LEADER : Far distant, where our Lord the sun sinks and his last effulgence dies. ATOSSA : And this far western land it is my son so craved to make his prey? LEADER : Aye, for if Athens once were his, all Hellas must his word obey. . . .