In the fifth century BC, when Egypt's era as a mighty imperial power was a distant memory and the halcyon days of the Roman Empire were still far in the future, two superpowers emerged in the world, each one representing a culture very unlike the other. On one side there was Greece, whose philosophy and literature would form the kernel of European civilization, and on the other was the Persian Empire, a civilization that was distinctly Asian in character.
Cyrus the Great (558-528 BC) had created the Persian Empire by uniting the tribes of Persia and extending the boundaries of his domain from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indus River in India. His grandson Darius (558-486 BC), who ascended the throne in 521 BC, consolidated Persian rule over Egypt and added the Phoenician fleet to his forces. His next goal was to be the conquest of Greece and the extension of the Persian Empire into Europe.
Darius had hoped to play on the internal disagreements among the Greek city-states, but they were able to set aside their differences and unite their forces to turn back his armies. Though outnumbered by the Persians, the better-trained Greeks defeated them at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC.
Ten years later, Darius' son Xerxes (zurk'sez) (519-465 BC) gathered an even larger army. Supported by naval units, the Persian forces marched on Greece with an estimated 2.5 million troops. The first major victory of the campaign occurred on September 23, 480 BC, when the Greeks lured the Persian fleet into the narrow straits off the island of Salamis, outmaneu-vered it and destroyed it. Xerxes regrouped over the winter and returned the following year and met the Greeks in battle on the Plain of Plataea. Again, as had been the case at Marathon and Salamis, an outnum-bered Greek force succeeded in outmaneu-vering and defeating the larger and more powerful Persian army.
Xerxes' defeat at Plataea marked the beginning of the end of the Persian Empire. No longer expanding, it began to collapse from within, and by the end of the next century it was ripe for conquest by Greek armies under Alexander the Great (345-323 BC).
Although no one could imagine it at the time, the campaign that had its climax in the Battle of Plataea would prove to be one of the most important turning points in world history. Had Darius or Xerxes prevailed, Greece would have fallen under Persian influence. As a conquered culture, the great flourishing of Greek science and literature that was to come in the last half of the fifth century would probably never have happened and the profound impact of Greek civilization on Roman, and later European, cultures would never have occurred. Small arms combat at Marathon.
So it is that on one long day in the summer of 479 BC the course—and very essence—of European history was cast.2