The Persian war brought a defeat for the Persians and a win for the Greeks. If the Greeks wouldn’t have won this war I think is hard to tell what would have happened:
“It’s difficult to assess all the consequences of the Greek victory over the Persians. While the Spartans were principally responsible for the victory, the Athenian fleet was probably the most important component of that victory. This victory left Athens with the most powerful fleet in the Aegean, and since the Persians hadn’t been completely defeated, all the Greeks feared a return. The majority of Greek city-states, however, didn’t turn to Sparta; they turned, rather, to Athens and the Athenian fleet. The alliances that Athens would make following the retreat of the Persians, the so-called Delian League, would suddenly catapult Athens into the major power of the Greek city-states. This power would make Athens the cultural center of the Greek world, but it would also spell their downfall as the Spartans grew increasingly frightened of Athenian power and increasingly suspicious of Athenian intentions.”(Richard Hooker 1996).
There would be no democracy because Athens would be under Persian control. Even if the Greeks lost that war, they will be too rebellious to contain. Remember that the Persians didn’t really have a much unified empire, and instead they had satraps that collected money from each province or peoples. Even though the Central Asian regions had centuries of warfare and cultural assimilation and their cultures been similar, they didn’t manage anything more than a loose control. If the Greeks lost the Persian wars, the cities will mass revolt so much that the Persians will lose those cities and the “Greek” colonies that they had a hold of. The city populations would have been restive, just as had happened throughout the previous three hundred years, and had happened in the Greek cities of Asia Minor. These coups would have been put down with increasing ferocity, so Greece would have been in turmoil. There would have been no ‘golden age’ of Greece, since the classic Greek age was right after the victory over Persia, in celebration of it. If the Persians had won we may never have heard or felt the greatness of Julius Augustus Caesar, the shape of Western Europe would be very different and Christianity may not have existed as we know it.
Then the world we live in now would feel the touch of the Persian king Xerxes a lot more, he would be thought of in the same way as a Caesar. And I think his reputation would be similar to a Napoleon or Alexander the Great. The Persian Empire like all Empires would eventually crumble beneath the weight of its own bureaucracy or the needs and desires of its own multi-cultural citizens. (Alexander Kent).
georginetteguance 