What if the Persians won at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC?
I think this paragraph explains it all, from Victor Davis Hanson's "No Glory That Was Greece" in the book What If?:
If the Scenario Group there doesn't make a scenario of the Perisan Wars in Greece, it will be my first one.
I think this paragraph explains it all, from Victor Davis Hanson's "No Glory That Was Greece" in the book What If?:
Hegel knew, as we may have forgotten, that had Greece become the westernmost province of Persia, in time Greek family farms would have become estates for the Great King. The public buildings of the agora would have been transformed into the covered shops of the bazaar, and yeomen hoplites paid shock troops alongside Xerxes' Immortals. In place of Hellenistic philosophy and science, there would have been only the subsidized arts of divination and astrology, which were the appendages of imperial or religious bureaucracies and not governed by unfettered rational inquiry. In a Persian Greece, local councils would be mere puppet bodies to facilitate royal requisitions of men and money, history the official diaries and edicts of the Great King, and appointed local officials mouthpieces for the satrap ("the protector of power") and the magi.
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