Tom Holland

So its democracy would have been pretty much stillborn.

Its cultural impact would have been immense.

No Parthenon, no tragedy, no Thucydides.

In fact, probably no Herodotus.

Herodotus probably would not have been inspired to write his great history.

And also, it would have had an incalculable impact on the development of philosophy.

And I think particularly Plato, because it's very difficult to imagine the emergence of either Christianity or Islam without the legacy of Plato's influence.

So to quote Walter Burkert in Greek religion, since Plato, there has been no theology which has not stood in his shadow for many centuries.

Platonism was simply the way in which God was thought of and spoken about in the West as in the Islamic East.

And so, obviously, that sense, the fact that Athens is going to be a crucial influence on the lands of what become the Caliphate as well as on Christendom, complicates any notion of Marathon, I think, as a binary conflict between West and East.

And in fact, throughout these two episodes, the comparisons that we've been drawing, the modern comparison has been between Persia and America.

I mean, I think America in the...

invading Afghanistan and in the Gulf Wars corresponds much more closely to Persia than to Athens.

And when George Bush...

talked about an axis of evil.

I mean, that's language that would have meant nothing to the Athenians, but it would absolutely have meant everything to the Persians.

Greece and Athens are obviously massive, massive influences on the West, but so too is Persia.

It's just that the influence of Persia is so occluded.

Yeah, he's on top of it.

And I think also that the notion of it as a battle between despotism and liberty is also complicated because in due course, after the defeat of the second invasion, after the great Athenian victory in the naval battle at Salamis, Athens emerges from the Persian Wars as a great power herself and as an imperial power.