Tom Holland

But I think Marathon does deserve to be seen as decisive, and for two reasons.

I think that

Had Athens been defeated, destroyed, burned, the Persians would have been back.

And I think the Spartans might have resisted, but I don't think anyone else would have done.

So I think that the victory at Marathon gives not just Athens, but all the cities of Greece that decide to resist the Persian invasion.

It gives them the backbone to do that.

And I do also think that had Athens been annihilated, as Miletus had been annihilated, as Eretria had been annihilated,

then that would have had profound consequences for the future.

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...