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increasingly complex marketplace. 17 The great Persian king Cyrus, Herodotus tells us, described the typical Greek agora as “a meeting place in the middle of their city where they gather together, swear oaths, and deceive each other.” 18
    Greek expansion depended not so much on market savvy as on brute force, particularly naval power. 19 For a moment, Athens under Pericles possessed the military might to siphon off foreign wealth to initiate massive building programs and still subsidize the incomes of much of the citizenry. “Because of the greatness of our city,” Pericles boasted, “the fruits of the entire earth flow to us.” 20
    In the process, the Greeks promoted a rapid expansion of the urban frontier from present-day Messina in Sicily to Marseilles, Nice, Monaco, and Byzantium on the Bosporus, later to grow into the great capital Constantinople. Greek city-states provided a model for these new towns, each of which developed its own agora, theater, and temple.
    Some colonies grew to be large cities themselves. Syracuse, initially a colony of Corinth, eventually became many times larger and far more powerful than its early founding polis. Under the rule of Dionysius I, it emerged the largest city in Europe, controlling most of Sicily and parts of southern Italy. Another important new city, Rhodes, founded in 408 B.C., was a model of classical planning, with broad avenues, drains, and a well-placed harbor. 21

     

THE TWILIGHT OF THE CITY-STATES
     
    These achievements ultimately could not protect the Greek city-states from the threat posed by larger, well-organized empires. Like the Phoenicians, they never developed an overarching ideology or governmental structure allowing for a stable confederation among themselves. Dismissive of other races as inherently inferior, they evidenced a profound difficulty relating to people of different cultures.
    No matter how fearsome in war, these parochial cities were not well suited to fend off empires that had evolved more tolerant and expansive governing systems. The founder of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great, possessed a remarkably cosmopolitan vision. Rather than annihilate or enslave his opponents, Cyrus envisioned a multinational empire where foreign cultures were to be respected and preserved, albeit under Persian supervision.
    This policy worked remarkably well, even among those Greek city-states conquered by the Persians. Many, particularly the merchants along the Ionian coast, welcomed the security and greater access to markets created by an alliance with a wider empire. 22 The expansion failed only when Persia tried to assault Greece itself. Threatened with the loss of their traditional independence, the Greek city-states under Athenian leadership expelled the multinational Asian foe in 480 B.C. in Salamis, one of the landmark battles of European history.
    But even such a heroic victory could not unite the quarrelsome city-states. Shortly after defeating the Persians, they returned to fighting among themselves, sometimes spurred on by the subtle diplomacy and gold of the Persians. By the end of the Peloponnesian War in the later part of the fifth century B.C., Athens was defeated by a Sparta-led coalition of cities. Thousands of slaves and many metics, foreign residents critical in several of the trades, fled the city. Reeling from the disaster, Athens became increasingly repressive, executing or exiling many of its greatest minds and persecuting the economically critical metics. Although democracy was restored by the end of the century, the era of leadership by the Greek city-states in the ancient world was over. 23

     

ALEXANDER AND THE HELLENISTIC CITY
     
    The final blow fell not from the Asiatic east, but from the rough-hewn north. In 338 B.C., armies of the obscure northern kingdom of Macedonia, under King Philip, overwhelmed the last resistance of the city-states.
    The Greeks could take solace in the fact that Philip’s son and successor, Alexander,