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spoke the Greek language, then Greek is what you were.
    One consequence of this broad diaspora is that there are as many magnificent Greek sites in Italy, Sicily and around the west and south coasts of Asia Minor as there are in mainland Greece, and they are often even more rewarding to the visitor. The Parthenon, it goes without saying, is in a class by itself; 9 the same could be said, perhaps, for the architectural masterpieces at Olympia and Bassae. But then one thinks of the great temples of Paestum south of Naples, or of those at Segesta and Agrigento in Sicily; or, beyond the Aegean, of the immense Greek theatre at Ephesus, of the smaller ones overlooking the sea at Side and Kaor of the almost unbearably evocative ruins of Priene, one of the relatively few Greek cities of the coast to have escaped romanisation, with its lovely little
bouleterion
where the chosen representatives of the people would meet under the sky and conduct the business of the city. All this may not be Greece as we think of the country today, but it is the Greek world, which is far more important.
    There were also a number of petty kingdoms in Asia Minor which, though increasingly influenced by Greek culture until they were almost completely hellenised, had their origins in those far-off days before the Greeks were ever heard of: Pergamum, for example, whose shrine to Aesculapius, the god of healing, had made it a place of pilgrimage for many centuries before it acquired something approaching political supremacy in the second and first centuries BC ; or Phrygia, whose celebrated King Midas–he of the fabled golden touch–reigned in the eighth century BC ; 10 or Lydia, ruled in the sixth century BC by the still richer King Croesus, where coinage and gambling were both invented–perhaps simultaneously?–and of whose inhabitants Herodotus was to write: ‘Except for the fact that they prostitute their daughters, the manners of the Lydians are much like our own.’
    This lack of political unity was entirely beneficial to the development of Greek art, culture and thought. It encouraged diversity and gave rise to a good deal of healthy competition. But it proved a serious weakness in the face of a formidable imperial power which, through most of the sixth century BC , was steadily increasing in strength. The Persian Empire was essentially the creation of Cyrus the Great, who during his thirty-year reign from 559 to 529 BC welded a number of disparate tribes into a single nation, and made that nation the mightiest on earth. The Persians were superb soldiers and magnificent bowmen, who would again and again overwhelm their enemies under hails of arrows: thanks to them and to his equally fine cavalry Cyrus defeated Croesus in 546 BC , subsequently extending his authority along the Anatolian coast to Caria and Lycia. At a stroke, Persia had become a Mediterranean power.
    Under Darius the Great–who came to the throne in 522 BC , having murdered Cyrus’s son Cambyses–it very nearly became a European one. Darius launched his first major expedition against the Greeks in 490 BC , when he sent a huge fleet and at least 15,000 men under his nephew Datis across the Aegean in an all-out assault on Athens. The Greek general Miltiades quickly rallied some 10,000 Athenian citizen-soldiers and another 1,000 from the little town of Plataea, ranging them in a long line across the plain of Marathon some twenty-two miles from the city. A reluctant Spartan army failed to turn up in time, and Miltiades did not wait for it. The battle was over quite quickly. The strongly reinforced Greek wings penetrated their Persian opposites and then wheeled inwards to envelop the centre. Datis’s army turned and fled, with the Greeks in hot pursuit. Persian losses amounted to 6,400; the Athenians lost 192, and captured five Persian ships into the bargain. 11
    Athens had won a battle, but she had not won the war. All she had gained was breathing space in which to prepare for the