6 2 GREECE. 



an episode in Persian history. The defeats of Platsea 

 and Salamis caused the Great King much annoyance, 

 and cost him a shred of land and sea. But it did not 

 directly affect the prosperity of his empire. What was 

 the loss of a few thousand slaves, and of a few hundred 

 Phoenician and Egyptian and Ionian ships to him ? 

 Indirectly, indeed, it decided the fate of Persia by 

 developing the power of the Greeks ; but ruined in any 

 case, that empire must have been, like all others of its 

 kind. The causes of its fall must be sought for within, 

 and not without. In the natural course of events, it 

 would have become the prey of some people like the 

 Parthian Highlanders or the wandering Turks. The 

 Greek wars had this result : the empire was conquered 

 at an earlier period than would otherwise have been 

 the case ; and it was conquered by a European instead 

 of an Asiatic power. 



There is no problem in history so interesting as the 

 unparalleled development of Greece. How was it that 

 so small a country could exert so remarkable an influ- 

 ence on the course of events and on the intellectual 

 progress of mankind ? The Greeks, as the science of 

 language clearly proves, belonged to the same race as 

 the Persians themselves. Many centuries before history 

 begins, a people migrated from the Highlands of 

 Central Asia, and overspread Europe on the one side, 

 on the other side Hindostan. Celts and Germans, 

 Russians and Poles, Romans and Greeks, Persians and 

 Hindoos, all sprang from the loins of a shepherd tribe 

 inhabiting the table land of the sources of the Oxus 

 and Jaxartes, and are quite distinct from the Assyrians, 

 the Arabs, and Phoenicians, whose ancestors descended 

 into the plains of Western Asia from the table land of 

 the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates. It is also 



