What is the historical significance of the Greek victory in the Persian Wars?
The Greeks stopped the Persian from taking over their territory and becoming slaves. That meant that they kept their freedom. At the time, the Greeks had just invented the idea of democracy in Athens, and it would have disappeared under the Persians. Many of the early writers in Athens fought against the Persians, and their victory helped influence their thinking. Herodotus wrote his famous Histories, the first history book in the Western world, as an attempt to explain the causes of the Persian Wars. Sophocles was a young man at the time of the Persian Wars, and he was followed by Plato and Aristotle as some of the great thinkers whose works went on to form the basis of Western thought. A little bit further down the line historically, if the Persians had conquered Greece, then there would have been no Alexander the Great. This wouldn’t have had that terrible an impact on European history, but there was one surprising effect of his conquests that most people don’t know. He conquered Ba
