Effects of a Successful 1st Persian Invasion of Greece?

The title says it all: What would be the world look like if the Persians under Darius I had successfully conquered the Greek city-states and made Greece into a satrapy? Could this mean that the West (or what arises in Europe in its place) become overall and customarily more open to new ideas and more tolerant than in OTL? Maybe, much later, no Transatlantic Slave Genocide, as the Persians famously banned slavery?

Discuss.
 
Do they get all of Greece or do they stop at say the razing of Athens?

If they stopped at Athens, I would say that many Greeks flee to Sparta and her surrounding City States, and Sparta would most likely continue fighting.
 
Do they get all of Greece or do they stop at say the razing of Athens?

If they stopped at Athens, I would say that many Greeks flee to Sparta and her surrounding City States, and Sparta would most likely continue fighting.
Let's say they get all of Greece, which is quite plausible, given that the Achaemenid Persian Empire was the largest empire in the Ancient World.

And even if Sparta keeps fighting, if Athens is raised it would be too late and completely futile, IMO.
 
If Persia succeeded, they would have burnt Athens to the ground and went home. Athenian allies might decide to throw in their lot with Persia or Sparta afterwards. It won't kill democracy but it would alter the future in ways that can't be predicted.



And even if Sparta keeps fighting, if Athens is raised it would be too late and completely futile, IMO.

You're talking about Spartans here. These are the people who look upon a barrage of arrows as an umbrella (though "we'll have our battle in the shade" is Heroditus exaggerating again, it certain fits the Spartan character). Futile or not, they'll fight.
 
You're talking about Spartans here. These are the people who look upon a barrage of arrows as an umbrella (though "we'll have our battle in the shade" is Heroditus exaggerating again, it certain fits the Spartan character). Futile or not, they'll fight.

They'll fight but they have a serious problem. They fortified the shit out of the Isthmus of Corinth but that relied on the allied navy still existing. It won't by this point if Persia has been successful up until then. Sparta would have to pull their troops back to their city, and they'll have the problem of Argos likely jumping ship and joining the Persians as well. It'll be an epic collapse but it'll be the end of Sparta.
 
That said, being so far from the capital and homeland regions, Greece satrapy(ies) beyond the Asia Minor coasts and islands may end quickly in historical time breaking away/the capital loosing hold of it somehow.
 

GdwnsnHo

Banned
The title says it all: What would be the world look like if the Persians under Darius I had successfully conquered the Greek city-states and made Greece into a satrapy? Could this mean that the West (or what arises in Europe in its place) become overall and customarily more open to new ideas and more tolerant than in OTL? Maybe, much later, no Transatlantic Slave Genocide, as the Persians famously banned slavery?

Discuss.

I have to be curious, what would you describe as more open to ideas and tolerant? I'd have to say that compared to other groups throughout history, we were no more significantly intolerant or close-minded than other cultures of the time, I'd love to see some "benchmarks" to compare against at different points in history. (In addition - there idea of the west is recent, is this meant to indicate lands of the modern west? Europe, N.America?)

As I'd expect the Persian hold on Greece to be tenuous, I can only imagine their cultural effects to be negligible. Slavery may well be introduced via a new conqueror of Greece, or of Persia (in the same way as the Parthians are meant to have done).

I'd love to see Greece not have slaves, but I am very doubtful that a Persian conquest would achieve this, unless it is held for a very long time, and that Persian attitudes don't change - that we don't see a successful slavocracy like Rome, etc. So I have to say, no I don't think that would change.

Tolerance and openness to ideas? Again, this entirely depends of the interim, we could see any number of anti-intellectual scholars gain followings - as is widely touted to have happened in Baghdad - I forget the name, which maddens me.

In addition, we could see rises of Nazi analogues, of Imperial Japanese analogues.

There is FAR too much time in between.

If you wanted a more open-minded and tolerant west, you may want either a large-scale conquest of Europe by such a polity. My choices would be

1) Super-Achemanids - It'll be hard, and unstable as hell - but assuming they were as anti-slavery as believed, this is the hardest option.

2) Alexandrian Empire - Considering his love of Persia after he conquered it, he may be against Slavery, in addition, unlike Plato in 'The Republic' I do recall reading the Phillip opposed slavery, and the Macedonians were much more like the Persians in this regard. If this expanded westward, and held these virtues, even if he loses Persia - this could work.

3) Non-Enslaving Roman or Carthaginian Empires? If the Roman Empire was anti-slavery, or some analogue with similar success was, chances are that this would have the biggest advance, as much as there is a more recent flirtation with Greece, it was Rome that had the largest impact on the west.

4) Macedonian Hegemony of the Med. If we assume Phillip Lives, and only takes territory we associate with the ERE, Macedonian views on slavery would begin to prevail - if Greater Macedonia and Persia can not destroy each other, this could lead to more anti-slavery support.
 
The title says it all: What would be the world look like if the Persians under Darius I had successfully conquered the Greek city-states and made Greece into a satrapy? Could this mean that the West (or what arises in Europe in its place) become overall and customarily more open to new ideas and more tolerant than in OTL? Maybe, much later, no Transatlantic Slave Genocide, as the Persians famously banned slavery?

Discuss.

Persians famously banned slavery? Say what?

Cite please?

Did they ban slavery in territories, like Ionia? Anatolia?

Besides. Persian slavery, like all slavery before it got race based in the Americas, was a very different thing.

I doubt highly that the habits of one Persian group, which wasnt followed by later persian groups, let alone other civilizations, would affect empires 1-2 thousand years later.
 
I doubt highly that the habits of one Persian group, which wasnt followed by later persian groups, let alone other civilizations, would affect empires 1-2 thousand years later.

This. A thousand times this.

It sounds bizarre to me to suggest that that one can take a trait of a civilisation and assume that it will apply to a successor-civilisation two-thousand years later, in spite of all that history in between. By that logic, we could deduce that all the nations descended from OTL's Principate would be absolute monarchies full of civil wars between rival military dictators and yet oddly maintaining the nominal institutions of long-passed republics while based in a single city and regarding those of their people outside that one city as lesser and while being slavocracies.

The modern United States, to pick an example, has absolutely none of these traits.

To just presume that a society descending from Persia two-thousand years ago would share the traits of Persia sounds unimaginable. That sort of reasoning doesn't necessarily work for a period of twenty years (see 1916 Germany and 1936 Germany, or 1765 British America and the 1785 United States, or… et cetera), let alone two-thousand years. Even if we ignore violent revolutions (and that sort of thing happens all the time), there's also the natural drift in ideas that happens over time ordinarily, let alone over such an extraordinarily long period of time. For one example, consider the change in the ideas of the great powers of Europe about the sovereignty of black African nations between 1875 and 1895, which is really pretty extreme - and that occurred without violent regime change in those powers. Add the fact that violent regime change can and does happen, plus wars, and changes will be even greater.

Sure, there'll be some influences and some linguistic descent, but the OP's implicit idea - that nations descended from Persia would tend to be more tolerant than nations descended from Rome - strikes me as flawed in and of itself.
 
Persians famously banned slavery? Say what?

Cite please?

Did they ban slavery in territories, like Ionia? Anatolia?

Besides. Persian slavery, like all slavery before it got race based in the Americas, was a very different thing.

I doubt highly that the habits of one Persian group, which wasnt followed by later persian groups, let alone other civilizations, would affect empires 1-2 thousand years later.
Here's a source:
Cyrus the Great said:
As to the inhabitants of Babylon who against the will of the gods were enslaved, I abolished the corvee which was against their social standing, I freed all slaves. I brought relief to their dilapidated housing, putting thus an end to their misfortunes and slaver
And here's another source.
 
OK. But otoh,
1) Thucydides apparently claiimed that Chios has the highest proportion of slaves in Greece.
2) Chios was part of the Ionian League, and ruled by Aechemenad Persia.
3) in the stories of the Ionian revolts and then the Persian invasion of Greece, the Persians are accused of all sorts of atrocities (in Greek eyes), but we never hear word of their property (slaves) being confiscated.

This leads me to believe that slaves were NOT freed by the Persians, at any point in this process.

Which, had there been an actual ban on slavery, would have happened.

Thus I have to conclude that, aside from specific, high profile events, like the conquest of Babylon you cited, and aside from a general distaste for slaves in general in their empire (which, again I see evidence of), that there simply was no ban on slavery.
 
OK. But otoh,
1) Thucydides apparently claiimed that Chios has the highest proportion of slaves in Greece.
2) Chios was part of the Ionian League, and ruled by Aechemenad Persia.
3) in the stories of the Ionian revolts and then the Persian invasion of Greece, the Persians are accused of all sorts of atrocities (in Greek eyes), but we never hear word of their property (slaves) being confiscated.

This leads me to believe that slaves were NOT freed by the Persians, at any point in this process.

Which, had there been an actual ban on slavery, would have happened.

Thus I have to conclude that, aside from specific, high profile events, like the conquest of Babylon you cited, and aside from a general distaste for slaves in general in their empire (which, again I see evidence of), that there simply was no ban on slavery.

That said, the word 'slavery' mean a few distinct status and acts, so persian slavery may have been 'not so bad' in some specific cases.. maybe. Like the high trained, educated personal slaves of roman empire. And abject-unholy in others, like miners of many epoches.
 

Cyrus' words seem a standard-issue decree of liberation of slaves (most probably, debt-slaves) which had been a traditional recurrence in Mesopotamian society and political traditions for the best part of two millennia by then (and came to be incorporated into the Hebrew law in the form of Jubilees). I think that the oldest example of such liberation edicts is by a Sumerian king called Urukagina somewhere roughly around 2400 BC, but don't quote me on this. However, I am positive that it was customary for any new king's accession in Babylon to free debt-slaves under Hammurabi's dynasty, a custom that many other kings followed (although at times very erratically, especially under the Kassites). Cyrus, eager to conform to Babylonian traditions in assuming the local kingship and present himself as a benevolent ruler and a liberator, was obviously happy to conform to such a tradional use that would have improved his legitimacy greatly at little cost.

I don't see this as evidence that slavery was generally banned in the Persian Empire, something that I think a fuckton of other sources would challenge anyway (Herodotus, just to name one).

While the Achaemenids made a point in their inscriptions of showing the justice, fairness and wisdom of their rule, they were still near-absolute, divinely invested autocrats ruling a highly hierarchical social system basically through superior military force at end. They concept of justice was mainly about upholding the hierarchy, not upsetting it.

So, they were certainly very nice as far as Late Iron Age large empires, go, but Late Iron Age large empires were on average a pretty nasty bunch. Abolitionism was hardly ever conceivable to them I'd think.
 
I don't see this as evidence that slavery was generally banned in the Persian Empire, something that I think a fuckton of other sources would challenge anyway (Herodotus, just to name one).

While the Achaemenids made a point in their inscriptions of showing the justice, fairness and wisdom of their rule, they were still near-absolute, divinely invested autocrats ruling a highly hierarchical social system basically through superior military force at end. They concept of justice was mainly about upholding the hierarchy, not upsetting it.

So, they were certainly very nice as far as Late Iron Age large empires, go, but Late Iron Age large empires were on average a pretty nasty bunch. Abolitionism was hardly ever conceivable to them I'd think.

That said again, many sources we got on persian history can be accused potentially of a certain bias, as Herodotus. Reliable? I'd say. Biaised? probably as well.
 
That said again, many sources we got on persian history can be accused potentially of a certain bias, as Herodotus. Reliable? I'd say. Biaised? probably as well.

Well, Herodotus was biased, but abolishing slavery would have hardly counted as a merit to him. He had no reason to use the issue to blacken the Persians, even if he had wanted to do so, which is not necessarily granted (he was a Persian subject himself after all).
The audience he was writing for (Athenians and generally Greeks) was more committed to a slave system than Persia at any rate.

EDIT: and of course, our main sources for Ancient Persia are either Greek historians or Persian royal inscriptions. Neither is remotely to be hoped to be really objective. Herodotus is probably the closest you can get to an impartial voice, and he wasn't really such.
 
If Persia succeeded, they would have burnt Athens to the ground and went home. Athenian allies might decide to throw in their lot with Persia or Sparta afterwards. It won't kill democracy but it would alter the future in ways that can't be predicted.
Can't be predicted eh? Can't you think of what butterflies would wreak havoc on history ten years at a time? And slowly continue such steady work to the present day?

Who wants to see such a timeline? ;)
 
Let's say they get all of Greece, which is quite plausible, given that the Achaemenid Persian Empire was the largest empire in the Ancient World.

And even if Sparta keeps fighting, if Athens is raised it would be too late and completely futile, IMO.


So with Sparta being beaten into submission, lets same some atrocity occurs like a complete genocide of the Spartan people for being defiant. Would a rebellion occur, forcing more men thrown into the fray. In other words a possible Persian Vietnam/Afghanistan situation.
 
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Can't be predicted eh? Can't you think of what butterflies would wreak havoc on history ten years at a time? And slowly continue such steady work to the present day?

Who wants to see such a timeline? ;)

So would the timeline be a Persian Occupation timeline, or a no more democracy timeline. Who's up for a King in America? Either way I'd give it a read
 
So would the timeline be a Persian Occupation timeline, or a no more democracy timeline. Who's up for a King in America? Either way I'd give it a read
This would also mean there would be little expansion of a Roman Republic as butterflies go against their favor. Rather, who's up for more chaos and no Christianity?
 
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