Quote Originally Posted by Van View Post
Rank Amateur


Perhaps you wish to reconsider this opinion? Especially in this thread?

Consider the long term consequences had the Spartans and the rest of the Greeks not held at the Hot Gates as long as they did, or had they failed a year later at Platea. What we think of as Greek Democracy would never have happened, the Rennaissance would have been very different, etc. Military conflict buys time for diplomatic solutions, but in history we have a number of examples of leaders who see military force as their primary instrument of national power (Hitler, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, for example). Wars matter, but require context to make sense.
Greek democracy, such as it was, would not have died under Persian rule. During the Ionian revolt, the Greek tyrannies in Ionia which revolted against Persia were put down and democracies implanted instead. Ionia (Greek Asia Minor) is the progenitor of Greek philosophy, a title it held under both Lydian and Persian hegemony.

The critical battle of that campaign was Salamis, anyway. Thermopylae was like the Alamo or the Lusitania in that it provided a useful myth and rallying cry, but it was strategically insignificant. Plataea was the mopping up of a denuded army already in strategic retreat.

At any rate Greek democracy quite thoroughly crushed by the Macedonians and then the Romans. The principles of democracy, hardly exclusively Greek, were already reasonably widespread through the Mediterranean, including places as farflung as North Africa and Italy.

I do agree that wars matter, even if most often they are simply violent reveals of an already-existing state of affairs. The sheer violence of these "reveals" often leads to unexpected changes that would never have occurred if they had come about through more peaceful means. The bankruptcy of European colonialism in Asia, for instance, was brutally exposed by Japan in WWII, and this resulted in a far more rapid and more violent removal of European dominance than would have happened otherwise.