It was not, however, only with the Phoenicians that the Greeks were brought into conflict. We have seen that after Nineveh fell, the Medes held sway over much of the empire of Assyria. To the Medes shortly suc ceeded another race from the mountainous border of the Iranian plateau. The Persians ruled over all the empire of Assyria, and extended her frontiers in almost all directions, with the result that for the first time in history a land empire was brought to face a sea-power. Greece included the coasts of Asia Minor.. These coasts Persia now approached from the plateau in the rear after the conquest of the kingdom of Crcesus, which had never been tributary to Assyria. Probably the Persian rulers thought that the inhabitants of these coast-lands would at once submit, as the Phoenicians had done. The latter, with little idea of the protecting power of the sea, bent to the storm, paid tribute, and carried on their trading as before. To them it was a natural thing to do ; it paid them to do it. But the Greeks looked at things in a different way : again the important fact is the mental attitude induced by the geographical conditions. Even to the Greeks of Asia Minor independence was more than trade, and the coasts of Asia Minor were only part of Greece. They looked to the sea, not to the land ; they looked away from Persia, not towards her. The Phoenicians of the Phoenician coast could receive no help from such colonies as they planted ; the Greeks of Asia Minor could continually receive assistance from their brethren over the water. The Greeks on the mainland might be conquered, for a time, by an army, but there still remained the Greeks across the sea and on the islands which formed a base inaccessible to a land power without a fleet. A sea-people can be crushed only by a sea-power. Persia, then, finally used the ships of her dependents, especially the Phoenicians, but also the Cilicians and even the Egyptians, and attempted to conquer the Greeks across the sea. Xerxes marched his army—probably the greatest the world had seen or was for many centuries to see—overland, and the very fear of it caused many Greeks to submit without a blow, but at Salamis, in the first of the long series of great sea-fights which the world has seen, the little sea state of Athens, pushed to desperation, overthrew the fleet of Xerxes, and destroyed any effective control of the sea by the great empire of the east. Now it is to be noticed that it was the mental attitude of the Persian king, it was the want of familiarity with the sea, which was the crucial point, not want of ships. At the con clusion of the battle Xerxes had more ships fit for action than had the Greeks, but because Xerxes came from a land in which the sea was looked on as a strange thing, because he was not a seaman, he mistrusted the sea and retired defeated. If his fleet had been quite destroyed, retreat might have meant no more than that the accidents of war were against him, and that he would come again, but retreat while his fleet was numerically superior implied an acknowledgment that the sea was beyond the rule of Persia.
This was in 480 B.c. Into less than the next century and a half is compressed the Golden Age of Greece, when those men lived who have made Greek culture memorable. During all the time the influence of the sea, direct or indirect, is always prominent. It is significant that one of the best-known stories in all history should be of that shout of the " Ten Thousand" when, after months of wandering, their eyes beheld the waters of the Euxine. That cry of " The sea, the sea," rivets attention on the controlling influence in the history of Greece, and is all the more striking as coming from an army made up for the most part of Spartans, who valued the sea somewhat less than did their brethren.
As it was natural that Athens, the state which was most dependent on the sea, should have been instrumental in bringing to naught the arms of Xerxes, so it was in evitable that Athens should then take the lead in Greece, and hold it for a longer time than did any other state.
But this time was itself short—some sixty years. Em barking on a career of conquest oversea, one fleet was destroyed in Sicily by other seamen, and her prestige was in a moment gone. When a second fleet, endeavour ing to protect the corn supply coming from the Black Sea, was also destroyed in the Dardanelles, her recupera tive power was not strong enough to bear the strain ; she was starved into submission, and became again negligible.
To Athens succeeded Sparta, but for little more than a generation, and, to Sparta, Thebes for some ten years, ere again the forces of disruption were too strong. Thebes never had control of the sea, and Sparta held it for only a few years after Athens fell. It was then partly regained by the Athenians, partly held by the Greek city states of Asia Minor, and partly by the Phoenicians. The latter, as we have seen, had been compelled by their situation to throw in their lot with Persia. The Greek city states of the mainland of Asia Minor, though some times not in vain they looked to Greece for aid, were still almost in a like ill case. By the help of these, when Greece was disunited, the Persian king was able, on two occasions, at least to claim, though he could scarcely be said to exercise, some kind of control over the whole of Greece.
Two conditions were, indeed, necessary in order that the whole of Greece should be united : effective control of the sea and effective control of the land. Greece consisted of islands and peninsulas. The former can obviously be united only by control of the sea ; the latter must always be vulnerable from the land. When an organized land-power arose, the disunited states of what is modern Greece were one and all compelled for a time to acknowledge one single overlordship ; and when to power on land was added power on sea, there arose a state strong enough not only to subdue to itself the whole of Greece, but to unite for a short time all the world that then mattered. The Macedonian conquests under Philip and Alexander show the controlling effect of in dividual men on the course of history. Nevertheless, the geographical controls, if not so obvious as in other cases, are yet as effective in this case as in others, and are perhaps more obvious if it is remembered that the geographical controls produce their effects by acting on the minds of men.
The little world known to men—to civilized men— consisted now of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and the lands between. Beyond this circle there lay lands and seas known in some vague way to those within the margin of mountain and desert. The mountain men, the Medes and Persians on the east, had descended on Mesopotamia, and sweeping westward had found a limit to their con quests in the seas and highlands of Greece. In so doing they had forced on the attention of the Greeks, and especially of the European Greeks, the existence of a great civilized power to the east. The Greeks thus tended to look eastward, and gradually came to realize that more easily than Xerxes had come west could they go east. Individually better men than the Asiatics, because of their Grecian birth and training, the " Ten Thousand " had shown an invasion to be possible. Agesilaus of Sparta had begun an invasion, and Jason of Thessaly had dreamed of the conquest of Persia by a united Greece. But both Agesilaus and Jason were thwarted in their aims, though only because Greece was so disunited. Thus the idea of the conquest of the East by Hellenic forces was no new thing; it was the natural result of the geographical conditions.