In his best-selling book The Right Side Of History: How Reason And Moral Purpose Made The West Great, Ben Shapiro makes a compelling case that we, meaning the West, are the offspring of two great civilizations: Jerusalem and the subject of this series, ancient Greece, in particular, Athens. The advent of the Greece whose concepts of reason as the diviner of truth, be it scientific, philosophical, or moral, which are so very much a part of our Western culture today, was forged in the crucible of war. The violent births of great nations is a common theme in history. Our own Revolution, and the democratic institutions that emerged from it, many a direct by-product of Athenian ideals, had to be won by force of arms. The abolition of the sin of slavery in North America would hurl the United States into the dark pit of an horrific and bloody Civil War. And so it was with ancient Greece, for at the crucial moment 2,500 years ago, when Athens was just emerging as the democracy whose impact would reach across the chasm of time and affect Western civilization even now, a threat from the East almost smothered the infant democracy in its crib.
At the beginning of the Fifth Century BC, the Persian Empire, under king Darius I and then his son Xerxes I, ruled the eastern ancient world from Egypt to Babylonia to India. And it had its eyes set on Greece, and with it Europe. Had the Persian invasions of 490 and then 480 BC been successful in their goals to subdue all of Hellas, the Western world as we know it, the world that Ben pays appropriate homage to in his book, would never have been. And as such, we would never have been.
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