331BC The Battle of Guagamela
In 331 BC, Alexander the Great defeated the army of Darius, Great King of Persia, at Guagamela and found that he was able to enter the capital city unopposed and so become ruler of the mighty Persian Empire, which stretched from the Aegean Sea (the west coast of modern Turkey) to the borders of India. Although Alexander died at an early age, and soon afterwards his Empire was divided up between several of his Macedonian generals, Greek was to have a long-standing influence on Asia in a number of ways, demonstrated by:
· Several Greek letters in the Russian alphabet.
· The New Testament, written in Judaea (Israel), was originally written as a single entity in Greek.
· Greek was the diplomatic, judicial and business language of the Eastern half of the Roman Empire, which meant that every educated Roman spoke and wrote Greek fluently.
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31BC The Battle of Actium
In 31 BC, following several years of civil war, the forces of Octavian – subsequently given the title ‘Augustus’ – the name by which he is more commonly known now – met with those of Mark Antony and the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra off the western coast off Greece in the Ionian Sea near the town of Actium. Octavian’s forces, ably commanded by Marcus Agrippa, won the battle and established Octavian’s supremacy over the Roman World. His clever refusal to style himself as a king but rather to retain the Republican forms of government whilst allowing the Senate to vote him increasing power constitutionally, together with establishing peace (pax Romana) after pretty much a century of Romans fighting other Romans for supremacy, led to him founding an imperial dynasty – now known as The Principate. To give his rule the impression of being civilised and untyrannical, Octavian surrounded himself with a veneer of culture by his imperial patronage of the poets, Virgil and Horace, and the historian Livy. They in turn happily extolled the virtue of the new regime – good old-fashioned propaganda. The Age of Emperors was born and continued for over 400 years.
312AD - The Battle of the Milvian Bridge
In 312 AD, in his campaign against Maxentius, Constantine marched on Rome. He is said to have seen a vision of a cross in front of the sun surrounded by these words: "In hoc signo vinces" (By this sign you shall conquer). He marched his troops into the Tiber, declared them baptised, and ordered them to paint the Greek letters chi and rho (an abbreviation for the name of Christ) on their shields. When the following battle ended in victory he became a staunch supporter of the Christian church and made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. The battle of the Milvian Bridge was a turning point in the history of Christianity, transforming the fortunes of a small, powerless middle eastern sect into a religion of global significance.
480BC - The Battle of Salamis
The Greeks' navy (with a majority of Athenian ships, but technically under a Spartan Admiral) defeated the numerically superior Persian fleet at Salamis and caused the withdrawal of Xerxes with the greater part of his invasion force. This was the key turning point in the Persian expedition against the Greeks, cemented by the Spartan infantry's victory the following year at Plataea.
What if . . . the Persians had conquered Greece in 480BC?
· European history would have been totally different - would Europe exist at all?
· Would Athens have reached its high point later in the Fifth Century as Democracy encouraged the development of Literature, Philosophy and Culture?
· Would Persia have expanded westwards into Italy, forestalling the emergence of Rome as a superpower?
· Would Christianity have spread in the way it did through the Roman Empire?
508BC - The Birth of Democracy
The Athenian Cleisthenes reformed his city's constitution by not only conducting a tribal re-organisation (which created 10 new tribes and 'mixed up' all the people) but then linking local level and state level political activity through the introduction of a new council of 500. Since an Athenian citizen could only serve on this annually selected council twice in his lifetime, this necessitated the active involvement of the vast majority of citizens, thus creating the world's first democracy - with the responsibility for all citizens to take part in government!
What if . . . democracy had never been invented by Cleisthenes?
· Would Athens have achieved its cultural high point in the Fifth Century?
· Would the modern world have been so heavily influenced by the thinkers of Ancient Greece?
Would much of the modern world have some form of democratic government?