have been Asiatic in its character, and it might have been as fleeting
as the labors of the Carthaginians in Europe and Africa. Nor would they
have felt any interest in the preservation of the works of those Greeks
who wrote before the Marathonian time, which they would have regarded
with that contempt with which most conquerors look upon the labors of
those whom they have enslaved. That most brilliant of ages, the age of
Pericles, could never have come to pass under the dominion of Persia;
and the Greeks of Europe, when ruled by satraps from Susa, would have
been of as little weight in the ancient world as, under that kind of
rule, were the Greeks of Ionia. All future history was involved in the
decision of the Persian contest, and we may well feel grateful that the
event was not left for the hands of men to decide, but that the winds
and the waves of the Grecian seas so far equalized the power of the
combatants as to enable the Greeks, who fought for us as well as for
themselves, to roll back the tide of Oriental conquest. We might not
have had even the Secession War, if there had been no storms in the
Thracian seas in a summer the roses of which perished more than two
thousand three hundred years ago.[A]

[Footnote A: When the Athenian patriots under Thrasybulus occupied
Phyle, they would have been destroyed by the forces of the Thirty
Tyrants, had not a violent snow-storm happened, which compelled
the besiegers to retreat. The patriots characterized this storm as
Providential. Had the weather remained fair, the patriots would have
been beaten, the democracy would not have been restored, and we should
never have had the orations of Demosthenes; and perhaps even Plato might
not have written and thought for all after time.]

The modern contest which most resembles that which was waged between the
Greeks and the Persians is that war between England and Spain which