Persian and Greek

• The Persian empire became the model for land-based empires throughout the world, excluding the Mongols.
• Herodotus, a Greek, is considered one of the first true historians and his book The Persian Wars provides much information about the Persians.
• The Persian Achaemenid dynasty was founded in 539 BCE by King Cyrus the Great.
• Cyrus took his nomadic warriors and conquered most of Mesopotamia, including the Babylonians, ending the sad period in Jewish history known as The Babylonian Exile.
• Darius the First, son of Cyrus, extended Persian control east to the Indus Valley, west to Egypt, and north to Anatolia.
• The Persian Empire was ruled with a light touch, allowing conquered kingdoms to keep their kings and elites as long as they pledged allegiance to the Persian King and paid taxes, which is why the Persian king was known as The King of Kings.
• Taxes in the Persian Empire were not too high and the Persians improved infrastructure with better roads and a pony express-like mail service.
• The Persians embraced freedom of religion, being Zoroastrian, which has a claim to being the world’s first monotheistic religion.
• Zoroastrianism introduced the good/evil dualism we all know so well: god and Satan, or Harry and Voldemort.
• The Persians were not very concerned about converting people of the empire to their faith.
• Zoroastrianism forbade slavery, and so slavery was almost unheard of in the Persian Empire.
• If you had to live in the 5th century BCE, the Persian Empire was probably the best place to do it, unless you believed Herodotus and the Greeks.
• The Athenian government derived its power not from its citizens, but from the imperialist belief that Might Makes Right.
• Greece should have lost the Persian Wars if lives are to be lived in pursuit of some great ideal worth sacrificing endlessly for.
• Under the Athenians, life wasn’t so awesome, particularly if you were a woman or a slave, and their government was notoriously corrupt.
• Athenians killed all the Melians and enslaved all the women and children when the Melians politely asked not to participate in the fight.
• Under the Persians, life was pretty good and there were more successful and stable empires than democracies.
• The Peloponnesian War weakened the Greek city-states so much that Alexander “Coming Soon” the Great’s father was able to conquer all of them, and there were a bunch of bloody wars with the Persians and all kinds of horrible things, and Greece wouldn’t glimpse democracy again for two millennia.
• The glory of Athens still shines, however dimly.
• Socrates is one of the most significant figures in Western philosophy, but the Athenians forced him to commit suicide.
• Socrates gave us his interrogative Method; Sophocles gave us Oedipus; but the legacy of Ancient Greece is profoundly ambiguous, all the more so because the final winner of the Peloponnesian War were the dictatorial Spartans.
• The Persian wars set off the cultural flourishing that gave us the Classical Age and if the Persians had won, their monarchy might have strangled democracy in its crib and given us more one-man rule.
• Greek poets and mathematicians were also playwrights and architects and philosophers.
• Most of these city-states featured some form of slavery, and in all of them citizenship was limited to males.
• Despite the fame of Aristophanes, his plays are not well-translated and are not popular in schools.
• Each of the city-states had its own form of government, ranging from very democratic to completely dictatorial.
• Aristophanes, who is seen as homework drudgery, is also responsible for the idea that slavery is a necessary evil.
• The Greeks gave the west our first dedicated history, our vocabulary for talking about politics, and our idealization of democracy, which comes from the government they had in Athens.
• Aristophanes, a Greek poet and playwright, is known as the Father of Comedy and his work is still studied and performed today.
• Greeks lived in city-states which consisted of a city and its surrounding area.
• The high point of Greek culture is exemplified by the Parthenon and the plays of Aeschylus, which is Athens in the fourth century BCE, right after the Persian Wars.
• The people who lived in these cities considered themselves citizens of that city, not of anything that would ever be called Greece.
• Aristophanes, who wrote that under every stone lurks a politician, called wealth the most excellent of all the gods.
• Aristophanes is responsible for the conversation "Praxagora: I want all to have a share of everything and everything to be in common; there will no longer be either rich or poor; [...].
• Blepyrus: But who will till the soil? Praxagora: The slaves.
• Greek poets, mathematicians, playwrights, architects, and philosophers founded a culture that is still identified with them and introduced many ideas, from democracy to fart jokes.
• Between 490 and 480 BCE, the Persians made war on the Greek City states, including the battle of Thermopylae where three hundred brave Spartans battled five million Persians.
• Aristophanes frequently used actual crap to make jokes, such as in The Acharnians where the chorus imagines a character in his play throwing crap at a real poet he didn't like.
• The Peloponnesian War was not about Athens trying to get Sparta to embrace democratic reform; wars rarely are.
• Pericles’s funeral oration, bragging about the golden democracy of Athens with rhetoric that wouldn’t sound out of place today, is from a later war, The Peloponnesian War, a thirty year conflict between the Athenians and the Spartans.