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Bernardo Gallegos
Page 03 - Part D
The Battle of Marathon (490
B.C.) has long been considered one of the "decisive battles of the world."
Had the despotism of the East triumphed here, and in the subsequent
campaign that ended in the defeat of the Persian fleet at Salamis (480
B.C.) and of the Persian army at Plataea (479 B.C.), the whole history of
our western world would have been different. The result of the war with
Persia was the triumph of this new western democratic civilization,
prepared and schooled for great national emergencies by a severe but
effective training, over the uneducated hordes led to battle by the
autocracy of the East. This was the first, but not the last, of the many
battles which western democracy and civilization has had to fight to avoid
being crushed by autocracy and despotism. Marathon broke the dread spell
of the Persian name and freed the more progressive Greeks to pursue their
intellectual and political development. Above all it revealed the strength
and power of the Athenians to themselves, and in the half-century
following the most wonderful political, literary, and artistic development
the world had ever known ensued, and the highest products of Greek
civilization were attained. Attica had braved everything for the common
cause of Greece, even to leaving Athens to be burned by the invader, and
for the next fifty years she held the position of political as well as
cultural preeminence among the Greek City-States. Athens now became the
world center of wealth and refinement and the home of art and literature
(R. 7), and her influence along cultural lines, due in part to her mastery
of the sea and her growing commerce, was now extended throughout the
Mediterranean world.
From 479 to 431 B.C. was the Golden Age of Greece, and during this short
period Athens gave birth to more great men--poets, artists, statesmen, and
philosophers--than all the world beside had produced [1] in any period of
equal length. Then, largely as a result of the growing jealousy of
military Sparta came that cruel and vindictive civil strife, known as the
Peloponnesian War, which desolated Greece, left Athens a wreck of her
former self, permanently lowered the moral tone of the Greek people, and
impaired beyond recovery the intellectual and artistic life of Hellas. For
many centuries Athens continued to be a center of intellectual
achievement, and to spread her culture throughout a new and a different
world, but her power as a State had been impaired forever by a revengeful
war between those who should have been friends and allies in the cause of
civilization.
Source: THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION, by ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
[ Part A ]
[ Part B ]
[ Part C ]
[ Part D ]
[ Part E ]
[ Part F ]
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