The Battle of Marathon I am now reading a book (The First Clash: The Miraculous Greek Victory at Marathon and Its Impact on Western Civilization) about the battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. The book is by Jim Lacey a military historian and former soldier. It was published in 2011 and I bought the first printing of the first edition, but have only started reading it now. Why a new book 2,500 years after a rather small* battle? The reason is simple. This was the most decisive as well as the first battle to allow Western Civilization to develop independent of the far older and originally more powerful Eastern empires. I do not like war! I very much hope we can stay out of more wars in the Near East. However, whether we like it or not, European (now Euro-American) history has been punctuated by battles between Eastern Empires and the West. Alexander the Great in 331 BCE was the first Westerner to penetrate far into the east and leave connections that took six centuries to completely wither away. In 732 CE at the Battle of Tours my ancestor Charles Martel saved Europe from an Arab invasion. In 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent of the Ottoman Empire laid siege to Vienna. Ordinary citizens and mercenaries were helped enormously by weather to beat back this assault, which would have decisively altered at least Eastern European history if it had succeeded. For about 700 years Muslims controlled Spain, Portugal, Sicily and southern Italy. But in the really decisive battles, Europe prevailed over the Near East. Is this long history relevant today? *Nothing so long ago can be known even approximately, and estimates vary, but there may have been about 10,000 Athenians, 1,000 Plataeans and 200,000 Persians.
Posted on: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 05:22:36 +0000