[muawiyah]

Let's go a step further into this ~ Greece, by Xerxes day, had grown its population to a rather magnificent number. The Greeks could, any time they really wanted to, field an army as big as anything the Persians could.

By Alexander's day the Greeks had 30 million people in their own little empire, and the Persians were still down around 10 million people.

So, let's say that the Greeks totally mesed up and got conquered by Persia. With nearly 1/4 of the Persian population "Greek Speaking" already, if not entirely Greek, the addition of the far more numerous Greek Speaking Greeks and their numerous colonies, would have done little to stop ultimate Roman hegemony. Rome would have arisen anyway because of technological and agricultural advances peculiar to the Italian peninsula and adjacent areas such as Greek speaking Southern France and, of course, Scota (now known as Ireland). How quickly we forget their little tricks eh!

I can see the "industrial revolution" occuring a good 1800 years sooner under this scenario since the Latin speakers would have had better lines of communication with the Persian speaking "East" and it's trade connections to China!

Alas, this scenario also results in a the diminishment and destruction of Classical Israel even earlier ~ no Messiah, no Christianity, no West!

[Cronos]

Where did you get that 30 million number? All the books I've read seem to indicate a number more in the range of 13 million even including Ionia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece says During the Archaic period, the population of Greece grew beyond the capacity of its limited arable land (according to one estimate, the population of ancient Greece increased by a factor larger than ten during the period from 800 BC to 400 BC, increasing from a population of 800,000 to a total estimated population of 10 to 13 million).[17]

a yahoo answer (ok, not the best source, probably close to the middling!) says the PErsian empire was 35- 70 million. even this concurs with the 70 million number.

Because Persia was the entire stretch of ancient civilisational lands from the indus right to Ionia, it had to have been more than 10 million.

Let's assume a 13 mill Greek added to 70 mill Persian, so the Greeks would have been about 13% of the Empire -- the rest of your statement about Rome seems accurate to my mind, especially the "industrial revolution" occuring a good 1800 years sooner

Not so sure about the no Messiah bit.