Replies

You are overlooking recurring famines and plagues ~ which definitely served to keep down Persian populations, plus the Greek addition of Greek colonies abroad ~ since, as you point out, Greece ran out of arable land.

On the other hand, those analyses usually discount the cleverness of the Greeks in turning from wheat to olive trees. The Athenians weren't the only folks to figure out that olives, credit unions, and trained militia were great ideas!

Greece's quite successful colonial era began way before the creation of a single polity under Philip and Alexander's crowd.

Another "plus" is the cause of so much conflict between the Greeks and Persians ~ that was the emigration of vast numbers of Greeks into Western Anatolia! In the end the Persians could do nothing about that.

And what happens to Israel and The Messiah when Greece fails to spread its culture into the Middle East proper on the current time table? Well, that gives the Italians the "edge" over the Western Greek interests around the Mediterranean ~ (France/Gaul/Sicily) ~ thereby preventing the acretion of Iberia to the Carthaginian interests (and with that, the elimination of a component of the Messianic prophecies that call for The Messiah to tend first to the lost tribes ~ they'd simply not been there in Spain where He could sail to them. The whole place would be speaking Latin with no protective Greek colonies on the Mediterranean coast.

That'd necessitated a recalibration of the Messianic schedule.

Would this have given the Druids the edge? Maybe, but most likely disruption of Greek advances to the Western Mediterranean would have also stymied Gaelic speakers from getting to the Northwest coast of Iberia, and using that place as a springboard into Scota!

There may well have not arisen the Ireland we've all known to revere ~ instead, there'd be a more impoverished place with no cultural tradition beyond chasing cows and looking for all the world like Southern Chad!

The Greeks didn't have anything resembling an empire prior to Alexander. That was the whole problem, they were tied up in a huge number of squabbling city-states. The major reason they were conquered by Philip and Alexander, and were almost conquered by Xerxes.

You are overlooking recurring famines and plagues ~ which definitely served to keep down Persian population

True, but they also did a dandy job on the Greeks. Look up the Plague of Pericles.

Here's a cite for Persia having a population in the 5th century of 50M, 44% of the entire world's population. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria and the Indus had enormous populations for the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires#Largest_empires_by_land_area_and_population

Meanwhile, the two most powerful Greek cities, Sparta and Athens, had total populations of 250k and 315k.

http://www.ancientgreekbattles.net/Pages/47932_Population.htm

Population of the entire Greek world is estimated at 8M to 10M. A very large percentage of this number was on the Persian side during the wars. Ionia, Thracian and Black Sea colonies, Macedon, Thessaly, etc. A bunch of the rest were in Italy and Sicily and out of this fight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_demography