True, it’s just a blog site, but I liked the topic as a discussion and what better place to get a rounded, intellectual discussion on the net than on FR?
I’m thinking about the loss to literature. There probably would never have been the Athenian tragedians, since Persia had a particular beef with Athens. No Xenophon, because those events likely wouldn’t have happened in a less-troubled Persian empire. Could we have even lost Homer’s epics?
Probably not. Greek culture was profoundly influential in Rome, and might have been equally so if the Greeks had been defeated by Persia. Maybe we’d see many differences in the details of what we know as Mediterranean history, but not in the larger sweep.