[CyberAnt]

Of course .. but after the Persians attacked Athens .. it galvanized the "loosely affiliated city-states" into a force which destroyed the Persians.

And .. I still say .. if the Persians had not been destroyed .. Greece would not have emerged as a nation and the Muslims would have had an open door when the remaining Greek army was destroyed.

Geeeeeeze .. you people are so sanctimonious .. you can't see beyond the end of your nose.

[metesky]

But Greece did not "emerge as a nation" following the Persian War. They remained city-states with enough shifting alliances to boggle the mind of Machiavelli, which eventually (aprox. 50 years after Thermopylae) led to the thirty year blood-letting known as The Pelopennisian Wars.

Alexander temporarily united Greece by force 150 years later but that fell apart on his death.

And there were no Muslims involved! All this happened about 1100 years before Mo deflowered his first nine year old.

[SoCal Pubbie]

You're getting beat up a lot for it, but I understood the meaning of your post. Its validity may be debatable, but it clearly did not mean you thought the Persian empire was Muslim at the time. Rather, the chain of historical events, from Alexander the Great to the Roman Empire and beyond may have been broken and the land we now call Greece may have been absorbed into the later Islamic world as part of a "Greater Persia".