Outside View: The Lessons of Marathon

PITTSBURGH, Sept. 28 (UPI) -- As you probably know we marked the anniversary this month; it was the anniversary of the beginning of the first and most important battle between the civilization of the West and the civilization of the East.

On Sept. 12, I took a significant amount of time to reflect on the importance of that anniversary, on the heroism of those involved, and on the triumph of society based on democracy, equality, commerce and property rights.

I suspect that the look on your face indicates that we may not be talking about the same anniversary, I'm referring to Sept. 12 that marked an event which occurred nearly 2,500 years before --- that event is the turning point of the Battle of Marathon.

Persia was the mightiest Empire that the world had ever seen: in a few short centuries it had expanded from what we now call Iran and Iraq to encompass territories in North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and Europe. In fact its army had almost never lost a battle. And then a small group of cities on the Greek peninsula decided to revolt and they sent the Persian satraps running home. Athens, a relatively unknown, but rapidly rising city decided to join with some of the lesser cities and resist the Persian incursion.

King Darius Hystaspes of Perisa sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers, most of them conscripts, to subdue this unruly collection of city states. In the years leading up to the conflict most of the emperors, or shahs of Persia did not even know who the Athenians were, but by the end of the battle they did know and they would never forget them thereafter.

The Persians were defeated by the Greeks and although Athens and some citizens from some lesser cities were outnumbered by at least 4 to 1; the Persians lost nearly 7,000 men, and the Greeks lost fewer than 200. It was perhaps the greatest miscalculation in military history and began the process through which the hinge of history turned from East to West.

How could the Persians have so misunderstood the men of Athens? Another Persian emperor, Cyrus, supplies the answer below. The account was written by the Greek historian, Herodotus.

Cyrus is said, on hearing the speech of a herald from the tough, militaristic Peolopennese city state of Sparta, to have asked some Greeks who were standing by, "Who these Lacedaemonians were, and what was their number, that they dared to send him such a notice?"

When he had received their reply, he turned to the Spartan herald and said, "I have never yet been afraid of any men, who have set a place in the middle of their city, where they come together to cheat each other and forswear themselves."

Cyrus intended these words as a reproach against all the Greeks, because of their having marketplaces where they bought and sold goods, which was a custom unknown to the Persians, who never made purchases in open marts, and indeed, according to Herodotus did not in their whole country a single marketplace.

The ancient Persian King Darius, the modern warlords like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein as well as much of our media partake of the same misunderstanding.

They look at our cities and in the middle of them they see no temples set aside for religious or nationalistic indoctrination. Instead they see spaces set aside for the peaceful conduct of trade and they confuse this physical space with moral emptiness and they underestimate us -- every time.

(Jerry Bowyer is a radio talk show host in Pittsburgh. Outside View commentaries are written for UPI by outside writers who specialize in a variety of important global issues.)