If Aristagoras had not overreached himself, insulted his admiral, and then led a revolt to save his own hide, it is quite possible that Persia would not have paid much attention to the relatively poor and small Greek cities beyond that empire’s border. If Athens had not meddled in another country’s revolt, then the world would be most different. The mistakes Aristagoras made, from insulting his admiral to starting a self-serving and hopeless revolt, began the Greco-Persian wars that included the Battle of Marathon, the famous stand of the 300 Spartans, and eventually Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia. Without the impetus of the Persian threat, Philip of Macedon might never have been able to unite Greece. Western culture might never have been forced to grow to greatness. The much greater Persian empire could have continued to dominate the Western world for centuries longer than it did, and the world today would look very different. It would have been a world in which the Persian values of subservience to the state and a strong central ruler were more important than the Greek values involving personal rights and pride in individual accomplishments. The world is as it is as it is today all because a local Persian politician, ruling a city at the far edge of the empire, got too ambitious.
