ABSTRACT
Greece was part of the Mediterranean world, and even during the ‘Dark Age’ had never been completely out of touch with what was going on elsewhere in that world. During the period surveyed so far in this book, developments in Greece had been informed by contact with that wider world. But those contacts had generally been on terms which the Greeks had themselves been able to control – barring occasional acts of piracy. It was only in the sixth century bc, when the Persian king Kyros the Great conquered Lydia, that conditions began to change and that political power became a serious factor in Greek contacts. e eect of the interest taken in the Greek world by Persia was transformative – politically, militarily, and culturally. Without Persia the classical Greek world would not have been as we know it.
