culture that followed the emancipation from fear of the Persian yoke would have been frozen in the bud. Most but not all historians of the ancient world agree with this. James Breasted follows Meyer there, but H. A. L. Fisher, the English historian, believes that the Persian victory would not have undermined genuine Greek traditions because both Darius and Xerxes were prepared to use renegade Greeks as puppet rulers. Under these puppet Greek rulers, what was distinctive in Greek culture would have been preserved.
But this overlooks the fact that not all Greeks were devoted to the Greek city-state any more than all Frenchmen accept the heritage of the French Revolution. Some Greeks preferred the stability of Persian despotism to the turbulence of Greek democracy. In addition, Fisher disregards the ruthless punitive measures taken by the Persians against the revolting Ionian cities and all who aided them. The same fate would have befallen the rest of the Greek cities if the Persian tide had broken through their defence.
The possibility envisaged by Meyer is credible and likely because it is based on the settled political and military policy of the Achæmenian Empire, as evidenced in a whole series of other actions in its history. That this policy would have remained constant is, of course, an assumption. But there is no reason to justify the belief that it would have been abandoned by a triumphant Xerxes, while there are good reasons for believing that such a policy, where it could be enforced, strengthened the Persians. If we are not justified in making assumptions concerning the relative constancy of certain determinate relationships in any historical situation, it would be hard to draw a line between fantasy and scientific reconstruction.
A disregard of this line between fantasy and scientific reconstruction mars at every crucial point Winston Churchill’s well-told tale of the result of hypothetical Confederate victory at Gettysburg. The high points in his hypothetical account of the consequences of a lost battle at Gettysburg are: (1) defeat of the North and the peaceful existence of two nations in the area now comprising the United States; (2) Lee’s abolition of slavery, immediately after the victory at Gettysburg, which reconciled the North to peace and brought an alliance between England and the South; (3) the formation at a moment of crisis around 1905 of an English-speaking Association. “The Re-United States” of Britain, the North, and the South—one great union
