The topographical configuration of Greece gave an impress to her political condition.  It divided her people into distinct communities having conflicting interests, and made them incapable of centralization.  Incessant domestic wars between the rival states checked her advancement.  She was poor, her leading men had become corrupt.  They were ever ready to barter patriotic considerations for foreign gold, to sell themselves for Persian bribes.  Possessing a perception of the beautiful as manifested in sculpture and architecture to a degree never attained elsewhere either before or since, Greece had lost a practical appreciation of the Good and the True.

While European Greece, full of ideas of liberty and independence, rejected the sovereignty of Persia, Asiatic Greece acknowledged it without reluctance.  At that time the Persian Empire in territorial extent was equal to half of modern Europe.  It touched the waters of the Mediterranean, the Aegean, the Black, the Caspian, the Indian, the Persian, the Red Seas.  Through its territories there flowed six of the grandest rivers in the world—­the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Indus, the Jaxartes, the Oxus, the Nile, each more than a thousand miles in length.  Its surface reached from thirteen hundred feet below the sea-level to twenty thousand feet above.  It yielded, therefore, every agricultural product.  Its mineral wealth was boundless.  It inherited the prestige of the Median, the Babylonian, the Assyrian, the Chaldean Empires, whose annals reached back through more than twenty centuries.

The Persian empire.  Persia had always looked upon European Greece as politically insignificant, for it had scarcely half the territorial extent of one of her satrapies.  Her expeditions for compelling its obedience had, however, taught her the military qualities of its people.  In her forces were incorporated Greek mercenaries, esteemed the very best of her troops.  She did not hesitate sometimes to give the command of her armies to Greek generals, of her fleets to Greek captains.  In the political convulsions through which she had passed, Greek soldiers had often been used by her contending chiefs.  These military operations were attended by a momentous result.  They revealed, to the quick eye of these warlike mercenaries, the political weakness of the empire and the possibility of reaching its centre.  After the death of Cyrus on the battle-field of Cunaxa, it was demonstrated, by the immortal retreat of the ten thousand under Xenophon, that a Greek army could force its way to and from the heart of Persia.

That reverence for the military abilities of Asiatic generals, so profoundly impressed on the Greeks by such engineering exploits as the bridging of the Hellespont, and the cutting of the isthmus at Mount Athos by Xerxes, had been obliterated at Salamis, Platea, Mycale.  To plunder rich Persian provinces had become an irresistible temptation.  Such was the expedition of Agesilaus, the Spartan king, whose brilliant successes were, however, checked by the Persian government resorting to its time-proved policy of bribing the neighbors of Sparta to attack her.  “I have been conquered by thirty thousand Persian archers,” bitterly exclaimed Agesilaus, as he re-embarked, alluding to the Persian coin, the Daric, which was stamped with the image of an archer.