Alexander the Great was antiquity\'s greatest commander

[M.H. White]

No need to defend the western view, this is how the Persian king saw it, and in his view he was the rightious one. wink: Despite that, any teacher and any tourist guide will tell you that we Dutch stood firm for our beliefs and heroically struggled to become free from Spanish and Catholic oppression. Our freedom fighter are the other side's terrorists. I bet they teach similar stuff in Ireland about the English..

This doesn't have anything to do with a 'Western' view of the war.

I think what he was going for was asking how you could consider someone a rebel who had never been under the political dominion of another in the first place. Unlike the Greek cities of the coast of Asia Minor, the city states of mainland Greece had not been a part of the Persian Empire. Leonidas was the king of a sovereign state attempting to keep from being subjugated by a large power.

My point is that the term 'rebel' implies that the Greeks were previously under the political power of Xerxes's forebears and that they attempted to throw off the yoke. I agree Xerxes probably viewed the Greeks as an insect on the periphery of his empire to be squashed, but they weren't in rebellion.