Alexander the Great was antiquity\'s greatest commander

[Robert Vermaat]

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.

Yes and no.

Yes, because Europeans are taught in school and later to see this conflict mainly from the Greek and European (Western) point of view, looking at the Greeks as those who defeated an unjust invader who had no claim at all. My point in this discussion is that the other side had a different view on things, as always with conflicts in history, which they were also entitled to.

Yes, I agree with you, the word ‘rebel’ indeed implies being once ruled by the other party, which technically the Greeks had not been.

On the other hand, I have some doubt that it was seen like that at the time. The mainland Greek states, while each being independent, had of course been meddling in Asian affairs because of Greeks there were seen as unjustly ruled by Persians. So indeed, these Asian Greeks were the rebels, not Athens, Sparta, Thebes etc. But they had been aided by mainland Greek states out of a cultural solidarity – Greeks aiding Greeks, right?
So, I am not sure that Xerxes et al saw the Greeks as so many different states, instead of lumping them together.

Maybe the Persians saw all Greeks as one group, for the same reason that Greeks themselves wanted to free fellow-Greeks in Asia from Persian rule?
Also, some Greek cities had been under Persian sway before, so that could qualify all mainland Greeks as belonging to one rebelling group.
If so, then Xerxes could indeed see the European Greeks as aiding and abetting rebels or as ‘true rebels’ themselves.

In modern language, Xerxes could have called the European Greeks ‘terrorists’. His campaign to mainland Greece can be well compared to Julius Caesar’s campaign to Britain, which was in part for glory, in part to stop the oversees aid for conquered Celts in Gaul?