Volume 54, Number 19 · December 6, 2007
East vs. West: The First Round
By Jasper Griffin
Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World
by Paul Cartledge
Overlook Press, 313 pp., $30.00
The early history of Europe is a history of constant invasions from the East. The peoples which think of themselves nowadays as quintessentially European—the French, the Germans, the Anglo-Saxons—all came into what we now call Europe, originally, from what we now call Asia. It was only later that invasion and conquest began to move in the opposite direction, and that Europe, an increasingly precocious and disrespectful heir to the ancient civilizations of Asia, began to march eastward, and to conquer the progenitors of its own upstart culture.
Review, 3338 words
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