[quote]florin wrote:
Interesting alternate history.
Come to think of it, it did happen, except it was the Romans, not the Spartans. [/quote]
After I posted that, I imagined how it might have happened. Sparta defeats Athens, and does not destroy Thebes, but annexes it. In due time, Epimanondas, who would have been governor of the vassal state of Thebes, perfects his improved phalanx maneuvers, which are adopted and refined by the Spartans.
Sparta, then, with this new combination of superlative discipline and superior technique, goes on to defeat the remaining kingdoms of Greece, adding them to its growing hegemony. Once Greece was consolidated, the natural next step would be to send a huge (by Spartan standards: let’s say 20,000 Spartan heavy infantry, and maybe 80,000 hoplites from other cities, plus skirmishers, light and heavy cavalry, slingers, archers and a supply train) expeditionary force east to face the Persians.
Armed thus with a phalanx not so inferior to the later Macedonian variety, and led by an able Spartan king, the odds are good that the Greeks could conquer and occupy at least as much territory as the Macedonians did. Greek settlers, traders and colonial governors would soon follow.
In the scenario I imagine, they avoid India, and instead confine themselves to the Mediterranean, Mesopotamian and Bosporus regions. Persia, Babylon, Turkey, Palestine, Phoenicia, Egypt, and then North Africa, Italy, Gaul and Iberia… all controlled by the Greeks, and not built on the shaky foundation of Alexander’s ego, would certainly have prevented the Romans from building an empire of their own. Likely, Christianity (if it ever appeared at all) would have been a very different religion (perhaps they would have made “Iesous Khristos” drink hemlock in lieu of crucifixion), and Muhammad’s jihad would likely have been stopped before it made it far past the Arabian peninsula.
There would have been no “Dark Ages”, so by extension no Renaissance, but rather an unbroken succession and evolution of Greek thought. Greek maritime and military technology would have continued to evolve as well, and there is no doubt in my mind that eventually, Greek merchants, searching for a faster route to the Spice Islands, and guided by Pythagoras’ postulate of a spherical earth, would have landed on the shores of what is now North America, maybe a eight hundred to a thousand years before Columbus (accompanied of course by a few phalanxes of Spartan marines), and they would have subdued the continent.
Now that’s an alternate history.
[quote]florin wrote:
[The Romans were] poor mathematicians…[/quote]
Yeah, well, you try doing calculus with Roman numerals sometime. Or long division even. It has been said that the Romans were conquered because they couldn’t divide.
