People who resisted empires
The great Persian empire expanded from Cyrus the Great in the year 558 BC, and dominated the Medes and took all of Mesopotamia, Cyrus respected the culture and customs of his enemies, but expanded his empire to Egypt, and advanced over the Greeks, but was defeated by Athens.
After Darius I, Xerxes I and his son Artaxerxes also tried to conquer Greece and failed, in the year 332 BC. Emperor Alexander of Macedonia the Great organized an invincible army and ended up taking Greece and eventually winning the Persians, establishing a new empire, Macedonian.
Alexander’s death from typhoid fever or malaria (the poisoning hypothesis is not accepted by historians) the dispute between generals ended up weakening the empire and starting a decline.
The period established between the starting point of the Classical Era is pointed out with the first record of the poetry of the Greek Homer, in the 7th-8th centuries BC. and will extend to the period from 300 to 600 A.D. which is called Late Antiquity, when the Middle Ages begin.
In this interregnum between the Macedonian Empire and the Roman/Byzantine Empire, Greek culture developed in classical antiquity, which is deeply influential to this day with the so-called Western culture.
Greek culture and language were for that time what the English language is today, great developments were made from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, names in several areas of knowledge stood out: Hippocrates in medicine, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in theater , Apelles in painting, Phidias in sculpture, Archimedes in mathematics, Aristarchus, Erastothenes and Hipparchus in astronomy, are some important names that still influence our culture today.
This small nation was a great founder of concepts and thoughts that reached our days: the Organon and the Ethics of Aristotle, the Geometry of Euclid and Thales of Miletus and Pythagoras in mathematics.
They won battles uniting the city-states, but they were a small people with a strong culture and humanistic values that are remembered to this day, although they can be modified and updated.