Plutarch
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Plutarch’
Alexander the Great dropped a hint to his sycophantic entourage.
In 336 BC, the young Alexander, son of Philip II of Macedon, was just beginning his astonishing rise to be King of all Greece and Asia. Like all great men, he was surrounded by tittering hangers-on; one wonders if they quite got the hint he gave them here.
As the Persian Empire’s grip tightened by land and sea, it fell to one man to unite Greece in a last desperate bid to break it.
The Battle of Salamis in September 480 BC was the turning point in the Greco-Persian Wars. By comparison with the small city-states of Greece, Xerxes’s highly centralised Persian empire was clumsy and backward, and the Greeks were ready to defend their superior civilisation to the death.