Fearful Symmetry
The Persian Wars led to the formation of classic Athenian-dominated Greece. That was their defining moment. Persia was the yin to Greece’s yang. Both as a challenge and as a contrast, it gave shape to public life.
To some extent the tradition of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, of Herodotus and Thucydides, of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle owes a debt to Darius and Xerxes. Without the Persian threat and the Greek victory, Greece might have remained splintered, weak, and poor, a backwater of history It might never have risen to greatness and come to serve as a model for government, literature, and philosophy ever since.
The gold of the Athenian golden ae was forged in the fire of war.
The villain deserves some credit for the success of the novel.
I suspect that there is some truth to the Manichaean view (espoused by Blake with his “fearful symmetry”) that good and evil are inseparable.
Am I an optimist, a pessimist or a fool to think that the battle against Trump and his allies may play a similar role in the resurrection and florescence of American democracy.
