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the cultural effect of Persian intervention was to make the Greeks less parochial, much
as the Hellenistic kingdoms that succeeded Persia would make the Romans more
aware of the wider world (Bang and Kolodziejczyk, 2012).
While Mediterranean city-states were dynamic they were also unstable, and in this
regard Asia’s monarchies played yet another important role. With the exception of
Rome, all city-states from the fourth century bce were eventually swallowed up by
monarchies, which had far greater capacity to mobilize manpower and financial
resources, and could deploy such resources more efficiently. The Greek defeat of
Persia back in 479 bce had been a temporary reprieve, for Macedon, the Hellenistic
kingdoms and imperial Rome came to rule the Mediterranean world. The Roman
Republic, which also suffered interminable social conflict, resolved its internal prob-
lems by becoming a monarchy. Mediterranean city-states did not disappear, but they
were effectively reduced to units of local administration.
Asian models inevitably influenced the transition to monarchy and empire, and it
had been the Persians who established the template for world empire, showing how a
vast collection of far-flung societies and cultures could be managed successfully by a
single authority over long periods. At its height, Persia had refined its “imperial
repertoire” for a durable state order, which included a good measure of flexibility
when dealing with subject groups, and a willingness to accommodate difference
(Burbank and Cooper, 2010). When Cyrus the Great (c. 558–530 bce) conquered
Anatolia and its numerous Greek city-states, he did not dismantle the local institu-
tions and traditions but ruled through them. Persian success had rested on absorbing
Egyptian, Babylonian and other elites into the imperial order, and on allowing them
to operate through their familiar traditions and processes. John Ma presents the
Persian paradigm as “the determinant factor in the genealogy of Hellenistic king-
ship.” Its “solutions became those of the Ptolemies, Seleukids, Antigonids and
Attalids” (Ma, 2003: 191). Alexander the Great conquered the empire but chose
to preserve most aspects of Persian imperial governance, including its struc-
tures ( provincial organization, communications and exchange infrastructure) and
ideology—Alexander understood that the empire did not fall because of structural
weaknesses but because of his own military prowess (Wiesehofer, 2010: 91). The
Hellenistic kings and the Romans followed suit. In fact, the Achaemenids, who
were in turn influenced by Mesopotamian state traditions, started a genealogy of
imperialism that can be traced through to the modern era. Thus, Hellenistic kingship
exercised great fascination among Roman politicians as Scipio Africanus, Pompey,
Caesar and Mark Antony, while Augustus Caesar looked to Alexander the Great as his
model for “king of kings” (Bang, 2011: 176), as did such later aspirants as the
fifteenth-century Ottoman sultan Mehmet the Conqueror. The Persians established a
tradition of “universal empire,” for which Alexander served as exemplar for all other
kings (Bang and Kolodziejczyk, 2012: 10–11).
Another reason why West Asia would remain a dominant presence for the
Mediterranean world long after the Achaemenid Persians was the fact that the region
seemed so conducive to large and powerful states, whereas the opposite applied to the
other half of the Mediterranean and western Europe—only Rome ever managed to
unite these western regions. It is surely no coincidence that the eastern Mediterranean
featured not only the most durable empires in western Eurasia but also a long succes-
sion of them, including Rome/Byzantium, the Islamic caliphate and the Ottoman