Possessing a perception of the beautiful as manifested in sculpture and architecture to a degree never attained elsewhere either before or since, Greece had lost a practical appreciation of the Good and the True.
While European Greece, full of ideas of liberty and independence, rejected the sovereignty of Persia, Asiatic Greece acknowledged it without reluctance.

At that time the Persian Empire in territorial extent was equal to half of modern Europe.

It touched the waters of the Mediterranean, the Aegean, the Black, the Caspian, the Indian, the Persian, the Red Seas.

Through its territories there flowed six of the grandest rivers in the world--the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Indus, the Jaxartes, the Oxus, the Nile, each more than a thousand miles in length.
Its surface reached from thirteen hundred feet below the sea-level to twenty thousand feet above.

It yielded, therefore, every agricultural product.