And then Athens emerged as the de facto capital of Greece and then got to experience a Golden Age, which is something that historians make up. But a lot of things did happen during the Golden Age, including the Parthenon, a temple that became a church and then a mosque and then an armory until finally settling into its current gig as a ruin. You also had statesmen like Pericles, whose famous funeral oration brags about the golden democracy of Athens with rhetoric that wouldn't sound out of place today. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences. If a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. And when you combine that high-minded rhetoric with the undeniable power and beauty of the art and philosophy that was created in ancient Athens, it's not hard to see it as the foundation of Western civilization. And if you buy into this, you have to be glad that the Greeks won the Persian Wars.