But the Persians weren't very concerned about converting people of the empire to their faith. Plus, Zoroastrianism forbids slavery, and so slavery was almost unheard of in the Persian Empire. All in all, if you had to live in the 5th century BCE, the Persian Empire was probably the best place to do it, unless, that is, you believe Herodotus and the Greeks. We all know about the Greeks. Architecture, philosophy, literature, the very word music comes from Greek, as does so much else in contemporary culture. Greek poets and mathematicians and architects and philosophers founded a culture that we still identify with, and they introduced us to many ideas, from democracy to fart jokes. And the Greeks gave the West our first dedicated history, they gave us our vocabulary for talking about politics, plus they gifted us our idealization of democracy, which comes from the government they had in Athens.