and their respective allies were, except for the final entrance of Persian financiers, all Greek speakers who worshipped the same gods and farmed and fought in the same manner. Although there was never a successful Panhellenic nation, Greeks of the city-states still felt themselves to be a single people. Their twenty-seven-year strife, in terms of the percentages of the population who fought and died, was one of the most horrific civil wars in early recorded history—conventional battles, terrorism, revolutions, assassinations, and mass murder all unfolding at once among a baffling array of
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