What if the entire expedition of the King of Kings, the massing of the hordes of Asia, and the extermination of Greek freedom that it threatened, were merely the climax of a feud infinitely more ancient and inveterate? “Persians in the know,” it would be asserted with bald confidence after the war, “put the blame for the quarrel squarely on the Phoenicians.”49 The hatred between East and West, Asia and Europe, barbarian and Greek: all, according to this theory, welled from a single perfidious source.
