Greece was one polar type of reaction to the northern challenges discussed in Chapter 6. The other pole was the revitalized empire of domination. The main empires contemporaneous with the Phoenician and Greek history just covered were Assyria and Persia. My treatment is brief and sometimes uncertain because sources are not nearly as good as they are for Greece. Indeed, much of our knowledge of Persia is gleaned from Greeks' accounts of their great struggle – an obviously biased source.

In Chapter 5, I set out the four main strategies of rule for the ancient empire: to rule through conquered elites; to rule through the army; or to move toward a higher level of power, through a mixture of the “compulsory cooperation” of a militarized economy and the beginnings of a diffused upper-class culture. On the one hand, the coming of the iron plow and the expansion of local trade, coinage, and literacy tended to decentralize the direction of economic development, making compulsory cooperation somewhat less productive and less attractive as a strategy. On the other hand, the growing cosmopolitan character of these processes facilitated the diffusion of broader class-cultural identities that could also be used as an instrument of rule.

The ruling strategies of the two empires differed within these broad bounds and possibilities. By and large, the Assyrians combined ruling through the army and a degree of compulsory cooperation with a diffused upper-class “nationalism” of their own core. The Persians, coming later into a more cosmopolitan arena, combined ruling through conquered elites with a broader, more universalized upper-class culture.