Empire and Imperialism

The multiple meanings of empire have a long history. To the ancient Greeks, the concept, expressed by the term monarchy, referred to the Persian Empire, the vast power that fought the Greeks in a series of campaigns in the early fifth century B.C.E. To the Greeks, the empire was a gigantic war machine, one in which military officers employed whips to force their soldiers to fight, unlike the Greeks, who fought voluntarily as freemen. Empire thus signified conquest and slavery, as opposed to the city-state, which signified freedom.