This gem comes from a lecture given by Max F. Muller to the civil servants who were going to India to govern.
What do we owe to the Persians It does not seem to be much for they were not a veiy inventive race and what they knew they had chiefly learnt from their neighbours the Babylonians and Assyrians. Still we owe them something First of all we owe them a large debt of gratitude for having allowed themselves to be beaten by the Greeks for think what the world would have been if the Persians had beaten the Greeks at Marathon and had enslaved that means annihilated the genius of ancient Greece However this may be called rather an involuntary contribution to the progress of humanity and I mention it only in order to show how narrowly not only Greeks and Romans but Saxons and Anglo Saxons too escaped becoming Parsis or Fire worshippers [India: what can it teach us?]
For context, the full book is available online on Project Gutenberg (HTML) or Google Books (page images).
BTW, also see this post on Max Mueller.
Thanks svat,
I finished reading the first lecture where he argues that there is a lot India can teach a European.