India, May 4 -- "Chicken." What ideas does the word bring to mind? I doubt "saviour of Western civilization" tops the list. Yet, that's how Jerry Adler and Andrew Lawler described the bird, writing in Smithsonian Magazine in 2012. The story they refer to, one of history's turning points, goes like this: In 480 BCE, the Athenian general Themistocles was on his way to what would become known as the Battle of Salamis. Earlier that year, the Persian ruler Xerxes I had attacked Greece. At Thermopylae, King Leonidas's Greek forces valiantly held back the vastly larger Persian army. When they were betrayed and the Persian army began to outflank them, Leonidas sent most of his army away and remained, with a small force, to slow the Persian advance....