Persian Fire Read online

  Tom Holland received a double first from Cambridge. He has adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for BBC Radio. His previous book, Rubicon, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History 2004. Rubicon is also available as an Abacus paperback as is his latest book, Millennium. All three books are available as audiobooks from Hachette Audio.

  'Persian history comes grippingly to life'

  Robert McCrum, Picks of the Year, Observer

  'A riveting narrative of the ancient world ... Holland is a superbly gifted storyteller who brings the world of the Persian wars to life'

  History Books of the Year, Daily Telegraph

  'All the elements that made the first book so exhilarating — his erudition, his cynicism, and above all his narrative zest — are present and correct in the new one, and the book contains one moment of drama (his description of the Athenian charge at the battle of Marathon as seen from inside the Greek hoplites' helmets) that will give you goosebumps'

  History Books of the Year, Sunday Times

  'A magisterial account of the Greek-Persian wars, told with great authority and a novelistic colour and verve'

  Christopher Hart, Book of the Year, Independent on Sunday

  'Notably fair and shrewd . . . Persian Fire makes good on the promise that Holland displayed in his Roman epic, Rubicon

  Boyd Tomkin, History Books of the Year, Independent

  'My most exciting historical narrative'

  Jan Morris, Book of the Year, Observer

  'Excellent . . . Holland is a cool-headed historian who writes here no less authoritatively and engagingly on classical Greece than he did on ancient Rome in his last book, Rubicon. There is an even-handedness in his treatment of both Greek and Persian cultural riches that is rare'

  Mary Beard, Sunday Times

  'Masterly and gripping ... In his preface, Tom Holland expresses the hope that his "attempt to build a bridge between the worlds of academic and general readership does not end up appearing as vainglorious as did the two-mile pontoon which Xerxes built from Asia to Europe". On the contrary. He has conquered this new territory with more power and panache than any platform-heeled King of Kings'

  Independent on Sunday

  'Fab. Written in such a contemporary style, full of scholarship, about the relationship between the East and the West, stuff so dominant in our minds at the moment'

  Tony Robinson, The Word

  'A great account of the Persian wars, and how a tiny Greece beat back Xerxes and his armada — not triumphalist but not politically correct either, and written by a great stylist for a wide audience'

  Victor Davis Hanson, National Review (USA)

  'When a global superpower again has the confidence to spread its ways to the ends of the earth, Holland sees every reason to look at the first such power to have such an aim. When we cheerfully start wars to promote democracy, he offers a clear-eyed view of the wars in which democracy began'

  Peter Stothard, Times

  'Tom Holland's panoramic and gripping book is an unequivocal argument for the relevance of ancient history ... He has opened up a world for me and I am grateful'

  Observer

  'Vibrant, bloodthirsty popular history, told with a rich sense of irony and irresistible narrative timing . . . The account of the Battle of Thermopylae is surely the most exciting in print'

  Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Telegraph

  'A pleasure for both general readers and the learned'

  James Buchan, Guardian

  'A sober and balanced narrative . .. Holland has a sense for the golden moment, is a widely read intellectual, shows a keen wit — and the result is an engaging story that the general public will find worth relearning'

  Times Literary Supplement

  'The Persian Wars are one of the great "David and Goliath" struggles of history, with a particular resonance today as the first truly historical clash between East and West. In the sweep and vividness of his prose Tom Holland does the subject proud'

  J. F. Lazenby, Literary Review

  'Incendiary stuff. . . sparkling insight and no less sparkling writing'

  Paul Cartledge, Independent

  'It is a mark of Tom Holland's success that, while the rest of us will find our pulses racing at this scintillating narrative of one of the great conflicts of the ancient world, a Greats examiner at Oxford could sit down with his pupils and chew over Holland's flamboyant analysis of events with equal advantage'

  Peter Jones, Sunday Telegraph

  'A piece of relentlessly exciting historical storytelling'

  Financial Times

  'Holland wears his impressive scholarship lightly; Persian Fire is unputdownable'

  Lucy Moore, Daily Mail

  'The battles of Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis may have taken place more than 2,000 years ago, but Tom Holland was there, no doubt about it. He writes with a startling immediacy, and his battles are nail-biting cliff-hangers even if you know who's going to win'

  Artemis Cooper, Book of the Year, Evening Standard

  'Accessible, erudite narrative history that does a fine job of telling the story without swallowing the propaganda'

  Scotland on Sunday

  'This book makes for a great read, but not one that should be perused at speed. Rather, it should be mused over and sifted in the mind. That's not to say that it is written in dry academic language. Holland presents his polemic in a lively prose that makes for a most entertaining story . . . Holland's book rings with the clamour of colourful war . . . a stirring account'

  Irish Examiner

  'A brilliant book. The prose is fresh, ornate, rich in metaphor, yet always clear and concise . . . Persian Fire is breathtakingly exciting, immensely informative, and resonating with lessons for the present'

  Neil Faulkner, Current World Archaeology

  'A first-rate work of accessible scholarship ... I know nothing that brings this ancient history to life better than this book'

  Mark Golden, The Toronto Globe and Mail

  The First World Empire and the Battle for the West

  Tom Holland

  For Jamie and Caroline

  First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Little, Brown This paperback edition published in 2005 by Abacus Reprinted 2006, 2007 (three times), 2009 (twice)

  Copyright © Tom Holland 2005

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-0-349-11717-1

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders in all the copyright material in this book. The publisher regrets any oversight and will be pleased to rectify any omission in future editions.

  Maps by Eugene Fleury

  Typeset in Spectrum by M Rules Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Abacus An imprint of Little, Brown Book Group 100 Victoria Embankment London EC4Y 0DY

  An Hachette UK Company www.hachette.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  ix

  List of Maps

  xi

  Note on Proper Names

  xii

  Preface

  xiii

  1

  THE KHORASAN HIGHWAY

  1

  2

 
BABYLON

  39

  3

  SPARTA

  63

  4

  ATHENS

  99

  5

  SINGEING THE KING OF PERSIA'S BEARD

  143

  6

  THE GATHERING STORM

  202

  7

  AT BAY

  260

  8

  NEMESIS

  307

  Envoi

  371

  Timeline

  373

  Notes

  377

  Bibliography

  402

  Index

  412

  Acknowledgements

  I have been wanting to write a book on the Persian Wars since I was very young, and I owe a immense debt of gratitude to all those who have given me the opportunity to devote three years of my life to its study. To Patrick Walsh, best of friends and agents. To my editors, Richard Beswick and Steve Guise. To Gerry Howard, Dan Israel, Ricardo Artola and Joan Eloi Roca Martinez, for all their encouragement from abroad. To Louise Allen-Jones and Elizabeth van Lear, for their support from nearer home. To Amelie Kuhrt and Paul Cartledge, for sharing their incomparable scholarship so generously, and saving me from more errors than I care to count. To the staff of the library of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, for their perfect blend of efficiency and courtesy. To Maike Bohn, for going out with Michael Cullen, and thereby introducing me to a travel-writer with a limitless knowledge of Greece. To Philip, Francis and Barbaro Noel-Baker, for happy months in Euboea. To Jonathan Tite, for arranging a perfect day on a motor-boat around Salamis. To Nick and Sarah Longman, for their hospitality in Athens. To my father, for his companionship on expeditions over Thermopylae. To Michael Lowry and Deniz Gurtin, for their hospitality in Bodrum. To Elahe Tabari, for her help at Persepolis. To Audrey and Becky Gordon, for everything they have done to keep the enemies of good art from the hall. To Caroline and Jamie Muir, without whose friendship, support and good humour I would still be writing this book, and to whom it is dedicated. To my beloved family, Sadie, Katy and Eliza, for enduring my long stretches of scholastic seclusion with such forbearance, and for touring dusty ruins across Greece, Iran and Turkey with such jollity, and giving me some of the happiest times of my life,

  List of Maps

  The Persian Empire xxvi

  Greece and the Aegean xxviii

  Mesopotamia and Iran 2

  The Peloponnese 67

  Attica 110

  Athens in the 6th and 5th centuries bc 123

  Persia's satrapies in the West 156

  Marathon 194

  The West 231

  At bay: Greece in 480 bc 256

  Thermpolyae 290

  Salamis 314

  Battle of Salamis 322

  Plataea 351

  Note on Proper Names

  In the interests of accessibility, it has been my policy throughout this book to use the familiar Latinate form of a proper name rather than the Greek or Persian original: Darius, for instance, rather than Dareios or Daryush.

  Preface

  In the summer of 2001 a friend of mine was appointed the head of a school history department. Among the many decisions he had to take before the start of the new term in September, one was particularly pressing. For as long as anyone could remember, students in their final year had been obliged to study a special paper devoted to the rise of Hitler. Now, with my friend's promotion, the winds of change were set to blow. Hitler, he suggested to his new colleagues, should be toppled and replaced with a very different topic of study: the Crusades. Howls of anguish greeted this radical proposal. What, my friend's colleagues demanded, was the point of studying a period so alien and remote from contemporary concerns? When my friend countered by suggesting that history students might benefit from studying a topic that did not relate exclusively to twentieth-century dictators, the indignation only swelled. Totalitarianism, the other teachers argued, was a living theme, in a way that the Crusades could never be. The hatreds of Islam and Christendom, of East and West — where was the possible relevance in these?

  The answer, of course, came a few weeks later, on 11 September, when nineteen hijackers incinerated themselves and thousands of others in the cause of some decidedly medieval grievances. The Crusades, in the opinion of Osama bin Laden at any rate, had never ended. 'It should not be hidden from you', he had warned the Muslim world back in 1996, 'that the people of Islam have always suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist—Crusaders alliance.'1 Menacingly proficient at exploiting the modern world of air flight and mass communications he may be, but bin Laden has long interpreted the present in the light of the Middle Ages. In his manifestos, past and present tend to merge as though one: blood-curdling abuse of the crimes of America or Israel will mingle with demands for the restoration of Muslim rule to Spain or of the medieval Caliphate. No wonder that when President Bush chose in an unguarded moment to describe his administration's war on terrorism as a 'crusade' his advisers begged him never to use the fateful word again.

  That an American president might be less au fait with the subtleties of medieval history than a Saudi fanatic is hardly surprising, of course. 'Why do they hate us?' In the days and weeks that followed September 11th, President Bush was not the only one to wrestle with that question. Newspapers everywhere were filled with pundits attempting to explain Muslim resentment of the West, whether by tracing its origins back to the vagaries of recent American foreign policy, or further, to the carve-up of the Middle East by the European colonial powers, or even — following the bin Laden analysis back to its starting point — to the Crusades themselves. Here, in the notion that the first great crisis of the twenty-first century could possibly have emerged from a swirl of confused and ancient hatreds, lay a pointed irony. Globalisation was supposed to have brought about the end of history, yet it appeared instead to be rousing any number of unwelcome phantoms from their ancestral resting places. For decades, the East against which the West had defined itself was communist; nowadays, as it always used to be, long before the Russian Revolution, it is Islamic. The war in Iraq; the rise of anti-immigrant, and specifically anti-Muslim, feeling across Europe; the question of whether Turkey should be allowed into the EU; all these have combined with the attacks of September 11th to foster an agonised consciousness of the fault-line that divides the Christian West from the Islamic East.

  That civilisations are doomed to clash in the new century, as both al-Qaeda terrorists and Harvard academics have variously argued, remains, as yet, a controversial thesis. What cannot be disputed, however, is the degree to which different cultures, in Europe and the Muslim world at any rate, are currently being obliged to examine the very foundations of their identities. The difference of East and West', thought Edward Gibbon, 'is arbitrary and shifts round the globe.'2 Yet that it exists — that East is East, and West is West — is easily history's most abiding assumption. Older by far than the Crusades, older than Islam, older than Christianity, its pedigree is so venerable that it reaches back almost two and a half thousand years. 'Why do they hate us?' It was with this question that history itself was born — for it was in the conflict between East and West that the world's first historian, back in the fifth century bc, discovered his life-work's theme.

  His name was Herodotus. As a Greek from what is now the Turkish resort of Bodrum, but was then known as Halicarnassus, he had grown up on the very margin of Asia. Why, he wondered, did the peoples of East and West find it so hard to live in peace? The answer appeared, superficially, a simple one. Asiatics, Herodotus reported, saw Europe as a place irreconcilably alien. 'And so it is they believe that Greeks will always be their enemies.'3 But why this fracture had opened in the first place was, Herodotus acknowledged, a puzzle. Perhaps the kidnapping of a princess or two by Greek pirates had been to blame? Or the burning of Troy? 'That, at any rate, is what many nations of Asia argue — but who can say f
or sure if they are right?"1 As Herodotus well knew, the world was an infinite place, and one man's truth might easily be another's lie. Yet if the origins of the conflict between East and West appeared lost in myth, then not so its effects. These had been made all too recently and tragically clear. Difference had bred suspicion — and suspicion had bred war.

  Indeed, a war like no other. In 480 bc, some forty years before Herodotus began his history, Xerxes, the King of Persia, had led an invasion of Greece. Military adventures of this kind had long been a specialisation of the Persians. For decades, victory — rapid, spectacular victory — had appeared to be their birthright. Their aura of invincibility reflected the unprecedented scale and speed of their conquests. Once, they had been nothing, just an obscure mountain tribe confined to the plains and mountains of what is now southern Iran. Then, in the space of a single generation, they had swept across the Middle East, shattering ancient kingdoms, storming famous cities, amassing an empire which stretched from India to the shores of the Aegean. As a result of those conquests, Xerxes had ruled as the most powerful man on the planet. The resources available to him were so stupefying as to appear virtually limitless. Europe was not to witness another invasion force to rival his until 1944, and the summer of D-Day.

  Set against this unprecedented juggernaut, the Greeks had appeared few in numbers and hopelessly divided. Greece itself was little more than a geographical expression: not a country but a patchwork of quarrelsome and often violently chauvinistic city-states. True, the Greeks regarded themselves as a single people, united by language, religion and custom; but what the various cities often seemed to have most in common was an addiction to fighting one another. The Persians, during the early years of their rise to power, had found it a simple matter to subdue the Greeks who lived in what is now western Turkey — including those of Herodotus' home town — and absorb them into their empire. Even the two principal powers of mainland Greece, the nascent democracy of Athens and the sternly militarised state of Sparta, had seemed ill equipped to put up a more effective fight. With the Persian king resolved to pacify once and for all the fractious and peculiar people on the western fringe of his great empire, the result had looked to be a foregone conclusion.