Persian Fire Read online

  Yet, astonishingly, against the largest expeditionary force ever assembled, the mainland Greeks had managed to hold out. The invaders had been turned back. Greece had remained free. The story of how they had taken on a superpower and defeated it appeared to the Greeks themselves the most extraordinary of all time. How precisely had they done it? And why? And what had caused the invasion to be launched against them in the first place? Questions such as these, not lacking in urgency even four decades later, prompted Herodotus into a wholly novel style of investigation. For the first time, a chronicler set himself to trace the origins of a conflict not to a past so remote as to be utterly fabulous, nor to the whims and wishes of some god, nor to a people's claim to a manifest destiny, but rather to explanations that he could verify personally. Committed to transcribing only living informants or eyewitness accounts, Herodotus toured the world — the first anthropologist, the first investigative reporter, the first foreign correspondent.5 The fruit of his tireless curiosity was not merely a narrative, but a sweeping analysis of an entire age: capacious, various, tolerant. Herodotus himself described what he had engaged in as 'enquiries' — 'historia'. 'And I set them down here,' he declared, in the first sentence of the first work of history ever written, 'so that the memory of the past may be preserved by recording the extraordinary deeds of Greek and foreigner alike — and above all, to show how it was that they came to go to war.'6

  Historians always like to argue for the significance of their material, of course. In Herodotus' case, his claims have had two and a half millennia to be put to the test. During that time, their founding presumption — that the great war between Greek and Persian was of an unexampled momentousness — has been resoundingly affirmed. John Stuart Mill claimed that 'the battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings'. Hegel, in the more expansive tones that one would expect of a German philosopher, declared that 'the interest of the whole world's history hung trembling in the balance'.8 And so it surely did. Any account of odds heroically defied is exciting — but how much more tense it becomes when the odds are incalculably, incomparably high. There was much more at stake during the course of the Persian attempts to subdue the Greek mainland than the independence of what Xerxes had regarded as a ragbag of terrorist states. As subjects of a foreign king, the Athenians would never have had the opportunity to develop their unique democratic culture. Much that made Greek civilisation distinctive would have been aborted. The legacy inherited by Rome and passed on to modern Europe would have been immeasurably impoverished. Not only would the West have lost its first struggle for independence and survival, but it is unlikely, had the Greeks succumbed to Xerxes' invasion, that there would ever have been such an entity as 'the West' at all.

  No wonder, then, that the story of the Persian Wars should serve as the founding-myth of European civilisation; as the archetype of the triumph of freedom over slavery, and of rugged civic virtue over enervated despotism. Certainly, as the word 'Christendom' began to lose its resonance in the aftermath of the Reformation, so the heroics of Marathon and Salamis began to strike many idealists as an altogether more edifying exemplification of Western virtues than the Crusades. More principled, after all, to defend than to invade; better to fight for liberty than in the cause of fanaticism. One episode above all, the doomed defence of the pass of Thermopylae by a tiny Greek holding-force — 'four thousand against three million',9 as Herodotus had it — took on the particular force of myth. Teeming hordes of Asiatics, driven forwards into battle by the whip; a Spartan king, Leonidas, resolved to do or die; an exemplary death, as he and three hundred of his countrymen were wiped out making a suicidal last stand:* the story had it all. As early as the sixteenth century ad, the great French essayist Michel de Montaigne could argue that although other battles fought by the Greeks were 'the fairest sister-victories which the Sun has ever seen, yet they would never dare to compare their combined glory with the glorious defeat of King Leonidas and his men at the defile of Thermopylae'.10 Two and a half centuries later, Lord Byron, appalled that the Greece of his own day should be languishing as a province under the rule ot the Turkish Sultan, knew exactly where to look in the history books to find the most heart-swelling call to arms.

  *To be strictly accurate, only 298 of the Spartans that Leonidas took with him to Thermopylae died there in battle. See p. 341.

  Earth! render back from out thy breast

  A remnant of our Spartan dead!

  Of the three hundred grant but three,

  To make a new Thermopylae!11

  Putting his money where his mouth was, Byron would subsequently emulate the example of Leonidas by dying in the glorious cause of Greek liberty himself. The glamour of his end, the first true celebrity death of the modern age, only added to the lustre of Leonidas, and helped ensure that Thermopylae, for generations afterwards, would serve as the model of a martyrdom for liberty. Why, the novelist William Golding asked himself during a visit to the pass in the early 1960s, did he feel so oddly stirred, despite the fact that Sparta herself had been such a 'dull, cruel city'?

  It is not just that the human spirit reacts directly and beyond all arguments to a story of sacrifice and courage, as a wine glass must vibrate to the sound of the violin. It is also because, way back and at the hundredth remove, that company stood in the right line of history. A little of Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go where I like and write what I like. He contributed to set us free.12

  Moving words, and true — and yet it is sobering to reflect that Golding's encomium might well have served to enthuse Adolf Hitler. To the Nazis, as it had been to Montaigne, Thermopylae was easily the most glorious episode in Greek history. The three hundred who defended the pass were regarded by Hitler as representatives of a true master-race, one bred and raised for war, and so authentically Nordic that even the Spartans' broth, according to one of the Fiihrer's more speculative pronouncements, derived from Schleswig-Holstein. In January 1943, with the Battle of Stalingrad at its height, Hitler explicitly compared the German 6th Army to the Spartan three hundred — and later, when its general surrendered, raged that the heroism of his soldiers had been 'nullified by one single characterless weakling'.13 Denied a Leonidas, Hitler fumed, the Wehrmacht had been frustrated of a perfect chance to make its own new Thermopylae.

  That the Nazis — as much as Montaigne, Byron or Golding — could feel such a passionate sense of identification with the example of the three hundred suggests that any portrayal of the Spartans as defenders of liberty does not perhaps tell the whole story. As is so often the case, the truth is both messier and more intriguing than the myth. Had Xerxes succeeded in conquering Greece, and occupying Sparta, then it would indeed have spelled the end of that proud city's freedom — for all the Persian king's subjects were ranked as his slaves. Yet even slavery can be a matter of degree: what would have been regarded as a fate worse than death by the Spartans themselves might well have proved a blessed relief to their neighbours. Sparta's greatness, as Hitler was well aware, rested upon the merciless exploitation of her neighbours, a demonstration of how to treat Untermenschen that the Nazis would brutally emulate in Poland and occupied Russia. The Persian monarchy, brilliantly subtle in the exploitation of its subjects' rivalries, would certainly have granted, with an imperious show of graciousness, emancipation and patronage to Sparta's neighbours. To people who had suffered under Spartan oppression for generations, Xerxes' rule might almost have felt like liberty.

  A momentous, indeed a history-shaping paradox: that annexation by a foreign power might perhaps, under certain circumstances, be welcomed. Xerxes was certainly, as the Greeks accused him of being, a despot, an Iranian who ruled as heir to the millennia-old traditions of ancient Iraq, of Akkad, Assyria and Babylon, kingdoms that had always taken it for granted that a monarch should rule and conquer as a strong man. Mercilessness and repression: these had invariably been the keynotes of the Iraqi imperial style. The empire of the Persians, however, alth
ough certainly founded amid 'the tearing down of walls, the tumult of cavalry charges, and the overthrow of cities',14 had also, as it expanded, developed a subtler response to the challenges of dominion. By guaranteeing peace and order to the dutifully submissive, and by giving a masterly demonstration of how best to divide and rule, a succession of Persian kings had won for themselves and their people the largest empire ever seen. Indeed, it was their epochal achievement to demonstrate to future ages the very possibility of a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, world-spanning state. As such, the influence of their example on the grand sweep of history would be infinitely more long term than the aberrant and fleeting experiment that was the democracy of Athens. The political model established by the Persian kings would inspire empire after empire, even into the Muslim era: the caliphs, would-be rulers of the world, were precisely echoing, albeit in piously Islamic idiom, the pretensions of Xerxes. Indeed, in a sense, the political model established by the ancient monarchy of Persia was one that would persist in the Middle East until 1922, and the deposition of the last ruling caliph, the Turkish Sultan.* It is the stated goal of Osama bin Laden, of course, to see the Caliphate resurrected to its prerogative of global rule.

  *The Caliphate itself was abolished two years later, in 1924.

  Granted, the influence of ancient Persia, certainly in comparison with that of Greece, has always been indirect, occluded, underground. In 1891, a young British Member of Parliament, George Nathaniel Curzon, visited the site of Xerxes' palace, which had been left charred and abandoned since being torched, 150 years after Thermopylae, by a vengeful Alexander the Great. 'To us,' Curzon wrote, in soaring Byronic mode, 'it is instinct with the solemn lesson of the ages; it takes its place in the chapter of things that have ceased to be; and its mute stones find a voice, and address us with the ineffable pathos of ruin.'15 Seven years later, the by-now Baron Curzon of Kedleston was appointed Viceroy of India. As such, he ruled as the heir of the Mughals — who had themselves been proud to wear the title, not of kings, but of viceroys to the kings of Persia. The British Raj, governed by the products of self-consciously Spartan boarding schools, was also thoroughly imbued with 'that picturesque wealth of pomp and circumstance which the East alone can give',16 — and which ultimately derived from the vanished flummery of Xerxes' palaces. It might have flattered the British Empire to imagine itself the heir of Athens; but it owed a certain debt of obligation to the mortal enemy of Athens, too.

  Persia was Persia, in other words, and Greece was Greece — and sometimes the twain did meet. They might have been combatants in the primal clash of civilisations, but the ripples of their influence, spilling out across the millennia to the present day, can sometimes serve to complicate the division between East and West rather than to clarify it. Had the Athenians lost the Battle of Marathon, and suffered the obliteration of their city, for instance, then there would have been no Plato — and without Plato, and the colossal shadow he cast on all subsequent theologies, it is unlikely that there would have been an Islam to inspire bin Laden. Conversely, when President Bush speaks of'an axis of evil', his vision of a world divided between rival forces of light and darkness is one that derives ultimately from Zoroaster, the ancient prophet of Iran. Although the defeat of Xerxes was certainly decisive in giving to the Greeks, and therefore to all Europeans, a sense of their own distinctiveness, the impact of Persia and Greece upon history cannot entirely be confined within rigid notions of East and West. Monotheism and the notion of a universal state, democracy and totalitarianism: all can trace their origins back to the period of the Persian Wars. Justifiably it has been described as the axis of world history.

  And yet, by and large, how little it is read about today. Peter Green, whose wonderful book The Year of Salamis, published over thirty years ago, was the last full-length account written for a non-academic audience, marvelled, in his customarily witty fashion, at the shortage of overviews of the subject.

  Bearing in mind the fact that the Greek victory in the Persian Wars is routinely described as a fundamental turning point in European history (advocates of this view don't quite argue that today, had things gone the other way, mosques and minarets would dominate Europe, but you can sense the unspoken thought in the air), this omission seems all the more inexplicable.17

  Perhaps Green has not been to Rotterdam or Malmo recently; and yet the fact that nowadays mosques and minarets are to be seen even in Athens, long the only EU capital without a Muslim place of worship, hardly detracts from the sense of perplexity he is expressing. If anything it gives it added force. The Persian Wars may be ancient history, but they are also, in a way that they never were during the twentieth century, contemporary history, too.

  What Green describes as inexplicable, however, is not entirely so. For all its momentousness, its sweep, and its drama, the story of the Persian Wars is not an easy one to piece together. The indisputable truth that they were the first conflict in history that we can reconstruct in detail does not mean that Herodotus tells us everything about them; far from it, regrettably. Yes, historians can attempt to cover some of the gaps by stitching together shreds and patches garnered from other classical authors; but this is a repair job to be attempted only with the utmost caution. Many sources derive from centuries — even millennia — after the events that they are purporting to describe, while many were written not as 'enquiries' but as poetry or drama. Iris Murdoch, in her novel The Nice and the Good, observed of early Greek history that it 'sets a special challenge to the disciplined mind. It is a game with very few pieces, where the skill of the player lies in complicating the rules.'18 Historians of archaic Greece, who rarely feature in novels, love to quote this passage: for the task that they have set themselves, to reconstruct a vanished world from often meagre scraps of evidence, does indeed resemble, at a certain level, a game. We can never know for sure what happened at a battle such as Salamis, when the sources on which any interpretation must depend manage to be simultaneously contradictory and full of holes: one might as well look to complete a half-broken Rubik's Cube. No matter how often the facts are studied, twisted, and rearranged, it is impossible to square them all; a definitive solution can never be found. Yet even Salamis, notoriously hard to make sense of though it is, can appear prodigally rich in detail in comparison with, say, the early history of Sparta. That particular topic, one eminent scholar has baldly confessed, 'is a puzzle to challenge the best of thinkers'.19 A second has described it as requiring 'intellectual gymnastics'.2" A third, even more up-front, simply titled a book The Spartan Mirage.21

  But at least the sources for Greek history, no matter how patchy, derive from the Greeks themselves. The Persians, with one key exception, did not write anything at all that we can identify as an account of real events. Tablets inscribed by imperial bureaucrats do survive, together with royal proclamations chiselled on palace walls, and, of course, the ruins of the astounding palaces themselves. Otherwise, if we are going to attempt to make any sense of the Persians and their empire, we must rely, to an alarming degree, upon the writings of others. These, coming as they do mainly from the Greeks — a people variously invaded, occupied and pillaged by the imperial armies — tend not to be wildly keen on giving a balanced portrait of the Persian character and achievement. Herodotus, ever curious, ever open-minded, is the exception that proves the rule. 'Philobarbaros — 'barbarian-lover' — one indignant patriot labelled him:22 the closest to the phrase 'bleeding-heart liberal' that ancient Greek approached. Yet even Herodotus, writing about remote and peculiar peoples whose languages he did not speak, has to be excused the occasional inaccuracy, the occasional prejudice, the occasional tendency to treat early Persian history as a fairy tale. None of which does much to make the modern historian's task any easier.

  Three obvious responses to the challenge present themselves. The first is to accept Greek prejudices at face value, and portray the Persians as effete cowards who somehow, inexplicably, conquered the world. The second is to condemn everything that the Greeks
wrote about Persia as an expression of racism, Eurocentrism, and a whole host of other thought-crimes to boot. The third, and most productive, is to explore the degree to which Greek misinterpretations of their great enemy reflected the truth, however distorted, of how the Persians lived and saw their world. It is this approach that has been adopted by a formidable band of scholars over the past thirty years, and the results have been spectacular: a whole empire brought back to life, redeemed out of oblivion, rendered so solid that it has become, in the words of one historian, 'something you can stub your toe on'.23 As a display of resurrectionism, it is worthy to stand beside the opening of Tutankhamen's tomb.

  And yet the Persians remain shrouded in obscurity. Perhaps this is hardly surprising. There have been no golden death-masks to give a face to their rediscovery — only scholarly tomes and journals. The study of Persia, even more than that of Greece, depends on the minutest sifting of the available evidence, the closest analysis of the sources, the most delicate weighing of inferences and alternatives. This is a field in which almost every detail can be debated, and certain themes — the. religion of the Persian kings, most notoriously — are bogs so treacherous that even the most eminent scholars have been known to blanch at the prospect of venturing into them.