Persian Fire: The First World Empire, Battle for the West - 'Magisterial' Books of the Year, Independent

by Tom Holland

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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.’2Yet 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.

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.’

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 for sure if they are right?’

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, ama...

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

John Stuart Mill claimed that ‘the battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings’.7 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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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 Führer’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...

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 pro...

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 ...

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, although certainly founded amid ‘the tearing down of walls, the tumult of cavalry charges, and the overthrow of cities’,14 had also, as ...

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.

George Nathaniel Curzon,

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.’

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 h...

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...

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.

Monotheism and the notion of a universal state, democracy and totalitarianism: all can trace their origins back to the period of the Persian Wars.

Perhaps Green has not been to Rotterdam or Malmö 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.

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 s...