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

by Tom Holland

A startling question for any Greek to have to answer. How could an Asiatic not have heard of the Spartans? Nothing could better have illustrated the remote and alien quality of the Persians than the fact that they were ignorant of history’s most notorious woman.

Helen of Sparta,

King Menelaus,

Trojan plain.

To the descendants of the victors, there had been, in the sheer scale of the destruction, something sobering and fearful: after all, ‘an immense expeditionary force had been assembled, Asia invaded and Trojan power wiped out, merely for the sake of a single Spartan woman’.

Ionians

To the Spartans themselves, however, the memory of their city’s most famous daughter was precious.

Menelaus,

H...

aureate

Had Cyrus known that the Spartans worshipped at the shrine of such a woman, sensual and pleasure-loving, he would no doubt have been confirmed in his contempt for their ridiculous pre-tensions.

Certainly, their ambassadors, long-haired and scarlet-cloaked as they were, would have appeared apt devotees of Helen; for Cyrus would have had sufficient opportunity to learn that the wearing of long hair, among the Greeks, was generally regarded as evidence of effeminacy, and the use of expensive vermilion as a mark of wild extravagance.

Appearances, of course, could be deceptive; but it was true that once, in the earliest years of their history, the Spartans had indeed been notorious for their materialism and greed. ‘Acquisitiveness will be their ruin’ had been a common prediction.

And this at a time when competition was hardly lacking; for everywhere in the Greek world, by the seventh century BC, the gap between rich and poor, the few and the many, had begun to widen alarmingly, so that the ideal of good governance, ‘eunomia’ as it was called, seemed a distant dream, and all was instability.

eunomia

clansmen of the Zagros,

With no ready models of bureaucracy or centralisation to hand, the Greek world had early on fragmented into a multitude of competing city-states, each with its distinctive brand of constitutional crisis.

Racked by chronic social tensions though they were, however, the Greeks were not entirely oblivious to the freedom that provincialism gave them: to experiment, innovate and forge their own distinctive paths. ‘Better a small city perched on a rock,’ it could be argued, ‘so ...

In Greece, the mountains which hemmed in the lowlands, cutting many a state off from state, to say nothing of the reach of the broader world beyond, afforded a rough-hewn autonomy as well as isolation.

Lacedaemon,

Taygetos,

Sparta of Helen and Menelaus.

Lacedaemonian plain,

Dorians

Heracles, slayer of monsters and son of Zeus,

The leading Spartans called themselves ‘Heraclids’ – and they laid claim, as the heirs of Heracles, not only to Lacedaemon but to the dominion of much of Greece.

Taygetos range,

Messenians

Messenia

Such an enslavement of one Greek people by another was wholly without precedent. It established the Spartans not only as the richest people in Greece, but as a prodigy, a mutant race, unnerving and unique.

Heraclids

conquest of Messenia,

For it was not cavalry – prancing, expensive, indelibly upper class – that had won Messenia for Sparta. Rather, the victory had gone to plodding foot-soldiers, citizens of farming stock, men who may not have had the resources to afford horses but who could still supply themselves with arms and armour; and in particular with hopla, circular shields of a radically new design, a metre high and wide, and faced with bronze across their wood.

‘hoplites’

hoplon,

phalanx,

‘Keep together,’ exhorted a Spartan battle hymn, ‘hold the line, do not give in to alarm, or disgraceful rout.’11 A cry for discipline aimed at hoplites of every class.

The Spartan establishment, having grown fat on the lower classes, suddenly found itself, in the very hour of victory, staring catastrophe in the face. No longer, by the middle of the seventh century, could civic cohesion be regarded merely as an idle aspiration of down-at-heel farmers. It had become, even for the Heraclids, a matter of life and death. Panic bred a truly extraordinary solution. Revolution came to Lacedaemon. The Spartan people, despairing of their future, were somehow persuaded to forget their time-honoured class differences and submit to a majestic yet murderous experiment in social engineering.

‘Lycurgus’,

eunomia

Control the past, and you control the future: as radical an act of surgery as had ever been attempted by a state upon itself was soon being represented as the essence of its traditions. Lycurgus, it would later be claimed, ‘moved and gratified by the beauty and loftiness of his legislation, now that it was completed and implemented, had longed to make it immortal and unbudging, for all time – or at least so far as could be achieved by human foresight’.

Revolution, as they were the first people in history to discover, could best be buttressed if it was transfigured into myth.

Lycurgus

Lycurgus,

Every citizen, be he aristocrat or peasant, was to be subsumed within its ranks. Henceforward, even ‘the very wealthy were to adopt a lifestyle that was as much as possible like that of the ordinary run of people’.15 Merciless and universal discipline was to teach every Spartan, from the moment of his birth, that conformity was all.

Lycurgus,

A grim philosophy, to be sure. Yet, self-denying though it might appear, it was valued by the Spartans precisely for the freedoms that it gave them.

Heraclids,

‘perioikoi’, or ‘about-dwellers’,

Hazy though the precise details are, it appears likely that one of the key policies of the Lycurgan reform programme had been the partitioning of much of Messenia into allotments for the poor.18 Not that any member of the master-race ever farmed these grants in person: it was out of the question for a Spartan warrior to toil and sweat in a field. That was the function of the conquered Messenians.