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

by Tom Holland

Thebes,

Thermopylae

Mount Oeta,

Heracles,

plain of Doris,

Parnassus,

Delphi,

Lord Apollo

Lacedaemon,

halls of Olympus

Since the youth of the god, foundation had succeeded foundation. The second had been built of fern-stalks, the third of wax and feathers, the fourth of bronze – for the history of Apollo’s oracle was a fabulous one, and marked by ceaseless change.

young priestess, the Pythia,

Around 750 BC, when Delphi’s history first begins to emerge from myth, a temple of stone was raised. Shortly afterwards, it appears, it was decided that only an old woman should be appointed to serve as the Pythia, although she was still, as a symbol of purity, obliged to wear a young girl’s dress.

In 54...

There was no other oracle to compare with it. Indeed, such was the prestige of Delphi that it became, of all the many temples founded by the Greeks, the only one to be served by a body of full-time priests.

The news that in Persia only a Magus could preside over a sacrifice was greeted with particular astonishment. In Greece, anyone, even women, even slaves, could sacrifice. Only the Delphians, far removed in their mountain valley from all other possible forms of income, made a living from the proceeds of their shrine.

‘Guard my temple,’ Apollo had instructed them, ‘receive the crowds of men.’47 The Delphians, obeying him, had lavishly cashed in. Other cities, far from begrudging the priests their professionalism, were happy to collude in it. The arrangement suited everyone. What better assurance could there be of the priests’ even-handedness than that they charged everyone the same flat fee?

in 595 BC,

neighbouring city of Crisa

Crisa

The terrifying lesson had been learned. Delphi was either an oracle for all the Greeks or it was nothing.

Sacred flames rose eternally upon the public altar of the temple in illustration of precisely this truth: tended busily by priestesses, fed with pine and laurel wood, never permitted to go out, they blazed as the hearth-fire of the whole of Greece.

Del...

Zeus

‘Navel Stone’, or Omphalos,

When Croesus, for instance, faced with the growing threat of Persia, had sought divine guidance, he had sent messengers to all the world’s leading oracles, with instructions, on a given day, to ask what their master was doing back in Lydia. Only Delphi had provided the right answer: that Croesus was boiling up a lamb and tortoise casserole.

Not that this had saved him in the long run, of course. If Apollo’s advice often appeared clear, then it was not always so. ‘The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor keeps silent, but offers hints.’

Croesus,

Apollo’s counsel,

When Apollo was accused of ingratitude towards his benefactor, his priests at Delphi retorted that the god, while he was unable to avert the course of destiny, had granted to Croesus three more years of prosperity than had been allotted him by Fate.

The claim that one mortal might be privileged over his fellows did not, as in the East, serve to legitimise the concept of monarchy, but rather to tarnish it – for no Greek cared to imagine that he might naturally be a slave.

It was all very well, perhaps, for the servile peoples of the East to live like women with a despot’s foot upon their necks – but not for a free-born Greek. Kings, unless safely confined to remote and effeminate lands, properly belonged in ancient poems.

How extraordinary, then, it might be thought, that in Sparta, of all states, where the communal was everything, kingship should not merely have endured but been illuminated by a sacral, haunting glow.

Other Spartans were homoioi – peers – but royalty was something more. As a boy a crown prince was exempted from the agoge. As commander-in-chief, a king led his countrymen into war. As head of state, he stood for no man in the city; nor was anyone permitted to touch him or even brush against him in public.

Most eerie of all, and what truly set him apart from his countrymen, was his intimacy with the gods. Certainly, no mortal in the world could look for a closer relationship with the D...

Their countrymen, naturally, looked to benefit from such a bloodline.

If the kings had the ears of Apollo, then the state had the ruling of the kings.

Gerousia;

In fact, if anything, the screws began to tighten.

insignificant magistracy, the Ephorate,

Five in number, t...

Ephorate,

In the beginning, it was said, the ephors had served the kings as their servants, but over the years, by a secretive and cunning process, they had advanced to become their masters’ shadows.

Faceless in comparison to the kingship they may have been, and yet they too had unearthly powers. They would meet in darkness and trace the future in the sky. Should it be discovered there that a king was ‘an offender against the god...

But would it? In a death-struggle between a king and the Ephorate, which side would Apollo and his priesthood back? This was not a question that the Spartans, with their deep-seated fear of constitutional upheaval, much cared to ponder.

‘sophrosyne’: soundness of mind, moderation, prudence, self-restraint.

Sophrosyne in everything: the spirit of revolution in Lacedaemon had been well tamed. Just as a warrior was subsumed within the discipline of the phalanx, so were the ephor and the king within the state: no selfishness, no running amok, no sudden lurching from the ranks.

Cleomenes

Cleomenes

Cleomenes’ half-brothers Dorieus