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

by Tom Holland

How very much more elevated, then, in every sense, were the heights of the Acropolis. The bare rock left no doubt as to their sanctity. There, growing from the stone, rose the primal olive-tree, gift of Athena and as old as Athens herself.

tomb of Erechtheus,

Yet that the snake was content to reside on the Acropolis at all could be reckoned a miracle.

575 BC,

In images such as these, faint, perhaps, but unmistakable, could be caught a glimpse of the influence of the East, fabulous and rarefied, the home of unimaginably rich and mighty kings.

Except that none of the work was actually done in the name of the Athenians.

This was why, if a partiality for dinner-parties was one mark of the cosmopolitan elite, then another distinguishing feature had become, during the seventh century BC, a relish for sport: spectacular contests of stamina and skill, in which the jeunesse dorée, glistening and gym-perfected, would compete with their fellow noblemen for public glory.

Olympic Games

and an occasional goat-herd might still sneak a fairytale victory, but in general only those with time and money could afford to put in the ten months’ ...

By the first half of the sixth century, the games at Olympia had been supplemented by a whole circuit of other festivals, so competitors might, and often did, spend year after year on the road, sculpting and toning their bodies, schmoo...

In 566 BC, even the Athenians, who in the previous century had been defiantly sniffy about the Olympics, got in on the act. A magnificent festival in honour of Athena, the Great Panathenaea, was inaugurated in their city, at which the ...

Yet the applause was not universal. Glamour and self-glorification might be all very well at Olympia, but not, say, for hoplites advancing into battle.

A competitor from elsewhere in Greece who won first prize at the Games might expect to have statues raised in his honour, or receive a bounty, or even breach a section of his native city’s walls, ‘to convey’, so it was said, ‘that a state with such a citizen hardly had need of fortifications’.19 No such nonsense for the Spartans – not least because they had no city walls to pull down in the first place.

For always, with the exceptional, with the god-like, there was menace. There rose, in the universe of things, a scale of perfection, towering like Mount Olympus, with the immortals on the summit, and mortals down in the foothills, eternally looking to climb higher.

But it was perilous for a man to reach too far. The dangers that resulted might plunge not only the hero but all who knew him – indeed, all his city – into ruin.

Cylon, a Eupatrid, and one of their few Olympic stars.

Cylon

archon,

Except that in states more in tune with the modern than Athens, men such as Cylon had already proved themselves vanguards of the future.

‘Tyrannides’, the Greeks called such regimes – ‘tyrannies’. For them, the term did not have remotely the bloodstained connotations that the English word ‘tyrant’ has for us. Indeed, a Greek tyrant, almost by definition, had to have the popular touch, since otherwise he could not hope to cling to power for long.

Periander, a celebrated tyrant of Corinth,

It was the tyrant’s own peers, of course, who would wince most painfully at these humiliations.

Few greater torments could be imagined for an aristocrat than to endure a tyranny: the equivalent of watching a single champion win every race, year after year.

Megacles, the...

Alcmaeonids, one of the grandest of all Athenian clans,

And, to be sure, the penalty he and all his family paid had been a terrible one. Even in defence of freedom, a crime such as Megacles had committed against the gods could not be readily forgiven. It had taken a full thirty years of furious foot-dragging by the Alcmaeonids before they were finally brought to court; but Megacles’ clan, in the end, around 600 BC, had all been sentenced to exile in perpetuity.

The Alcmaeonids

But even absent from Athens, they continued to cast a long and glamorous shadow.

It was typical of the Alcmaeonids’ cool effrontery that the moment they were exiled they entered into a hugely profitable relationship of mutual back-scratching ...

Megacles’ son A...

King Croesus,

royal treasury in Sardis

Still the Alcmaeonids’ gaze remained fixed longingly on their native city, even though the view by the 560s BC had become an increasingly discouraging one.

Eupatrid of immense hauteur, Lycurgus, head of the Boutads,

brother of Er...

Lycurgus,

the Great Panathenaea.

Athena Polias, the ‘Guardian of the City’.

566 BC,

the Great Panathenaea

a great procession would climb the ramp to the temple of Athena and present to the statue, which was already wearing around its neck a golden gorgon’s head, a beautifully embroidered robe, woven by the noblest maidens of the city. Hoplites and cavalrymen, venerable elders and young girls, even foreigners...

Bo...

Lyc...

560...

Pisis...

war for S...

Boutads

By the end of the decade, however, with Megara defeated and Salamis at last securely in Athenian hands, he had fostered a formidable prestige.

Not merely a war hero, Pisistratus was also a charmer and a schemer, blessed with the popular touch, and possessed of a rare eye for the op...

Having first cast himself as the spokesman for the poorest of the rural poor, he then faked a dramatic assault upon himself, and app...