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

by Tom Holland

‘Why do they hate us?’ It was with this question that history itself was born – for it was in the conflict between East and West that the world’s first historian, back in the fifth century BC, discovered his life-work’s theme.

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.

‘For it is always your nature’, as a Corinthian would one day complain, ‘to do less than you could have done, and to hold back from heading where your judgement might otherwise lead you.’

True, the first victor at the Olympic Games was said to have been a cook, 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’ training officially required by the rules.

Even before the debacle of 2020 Tokyo Olympics, there have been criticisms about the Olympics becoming ever more professionalised. We should be reminded however, that the Olympics was originally for show-offs among noblemen who could afford to participate in the Game. Occasional surprises by amateurs may have somewhat mystified it, but it is fundamentally professionalised. I see no reason then, to heavily subsidise such a game of private nature with taxpayer's money.

There were few leading cities anywhere in the Greek world that did not at some point during the seventh and sixth centuries BC fall into the hands of a high-aiming strongman – with Sparta, as ever, the exception that proved the rule. ‘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.

While ‘eunomia’ – good governance – had been the watchword of previous Greek reformers, from Lycurgus to Solon, that of Cleisthenes and his associates was subtly, and yet radically, different: ‘isonomia’ – equality. Equality before the law, equality of participation in the running of the state: this, henceforward, was to be the Athenian ideal.

It was not enough for a servant, however, even one as favoured as Artaphernes, to owe his duty simply to the king. Master-accountant and insatiable for tribute though Darius was, yet he demanded from his satraps something more than revenue alone. ‘By the favour of Ahura Mazda,’ he reminded those who served him, ‘I am the kind of man who is a friend to the right, who frowns upon the wrong, who has no wish to see the weak oppressed by the strong.’2 Darius spoke, as was his privilege, as the fount of law for all the world, but he was also closely reflecting how the Persians saw themselves. No people had a greater faith in their own virtue. So stern were the demands of justice, the Persians liked to believe, that they might outface even those of class and breeding. A peasant, his upright nature spotted by the unblinking eye of the Great King, might be promoted to the judicial bench; once installed there, he might find himself seated upon strips of drying skin, the hide of his corrupt predecessor, justly flayed alive. This was the kind of anecdote, both edifying and gruesome, that never failed to delight the Persians. Naturally – for it helped to confirm all their dearest preconceptions. There was no other people, they could reflect contentedly, with a sense of justice, an aptitude for rule that could remotely match their own. What good fortune for lesser nations, then, that they should all have ended up the slaves of the Persian king!

This comical notion, that Cyrus might somehow have owed all his greatness to the Judaeans’ boastful god, was one that the Persians were nevertheless perfectly content to indulge; for they well understood the longing of a slave to believe himself his master’s favourite.

More clearly than any of his elders, the tyro politician recognised that the best chance for his city’s survival lay not on dry land but on the sea – and that any warship would depend for power upon the massed muscle of its rowers. This was hardly a convincing prognosis, it might have been thought, when Athens possessed barely a harbour, let alone a battle fleet. Themistocles, however, his gaze fixed in visionary fashion upon the long term, was undaunted. Drawing up his manifesto, he began to argue for the urgent downgrading of the existing docks and their replacement by a new port at Piraeus, the rocky headland that lay just beyond Phalerum beach.

The ultimate basis of Persian greatness, then, was not its bureaucracy, nor even its armies, but its roads.

Themistocles and a fellow rising star of the democracy, Aristeides, led their tribes in the centre of the phalanx, at its perilously weakened heart.

Nothing, perhaps, became Darius’ reign like the leaving it: in the contrast between the violent illegalities of his own accession and the stately smoothness of his son’s lay striking testimony to the order he had brought to his wide dominions.

The Persians, hemmed in all around by mountains and barrenness, had always regarded the ability to make a desert bloom as the surest mark of any statesman. The satrap who could demonstrate to the Great King’s satisfaction ‘that he had fostered the cultivation of his province, planted it with trees, and seeded it with crops,’18 was invariably marked down as a high-flyer. Present the Great King with a prize vegetable, and even the humblest gardener might be fast-tracked on the spot. As one of Xerxes’ heirs was supposed to have said, when given a monstrous pomegranate, ‘It should be no problem for someone who can grow fruit of this size, it seems to me, to make a small city just as correspondingly great.’

Indeed, perhaps only the hunt could rival gardening as a passion of the court. To combine the two was, for a Persian, true fulfilment.

Darius, even amid the labours demanded of any conscientious universal monarch, had always kept himself abreast of the latest horticultural innovations, tirelessly encouraging his satraps to experiment with cuttings and collect rare seedlings.

Once, in the time before the democracy, exile had been a fate inflicted by armed menaces at the whim of faction leaders, ruinous and brutal in its effects; now, for the first time, it was to be imposed as a measured sentence of the sovereign people. Every citizen, registering his vote on the back of a piece of pottery, was obliged to choose a prominent politician’s name. At the end of the day, all the shards – ‘ostraka’, as the Greeks called them – were to be sorted into piles and counted. The citizen with the largest number of nominations would then have ten days to leave Attica. He would not, as exiles had once done, suffer the loss of his property or his civic rights – but nor, for ten years, would he be permitted to return home. He was to remain, as the Athenians put it, ‘ostracised’.

The Lord of Light was to be regarded as a constant presence on the campaign. Not, of course, that Ahura Mazda could be represented as other people chose to portray their gods, in the form of some vulgar idol or painted image; yet vacancy, mystery-hedged and awful, might serve instead. So it was that an exquisitely decorated war chariot, guided by a charioteer following it on foot, was to accompany the army into Greece, wholly empty – ‘for the mortal does not exist who may take his place upon that chariot’s throne’.

Voters, as had been proved time and again in the brief history of the democracy, might have lethally short memories.

Behind them, on the sacred rock, the silhouette remained one of devastation still: for the allies – Athenians included – had vowed before taking the field against Mardonius that any temple burned by the barbarians was to be left for ever as a ruin, ‘to serve as witness for generations yet to come’.

he aimed to raise, as he put it, ‘marks and monuments of our city’s empire’ so perfect that ‘future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now’.81 In 447 BC, work began on a temple designed to be the most sumptuous and beautiful ever built. Subsequent generations would know it as the Parthenon.*