Persian Fire

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.

Europe was not to witness another invasion force to rival his until 1944, and the summer of D-Day.

When Cyrus at last fell in battle he was seventy, his appetite for conquest still unassuaged, for his death had come north of the Jaxartes, far beyond the limits he had once set on his own ambitions.29 In her triumph, the queen of the tribe which had killed him was said to have decapitated his corpse, and dropped the head into a blood-filled wineskin, so that the old man’s thirst might glut itself at last.

For the Spartans, in their concern to mold the perfect citizen, had developed a truly bizarre and radical notion: the world’s first universal, state-run education system.