Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

the traditions that define a people, that they cling to, that they love, can also, if cunningly exploited by a conqueror, serve to enslave them. This

Ahura Mazda,

Ionian aristocracy’s endless feuding. Whereas in Sardis they could base their administration upon an efficient and respectful bureaucracy, in Ionia they had to found it upon intrigue, factionalism and espionage.

Ionian tyrant had to deflect not only the jealousy of his peers but the suspicions of a turbulent and xenophobic lower class. While the aristocracy, suckers for Oriental chic, had proved themselves natural collaborators with their counterparts from the East, their countrymen retained an invincible contempt for foreigners of any kind.

The Ionians liked to call their neighbors “barbarians”: people whose languages were gibberish; who went, “bah, bah, bah.” This failure to speak Greek, self-evidently contemptible, was also widely believed to veil more sinister failings. Ionian suspicion of foreign habits long predated the humiliation of conquest by the Persian king. The same Lydians so admired by upwardly mobile aristocrats back in the days of Croesus, for instance, had been widely despised by the vast majority of Ionians who were unable to afford purple cloaks, perfumes or golden supperware. Scandalous stories had been enthusiastically told of Croesus’ predecessors, in particular. One, it was said, had patented female circumcision in an effort to economize on eunuchs; another had been in the habit of showing off his naked queen to voyeurs; yet another was claimed, revoltingly, to have developed a taste for cannibalism, and to have woken up one morning after a night of heavy drinking to find his wife’s hand protruding from his mouth.

Histiaeus, the chief opponent of Miltiades’ braggadocio on the Danube, had spoken out as tyrant of the Aegean’s sole world city, the acknowledged “glory of Ionia,”12 Miletus. The birthplace of Thales, and of philosophy itself, the city was an economic as well as a cultural powerhouse. The port’s four magnificent harbors, thronged with a great bobbing forest of masts—those of grain ships from the Crimea, merchant ships from Syria, from Egypt, from Italy, warships, sleek and menacing, from the Great King’s own battle fleet—were unparalleled anywhere else in the Greek world as scenes of opulence and bustle. So prized was Miletus by the Persians, both as trading entrepôt and naval base, that she enjoyed, in comparison to the other Ionian cities, a uniquely privileged form of vassalage, one that enabled her to pretend almost to the rank of ally. While being sure never to let this status go to his head, Histiaeus had nevertheless relished the advantages it had given him over his fellow tyrants—and the opportunity, above all else, to establish a personal relationship with the world’s most powerful man.

“medizing”—swirled

Cleisthenes may have been the patron of democracy,

To the Eupatrids, of course, this was an old game. Appeasement came naturally to them. As in Ionia, so in Athens, the aristocracy had long affected a faddish Orientalism.

Themistocles

In 494 BC, this brilliant and ambitious young man celebrated his thirtieth birthday—and became old enough, after years of waiting, to stand for election to the archonship. The following year, he resolved, he would have a go at it—and do so, furthermore, with a good chance of success. He might have been inexperienced in public life and of obscure background, but he nevertheless had all the makings of a star. Bull-necked, crop-haired, solid of body and face, Themistocles had the appearance, so posterity would judge, “of a true hero”:19 one indomitable, indestructible, packed with strength. Yet he was simultaneously, in his intelligence, the very opposite of muscle-bound: the workings of his mind, infinitely mobile and serpentine, would ultimately become a thing of wonder to his fellow citizens—and of alarm. Not a dark art required of the politician under the Athenians’ new form of government but Themistocles showed himself its master: he could infight, he could network, he could spin. Above all, and most crucially, he knew how to make himself visible.

he set up as an attorney, the first candidate ever in a democracy to rehearse for public life by practicing the law. Above all, naturally affable and gregarious as he was, he wooed the poor; and they, not used to being courted, duly loved him back. Touring the taverns, the markets, the docks, canvassing where no politician had ever thought to canvass before, making sure never to forget a single voter’s name, Themistocles had set his eyes on a radically new constituency.

Not that ambition was his only motivation. While nothing that Themistocles did was ever entirely divorced from self-interest, he had seen in the poor not merely voters but the future saving of his city. A startling notion to his peers; “yet it was the genius of Themistocles that he could gaze far into the future, and penetrate there every possibility, both for evil and for good.”20 More clearly than any of his elders, the tyro politician recognized 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.

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 shoreline there afforded not one but three natural harbors, enough for any fleet, and readily fortifiable. True, it lay two miles further from the city than Phalerum, but Themistocles argued passionately that this was a small price to pay for the immense advantages that a new harbor at Piraeus would afford: a safe port for the Athenians’ ever-expanding merchant fleet; a trading hub to rival Corinth and Aegina; immunity from Aeginetan privateers. And perhaps, in due course, if the money could be found and the circumstances appeared to demand it, then perhaps, just perhaps, a naval base as well…

razzia,

Xerxes was not the oldest of the royal princes, but he had long been the Great King’s heir apparent. Many circumstances had combined to win him this title. Most crucially of all, perhaps, Xerxes, unlike many of his half-brothers, had the right mix of blood flowing in his veins—for his mother was the imperious Atossa, the best-connected woman in the kingdom, widow of both Cambyses and Bardiya, and daughter of Cyrus the Great. Yet such a pedigree, although certainly an advantage, would hardly have been sufficient to win Xerxes his father’s blessing had he not possessed manifold other qualities, too. As a graduate of the most exclusive education in the world, he would have more than demonstrated his proficiency in riding, the handling of weapons, and the wisdom of the Magi—“for no man could be King of Persia who had failed to be instructed properly in that.”7 Likewise, in the hunt and on campaign, leading from the front, he would have given ample evidence of his personal bravery. Perhaps the clincher, however, was that Xerxes, tall and handsome, looked a king. This was a crucial consideration: the Persians were a people so obsessed by physical appearance that every nobleman kept a makeup artist in his train; the must-have fashion item was a pair of platform heels; and false beards and mustaches were so valued that the treasury ranked them as taxable items. Not even Xerxes’ father could compare with the prince for good looks: for Darius, who was otherwise reckoned a strikingly...

nobility of his bearing, there was no man who appeared more suited to the wielding of great power.”

So it was that when the ailing King of Kings, in the late autumn of 486 BC, and before he could set out for Egypt, finally “went away from the throne,”10 as the Persians euphemistically put it, Xerxes was able to succeed to the monarchy of the world without opposition.

As part of this initiation, Xerxes was obliged first “to divest himself of his own clothes, and put on a robe which Cyrus had worn before becoming king,”11 and then to down various foul concoctions prepared for him by the Magi, necromantic brews of curdled milk and sacred herbs. A scepter was placed in his right hand; the kidaris, the fluted tiara of royalty, upon his head. Xerxes was then led into the glaring brightness of the Persian day. The satraps, the high officials, the

expectant, swirling crowds, all of whom had assembled at Pasargadae for just this moment, now fell to the ground, prostrating themselves, as it was their duty and their honor to do, whenever graced by the presence of their king. Heir of Cyrus and chosen one of Ahura Mazda, Xerxes stood resplendent before the Persian people as both.

“Paradaida,” the Persians called their exquisitely beautiful parks, a word transcribed by the Greeks as “paradeisos”—“paradise.”

medizers.

Caryae—a

When representatives from Sparta, arriving in Argos that winter, had invited them to do so, the Argives had responded with what they knew were impossible demands: a thirty-year truce and a share of the command. The negotiations had collapsed on the spot.

Thessaly

Tempe, the narrow five-mile pass that separated Olympus from Ossa,

The Thessalians assured the allies that any army heading south would have to pass through this gorge: all the Greeks needed to do to halt the Great King in his tracks was dispatch a force to Thessaly and stopper Tempe up.

fillip

his name mean “He Who Rules Over Heroes.”

There were two sons of Datis, for instance, in command of the cavalry; and then, of course, the key adviser on everything Greek, there was Demaratus. Even as Xerxes, periodically dispatching his troops into the Hot Gates, continued to probe the defenders of the pass for any suggestion of weakening, he pumped the exiled king for insights into Spartan psychology. Overwhelming force and a mastery of data: the twin characteristics, as they had ever been, of the Persian way of making war. To synthesize these adequately, in order to neutralize a problem such as the one presented by defenders of Thermopylae, was a challenge that could only really be met in the tent of the King of Kings, where princes of the royal blood, and intelligence agents, and logistics chiefs, and Greek renegades, all might equally be summoned and have their reports and judgments pooled.

now, at last, an informant was brought cringing into the royal tent. His name was Ephialtes, a native of the plain on which the Persian army was camped, and he it was who revealed to his interrogators that Callidromus did indeed possess a secret. “In the hope of a rich reward, he told the king about the trail which led over the mountain to Thermopylae”35—and even offered, in the truly fatal act of treachery, to serve the invaders as their guide.

mestizo.

Queen Artemisia.

Troezen, a city safely in the Peloponnese, some thirty miles across the Saronic Gulf from Piraeus, had been open to refugees from Athens since the onset of the crisis.

Troezenians had already proved to be remarkably generous hosts: every nervous mother arriving in their city was given public welfare, every child free education, and even carte blanche to pick fresh fruit from groves and orchards.

“Brought up under the most cramping restrictions, raised from childhood to see and hear as little as possible, and to ask only a minimum of questions,”46 Athenian women lived a life of seclusion without parallel elsewhere in Greece. The peculiar character of the democracy demanded nothing less. The capacity of women to stir up mischief in public life had been a cause of alarm to thoughtful reformers well before the revolution of 507 BC. Concerned to instruct the elite in the virtues of self-restraint, Solon had found any hint of female showiness particularly insufferable, and had made stringent efforts to rein it in. Rather than permit daughters of the aristocracy to flaunt their wealth and taste in public, he had taken the simple, if drastic, step of decreeing that any woman seen “walking the streets, out and about,”47 should be regarded as a prostitute. Athenian husbands—or at least those with sufficient floor space to immure their wives in separate quarters—had seized the opportunities presented by this legislation with relish. Increasingly, over the decades, the law had ensured that only women whom no one ever saw could be regarded as respectable. Simultaneously, of course, it did wonders for the sex trade.

So much so that Solon, a century after his death, would be remembered gratefully by the Athenian citizenry as a man who had used state funding to subsidize brothels, on the impeccably egalitarian principle that whores should be available to all. This tradition—since the great reformer’s attitude toward women was almost certainly one of stern indifference—was probably a distortion; but it does suggest how the right to cruise for prostitutes had come to be seen by many citizens as a foundation stone of democracy. Like the statue of the tyrannicides in the Agora, or the rows of seats carved out of the Pnyx, the Athenian red-light district, vibrant with riot, suffering and pleasure, served as one of the supreme monuments to the new order.

Whores were to be seen everywhere in the Ceramicus, whether sunning themselves topless outside brothels, brawling in squalid back alleys or haunting tombs beyond the city limits. Menaced by this flamboyant visibility, their respectable sisters shrank and grew ever less visible before it, so that it had soon become the convention, under the democracy, not even to mention the name of a married woman in public. Indeed, the carnivorous nature of Athenian politics being what it was, the only real impact that even the most virtuous of wives could have upon the career of her husband was as a liability. For a politician, there was only one thing worse than not being talked about, and that was having his family talke...

tutor of Themistocles’ sons, a slave by the name of Sicinnus.

is possible, since his name derived from Phrygia, a satrapy to the east of Lydia, that he spoke some Persian.10 It is also possible that his arrival on the mainland did not come as a total surprise to those who met him—for no sooner had Sicinnus set foot on dry land than he was being hurried into the presence of the Persian high command. Certainly, the message that he had to deliver was of the utmost urgency: the Greeks, Sicinnus reported, were planning a getaway that very night. “Only block their escape,” came the advice from Themistocles, “and you will have a perfect chance of success.” Meanwhile, the Athenian admiral himself, revolted by his allies’ pusillanimity, was described by his slave as being “in full sympathy with the king, and earnestly longing for a Persian victory.”11 The imperial espionage chiefs, if they had indeed been fishing for a communication from Themistocles, could hardly have hoped to land better news.

Meanwhile, Sicinnus, the slave whose message had led to all of these preparations, had returned to Themistocles. His courage had been astonishing. He would surely have expected to be kept for further interrogation; indeed, it is hard to imagine why he was released, unless it was to carry a message from the Persian spy chiefs back to his master.14 Nor is it hard to guess what the contents of this communication might have been: the Great King’s final terms; the offer of an amnesty, perhaps, a chance for the Athenians to pick up their families before they sailed off into exile; or the assurance of a privileged future in Attica as favored servants of the King of Kings. Whatever the precise details, Themistocles must surely have breathed a sigh of relief when he read them, for he would have known that he had preserved his daughters from the slave market, his sons from the gelding knife, his fellow citizens from obliteration. Even were the Greek fleet to be wiped out in the morning, the Athenians, at least, would have a claim to the Great King’s mercy.

But there was a second prospect, infinitely more glittering and glorious, that had also been opened up by Sicinnus’ return. The Greek admirals, even as the imperial battle squadrons were embarking upon their secret maneuvers, remained in urgent session, “still quarrelling furiously,” it is said.15 At some point toward midnight, Themistocles—who had evidently been having a busy time of it, slipping in and out of the meeting—rose to his feet and made his excuses yet again. Stepping outside, he found waiting for him, cloaked in the shadows, an old enemy. Aristeides, the “Just,” summoned back from exile along with Xanthippus and all the other victims of ostracism, had smoothly resumed his place at the very heart of the democracy’s affairs. Returning that same evening from a mission to Aegina, he had seen, as he slipped back toward Salamis, the ominous silhouettes of the Persian fleet fanning out across the gulf to plug the exits from the straits. Themistocles, to whom this news naturally came as little surprise, confessed himself delighted, and told Aristeides that it was all his doing—“for

our allies had to be forced into making a stand that they would otherwise have shrunk from, had it been left to themselves.” Then, embracing his old adversary, he urged Aristeides to take the news in to the other admirals, “...

All of which, of course, was to cast the Peloponnesians as hapless stooges. No wonder that the Athenians, in the years to come, would enjoy harping on the story. Even so, there is something strange about it. Aristeides, although he did indeed inform the Greek commanders that their fleet was surrounded, neglected to mention, it appears, that this was courtesy of a trick pulled by one of their own colleagues. Understandably, it might be thought. Yet it is curious that the Spartans and the other Peloponnesians, even once the full details of Themistocles’ stratagem had become public knowledge, betrayed not the slightest hint of resentment toward the man who was supposed to have outsmarted them so comprehensively, but, on the contrary, only lauded him for his cleverness and foresight. Nor, despite being ambushed, as we are told, by Aristeides’ revelation, does it seem that the Greek admirals were thrown into a panic by it. Just the opposite—their dispositions for the morning appeared to reflect the minutest forward planning. Almost as though the news of the Persian blockade had come as no great surprise to them, either. Almost as though they had been complicit in Themistocles’ scheme from the start. And perhaps they had been. Details of the Salamis campaign only ever come into focus as though through a swirling fog, and then they are either lost, or are so confused that they can be interpreted in any number of ways.

Cambridge Ancient History: The Expansion of the Greek World, Eighth to Sixth Centuries BC, ed. John Boardman and N. G. L. Hammond (Cambridge, 1982) Cambridge Ancient History: Persia, Greece and the Western Mediterranean, c. 525–479 BC, ed. John Boardman, N. G. L. Hammond, D. M. Lewis and M. Ostwald (Cambridge, 1988) Cambridge History of Iran: The Median and Achaemenian Periods, ed. Ilya Gershevitch (Cambridge, 1985)

Cartledge, Paul:

Cawkwell, George: The Greek Wars: The Failure of Persia (Oxford, 2005)

Cohen, Edward E.: The Athenian Nation (Princeton, 2000)

Cook, J. M.: The Greeks in Ionia and the East (London, 1962) ——The Persian Empire (London, 1983)

Curtis, John (ed.): Mesopotamia and Iran in the Persian Period: Conquest and Imperialism 539–331 BC (London, 1997)