Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

prophesied, “would grow up the loveliest woman in Lacedaemon.”35 And so it had come to pass: the girl had become a celebrated beauty and ended up the wife of a Spartan king. Evidently, the spirit of Helen still sometimes walked her native land. Such a story revealed an important truth about the Spartan cast of mind. Egalitarian though the Lycurgan ideal was, it did not foster any notions of equality. The sense of frantic competition that made women wish to outshine their peers in beauty gnawed at everyone in the city. “What is the best kind of government?” a Spartan king was once asked. Back came his answer, unhesitatingly: “The one in which the largest number of citizens are able to strive with each other in virtue, without threatening the state with anarchy.”36 This was why the education system, in a seeming paradox, worked both to stamp a single mold on those who passed through it, and yet to identify and fast-track an elite. Evident in the upbringing of girls, it was even more so in the training of their brothers. The Spartan who best submitted to it was the Spartan who most excelled. For it was the goal of instructors not merely to crush a boy’s individuality, but to push h...

same: nowhere was so private, so intimate, but the state had the right to intrude there. Yet, traumatic though the experience of submitting must have been for most young Spartans, there were, for boys at least, some significant compensations. Not only was it acceptable for a lover to serve his young boyfriend as a patron; it was positively expected. The more honored a citizen, and the better connected, the more effectively he could further his beloved’s career. Elite would advance elite: so it was that a boy, yielding to the nocturnal thrustings of a battle-scarred older man, might well find the secret wellsprings of Spartan power opened up to him. Certainly, by the time he finished the agoge, a young man would know for sure whether he had been marked out for future greatness. To the most promising graduates was granted the honor of one final, bloody challenge. Enrolled into a crack squad known as the Crypteia, they would be sent into the mountains, armed only with a single dagger each, and ordered to live off the land. This period of exile from their city, however, was much more than a mere endurance test. Traveling alone, each member of the Crypteia would inevitably cross the ...

the helots, a maneuver of typically murderous circumspection, calculated to spare the Crypteia any risk of blood pollution.39 How else, after all, save by careful pruning of the most able Messenians, could the Spartans hope to breed natural serfs? Just as they condemned to the Apothetae the dregs of their own city, so they aimed to extinguish any spark of talent or rebellion in their slaves. Only the truly servile could be permitted to reproduce. Individual masters who failed to stunt the growth and aptitudes of their helots would be fined. The matter would be brought to the attention of the elders. The Crypteia, tipped off, would then glide in and set about its business. Hitman though he was, the young Spartan who brought his dagger to the throat of a condemned Messenian was performing something more than an execution: it was almost an initiation rite, a deed of magic. As he felt his blade slice deep, he was privileged to know himself an acolyte of the profoundest mysteries of his state. No Spartan could lead his people who had shrunk from killing in cold blood. The elders who gave the Crypteia its commissions were simultaneously putting its members to the test. Only once he ha...

Helen, it was said, while still a little girl, had been surprised as she danced before the sanctuary of Artemis, and raped. Messenian raiders, prior to the enslavement of their country, had similarly violated a whole chorus of dancers. And they might do so again, given half a chance. Every Spartan girl knew what her fate would be should her city’s whip hand fail. It was left to her brothers, however, to test this certainty to the limits of their endurance. Every citizen, as part of his boyhood training, had learned what it was to suffer the lash. With their rough tunics slashed to ribbons, and their shoulders scarred and bleeding, the children of Lacedaemon’s master race might sometimes, after rituals that demanded a whipping, look little better than the meanest, lowest-born slaves. And yet they had proved themselves the very opposite of servile. The whip which degraded the helot served to ennoble the Spartan boy. “Brief suffering leads to the joy of...

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

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 Delphic oracle than that enjoyed by a Spartan king. Each one, in an arrangement unparalleled in any other state, had two ambassadors, the “Pythians,” on permanent standby, ready upon a royal gesture to gallop north and put questions to Apollo. Such were the privileges of breeding. The kings were, after all, the distant relatives of Zeus.

Nor did they expect to have to: Sparta was a city governed, in the final reckoning, not by kings or ephors, but by custom, and by the inimitable character of her people. To the quality they most universally prized the Spartans gave the name “sophrosyne”: soundness of mind, moderation, prudence, self-restraint.

Logic was rarely a feature of the Greeks’ foundation myths. In the Peloponnese, particularly, where there were any number of competing traditions, claims swirled amid counterclaims, and the past might easily be adapted on the hoof.

Such was the desire for exclusivity of some aristocratic clans that they even turned their noses up at what was commonly an Athenian’s proudest boast, and would trace exotic foreign lineages for themselves from the assorted stars of the Trojan War. One family, the Pisistratids, claimed descent from a Messenian king; another, the Philaids, from Ajax, the tallest warrior to have fought on either side at Troy, and a king of Salamis, an island just off the Attic coast. Well might the Athenian nobility have awarded themselves the title “Eupatrids,” or “Well-bred.” There was no other aristocracy in Greece quite so snobbishly stuck in the past.

Taste as well as breeding had become the mark of the elite.

Spectral figures began to be glimpsed on the streets of the city, seeming portents of imminent ruin. So desperate did the situation appear that the Athenians, with that Greek enthusiasm for one-man think tanks best exemplified by the tales told of Lycurgus, began to cast around for a sage. Fortunately for them, a ready candidate was at hand. In 594 BC,11 Solon, universally held to be the wisest man in Athens (not to mention one of the seven wisest Greeks who had ever lived), was given the archonship, the city’s supreme magistracy, and entrusted with the task of saving the state. His appointment, remarkably in a society as class-riven as Athens’, met with universal applause. The blue-blooded descendant of an ancient Attic king, Solon had also dabbled in trade, while simultaneously letting slip to the poor his sense of outrage at their plight. Here was a man who could appeal to all his constituencies.

Most landlords, naturally enough, were outraged; but Solon, playing the selfless sage to the hilt, argued sternly that his reforms were in their interests, too. After all, without the bedrock provided by a free peasantry, what hope was there of capturing Salamis, or of preserving Athens from social meltdown, or of winning for the city a rank commensurate with her size? Yes, Solon had sought to ease the sufferings of the poor—but he had also labored hard to keep the rich in power. The Eupatrids, holding their noses, had duly been persuaded into an alliance with

the Kakoi; wealth rather than birth made the prerequisite for office; the poor, although granted membership of a citizens’ assembly, denied the privilege of speaking in it. It was a triumph not for revolution but for a hard-fought middle way. “Envied for their wealth though they were,” Solon pointed out, “I sought to preserve the powerful from the hatred of the oppressed. Taking my stand, I used my strong shield to protect both sides of the class divide, allowing neither to gain an advantage over the other that would be unjust.”14 The boast, in short, of an instinctive centrist. Solon’s watchword was the traditional one of eunomia: that familiar Greek dream of a just and natural order, one in which all would know their place, and “rough edges would be smoothed out, appetites tamed, and presumption curbed.”15 What was such an ideal, after all, if not the birthright of the earth-sprung Athenian people? Far from launching a novel political experiment, Solon saw himself as engaged in an act of restoration and repair. With a talent for reinventing history that would have done credit to a Spartan, he persuaded his city that the constitution he had drafted was in fact the very one she had possessed in her distant past. Copies of his laws, inscribed in public on revolving wooden tablets, served to spell this out to every class of citizen. To the poor, they guaranteed freedom and legal recourse against the abuses of the powerful; to the rich, they gave exclusive right to magistraci...

There could be no doubting, from that moment on, who was an Athenian and who was not. Nothing, of course, like the spectacle of another’s servitude to boost one’s self-esteem: thanks to Solon, even the poorest peasant could now look down upon a slave, and know himself to be as free as the haughtiest Eupatrid. Admittedly, he was not as much of a citizen; how could he be when he was barred from standing for office or making his voice heard in debate? Yet the rich, even though they still hugged political power to themselves, could not entirely afford to ignore him and his fellows. The poor may have

been silent in the Assembly—but not without a vote. “For in their hands lay the power to elect officials, and to review their performances—and indeed, had the people been denied even this privilege, then they would still have ranked as little more than slaves.”16 Clearly, a new and intriguing cross-current had been added to the endless swirl of aristocratic rivalries. How best to negotiate it was a challenge that every ambitious nobleman would henceforward have to meet. There was certainly no call for him to kowtow to the poor—the very idea would have been ludicrous!—but success or failure, even for a Eupatrid, might now depend on a show of hands. Tanners, carpenters, farmhands, potters, blacksmiths: any or all of these might come to the Assembly to use their votes. Even as they continued to make policy in the closed rooms of their mansions, the elite could not afford entirely to forget where sovereignty now resided. As befitted a city with earth-sprung origins, it lay not only with the Eupatrids, nor even with the rich alone, but with the Assembly of all the Athenians, with the people—with the “demos.”

Except that in states more in tune with the modern than Athens, men such as Cylon had already proved themselves vanguards of the future. 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. Trumpets, slogans and public works: such were the enthusiasms he would invariably parade. He would also be expected to provide, to a people that might have been racked by faction-fighting for decades, the stamp of firm government—at the very least. Most provided a good deal more: Periander, a celebrated tyrant of Corinth, for instance, proved so consummate a statesman that he was remembered, along with Solon, as one of the seven sages of Greece.*11 Naturally, in exchange for granting his fellow citizens the blessings of order and prosperity, a tyrant could be expected to make a few demands of his own. He might require that certain illegal measures, certain regrettable precautions, be overlooked: bodyguards, for instance; controls on free speech; the occasional midnight knocking on doors.

Of the many memorials raised by the tyranny to itself, then, perhaps the most fitting was not the temple of Zeus, nor any other grand projet, but rather an addiction among the Athenians to the wearing of masks, the mouthing of scripts and the playing of roles. Later generations, looking back to the mysterious birth of tragedy, would have no hesitation in attributing to the tyrants’ original patronage a prestigious new festival, the City Dionysia, which had as its centerpiece a contest between rival tragedians—nor in imagining what the motive for such sponsorship might have been. After all, “only allow ourselves to praise and honour make-believe,” as Solon was said to have warned, “and the next thing will be to find it creeping into the very business of state.”35 Which was, of course, for the Pisistratids, precisely the appeal.

That was the limit of their conspiracy. Harmodius himself was killed on the spot; Aristogiton, although tortured for a few days, revealed nothing of any broader plot. Yet could Hippias afford to believe that the two assassins had acted on their own? Hipparchus, after all, had been murdered because he had abused his power; and the whisper on the streets was that he had been the victim, not of a crime of passion, but of a heroic blow struck in the cause of freedom. Hippias began to grow paranoid. With the ebbing of his confidence, the shadow play which he and his family had long orchestrated appeared increasingly a sham. The balance that they had always struck with such delicacy—between the true nature of their regime and the sets which had served to adorn it, between menace and a gracious magnanimity—was fatally upset. Despairing, the bereaved and panicky Hippias began to rely increasingly upon naked terror. Executions, previously carried out in back rooms, were soon washing the city in blood. Repression bred conspiracy; conspiracy led to further repression. The pretense that Athens was anything other than a police state began to seem a savage joke. Hippias, formerly “a man who was always easily approachable,”38 now hunkered himself away among his Scythians and his other foreign mercenaries, as though he were some alien despot, as though barely Athenian at all.

Cleisthenes, though he had stooped to many low tricks in his time, had never sunk quite as low as that. For all his mastery of scam and spin, he was much more than the grasping opportunist of his enemies’ propaganda. Resolute in his determination not to see Athens sunk to the status of a Spartan client state, he could also recognize that Isagoras and his allies were fighting a war that had already had its day. Few Athenians might have recognized it, but the character of their city had changed forever. Authority, under the tyrants, had become a thing of shadow, melted from the grip of the elite who had once hugged it so tightly to themselves. Now that the tyranny itself was gone, it was difficult to say where precisely power resided. With those few families, the Alcmaeonids themselves, perhaps, or the Philaids, who still had a personal base? Perhaps, but Cleisthenes’ own experiences since his return to Athens had demonstrated that even the very grandest Eupatrids, weakened by exile or by the humiliations of collaboration, had been perilously leeched of their prestige. Menaced by Isagoras, he chose to turn for support not, as was traditional for one of his background, to other factions among the elite, to those of wealth and breeding, but to a wholly original source. Addressing an assembly of the citizens, Cleisthenes proposed what was in effect a revolution.43 If the people, as Hippias, as Pisistratus, as even Solon had always claimed, were truly sovereign, very well then—l...

The measures Cleisthenes was putting forward, in the sweep of their ambition, and in the brilliance of their design, did not have the character of a cornered gambler’s makeshift throw. Far from it: they showed every sign of having been most carefully worked out. Cleisthenes would have had no lack of opportunity, in the bitterness of his exile, to reflect upon how all the ambitions of the nobility, all the pretensions of his own and of the other Eupatrid clans had led only to decades of internal feuding and to the indignities of a tyranny. Athens was sick—so much everyone agreed. What possible hope, then, for a cure? Only one, Cleisthenes and his associates appear to have decided. To break the mold; to harness the ambitions not only of the elite but of all the Athenian people; to create, from their energy, a future for Athens that would at last match the full measure of her potential. A great, a momentous, a breathtaking gamble—and on it Cleisthenes appeared willing to stake everything.

So it was that midway through that momentous year of 507 BC, an Alcmaeonid relative of Cleisthenes was able to take over smoothly from Isagoras as archon and resume the transformation of Athens into a state like no other in history. 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. True, some citizens remained much more equal than others: it remained the case, for instance, that only the upper classes could run for high office. Nevertheless, although certain relics of the old order had been preserved from the democratic tide, many more were soon to lie submerged beneath it for ever: Solon, for one, would barely have recognized the flood

scene. Athens had become a city in which any citizen, no matter how poor or uneducated, was guaranteed freedom of public speech;47 in which policy was no longer debated in the closed and gilded salons of the aristocracy, but openly, in the Assembly, before “carpenter, blacksmith or cobbler, merchant or ship-owner, rich or poor, aristocrat or low-born alike”;48 in which no measure could be adopted, no law passed, save by the votes of all the Athenian people. It was a great and noble experiment, a state in which, for the first time, a citizen could feel himself both engaged and in control. Nothing in Athens, or indeed Greece, would ever quite be the same again. And that, for Cleisthenes and all who supported him, was absolutely the point. The sponsors of the Athenian revolution were no giddy visionaries moved by shimmering notions of brotherhood with the poor, but rather hard-nosed pragmatists whose goal, quite simply, was to profit as Athenian noblemen by making their city strong. To this ambition, and to the whole immense project that followed from it, they brought a desperate energy. Time, as they well knew, was hardly on their side. It was not only that Cleomenes, “who felt that the Athenians had shown him disrespect in word and deed,”49 was set on revenge; Cleisthenes also feared, with both Hippias and Isagoras plotting their returns, that the city might implode at any moment into rival factions. Dynastic feuding, having brought Athens to the point of ruin, was simply t...

Yet how to neutralize them? Cleisthenes’ solution was both brilliantly simple and quite ferociously ambitious: to suppress a citizen’s identification with family, neighborhood and local clan chief altogether. Since these were instincts that had long come naturally to almost everyone in Attica, the plan to scotch them required peculiarly ingenious and detailed measures. Punctiliously, Cleisthenes sliced up the countryside, with its ancient tapestry of towns, estates and villages, into almost 150 separate districts. It was from these, the “demes,” and no longer from their families, that the citizens of the new democracy would henceforward be obliged to take their second names. Their civic identity too—for a young man, when he came of age, might become a citizen of Athens under Cleisthenes’ reforms only by being enrolled within a deme. This was to apply to the haughtiest Eupatrid and the humblest plowman in the field alike: both, as fellow demesmen, would share the same second name. Not all Eupatrids were necessarily thrilled by this innovation, of course. Some of them, particularly those so grand that they had an estate or village, and thereby a deme, named after them, made their ...

delegates from among themselves to travel to Athens, and there prepare the agenda for the Assembly. What aristocrat worth his salt was going to put snobbery above such a plum opportunity? Just as Cleisthenes had to encourage the Eupatrids not to sulk in their tents, so he had to beware a counter-danger: that an ambitious nobleman might use his deme as a springboard to tyranny. Against that peril, deploying both their habitual foresight and their fiendish taste for complicating anything they touched, the founders of the democracy massed a whole array of checks and balances. Attica, already partitioned into demes, was scored with further patterning and fretwork. Demes were bunched into “thirds,” a “third,” as the name implied, was then grouped with two others to form a tribe. Since the thirds would all be drawn from separate corners of Attica—one from a mountainside, perhaps another from the coast, and another from nearby Athens herself—every tribe, of which there were ten in all, inevitably served to snarl up ancient roots. In place of the primal simplicities of the clan, the Athenian people could now enjoy infinitely more artificial and finely calibrated loyalties. Tribes, third...

to entrench their reforms, always kept one nervous eye on the Spartans, then so too did the Spartan king, as he plotted counterrevolution, dread that he might be in a race against time himself. Fabulously intricate though the democratic reforms were, their potential appeared to Cleomenes ominously clear. No longer divided among themselves, the citizens of a democratic Athens would at last be able to present a united front to their neighbors. The sheer size of Attica would give them a truly...

One question, in particular, was about to be answered. Accustomed as the average Athenian was to fighting in the train of a great aristocrat, would he now feel sufficient loyalty to a novel and wholly artificial innovation, his tribe, to stand in the line of battle, to cover the flank of his fellow demesman, to fight not for a clan lord but for an ideal, for liberty, for Athens herself? The answer, resoundingly, triumphantly, was yes. The Theban invasion force was annihilated. On the same day, crossing into Euboea, the Athenians forced Chalcis to sue for a humiliating peace, and accept, on what had previously been her own territory, a huge colony of four thousand Athenian settlers.

Like every other revolutionary state in history, Cleisthenes’ regime had an urgent need of heroes.

The hype also served a more profound purpose. Cleisthenes understood his countrymen well; he knew that the Athenian people, revolutionaries though they had rather startlingly proved themselves to be, remained, in their souls, traditionalists still. Far from glorying in the novel character of the democracy, they craved reassurance that it was rooted in their past. Cleisthenes, ever subtle, had therefore been sure to adorn even his most daring experiments in the fustian of tradition. The tribes, for instance, had all been given the names of antique heroes, as though, like the Athenians themselves, they had sprung not from Cleisthenes’ fertile brain but directly from the soil. Even the democracy itself, so its founders implied, far from being something new, was in fact the primordial birthright of all the people of Attica, having originally been bequeathed to them back in the days of legend by the celebrated hero Theseus, slayer of the minotaur. Seen in such a light, what were the two tyrannicides themselves but monster killers, selfless patriots who had died in order that Athenian democracy might be restored? Smoke and mirrors all, of course—and hardly paying to Cleisthenes and his associates anything remotely like their due. Yet it is perhaps the clinching proof of their greatness that even Cleisthenes himself,

scion of a family rarely noted for its modesty, should have recognized how essential it was to veil the full scale of his achievement behind such fantastical shadows. In founding democracy, he had invented his city’s future; but he had also, just as crucially, fabricated its past.

It was a bittersweet paradox: in the false-memory syndrome that buried Cleisthenes in obscurity was the ultimate proof of his stunning success. Not merely to have redeemed his country from civil war, but to have set it upon enduring foundations—only Darius, of Cleisthenes’ contemporaries, could compare. To be sure, between the Persian, monarch of all the world, and the Athenian, friend of the people, there might have appeared few correspondences; and yet in truth, in the scale of their achievements, and in what they betokened for the future, the two men were indeed well matched. Both had come to power amid bloodshed and given their countries peace; both had tamed the ambitions of a turbulent aristocracy; both, in doing so, had crafted a radical new future for their people and yet opted to disguise their originality behind the lumber of the past. Both, most portentously of all, had created something restless, and dangerous, and new.

Not that the Persians’ tolerance of foreigners and their peculiar habits in any way implied respect. Just as Cyrus, conquering Babylon, had felt free to claim the favor of a whole multitude of gods precisely because he believed in none of them, so too did Artaphernes, by appropriating the Lydians’ traditions and twisting them to his own ends, display his appreciation of a bleak and baneful truth: 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 maxim, applied by the Persians across the vast range of all their many satrapies, was one that underpinned their whole philosophy of empire. No elite anywhere, they liked to think, but it might somehow be seduced into submission.

And when no elite existed, one could always be imported from elsewhere. Cyrus, even as he flattered the Babylonians with the attentions he paid to Marduk, had not ignored the yearnings of the city’s deportees, exiles such as the Judaeans, brought to Babylon decades previously—for the Persians had recognized in these wretched captives, and in their homesickness, a resource of great potential. Judaea was the pivot between Mesopotamia and Egypt; a land of such strategic significance might certainly be considered worth a small investment. Not only had Cyrus permitted the Judaeans to return to the weed-covered rubble of their homeland, but he had even paid for the rebuilding in Jerusalem of their obliterated Temple. Yahweh, the Judaeans’ god, was said to have hailed the Persian king in gratitude as His “anointed,” His “Christ,”4 and asserted that for the messiah of his chosen people the earth itself would prove the limit. “I will break in pieces the doors of bronze and cut asunder the bars of iron, I will give you the treasures of darkness and the hoards in secret places, that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who call you by your name.”5 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 favorite. There was no greater source of self-contentment for a ...

been: the Persians themselves, back in the days of their nomadic insignificance, had hardly been oblivious to the magnificence of Mesopotamia. Now the masters of the world, they could still remember what it was like to experi...

Yet still the Ionians, to their masters, were an enigma—and a challenge. All they ever did, it seemed to the Persians, was quarrel. This interminable feuding, which had helped immensely when it came to conquering them, also made them a uniquely wearisome people to rule. Where the Lydians had their bureaucrats and the Judaeans their priests, the Greeks seemed to have only treacherous and floating factions.

Whatever were the Persians to make of such gods? Nothing, really, could have been more shocking to their sensibilities—unless it was the trend, among the more adventurous of the Ionian elite, to deny a divine plan for the universe at all. The first philosophers may have been raised within the Persian Empire, but they could hardly be considered supportive of the Great King’s claims or ideals. Where Darius saw in the rise to power of his people certain evidence of the animating favor of Ahura Mazda, a daring Ionian might see only the operation of the principles of nature. As to the character of these principles, that was also the subject of heated debate. One sage might argue that the world was formed entirely out of air, thereby reducing the Persian Empire and all its works merely to the interplay between condensation and rarefaction. Another might press the counterclaim of Zoroaster’s sacred element of fire, seeing in it, however, not the immanence of truth, or justice, or righteousness, but only a ceaseless flux. To such a philosopher, the belief that any profounder order might lie behind it was merely the stupidest pretension. “All things are constituted from fire and all things will melt back into fire.”7 Not much for a propagandist at the satrapal court to work with there.

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. What kind of Greeks could choose to ape monsters such as these? Clearly, critics of the nobility liked to imply, only those who were perverts and degenerates themselves. Lydia, like her notoriously expert whores, was both diseased and predatory; those who surrendered to her embraces deserved all the scorn they got. Strip away the veil of barbarian delicacies so prized by the aristocracy—the silken eroticism, the refinements, the displays of wealth—and the reality would be an infinitely sordid one: the court at Sardis could fittingly be portrayed as a prostitute “speaking Lydian,” kneeling in a back alley, thrashing her client’s testicles while shafting his dripping arse. “The passageway reeked. Clouds of dung-beetles came whirring after the stench.”9 A vile and shocking scene: fitting metaphor for a vile and shocking truth. The aristocracy were wallowing in shit—and tyrants, the worst offenders, were in it up to their necks.

War fever, as Aristagoras jovially pointed out, was an intoxication to which democracies appeared peculiarly prone.

As the Persians understood to a degree never before rivaled, information was dominance. Master information, and master all the world.

The longer that the punishment of Athens was delayed, the greater was the risk that terrorist states might proliferate throughout the mountainous and inaccessible wilds of Greece: a nightmare prospect for any Persian strategist. Geopolitics, however, was far from the only prompting at the back of the Great King’s mind. Not for nothing had Ahura Mazda delivered the world into his hands. No more sacred duty had been laid upon him than the obligation to storm, wherever they might fester, the strongholds of the Lie. Athens was a nest of rebels, to be sure—but the city also stood revealed, far more sinisterly, as the home of demons, “daiva,” false gods who had chosen the path of rebellion against the Lord Mazda, “following the course of Wrath, sickening the lives of men.”31 Only fire, of the kind that had already cleansed and purged the shrines of the Ionians, could possibly redeem Athens and her temples from the Lie. For the spiritual good of the universe, as well as the future stability of Ionia, the entire Aegean would have to be transformed into a Persian lake—and without delay. Staging post in a thrilling new phase of imperial expansion and holy war: the burning of Athens promised to be both.

Marathon had taught not only Athens but the whole of Greece a portentous lesson: humiliation at the hands of the superpower was not inevitable.

This name, deriving as it almost certainly did from “phoinix,” the Greek word for “purple,” reflected that same blend of admiration and contempt with which they tended to regard any people whom they found threatening. Admiration—because the

violet dye which the Phoenicians manufactured from shellfish was definitively the color of refinement and privilege, an internationally desired luxury product that had helped to fill the coffers of Tyre and Sidon to overflowing. Contempt—because how vulgar it was, after all, how crashingly and irredeemably vulgar, to be defined by an item of merchandise!

What if the entire expedition of the King of Kings, the massing of the hordes of Asia, and the extermination of Greek freedom that it threatened, were merely the climax of a feud infinitely more ancient and inveterate? “Persians in the know,” it would be asserted with bald confidence after the war, “put the blame for the quarrel squarely on the Phoenicians.”49 The hatred between East and West, Asia and Europe, barbarian and Greek: all, according to this theory, welled from a single perfidious source.

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.”

Then, with the Pisistratids no doubt whispering helpful encouragements from the side, a thousand oxen were driven up the hill, and the whole lot immolated on the summit as an offering to Athena. This, since the goddess had always been notorious for her loathing of the Trojans, might have been thought a maladroit gesture—except that Xerxes, by displaying his respect for the protectress of Athens so extravagantly, was sending the Athenians a very public message. The Athena worshipped in their city was no Olympian, but rather a demon who had taken on her form, one of the daivas, a servant of the Lie. The King of Kings, pledged though he was to burn the Acropolis, was no enemy of the true goddess, whose worship, in the company of the Pisistratids, he would shortly be restoring. Only with Athens under Persian rule could Athena return to her ancient home—and that moment, in the spring of 480 BC, was drawing ever nearer.

“Always be the bravest. Always be the best.” Maxims, it went without saying, from The Iliad itself.

And regarded by Greeks everywhere, despite Hipparchus’ best efforts, as the birthright of them all. The Spartans, for instance, those countrymen of Helen and Menelaus, hardly needed to stage poetry readings in order to parade their affinity with the values of Homer’s epics. If the letter of their military code derived from Lycurgus, then its spirit, that heroic determination to prefer death and “a glorious reputation that will never die,”1 to a life of cowardice and shame, appeared vivid with the fearsome radiance of the heroes sung by the “Poet.” And of one hero more than any other: Achilles, greatest and deadliest of fighters, who had traveled to Troy, there to blaze in a glow of terrible splendor, knowing that all his fame would serve only to doom him before his time. True, the pure ecstasy of his glory-hunting, which had led him to squabble with Agamemnon over a slave girl, sulk in his tent while his comrades were being slaughtered, and return to the fray only because his beloved cousin had been cut down, was a self-indulgence that could hardly be permitted a Spartan soldier. Nevertheless, that death in battle might be beautiful, that it might enshrine a warrior’s memory, even as his spirit gibbered in the gray shadows of the underworld, with a brilliant and golden halo, that it might win him “kleos,” immortal fame: these notions, forever associated with Achilles, were regarded by the Greeks as having long been distinctively Spartan, too. Others might aspire to such id...

They also serve who only stand and wait. If Leonidas, on his lonely sentry duty at Thermopylae, was primed for death, then Themistocles, just as surely, had his heart set on survival. Glorious as it was, having left home and family behind, having journeyed to war in a distant land, having staked one’s life in a