Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

except that the putative ancestor dredged up by the Argives, a gorgon-slaying, princess-rescuing hero by the name of Perseus, certainly sounded as though he might have been an ancestor of the Persians.

Next, having shattered the Argive army in a great battle beside the village of Sepeia and pursued the survivors to a sacred grove, he called out to individual Argives that their ransom money had been paid. As they emerged from the sanctuary, Cleomenes had them executed one by one. When the remaining fugitives finally understood this murderous trick, Cleomenes coolly ordered the incineration of the holy grove.

The Athenians’ response to the Persian threat seemed to be to bury their heads deep in the sand.

Day after day, it was rumored, year after year, every time that Darius sat down at his table to eat, a servant would whisper softly into his ear, “Master, remember the Athenians.”26

It would have been small comfort for the Athenians, as they awaited their hour of doom, but teaching them a lesson was not the only, nor even the most pressing, of Darius’ concerns.

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

Hauled to Sardis in chains, the irrepressible Histiaeus had coolly insisted that he be returned to the Great King—a demand which Artaphernes had duly met by impaling him, and then sending his severed head, pickled and packed in salt, by express post to Susa.

After all, just as long as the king’s peace was kept, it scarcely mattered how the Greeks chose to rule themselves.

A mere detail to Cleomenes, though; and when Leotychides, raking up the issue of Demaratus’ legitimacy, proposed taking the case to Delphi for arbitration, judicious bribes to the priesthood had already guaranteed Apollo’s complicity.

There were few complaints when his two surviving half-brothers, Leonidas and Cleombrotus, late in 491 BC, had him certified and locked up in the stocks. Nor were many eyebrows raised when his corpse was found the following morning, slices of flesh carved off his legs, hips and belly, a bloodstained knife dropped in the dirt by his side. The verdict, one that pushed plausibility to its outer limits but was nevertheless universally accepted: suicide.

Datis reacted to the news that the Delians had fled before his approach with injured innocence. “You men illumined by the sacred,” he expostulated, “what a strange notion of me you must have, that you run away in this manner!

Intimidate the masses, flatter the elite: once again, the Persians’ favored policy had triumphantly proved its worth.

no Greek army had ever, in fifty years, succeeded in defeating the Persians in open combat,

By covering the staggering distance of 140 miles in under two days,

3 miles/hour for 48 straight hours

Here was where the invaders’ best troops had been stationed: the Persians themselves, more heavily armored than most of the other levies, and the Saka, those brutal fighters from the far-off eastern steppes,

One son of his in particular shone out from the crowd: Xerxes was not the oldest of the royal princes, but he had long been the Great King’s heir apparent.

“went away from the throne,”10 as the Persians euphemistically put it,

Admittedly, this swelling of his task force with a vast babel of poorly armed levies would generate any number of headaches for the Great King’s harassed commissariat.

but then again, as the owner of a large estate at Phalerum and a close relation of some of the richest men in Athens, he hardly needed to be.

“‘I am fed up with hearing him called the “Just” all the time.’ And Aristeides, when he heard this, did not reply, but merely took the shard, wrote his name on it, and then handed it back.”36

The effective pulling of an oar on a trireme was a notoriously difficult skill to master.

His vanity may have been immense, but his determination to be the savior of Athens was even greater.

Most historians, forced to make an estimate, would put the army under Xerxes’ command closer to 250,000.54 Even that, however, translated into an invasion force vaster than any previously assembled; and it was hardly a surprise that the Persian propaganda machine, looking to panic the Greeks into despair and perhaps even outright surrender, should have pumped their agents full of disinformation.

The aged Pythius, as “alarmed by the sign from the heavens”59 as anyone, even went so far as to beg the Great King for his eldest son to be spared from going to Greece. A terrible, a fatal mistake. At a time when Xerxes himself was preparing to ride into danger with all his “sons, and brothers, and relatives, and friends,”60 no more scandalous a request could possibly have been imagined.

Pythius’ precious eldest son was duly apprehended, killed and sawn in two.

The Athenian people, facing the gravest moment of peril in their history, committed themselves once and for all to the alien element of the sea, and put their faith in a man whose ambitions many had long profoundly dreaded.

for the Phoenicians, unlike their rivals, had learned to navigate the open sea by night.

The phony war, it appeared, was over. The Great King’s army was approaching Thermopylae. The Mede was at the Hot Gates.

When the Great King’s embassy, returning to the Hot Gates, demanded that the Greeks hand over their arms, Leonidas’ defiance was aptly laconic: “Molon labe”; “Come and get them.”

Even a Spartan might sometimes need to catch his breath.

not for nothing did his name mean “He Who Rules Over Heroes.”

The Syrian Gates, and the Cilician Gates, and the Persian Gates: all were vulnerable to being outflanked by mountain roads. Why not the Hot Gates, too?

“The typical Greek: a man who envies the good fortune of others, and resents the power of those stronger than himself.”30 This, delivered with crushing but not inaccurate condescension, was the considered judgment of the Persian high command

one wag, bled white by the “honor” of hosting the imperial army, had called on his fellow citizens to offer up thanks to the gods “that King Xerxes was not in the habit of demanding breakfast as well.”32

The approaches to Thermopylae, never abundant in ostriches at the best of times, were proving an alarming culinary letdown to the men of the Great King’s army. Persian cooks, celebrated though they were for the inventiveness of their recipes, could hardly magically produce meals out of fields stripped wholly bare.

Here they steeled themselves to make a heroic final stand—only to see the Immortals sweep contemptuously past them, and continue along the open path.

Simultaneously, of course, it did wonders for the sex trade.

And he could reflect, perhaps, that the order to engage the Greeks had been his own.

Having dreamed only days previously of conquering an entire continent, the Great King now found himself defied by a mile-wide stretch of water.

Each side was indicating to the other their appreciation of a guilty secret: that the moment might yet come when it would be in their mutual interests for Athens to be granted a privileged surrender.

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

Mardonius, knowing that he had no hope of winning his satrapy unless he could lure the Spartans north of the Isthmus, or somehow secure the Athenians’ fleet, skulked in Thessaly.

despite the fact that his fellow citizens, cornered and despairing as they were, had promptly stoned the would-be medizer. Lycidas’ wife and children too, surrounded by the women camped out on Salamis, had been similarly pulped to death.

There could be no easy retreat back to the Isthmus from Plataea. Nor, equally, for Mardonius, if he lost, back to Thessaly. If the allies came, then the moment of truth would come as well.

Every man too, whether ephor or helot, was obliged to wail and beat his brow when a king descended to the underworld.

a Persian officer had turned to his Greek neighbor and whispered that of all the guests around them, and of all the troops camped beside the river, “you will see, in a short time, only a very few left alive.”

the largest hoplite army ever assembled in a single place: almost forty thousand men.48

he would have had no illusions that his infantry, only lightly armed and armored, could hope to overrun the Greek positions.

“I have invited you so that you could appreciate for yourselves the irrational character of the Mede, who has a lifestyle such as you see here laid out before you, and yet who came here to our country to rob us of our wretched poverty.

And so it was, as a royal servitor and as a traitor, that Themistocles, in 459 BC, finally breathed his last.