Persian Fire Read Free Page A

anthropologist, the first investigative reporter, the first foreign correspondent. 5 The fruit of his tireless curiosity was not merely a narrative, but a sweeping analysis of an entire age: capacious, various, tolerant. Herodotus himself described what he had engaged in as 'enquiries' — 'historia'. 'And I set them down here,' he declared, in the first sentence of the first work of history ever written, 'so that the memory of the past may be preserved by recording the extraordinary deeds of Greek and foreigner alike — and above all, to show how it was that they came to go to war.' 6
    Historians always like to argue for the significance of their material, of course. In Herodotus' case, his claims have had two and a half millennia to be put to the test. During that time, their founding presumption — that the great war between Greek and Persian was of an unexampled momentousness — has been resoundingly affirmed. John Stuart Mill claimed that 'the battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings'. Hegel, in the more expansive tones that one would expect of a German philosopher, declared that 'the interest of the whole world's history hung trembling in the balance'. 8 And so it surely did. Any account of odds heroically defied is exciting — but how much more tense it becomes when the odds are incalculably, incomparably high. There was much more at stake during the course of the Persian attempts to subdue the Greek mainland than the independence of what Xerxes had regarded as a ragbag of terrorist states. As subjects of a foreign king, the Athenians would never have had the opportunity to develop their unique democratic culture. Much that made Greek civilisation distinctive would have been aborted. The legacy inherited by Rome and passed on to modern Europe would have been immeasurably impoverished. Not only would the West have lost its first struggle for independence and survival, but it is unlikely, had the Greeks succumbed to Xerxes' invasion, that there would ever have been such an entity as 'the West' at all.
    No wonder, then, that the story of the Persian Wars should serve as the founding-myth of European civilisation; as the archetype of the triumph of freedom over slavery, and of rugged civic virtue over enervated despotism. Certainly, as the word 'Christendom' began to lose its resonance in the aftermath of the Reformation, so the heroics of Marathon and Salamis began to strike many idealists as an altogether more edifying exemplification of Western virtues than the Crusades. More principled, after all, to defend than to invade; better to fight for liberty than in the cause of fanaticism. One episode above all, the doomed defence of the pass of Thermopylae by a tiny Greek holding-force — 'four thousand against three million', 9 as Herodotus had it — took on the particular force of myth. Teeming hordes of Asiatics, driven forwards into battle by the whip; a Spartan king, Leonidas, resolved to do or die; an exemplary death, as he and three hundred of his countrymen were wiped out making a suicidal last stand:* the story had it all. As early as the sixteenth century ad , the great French essayist Michel de Montaigne could argue that although other battles fought by the Greeks were 'the fairest sister-victories which the Sun has ever seen, yet they would never dare to compare their combined glory with the glorious defeat of King Leonidas and his men at the defile of Thermopylae'. 10 Two and a half centuries later, Lord Byron, appalled that the Greece of his own day should be languishing as a province under the rule ot the Turkish Sultan, knew exactly where to look in the history books to find the most heart-swelling call to arms.
     
    *To be strictly accurate, only 298 of the Spartans that Leonidas took with him to Thermopylae died there in battle. See p. 341.
     
 
Earth! render back from out thy breast
A remnant of our Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred