Persian Fire Read Free Page B

grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylae! 11
     
     
     
    Putting his money where his mouth was, Byron would subsequently emulate the example of Leonidas by dying in the glorious cause of Greek liberty himself. The glamour of his end, the first true celebrity death of the modern age, only added to the lustre of Leonidas, and helped ensure that Thermopylae, for generations afterwards, would serve as the model of a martyrdom for liberty. Why, the novelist William Golding asked himself during a visit to the pass in the early 1960s, did he feel so oddly stirred, despite the fact that Sparta herself had been such a 'dull, cruel city'?
 
It is not just that the human spirit reacts directly and beyond all arguments to a story of sacrifice and courage, as a wine glass must vibrate to the sound of the violin. It is also because, way back and at the hundredth remove, that company stood in the right line of history. A little of Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go where I like and write what I like. He contributed to set us free. 12
     
    Moving words, and true — and yet it is sobering to reflect that Golding's encomium might well have served to enthuse Adolf Hitler. To the Nazis, as it had been to Montaigne, Thermopylae was easily the most glorious episode in Greek history. The three hundred who defended the pass were regarded by Hitler as representatives of a true master-race, one bred and raised for war, and so authentically Nordic that even the Spartans' broth, according to one of the Fiihrer's more speculative pronouncements, derived from Schleswig-Holstein. In January 1943, with the Battle of Stalingrad at its height, Hitler explicitly compared the German 6th Army to the Spartan three hundred — and later, when its general surrendered, raged that the heroism of his soldiers had been 'nullified by one single characterless weakling'. 13 Denied a Leonidas, Hitler fumed, the Wehrmacht had been frustrated of a perfect chance to make its own new Thermopylae.
    That the Nazis — as much as Montaigne, Byron or Golding — could feel such a passionate sense of identification with the example of the three hundred suggests that any portrayal of the Spartans as defenders of liberty does not perhaps tell the whole story. As is so often the case, the truth is both messier and more intriguing than the myth. Had Xerxes succeeded in conquering Greece, and occupying Sparta, then it would indeed have spelled the end of that proud city's freedom — for all the Persian king's subjects were ranked as his slaves. Yet even slavery can be a matter of degree: what would have been regarded as a fate worse than death by the Spartans themselves might well have proved a blessed relief to their neighbours. Sparta's greatness, as Hitler was well aware, rested upon the merciless exploitation of her neighbours, a demonstration of how to treat Untermenschen that the Nazis would brutally emulate in Poland and occupied Russia. The Persian monarchy, brilliantly subtle in the exploitation of its subjects' rivalries, would certainly have granted, with an imperious show of graciousness, emancipation and patronage to Sparta's neighbours. To people who had suffered under Spartan oppression for generations, Xerxes' rule might almost have felt like liberty.
    A momentous, indeed a history-shaping paradox: that annexation by a foreign power might perhaps, under certain circumstances, be welcomed. Xerxes was certainly, as the Greeks accused him of being, a despot, an Iranian who ruled as heir to the millennia-old traditions of ancient Iraq, of Akkad, Assyria and Babylon, kingdoms that had always taken it for granted that a monarch should rule and conquer as a strong man. Mercilessness and repression: these had invariably been the keynotes of the Iraqi imperial style. The empire of the Persians, however, although certainly founded amid 'the tearing down of walls, the tumult of cavalry charges, and the overthrow of cities', 14 had also, as it expanded, developed a subtler