The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  When the king was in residence, it was here that he seems to have conducted much of the routine business of ruling. This consisted – rather surprisingly, perhaps, after so much talk of Persians conquering – of sitting enthroned to give audience. The hall was grand and meant to impress. Its actual functioning might not have been so different from the traditional majlis – or audience – of more recent Arab potentates: ‘an arena for mediation, dispute settlement, the renewal of allegiance, but most importantly the representation of power. Attending the majlis of a local emir gave subjects the opportunity to assess the magnitude of this power.’ In the case of the Achaemenid kings, the mightiest of such subjects, ones who might need reminding of their place, were the families of the Persian aristocracy. The male members of these families provided the king with his provincial governors, his generals, and sometimes with husbands for his daughters.

  A system of royal gifts and rewards redistributed the profits of empire to these magnates and sought to keep them in line. Much later in the history of the Persian Empire, a glimpse of this system comes in the eyewitness account (400 BC) of a Greek soldier involved in raiding Persian targets in what is now western Turkey. He took part in a Greek attack on a rich property belonging to a certain Asidates (a Persian name in Greek form). This man lived there with his wife and children like a feudal lord:

  When they reached the place, about midnight, the slaves that were round about the tower and most of the animals ran away, the Greeks leaving them unheeded in order to capture Asidates himself and his belongings. And when they found themselves unable to take the tower by storm (for it was high and large, and furnished with battlements and a considerable force of warlike defenders), they attempted to dig through the tower-wall. Now the wall had a thickness of eight earthen bricks. At daybreak, however, a breach had been made; and just as soon as the light showed through, some one from within struck with an ox-spit clean through the thigh of the man who was nearest the hole; and from that time on they kept shooting out arrows.

  How this Persian notable came to own a fortified estate close to the Aegean Sea, well over 1,500 miles from his homeland, is unknown. Ultimately his title must have derived from the Persian conquest of this region under Cyrus the Great (around 550 BC): his land was Persian booty, in other words. Grants of conquered territory were not just rewards. By encouraging a diaspora of ethnic Persians, the kings in Iran tried to build up a loyal network among the subject populations in their remoter provinces.

  To their Greek neighbours the Persian kings were fabulously rich. Their wealth is best grasped by an ancient Greek total for the treasure amassed by Alexander of Macedon when he in turn conquered Persia: ‘. . . the whole treasure, collected from all quarters . . . amounted to 180,000 talents [of silver]’. Scholars accept this figure as plausible. Since a talent weighed roughly 57 pounds, Alexander’s treasure amounted to over 4,600 tons of silver. Exact comparisons with today’s values are hard to make. To give a very rough indication, at 2011 values in the USA, this haul would have been worth some $3.7 billion.

  As for the origins of this treasure, the Persian kings grew so rich mainly by demanding an annual tribute from their subjects in return for military protection. What Alexander plundered was the (relatively small) amount lying around unspent in the storerooms of the royal palaces at that moment. Collecting the tribute was a task the Persian kings delegated to their provincial governors. The Greek historian Herodotus claimed that it was Darius who introduced this system of taxation. As a result of this reform, Herodotus says, the Persians called Darius ‘the retail merchant’.

  The pause button must now be pressed in order to consider Herodotus for a moment. Although he has already occurred frequently as a source in this book, it must be admitted that as a historian he was, and remains, controversial. His is the major written account from ancient times for the early phase of Persian empire building. It is true that the Persians were a literate society. The kings commissioned inscriptions in Near Eastern languages, as seen. There is no known literature in Old Persian, however. As with the Carthaginians and Etruscans, Greeks and Romans wrote the ancient accounts of the Persians that still exist.

  Without Persia Herodotus might not have written his history, since Persia provided him with his subject, specifically the wars of 490–479 BC fought between the mainland Greeks and the armies of Darius and Xerxes, father and son – the so-called Persian Wars, as modern historians call them. So the ancient Persians should take some credit for indirectly stimulating a new type of ancient Greek cultural activity still in its infancy when Herodotus wrote. He called this activity ‘learning by inquiry,’ historiē in Herodotean Greek. As his subject for this kind of investigation he took, not the remote age of Greek myths and legends, but an event of great magnitude, as he saw it, in the recent past of the Greeks.

  Almost as soon as he made his work available to Greek booksellers to copy and sell in a papyrus-roll format (around 420 BC), fellow Greek writers attacked him for untruthfulness. The later ancients recognized his place in the development of history-writing. By the first century BC a distinguished Roman could hail him as the ‘father of history’. But that did not prevent them from claiming that he was a bad historian.

  This was partly because ancient historians were a quarrelsome, backstabbing lot. In mitigation, Herodotus lived at a time when written records were few and far between. Ancient societies, including Greece, still depended heavily on word of mouth. So Herodotus relied on the interview technique certainly for much, if not most, of his information.

  On the plus side, he wrote at a time when stories about the Persian Wars could still have been circulating at second or even first hand. Alarm bells might ring at his obvious relish of a good story, although this is one reason why he remains such an entertaining read today. On the other hand, he can hardly be blamed, as he has been, for his belief in supernatural influences on human affairs. In his world, most people really thought that the gods were everywhere and were active interveners in human affairs.

  There is a more serious charge against Herodotus than a naïve faith in his informants, or failures in seriousness, or ‘superstition’. In the late twentieth century some experts became convinced that Herodotus deliberately invented stories and passed them off as true. This heated debate cannot be gone into here, and anyway many scholars are unconvinced by this approach. It is true that Herodotus was limited in his pioneering inquiry after historical truth by ways of ancient thinking different from today’s, as he was by the nature of human memory – its capacity to misremember past events, even ones at which the informant was supposedly present.

  Although Herodotus can hardly be blamed for not knowing it, when he relied as he often says he did on information supplied by ‘the locals’, he also had to deal with what academics now call ‘social memory’. By this they mean the popular stories of past times that a traditional society hands down by word of mouth. These tales do not pass through the scrupulous filter of the sceptical historian. Their purpose is less to preserve historical truth than, say, to give a social group a shared identity. Over time such ‘old wives’ tales’ can take on the dimensions of legend. The stories about King Arthur might be an example of this.

  This ‘health warning’ about Herodotus may seem all the more needed, because his history is the only detailed narrative of the Persian Wars that now exists. It must always have been one of the closest in time to its subject matter, since Herodotus seems to have been born at around the period of the conflict. He was able – so he says, or so his writings imply – to access information from survivors, or people who had known them. His account is a blessing in another way: it preserves for posterity the names and actions of individuals. These bring the war vividly to life.

  As for reliability, I respect the view of a former university colleague of mine, and an expert on the subject, who wrote:

  the more one studies him [Herodotus], the more one comes to the conclusion that there is very little that he says about the two Pe
rsian invasions of Greece which can be proved to be wrong, and one is continually struck by the realisation that there is a lot more acute observation and analysis in what he says than one at first thinks.

  In 2015 I led a group of enthusiasts up an overgrown farm track behind the archaeological museum at modern Marathon some 25 miles north-east of Athens. After a short but steep climb, we had an excellent view of the modern plain of Marathon below us. In the middle distance we could just make out a brown pimple. This was the ancient earth mound under which the Athenians buried the remains of their 192 casualties after a day’s fighting with a Persian force, probably thickest at that very spot.

  Herodotus describes how battle had been joined:

  The Persians saw [the Athenians] running to attack and prepared to receive them, thinking the Athenians absolutely crazy, since they saw how few of them there were and that they ran up so fast without either cavalry or archers. So the barbarians imagined, but when the Athenians all together fell upon the barbarians they fought in a way worthy of record. These are the first Greeks whom we know of to use running against the enemy. They are also the first to endure looking at Median dress and men wearing it, for up until then just hearing the name of the Medes caused the Greeks to panic.

  Further away from us, at the far end of the plain, we could see the promontory which protected the stretch of beach on which the Persian ships landed their troops. Herodotus says that they fled back there pursued by the Athenians, who tried to set fire to the enemy vessels. One was a man whom Herodotus turned into a hero, as he liked to do in his storytelling: ‘Cynegirus son of Euphorion fell there, his hand cut off with an axe as he grabbed a ship’s figurehead.’

  At our end of the plain, in the gap between the foothills on which we were standing and the modern shoreline, once wended the ancient road back to Athens. Along it, too late, came reinforcements sent by the Spartans in tardy response to an Athenian messenger who had run the 140 miles from Athens to Sparta with an Athenian plea for help. By the same road a later messenger ran the much shorter distance back to Athens, with news of the Athenian victory. This is the run commemorated in today’s marathon races.

  The battle of Marathon (490 BC) had come about because two mainland Greek cities, one of them Athens, had earlier given military support to a coordinated revolt against Persian rule by the Greeks in western Turkey – their kin, as both sides believed, since the Athenians too belonged to the Ionian ‘branch’ of the Greek people. To the Persians, however, the Athenian intervention in Asia Minor probably looked like unprovoked aggression.

  This revolt had broken out under Darius, a generation or so after the conquest of Greek Ionia under Cyrus. Persian forces finally crushed the Greeks in a naval battle (494 BC) outside the harbour of Miletus. On this occasion Persia’s war galleys were mainly built and crewed by Phoenicians, themselves now Persian subjects. Persian troops then razed to the ground Miletus, home of the first Greek philosophers. This was the Ionian city whose leaders, Herodotus says, had prompted the revolt.

  After Marathon, the Persians put back to sea. Soon after, they sailed away. Darius died, and his son and heir, Xerxes, in effect inherited Persia’s unfinished business with Greece. Herodotus reports a council at which two Persian princes, an uncle and a cousin, gave the king their advice. Apart from anything else, this vignette conveys a vivid impression of Achaemenid Persia being run as a kind of family firm, rather like the ruling clans of today’s Gulf states.

  The first reason that Xerxes – according to Herodotus – gave for wanting to invade Greece matches what can be inferred about Persian royal thinking from the inscriptions in Old Persian that Darius, the father of Xerxes, placed on his Iranian monuments – retribution for injuries to the Persians: ‘I do not wish that a man should do harm; nor do I wish it that, if he should do harm, he should not be punished.’ Thus spake Darius in words engraved on, once again, his tomb. Herodotus might have had informants who told him about these Persian ethics of kingship. There were other reasons too according to Herodotus: further expansion of the Persian Empire, and the greater glory of the monarch. The bombastic presentation of Achaemenid rule in the royal inscriptions from Iran makes these motives eminently believable too.

  So the wheels of war began to turn once more, this time on a larger scale. Xerxes was planning to come in person at the head of a great host. Advance reports of Persian preparations inevitably reached Greece, where reaction was mixed among the city-states. Herodotus reports individual states consulting oracles – the customary ancient Greek means of assessing or managing risk.

  He claims to reproduce a rambling, riddling response by Apollo’s prophetess at Delphi to the Athenian emissaries. Athens should put her trust in a ‘wood-built wall’, ‘withdraw from the foe’ (that is, retreat), but also be aware that ‘a day will come when you will meet him face to face’. The oracle ended:

  Divine Salamis, you will bring death to women’s sons

  When the corn is scattered, or the harvest gathered in.

  Understandably Athenians were divided as to what all this meant. Then a political leader with an interest in the Athenian navy – his name was Themistocles – persuaded them that the wooden wall was a reference to their warships. Fortified by this reading of the oracle, the assembled citizens resolved to stand and fight. The representatives of Athens and of other like-minded states, including the chief land power on the Greek mainland at this time, Sparta, then met in a congress. They vowed to put aside their quarrels and make a military and naval alliance.

  In spring 480 BC Xerxes and his army crossed the Dardanelles on a specially made pontoon bridge into Europe. The Greek allies decided to see if they could prevent the Persians from entering central Greece from the north by holding a land pass which they knew as the ‘Hot Gates’ (Thermopylae) from its thermal springs. At the same time they would use a fleet of allied warships to block the Persian armada at the entrance to a nearby sea channel. Xerxes would need to use this channel if his fleet, which included supply ships, was to continue to shadow the land army.

  Nowadays the site of Thermopylae is a two-hour drive north from Athens. In 480 BC this was a defensible pass, 50 or so feet wide at its narrowest point, with mountains on one side and marsh and sea on the other. The sea has since receded here, making the strategic significance of the place in Xerxes’ time harder to grasp today.

  Herodotus relates how a small allied army of 5,300 men under the overall command of a Spartan king, Leonidas, took up positions. Although numerically a fraction of the Persian army, they could take advantage of the confined space which prevented Xerxes from deploying his superior strength. What happened next, as Herodotus tells the story, did much in ancient times to confer a near-mythic status on the Spartans as warriors.

  First a Persian scout came up to the Greek position. He was astonished to see the Spartan men calmly exercising naked and dressing their long locks. A renegade Spartan explained to an equally disbelieving Xerxes that Spartan soldiers always combed their hair when about to risk their lives. After the Greeks beat off successive Persian attacks, a local Greek in hope of a reward guided the Persians by night over a mountain path which would allow them to surprise the Greeks in their rear.

  The next morning, hearing this news, Leonidas sent home all but 1,200 of the Greek contingent. With them and his fellow Spartans, he made a last stand, since it was ‘unfitting’ that he should abandon his command. They fought to the death, ‘with swords, hands and teeth’. After the war, the Greeks set up memorials here. A short poem was inscribed (there is now a modern replica) to commemorate the Spartans, all but two of whom had fallen: ‘Stranger, go tell the Spartans that here we lie, obedient to their commands.’ The Greek ships pulled back on hearing what had happened. The Persians were now free to continue their southward march, plundering Greek sanctuaries and, according to Herodotus, raping women. The Athenians completed a (probably pre-planned) evacuation of their city and country villages, sending the women and children to take refuge in
the Peloponnese. The Persians captured and burnt the Athenian Acropolis.

  The allied fleet had regrouped in the waters of the offshore island of Salamis, just outside what is now Piraeus, and separated from the mainland by a narrow and sinuous channel. Encamped on the island with their galleys beached on its shore, the Greek allies were all for falling back on the nearby isthmus connecting the Peloponnese to central Greece. Themistocles, cast by Herodotus as a wily and honey-tongued strategist, managed to convince his fellow Greeks that this was a bad plan because in doing so the allied fleet would ‘lead’ the Persian army towards the Peloponnese. Not without difficulty, the allied naval contingents were persuaded to stay united and await the Persian fleet.

  Xerxes’ fleet sailed round Cape Sunium and up the west coast of the Athenian land mass. At night Persian ships took up positions at either end of the channel between Salamis and the mainland, trapping the Greek galleys. The next morning the encamped Greeks took to the water. Xerxes watched the battle from a vantage point on the mainland, expecting of course a great victory. In fact the Persians suffered a decisive defeat.

  Herodotus says that this was chiefly because Persian ships in front tried to turn and flee the attacking Greek ships. Then they ran into a new wave of their own galleys going forward ‘so that they too could display some feat to the king’. Greeks must have liked the idea that the very presence of Xerxes contributed to his misfortune. The Greeks had made effective use of the narrow channel. It had trapped them, but had also prevented the Persians from making the most of their superior numbers.

  According to Herodotus, Xerxes was undecided at first what to do next. He was worried that the Greeks might now sail to the Dardanelles, cutting the pontoon bridge and leaving him stranded in Europe. He was also persuaded that he had achieved his chief objective, the punishment of Athens, now a smouldering ruin. He departed with what was left of his fleet, but not before taking up the offer of a Persian general, also a nephew, to finish off the job if the king allowed him to choose the best troops from the, as yet undefeated, Persian land army. This the nephew, Mardonius, did, wintering in northern Greece among friendly, pro-Persian Greeks.