by Ed West
Told at Thermopylae that the Persians they faced had so many men that their arrows would block out the sun, one soldier, Dieneces, famously replied “then we shall fight our battles in the shade.”10 This was an example of the dry Spartan sense of humor, from which we get the word laconic, Laconia being the name for the region around the city (such was its popularity that the Roman Plutarch even assembled a book of laconic sayings). Dieneces, like Leonidas and 298 or so others, was killed after the gruelling thirty-six-hour battle against the Persians.11
Another word still in use, Spartan, reflects their plain and simple tastes. A wit once commented on their food that “Now I know why the Spartans don’t fear death,” and their famous disgust for luxury attracted admirers throughout the ages, from their Greek rivals to the nineteenth century German educationalists who established boarding schools based on their way of life.
Hoplite warfare (which the Unsullied tactics are clearly based on) was an extremely bloody affair, and foreigners were shocked by the level of brutality in Greek conflict. Herodotus quoted a Persian, Mardonius, who noted that in Greece’s wars “even the victors suffer extreme fatalities. Needless to say, the losing side is annihilated.” Even Greeks realized this was a costly way of settling disputes, and Xenophon’s description of a battle between Thebes and Sparta in 394 gives some idea of the ferocity: “The earth was stained with gore, with the bodies of friends and enemies strewn alongside one another, shields shattered into pieces, spears smashed in two, swords pulled out of their scabbards—some on the ground, some in cadavers, some still clutched in the hand.”12 It must have been terrifying.
Tyrtaeus, describing hoplite warfare with barely concealed homoerotic glee, wrote: “Everyone must bite his lip and stand firm, his feet firmly planted bestriding the ground, using his broad shield to cover his thighs and shins below, and breast and shoulders above. He must shake his mighty spear in his right hand and wave the crest frighteningly on his head.”
The phalanx, about eight to ten men deep, was a rectangular form, with the best fighters at the front and back. Into battle each man carried a large and heavy convex shield, the aspis, and a spear with an iron tip and a spike on the other end, as well as a short sword and helmet, and armor covering the trunk. As the battle began trumpets blared and phalanxes moved forward and attacked: “Let each warrior get up close to the one of the enemy, wound him and take him down with long spear or sword,” Tyrtaeus sang. “He must fight his opponent placing foot against foot, pressing shield against shield, crest beside crest and helmet beside helmet—fight breast to breast gripping his word or long spear.”
The battle would end when eventually one side gave way, the blood-letting rarely lasting more than an hour. As in all conflict, cowardice was looked down upon, for if anyone fled the battle everyone in his line was immediately in lethal danger, exposed to the enemy’s spears. Running away without one’s shield, in order to make escape quicker, was considered a disgrace, leading to the famous Spartan mother’s wish that her son return “with his shield, or on it.”13 In some battles the violence would end with every single one of the defeated dead on the battlefield; sometimes it would go down to fighting with teeth and nails, as with the Spartans at Thermopylae.
Although poorer and smaller than its rival, Sparta won the Peloponnesian War because of its enemy’s hubris; Athens alienated its allies in the Delian League by pushing its weight around and, in an act of sheer madness, attempted to invade Syracuse in Sicily, the largest city in the known world with over a quarter of a million people, and part of the Greek-speaking area of southern Italy called Greater Greece.
After initially taking the mantle of dominance, Sparta was badly beaten in battle by Thebes at Leuctra in 371BC, but it was ultimately destroyed internally by the low birth rates that became endemic; but considering that brides on their wedding night were forced to shave their heads, it was perhaps not entirely surprising that its people were not that keen on having children. Eventually both Athens and Sparta, along with the rest of Greece, were conquered by Macedonia, a sort-of-Greek kingdom to the north inhabited by a race of people who spoke a dialect of their language. (Greek itself was known as koine, literally “the common tongue,” as the language of Westeros is known to its speakers.) With the Macedonian king Alexander the Great conquering most of the known world, these semi-Greeks spread the Hellenic language and culture across the Near East and Asia, in much the same way that American dominance in the twentieth century helped spread English beyond those regions that had been settled by British colonists.
SISTER-WIVES
Among those lands conquered by Alexander was Egypt, home to a much older and, to us, far more exotic and strange civilization. Egypt’s Old Kingdom was as distant from Alexander’s time as his was from us—millennia before Greece emerged, the gigantic Nile River nourished a long, thin fertile strip upon which a civilization grew. Its crop production allowed a centralized state to emerge, ruled by leaders with semi-divine status, and like the gods, the royal family practiced incest.
Among the earliest recorded evidence of such behavior concerns the Pharaoh Ahmose, who back in the sixteenth century BC was one of a dozen children born to full brother and sister, his parents both children of the Pharaoh Tetisheri. Ahmose also married his full sister, Ahmose-Nefertari, who went by numerous titles, including King’s Mother, King’s Daughter, King’s Sister and King’s Great Wife, although the last two applied to the same king, and she also called herself “God’s wife.”
The reasons for the practice are unclear; it was possibly to emulate the gods, who indulged in brother-sister marriages, or more prosaically to shut out any potential rivals, or to increase clan solidarity—still a reason for widespread cousin marriage in the Middle East today. The Pharaohs were not the only people to practice the same marriage patterns as the Targaryens, although they are the most famous; the Incan and Hawaiian royal families both indulged in it. However, it came with obvious downsides, for the Theban rulers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth dynasties eventually became so inbred they were unable to have healthy children. Amenhotep I and his sister-wife were the product of a brother-sister marriage, and their parents before them, so the royal couple had only two great-grandparents, rather than eight.14 The most famous of Egyptians, Tutankhamun, was married to his sister, and they had two stillborn daughters before his untimely death at nineteen from a bone disorder; both his children are mummified and buried beside their father in the Valley of the Kings.
After Alexander, Egypt was ruled by a Greek family, the Ptolemys, who continued the practice, repeatedly marrying siblings. In the mid-270s Ptolemy II divorced his Macedonian wife Arsinoe so he could marry his sister, another Arsinoe; their images were issued jointly on coins and when she died in 270 BC he declared her divine. Incest continued within the dynasty—confusingly, all of whom were called Ptolemy—right up until their fall in the first century BC. They were a cruel family, but rulers of Egypt were expected to be so, this country being an obvious inspiration for Slavers’ Bay, with its grand pyramids and endlessly suffering legions of slaves.
Ptolemy VIII married his brother’s widow, who was also his own sister, and allegedly had her son by his/her brother Ptolemy VI murdered during their wedding party. Then he began a relationship with his sister-wife’s younger daughter (his double-niece) before marrying her in 141BC, making her queen; mother and daughter became rivals, as did Ptolemy and his son by his first wife/sister. Fearing his son’s ambitions, Ptolemy had him kidnapped and murdered in front of him, before the body was cut up and sent to the boy’s mother just in time for her birthday celebrations.
The last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt died in 30BC, having married first her brother Ptolemy XII and fallen out with him, later being wed to two foreigners in succession and poisoning herself with snakes. Her name was Cleopatra, one of the most famous female rulers in history, and by this stage the world was dominated by a different sort of power, indeed a true superpower. For by the third century BC a new
city-state had been emerging north of Greater Greece, an expanding empire built on slavery that would shape Europe like no other—Rome.
*In 1631, over one hundred people in the Irish village of Baltimore were kidnapped by North African slavers and taken away to the Middle East. Over time, one million Europeans were kidnapped and taken into slavery in the Middle East in total. The gung-ho song Rule Britannia, with its lyrics “Britons never will be slaves,” refers to the Royal Navy having by the mid-eighteenth century eliminated this menace.
7
WALLS OF ICE AND BRICK
Many worthy fighters have died trying to make it to the Great Games. When most of you worthless scum join them in death this afternoon, it will represent a significant rise in your station.
—YEZZAN ZO QAGGAZ
The games began with the sound of trumpets and horns ringing out, then a loud roar erupted and the dust on the floor rose as the gates opened. The largest stadium in the imperial capital held tens of thousands of people and the noise would have been deafening, and terrifying, to men from faraway lands who had never seen two-story buildings before. All the fighters entering the arena would have known one thing—that many of them would die that day, not for a cause, or a country or for a woman, but for sheer entertainment.
The Roman crowd was enthralled by this bloodthirsty spectacle, screaming words of encouragement for their favorite fighter: verbera, iugula, ure (whip, slice, burn). Often, after the fight had been concluded, the people chose whether the loser lived or died, his fate depending on whether the shouts of mitte (free him) or igula (cut his throat) were loudest—although the ultimate decision came down to the editor, the citizen who had paid for the games, or the emperor if he was in attendance. An effective means of buying popularity, leading Romans often put on games at great expense; Julius Caesar, for his father’s funeral games, paid for 320 pairs of gladiators to fight in his memory.
After this horrific spectacle, the winner would leave by the victor’s door, the loser dragged off to the exit opposite, the libitinaria, door of Libitina, the goddess of death. There the body was brought to a room with rounded corners—it was easier to wash off the blood—stripped, and if still alive, finished off with a sharp knife. Little was wasted: the blood of gladiators might then be sold off as an aphrodisiac.
All this seems cruel, but ancient Rome was a cruel place. When a slave revolt erupted, led by a Thracian called Spartacus and including up to seventy thousand desperate men, the Romans dealt with it by crucifixion, a fantastically inhumane method of execution that could take days to kill its victims. Likewise, in the Slavers’ Bay city-states Astapor and Meereen, crucifixion is used as a way to discipline slave populations. In Meereen, Daenerys Targaryen also visits Daznak’s Pit, where for political reasons she is obliged to attend the games in the slaving city, part of their Valyrian heritage. There the Queen watches as tens of thousands of people come to see men fight to the death, an elephant take on a pack of six red wolves, and see a bull pitted against a bear. For the audience’s amusement there is also a mock battle, with six men on foot against six horsemen, the latter dressed as Dothraki; on top of this there is a fight between jousting dwarves, lions against people, and a woman fighting a boar. The new queen is horrified by the violence, but the people love it, enthralled, aroused, and amused by the day’s events. Rome witnessed such horror countless times.
The city that became master of the world had been founded in the eighth century BC when a number of villages in Latium, central Italy, joined together; to the south the Greeks had colonized most of the peninsula while to the north lay the somewhat mysterious Etruscan civilization. From 616BC until 495BC Etruscan kings ruled Rome until their overthrow and the establishment of the Roman Republic. They left their mark on the Latin tribes to the south, including a belief that breaking mirrors brought bad luck and a number of words such as people, arena, palace, military, element, and letter. Another innovation they gave the Romans was the games, which first began at funerals.
Having thrown off Etruscan rule, Rome began a period of expansion, and by 300BC they controlled most of Latium; a century later they ruled almost all of Italy, and a hundred years after that they were effectively in control of the Mediterranean.
Rome’s two most obvious influences on Martin’s world are the games and its horrendously murderous court politics. At the city’s Colosseum, officially known as the Flavian Amphitheatre, an astonishing number were sent to their deaths for the crowd’s amusement; in AD107 the emperor Trajan, having captured fifty thousand prisoners in the conquest of Dacia (today’s Romania), staged fights between ten thousand gladiators, likely prisoners of war; two years later, some 9,800 people died in the arena during games that lasted 117 days. Then in AD115, another 2,400 perished for sport. Even the low-end estimate for the total number of deaths from the time of its opening in AD80 to the abolition of gladiator fights by the Christian emperor Constantine in the fourth century is 270,000, with as many as one million perishing for sport; it is a place of death.
Daenerys orders that only criminals should be forced to fight, for just as in Rome, previously in Essos the innocent and guilty alike were made to die for the pleasure of the mob. In Rome many of those pushed into the Colosseum were lawbreakers but most were simply luckless slaves, usually foreign prisoners now sent to agonizing deaths in this bewildering, monstrous, terrifying arena, with its ninety feet statues, watched by a crowd larger than their tribe. That being said, a small minority of gladiators were volunteers who took on the risks for the money and glory. Some even made it to the end of their careers and retired, and these skilful, lucky men were given a wooden rudis, a miniature wooden version of the gladius—the sword with which they fought—to symbolize the end of their service.
Many were honored, respected men, and when two gladiators, Priscus and Verus, fought such a long and gruelling contest that they conceded at the same time, placing their swords down out of respect for one another, Emperor Titus—seeing the crowd’s approval—gave them each a rudis. Some weren’t that keen on freedom—Flamma, a Syrian slave, was offered his liberty four times but chose to continue fighting, winning most of his thirty-four contests until his predictable death at age thirty. He lost four bouts before his final, fatal fight, but then not every gladiatorial event ended in death—in fact only between 13 and 19 percent were lethal, but even this meant that at a rate of two or three battles a year most gladiators would not expect to last a decade.1
There were twelve different types of gladiators, among them the retiarius (net fighter), who battled with a net and trident, usually pitted against a secutor (chaser), armed with a large rectangular shield, an arm guard and an egg-shaped helmet. The gladiators also wore feathers on their helmets, a throwback to the archaic headdresses worn by ancient Italic peoples before the Romans rose to power.
Rome had been a republic since 510 BC, but in the first century BC it would come under strain as a series of powerful generals fought for control; one of them, Julius Caesar, had become too strong and so a senatorial conspiracy brought about his murder. On top of many offences, on his travels to Egypt he had fallen in love with its ruler, Cleopatra, much to the disgust of Rome’s elite who distrusted the foreign queen. Later his leading supporter Marc Anthony and his nephew Octavius would become enemies, but not before the former had also fallen for the Egyptian beauty.
The civil wars of the first century BC would lead to the downfall of the Roman Republic and the rise of an imperial family, followed by almost five centuries of rule by emperors, the first being Octavius Caesar, or as he now styled himself, Augustus. The first five Caesars, of the Julio-Claudian family, are clearly an inspiration for the intrigues of Westeros, in particular the third emperor, Caligula, and his nephew Nero, who succeeded as the fifth. Both were sadists who indulged in sexual depredations but also enjoyed vast spectacles to impress the poor of Rome.
Caligula had grown up in a poisonous world full of intrigue. Born Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus,
he had spent much of his childhood following his father Germanicus on campaign in Germany, where the soldiers nicknamed him Caligula, or “little soldier’s boots,” after the footwear he sported. Later his mother Agrippina the Elder fell into a bitter dispute with the emperor Tiberius, her father-in-law, which resulted in the murder of her two eldest sons. And so when Tiberius died in 37AD, Caligula was almost the last member of Augustus’s family left, and assumed the role of emperor, aged just twenty-five.
A sadist of great cruelty, he was immature and bestial but also obsessed with spectacle; indeed, the comparisons with Westeros’s own boy-tyrant even extend to a strong resemblance to the actor Jack Gleeson. At one of Caligula’s events in the Bay of Naples, bonfires were lit on the surrounding high ground to illuminate the party goers feasting on boats anchored together to form a bridge across the bay. There the emperor had his companions and even relatives pushed into the sea, and “Finally, determined that the celebrations not end in anti-climax, he ordered that some of the vessels where his men lay feasting be rammed. And as he watched the action, so his mood was all elation.”2 Caligula also had the children of senators act out the role of prostitutes on his private island, mostly to humiliate them as well as arouse himself.3 Although the story that he made his horse a senator is probably a myth, there is more truth to the tale that he once declared war on the sea, after a failed attempt to launch an invasion of Britain in which his troops merely collected seashells on the coast.
Eventually Little Boots was murdered, and the throne passed to his uncle Claudius, who had a crippled leg and a stammer and had always been somewhat despised by his family. Claudius, however, eventually succumbed, most likely by poison at the hands of his wife Agrippina, and the throne passed to his stepson Nero, the very epitome of the mad king, who soon disposed of Claudius’s fourteen-year-old son Britannicus, or so it was said.
