Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

  To the Spartans themselves, however, the memory of their city's most famous daughter was precious. Menelaus, it was said, searching for Helen amid the final massacre of the Trojans, had been planning to add her to the piles of corpses, a fitting punishment for all the slaughter she had caused — but when at last he had found his wife, rather than kill her, he had instead dropped his sword, struck dumb by the perfection of her naked breasts, and swept her up into his arms. Both had returned to Sparta, and their tomb could still be seen on a promontory south of the city, its immense stone blocks raised on earth as red as Menelaus' hair. Helen herself, 'that radiance of women','1 had been altogether more aureate than her husband: not only had she been a blonde, but even her spindle had been fashioned out of gold. Had Cyrus known that the Spartans worshipped at the shrine of such a woman, sensual and pleasure-loving, he would no doubt have been confirmed in his contempt for their ridiculous pretensions. Certainly, their ambassadors, long-haired and scarlet-cloaked

  as they were, would have appeared apt devotees of Helen; for Cyrus would have had sufficient opportunity to learn that the wearing of long hair, among the Greeks, was generally regarded as evidence of effeminacy, and the use of expensive vermilion as a mark of wild extravagance. The Persians, unsurprisingly, chose to scorn the Spartan threats. Surely they could have little to fear from such a luxury-loving race?

  Appearances, of course, could be deceptive; but it was true that once, in the earliest years of their history, the Spartans had indeed been notorious for their materialism and greed. 'Acquisitiveness will be their ruin' had been a common prediction.4 Sparta, in the eighth and seventh centuries bc, had served as a model of everything that other Greeks hoped to avoid: her elite was brutal and rapacious; its land-hunger was obscene; the impoverishment of the average citizen, leeched of his patrimony and often even of his freedom, was something shocking. Appalled foreign analysts, observing the toxic quality of Sparta's class hatreds, had no hesitation in judging her 'the worst-governed state in Greece'.5 And this at a time when competition was hardly lacking; for everywhere in the Greek world, by the seventh century bc, the gap between rich and poor, the few and the many, had begun to widen alarmingly, so that the ideal of good governance, 'eunomid1as it was called, seemed a distant dream, and all was instability.

  Social convulsions were not unknown elsewhere in the world, as the clan chiefs of Media or Persia could have vouched. Among the Greeks, however, the yearning for eunomia had a peculiar urgency. In their search for it, they were, in a sense, alone. There was certainly no equivalent in their poor and backward land of the millennia-old traditions of the monarchies of the East. Unlike the clansmen of the Zagros, they were far removed from the well-springs of civilisation. With no ready models of bureaucracy or centralisation to hand, the Greek world had early on fragmented into a multitude of competing city-states, each with its distinctive brand of constitutional crisis. Racked by chronic social tensions though they were, however, the Greeks were not entirely oblivious to the freedom that provincialism gave them: to experiment, innovate and forge their own distinctive paths. 'Better a small city perched on a rock,' it could be argued, 'so long as it is well governed, than all the splendours of idiotic Nineveh.'6 Certainly, compared to the rugged landscape across which Greek cities were dotted, the bland alluvium of Mesopotamia might indeed appear just a little effete. In Greece, the mountains which hemmed in the lowlands, cutting many a state off from state, to say nothing of the reach of the broader world beyond, afforded a rough-hewn autonomy as well as isolation.

  The Spartans, certainly, had profited from the location of their city. That they had been left free to indulge their taste for class warfare had owed almost everything to geography. Lacedaemon, the territory in the remote reaches of southern Greece which their city dominated, was framed all around by formidable natural bulwarks: to the east and south, the sea; to the north, grey, forbidding hills; to the west, savage and immense, the mountain of Taygetos, its five claw-like peaks streaked with snow even in the heat of summer. Behind such frontiers a city might easily bring itself to the point of ruin, and still remain undisturbed.

  But behind such frontiers it might equally evolve and metamorphose. The Spartans, like the Persians, had originally been a tribal monarchy, with a state that had its roots in an ancient nomadic past. Sparta itself, despite its venerable name, was little more than an agglomeration of four villages, founded on what had previously been an almost virgin site. Certainly it owed nothing to the original Sparta, the Sparta of Helen and Menelaus. Impressively though the couple's tomb loomed over the Lacedaemonian plain, the shrine bore witness not to continuity but to the very opposite: a brutal rupture with the past. Hillocks of buried rubble surrounded it, all that remained of a long-abandoned palace, perhaps one that had been occupied by Helen and Menelaus themselves; and yet, around 1200 bc, it and all the other great buildings of Lacedaemon had been sacked and burned to the ground. Why, and by whom, had rapidly been forgotten: the ruin had been too total for the memory to be preserved. Centuries had passed.

  Gradually, the void left by the collapse of Menelaus' kingdom had been filled by newcomers from the north, wandering tribes who would be known much later as the Dorians, in proud contra-distinction to the vanquished native Greeks.7 Yet the Dorians too were Greek, and far from oblivious to their adopted homeland's golden past. Indeed, it would be said of them that there was no nation more devoted 'to tales of the age of heroes, of the ancient beginnings of cities, and of anything that related to far-off times'.8 The settlers, intrigued by Lacedaemon's pedigree, began to appropriate it to themselves. Around 700 bc, for instance, roughly when the Medes and Persians were putting down their own roots in the distant Zagros, the fortuitous identification of Helen's tomb was first made. Even more sensationally, the Spartan elite also began to manufacture an ancestry for itself that stretched far beyond the reign of Menelaus, back to the greatest hero of them all, Heracles, slayer of monsters and son of Zeus, the king of the gods. What had been an invasion by the Dorians' distant ancestors could now be presented as a return; what had been won by conquest as a patrimony. The leading Spartans called themselves 'Heraclids' — and they laid claim, as the heirs of Heracles, not only to Lacedaemon but to the dominion of much of Greece.

  All of which, of course, was profoundly alarming for their neighbours. By 700 bc, the Spartans had already achieved the startling feat of crossing the most intimidating of their natural frontiers, the Taygetos range, and launching a war of annexation in the land of Messenia that lay beyond it to the west. The 'broad dancing-grounds' to be found there, 'good for ploughing, good for growing fruit',9 were more fertile even than those of Lacedaemon, and although the Messenians too could lay claim to Dorian ancestry, the Spartans savagely demonstrated their disdain for any possible ties of kinship by the brutality of their assault, and by the implacability of their resolve. A territory as extensive as Messenia was not easily subdued, but the Spartans, keeping grimly to their objective, had continued for decades to wash its fields and groves with blood. The Messenians' submission, when it came at last, was total. Victory had taken their conquerors more than a century to force.

  Such an enslavement of one Greek people by another was wholly without precedent. It established the Spartans not only as the richest people in Greece, but as a prodigy, a mutant race, unnerving and unique. As far as the Spartans themselves were concerned, this aura of mystery was merely their due. Where else in a world long since decayed from the golden age of heroes could a bloodline be traced back to the king of the gods himself? Brutally pragmatic in the ends to which they put their superstitions, the Spartans believed in them devoutly all the same. They knew themselves shadowed, in everything they did, by the whims of the divine. Offend the gods, and all might be lost; attend to their wishes, and Sparta's greatness would surely be secured. So it was that she had been able, in the end, to subdue Messenia. And so it was, in the teeth of that interminable campaign, that she had also been able to redeem herself from an
even greater crisis, a near-fatal social meltdown, and emerge from it, astonishingly, as the model of eunomia.

  This choice — between reform or ruin — was one that the Heraclids had long sought to postpone. The conquest of Messenia, however, far from putting off the hour of reckoning, had served only to hasten it. Victory, although it brought Sparta great wealth, had done little to ease the miseries of the poor. Indeed, by concentrating even greater resources in the hands of the aristocracy, it had threatened to exacerbate them. Perhaps, had the circumstances of the Spartan upper classes corresponded to those of their counterparts in far-off Media, they could have afforded to ignore the impoverishment of their fellow citizens, their cries for redistribution of land, and all their 'seditions against the realm'.10 But Sparta was not Media — and a great revolution in military affairs, one that had begun to surge and swell across the whole of Greece, was at that very moment threatening to sink the Heraclids.

  For it was not cavalry — prancing, expensive, indelibly upper class — that had won Messenia for Sparta. Rather, the victory had gone to plodding foot-soldiers, citizens of farming stock, men who may not have had the resources to afford horses but who could still supply themselves with arms and armour; and in particular with hopla, circular shields of a radically new design, a metre high and wide, and faced with bronze across their wood. A line of hoplon-holders — 'hoplites' — advancing in a phalanx, protected as well, perhaps, by bronze helmets and cuirasses, and bristling with spears, was potentially a devastating offensive weapon; and the Spartans, in the course of the Messenian War, had been given every opportunity to experiment with this radical and lethal new form of warfare. Yet it was not easily waged. A particular breed of man was required to make it succeed. Every hoplon, if it were to serve its purpose, had to offer protection to its neighbour as well as its holder — so that the line of a phalanx, as it advanced towards an enemy, risked being cut to pieces on any show of social division.

  'Keep together,' exhorted a Spartan battle hymn, 'hold the line, do not give in to alarm, or disgraceful rout.'" A cry for discipline aimed at hoplites of every class. What, after all, would be the fate of even the most blue-blooded Heraclid in battle if he could not trust his flank to his neighbour, the humble farmer? And what, even more pressingly, would be the fate of Sparta herself if the farmer could no longer afford his expensive shield? Ruin — as sure and violent as the hatreds of Messenia. The Spartan establishment, having grown fat on the lower classes, suddenly found itself, in the very hour of victory, staring catastrophe in the face. No longer, by the middle of the seventh century, could civic cohesion be regarded merely as an idle aspiration of down-at-heel farmers. It had become, even for the Heraclids, a matter of life and death.

  Panic bred a truly extraordinary solution. Revolution came to Lacedaemon. The Spartan people, despairing of their future, were somehow persuaded to forget their time-honoured class differences and submit to a majestic yet murderous experiment in social engineering. But how, precisely — and at whose instigation? The Spartans themselves, enthusiasts for dramatic tales of ancient heroes, were hardly the type of people to attribute their new order to anonymous social forces. Surely it could only have been the work of some visionary sage? Soon enough, a name, 'Lycurgus', began to be floated. Barely a century after the establishment of eunomia in Sparta, and this mysterious figure had been definitively hailed as its architect. By and large, it was agreed that he had been a Heraclid grandee, uncle to a Spartan king, no less, and possessed of the sternest temperament, 'high-principled and fair'.12 Such, however, were the limits of his biographers' consensus. Even oracles confessed that they were baffled as to whether Lycurgus was 'human or a god' — although their inclination was, on balance, to believe the sage divine.13 The Spartans shared this opinion: a temple was raised in the great man's honour, and his purported reform programme increasingly located back in the mists of time, giving it, like the Heraclid bloodline, a pedigree as venerable as it was bogus. Control the past, and you control the future: as radical an act of surgery as had ever been attempted by a state upon itself was soon being represented as the essence of its traditions. Lycurgus, it would later be claimed, 'moved and gratified by the beauty and loftiness of his legislation, now that it was completed and implemented, had longed to make it immortal and unbudging, for all time — or at least so far as could be achieved by human foresight'.14 The Spartans, by reverencing him, and possibly by fabricating him as well, had duly fulfilled his dream. Revolution, as they were the first people in history to discover, could best be buttressed if it was transfigured into myth.

  The sense of strangeness that had long haunted the Spartans now came to animate the structures of their state. They had become, it appeared to the men of other cities, both more and less than human. Lycurgus was said to have been divine, and yet he had worn the aspect of a beast, of something feral, as well as that of a god. 'He who brings into being the works of a wolf: this, portentous and menacing, was the literal meaning of his name. No longer, under the constitution established by Lycurgus, were the Spartans to be counted as predators upon their own kind, the rich upon the poor, the Heraclids upon the farmers, but rather as hunters in a single deadly pack. Every citizen, be he aristocrat or peasant, was to be subsumed within its ranks. Henceforward, even 'the very wealthy were to adopt a lifestyle that was as much as possible like that of the ordinary run of people'.15

  Merciless and universal discipline was to teach every Spartan, from the moment of his birth, that conformity was all. The citizen would assume his place in society; the hoplite would assume his place in a line of battle. There he would be obliged to remain for the length of his life, 'his feet set firmly apart, biting Dn his lip, taking a stand against his foe'16 - with only death to redeem him from his duty. Indeed, Lycurgus, it was said, in a supreme illustration of what a citizen owed the state, had gone so far as to commit suicide, hoping by such a gesture that he might educate his people. 'For it was his reasoning that even a statesman's end should be of some value to society, by setting it an example both virtuous and practical — and so it was that he starved himself to death.'17

  A grim philosophy, to be sure. Yet, self-denying though it might appear, it was valued by the Spartans precisely for the freedoms that it gave them. That their city had become a barracks and their whole society an immense phalanx braced for war reflected not coercion but rather a hard-wrought class consensus. The balance it struck between the rich and the poor was delicate. The Heraclids, although they had ceded sovereignty to the people, and also a seeming equality, nevertheless preserved their wealth, their estates, and much of their power. The poorer classes, initiated into the rinks of an elite and peerless army, gained a status they had hitherto been denied — and material security to boot. No more sordid scratching around for them, trying to make a living out of farming or trade. A warrior had no business with mending shoes, or sawing wood, or making pa is. Such activities were best left to the citizens of other communities in Lacedaemon, the 'perioikoi', or 'about-dwellers', as they were dismissively labelled, second-rate men denied the rights of a full and tested Spartan.

  Only one source of wealth, to the true soldier, could be counted worthy of his rank. Gratifyingly, for a people once haunted by land-hunger, the conquest of Messenia had provided ample scope for the aristocracy to be generous with their spoils. Hazy though the precise details are, it appears likely that one of the key policies of the Lycurgan reform programme had been the partitioning of much of Messenia into allotments for the poor.18 Not that any member of the master-race ever farmed these grants in person: it was out of the question for a Spartan warrior to toil and sweat in a field. That was the function of the conquered Messenians. The Spartans, even prior to the crossing of Taygetos, had displayed a peculiar genius for the exploitation of vanquished foes. Their whole history bore witness to it. Learned scholars, curious about the name — 'helots' — that the Spartans gave their wretched underclass, derived it from Helos, a town in Lacedaemon, conquered in the ve
ry earliest days of their expansion.19 What had first been practised on one side of the Taygetos range was refined and perfected on the other: a whole population was reduced to serfdom. The Messenians, labouring 'like asses suffering under heavy loads',20 found themselves having to shoulder the full weight of Spartan greatness.

  And no sooner had the conquerors found themselves growing rich off their helots than they began to cast around for more. By the early sixth century bc, with the west successfully pacified, the focus of their ambitions was inevitably turning north. There, however, blocking the path of empire, loomed a menacing rival. Argos, a city less than forty miles from the Lacedaemonian frontier, was a power just as restless and arrogant as Sparta, and had claims on southern Greece that were, if anything, more impressive. While the Spartans boasted of Menelaus as their forebear, the Argives could cite an even more celebrated figure, his elder brother Agamemnon, master of golden Mycenae, and commander-in-chief of the Greeks at Troy. Mycenae herself, although no longer the seat of kings, was still to be found, albeit a crumbled shell of her former greatness, huddled between ravines to the north of the plain of Argos. The Argives, despite taking regular pains to crush even the slightest hint of independence from her, had eagerly adopted her ancient pretensions. These, in the endless propaganda war waged by every Greek city, were certainly not to be sniffed at. Agamemnon, after all, had ruled as heir to his grandfather, the hero Pelops, an ivory-shouldered adventurer who had given his name to the entire peninsula which formed the south of Greece. Why, then, in any struggle for the mastery of'Pelop's island' — 'Peloponnesos' in Greek — should the Argives be content with second place? Surely Argos, not Sparta, should reign as the mistress of the Peloponnese?