Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (7 page)

nesians, in the wake of the capture of Athens and the burning of the

temples on the Acropolis, did not withdraw their fleets as they had pre-

viously withdrawn their land forces but were prepared instead to join

with the Athenian ships and make a stand in the straits of Salamis. By

doing so they demonstrated that the spin of the Greek propagandists

had indeed been something more than spin: that the bloody defeat at

Thermopylae had been, precisely as they had claimed, a kind of victory.

It was to prove a decisive one as well. At Salamis and at Plataea, on

sea and then on land, the Greek allies crushingly repulsed the amphibi-

ous task force that had been ranged against them and ensured that the

Pax Persica would not be extended to Greece. The failure of the at-

tempt had certainly not been due to Persian effeminacy, or softness, or

any lack of courage, “for in bravery and strength,” as the Greeks them-

selves freely acknowledged, “the two sides were evenly matched.”18

Indisputably, however, in man-to-man combat, Greek equipment and

training had proven far superior, for Plataea had confirmed the lesson

of Marathon, that in pitched battle the Persian infantry was no match

From Persia with Love 27

for the impact of a phalanx. Most wounding of all, however, for the

bloodied King of Kings was surely the way in which his own strengths

had been used against him: his hitherto unchallenged mastery of es-

pionage and self-promotion. At Salamis, for instance, the Athenian

admiral, displaying an almost Persian grasp of psychology, had lured

the imperial fleet into an ambush by assuring Xerxes that he wished

to come over to his side, a lie that the Great King and his advisers,

remembering Lade, had been predisposed to believe. Then, shortly be-

fore embarking on the campaign that would lead them to Plataea, the

Greek allies had sworn a terrible oath, that all the temples burned by

the barbarians should be left forever as blackened ruins, “to serve as

a witness for generations yet to come.”19 This, of course, was to turn

Xerxes’ self-estimation devastatingly against him, casting him not as

the defender of order but as its great enemy and casting his empire not

as the agency of truth and light but rather as an impious despotism

rightfully humbled by the gods. This, as a theme, was one that would

never cease to inspire the Greeks. It would help to inspire incomparable

drama, history, and architecture. As a result, for as long as Aeschylus

continues to be watched, Herodotus read, or the Parthenon admired, it

will never be forgotten. Two and a half thousand years on, and the men

who fought at Marathon and Thermopylae, at Salamis and Plataea, re-

main secure in their victory.

Yet the failure of the world’s first superpower to bring what it saw as

security and order to a mountainous backwater on the very periphery

of its interests does not necessarily mean that the Persians and their

empire have nothing of value to teach the present day—just the op-

posite, in fact. If it is true that in matters of combat and strategy, as in

so much else, the West has long considered itself heir to the Greeks,

that has not prevented “the Persian way of war” from casting its own

lengthy shadow over the centuries. Seen in that light, the future of hu-

man conflict is likely to prove no less Persian than Greek.

Further Reading

The
fons et origo
of information on the Greco-Persian Wars is, of course, Herodotus,

the first and most readable of historians. The most fluent translation in English is the

Everyman edition; the best
annotated is
The Landmark Herodotus
(New York: Pantheon,

28 Holland

2007). Another key source is Aeschylus’s play
The Persians
, with its celebrated descrip-

tion of Salamis, written by a veteran of the Greco-Persian Wars; a useful edition is

Edith Hall’s (Warminster, UK: Aris and Phillips, 1996). Diodorus and Plutarch provide

valuable, though late, supplementary information.

No Persian is known even so much as to have mentioned the invasion of Greece.

That does not mean, however, that there are no relevant sources for this period from

the Persian side. The definitive collection is Amélie Kuhrt’s, published in two vol-

umes as
The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period
(London:

Routledge, 2007). The definitive book on the Persian Empire—and an epochal work

of scholarship—is by Pierre Briant, translated into English by Peter T. Daniels as
From

Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire
(Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns,

2002). Other excellent recent general studies include
Ancient Persia
, by Josef Wiese-

höfer (London: Tauris, 2001), and
The Persian Empire
, by Lindsay Allen (Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 2005). The catalogue of a recent exhibition at the British

Museum,
Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia
, edited by John Curtis and Nigel

Tallis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), is sumptuously

illustrated.

For Persian involvement in Iraq, see the collection of essays edited by John Cur-

tis,
Mesopotamia and Iran in the Persian Period: Conquest and Imperialism.
Proceedings of a

Seminar in Memory of Vladimir G. Lukonin
(London: British Museum Press, 1997). For

Lydia and Ionia, see
Aspects of Empire in Achaemenid Sardis
, by Elspeth R. M. Dusinberre

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and
Sparda by the Bitter Sea: Imperial

Interaction in Western Anatolia
,
by Jack Martin Balcer (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1984). Balcer is also the author of a fascinating study of Darius’s accession to

power,
Herodotus and Bisitun: Problems in Ancient Persian Historiography
(Stuttgart: Franz

Steiner, 1987). The best study of the notorious academic bog that is Persian religion is

by Jean Kellens, a collection of essays translated into English as
Essays on Zarathustra

and Zoroastrianism
(Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2000). For the specifics of Persian war-

fare, see
Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War
, by Kaveh Farrokh (Oxford: Osprey,

2007). For a valuable overview of Greco-Persian relations all the way from the conquest

of Ionia to Alexander, see
The Greek Wars: The Failure of Persia
, by George Cawkwell

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

The literature on the Greco-Persian Wars themselves is voluminous. Essential

studies include A. R. Burns’s
Persia and the Greeks: The Defence of the West
, 2nd ed.

(London: Duckworth, 1984), and Peter Green’s wonderfully written
The Greco-Persian

Wars
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970). The best mili-

tary study is J. F. Lazenby’s
The Defence of Greece 490–479 bc
(Warminster, UK: Aris and

Phillips, 1993). Recent books on individual battles include
Thermopylae: The Battle That

Changed the World
,
by Paul Cartledge (London: Overlook Press, 2006), and
Salamis: The
Greatest Naval Battle of the Ancient World, 480 bc
,
by Barry Strauss (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). For the enduring impact of the wars on the popular imagination, see

Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium
, edited by Emma

Bridges, Edith Hall, and P. J. Rhodes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Mod-

esty, of course, forbids me from recommending my own
Persian Fire: The First World

Empire and the Battle for the West
(London: Time Warner Books, 2005).

From Persia with Love 29

notes

1
Nabonidus Chronicle
, col. ii, 15. Cyrus himself entered Babylon two and a half weeks

later.

2 Jeremiah 28.14.

3 Ezekiel 32.23.

4 Cyrus Cylinder 20. The titles used by the Persian kings were not original to them

but were derived from an assortment of Near Eastern kingdoms, Babylon included.

5 Aeschylus
The Persians
104–5.

6 Cyrus Cylinder 16.

7 Herodotus 1.214.

8 Isaiah 45.1–3.

9 Heracleitus, quoted by Diogenes Laertius,
The Lives and Doctrines of the Eminent

Philosophers
, trans. R. D. Hicks, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library no. 184 (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1925), 1.21.

10 For a concise introduction to the sources that enable the events of 522 to be recon-

structed, as well as the sources themselves, see the chapter “From Cambyses to Darius

I,” in Amélie Kuhrt,
The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period

(London: Routledge, 2007), vol. 1.

11 Bisitun Inscription 63.

12 A date that is probable rather than certain.

13 Phocylides frag. 4. Despite the Assyrian reference, the poem is almost certainly a

reflection of the growth of Persian power.

14 Tyrtaeus 7.31–32.

15 Quoted by Tim Blanning in
The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815
(New York: Vi-

king, 2007), 626.

16 Herodotus 6.116.

17 Herodotus 8.24.

18 Herodotus 9.62.

19 Lycurgus
Against Leocrates
81.

30 Holland

2. Pericles, Thucydides, and the Defense of Empire

Donald Kagan

By the middle of the fifth century, when Pericles became the

leading figure in Athens, defense of its empire was of the highest im-

portance, because the empire was the key to the defense of Athens itself.

It represented security against a renewal of the Persian threat, and it pro-

vided the means for warding off any future chal enge from Sparta. Beyond

that, its revenues were essential to Pericles’ plans for making Athens the

most prosperous, beautiful, and civilized city the Greeks had ever known.

The glory it reflected was an essential part of his vision for Athens.

Pericles and his Athenians regarded their empire as necessary, but it

also raised serious questions. Could an empire limit its growth and am-

bition and maintain itself in safety? Or did rule over others inevitably

lead the imperial power to overreach and bring about its own ruin? Was

empire, especially by Greek over Greek, morally legitimate? Or was it

evidence of
hubris
, the violent arrogance that was sure to bring on the

justified destruction of those who dared to rule over others as though

they were gods?

It fell to Pericles, as leader of the Athenian people, to guide their

policy into safe channels and to justify the empire in the eyes of the

other Greeks as well as their own. In both tasks Pericles broke a sharply

new path. He put an end to imperial expansion and moderated Athe-

nian ambitions. He also put forward powerful arguments, by word as

well as deed, to show that the empire was both legitimate and in the

common interest of
all
the Greeks.

It is important to recall that the Athenians did not set out to acquire

an empire and that the Delian League that was its forerunner came

into being only because of Sparta’s default, but the Athenians had good

reasons for accepting its leadership. First and foremost was the fear and

expectation that the Persians would come again to conquer the Greeks.

The Persians had attacked them three times in two decades, and there

was no reason to believe they would permanently accept the latest

defeat. Second, the Athenians had hardly begun to repair the dam-

age done by the latest Persian attack; they knew another would surely

make Athens a target again. In addition, the Aegean and the lands to its

east were important to Athenian trade. Their dependence on imported

grain from Ukraine, which had to travel from the Black Sea, meant that

even a very limited Persian campaign that gained control of the Bos-

porus or the Dardanelles could cut their lifeline. Finally, the Athenians

had ties of common ancestry, religion, and tradition with the Ionian

Greeks, who made up most of the endangered cities. Athenian security,

prosperity, and sentiment all pointed toward driving the Persians from

all the coasts and islands of the Aegean, the Dardanelles, the Sea of

Marmora, the Bosporus, and the Black Sea.

The new alliance was one of three interstate organizations in the

Greek world, alongside the Peloponnesian League and the Hellenic

League formed against Persia, which had by no means lapsed when the

Spartans withdrew from the Aegean. After the founding of the Delian

League, the Hellenic League had an increasingly shadowy existence

and collapsed at the first real test. The important, effective, and active

alliances were the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta, on the main-

land and the Delian League, led by Athens, in the Aegean.

From the first, the Delian League was very effective because it was

entirely and enthusiastically voluntary, its purposes were essential to

its members, and its organization was clear and simple. Athens was