Persian Fire (3 page)

That an American president might be less
au fait
with the subtleties of medieval history than a Saudi fanatic is hardly surprising, of course. 'Why do they hate us?' In the days and weeks that followed September 11th, President Bush was not the only one to wrestle with that question. Newspapers everywhere were filled with pundits attempting to explain Muslim resentment of the West, whether by tracing its origins back to the vagaries of recent American foreign policy, or further, to the carve-up of the Middle East by the European colonial powers, or even — following the bin Laden analysis back to its starting point — to the Crusades themselves. Here, in the notion that the first great crisis of the twenty-first century could possibly have emerged from a swirl of confused and ancient hatreds, lay a pointed irony. Globalisation was supposed to have brought about the end of history, yet it appeared instead to be rousing any number of unwelcome phantoms from their ancestral resting places. For decades, the East against which the West had defined itself was communist; nowadays, as it always used to be, long before the Russian Revolution, it is Islamic. The war in Iraq; the rise of anti-immigrant, and specifically anti-Muslim, feeling across Europe; the question of whether Turkey should be allowed into the EU; all these have combined with the attacks of September 11th to foster an agonised consciousness of the fault-line that divides the Christian West from the Islamic East.

That civilisations are doomed to clash in the new century, as both al-Qaeda terrorists and Harvard academics have variously argued, remains, as yet, a controversial thesis. What cannot be disputed, however, is the degree to which different cultures, in Europe and the Muslim world at any rate, are currently being obliged to examine the very foundations of their identities. The difference of East and West', thought Edward Gibbon, 'is arbitrary and shifts round the globe.'
²
Yet that it exists — that East is East, and West is West — is easily history's most abiding assumption. Older by far than the Crusades, older than Islam, older than Christianity, its pedigree is so venerable that it reaches back almost two and a half thousand years. 'Why do they hate us?' It was with this question that history itself was born — for it was in the conflict between East and West that the world's first historian, back in the fifth century
bc
, discovered his life-work's theme.

His name was Herodotus. As a Greek from what is now the Turkish resort of Bodrum, but was then known as Halicarnassus, he had grown up on the very margin of Asia. Why, he wondered, did the peoples of East and West find it so hard to live in peace? The answer appeared, superficially, a simple one. Asiatics, Herodotus reported, saw Europe as a place irreconcilably alien. 'And so it is they believe that Greeks will always be their enemies.'
³
But why this fracture had opened in the first place was, Herodotus acknowledged, a puzzle. Perhaps the kidnapping of a princess or two by Greek pirates had been to blame? Or the burning of Troy? 'That, at any rate, is what many nations of Asia argue — but who can say for sure if they are right?"
¹
As Herodotus well knew, the world was an infinite place, and one man's truth might easily be another's lie. Yet if the origins of the conflict between East and West appeared lost in myth, then not so its effects. These had been made all too recently and tragically clear. Difference had bred suspicion — and suspicion had bred war.

Indeed, a war like no other. In 480
bc
, some forty years before Herodotus began his history, Xerxes, the King of Persia, had led an invasion of Greece. Military adventures of this kind had long been a specialisation of the Persians. For decades, victory — rapid, spectacular victory — had appeared to be their birthright. Their aura of invincibility reflected the unprecedented scale and speed of their conquests. Once, they had been nothing, just an obscure mountain tribe confined to the plains and mountains of what is now southern Iran. Then, in the space of a single generation, they had swept across the Middle East, shattering ancient kingdoms, storming famous cities, amassing an empire which stretched from India to the shores of the Aegean. As a result of those conquests, Xerxes had ruled as the most powerful man on the planet. The resources available to him were so stupefying as to appear virtually limitless. Europe was not to witness another invasion force to rival his until 1944, and the summer of D-Day.

Set against this unprecedented juggernaut, the Greeks had appeared few in numbers and hopelessly divided. Greece itself was little more than a geographical expression: not a country but a patchwork of quarrelsome and often violently chauvinistic city-states. True, the Greeks regarded themselves as a single people, united by language, religion and custom; but what the various cities often seemed to have most in common was an addiction to fighting one another. The Persians, during the early years of their rise to power, had found it a simple matter to subdue the Greeks who lived in what is now western Turkey — including those of Herodotus' home town — and absorb them into their empire. Even the two principal powers of mainland Greece, the nascent democracy of Athens and the sternly militarised state of Sparta, had seemed ill equipped to put up a more effective fight. With the Persian king resolved to pacify once and for all the fractious and peculiar people on the western fringe of his great empire, the result had looked to be a foregone conclusion.

Yet, astonishingly, against the largest expeditionary force ever assembled, the mainland Greeks had managed to hold out. The invaders had been turned back. Greece had remained free. The story of how they had taken on a superpower and defeated it appeared to the Greeks themselves the most extraordinary of all time. How precisely had they done it? And why? And what had caused the invasion to be launched against them in the first place? Questions such as these, not lacking in urgency even four decades later, prompted Herodotus into a wholly novel style of investigation. For the first time, a chronicler set himself to trace the origins of a conflict not to a past so remote as to be utterly fabulous, nor to the whims and wishes of some god, nor to a people's claim to a manifest destiny, but rather to explanations that he could verify personally. Committed to transcribing only living informants or eyewitness accounts, Herodotus toured the world — the first anthropologist, the first investigative reporter, the first foreign correspondent.
⁵
The fruit of his tireless curiosity was not merely a narrative, but a sweeping analysis of an entire age: capacious, various, tolerant. Herodotus himself described what he had engaged in as 'enquiries' —
'historia'.
'And I set them down here,' he declared, in the first sentence of the first work of history ever written, 'so that the memory of the past may be preserved by recording the extraordinary deeds of Greek and foreigner alike — and above all, to show how it was that they came to go to war.'
⁶

Historians always like to argue for the significance of their material, of course. In Herodotus' case, his claims have had two and a half millennia to be put to the test. During that time, their founding presumption — that the great war between Greek and Persian was of an unexampled momentousness — has been resoundingly affirmed. John Stuart Mill claimed that 'the battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings'. Hegel, in the more expansive tones that one would expect of a German philosopher, declared that 'the interest of the whole world's history hung trembling in the balance'.
⁸
And so it surely did. Any account of odds heroically defied is exciting — but how much more tense it becomes when the odds are incalculably, incomparably high. There was much more at stake during the course of the Persian attempts to subdue the Greek mainland than the independence of what Xerxes had regarded as a ragbag of terrorist states. As subjects of a foreign king, the Athenians would never have had the opportunity to develop their unique democratic culture. Much that made Greek civilisation distinctive would have been aborted. The legacy inherited by Rome and passed on to modern Europe would have been immeasurably impoverished. Not only would the West have lost its first struggle for independence and survival, but it is unlikely, had the Greeks succumbed to Xerxes' invasion, that there would ever have been such an entity as 'the West' at all.

No wonder, then, that the story of the Persian Wars should serve as the founding-myth of European civilisation; as the archetype of the triumph of freedom over slavery, and of rugged civic virtue over enervated despotism. Certainly, as the word 'Christendom' began to lose its resonance in the aftermath of the Reformation, so the heroics of Marathon and Salamis began to strike many idealists as an altogether more edifying exemplification of Western virtues than the Crusades. More principled, after all, to defend than to invade; better to fight for liberty than in the cause of fanaticism. One episode above all, the doomed defence of the pass of Thermopylae by a tiny Greek holding-force — 'four thousand against three million',
⁹
as Herodotus had it — took on the particular force of myth. Teeming hordes of Asiatics, driven forwards into battle by the whip; a Spartan king, Leonidas, resolved to do or die; an exemplary death, as he and three hundred of his countrymen were wiped out making a suicidal last stand:* the story had it all. As early as the sixteenth century
ad
, the great French essayist Michel de Montaigne could argue that although other battles fought by the Greeks were 'the fairest sister-victories which the Sun has ever seen, yet they would never dare to compare their combined glory with the glorious defeat of King Leonidas and his men at the defile of Thermopylae'.
¹⁰
Two and a half centuries later, Lord Byron, appalled that the Greece of his own day should be languishing as a province under the rule ot the Turkish Sultan, knew exactly where to look in the history books to find the most heart-swelling call to arms.

*To be strictly accurate, only 298 of the Spartans that Leonidas took with him to Thermopylae died there in battle. See p. 341.

Earth! render back from out thy breast

A remnant of our Spartan dead!

Of the three hundred 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.