Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
List of Maps
Note on Proper Names
Preface
Maps
1 THE KHORASAN HIGHWAY
2 BABYLON
3 SPARTA
4 ATHENS
5 SINGEING THE KING OF PERSIA’S BEARD
Photo/Art Insert
6 THE GATHERING STORM
7 AT BAY
8 NEMESIS
Envoi
Timeline
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
Also by Tom Holland
Copyright Page
For Jamie and Caroline
Listen now to a further point: no mortal thing
Has a beginning, nor does it end in death and obliteration;
There is only a mixing and then a separating of what was mixed,
But by mortal men these processes are named “beginnings.”
Empedocles
Acknowledgments
I have been wanting to write a book on the Persian Wars since I was very young, and I owe an immense debt of gratitude to all those who have given me the opportunity to devote three years of my life to its study. To Patrick Walsh, best of friends and agents. To my editors, Richard Beswick and Steve Guise. To Gerry Howard, Dan Israel, Ricardo Artola and Joan Eloi Roca Martinez, for all their encouragement from abroad. To Louise Allen-Jones and Elizabeth van Lear, for their support from nearer home. To Amélie Kuhrt and Paul Cartledge, for sharing their incomparable scholarship so generously, and saving me from more errors than I care to count. To the staff of the library of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, for their perfect blend of efficiency and courtesy. To Maike Bohn, for going out with Michael Cullen, and thereby introducing me to a travel writer with a limitless knowledge of Greece. To Philip, Francis and Barbaro Noel-Baker, for happy months in Euboea. To Jonathan Tite, for arranging a perfect day on a motorboat around Salamis. To Nick and Sarah Longman, for their hospitality in Athens. To my father, for his companionship on expeditions over Thermopylae. To Michael Lowry and Deniz Gurtin, for their hospitality in Bodrum. To Elahe Tabari, for her help at Persepolis. To Audrey and Becky Gordon, for everything they have done to keep the enemies of good art from the hall. To Caroline and Jamie Muir, without whose friendship, support and good humor I would still be writing this book, and to whom it is dedicated. To my beloved family, Sadie, Katy and Eliza, for enduring my long stretches of scholastic seclusion with such forbearance, and for touring dusty ruins across Greece, Iran and Turkey with such jollity, and giving me some of the happiest times of my life.
List of Maps
The Persian Empire
Greece and the Aegean
Mesopotamia and Iran
The Peloponnese
Attica
Athens in the 6th and 5th centuries BC
Persia’s satrapies in the West
Marathon
The West
At bay: Greece in 480 BC
Thermopylae
Salamis
Battle of Salamis
Plataea
Note on Proper Names
In the interests of accessibility, it has been my policy throughout this book to use the familiar Latinate form of a proper name rather than the Greek or Persian originaclass="underline" Darius, for instance, rather than Dareios or Daryush.
Preface
In the summer of 2001 a friend of mine was appointed the head of a school history department. Among the many decisions he had to take before the start of the new term in September, one was particularly pressing. For as long as anyone could remember, students in their final year had been obliged to study a special paper devoted to the rise of Hitler. Now, with my friend’s promotion, the winds of change were set to blow. Hitler, he suggested to his new colleagues, should be toppled and replaced with a very different topic of study: the Crusades. Howls of anguish greeted this radical proposal. What, my friend’s colleagues demanded, was the point of studying a period so alien and remote from contemporary concerns? When my friend countered by suggesting that history students might benefit from studying a topic that did not relate exclusively to twentieth-century dictators, the indignation only swelled. Totalitarianism, the other teachers argued, was a living theme, in a way that the Crusades could never be. The hatreds of Islam and Christendom, of East and West – where was the possible relevance in these?
The answer, of course, came a few weeks later, on September 11, when nineteen hijackers incinerated themselves and thousands of others in the cause of some decidedly medieval grievances. The Crusades, in the opinion of Osama bin Laden at any rate, had never ended. “It should not be hidden from you,” he had warned the Muslim world back in 1996, “that the people of Islam have always suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist–Crusaders alliance.”1 Menacingly proficient at exploiting the modern world of air flight and mass communications he may be, but bin Laden has long interpreted the present in the light of the Middle Ages. In his manifestos, past and present tend to merge as though one: blood-curdling abuse of the crimes of America or Israel will mingle with demands for the restoration of Muslim rule to Spain or of the medieval Caliphate. No wonder that when President Bush chose in an unguarded moment to describe his administration’s war on terrorism as a “crusade” his advisers begged him never to use the fateful word again.
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 11, 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. Globalization 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 11 to foster an agonized consciousness of the fault-line that divides the Christian West from the Islamic East.