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*15 Only when a German surveyor in the nineteenth century found a great jumble of bones on the plain was the location of the Persians’ grave identified.
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*16 No detail better proves the authenticity of Herodotus’ sources for Xerxes’ crossing of the Hellespont than this: that the Immortals marched to war with their spears held upside down. Assyrian frescoes, which no Greek could possibly have seen, show exactly the same scene, evidence both of the continuity between Persian traditions and those of earlier empires, and of Herodotus’ remarkable scrupulousness as a historian.
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*17 It is possible that such an attempt was made. Several sources claim that Leonidas, on the eve of the Spartans’ last stand, launched a raid on the royal tent and was killed. It is hard to know what to make of this story – since Leonidas himself certainly died in battle – unless it hints at a garbled memory of a foiled mission to assassinate Xerxes.
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*18 The precise date of the Battle of Himera is uncertain. Gelon’s propagandists, keen to foster the notion that their master had been fighting in defense of Greek liberty, rather than merely his own interests, liked to claim that it had been waged on the same day as either the last stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae or the Battle of Salamis.
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*19 His remains were finally brought back to Sparta for reburial in 440 BC.
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*20 What the temple was called in the time of Pericles is unknown..
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*21 The Greek word “satrapes” was a transliteration of the original Persian “ xsachapava.” Return to text.
*22 This was the march that inspired the French educationalist Michel Bréal to propose a “marathon race” for the 1896 Olympic Games, tracing the route taken by the Athenians from the battlefield to Athens. The legend that it was Philippides who brought the news of the victory, gasping out, “We have won!” and then expiring, is sadly no less spurious for being so poetic and fitting. Return to text.
*23 Only when a German surveyor in the nineteenth century found a great jumble of bones on the plain was the location of the Persians’ grave identified. Return to text.
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2007
Copyright © 2005 by Tom Holland
Persian Fire was originally published in Great Britain in 2005 by Little, Brown, a division of Time Warner Books UK. The Doubleday edition is published by arrangement with Little, Brown.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress
www.anchorbooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-38698-4
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ALSO BY
TOM HOLLAND
The evolution of the Arab empire is one of the supreme narratives of ancient history, a story dazzlingly rich in drama, character, and achievement. Just like the Romans, the Arabs came from nowhere to carve out a vast dominion–except that they achieved their conquests not over the course of centuries as the Romans did, but in a matter of decades. Just like the Greeks during the Persian wars, they overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to emerge triumphant against the greatest empire of the day–not by standing on the defensive, but by hurling themselves against all who lay in their path.