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 luster of Leonidas, and helped ensure that Thermopylae, for generations afterward, 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 Führer’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.
That the Nazis—as much as Montaigne, Byron or Golding—could feel such a passionate sense of identification with the example of the three hundred suggests that any portrayal of the Spartans as defenders of liberty does not perhaps tell the whole story. As is so often the case, the truth is both messier and more intriguing than the myth. Had Xerxes succeeded in conquering Greece, and occupying Sparta, then it would indeed have spelled the end of that proud city’s freedom—for all the Persian king’s subjects were ranked as his slaves. Yet even slavery can be a matter of degree: what would have been regarded as a fate worse than death by the Spartans themselves might well have proved a blessed relief to their neighbors. Sparta’s greatness, as Hitler was well aware, rested upon the merciless exploitation of her neighbors, a demonstration of how to treat Untermenschen that the Nazis would brutally emulate in Poland and occupied Russia. The Persian monarchy, brilliantly subtle in the exploitation of its subjects’ rivalries, would certainly have granted, with an imperious show of graciousness, emancipation and patronage to Sparta’s neighbors. To people who had suffered under Spartan oppression for generations, Xerxes’ rule might almost have felt like liberty.
A momentous, indeed a history-shaping paradox: that annexation by a foreign power might perhaps, under certain circumstances, be welcomed. Xerxes was certainly, as the Greeks accused him of being, a despot, an Iranian who ruled as heir to the millennia-old traditions of ancient Iraq, of Akkad, Assyria and Babylon, kingdoms that had always taken it for granted that a monarch should rule and conquer as a strong man. Mercilessness and repression: these had invariably been the keynotes of the Iraqi imperial style. The empire of the Persians, however, although certainly founded amid “the tearing down of walls, the tumult of cavalry charges, and the overthrow of cities,”14 had also, as it expanded, developed a subtler response to the challenges of dominion. By guaranteeing peace and order to the dutifully submissive, and by giving a masterly demonstration of how best to divide and rule, a succession of Persian kings had won for themselves and their people the largest empire ever seen. Indeed, it was their epochal achievement to demonstrate to future ages the very possibility of a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, world-spanning state. As such, the influence of their example on the grand sweep of history would be infinitely more long term than the aberrant and fleeting experiment that was the democracy of Athens. The political model established by the Persian kings would inspire empire after empire, even into the Muslim era: the caliphs, would-be rulers of the world, were precisely echoing, albeit in piously Islamic idiom, the pretensions of Xerxes. Indeed, in a sense, the political model established by the ancient monarchy of Persia was one that would persist in the Middle East until 1922, and the deposition of the last ruling caliph, the Turkish Sultan.*2 It is the stated goal of Osama bin Laden, of course, to see the Caliphate resurrected to its prerogative of global rule.
Granted, the influence of ancient Persia, certainly in comparison with that of Greece, has always been indirect, occluded, underground. In 1891, a young British Member of Parliament, George Nathaniel Curzon, visited the site of Xerxes’ palace, which had been left charred and abandoned since being torched, 150 years after Thermopylae, by a vengeful Alexander the Great. “To us,” Curzon wrote, in soaring Byronic mode, “it is instinct with the solemn lesson of the ages; it takes its place in the chapter of things that have ceased to be; and its mute stones find a voice, and address us with the ineffable pathos of ruin.”15 Seven years later, the by-now Baron Curzon of Kedleston was appointed Viceroy of India. As such, he ruled as the heir of the Mughals—who had themselves been proud to wear the title, not of kings, but of viceroys to the kings of Persia. The British Raj, governed by the products of self-consciously Spartan boarding schools, was also thoroughly imbued with “that picturesque wealth of pomp and circumstance which the East alone can give”16—and which ultimately derived from the vanished flummery of Xerxes’ palaces. It might have flattered the British Empire to imagine itself the heir of Athens; but it owed a certain debt of obligation to the mortal enemy of Athens, too.
Persia was Persia, in other words, and Greece was Greece—and sometimes the twain did meet. They might have been combatants in the primal clash of civilizations, but the ripples of their influence, spilling out across the millennia to the present day, can sometimes serve to complicate the division between East and West rather than to clarify it. Had the Athenians lost the Battle of Marathon, and suffered the obliteration of their city, for instance, then there would have been no Plato—and without Plato, and the colossal shadow he cast on all subsequent theologies, it is unlikely that there would have been an Islam to inspire bin Laden. Conversely, when President Bush speaks of “an axis of evil,” his vision of a world divided between rival forces of light and darkness is one that derives ultimately from Zoroaster, the ancient prophet of Iran. Although the defeat of Xerxes was certainly decisive in giving to the Greeks, and therefore to all Europeans, a sense of their own distinctiveness, the impact of Persia and Greece upon history cannot entirely be confined within rigid notions of East and West. Monotheism and the notion of a universal state, democracy and totalitarianism: all can trace their origins back to the period of the Persian Wars. Justifiably it has been described as the axis of world history.