And yet, by and large, how little it is read about today. Peter Green, whose wonderful book The Year of Salamis, published over thirty years ago, was the last full-length account written for a non-academic audience, marveled, in his customarily witty fashion, at the shortage of overviews of the subject.
Bearing in mind the fact that the Greek victory in the Persian Wars is routinely described as a fundamental turning point in European history (advocates of this view don’t quite argue that today, had things gone the other way, mosques and minarets would dominate Europe, but you can sense the unspoken thought in the air), this omission seems all the more inexplicable.17
Perhaps Green has not been to Rotterdam or Malmö recently; and yet the fact that nowadays mosques and minarets are to be seen even in Athens, long the only EU capital without a Muslim place of worship, hardly detracts from the sense of perplexity he is expressing. If anything it gives it added force. The Persian Wars may be ancient history, but they are also, in a way that they never were during the twentieth century, contemporary history, too.
What Green describes as inexplicable, however, is not entirely so. For all its momentousness, its sweep, and its drama, the story of the Persian Wars is not an easy one to piece together. The indisputable truth that they were the first conflict in history that we can reconstruct in detail does not mean that Herodotus tells us everything about them; far from it, regrettably. Yes, historians can attempt to cover some of the gaps by stitching together shreds and patches garnered from other classical authors; but this is a repair job to be attempted only with the utmost caution. Many sources derive from centuries—even millennia—after the events that they are purporting to describe, while many were written not as “inquiries” but as poetry or drama. Iris Murdoch, in her novel The Nice and the Good, observed of early Greek history that it “sets a special challenge to the disciplined mind. It is a game with very few pieces, where the skill of the player lies in complicating the rules.”18 Historians of archaic Greece, who rarely feature in novels, love to quote this passage: for the task that they have set themselves, to reconstruct a vanished world from often meager scraps of evidence, does indeed resemble, at a certain level, a game. We can never know for sure what happened at a battle such as Salamis, when the sources on which any interpretation must depend manage to be simultaneously contradictory and full of holes: one might as well look to complete a half-broken Rubik’s Cube. No matter how often the facts are studied, twisted, and rearranged, it is impossible to square them all; a definitive solution can never be found. Yet even Salamis, notoriously hard to make sense of though it is, can appear prodigally rich in detail in comparison with, say, the early history of Sparta. That particular topic, one eminent scholar has baldly confessed, “is a puzzle to challenge the best of thinkers.”19 A second has described it as requiring “intellectual gymnastics.”20 A third, even more up front, simply titled a book The Spartan Mirage.21
But at least the sources for Greek history, no matter how patchy, derive from the Greeks themselves. The Persians, with one key exception, did not write anything at all that we can identify as an account of real events. Tablets inscribed by imperial bureaucrats do survive, together with royal proclamations chiseled on palace walls, and, of course, the ruins of the astounding palaces themselves. Otherwise, if we are going to attempt to make any sense of the Persians and their empire, we must rely, to an alarming degree, upon the writings of others. These, coming as they do mainly from the Greeks—a people variously invaded, occupied and pillaged by the imperial armies—tend not to be wildly keen on giving a balanced portrait of the Persian character and achievement. Herodotus, ever curious, ever open-minded, is the exception that proves the rule. “Philobarbaros”—“barbarian lover”—one indignant patriot labeled him:22 the closest to the phrase “bleeding-heart liberal” that ancient Greek approached. Yet even Herodotus, writing about remote and peculiar peoples whose languages he did not speak, has to be excused the occasional inaccuracy, the occasional prejudice, the occasional tendency to treat early Persian history as a fairy tale. None of which does much to make the modern historian’s task any easier.
Three obvious responses to the challenge present themselves. The first is to accept Greek prejudices at face value, and portray the Persians as effete cowards who somehow, inexplicably, conquered the world. The second is to condemn everything that the Greeks wrote about Persia as an expression of racism, Eurocentrism, and a whole host of other thought crimes to boot. The third, and most productive, is to explore the degree to which Greek misinterpretations of their great enemy reflected the truth, however distorted, of how the Persians lived and saw their world. It is this approach that has been adopted by a formidable band of scholars over the past thirty years, and the results have been spectacular: a whole empire brought back to life, redeemed out of oblivion, rendered so solid that it has become, in the words of one historian, “something you can stub your toe on.”23 As a display of resurrectionism, it is worthy to stand beside the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb.
And yet the Persians remain shrouded in obscurity. Perhaps this is hardly surprising. There have been no golden death masks to give a face to their rediscovery—only scholarly tomes and journals. The study of Persia, even more than that of Greece, depends on the minutest sifting of the available evidence, the closest analysis of the sources, the most delicate weighing of inferences and alternatives. This is a field in which almost every detail can be debated, and certain themes—the religion of the Persian kings, most notoriously—are bogs so treacherous that even the most eminent scholars have been known to blanch at the prospect of venturing into them.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread; but I hope, even so, that my attempt to build a bridge between the worlds of academic and general readership does not end up appearing as vainglorious as did the two-mile pontoon which Xerxes built from Asia to Europe, to the horrified derision of the Greeks. Readers should certainly be warned that many of the details out of which this book’s narrative has been constructed are ambiguous and ferociously disputed—and that the sudden appearance of a number in the text, hovering like a fly over a dunghill, generally indicates that qualification is being offered in an endnote. Yet while it is true that we can never definitively reconstruct a period so remote from ourselves, even more striking than our ignorance, perhaps, is the fact that the attempt can be made at all. I have sought with this book to provide something more than merely a narrative, for it has been my ambition, following in the footsteps of Herodotus himself, to paint a panorama of the entire world that went to war—East as well as West. The reader will be taken to Assyria, Persia and Babylon before Greece; will read of the rise of the first global monarchy before that of Spartan militarism or the democracy of Athens; and only halfway through the book will embark on the account of the Persian Wars themselves. That a story traditionally told from one side may now be glimpsed, albeit opaquely, from the other as well, is justification enough, I hope, for attempting to piece together, out of the many scattered and ambiguous fragments of evidence, a new account of those wars, of why they were fought, and by whom. It is, after all, an epic as powerful and extraordinary as any to be found in ancient literature; and one that is, despite all the many imponderables, not myth but the very stuff of history.