But the Persians were ruled by a despot. They and their subject peoples were not free. The Hellenes were free, and each Greek thought himself to be the equal of all others. So said Herodotus, ignoring the large numbers of slaves who did most of the work.
The Greek settlements along the Ionian coast of the Mediterranean—in what is today Syria, Lebanon, and Israel—began to irritate the Persians. The emperor decided to punish and control them. He sent expeditions, small at first then larger, but—to the dismay of everyone on the Persian side—these Greeks did not fall down and beg for mercy, as subject peoples were supposed to do. Instead they fought. And often won.
So the Great King (as the Greeks called him, using the word for king that in Greek meant “tyrant”) sent a larger force, an army that landed on the plain of Marathon, twenty-six miles across the mountains from Athens. A joint Spartan and Athenian army under Miltiades the Spartan attacked in September 490 and routed the Persians, killing 6,400 with a loss of only 192 men. It is one of the most famous battles ever fought.
Darius, the Persian emperor, died and was succeeded by Xerxes who, infuriated by the defeats, determined to send an army and navy to Greece that no force on Earth could resist. Herodotus tells of the gathering of the soldiers and sailors in the early spring of 480, of the long days it took for the troops to march past certain points, of the thousands of camp followers and others who accompanied the immense horde as it slowly advanced across Asia Minor to the Bosporus, the narrow strip of water that divides (not far from the site of modern Istanbul) Asia from Europe.
Here bridges were constructed for the troops to cross. A storm rose and broke the bridges. Xerxes grew angry and ordered the sea to be whipped. Hundreds of Persians, armed with whips, strode to the shore and lashed out at the waves. Herodotus thought the gods were offended by this act of hubris and decided then and there to punish Xerxes.
New bridges were built. The army crossed the straits and marched on. The Greeks met them at Plataea and defeated them again. The Persian navy, the most redoubtable sea force up to that time, was trapped by Themistocles the Athenian on a lee shore in the Bay of Salamis, just a few miles from Athens. Themistocles sank many of the Persian ships and captured the others. Persia retreated and did not try again to interfere in Greek affairs for a century.
This utterly surprising victory by Greeks—who fought freely, Herodotus said, and not out of necessity (in battle the Persian captains whipped their men into action, as they had whipped the sea)—initiated one of the most creative and innovative half-centuries in the history of Western man: the period from about 480 BCE until the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 430. Athens became the “school of Hellas,” as Pericles would call it. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides invented and refined the art of the drama; Phidias and Myron carved sculptures that come down to us (for the most part in Roman copies) as among the highest achievements of art; and the Athenians, united by passion and an idea, built the Acropolis and its great shining monument to Athena, the Parthenon. Equally important achievements occurred in the other arts, in mathematics and science, in language and in philosophy. Perhaps there has never been a time quite like it.
The sense of that time and Athenian freedom breathes in Herodotus’s book. It is full of wonderful, curious stories, many of which he knows are probably not entirely true—but, as he says, it would be a shame not to tell them, they are so interesting. Equally, it would be a shame not to read the History, it is so interesting.
Nota bene: Recently a spate of so-called historical films about the classical age of Greece have appeared. They are a sorry lot, which would not be important except that many young people, for example my younger grandson, believe after seeing them that they know everything about Greece in the old days and don’t have to read Homer and Herodotus and Thucydides, and so forth. All I can say to them and to you if you agree with them is that you are missing something wonderful.
THUCYDIDES
460?–404? BCE
History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides, an Athenian, was born around 460 BCE. He was old enough, as he writes in his history, to understand the importance of the Peloponnesian War when it began in 431 and to foretell that it would probably be a long war. He was of Thracian descent on his father’s side, and he had property in Thrace including mining rights in its gold mines.
Thucydides was in Athens during the great plague of 430–29 BCE and was himself infected. In 424, he was elected a general for a year and was given command of a fleet. But, failing to prevent the capture by the Spartan general Brasidas of an important city, he was recalled, tried, and condemned to exile from Athens. He did not return to his native city until the war was over, in 404, and he probably died very soon thereafter, for his History of the Peloponnesian War is unfinished. The narrative, in fact, does not continue beyond the year 413. The last surviving book apparently consists of notes for a continuation of the narrative that Thucydides didn’t have time to complete.
The sculpture collection of the Vatican contains many famous works from antiquity, but perhaps none is more impressive than the portrait bust of Pericles the Athenian. Pericles ruled Athens as “first among equals”—that is, more or less by the common consent of his peers—during the third quarter of the fifth century BCE. We have the impression, both from the bust with its steady, firm gaze and from what Thucydides says about him, that Pericles was the leader of Athens because he was the most intelligent and capable man in the city. Extraordinary and fortunate city to choose its best man for its ruler!
We meet Pericles near the beginning of Thucydides’ account of the travails and tragedy of Athens during the last decades of the fifth century. An Athenian armed force has obtained a certain victory, Thucydides tells us, but at the loss of a number of young lives. Pericles is asked to deliver the funeral oration and takes the opportunity, Thucydides says, to explain not only the immediate cause of the fighting but, more generally, what those young heroes had been fighting for—which, in short, was to explain what Athens was and meant. The speech is one of the half dozen most famous orations. Perhaps only Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is comparable to it.
In the speech, Pericles takes pains to say that Athens is democratic, in contrast to many of its neighbors, and to explain why democracy is the best of all the forms of government. There are perils in democracy, Pericles admits. Democratic citizens do not always do what they are told to do. But that is also democracy’s strength. Finally, he says, Athens is the “school of Hellas”—the example that all the rest of Greece should follow and would follow, he suggests, if it were not impeded by tyrants.
The speech is moving to this day, especially when one contemplates the tragic fall that Athens suffered only a few years after the speech was given on that bright day at the outset of the Peloponnesian War.
This celebrated conflict was a civil war between Athens and its followers—the liberal, seagoing, commercial cities and states of Hellas—and Sparta and its followers—the oligarchic, conservative, agricultural, and land-bound cities and states. At war were not only all the men and cities of Greece, but also sets of ideas about how human beings should live and work together.