Chapter I: “Go Tell the Spartans”: The Battle of Thermopylae (480 B.C.)

0.     Estimates vary widely, from 120,000 to 2.6 million. At one point in The Histories, Herodotus confidently puts the number of Persians at Thermopylae at an utterly fantastic 5,283,220 men, not counting eunuchs, female cooks, and concubines.

0.     Aside from military training, Spartan girls were educated in much the same way as the boys, including competing naked in athletic competitions—something that surprised and appalled other Greeks—and learning songs and poetry.

0.     Upon first encountering Spartan envoys at Sardis in the sixth century B.C., the first great king of Persia, Cyrus, was said to have asked some other Greeks present, “Who are the Spartans?”

0.     “For example, the encounters between the Greeks and Persians, which followed Marathon, seem to me not to have been phenomena of primary impulse. Greek superiority had been already asserted, Asiatic ambition had already been checked, before Salamis and Plataea confirmed the superiority of European free states over Oriental despotism.” Creasy, Fifteen Decisive Battles.

0.     And, as we shall see, was also true of the Battle of Hastings.

0.     Principally, the Roman-Persian wars fought against the Parthians and the Sassanids between 54 B.C. and 628 A.D. Shortly before his assassination in 44 B.C., Caesar had announced a new campaign against the Parthians.

0.     Alexander’s teacher, Aristotle, advised him to be a leader to the Greeks but a master to the barbarians.

0.     For twelve centuries a series of “Pythias” spoke on behalf of the god.

0.     Herodotus admits he does not know the truth behind the Argives’ decision, then goes on to say, “If all mankind agreed to meet, and everyone brought his own sufferings along with him for the purpose of exchanging them for somebody else’s, there is not a man who, after taking a good look at his neighbor’s suffering, would not be only too happy to return home with his own.… My business is to record what people say, but I am by no means bound to believe it—and that may be taken to apply to this book as a whole.”

0.   After the defeat at the Hot Gates, and an inconclusive naval battle with the Persians that inflicted heavy casualties on both sides, the Greek fleet abandoned Artemisium and regrouped at Salamis.

0.   Similar in function to the “mealie bag” wall the defenders at Rorke’s Drift improvised in their battle with the Zulus in 1879, as we shall see.

0.   As there were Roman consuls, following the expulsion of the Tarquins in 509 B.C. Even after the advent of the emperors, two consuls, elected annually, continued to be the norm.

0.   A shorter version reads: “The strength of bulls or lions cannot stop the foe. No, he will not leave off, I say, until he tears the city or the king limb from limb.” The meaning is the same: either Sparta must be destroyed, or its king must die.

0.   Which indicates she was still of child-bearing age. From antiquity, older, successful men often selected younger women to be the mothers of their children, a kind of Darwinian imperative.

0.   Herodotus also notes that two other men, Onetes and Corydallus, have also been suspected of providing the information to Xerxes, but the historian rejects the charge and pins the blame on Ephialtes: “It was Ephialtes, and no one else, who showed the Persians the way, and I put his name on record as the guilty one.” The Spartans later put a bounty on the traitor’s head, and in due course he was killed in Thessaly c. 470 B.C. by one Athenades, although apparently for an unrelated reason; the bounty, however, was paid.

0.   In the Apophthegmata Laconica.

0.   Echoing the struggle for the body of Patroclus in The Iliad. As we shall see, the Saxon Huscarls performed a similar service for their king, Harold, at Hastings.

0.   The Persians was the second part of a trilogy whose bookends are lost to us, except by name. The first play was called Phineus; the second, Promethus Pyrkaeus, or Prometheus, the Fire-Kindler.

0.   Creasy, Fifteen Decisive Battles.

0.   In A Study of History, Toynbee attributes some cultural progression to geographic causes: “If it is true, as our evidence suggests, that new ground provides a greater stimulus to activity than old ground, one would expect to find such stimulus specially marked in cases where the new ground is separated from the old by a sea voyage.… It appears, for instance, in the degree to which the two greatest of these colonial foundations, Syriac Carthage and Hellenic Syracuse, outstripped their parent cities, Tyre and Corinth. The Achaean colonies in Magna Graecia … became busy seats of commerce and brilliant centres of thought, while the parent Achaean communities along the northern coast of the Peloponnese remained in a backwater until after Hellenic Civilization had passed its zenith.”

0.   Es ist eine Feinheit, daß Gott griechisch lernte, als er Schriftsteller werden wollte—und daß er es nicht besser lernte, wrote Nietzsche in the Apophthegm 121 of Beyond Good and Evil: “It’s a particular refinement that God learned Greek when he wanted to become a writer—and that he didn’t learn it better.”

0.   See Chapter XII.

0.   Any resemblance to the current geopolitical struggle between the forces of personal liberty and those of state power should come as no surprise.