* The term ‘colonization’ is conventional, but strictly it is inaccurate, since most of these new foundations were independent settlements from the start, not colonial outposts of a metropolitan power.

* Thanks to Alexander’s conquest of ‘India’ in the 320s, the Greeks would gain some idea of the southward extension of the Indian subcontinent, but the mass of the sub-continent remained out of bounds to them. By the time of the great Indian Emperor Ashoka in the early third century BCE the Indians knew quite a lot about Greeks; enough, at any rate, for Ashoka explicitly to renounce the sort of empire-building for which Alexander the Great was famous – or notorious – and to embrace a new form of governance based on Buddhist principles of tolerance and compassion.

* There was plenty of scope here too for the business activities of a shrewd banking house, the Murashu of Nippur in Babylonia, whose instructive records have in part come down to us in decipherable cuneiform writing on baked clay tablets.

* Palatine Anthology 7.431. It would be good to know exactly when the epigram was composed, whether before or after Thermopylae.

† For example, he made a valuable donation of gold leaf to coat a venerated and presumably wooden statue of Apollo at Thornax near Sparta (Herodotus 1.69).

* The Spartans eventually won that war, but (another paradox) did so thanks only to Persian money. The Athenians with their naval power and desire to liberate the Greeks of Asia presented a greater threat to Persian interests than did Sparta. So on the principle that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, first the two westernmost Persian satraps and then a son of Great King Darius II channelled enormous amounts of money the Spartans’ way to enable them to build a fleet that could eventually defeat the Athenians and rob them of their control of the Aegean, and especially its link to the Black Sea via the Hellespont.

* See Appendix 1.

* See Appendix 2.

* ‘Egypt’s Leonardo’, as he has been called: Ray 2001.

* To put this in a Greek perspective, that sum would be almost thirty times the total revenue of the Athenians’ naval empire at its height in the 440s and 430s.

† Elsewhere, 8.105, he describes the Greek Panionius’s trading in eunuchs as ‘utterly wicked’.

* This, since it made it possible for Henry Rawlinson to decipher cuneiform writing, has been called the most important text for the study of the history of the entire ancient Near East. But others would make the same claim for the Hebrew Bible.

* The great exception was of course Judah, where Cyrus had earned the title ‘Messiah’ from Deutero-Isaiah for restoring the exiled Jews from their Babylonian captivity.

* The rest is lost.

* The label ‘Athenian Revolution’ is not uncontroversial, since it may carry the implication that it was a consciously motivated act of political self-transformation. I would myself emphasize more the – surely revolutionary – transformation of both institutions and consciousness that flowed from the reforms.

* The governor was Mardonius, later to be the premier general of Xerxes in Greece.

* The modern-day ‘Spartathlon’, the ultra-Marathon race inspired by him, has seen the record-winning time cut to a little over twenty hours.

* It was indeed the same strategy later pursued to devastating effect by Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great.

* After the Persians had withdrawn, an early form of political unification was first achieved by King Archelaus at the end of the fifth century, but true unification came only under Philip II (359–336).

* See Appendix 3.

* See Glossary.

* Since in general Herodotus’s account of Cleomenes is hostile, and since he elsewhere says nice things about the crucial military importance of Athens being a democracy, presumably his judgement was affected here by his own conviction of the supreme folly of the Ionian Revolt.

* Already at the Battle of Plataea in 479 there was the same absolute number (5,000) of such hoplites in the field as of Spartans, but 5,000 was a far higher percentage of the potentially available Spartan total.

* The Spartans had a reputation among other Greeks, no doubt exaggerated, for being addicted to buggery.

† The future king Agesilaus II, as a teenager going through the regular educational system (because not expected to succeed to the throne), was the ‘hearer’ of Lysander. Lysander later became briefly the single most powerful Spartan of his day, and so the most influential single Greek, since Sparta was then the superpower of the Greek world. Certainly, he was more powerful even than the kings, and his support and influence were by no means irrelevant or incidental to Agesilaus’s attaining the Eurypontid throne in a fiercely contested succession dispute in (probably) 400.

* Edgar Degas, well schooled in the classics, was particularly caught by this Spartan female athleticism and reproduced it on several occasions in the 1860s in studies now in the National Gallery, London, the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, and the Art Institute, Chicago.

* Lycurgus was a legendary and at least semi-mythical lawgiver of early times to whom were ascribed pretty well all historical Sparta’s laws and regulations. But despite his success with the Spartan men, he was said to have failed to win the women over to his views.

† Xenophon was a much older contemporary of Aristotle. As a guest-friend of King Agesilaus, he had lived in Sparta when in exile from his native Athens at the beginning of the fourth century, and at Agesilaus’s suggestion had put his two sons through the Spartan educational system.

* The new alliance system had a rosy future: it was this that gave Sparta, and only Sparta, the claim to hegemony and supremacy in any Hellenic resistance to Persia. Most of the (few) Greek states that conducted the successful resistance in 480 and 479 were members of Sparta’s Peloponnesian League alliance.

* Identified plausibly at the village of Parori not far from Byzantine Mistra on the flank of Mt Taygetus.

* See Chapter Eight.

* We shall return to this in Chapter Six.

* Leotychidas was a Eurypontid, but only a distant relative of Demaratus. He was also a deadly personal foe, since he had once literally stolen Demaratus’s well connected and wealthy fiancée from him and married her himself.

* He was probably faithfully retailing what he had been told by his anti-Cleomenes informants, who may well have included descendants of Demaratus still living in the region around Troy in north-west Anatolia.

* This is the book immediately after the description of Marathon and the first of the three final books that deal with the battles of 480–479, the Graeco-Persian Wars proper.

* It is all the more noticeable therefore that Herodotus does not introduce the ex-Spartan king Demaratus, an obvious medizer of the first water, into his narrative here. He is saving him for greater things later.

* See Appendix 3.

* When Themistocles requested support in 480 from the Aegean island-state of Andros, the Andrians told him they were unable to help, constrained as they were by two implacable goddesses, Poverty and Incapacity (Herodotus 8.111).

* A notorious recurrence resulted in the execution of Alexander the Great’s official historian Callisthenes in 327, when he refused to kowtow to Graeco-Macedonian Alexander as the new Great King.

* For three years in the early 1990s Dr B. J. Isserlin directed a topographical and geophysical expedition to trace the canal’s basic characteristics.

* Almost all the silver was extracted by slave labour under the most appalling physical conditions. The silver was contained within seams of lead and had to be separated from it by a process called cupellation. The resulting ore had to be washed and processed before it was usable for coinage. The primary extraction and ancillary industries, at their peak, may have soaked up the labour of as many as 20–30,000 slaves.

* See Glossary.

* See Chapter Eight.

* See Chapter Three.

* See Glossary.

† It was a peculiarly Spartan sort of gift, since one of the chief marks of respect that a junior could pay to a senior at Sparta was ostentatiously to yield his seat to him.

* A variant spelling of Orchomenians, referring to the men of Arcadian Orchomenus, not to be confused with its Boeotian homonym, since all Boeotians except for the Plataeans and Thespians had medized.

† Decisions at League congresses were taken by majority vote, with each city represented having one vote apiece, regardless of size.

* This was where Aeschylus was to die and be buried in 456.

† Their father was Deinomenes, so the tyrant dynasty is known as the Deinomenids, on the model of the Peisistratids at Athens.

* Ancient Thrace is roughly modern Bulgaria, plus the coastal strip in the south that now forms part of the modern state of Greece.

* See Glossary; and for their prowess at Thermopylae, see Chapter Seven.

† The Greeks borrowed from the East the notion of a Golden Age, when all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. But gold was not native to Greece, with just a couple of minor exceptions, so the metal retained a whiff of exoticism that acquired a strongly negative connotation by its association with barbarian Persia – especially through the imperial ‘daric’ coinage (see Glossary).

* This was a name destined to echo down the corridors of ancient Middle Eastern history for many centuries to come, as the Romans would become only too well aware in their attempts to control Armenia.

* Paphlagonia was a major source of the slaves privately owned in, for example, Athens. Partly for this reason, Aristophanes caricatures the leading Athenian politician Cleon as a Paphlagonian house-slave in his comedy Knights, staged in 424.

† Both Mossynoeci and Macrones reappear in Xenophon’s Anabasis describing exciting events of 401–400.

* Literally, ‘something too new’ – a very Greek expression.

* Herodotus does not include a description, or even a mention, of the Macedonian troops under Xerxes here (he does include them later on), perhaps because the muster occurred before the army had reached Macedonia. But he does quote a Macedonian source saying that the Thracian Brygi of Asia had once lived in Macedonia. One probable member of this ethnic group has acquired a certain fame among art-historians: he was a potter, or the owner of an outstandingly successful pottery workshop, at Athens in the first quarter of the fifth century and employed an artist known to scholarship as the ‘Brygos Painter’, who specialized in powerfully dramatic scenes of human and divine life.

† See Appendix 2.

* The islanders apart from those of Samos had suffered major losses at Lade in 494, the final battle of the Ionian Revolt, and Persian generosity in victory had clearly not extended to allowing, let alone encouraging, the rebuilding or maintenance of serious navies.

† See Appendix 3.

* Whether she did in fact advise Xerxes intimately in the way that, say, Artabanus certainly did, is perhaps doubtful.

* The Roman word for baggage trains, impedimenta, says it all.

* The Spartans’ two kings were supposedly descended lineally from the two great-great-grandsons of Heracles who had founded the city of Sparta, making Heracles the Spartans’ ultimate ancestor. Ancestral piety including ancestor worship was a Spartan speciality.

* See Chapter Four.

* Cleomenes died a gruesome, allegedly self-inflicted death. It has been suggested that Leonidas may have had a hand in this and in the subsequent cover-up. At all events, he it was who most benefited from Cleomenes’s untimely demise.

† This was true also of Eurypontid King Agesilaus II, who also succeeded an older half-brother; he reigned from c. 400 to 360 and was for a time the most powerful of all mainland Greeks.

‡ In his 1776 republican pamphlet Common Sense Thomas Paine acutely observed: ‘Men who look upon themselves [as] born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.’

* Most famously in the Sacred Band of Thebes, which flourished from 378 to 338 and consisted of 150 homosexual couples. The Spartans practised official pederasty involving an adult with an adolescent, as noted in Chapter Four, but did not officially encourage, let alone institutionalize, for military purposes homosexual relationships between two adult men of fighting age.

* See the case of the Spartan Aristodamus, Chapter Eight.

† See Chapter Four.

* The story of Caryan medism is told by the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius in connection with the type of female-figure architectural member in the form of a column known as a ‘caryatid’, which means literally a female from the town of Caryae. But I am inclined to think it’s made up retrospectively, since in 370 Caryae did defect from Sparta, and the Spartans might well have invented a tale of Caryae’s medism in 480 in order to blacken the name of the men of Caryae and justify their taking harsh steps to recover and punish the town.

* Evidence of this sort has led the bestselling novelist Steven Pressfield to add one further, wholly fictional factor to the Thermopylae 300 equation in his Gates of Fire (Pressfield 1999). As he tells the story, Leonidas personally chose the 300, but paid special attention to the likely comportment of their soon-to-be widows and the effect that their premature bereavement would have on the morale of Sparta as a whole. He has based this persuasive intuition not on any direct evidence but on the attested comportment of the female relatives of the Spartans who either died in or, worse, survived the disastrous defeat at Leuctra in 371 (see Chapter Four).

* To anticipate, the reminiscence here of the language of Simonides’s Thermopylae epigram is palpable and surely conscious. Simonides’s Spartans lie dead in the pass, ‘obeying [present tense] the rhêmata of the Spartans’. Rhêmata, literally ‘sayings’, is derived from the same root word as rhêmata, and rhêmata was the term the Spartans used both for their basic constitutional law (which they ascribed to the Delphic oracle via their lawgiver Lycurgus) and to a number of other lesser laws.

† This point seems to me to be crystal-clear and unarguable, even if Herodotus was also trying to convey another point about the Spartans: namely, that their society was by Greek standards unusually authoritarian. All military discipline is indeed hierarchical, unidirectional and top–down; and Sparta was a uniquely military society.

* From the Greek word for stark-naked, gumnos. Gymnasia were also public parks; it was in a gymnasium in this sense that Aristotle’s Lyceum (institute for advanced study) was located at Athens.

* This is the figure reported by Herodotus as having been inscribed on a commemorative postwar document.

† So black indeed were the Theban traitors painted that 150 years later Alexander the Great could still hope to disguise or at least mitigate his brutally pragmatic destruction of Thebes in 335 by referring back to the Thebans’ medism in the Graeco-Persian Wars.

* It’s a product, I think, of the mainly Athenian anti-Spartan strain within Herodotus’s oral sources. This represented the Spartans and other Peloponnesians as always keener on maintaining a defensive line at the Isthmus.

* See Appendix 1 for a deailed discussion of the source question.

† Greek excavations in the last century uncovered a stretch of walling over 100 metres long; originally built by the local Phocians to resist enemies coming at them from the south, the structure was now refurbished and reoriented by the Spartans to face north.

* Herodotus is not at his best in making clear the inextricable link between the land and naval forces of the two sides, but he does at least mention the key role played by Leonidas’s liaison officer, the ship-based Abronychus of Athens, a trusted lieutenant of Themistocles. More than once he had to run the 7 or so kilometres between the Gulf of Malis and Artemisium.

* A transverse crest is depicted on the little bronze figurine of a cloaked Spartan hoplite now in the Wadworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut.

† The replica Spartan hoplite statue standing proud in Sparta, Wisconsin, has an ‘S’ inscribed on his shield, so as not to confuse the ordinary local viewer; but in antiquity ‘S’ stood for Sicyon. In a battle in the 390s Spartan hoplites wickedly picked up discarded shields belonging to men of Sicyon, precisely so as to confuse their enemies.

* The source is Ephorus as preserved by Diodorus, supported with minor variations by Plutarch and another, inferior writer. Leonidas was allegedly warned of his impending encirclement by a Greek deserter from the Persian camp, one Tyrrhastiades from Cyme in Aeolis, and not (as in Herodotus) by the Phocian guards he had posted to guard the Anopaea. The nationality of the supposed deserter is enough to make the tale suspect as a patriotic fiction, since Cyme was Ephorus’s own polis.

* Megistias, from Acarnania in north-west Greece, was a professional mantis; there were various kinds of divination, not all involving animal sacrifice.

† He was motivated along the same lines as the Spartans had been when choosing the 300 from fathers of living sons.

* The definition offered by the great Maghrebi historian Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century.

* Herodotus 9.78–9. Likewise emblematic of cultural difference is the story that, when the survivors of the Theban 400 tried to surrender to Xerxes, they were branded with the royal mark, as mere slaves.

† The Thespians seem to have sacrificed every one of their available hoplites in support of ‘the Greeks’; it is entirely right and proper that there should be a separate modern memorial in the pass to them too.

‡ Or, as Peter Green has nicely put it, ‘The ultimate victories of Salamis and Plataea became possible, in a sense, only through that splendid and inspiring defeat.’

* The Greek for ‘best’ was aristos; the term for a battlefield performance of excellence, aristeia. Aristodamus’s name meant ‘best of – or for – the people’.

* The most famous example of a foreign grave memorial can still be viewed by the informed visitor to Athens today. Sometime in or after 403 the Athenians erected in their city’s most important cemetery, the Cerameicus, an impressive tomb for those Spartans who had been killed in the fighting that saw the end of the horrendous reign of Critias’s Thirty Tyrants. This was part of the deal whereby Sparta allowed Athens to revert to being a free democracy, if under stringent conditions. The names of the dead were inscribed above the graves, in a Laconian hand.

† The first successful incursion was in winter 370/69 BCE.

* Herodotus says this feature was the same ‘in Asia’ as in Sparta, meaning presumably within the Persian Empire.

* The embalmed corpse of Agesilaus II, who died aged eighty-four in north Africa in 360, was brought back to Sparta for burial, but he had not died ‘in war’.

† The Greek for ‘lion’ is leôn, a quite common Spartan personal name, understandably enough, and the first part of Leonidas’s; a later poem preserved in the collection known as the Palatine Anthology purports to be spoken by this famous Thermopylae stone lion.

* Regent Pausanias (regent for Leonidas’s son Pleistarchus), however, was made of different stuff. There seems no kinder way of putting it other than to say that the victory at Plataea had gone to his head. The stunning celebratory poetry of Simonides, which mentioned him by name, will not have helped to deflate his hypertrophied ego. The Spartans had to remind him, not gently, that it was not he alone who had defeated the Persians, as an inscription added on his instructions to the base of the Greeks’ victory memorial at Delphi, the ‘Serpent Column’ – the cauldron standing on three bronze coils topped with snakes’ heads (see Chapter Five) – tried to make out. Somehow or other he had himself appointed officially in 478 to some sort of command at Byzantium, the obvious nodal point for carrying on – or rounding off – the active anti-Persian naval–military campaign. But while there, he massively alienated the largely Athenian forces, and a majority of the allies clamoured for his recall and replacement. Most likely his overbearing Spartan style of command did not mix brilliantly well with Athenian democratic notions of military service. But the formal allegation made against him was far more serious than that; indeed, it could hardly have been more serious: namely, that Pausanias had been treating with Persia, either with the local satrap or with Great King Xerxes himself, with a view to doing some sort of private deal. My own hunch is that this was black propaganda, a sure-fire way to get Pausanias recalled by the Spartans – and it worked a treat. Pausanias, however, soon returned to Byzantium in a private capacity, and it may have been now rather than earlier that he really did start negotiations with the Persian High Command and even – with the example of Demaratus before him – conceive the notion of becoming a pliant Persian instrument, possibly even satrap of ‘Greece’ (south of Macedonia). This, however, is all speculation. The most important consequence of Pausanias’s career was the shift of the leadership of the anti-Persian campaign in 478/7 from Sparta to Athens, and the formation of the Athenian alliance that soon became an Athenian empire. Later, on his eventual return to Sparta, Pausanias was very harshly treated by the ephors of the day, not so much for his behaviour towards Athens and Persia but because, allegedly, he had been intriguing with Helots to grant them freedom and even citizenship of some sort. He was shut up in a sacred space on the Spartan acropolis and starved to within an inch of his life, being released only so that he could die outside consecrated ground to avoid pollution. In an act of posthumous recompense and restitution the Spartans erected bronze statues of him, and at some point a religious cult to him was established, jointly with that of the other Spartan Graeco-Persian war hero, Leonidas.

* I myself, on the other hand, feel constrained to differ, strongly, from Herodotus’s judgement. True, the Battle of Salamis was a stunning naval victory, one of the greatest of all time. Scholars will forever debate why Xerxes felt he could afford to negate his numerical and tactical advantage by going in to fight in the narrows around the islet of Salamis, thereby experiencing a sort of maritime Thermopylae, but a self-inflicted one rather than a natural obstacle that was unavoidable. There is no debate at all, however, about the strategic genius and other leadership qualities of Themistocles, nor about the courage and faith of the Athenians in temporarily abandoning their polis in the hope of returning to it again another, much better day. Culturally and politically, too, Salamis was of the utmost significance. Aeschylus’s tragedy The Persians, produced under eight years later in spring 472, focuses on Salamis and (the unnamed) Themistocles. Salamis confirmed the status of the Athenians’ democracy as the most effective fighting constitution for them, and confirmed too the hugely enhanced position within it of the mass of the poorest Athenians who had rowed the victorious trireme warships. Victory at Salamis also led more or less directly to the Athenians’ creation of an initially anti-Persian maritime empire that later turned into a major cause of the fatal bust-up between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies in the great Atheno-Peloponnesian War of 431–404. One of those Spartan allies, and not the least important in sealing the Spartans’ eventual victory, was Persia, an ironic twist of fate. And yet: in immediate military terms, the value of Salamis was ambiguous. Had Xerxes won, then the Persians would have had the Peloponnese at the mercy of a naval assault; and, if it is still not quite a foregone conclusion that they would then inevitably have won overall, by land as well as sea, their task would have been eased immensely. Victory at Salamis did not, on the other hand, inevitably mean victory for the resistant coalition Greeks in the Graeco-Persian Wars overall. From that perspective, it was not Salamis but Plataea that was the decisive battle. ‘It was at Plataea, not at Salamis, that the new satrapy was lost’, as George Cawkwell has crisply put it. Xerxes may have retired to Asia after Salamis, but Great Kings did not necessarily lead all major campaigns in person, and he left behind, under the command of the more than competent Mardonius, sufficient forces to complete the job by land as well as by sea. But Mardonius was decisively defeated on land in the summer of 479 at Plataea in southern Boeotia in central Greece, by the largest land army ever mustered by Greeks to that date (some forty thousand in all). Herodotus – even Herodotus, whose views on the critical importance of Salamis we have just rehearsed – was forced to concede that Plataea was essentially a Spartan victory.

* Lysias was not an Athenian citizen, but a permanent resident alien of Syracusan origin, so his speech if delivered would have been delivered by another. His family had personal connections with Pericles, and he was immensely wealthy thanks to the profits from a slave-staffed shield manufactory.

† The war takes its name from Lamia, but Hyperides has to skate over the awkward fact that Antipater broke out from there and in 321 heavily defeated the rebels.

* Xerxes and the Persians had sacked the sacred Acropolis of Athens twice, in 480 and again in 479.

* Second after the Athens-centred phenomenon of the later fifth and the fourth centuries BCE, which had made of Athens, in the phrase of Plato, ‘the city hall of wisdom’.

† Another glittering ornament of the Second Sophistic, but by origin a non-Greek Syrian from Samosata (modern Samsat in Turkey) and so more easily able to maintain a slightly ironic distance.

* Tyrtaeus’s poetry was officially memorized in Sparta and had been sung on campaign at least until the earlier Hellenistic age in the third century BCE.

* A reference to the Battle of Himera, a victory of Sicilian Greeks over invading Carthaginians, legendarily fought on the very same day as Salamis.

* This plane tree of Xerxes is not to be confused with the oriental plane tree grown in Cambridge, at Jesus College, from a seed brought back by Edward Daniel Clarke from Thermopylae. That tree reached its bicentenary in 2002 and was duly celebrated in both Greek and Latin verse composed by a Fellow of the college, Anthony Bowen (also the Cambridge University Orator).

* Besides the Sparta in Wisconsin already noted, we could mention the Sparta in Tennessee that featured in In the Heat of the Night, the memorable movie of Southern racial hatred starring Sidney Poitier. However, the name Thermopolis in Wyoming should probably not be given any other interpretation than the purely topographical – like Greek Thermopylae, it is blessed with mineral hot springs (the world’s largest), and its founding inhabitants probably did not see themselves as making a last stand like General Custer (at Little Bighorn in Montana, on 25 June 1876).

* This is a slightly foxed French translation of part of Simonides’s epigram ‘Go, tell the Spartans …’.

* I have quoted it as the epigraph to Chapter Four.

* See Chapter Eight, and the epigraph to Chapter One.

* On the historical downside, the film accepts and enacts Diodorus/Ephorus’s massively implausible tale of a night commando raid designed by Leonidas to assassinate Xerxes in his bed.

* One small but telling visual mistake merits comment. Miller shows the Spartans with moustaches as well as beards. Yet the historical Spartans of Leonidas’s day in fact shaved their upper lip in subservience to the annual injunction by each incoming board of ephors to ‘shave their moustaches and obey the laws’. The famous marble statue wrongly named ‘Leonidas’ faithfully shows precisely this distinctively Spartan treatment of facial hair: full beard but no moustache.

* A slightly different and fully annotated version of this Epilogue appeared as ‘What have the Spartans done for us? Sparta’s contribution to Western civilization’ in the Classics journal Greece & Rome 2nd ser., 52.2 (2004) 164–79. I am most grateful to the journal’s editor, Katherine Clarke, for permission to reproduce this reworded and mostly annotation-free version here.

* Indeed, from the time of an ancient Greek ‘renaissance’, the Second Sophistic of the second century CE, when the hellenized Syrian writer Lucian awarded Thucydides the palm in his tract on How to Write History.

* I shall use Herodotus’s treatment of Polycrates, the colourful tyrant of Samos in the 530s and 520s, in order to illustrate both. Herodotus knew Samos personally very well indeed, and he picked up unusually rich and detailed traditions both on and about the island.

* It is rather surprising to note that the supposedly ‘scientific’ Thucydides takes Minos’s real historical existence as read.

† According to Herodotus’s account, Polycrates had struck up a useful personal–political friendship with Amasis, but Amasis broke it off when he heard the story of Polycrates’s ring. In brief, Polycrates fears that an excess of prosperity may well cause his downfall, so he hurls into the sea a specially favoured ring. But the ring is swallowed by a large fish, which is caught and presented to Polycrates by the proud and loyal fisherman – and found to contain the ring. Polycrates and Amasis infer that his downfall is inescapable. Actually this is just a Greek variant of a widely dispersed international folktale.

* This, at any rate, is the view regularly taken by George Cawkwell in the most recent scholarly account of Greek–Persian relations available to me as I wrote this book: Cawkwell 2004.

* As Mary Renault entitled the historical novel she devoted to him in 1976.

† Helen (of Troy) was worshipped in Sparta, alongside her brothers: see Hughes 2005.

‡ Pindar seems never to have been commissioned by the Spartan state or by an individual Spartan, though he did manage to sneak in flattering references to the unique excellence of Laconian hunting hounds (Fragments 106, 107ab) and to Apollo Carneios, patron of the single most important festival of the Spartan annual religious calendar, the Carneia: ‘Mine to sing the lovely / Glory that came from Sparta’; and to Cyrene in north Africa, that is, home of Arcesilas, the victor at the Pythian Games of 462/1 who had commissioned this victory ode. Indeed, Pindar seems to have claimed descent for himself from a Spartan who achieved the feat of conquering nearby Amyclae and bringing it into political union with Sparta.

* The Spartans had given Philippides an assurance that they too would be present at the battle, just as soon as the phase of the moon had altered so as to free them from an overriding religious commitment. After a remarkable series of forced marches, the Spartans arrived at Marathon, but on the day after the battle had been fought, as we saw. This was a poignant moment, not without its embarrassment, and one that I am sure contributed to Leonidas’s resolve to make amends at Thermopylae exactly a decade later.

* This recalls a remarkable epigram, possibly also to be attributed to Simonides, that found its way into the later collection, the Palatine Anthology (7.344). Herodotus had recorded (7.225.2) that the Greeks erected a stone monument at Thermopylae in the form of a lion to commemorate the deed of Leonidas and his men; there was a sort of pun involved here, since the Greek for lion is leòn. This poem, collected in the Anthology, is as if spoken by a stone lion.

* Not content with setting up a boastful epigram at the entrance to the Black Sea (Herodotus 4.81.3; compare Nymphis of Heraclea, FGrHist. 432F9), Pausanias also had an inscription added to the base of the Serpent Column set up in 479 at Delphi, the ‘navel’ of the earth. Whereas the inscription on the Serpent’s bronze coils merely stated that ‘These fought the war’ and then gave a list of the names of thirty-one Greek states, headed of course by the Lacedaemonians, Pausanias’s personally commissioned epigram (quoted at Thucydides 1.132.2) virtually ascribed the combined Greeks’ victory to him alone. Any even minimally alert reader of Herodotus would have predicted from this hubris that Pausanias was destined to pay the penalty of nemesis and come to a bad end. He did indeed come to a spectacularly bad end, being starved out – as we learn from Thucydides – in the holy shrine of the Spartans’ patron goddess Athena on the acropolis of Sparta. This end by itself, in the eyes of Herodotus and many other conventional Greeks, would have wiped out the previous kleos (fame) that had accrued to him as conqueror of the Persians – though there were other reasons besides for thinking less than entirely well of Pausanias. Yet the exceptionally pious Spartans were anxious in case they might collectively acquire some divinely sent stain of pollution as a result of the manner of Pausanias’s death in, or very near, hallowed ground. So as an act of divine atonement or restitution the authorities commissioned two bronze effigies of him to be erected on the Spartan acropolis.

† Thucydides, Herodotus’s major successor as historian, offers interesting material and judgement on the Persian Wars as a whole but not on Thermopylae specifically. See Rood 1999.

* The original version of this Appendix was delivered as a lecture at the Museum of the University of Athens in May 2005, to launch the collective volume on Herodotus published by the En Kuklôi (‘In a Circle’) group of the University of Athens directed by Dr Mairi Yossi (Faculty of Classics). I am indebted to Dr Yossi and her collaborators for their kind invitation and matchless philoxenia.

* This is actually a later division of his work, by learned scholars working in the library attached to the Museum (Shrine of the Muses) at post-Classical Alexandria in Egypt, who amused themselves by inscribing each of the ‘books’ under the sign of one of the nine Muses.