This is the setting-forth of the research [historiê] of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, done so that the achievements of men may not be lost to memory over time, and that the great and wondrous deeds of both Greeks and barbarians [non-Greeks] may not lack their due glory; and especially to show what was the cause why the two peoples fought against one another.
Herodotus Histories 1.1
SHORTLY AFTER finishing my last book – on Alexander III ‘the Great’ King of Macedon (and a great deal more besides) between 336 and 323 BC(E) – I paid a visit to Thermopylae in preparation for writing this one. From plotting the world-changing course of Alexander the Great over most of the known world to charting the history-changing defence of a narrow pass by a Few. The task was similar in many ways – the weighing of evidence, the estimation of consequence and implication, the judgement of value – but here the subject, though comparably massive, is concentrated in one act carried out in a little space: a suicidally defining stand for ‘freedom’.
The ‘Hot Gates’ – that is what ‘Thermopylae’ means in ancient Greek – are a narrow pass in north-central mainland Greece. The ‘gates’ bit referred to the fact that this was the natural and obvious route for any invading army coming from the north to defeat the forces of central or southern Greece. They were called ‘hot’ because of the presence nearby of natural healing sulphur springs still there today. Here it was that in August 480 BCE an ancient Greek ‘Few’, representing a small and wavering grouping of Greek cities, made their heroic stand against the oncoming might of a massive Persian invasionary force. They were headed by an elite force from Sparta, the single most powerful Greek polis, or citizen-state.
It is disconcerting to find that today the ‘National Road’ linking Athens with Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki in Macedonia, carves its way slap bang through this deeply historic site. Imaginative reconstruction of the ancient scene is not much helped, either, by the occurrence of key changes in the geomorphology of the region. Since the fifth century BCE there have been at least two major earthquakes, and besides those the River Spercheius has laid down alluvial deposits that have caused the sea to recede some five kilometres to the north. So that what was once a narrow (20–30 metres wide) mountain defile with the sea roaring close by on one side has become a road through a fairly broad coastal plateau, with the sound of the sea but a distantly gentle murmur (when, that is, the roar of the trucks and other motor traffic hurtling by does not drown it out).
The modern memorials to Leonidas and the other Greeks killed here in desperate battle in 480 BCE were first erected beside the National Road in the mid-1950s by the Greek government with the aid of American money. This was not all that long after a devastating civil war (1946–9) had left at least half a million Greeks dead. This intestine conflict in its turn had followed hotly on a period of deeply unpleasant foreign occupation by the Axis powers of first Italy and then Nazi Germany (1941–4), notwithstanding the heroic Greek resistance in late 1940 that prompted comparison precisely with their ancestors’ derring-do of 480 BCE.
Clearly, the soothing balm of a memorial to men who had famously given their lives resisting a foreign invasion and an attempted conquest was then sorely needed. The monuments, which have been added to since the mid-1950s, are indeed still suitably powerful and evocative. But if you cross to the other side of the National Road, the rewards for the student of 480 BCE are even greater. Close by is what has been identified – almost certainly correctly – as the low hill on which the Spartan King Leonidas and his few Spartans mounted their heroic ‘last stand’ against Great King Xerxes’s Persians. If you search among the scrub that overlies the site, you will come upon another modern memorial, this one set flat into the ground and decorated appropriately with green Laconian stone (Lapis lacedaemonius) from an area south of Sparta. This memorial is poetic in a literal as well as a metaphorical sense: inscribed upon it is a copy of the two-line epigram, an elegiac couplet, composed twenty-five centuries ago by the contemporary praise-singer Simonides son of Leoprepes from the island of Ceos. This reads, in its most usual English translation:
Go tell the Spartans, passerby,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
Obedience and freedom, self-sacrificing suicide … Thermopylae is a place of witness, redolent of the Spartans’ paradoxical cultural values that need explaining now as much as at the time, when Persian Great King Xerxes uncomprehendingly wondered at the report of these fearsome warriors combing their hair in preparation (though he did not know it) for a beautiful death.
In Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past I considered the final act in one of the greatest dramas in Middle Eastern history: the conquest by Alexander of the once mighty Achaemenid Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus II, also ‘the Great’, in about 550. In this book I am going back a century and a half and looking at that empire when it was at or near its peak, in terms of expressible and visible power wielded from its historic centre in Iran. In 334 Alexander invaded the Asiatic Persian Empire from the European ‘west’, from northern Greece. In 480 Great King Xerxes of Persia invaded Europe – that is, Greece – at pretty much the same point but from the ‘east’. In the very broadest historical perspective of all it is indeed the cultural ‘East versus West’ dimension of the conflict that obtrudes. This is as it should be. Herodotus, our first and best historian of what I shall call the Graeco-Persian Wars, saw things this way himself (see the epigraph on p. ix), and it is in his balanced footsteps that I seek very distantly to tread.
Moreover, this clash between the Spartans and other Greeks, on one side, and the Persian horde (including Greeks), on the other, was a clash between Freedom and Slavery, and was perceived as such by the Greeks both at the time and subsequently. In fact, the conflict has been plausibly described as the very axis of world history. ‘The interest of the whole world’s history hung trembling in the balance’, so the world-historically minded nineteenth-century German theoretician Hegel powerfully put it. At stake were nothing less than early forms of monotheism, the notion of a global state, democracy and totalitarianism. The Battle of Thermopylae, in short, was a turning-point not only in the history of Classical Greece, but in all the world’s history, eastern as well as western.
So we are dealing here with the earlier of the two gigantic clashes of cultures and civilizations that helped to define both the identity of Classical Greece and, as a consequence, the nature of our own cultural heritage. Scholars and other professionally interested parties still argue the toss as to whether Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. There are fewer doubters as regards the (loyalist) Greeks’ resistance to intended Persian conquest in 480–479. But even in this case there are some who say that conquest and incorporation of mainland Greece by Persia would not necessarily have been the total cultural disaster that old-fashioned ‘orientalist’, eurocentric historians like to pretend. We professional historians are at least all agreed that, as things appear to us looking back over the past two and a half millennia, Greece – Classical Greece – is one of the major taproots of our own Western civilization. This is not so much in the sense that there is an unbroken continuity of direct inheritance, but rather in the sense that there has been a series of conscious choices made – in the Byzantine era, in the mainly Italian Renaissance, in the age of Enlightenment and in the nineteenth-century age of imperialism – to adopt the Classical Greeks as our ‘ancestors’ in key cultural respects.
However, the story I have to tell is not as uncomplicatedly black and white as the stereotypes of ideological polarization, both ancient and modern, would like to have it. Neither were the Greeks, all of them, as pure as the driven snow, nor probably were the hearts of the Persians as dastardly black as all that. ‘Probably’ – because, unfortunately, the Persians have not left us the same kind of reflexive, introspective, cross-culturally comparativist literature that the Greeks, famously, did. To put it in the form of an aphorism, there was no Persian Herodotus – nor, if my reading of Achaemenid Persian culture of the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE is at all accurate, could there possibly have been one. On the other hand, there is more than enough evidence to show that the Persian Empire was far more than just a brutal oriental despotism.
There were indeed Greeks living perforce where they had been transported as a punishment for their or their ancestors’ political intransigence, deep in the interior of Iran or on another, fatally alien shore – that of the Persian Gulf. But among the Persians’ many thousands of subjects in their far-flung Asiatic empire were the significant number of Greeks who lived in their own long-settled communities along the Anatolian littoral, from Chalcedon in the north (on the opposite side of the Bosporus strait from Byzantium, modern Istanbul) to the shore opposite the northern coasts of Rhodes and Cyprus in the south. For the most part they were left alone, so long as they paid their imperial taxes and tribute. On the other hand, there were Greeks who, as more or less free agents perhaps, opted to serve the Persians for pay – whether as craftsmen or as mercenaries.
There were even a few ideologically pro-Persian Greeks right at the heart of the matter, admitted to the inner sanctum of the Great King’s deliberations wherever he happened at any time to be based. This might be in Susa, the main administrative capital, or Persepolis (as the Greeks later called it) in the deep south-east of Iran (modern Fars), or further north in Iran at Ecbatana (Hamadan) in ancient Media; and even further north and west still, in one or other of the viceregal capitals of the provinces, or ‘satrapies’, into which the Empire was divided for administrative purposes – at Lydian Sardis, say, adjoining Greek Ionia, which had been brought into the Empire very early on, even before Babylon, or at Phrygian Dascyleum, close to the southern shore of the Black Sea. Many of these ‘Asiatic’ or ‘eastern’ Greeks found themselves, willingly or willy-nilly, on the Persian side during the West–East contest with which we shall be principally concerned. In fact, almost certainly more Greeks fought for or at any rate with Xerxes than against him in 480–479.
So far as the ‘loyalist’ Greeks are concerned, those few, that is, who were in a position – and who plucked up the courage to resist the Persian invasion of mainland Greece in 480, this book will concentrate most extensively on the decisive contributions made by the Spartans, on whose extraordinary society and civilization there has recently been a quite remarkable focus of academic and more popular interest. Three television series have been aired, one of them in over fifty countries on the History Channel, the other two on the United Kingdom’s Channel 4; it was for one of the latter, devised and presented by Bettany Hughes, that I wrote the accompanying book, The Spartans: An Epic History (original edition, Pan Macmillan 2003, 2nd edn, 2004). There have been no fewer than six discussion panels at international scholarly conferences, one held in the States, others in Scotland, Italy and France; and two actually held in or near modern Sparta itself. One of these was organized by Greek scholars including, centrally, members of the Greek Archaeological Service who work there, the other jointly by the British School at Athens (which has been involved with Sparta and Laconia one way or another since 1904 and is currently seeking to establish a research centre in the city) and the local Byzantine and prehistoric/Classical superintendencies of the Greek Archaeological Service. What can there possibly be still to talk about that merits focusing all this media and other attention on ancient Sparta?
This book will seek to provide a resounding answer or set of answers to this question, paying attention not least to the theme of Sparta’s promotion (or otherwise) of freedom, both at home and abroad. There is all to play for – and a great deal at stake – in any history of ‘Thermopylae’. The events of ‘9/11’ in New York City and now ‘7/7’ in London have given this project a renewed urgency and importance within the wider framework of East–West cultural encounter. The history of Thermopylae that I am offering here, however, is one that I would have chosen to write anyway. It is simply too good a story not to retell, on a cultural theme that is too important not to revisit.