1. The Scythians were a nomadic people of southern Russia. Among the first to master the art of horsemanship, their military success was based on skilled light cavalry, armed with bows, not unlike the Indians of the NorthnAmerican plains.

2. An instance of gentle intellectual humour. The quotations are from the Iliad V, 222–3 and VIII, 106–8, but in that context they refer to the ability to put an opponent to flight, rather than to the use of feigned flight as a tactic. Plato was fond of such witty allusions to Homer.

3. In 479 the Persian army led by Mardonius was defeated at Plataea, on the border between Attica and Boeotia, by the united Greek army under the Spartan king Pausanias. Herodotus (IX.53) gives a notably different account of the battle from Socrates’.

4. The élite native Persian infantry were armed with spear, bow and distinctive wicker shield.