See also Nylander. The king is supposed to have crossed no man’s land in person, alone and by dead of night, in order to reveal the Persian battle plans to Aristeides: a hugely implausible story. 30 Pindar, quoted by Plutarch, Lycurgus, 21. The Spartans were in the midst of one of their holiest festivals but said they would come when they were finished, in 10 days. 201–4. Independent Premium Comments can be posted by members of our membership scheme, Independent Premium. 57 The phrase “fire-holder” is Boyce’s (Zoroastrianism, Vol. Even though he mislocates the site of the assassination, Herodotus appears on this occasion to have had unusually precise information. The whiff of self-exculpation from a man who had been a notorious medizer is palpable. The applicability of this verse to Lydia is almost certain; damage to the inscription prevents it from being incontrovertible. See Dusinberre, p. 142. 23 Our ignorance of the details of Cyrus’ campaigns in the east is almost total. 41 Darius, the Bisitun inscription (DB 14). 73 From lines 4 and 5 of the so-called “Troezen decree,” a stone stele found in 1959, which appears to provide a third-century BC copy of the motion put forward by Themistocles. Cleomenes was certainly king by 519 BC, at the latest. So explosive was their message and so transformative their influence that it makes most sense to explain the relationship between them and Athenian policy in the summer of 480 BC as one of instantaneous cause and effect. 113-15), who settles on a figure of 300,000 for Xerxes’ land forces; Hammond (Cambridge Ancient History, 1988, p. 534), who goes for 242,000; Green (pp. It was quoted as such in a Byzantine encyclopedia, the so-called Suda, together with an explanation of its origin in the Marathon campaign. If I told you that you could profit from reading the historical treatise of a writer of vampire novels, you might look at me askance. Plutarch, Aristeides, 7). 26 Darius, inscription at Persepolis (Dpg 2). 28 Pindar, quoted by Plutarch, Lycurgus, 21. Clearly, although some horsemen must have been left behind by Datis, there were not enough to influence the result. 4 For the implication that each Spartan brought a single helot with him, see ibid., 7.229. 18 Pindar, Fifth Isthmian Ode, 12–13. The majesty of his prose is unassailable. The saying was also attributed to Socrates. The first battle was won, but not the war. The phrase refers to Ashurnasirpal’s campaigns in the mountains north of Assyria. The aphorism is attributed to Demaratus. Before the twentieth century, the East-West dichotomy had been construed as a clash between Christianity and Islam, culminating in the medieval crusades and the fall of Constantinople. The Spartan "defeat" has rung down the centuries, perhaps the purest example of heroism in history (and a salutary counter to the cliché that only the British celebrate their defeats). 52–3. This seems excessive. 51 Herodotus claims that a shield was used, but since the shields used by the Greeks were convex, and a flat surface is needed to catch the sun, this seems improbable. See Meiggs and Lewis, p. 20. Rebels were flayed, their skins stuffed with straw and impaled on stakes. The Greek-Persian wars were wars of two opposing ideologies; and we are the heirs to Greece's astonishing victory. 67 Ibid., 7.220. True, there is a tradition preserved by Aristotle (Politics, 1311b40) that Astyages was soft and self-indulgent, but this is flatly contradicted by all the other sources, to say nothing of the evidence of the length of his reign: weak kings, in the ancient Near East, rarely lasted for long. Fighting the Egyptians they pinned cats to their shields - a sacred animal to their enemies. A further clincher—albeit an argument from omission—is the failure of Herodotus to make any mention of cavalry in his account of the famous battle. Regardless of the subject matter, I shall read Holland's works. Themistocles? Down south were another kind of Greeks altogether: the Spartans. 6 Phocylides, Fragment 4. 8 Diogenes Laertius, 1.21. The theory also makes a nonsense of the Persians’ attempt to keep their maneuvers a secret. He found it in the off-color religion of Zoroaster, a mysterious prophet who had turned the pagan religion of the Aryan tribes into a Monotheistic clash between good and evil. Herodotus (1.136) and Strabo (15.3.18) claim that Persian boys began their full-time education at the age of five; Plato, immediately after the passage quoted, says seven. 55 For Persian opinion, we have to rely on the evidence of the Greeks: Zoroaster was dated by Xanthus of Lydia (fifth century BC) to six thousand years before the time of Xerxes, a number which almost certainly reflected Zoroastrian notions of the cycle of world ages. "Excellent," replied the Spartans. 7 This account of the Median Empire depends heavily—and inevitably—on the testimony of Herodotus, who wrote more than a century after the events he was describing. The truth has been lost. They were grimly militaristic, culturally barren, and treated their slaves, the helots, abominably. Inevitably, a minority of historians dispute whether it was ever anything more than a myth. 5 The precise geographical limits of Media between the ninth and seventh centuries BC are unclear. . The story is often dismissed as a fabrication, partly because it does not appear in Herodotus, and partly because Plutarch’s chronology is undoubtedly muddled. to your comment. try again, the name must be unique, Please Her shrine by the Eurotas was originally dedicated to an obscure goddess named Ortheia. 39–55) to doubt the existence of a Median Empire at all. I hope this is untrue, for Holland needs to write a sequel to Persian Fire in the form of the overthrow of Persia by Macedon. Community The last native king of Anshan can be dated to this period, and the first Persian to claim the title did so a generation later. The formal nature of such a program was a fourth-century BC innovation, but the words of the oath are traditional, and date back at least to the time of the Persian Wars. 42 For this explanation of the contradictory stories about Demaratus’ paternity found in Herodotus, see Burkert (1965). In short, as this range of opinions eloquently suggests, we will never know. The list of rivers surely reflects the historian’s Greek perspective: it seems improbable that the Indus would not also have been included. This may not be conclusive evidence of a coup, but it is suggestive, at the very least. Veneration of the sun, however, was a constant throughout Persian history, and it seems reasonable to suppose that the Great Kings would have preserved it as an emblem of their might. The past few decades have brought about a fundamental reappraisal of his accuracy: again and again, archaeological discoveries have demonstrated the reliability of his claims. 63 As Green (p. 281) points out, this is the only explanation that can make sense of the claim, asserted unequivocally by the ancient sources, that the battles of Plataea and Mycale were fought on the same day. See Lazenby (1993), p. 228. 15 Herodotus, as ever our principal source, gives us a detailed account of the debate, complete with speeches from Xerxes, Mardonius and Xerxes’ uncle Artabanus, a prominent dove—all of which he claims to have derived directly from Persian sources (7.12). See The Defence of Greece, pp. True, the Athenians almost certainly would have visited Delphi in 481 BC; but the record of any early consultations would have been blotted out by the later, and infinitely more sensational, oracles. 72 It is all too depressingly typical of the general murk of Near Eastern history in this period that the revolt has also been dated to 482 BC. Now that's cool. Thus, almost by definition, as Holland notes, the presumed antagonism between East and West is history�s oldest legacy. Persian Fire; Page 33; Notes. 8, pp. 13 For this interpretation of Herodotus, 5.36, see Wallinga (1984). The description is of the banner of Darius III, the last King of Persia, who was overthrown by Alexander the Great. 1 From bin Laden’s “Declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places,” quoted by Burke, p. 163.