Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome

by Victor Davis Hanson

  so long had made fighting the Yauna akin to shooting fish in a barrel.

  From Persia with Love 23

  In 494, in a climactic confrontation off the tiny island of Lade, it was

  Persia’s spymasters as much as its admirals, and its bribes as much as

  its battleships, that served to provoke the final disintegration of the Io-

  nian insurgency. Four years on, and the preparations for an expedition

  against Athens reflected the same core presumption: that rival factions

  were bound to end up dooming the city’s resistance. It was no coin-

  cidence, for instance, that Datis, the commander of the Persian task

  force, should have been a veteran of the Ionian revolt, a general with

  such a specialist’s understanding of how the Yauna functioned that he

  could actually speak a few words of Greek. Also on the expedition, and

  whispering honeyed reassurances into Datis’s ear as to the welcome

  that he was bound to receive, was Hippias, the toppled Pisistratid, evi-

  dence of the Persians’ perennial obsession with securing the collabo-

  ration of native elites. Yet on this occasion, as events were to prove,

  they had miscalculated—and fatally so. For their intelligence was worse

  than useless; it was out of date.

  The Athenian army that confronted the invaders on the plain of

  Marathon, blocking the road that led to their city some twenty miles

  to the south, did not, as the Ionian fleet at Lade had, disintegrate. True,

  Athens had long been perfervid with rumors of fifth columnists and

  profiteers from the Great King’s gold, but it was precisely the Athenians’

  awareness of the consequent peril that had prompted them to march

  out from behind their city’s walls in the first place. During a siege, af-

  ter all, there would have been no lack of opportunity for traitors to

  open the gates, but out on the field of battle, where the Greek style of

  fighting, warriors advancing side by side in a phalanx, meant that all

  had to fight as one or else be wiped out, anyone who wished to live,

  even a would-be traitor, had no option but to handle his spear and hold

  his shield for the good of all. The battle line at Marathon, in short,

  could not be bought. It was to the credit of Datis that he eventually

  came to recognize this, but still he would not abandon his conviction

  that every Greek city ultimately had its price. In due course, after a

  stand-off of several days, he resolved to put this to the test. Dividing

  his army, he embarked a sizable task force—including, almost certainly,

  his cavalry—and sent it around the Attic coast to see if its appearance

  in the harbor off Athens would help to unbar the city’s gates. Yet it was

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  precisely this same maneuver that gave the Athenian holding force its

  chance. Against all expectations, moving against a foe widely assumed

  to be invincible, crossing what many of the Athenians themselves must

  have dreaded would prove to be a plain of death, they charged an en-

  emy that no Greek army had ever before defeated in open battle. The

  reward for their courage was a glorious, an immortal victory. Fearful

  still of treachery, however, the exhausted and blood-streaked victors

  had no time to savor their triumph. Instead, in the full heat of day

  they headed straight back for Athens, “as fast as their legs could take

  them.”16 They arrived in the very nick of time, for not long afterward

  Persian transport ships began to glide toward the city’s harbor. For a

  few hours they lay stationary beyond its entrance; then, as the sun set

  at last, they raised anchor, swung around, and sailed away. The threat

  of invasion was over—for the moment, at any rate.

  To be sure, there was no doubt that what had saved Athens on the

  battlefield of Marathon was first and foremost the prowess of its own

  citizens: not merely their courage but also the sheer pulverizing impact

  of their charge, the heavy crunching of spears and shields into oppo-

  nents wearing, at most, quilted jerkins for protection and armed, per-

  haps, many of them, only with bows and slings. Yet something more

  had been in conflict on that fateful day than flesh and metal alone: Mar-

  athon had also been a testing of the stereotypes that both sides had of

  the other. The Athenians, by refusing to play the role al otted them by

  the Persians’ spymasters, had duly served to convince themselves once

  and for al that the watchwords of the democracy—comradeship, equal-

  ity, liberty—might indeed be more than slogans. Simultaneously, the su-

  perpower that for so long had appeared invincible had been shown to

  have feet of clay. The Persians might be defeated, after al . “Barbarians,”

  the Ionians had always cal ed them, a people whose language was gib-

  berish, who went “bah, bah, bah”—and now, in the wake of Marathon,

  the Athenians began to do the same. It was a word that perfectly evoked

  their dread of what they had been forced to confront on the day of their

  great victory, an alien, mil ing numberless horde, jabbering for their de-

  struction. Yet “barbarian,” in the wake of such a battle, could also sug-

  gest something more: a sneer, a tone of contempt. A self-assurance, in

  short, more than fit to go nose to nose with that of a superpower.

  From Persia with Love 25

  Here, then, was a measure of the decisiveness of Marathon: that it

  helped to purge the Athenians of the deep-rooted inferiority complex

  the Greeks had traditionally felt whenever they compared themselves

  to the great powers of the Near East. Nor, as the Athenians themselves

  never wearied of pointing out, had the victory been won on behalf

  of their city alone. In its wake, even those Greeks who loathed the

  democracy could walk that little bit taller, confident that the qualities

  that distinguished them from foreigners might, just perhaps, be the

  mark of their superiority. Not, of course, that a temporary reverse on

  the distant frontier of their empire had done anything to diminish the

  Persians’ own conceit and sense of entitlement; and so it was, ten years

  after Marathon, when Xerxes, Darius’s son and heir, embarked on a

  full-scale invasion of Greece, that the resulting conflict served to pro-

  vide an authentic clash of ideals. Indeed, on the Persian side, Xerxes’

  determination to give form to his sense of global mission was such that

  it took precedence over purely military considerations. So it was that,

  rather than leading a strike force such as Cyrus would have recognized,

  capable of descending on the lumbering infantrymen of the enemy

  with the same murderous speed that had always proved so lethal to the

  Greeks of Ionia, he opted instead to summon a tribute of contingents

  from all the manifold subject peoples of his empire, a coalition if not

  of the willing then of the submissively dutiful, at any rate. Naturally,

  this swelling of his army with a vast babel of poorly armed levies repre-

  sented a fearsome headache for his harassed commissariat, but Xerxes

  judged that it was necessary to the proper maintenance of his dignity.

  After all, to what did the presence in his train of the full astounding
<
br />   diversity of his tributaries give glorious expression if not his rank as

  the lieutenant on earth of Ahura Mazda? Nor was that all. The rumor

  of his approach, assiduously fanned by Persian agents, promised fair

  to overwhelm the Greeks with sheer terror—or else, at the thought

  of all the potential pickings on offer, with greed. It must have seemed

  to Xerxes, as he embarked on his great expedition, that the whole of

  Greece would end up dropping like overripe fruit into his lap.

  But it did not. Indeed, for al the wel -honed bril iance of the invad-

  ers’ propaganda chiefs, they found themselves, over the course of the

  invasion, being repeatedly outsmarted by the Greeks. What made this

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  al the more striking an upset was that the Persians, in the opening

  rounds of the campaign, did indeed have genuine triumphs to trumpet.

  At the mountain pass of Thermopylae, for instance, their achievement

  in dislodging a force of five thousand heavy infantry from a nearly im-

  pregnable position, in wiping out hundreds of the supposedly invincible

  Spartans, and in kil ing one of their kings was a thumping one. No won-

  der that Xerxes invited sailors from his fleet to tour the Hot Gates, “so

  that they might see how the Great King deals with those lunatics who

  presume to oppose him.”17 No wonder either that the Peloponnesian

  land forces, brought the news of Thermopylae, immediately scuttled

  back behind the line of the Isthmus of Corinth and refused to reemerge

  from their bolt-hole for almost a year. Clearly, then, for any Greek re-

  solved to continue the fight, it was essential to transmute the disaster at

  the Hot Gates into a display of heroism sufficiently glorious to inspire

  the whole of Greece to continued defiance. Indeed, in the immediate

  wake of Thermopylae, with their city defenseless before the Persian

  juggernaut, the Athenians had, if anything, an even greater stake than

  the Spartans in casting the dead king and his bodyguards as martyrs for

  liberty. Perhaps, then, it is an index of their success that the Pelopon-

  nesians, in the wake of the capture of Athens and the burning of the

  temples on the Acropolis, did not withdraw their fleets as they had pre-

  viously withdrawn their land forces but were prepared instead to join

  with the Athenian ships and make a stand in the straits of Salamis. By

  doing so they demonstrated that the spin of the Greek propagandists

  had indeed been something more than spin: that the bloody defeat at

  Thermopylae had been, precisely as they had claimed, a kind of victory.

  It was to prove a decisive one as well. At Salamis and at Plataea, on

  sea and then on land, the Greek allies crushingly repulsed the amphibi-

  ous task force that had been ranged against them and ensured that the

  Pax Persica would not be extended to Greece. The failure of the at-

  tempt had certainly not been due to Persian effeminacy, or softness, or

  any lack of courage, “for in bravery and strength,” as the Greeks them-

  selves freely acknowledged, “the two sides were evenly matched.”18

  Indisputably, however, in man-to-man combat, Greek equipment and

  training had proven far superior, for Plataea had confirmed the lesson

  of Marathon, that in pitched battle the Persian infantry was no match

  From Persia with Love 27

  for the impact of a phalanx. Most wounding of all, however, for the

  bloodied King of Kings was surely the way in which his own strengths

  had been used against him: his hitherto unchallenged mastery of es-

  pionage and self-promotion. At Salamis, for instance, the Athenian

  admiral, displaying an almost Persian grasp of psychology, had lured

  the imperial fleet into an ambush by assuring Xerxes that he wished

  to come over to his side, a lie that the Great King and his advisers,

  remembering Lade, had been predisposed to believe. Then, shortly be-

  fore embarking on the campaign that would lead them to Plataea, the

  Greek allies had sworn a terrible oath, that all the temples burned by

  the barbarians should be left forever as blackened ruins, “to serve as

  a witness for generations yet to come.”19 This, of course, was to turn

  Xerxes’ self-estimation devastatingly against him, casting him not as

  the defender of order but as its great enemy and casting his empire not

  as the agency of truth and light but rather as an impious despotism

  rightfully humbled by the gods. This, as a theme, was one that would

  never cease to inspire the Greeks. It would help to inspire incomparable

  drama, history, and architecture. As a result, for as long as Aeschylus

  continues to be watched, Herodotus read, or the Parthenon admired, it

  will never be forgotten. Two and a half thousand years on, and the men

  who fought at Marathon and Thermopylae, at Salamis and Plataea, re-

  main secure in their victory.

  Yet the failure of the world’s first superpower to bring what it saw as

  security and order to a mountainous backwater on the very periphery

  of its interests does not necessarily mean that the Persians and their

  empire have nothing of value to teach the present day—just the op-

  posite, in fact. If it is true that in matters of combat and strategy, as in

  so much else, the West has long considered itself heir to the Greeks,

  that has not prevented “the Persian way of war” from casting its own

  lengthy shadow over the centuries. Seen in that light, the future of hu-

  man conflict is likely to prove no less Persian than Greek.

  Further Reading

  The fons et origo of information on the Greco-Persian Wars is, of course, Herodotus,

  the first and most readable of historians. The most fluent translation in English is the

  Everyman edition; the best annotated is The Landmark Herodotus (New York: Pantheon,

  28 Holland

  2007). Another key source is Aeschylus’s play The Persians, with its celebrated descrip-

  tion of Salamis, written by a veteran of the Greco-Persian Wars; a useful edition is

  Edith Hall’s (Warminster, UK: Aris and Phillips, 1996). Diodorus and Plutarch provide

  valuable, though late, supplementary information.

  No Persian is known even so much as to have mentioned the invasion of Greece.

  That does not mean, however, that there are no relevant sources for this period from

  the Persian side. The definitive collection is Amélie Kuhrt’s, published in two vol-

  umes as The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period (London:

  Routledge, 2007). The definitive book on the Persian Empire—and an epochal work

  of scholarship—is by Pierre Briant, translated into English by Peter T. Daniels as From

  Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns,

  2002). Other excellent recent general studies include Ancient Persia, by Josef Wiese-

  höfer (London: Tauris, 2001), and The Persian Empire, by Lindsay Allen (Chicago: Uni-

  versity of Chicago Press, 2005). The catalogue of a recent exhibition at the British

  Museum, Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia, edited by John Curtis and Nigel

  Tallis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), is sumptuously

  illustrated.

  For Persian involvement in
Iraq, see the collection of essays edited by John Cur-

  tis, Mesopotamia and Iran in the Persian Period: Conquest and Imperialism. Proceedings of a

  Seminar in Memory of Vladimir G. Lukonin (London: British Museum Press, 1997). For

  Lydia and Ionia, see Aspects of Empire in Achaemenid Sardis, by Elspeth R. M. Dusinberre

  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Sparda by the Bitter Sea: Imperial

  Interaction in Western Anatolia, by Jack Martin Balcer (Chicago: University of Chicago

  Press, 1984). Balcer is also the author of a fascinating study of Darius’s accession to

  power, Herodotus and Bisitun: Problems in Ancient Persian Historiography (Stuttgart: Franz

  Steiner, 1987). The best study of the notorious academic bog that is Persian religion is

  by Jean Kellens, a collection of essays translated into English as Essays on Zarathustra

  and Zoroastrianism (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2000). For the specifics of Persian war-

  fare, see Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War, by Kaveh Farrokh (Oxford: Osprey,

  2007). For a valuable overview of Greco-Persian relations all the way from the conquest

  of Ionia to Alexander, see The Greek Wars: The Failure of Persia, by George Cawkwell

  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  The literature on the Greco-Persian Wars themselves is voluminous. Essential

  studies include A. R. Burns’s Persia and the Greeks: The Defence of the West, 2nd ed.

  (London: Duckworth, 1984), and Peter Green’s wonderfully written The Greco-Persian

  Wars (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970). The best mili-

  tary study is J. F. Lazenby’s The Defence of Greece 490–479 bc (Warminster, UK: Aris and

  Phillips, 1993). Recent books on individual battles include Thermopylae: The Battle That

  Changed the World, by Paul Cartledge (London: Overlook Press, 2006), and Salamis: The Greatest Naval Battle of the Ancient World, 480 bc, by Barry Strauss (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). For the enduring impact of the wars on the popular imagination, see

  Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium, edited by Emma

  Bridges, Edith Hall, and P. J. Rhodes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Mod-

  esty, of course, forbids me from recommending my own Persian Fire: The First World

  Empire and the Battle for the West (London: Time Warner Books, 2005).

  From Persia with Love 29

  notes