Persian Fire (2 page)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-349-11717-1

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders in all the copyright material in this book. The publisher regrets any oversight and will be pleased to rectify any omission in future editions.

Maps by Eugene Fleury

Typeset in Spectrum by M Rules Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Abacus An imprint of Little, Brown Book Group 100 Victoria Embankment London EC4Y 0DY

An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk

www.littlebrown.co.uk

Contents

Acknowledgements

I have been wanting to write a book on the Persian Wars since I was very young, and I owe a immense debt of gratitude to all those who have given me the opportunity to devote three years of my life to its study. To Patrick Walsh, best of friends and agents. To my editors, Richard Beswick and Steve Guise. To Gerry Howard, Dan Israel, Ricardo Artola and Joan Eloi Roca Martinez, for all their encouragement from abroad. To Louise Allen-Jones and Elizabeth van Lear, for their support from nearer home. To Amelie Kuhrt and Paul Cartledge, for sharing their incomparable scholarship so generously, and saving me from more errors than I care to count. To the staff of the library of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, for their perfect blend of efficiency and courtesy. To Maike Bohn, for going out with Michael Cullen, and thereby introducing me to a travel-writer with a limitless knowledge of Greece. To Philip, Francis and Barbaro Noel-Baker, for happy months in Euboea. To Jonathan Tite, for arranging a perfect day on a motor-boat around Salamis. To Nick and Sarah Longman, for their hospitality in Athens. To my father, for his companionship on expeditions over Thermopylae. To Michael Lowry and Deniz Gurtin, for their hospitality in Bodrum. To Elahe Tabari, for her help at Persepolis. To Audrey and Becky Gordon, for everything they have done to keep the enemies of good art from the hall. To Caroline and Jamie Muir, without whose friendship, support and good humour I would still be writing this book, and to whom it is dedicated. To my beloved family, Sadie, Katy and Eliza, for enduring my long stretches of scholastic seclusion with such forbearance, and for touring dusty ruins across Greece, Iran and Turkey with such jollity, and giving me some of the happiest times of my life,

List of Maps

The Persian Empire
                                
xxvi

Greece and the Aegean
                        
xxviii

Mesopotamia and Iran
                                
2

The Peloponnese
                                       
67

Attica
                                                          
110

Athens in the 6th and 5th centuries
bc
123

Persia's satrapies in the West
                
156

Marathon
                                                  
194

The West
                                                    
231

At bay: Greece in 480
bc
                        
256

Thermpolyae
                                            
290

Salamis
                                                       
314

Battle of Salamis
                                      
322

Plataea
                                                        
351

Note on Proper Names

In the interests of accessibility, it has been my policy throughout this book to use the familiar Latinate form of a proper name rather than the Greek or Persian original: Darius, for instance, rather than Dareios or Daryush.

Preface

In the summer of 2001 a friend of mine was appointed the head of a school history department. Among the many decisions he had to take before the start of the new term in September, one was particularly pressing. For as long as anyone could remember, students in their final year had been obliged to study a special paper devoted to the rise of Hitler. Now, with my friend's promotion, the winds of change were set to blow. Hitler, he suggested to his new colleagues, should be toppled and replaced with a very different topic of study: the Crusades. Howls of anguish greeted this radical proposal. What, my friend's colleagues demanded, was the point of studying a period so alien and remote from contemporary concerns? When my friend countered by suggesting that history students might benefit from studying a topic that did not relate exclusively to twentieth-century dictators, the indignation only swelled. Totalitarianism, the other teachers argued, was a living theme, in a way that the Crusades could never be. The hatreds of Islam and Christendom, of East and West — where was the possible relevance in these?

The answer, of course, came a few weeks later, on 11 September, when nineteen hijackers incinerated themselves and thousands of others in the cause of some decidedly medieval grievances. The Crusades, in the opinion of Osama bin Laden at any rate, had never ended. 'It should not be hidden from you', he had warned the Muslim world back in 1996, 'that the people of Islam have always suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist—Crusaders alliance.'
¹
Menacingly proficient at exploiting the modern world of air flight and mass communications he may be, but bin Laden has long interpreted the present in the light of the Middle Ages. In his manifestos, past and present tend to merge as though one: blood-curdling abuse of the crimes of America or Israel will mingle with demands for the restoration of Muslim rule to Spain or of the medieval Caliphate. No wonder that when President Bush chose in an unguarded moment to describe his administration's war on terrorism as a 'crusade' his advisers begged him never to use the fateful word again.