Persian Fire: Herodotus, Global Empire, and the Clash of Civilizations
Discussion notes on Tom Holland's "Persian Fire"
“The nature of a land cannot be understood unless its opinions and customs are also understood.” -Benardete, Herodotean Inquiries
NOTE: These are an elaboration of my speaking notes for this month’s men’s group. I generally don’t go into a reading with a plan of what I want to speak about from the book in most cases. My goal is to develop a list of three or four “prompts” or “questions” that can drive the discussion. These questions are all related to the text, however, I do not care if they encompass the whole volume. I do not bring my notes to the meeting but make a solid effort into memorizing any important quotations. I do have them bookmarked in any texts that I plan to utilize for longer passages. During the duration of the meeting, I may or may not discuss everything here — it depends on the other members and what interesting thoughts they deliver.
On the selection of Persian Fire
I have mentioned Herodotus many times over the past four years but have never brought his Histories in for a group reading and discussion. I felt that the density of the work, plus its length, poses a challenge for a four or five week detailed reading. However, I have just finished Tom Holland’s Persian Fire - a narrative history of Herodotus. Holland focuses on the events in Athens, Sparta, and Persia leading up to the great battles and leaves out some of the more ‘fantastic’ elements. What you are left with is a work that is not a lesser version of the original, but something that is more approachable. The upside of Persian Fire is that the author ties in a lot of Plutarch, Xenophon, and Thucydides, all authors that we will approach later on and builds a great foundation for later readings. Accessible scholarship is a good way of putting it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called the Persian Wars, especially the battles of Marathon, Plataea, and Salamis in 480-470 BC more “important to English History than the Battle of Hastings.” He says, “the whole world’s history hung trembling in the balance.” The Persians and the Greeks were irreconcilably alien to each other. To some degree, so were the Greeks to each other. “Why?” Is a question that has been asked, and debated on, for thousands of years. This is why Herodotus made his Inquiries. What lessons can we learn on the way?
Remembering that Argos and Persia were founded by Perseus and Danae, we should be asking ourselves the question, “What was the reason for war between peoples with the same mythological ancestors?”
Why did the assembly of Greek cities defeat the mightiest and richest empire on the planet?
Benardete says, “Seeing what is for what is, was the path to victory for the Athenians at Marathon. Greek superiority rested upon this. Herodotus constantly reminds us of his virtue of sanity: the ability to see things as they are.” What is best for Athenian, or any Greek, was never being born — the second best was dying for your country. This is impossible when you are on the receiving end of a lash, the preferred method of the motley Persian host.
Early in the story, we come upon the Ionian revolt against the Persians. Ultimately the Ionian revolt failed because money is not the sinews of war. The quality of people are what win wars. Those that prefer freedom with toil over slavery with pleasure. The Greeks have reflexive virtue, that virtue of remaining true to oneself. They speak plainly and soberly, “come and take them,” the Spartans say. The Greeks regimes produced better men than their enemy. In Persia, the confluence of merit and rank only occurs by chance, which is a defect of monarchy. Commanders of Persian forces were being designated as either personal favors or insurance against rebellion (an example is Darius’ nephew Artaphernes being appointed commander of the Lydian and Mysian forces during the second expedition to Greece).
How did the Persians build and maintain their empire?
Cyrus treated Astyages with mercy, as he did with Croesus later. Neither of these men treated their defeated foes with the same respect. This was the foundation of a relatively harmonious empire, where ancient religions and titles were preserved, where conquered gods were subservient to Ahura Mazda, and the Persian king becoming the “King of Kings.” We can compare to the later expansion of ancient Rome where this syncretism is observed resulting in peaceful incorporation into empire.
From where does the legitimacy of government come from?
The Greeks were the first civilized people of the west who defeated tyranny from the perspective of tyranny (see Aeschylus’ Persians) - they were also the last, since no one else has. Pindar says, “Law is the king of all” and Law completes man by saying “no” to man.
“Without a monarch, civilization would cease to hold; the demons would surely return. Men knew that in the beginning of the world had been under the sway of demons, until the gods, established order by giving them a king” — Tolkien’s commentary on Beowulf
The tribes of the Eurasian steppes were particularly deadly. The typical methods of conquest utilized by the Persians (forced relocation, restricted diets, etc.) were not applicable — they had no cities. On the steppe, there were no cities and no homelands, just nomadic groups of horsemen that could relocate quickly. This is wisdom, in a way. The cost of this wisdom of the Scythians’ way of life is extreme: nothing they do is admirable. The Persian answer to this was to prop up rump states, satraps on the frontier, to manage hostilities while the Persian kings expanded westward.
What drove the Persians to endless expansion?
We are told of stories of the Magi and the Medes’ persistent fear of decline - “Greatness, like fire, must be tended with care.” Cyrus gives us the first example of hubris. Unsated, his thirst for conquest lead him to his defeat beyond his borders. In battle, the victors drowned his head in wine so that he could “drink his fill.”
“Upon receiving a gift of a frog, a mouse, a bird, and five arrows: “Unless you can burrow, swim, or fly, you will be struck by these arrows.”
This was continued by Darius, who attempted the “end of history.” He felt, “the sky was everywhere, as one under their Zeus, so the whole earth should be under one ruler.” Persian expansion was subversive by nature, undermining native customs to enslave the populace, often in collaboration with the local elite. There are numerous examples of inflammation of class-related strife that encouraged either the people (or the aristocracies), to quite literally “throw open the gates.” Take the surrender of Alexander I of Macedon in the face of Xerxes army - he knew which way the winds were blowing.
The Greeks of the time could not comprehend the vast scale of the Persian empire. It was a three month march to Persepolis, and another three month march to the eastern frontier. Fire beacons signaled across the empire like the beacons of Amon Din in the Lord of the Rings.
In the line of Persian kings, hubris ran in the family. From Cyrus, to Darius, to at last Xerxes, who refuses to admit the distinction between heaven and earth leading him to ultimately trying to shackle nature itself at the Hellespont, and was punished for it.
What can we conclude about the Athenian democracy?
kratos (power) + demos (people) -> demokratia
Athenian democracy was founded on a myth. Greeks were ambivalent to tyranny and some of the tyrants were extremely popular. Many elections were fixed with “palatable” candidates for the illusion of choice. Harmodius and Aristogeiton killed Hipparchus over a lovers’ quarrel. This drove the tyrant Hippias into exile, allowing for subsequent reforms. History was ret-conned to conceal the role of Sparta in the removal of the Athenian tyrants.
At the onset of the Ionian revolt, Aristagoras was able to convence Athens to support the Ionians. His proposal was rejected by the Spartans. It was far easier to convince ten thousand men than it was to convince the Spartan kings. Herodotus says that democracies are particularly war prone.
Radical changes were proposed in the face of the first Persian onslaught. Themistocles, who wanted to build a navy was pitted against Aristides, who wanted to preserve “traditional hoplite values.” Who would build these ships? Why would the hoplite class, with their expensive equipment, vote themselves into irrelevance? The poor had a lot of gain here, as they were the ones who would be paid to row the ships. Thus, thirty years into the fledgling democracy, a “two-party system” was born.
What could resolve this logjam in the face of a looming threat? Society was paralyzed by demagoguery. The peasants were sick of hearing of “Aristides the Just” and of Themistocles’ bribes. Hypocrisy is the lifeblood of democracy, it seems. Athens was equipped with a tool - ostracism, from ostraka — the shards of pottery cast as ballots, which was a pressure valve to break loggerheads peacefully in a sort of “guillotine without blood.” Such civility was unheard of before, and long after. The populace was suspicious of talent, and would frequently exile the flowers of the city (Themistocles found this out after the war!), but this was a moment of crisis that she could not afford delay - potential annihilation.
Aftermath
What happens afterwards are some of the greatest stories in human history. The Battle of Marathon and the Greeks charge to defend the city. Thermopylae and Leonidas’ three hundred. The Spartan Aristodemus, dismissed from Thermopylae due to an eye injury, humiliated as a coward when he returned to Sparta, then redeeming himself at Plataea with a fanatical charge, frenzy, and death. The naval battle of Salamis and the descriptions of the fleet movements, to individuals such as the Persian commander Artemisia. The poignant description of Pausanias’ dinner in Mardonius’ tent that highlights the contrasts the sheer wealth of the Persians to the poverty of Greece, saying, “the irrational character of the Mede, who has such a lifestyle such as you see here laid out before you, and yet who came here to our country to rob us of our wretched poverty.”
In these singular individuals, we learn that virtue depends on choice. Where there is no choice, responsibility disappears. At Thermopylae, the Greeks “made it clear to everyone and not least to the king that there were many human beings [in the Persian army], but few men.” This is why the Greeks handed the largest empire in human history a resounding defeat. It appears that justice takes refuge at the edges of the known world.
The hegemony granted to Athens after the war sowed the seeds of its own destruction described later in Thucydides’ work for all time, The History of the Peloponnesian War.
Recommended reading:
Herodotus, Histories
Strauss, The City and Man
Benardete, Herodotean Inquiries