Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (6 page)

present a united front to their neighbors, by taking their place not in

the train of some great clan lord but as the defenders of an ideal, of
iso-

nomia
, of Athens itself. The first year of what later generations would

term the
dêmokratia
served to demonstrate that such expectations

were not farfetched. As would happen millennia later, in response to

the French, the Russian, and the Iranian revolutions, attempts by rival

powers to snuff out the alarming new cuckoo in the nest were com-

prehensively, indeed triumphantly, rebuffed. Goethe’s famous words on

the battle of Valmy might have been applied with no less justice to the

first great victories of the first great democratic state: “From here and

today there begins a new epoch in the history of the world.”15

As in Persia, then, so in Attica: something restless, dangerous, and

novel had come into being. Between a global monarchy and a tiny city

that prided itself on its people’s autochthony there might have ap-

peared few correspondences, and yet, as events were to prove, both

were now possessed of an ideology that could have no possible tol-

erance of the other. Perhaps, had democracy remained confined to

Athens, a clash might conceivably have been avoided, but revolutions

22 Holland

invariably prove exportable. In 499, a series of uprisings across Ionia

succeeded in toppling the tyrants who for decades had been serving the

Persians in the role of quislings; democracies were established in their

place; one year later, an Athenian task force joined the rebels in put-

ting Sardis to the torch. The Athenians themselves, however, dispirited

by their failure to capture the city’s acropolis and by their accidental

incineration of a celebrated temple, had no sooner burned the Lydian

capital than they were scampering back to Attica, gripped by nerves

and regret. Yet panicky though they undoubtedly felt at the notion that

the far-seeing and pitiless eye of the King of Kings might soon be fixed

upon them, they would surely have been even more so had they only

appreciated the precise nature of the beast whose tail they had opted

so cavalierly to tweak, for nothing could have been more calculated

to rouse the fury of the most powerful man on the planet. To Darius,

of course, it went without saying that the Ionian insurgency needed

urgently to be suppressed, and that the terrorist state beyond the Ae-

gean had to be neutralized if the northwestern flank of the empire

were ever to be rendered fully secure. The longer the punishment of

Athens was delayed, the greater was the risk that similar nests of rebels

might proliferate throughout the mountainous and inaccessible wilds

of Greece—a nightmare prospect for any Persian strategist. Geopoli-

tics, however, was far from the only prompting at the back of the Great

King’s mind. Stronghold of terrorists Athens might be, but it had also

stood revealed as a peculiarly viperous stronghold of the Lie. It was for

the good of the cosmos, then, as well as for the future stability of Ionia

that Darius began to contemplate carrying his divinely appointed mis-

sion, his war on terror, to Attica. Staging post in a necessary new phase

of imperial expansion and a blow struck against the demonic foes of

Ahura Mazda: the burning of Athens promised to be both.

Yet if the Athenians had little understanding of the motives and ide-

als of the superpower that was now ranged against them, the Persians

in turn were fatally ignorant of what they faced in the democracy. To

the strategists entrusted with the suppression of the Ionian revolt,

there seemed nothing exceptional about the new form of government;

if anything, it seemed only to have intensified the factionalism that for

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

24 Holland

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

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

26 Holland

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-