June 28, 2006
The Persian Wars Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST This blog is supposed to be tied to American history, so it’s a bit of a stretch, to put it mildly, to write about a book concerning events that took place two millennia before Columbus sailed out of the port of Palos, seeking a new route to the Indies, and bumped into the New World. Undaunted, I will try to make the necessary connection. The events are the Persian Wars, fought in the early years of the fifth century before Christ between the Persian Empire and Greece. The story, told and retold endlessly ever since, can hardly be beat, a classic David-and-Goliath tale. The superpower of the day, stretching from the Aegean to India, able to efficiently command and deploy its bottomless resources, decides to absorb a group of impoverished and politically divided city-states on the fringes of the known world. It should have been a slam dunk. It wasn’t. In a series of battles whose names are still familiar—Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea—the Greeks defended their homeland, their gods, and their way of life, and triumphed. The consequences for world history could hardly have been more far-reaching. As Plato wrote 150 years later, those who defeated Persia “were the fathers not merely of children, of mortal flesh and blood, but of their children’s freedom, and the freedom of every person who dwells in the continent of the West.” The Persian Wars gave the West its sense of self, and the history of the world ever since could well be titled, as the great historian William McNeill did title it, The Rise of the West. The history of the United States is but the latest chapter in that long, long story and in a very real sense we, too, are the children of those men who fought at Marathon and Salamis. Had they lost, it is hard to imagine how the United States could ever have come into existence. Most of us, I imagine, remember the Persian Wars only from some long-ago ancient-history course in high school. That is why I recommend so highly Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West, by Tom Holland.
Mr. Holland writes as well as the best of novelists and never forgets for a minute that narrative history is first and foremost story-telling. But, with a Ph.D. from Oxford, he is a thoroughly trained historian who handles the often sketchy and always contradictory source material with great professional skill. He not only tells the story with wit, grace, and perfect pacing, he brings the long-lost world in which it happened back to vivid life, as he does the major characters, who are, to most of us at least, little more than names, such as Xerxes, Themistocles, and Leonidas. Importantly, he gives the same attention to both sides, showing us their virtues and vices equally. Persian Fire is history writing at its absolute, thrilling best.
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