Persian Fire Read Online Free Page A

Salamis, published over thirty years ago, was the last full-length account written for a non-academic audience, marvelled, in his customarily witty fashion, at the shortage of overviews of the subject.
 
Bearing in mind the fact that the Greek victory in the Persian Wars is routinely described as a fundamental turning point in European history (advocates of this view don't quite argue that today, had things gone the other way, mosques and minarets would dominate Europe, but you can sense the unspoken thought in the air), this omission seems all the more inexplicable. 17
     
    Perhaps Green has not been to Rotterdam or Malmo recently; and yet the fact that nowadays mosques and minarets are to be seen even in Athens, long the only EU capital without a Muslim place of worship, hardly detracts from the sense of perplexity he is expressing. If anything it gives it added force. The Persian Wars may be ancient history, but they are also, in a way that they never were during the twentieth century, contemporary history, too.
    What Green describes as inexplicable, however, is not entirely so. For all its momentousness, its sweep, and its drama, the story of the Persian Wars is not an easy one to piece together. The indisputable truth that they were the first conflict in history that we can reconstruct in detail does not mean that Herodotus tells us everything about them; far from it, regrettably. Yes, historians can attempt to cover some of the gaps by stitching together shreds and patches garnered from other classical authors; but this is a repair job to be attempted only with the utmost caution. Many sources derive from centuries — even millennia — after the events that they are purporting to describe, while many were written not as 'enquiries' but as poetry or drama. Iris Murdoch, in her novel The Nice and the Good, observed of early Greek history that it 'sets a special challenge to the disciplined mind. It is a game with very few pieces, where the skill of the player lies in complicating the rules.' 18 Historians of archaic Greece, who rarely feature in novels, love to quote this passage: for the task that they have set themselves, to reconstruct a vanished world from often meagre scraps of evidence, does indeed resemble, at a certain level, a game. We can never know for sure what happened at a battle such as Salamis, when the sources on which any interpretation must depend manage to be simultaneously contradictory and full of holes: one might as well look to complete a half-broken Rubik's Cube. No matter how often the facts are studied, twisted, and rearranged, it is impossible to square them all; a definitive solution can never be found. Yet even Salamis, notoriously hard to make sense of though it is, can appear prodigally rich in detail in comparison with, say, the early history of Sparta. That particular topic, one eminent scholar has baldly confessed, 'is a puzzle to challenge the best of thinkers'. 19 A second has described it as requiring 'intellectual gymnastics'. 2 " A third, even more up-front, simply titled a book The Spartan Mirage. 21
    But at least the sources for Greek history, no matter how patchy, derive from the Greeks themselves. The Persians, with one key exception, did not write anything at all that we can identify as an account of real events. Tablets inscribed by imperial bureaucrats do survive, together with royal proclamations chiselled on palace walls, and, of course, the ruins of the astounding palaces themselves. Otherwise, if we are going to attempt to make any sense of the Persians and their empire, we must rely, to an alarming degree, upon the writings of others. These, coming as they do mainly from the Greeks — a people variously invaded, occupied and pillaged by the imperial armies — tend not to be wildly keen on giving a balanced portrait of the Persian character and achievement. Herodotus, ever curious, ever open-minded, is the exception that proves the rule. 'Philobarbaros —