Titans of History (5 page)

Boys were taught only the skills needed in war. Literacy was of no importance, and music only valued insofar as it encouraged heroic thoughts. Cunning, endurance, stamina and boldness were all prized. The boys slept on pallets made of rushes they gathered themselves. They were kept hungry to encourage them to take the initiative and steal food and were only punished if they were caught.

Flogging competitions tested their mental and physical stamina. Some boys died, but as long as they had betrayed no flicker of emotion they were commemorated with a statue. Pitched into battles against each other, the boys went at it with unremitting
savagery. They spent long periods fending for themselves in the wild. As the twenty-year-old soldier-citizens approached the end of their training, the elite were sent out to live a guerrilla existence, using
helots
(slaves) as target practice.

All young men had to live in barracks until they were thirty. They were encouraged to marry, but they could only visit their wives by stealth. “Some of them,” reports Plutarch, “became fathers before they looked upon their own wives by daylight.” It mattered little: their education had produced an unbreakable bond. “They neither would nor could live alone,” Plutarch continues, “but were in manner as men incorporated one with another.”

“A city will be well fortified which is surrounded by brave men and not by bricks,” declared Lycurgus. Sparta's citizens did not work—that was for the
helots
, who outnumbered them twenty-five to one. They were rather born and bred to fight, so in this respect the heroism of the 300 at Thermopylae should not surprise us.

It was said that the Delphic Oracle had prophesied to Leonidas that only the sacrifice of a king descended from Hercules could save his city from destruction. Leonidas, the seventeenth king of the Agiad dynasty, knew that his family claimed descent from Hercules and thus from Zeus. When representatives of the terrified Greek city-states met to confer at Corinth to discuss Xerxes' advance, Leonidas volunteered to lead his men to head off the Persians at the only choke-point left: the narrow pass of Thermopylae.

It seemed an unwinnable battle from the start. With the Athenians setting sail to fight the Persians at sea and the other city-states apparently resigned to their fate and focusing instead on securing victory at the Olympics, Leonidas was given a force of no more than 7000 Greeks to combat the vast Persian army. Even Sparta—occupied by its own ceremonial games and wanting to reserve the mass of its troops to defend the Isthmus of Corinth, the gateway to the Peloponnese—allowed its king just 300 soldiers.
Leonidas, who chose only men with sons old enough to assume their fathers' role, seemed in no doubt that he was going to his death, telling his wife: “Marry a good man and have good children.”

The laconic wit of the Lacedaemonians spread the legend of Spartan intrepidity across the world. Asked by Xerxes' envoy to order his army to lay down its arms, Leonidas replied, “Come and get them.” His men were no less defiant. When the Persians threatened to let loose so many arrows that the light of the sun would be blotted out, one Spartan commented, “So much the better. We will fight in the shade.”

Xerxes was confident of victory after his scout reported that the Spartans appeared to be preparing for battle by performing stretching exercises and combing their long hair. But as wave upon wave of Persians tried to force their way through the pass the next day, they were cut down in their thousands. The oncoming Persians were forced to scale a wall of their fallen comrades, and then they found themselves in a death trap. After three days of hurling tens of thousands of men at the small band of Greeks, Xerxes withdrew to rethink.

Had it not been for the actions of one man, the Delphic Oracle might have been proved false. But when a Greek traitor called Ephialtes showed the Persians a hidden path that led behind Greek lines, the fate of Leonidas was sealed. Leonidas sent away the bulk of his army. With 700 Thespians who chose to stay, and 400 Thebans who deserted almost immediately, Leonidas and his 300 Spartans set themselves up as a rearguard to delay the Persian advance and protect the retreating Greeks. They knew they would die fighting.

They fought with spears. When their spears shattered they fought with swords. Once those were broken, they fought with teeth and hands until they fell. The historian Herodotus estimated that this tiny band inflicted losses of 20,000 on the Persians. When Leonidas' body was recovered, Xerxes, raging impotently at his ignominious
victory, ordered that the dead king be decapitated and his body crucified. Forty years later Leonidas' remains were finally returned to the Spartans, to be buried with the honor they were due.

Leonidas' last stand inspired the Greeks to rally and fight for their freedom. Their subsequent victories over the Persians at sea (Salamis) and on land (Plataea) ensured that Xerxes was the first, and last, Persian sovereign to set foot on Greek soil. The suicidal bravery of the Spartans, so gloriously victorious in defeat, is commemorated in a famous epitaph inscribed on a stone marking the place where they fell at Thermopylae:

Go tell it in Sparta, stranger passing by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie
.

?484–430/420
BC

[I write] in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done
.

Herodotus,
The Histories
, Book I

Herodotus was the West's “Father of History.” An adventurous traveler, he used his gift for storytelling to recount the upheavals affecting the lands where Europe, Asia and Africa meet. He is best known as a hawk-eyed observer of the epic wars between Greece and Persia in the 5th century
BC
, but he also charted the growing rivalry between Athens and Sparta.

Herodotus was the first to employ many of the techniques of
modern historical writing, and although his credibility has sometimes been called into question, modern research has often proved him right.

He was probably born in Halicarnassus, then under Persian rule, but he lived for much of his life in Athens, where he met the Greek dramatist Sophocles. Herodotus left Athens for Thurii, a colony in southern Italy that was sponsored by Athens. The last event recorded by Herodotus took place in 430
BC
, although it is not certain when he died.

If our knowledge of his life is sketchy, our understanding of Herodotus' times is exceptional, thanks to the work he undertook. He traveled extensively through Egypt, Libya, Syria, Babylonia, Lydia and Phrygia. He sailed up the Hellespont to Byzantium, visited Thrace and Macedonia, and journeyed north to the Danube, then traveled east along the northern coast of the Black Sea.

Herodotus' masterpiece was his
Histories
, divided into nine books, each named after one of the Greek muses. The first five books concern the background to the Greco-Persian Wars of 499–479
BC
. The final four comprise a history of the wars themselves, culminating in the invasion of Greece by the Persian king Xerxes at the head of a vast army.

The books setting up the background to the wars are subtle works that give a wealth of geographical and political information about the Persian empire and its rulers. They also chart the fundamental differences between Persian and Greek society, with a level of comparison that was unmatched by the city chroniclers who had been the writers of history before Herodotus. Herodotus notes how the Persian empire, although made up of diverse peoples divided by religion, geography and language, nevertheless acts with a remarkable unity. The Greeks, by contrast, drawn from a relatively small pool of culturally homogeneous city-states, are prone to faction and infighting.

Such astute general observations help to provide an explanation for the events contemporary with Herodotus' own life, when the political rivalries and disputes within Athens affected the course of the bloody contests between the Athenians and the Spartans. This grand, thematic approach was something quite new in historical writing.

The Histories
is a detailed account of four generations of Persian kings and their conquests. Herodotus first describes Cyrus the Great's expedition to Lydia, followed by Cambyses' conquest of Egypt and his stalled expedition to Ethiopia. After Cambyses' madness and death comes the reorganization and further expansion of the empire under Darius the Great, and finally Herodotus recounts the campaigns led by Xerxes against the Greeks.

Herodotus tends to attach importance to the actions, personalities and squabbles of individual protagonists. Xerxes is portrayed as arrogant, petulant, savage and cruel, and Herodotus suggests that it was these defects of character that caused his invasion to fail.

For Herodotus, pride always comes before a fall, but he emphasizes that such failures are not the punishment of the gods, but rather result from human mistakes. This rational approach, in which the gods did not intervene in the affairs of men, was a major innovation and formed the basis for the tradition of Western history.

The “Father of History,” has also been called the “Father of Lies.” It is true that some of his tales, such as that of the giant man-eating ants, are fables. But his methods were those of a true historian: he compared his sources wherever possible. He was also a consummate storyteller; the first historian, and arguably one of the greatest ever.

c.
450–404
BC

It is wiser not to rear a lion's whelp, but if you do, you must accept its ways
.

The dramatist Aeschylus' verdict on Alcibiades (as represented by Aristophanes in his play
The Frogs
)

Alcibiades was the gilded youth in the golden age of classical Greece, who took center stage in the life-and-death struggle that enveloped Athens in the second half of the 5th century
BC
. A dazzling politician and brilliant military leader, he was uniquely blessed: well-born, charming, beautiful, charismatic, quick-witted, eloquent. But his virtues were matched by deep flaws: vanity, unscrupulousness and egotism. Hamstrung by his political enemies and by his own shortcomings, in the end he was unable to harness his talents to save his city from destruction.

At the time of Alcibiades' birth in or just before 450
BC
, the city of Athens was at the height of its power and wealth. Less than thirty years earlier, the Athenians had led an alliance of Greek states to turn back the armies of Persian invaders rolling in from the east. But what had started as a voluntary league of equals had gradually been transformed into an Athenian maritime empire. Throughout Alcibiades' adolescence there had been growing tension and eventually, in 431, Sparta, a conservative state increasingly alarmed at the expansive imperial ambitions of Athens, could take no more and attacked, so precipitating the Peloponnesian War. This was to engulf the Greek
world for the next twenty-seven years and finally led to the total defeat of Athens.

Alcibiades' father had died in battle in 447, leaving the boy to be raised in the household of Pericles, the greatest Athenian statesman and heroic leader of the day. Alcibiades was a follower of the philosopher Socrates and his superb oratorical skills must in part have been due to the excellent grounding in rhetoric he received at the hands of Socrates and Pericles.

In 421, after ten years of indecisive fighting, Athens and Sparta negotiated the precarious Peace of Nicias. Piqued at being considered too young to take part in the peace talks, Alcibiades instead set about undermining them, first holding private discussions with the Spartan ambassadors and then attempting to ridicule them before the Athenian assembly. He was elected general in 420 and orchestrated a new alliance against Sparta, but his aggressive ambitions were thwarted two years later when the new allies were heavily defeated by the Spartans at Mantinea.

The defining moment of Alcibiades' career came in 415, when he once again took up the cause of the war party by championing an ambitious plan to send a major expeditionary force to attack the city of Syracuse in Sicily. His view prevailed and he was appointed one of the three generals to lead the expedition. However, as he was about to set sail, his enemies managed to embroil him (perhaps unjustly) in scandal when the
hermoi
—sacred boundary posts positioned all around Athens—were mysteriously mutilated. The outrage was considered a bad omen for the mission, which nevertheless set sail with the charges unresolved.

Recalled to face trial, Alcibiades fled and was sentenced to death in his absence. Now revealing the full depths of his vengeance, he defected to Sparta and persuaded them to send forces to reinforce Syracuse, which contributed to the catastrophic defeat of the Athenians two years later. Then he encouraged Sparta to build
a fortified outpost at Decelea, in sight of the city of Athens. This cut off the Athenians from their homes, crops and silver mines, forcing them to live inside the city walls all year round.

Having caused trouble for Athens at home, Alcibiades moved east to Ionia (Asia Minor), fomenting revolts among Athens' subject allies. However, his scheming with Sparta came to an abrupt end when he was suspected of having an affair with the Spartan king's wife. In mortal danger, he defected once again, this time to Persia. Now in negotiation with the Persians, Alcibiades was involved in stirring up political unrest in Athens, where in 411 a new (albeit short-lived) oligarchic regime was set up.

Believing (unrealistic) promises of Persian assistance, the Athenian fleet reinstated Alcibiades as general. Between 411 and 408 he redeemed himself by leading the Athenians to a spectacular recovery with a series of military successes. Most notably, he inflicted a crushing defeat on the Spartan fleet at Cyzicus in 410 and helped Athens regain control over the supply route through the Black Sea.

Invited back to Athens and cleared of any impropriety, Alcibiades was given complete command of the war on land and at sea. But following a naval setback at Notium in 406 (due to the disobedience of one of his subordinates—Alcibiades himself was absent), he lost his position. In 405, following a catastrophic naval defeat at Aegospotami—which occurred despite Alcibiades' warnings to the Athenian commanders—he returned to Persia, where he was murdered, probably at the instigation of Sparta, in 404.