William Shepherd - The Persian War: In Herodotus and Other Ancient Voices

If you go to the Hot Gates take some historical knowledge

and your imagination with you.

William Golding, 1965

The interest of Grecian history is unexhausted and inexhaustible.

As a mere story, hardly any other portion of authentic history can compete with it.

Its characters, its situations, the very march of its incidents, are epic.

It is an heroic poem, of which the personages are peoples.

It is also, of all histories of which we know so much,

the most abounding in consequences to us who now live.

The true ancestors of the European nations (it has been well said)

are not those from whose blood they are sprung,

but those from whom they derive the richest portion of their inheritance.

John Stuart Mill, 1846

Contents

The Persian War is the name generally given to the first two decades of the period of conflict between the Greeks and the Persians that began in 499 bc and ended around 450. However, in 480 and 479, a massive Persian invasion force was defeated and driven out of mainland Greece and Europe, never to return.

When they had gathered together all the spoils, the Greeks put one tenth aside for dedication to the god at Delphi. With this they set up the golden tripod resting on a bronze triple-headed serpent that is to be found very close to the altar. ( Historia 9.81)

This Serpent Column was 7m or 8m tall and crowned with a golden dish for sacrificial offerings to Apollo, its dedicatee. On its shaft were engraved the names of 31 city-states ( poleis , singular polis ) or peoples that had fought the Persians, one of the very few contemporary inscriptions to have survived as evidence of the war. The golden dish survived until only half-way through the following century, but, in the 4th century ad, Constantine the Great, Roman Emperor of the West and East, brought the column to Byzantium, the crossing point between Europe and Asia. The serpents (actually three of them, not one with three heads) were decapitated, allegedly by a drunken Mameluk soldier during the Ottoman era, but the twisted column still stands in the Hippodrome of Constantine, now Istanbuls Sultanahmet Square. Beyond, reliefs at the base of a commemorative column show Theodosius I in his pomp as Emperor of the East in the late 4th century. The great basilica of Agia Sophia with its four minarets behind, and the Sultanahmet Blue Mosque is close by. These are massive symbols of the glories of Greece, Rome, Christianity and Islam.

Alternate history is often little more than an entertaining game, but here the what-if questions are profound. If the Persian War had been lost in 479, would there have been the same golden flowering of Athenian culture and institutions in the decades that followed? If Greece had become part of a Persian empire with southern Italy now on its frontier, would Rome (which had turned republican at about the same time as the Athenians were taking their first steps towards democracy) have been allowed to grow into the world power that Constantine ruled? If not, what of Christianity? Without the bloodstream of the Roman Empires communications network to sustain its growth, Christianity might never have spread to become a world religion and the catalyst that brought another, Islam, into being. A Persian victory would have changed much more than the scenery at the centre of the site of ancient Byzantium. It could have profoundly redirected the subsequent evolution of the cultural, intellectual, political and religious landscapes of Europe and the Middle East.