The birth of Western hubris

"Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West"
by Tom Holland
Doubleday, 418 pp., $27.50

The West's view of itself as special, with a sense of mission that millennia later would result in President Bush's "democracy is on the march" line, began at Marathon and Salamis. There Greeks led by fledgling democracy Athens turned back the mammoth Persian Empire.

It was a David versus Goliath victory so improbable that the Greek feeling of superiority is something we Westerners inherit as an unconscious birthright.

In his history of those wars, "Persian Fire," British author Tom Holland draws a direct line between that clash and 9/11 and Iraq. He introduces his subject through the "Why do they hate us?" question that followed the attack on the World Trade Center. He ends it with Alexander the Great conquering the Persians approximately 160 years after the Battle of Marathon, entering fabled Babylon just a few miles south of where American troops would enter Baghdad.

Some historians would take issue with the idea that the present strife can really be traced to an East-West clash 2,500 years old, but it is the eerie echoes of colliding values and world views that makes "Persian Fire" seem relevant as well as gripping.

"And so it was that the Athenians found themselves suddenly a great power," Herodotus is quoted about the sudden emergence of democracy as a cure for aristocratic feuding in 507 B.C. "Not just in one field, but in everything they set their minds to, they gave vivid proof of what equality and freedom of speech might achieve. With the tyrant gone, they had suddenly become the best fighters in the world. Held down like slaves, they had shirked and slacked; once they had won their freedom, every citizen could feel that he was laboring for himself."

This was the unique experiment that was at stake. Traitors abounded. Time and again the Athenian assembly was tempted to give in. Yet in the end they fought, and won.

Holland's book is ambitious. It differs from many accounts in exploring in detail the origins of the Persian Empire, putting a face on the "Asiatic hordes" and allowing the Persians to be more humane, thoughtful, strategic and brave than Western accounts usually allow. He then explains the masochistic militarism of Sparta and the improbable rise of democracy in Athens, so that it takes almost 200 pages to get to the Battle of Marathon.

Yet that astonishing Greek victory over Darius sets the stage for the real contest, the invasion of Greece by the Persian king Xerxes with the biggest army ever assembled to that point — more than a million men, according to Greek historians, or perhaps 250,000 by the estimate of modern scholars.

What follows sounds like fervent fiction. The waters of the Bosphorus are lashed with Persian whips to command them to calm. The 300 Spartans and their allies make a doomed stand at Thermopylae, responding to a Persian threat of arrows enough to blot out the sun with the reply, "Good, then we can fight in the shade."

Athenians feverishly debate whether a Delphic prophecy calling for "wooden walls" means a palisade or the need to build ships. Storms cripple the Persian fleet. Athens burns. Double agents trick the Persians into sailing into a trap in the narrow straits of Salamis. The Great King watches naval catastrophe from his golden throne, exclaiming after an allied queen has rammed her way to escape that "My men have turned to women, and my women to men."

Finally the full Spartan army marches, in grumpy league with the Athenians, and crushes the Persians at Plataea in 479 B.C. Another 30 years of warfare sputtered on before Persia signed a peace treaty with Athens and work began on the Parthenon.

Holland, who ably summed up the chaotic transition from Roman republic to empire in his earlier book "Rubicon," does the same here. The publisher contends this is the only popular history of the entire Persian Wars to be written since Herodotus. The author has a superb ability to marshal hundreds of sources into a coherent big picture and keep it surging forward like a hoplite charge.

He also has a 21st-century sensibility for modern interests, such as mentioning the strange sequestering of Athenian wives that long predates Muslim practice, even while brothels were institutionalized and Athenian whores were on brazen display. We see the horrified mingling of the two classes as Athens is evacuated to escape the Persians.

As in "Rubicon," the labyrinth political plotting of ancients with complicated names can get confusing at times, like missing an episode of "The Sopranos." Holland's scholarly meanderings to impress history junkies occasionally subtract from the main drama of terrifying invasion.

Yet the author's point in always clear and his writing is vivid, letting us feel what it was like to be in the phalanx at Marathon. Here is the first great clash of East and West in a sweeping popular account that seems destined to become a classic.

Yes, history repeats itself. And one can imagine Christians and Muslims arguing who are the beleaguered Greeks, and who are the overweening Persians, today.

William Dietrich is a writer for Pacific Northwest Magazine. His most recent book is "The Scourge of God."