Thermopylae The Battle That Changed the World

Chapter One THE ANCIENT WORLD IN 500 bce: FROM INDIA TO THE AEGEAN In Lacedaimon are to be found those who are the most enslaved [douloi] and those who are the most free. Critias of Athens, Spartan Society Herodotus begins by placing his chosen subject of the Graeco-Persian Wars in the broadest framework of East versus West historical and (what we should call) myth-historical conflict. A major 'moment' in that chronic Greek-barbarian, West-East contest was the Trojan War sung by Homer in the Iliad. Like its companion epic the Odyssey, the Iliad was the culmination of a long bardic tradition of oral poetic composition and recitation stretching back to the Late Bronze Age or Mycenaean era. But if there was one Homer, that genius of a monumental poet who created the unified stories of Achilles and Odysseus, he would have lived somewhere in east Greece; that is, along the west Anatolian littoral or on one of its offshore Greek islands such as Chios, at around 700 bce. This was also, and not coincidentally, when Ilium or New Troy was founded on what was taken to be the site of Homer's Troy by Greeks coming out from central mainland Greece to settle permanently in north-west Asia Minor. Ilium was just one of a whole host of such new Greek foundations established during the age of Greek 'colonization' which occupied the two centuries from about 700-500.* This great movement of people was prompted by a variety of motives and factors including land hunger, political faction-fighting and sheer adventurism. By the end of it, Greeks were to be found perched (as Plato later put it) like frogs or ants around a pond - or rather two ponds, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The resulting Greek world in the year 500 was not a political unit but rather a series of individual, independent, often mutually hostile political communities that mostly called themselves poleis, or cities. We would call them republics, though there were a number of monarchies among them too - and a unique 'dyarchy', or double kingship, Sparta. There were well over one thousand such independent units all told, scattered around much of the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts - from, as the Greeks themselves said, the Pillars of Heracles (Straits of Gibraltar) to Phasis (in modern Georgia at the far eastern end of the Black Sea). Most lived in Europe, extending from Byzantium (modern Istanbul) in the east to the southern coast of Spain in the far west, and taking in most of coastal Sicily and southern Italy and part of the French Riviera. There were some Greeks settled in Africa too, along the Mediterranean coasts of today's Libya and Egypt, most notably at Cyrene and at Naucratis in the Nile delta. But there were many more Greeks living in Asia than in Africa, and it was in Asia that settlement out of the Greek mainland had first begun, well before the 'colonization' movement proper. Miletus, for example, in Ionia was founded already in the eleventh century bce, at the beginning of an era known to scholars as the Greek Dark Age (c. 1100-800). It was the Greeks of Asia and the major offshore islands (Lesbos, Chios and Samos) who first felt the lash of the Persian whip. By 500 the Persian Empire, founded just half a century earlier, was established as the fastest-growing empire in the entire history of the ancient East. It stretched from the Indian subcontinent to the eastern shore of the Aegean, and it encompassed the ancient territories of Egypt and Babylonia besides its Iranian heartland. The two cultures, the Greek and the Persian, overlapped, intermingled or clashed first at the western, Mediterranean margins of the Persian Empire. Some Greek cities located at the western fringe of Asia had even been forcibly incorporated into the Empire in the 540s. This situation provoked mixed reactions among the conquered Greeks themselves and among their cultural and ethnic kinspeople yet further to the west. In 499 a numberCartledge, Paul is the author of 'Thermopylae The Battle That Changed the World', published 2007 under ISBN 9781400079186 and ISBN 1400079187.