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Authors: Victor Davis Hanson
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the local level were left to worship their own gods. Because
no
culture in the conquered East had any tradition of religion apart from politics, or even embraced the ideal of religious diversity, most Persian subjects considered the Achaemenid religious-political relationship not any different from their own—and if anything more tolerant.
That being said, there were numerous castes of holy men who not only enjoyed political power as agents of the king but also sought vast acreages to support their work. The official white-robed magi were employed by the monarchy as religious auditors in public ceremony and to ensure the piety of the imperial subjects. Mathematics and astronomy were advanced, but ultimately they were subject to religious scrutiny and used to promote in a religious context the arts of divination and prophesy. A humanist such as Protagoras (“Man is the measure of all things”) or an atheist rationalist like Anaxagoras (“Whatever has life, both the greater and smaller, Mind
[nous]
controls them all . . . whatsoever things are now and will be, Mind arranged them all”) could not have prospered under the Achaemenids. Such freethinking in Persia might arise only through imperial laxity; and if discovered, was subject to immediate imperial censure. The classical Greeks were as pious as the Persians, but when conservative citizens rallied to rid their cities of atheistic provocateurs, they first sought a majority decree of the people or at least the semblance of an open jury trial.
If in the past Western historians have relied on Greek authors such as Aeschylus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Euripides, Isocrates, and Plato to form stereotypes of the Persians as decadent, effete, corrupt, and under the spell of eunuchs and harems, the careful examination of imperial archives and inscriptions of the Achaemenids should warn us of going too far in the other direction. The Persian army at Salamis was not decadent or effeminate, but it did constitute a complete alternate universe to almost everything Greek. All things considered, there was no polis to the east. Achaemenid Persia—like Ottoman Turkey or Montezuma’s Aztecs—was a vast two-tiered society in which millions were ruled by autocrats, audited by theocrats, and coerced by generals.
THE PERSIAN WARS AND THE STRATEGY OF SALAMIS
Salamis was the central battle in the clash of two entirely different cultures, one enormous, wealthy, and imperial, the other small, poor, and decentralized. The former drew its enormous strength from the taxes, manpower, and obedience that a centralized palatial culture can so well command; the latter from the spontaneity, innovation, and initiative that arise exclusively in small, autonomous, and free communities of lifelong peers. Contemporary Greeks themselves believed that the course of the war hinged mostly on a question of absolute values. Indeed, they felt that it centered on their own strange idea of freedom, or
eleutheria—
theirs to keep, Xerxes’ to take away. The war, in their eyes, would hinge on how much freedom was worth and to what degree it might trump the king’s enormous advantages in numbers, material wealth, and military experience. The Athenian infantry’s triumph at Marathon ten years earlier had stopped cold a local punitive incursion of Darius, a day’s battle that saw Athens and Plataea alone of the Greeks take the field. That initial Persian expeditionary force of 490 B.C. was not large by later standards—at most, 30,000 invading troops were pitted against a little more than 10,000 Greeks. Xerxes’ subsequent muster, however, was a different army altogether.
Thermopylae, fought a decade after Marathon, was a terrible defeat— for all its gallantry and talk of Greek freedom perhaps the greatest loss in the entire history of Panhellenic operations, and one of the few times in history that an Asian army would defeat a Western force inside Europe. The nearly simultaneous sea battle at Artemesium was at
no
culture in the conquered East had any tradition of religion apart from politics, or even embraced the ideal of religious diversity, most Persian subjects considered the Achaemenid religious-political relationship not any different from their own—and if anything more tolerant.
That being said, there were numerous castes of holy men who not only enjoyed political power as agents of the king but also sought vast acreages to support their work. The official white-robed magi were employed by the monarchy as religious auditors in public ceremony and to ensure the piety of the imperial subjects. Mathematics and astronomy were advanced, but ultimately they were subject to religious scrutiny and used to promote in a religious context the arts of divination and prophesy. A humanist such as Protagoras (“Man is the measure of all things”) or an atheist rationalist like Anaxagoras (“Whatever has life, both the greater and smaller, Mind
[nous]
controls them all . . . whatsoever things are now and will be, Mind arranged them all”) could not have prospered under the Achaemenids. Such freethinking in Persia might arise only through imperial laxity; and if discovered, was subject to immediate imperial censure. The classical Greeks were as pious as the Persians, but when conservative citizens rallied to rid their cities of atheistic provocateurs, they first sought a majority decree of the people or at least the semblance of an open jury trial.
If in the past Western historians have relied on Greek authors such as Aeschylus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Euripides, Isocrates, and Plato to form stereotypes of the Persians as decadent, effete, corrupt, and under the spell of eunuchs and harems, the careful examination of imperial archives and inscriptions of the Achaemenids should warn us of going too far in the other direction. The Persian army at Salamis was not decadent or effeminate, but it did constitute a complete alternate universe to almost everything Greek. All things considered, there was no polis to the east. Achaemenid Persia—like Ottoman Turkey or Montezuma’s Aztecs—was a vast two-tiered society in which millions were ruled by autocrats, audited by theocrats, and coerced by generals.
THE PERSIAN WARS AND THE STRATEGY OF SALAMIS
Salamis was the central battle in the clash of two entirely different cultures, one enormous, wealthy, and imperial, the other small, poor, and decentralized. The former drew its enormous strength from the taxes, manpower, and obedience that a centralized palatial culture can so well command; the latter from the spontaneity, innovation, and initiative that arise exclusively in small, autonomous, and free communities of lifelong peers. Contemporary Greeks themselves believed that the course of the war hinged mostly on a question of absolute values. Indeed, they felt that it centered on their own strange idea of freedom, or
eleutheria—
theirs to keep, Xerxes’ to take away. The war, in their eyes, would hinge on how much freedom was worth and to what degree it might trump the king’s enormous advantages in numbers, material wealth, and military experience. The Athenian infantry’s triumph at Marathon ten years earlier had stopped cold a local punitive incursion of Darius, a day’s battle that saw Athens and Plataea alone of the Greeks take the field. That initial Persian expeditionary force of 490 B.C. was not large by later standards—at most, 30,000 invading troops were pitted against a little more than 10,000 Greeks. Xerxes’ subsequent muster, however, was a different army altogether.
Thermopylae, fought a decade after Marathon, was a terrible defeat— for all its gallantry and talk of Greek freedom perhaps the greatest loss in the entire history of Panhellenic operations, and one of the few times in history that an Asian army would defeat a Western force inside Europe. The nearly simultaneous sea battle at Artemesium was at
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