In Our Time - Thermopylae

Episode Date: February 5, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Battle of Thermopylae. For the historian Herodotus, the Battle of Thermopylae was the defining clash between East and West: “The Persians fell in their scores, for the officers stood behind lashing them forward, forward all the time. Many fell into the sea and were drowned, many more were trampled to death by their comrades ... The Greeks knew they were doomed now the Persians had discovered a way round the hill, and put forth their last ounce of strength, utterly desperate, utterly unsparing of their lives. (King) Leonidas fell in this battle. He had proved himself a great and brave man”.A force of three hundred free Spartans and their King had stood and fallen before an invading army of three million, led by a brutal tyrant. Or so the story goes – such was their courage and its association with freedom that, nearly two and a half thousand years later, William Golding wrote, “A little of Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go where I like and write what I like. He contributed to setting us free”.How important are the Greek/Persian wars to the story of democracy? Was the West and its values really so far removed from life in the Persian Empire?With Tom Holland, historian and author of Persian Fire; Simon Goldhill, Professor in Greek Literature and Culture at King’s College, Cambridge; Edith Hall, Leverhulme Professor of Greek Cultural History at the University of Durham and author of Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, there are certain events in history which have often been thought of as crucial. The Battle of Thermopylae is seen to be one of those. Two and a half thousand years ago,

a few warriors from the cities of Greece, especially Sparta, held off the hugely more numerous Persians, about two million of them it's claimed, who brought together for this war people such as the Babylonians, the Medians, and the Egyptians, often more civilized then than the infant states of Greece. But later readings of that battle

have said that it saved what became Western civilization, its democracy, its Socratic cast of mind, its philosophy, its arts and sciences, the engine room of the modern world. Or is this just mythologising? Were the 300 Spartans combing their hair in final acknowledgement that they were facing death at Thermopylae in truth so crucial? Did they enable Western civilization as we know it to survive and thrive? The father of history, Herodotus, thought so 2,500 years ago.

The novelist William Golding thought so 50 years ago. What of today's historians? How important is the Greek and Persian war to the story of democracy, though? Was the West and its values really so far removed from life in the Persian? Empire. With me, to discuss the legacy of Thermopylae and the Persian Wars is Edith Hall, Professor of Greek Cultural History at Durham University, and author of Inventing the Barbarian. Tom Holland, historian and author of a forthcoming book on the Greco-Persian Wars, and Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek at King's College, Cambridge.

Tom Holland, the Battle of Thermopyla, the Battle of Thermopyla marked the start of the Persian's second attempt to conquer Greece. Can you take us back to the first invasion to get it in context? and give us a date. Yeah. The Persian Empire is really, I suppose, in the long history of the Middle East, the pivotal turning point. It's the air of the ancient kingdoms of the Near East, Egypt, Babylon, Assyria. But it absorbs all these and establishes what will become the first great world empire, therefore

the ancestor of the Macedonian empires, the Roman empires, the empires of the Caliphate. This is a date. We're talking about 540 BC, yes, and the Persians in a sense come from nowhere. They explode onto the stage of history with the most incredible bang. To begin with, they are an obscure, backward kingdom of semi-nomads. Within 30 years, they have conquered most of the known world from the Greek cities of the Aegean coast to the Hindu Kush, to Central Asia, to Egypt and this is something holy, wholly exceptional.

No king has been master of such a vast domain before. This was Cyrus. Yes, the man who achieves this extraordinary, I mean, really the most phenomenal rate of conquest until, I suppose, the Muslim invasions a thousand years later, is a man called Cyrus. And he does it really through, he has two key attributes. One is exceptional military genius.

The Persians have an ability to move very, very fast. They attack when they are not expected. For instance, they do winter campaigns, which is unheard of for the time. They're very, very skilled, interestingly, thinking about Thermopy, they're very, very skilled at outflanking. This is often how the Persians, for instance, defeat the Babylonians. They outflank all their defences, come at them by surprise. And the Persians are by no means reluctant to indulge in atrocities

to intimidate and to overwhelm and to shock and awe, you like. Having said that, what is extraordinary about Cyrus's reputation is that for a man who conquered the known world, he's remembered almost as a prince of peace. He is exceptionally talented at propaganda, and he is exceptionally talented at identifying the interests of the Persian kingdom with those of the people he has conquered. He's an absolute master of self-presentation so that, for instance, with the Babylonians, he will present himself as the king. of Babylon. And famously, with the descendants of the Judeans who have been brought from Judah to Babylon there to sit by the rivers and weep, he says that they can go home, re-found the temple of

Jerusalem, and he is hailed by the second Isaiah as a Messiah, as an anointed one, as the Christ. Well, that fills us in a very great deal of bounce about the Cyrus. It's Darias who invades what we now think of as Greece, although in fact there were embryonic states, there were cities, they were a bunch over there. He goes there and we get the Battle of Marathon. Can you briefly give us that? Why he wanted to go there, why Marathon was such a shock to him? Well, the background to this, I think, is that Darius is, if Cyrus is the man who conquers the world, Darius is really the man who consolidates it. And he does this partly by imposing tribute, formalizing the system of the empire that has been set up under Cyrus.

But he also brings a very potent ideological framework to what he's doing. And he has to do this essentially because he is a usurper. He has certainly murdered one son of Cyrus, possibly murdered two. And yet he presents himself as the defender of truth. And in his account of how he came to the throne, he says that the son of Cyrus, he says that the son of who he murdered was in fact an imposter, somebody who had replaced... We have to get to Marathon. Yes, sorry.

We've got to get to Thermopyla, and that's beyond Marathon, and then we've got to get the Salamis. But Darius is presenting himself as a defender of truth. This is a key Persian concept. And he meant to God in the sky, and he's representing the God in the sky, and that's the great God, and away he goes to Marathon. Well, he... Crucially, for the Persians,

they are the defenders of order those who attack their order are in that sense if you want to use modern terminology terrorist states the Athenians have come to the Persians and have said we give you earth and water we give you the earth and water of our state

by doing this they are essentially asking for admission into the symbolic order of the Persian Empire they're saying we want to take our place in this framework of truth and order that you are the defender of and Darius says, fine, in that case, I will take your earth and water and you will have to do what I say.

The Athenians have no sooner done this, then they start thinking, actually, we don't want to be part of the Persian Empire. We want to get out of it. Honestly, Tom, I'm really enjoying it very much. No, seriously, I'm enjoying it very much, but we've got to get a move on. The real problem is that the Athenians had sent a large fleet of 20 ships to help the Eastern Greeks rebel and actually put two fingers up to the Persian Empire in 493 BC. Darius was absolutely livid.

He did worse atrocities than he'd ever done and he partly invaded mainland Greece to get back at Athens. This is a revenge, a piece of revenge campaigning. And Simon, when he came to Greece, what was Greece did he find? What was there then? When Darius invaded, there was no country, Greece.

There are series of individual states who, most famously Athens, Sparta, Corinth. And it's because of that divisiveness, that Greece was in a particularly weak position because no individual city had any chance whatsoever of standing up against this huge army yet there was no way, no natural way, for them to band together. They'd always been at war with one another.

And that was the problem that faced Greece in this huge invading army. There's a schoolboy reading about it. I was very definitely, but this is post-imperial or still imperial when I was a schoolboy at Britain, which took a lot from Roman Greece, as we all know, that the Greeks were at that time, were divided, they had democracy,

which invaders, the Persians, did not have, that they had a particular sort of culture, which was a culture which was going to define our culture, which the Greeks and Persians did not have. How far is that true? Or was it true then? It's true for Athens. Athens already has an embryonic democracy,

and that's crucial for the way they respond to the Persians. But nobody would ever suggest the Spartans were a democratic state. They were ruled by two kings. They had an extraordinarily formal, almost totalitarian model. The Corinthians also had a different model. So each state had its own possibility of a political response. In terms of general culture, well, they had a language they could understand. And some people would say they shared the same gods.

Some people would say they shared certain rituals. But they could also make those things seem very different to each other. It was not yet a country that could say, I am a Greek, and have a meaning behind that. That was something that the Persian wars helped form for us. If you were taking a snapshot in 480 BC, 484, would you say, look, the Persians and the Persian army in all they're bringing to bear are less well-educated, less capable of developing what we know as civilization? I'm sorry to talk in these easy terms, but it might be helpful than the Greeks were. Was the Greek potential seen at that time?

I think it's one of those extraordinary questions. It depends on whose side you are. All wars are wars between cultures. If you looked at the Persian Empire, you had an extraordinarily highly formed bureaucracy. You had over a huge distance. You had great wealth, great luxury. And some would say that was a sign of civilization. There was also a literature.

there was also, as Tom mentioned, a great propaganda machine. But at the same time in Greece, we have things such as tragedy, we have the beginnings of theatre, beginnings of democracy, the values that we care to privilege as being the origins of the West. And so, yeah, you could say that there was a big clash between what we want culture to look like. Edith Hall, when we come to the Battle of Marathon, can you tell us why that was, we know why it was what Tom's told,

was why it was fought, and Simon's confirmed that. So they get to Marathon. What happened then that was such a surprise, and why was it so significant? Well, the Battle of Marathon, whatever else, did demonstrate quite extraordinary courage on behalf of the Athenians. I mean, you had got the Persian lion holding down Macedonia in the north, North Africa and the South, terrorising the Aegean with really brutal acts of atrocity. And the Athenians said, no, they did. the Persians got to Yubir, which is on the eastern coast of mainland Greece,

sacked Eretria, which is one of the most beautiful old cities, you know, enslaved its women and marched. Well, they actually sailed over to Attica. The Athenians got there in no time. The speed with which they mobilised was unbelievable. They sent off famously by Dipides to Sparta to run the marathon to try and get help. The Spartans didn't come in time because they were doing a religious festival. And the Athenians managed to hold off the Persians by quite extraordinarily courage.

if we're to believe Herodotus. They hurled themselves at the centre, the Persian centre, which had cavalry as well as infantry. And Herodotus actually says, this was the first time an awful lot of these ordinary Athenian peasants had ever seen a person, had ever seen this magnificent armour, had ever seen these sorts of horses in warfare.

And they ran, and the Persians couldn't believe it. And it was actually the sort of naivety of this shock tactic of running these sort of thousands of them. And the casualties seem to have been, and we actually have excavated the two. tombs here, the mounds, there does seem to be some reality behind Herodotus figures. 192 Athenians died and about 6,000 of the Persians. It was an extraordinary battle.

However, there were a lot of extraordinary battles in antiquity. And not all of them did John Stuart Mill say about them, which is what you learned at school, I think, on liberty. He actually said that the Battle of Marathon was more important than the Battle of Hastings in English history, which is quite something. Would you take that on further? Do you think there's any validity in his saying that? I actually have two voices in my head. I have a sort of intuitive gut one, which is, good on the Greeks, good on the Greeks. God, they were brave, you know. And then I have the sort of rational academic one, which just says this is all ideological constructs,

and it's all the sort of interaction between the past and the present, and it wasn't real. So you really have to take your pick between those two different voices. It still is an exciting story. All the battles are, and that's why they're beginning to make such excellent movies. But did this, what did this battle do, through you before we move on to the marathon do, in terms of defining, or did it do? Did it define Greekness, Tom? Tom Holland. The Greeks had never before beaten the Persians. So in talking about the courage and the resolve that it took to advance across this plane into a hail of arrows and slingshot,

that in itself was a great achievement, and it showed that the Persians could be defeated. and that was key, absolutely key, because until then there'd been an immense sense of defeatism, I think. Had Athens fallen, we know what the Persians were planning for them. They were planning to raise it to install a tyrant again, so democracy would have been abolished, and the leading sons of the Athenians would have been castrated and carried off back to Persia. So probably Athens as a functioning city-state would have ceased to exist. So, yeah, I think it was indeed crucial. I would gave a jump through at Melon.

On the other hand, as Edith reminded us all earlier, Herodotus is known as the father of history, and then she added also the father of lies. So, Simon, and we rely, Edith's animated description, which should be pick of the year, I mean, as a battle of Thalmoply, is straight out of Herodotus. I mean, we have Herodotus, the Greek historian talking,

and he talks in a fantastic, it's an amazing description of Thaumopoli, which we've come into admitted to do. So we're on that. How true is it? It is undoubtedly true in certain basic facts. There was a battle, it was won by the Athenians, it was extraordinary. The battle...

This is Marathon. This is Marathon. The figures for the Persians who came through are obviously fantastical. I mean, the idea that 2 million people invaded Greece, I mean, there's no way they could have eaten or drunk in that country at that time. And that's bigger than the whole population of Greece in all probability. So those sorts of things are definitely exaggerated. Herodotus was the most fantastic storyteller, and the stories that he writes about Marathonathomopoli

have fed the imagination of the West ever since. They give us our models of bravery. That's why when Edith can tell the story, it's so familiar, because those models have come through generations of schoolchildren, learning about how to be brave, how to be a soldier. But one should never forget that Herodotus had an agenda. He was inventing Greekness. There was no way that we could talk about,

Greekness a hundred years earlier. It wasn't even an idea. And so when we have our origins of Western culture in this ideas of democracy and Greekness, that comes about primarily because of Herodotus. So history and lies, what comes between those? Well, ideology. And that's what he gives us. Can we move on now to the top, Tom Holland, because after marathon, there's a 10-year gap, as we now see, and Athenians had every reason to think the Persians wouldn't come back, they'd seen them off. And anyway, they weren't terribly important in the scheme of things as far as the great Persian Empire is concerned. There's much else to deal with as you outlined in your first answer

to the Hindu Kush down into Egypt and so and so forth. What happened at Tumopoli? The Persians invade again and although... Under Xerxes, this. Under King Xerxes Dar es's son, and even though the figure of two million is an exaggeration, in a sense it's responding to something very real about the Persian forces.

They were designed to overwhelm and intimidate. Xerxes deliberately does not go for Cyrus's policy of invading with a small, mobile force. He attacks with people drawn from every corner of his empire. And when the Greek sends some spies to have a look at the camp, Xerxes finds them. He doesn't execute them. He gives them a guided tour around to see exactly how many people are invading and then sends them back to try and spread demoralization. However, the Athenians and the Spartans are backed into a corner. There is no way that they can possibly come to terms with the Persians, because when the Persian

sent ambassadors to Sparta, for instance, to ask for submission, to ask for earth and water. The Spartans rather wittily threw them down a well and told them to go and find the earth and water there. So Sparta has no choice but to fight. Having said that, we've had this thing in the marathon. The Spartans didn't turn up at marathon because they were celebrating a festival. The Spartans are sensationally superstitious. And even as the huge Persian juggernaut is sweeping down through northern Greece towards Athens on the main road, the Spartans are celebrating their festival

and they cannot send their main army to block the route and this is key because at Thermopyla a pass, very very narrow pass between the sea and the mountains where really any two wagons can go at a time this is the ideal place to block off the attack the weight of Persian troops

cannot be mobilised and the Spartans exceptionally even though there is this festival decide to send an advance guard and they send one of their two kings Leonidas. And I think there's a sense in which Leonidas knew that this was a suicide mission. He takes 300 of his pickmen, but only men who have already had sons. So the lines will continue. They occupy the pass of Thermopy the Thomoply and wait. And in the distance they see a dust cloud approaching,

the monstrous sound of the armies coming nearer. And they're told the Persians have so many men that the flight of their arrows will let you fight in the shade. Sorry, I don't go there. Don't worry, trying to get a lot of stuff in. Can you check it up now, Edith Hall? There were some Greeks, about 5,000 Greeks joined these 300 Spartans, as I understand it, around this pass, and the Persians are coming with this mythic army crossing the Hellespont with tribe after tribe after tribe after tribe. It's a whole chapter, and already has just described the tribes and peoples that crossed the Hellespont

on these ships laid in line with planks across them. It's fantastic. So they got to Zemopoli. And there's the Battle of Somopoli, which we can take it for granted, everybody knows, a very few people, centrally the Spartans, fought, according to Herodotus and according to collaborative evidence, fought with quite remarkable courage and tenacity, and were, this is the crunch, really, defeated.

They were defeated, they died, they died to almost the last man. And they, I have every, you know, I think Herodotus is probably telling a true story, a true fiction, when he says that when they had lost their weapons, they fought with their fingernails and their teeth, and they tore at the hair in the faces of the Persians. They did anything that they could. One would, if you were fighting to the death.

And I think the religious thing, which may be negative in terms of the Spartans, in terms of them being very conservative, about actually getting out of Sparta and going off to fight, is also very positive here, though, because I think, I mean, two things. One is Leonidas had actually very famously gone to the Delphic Oracle to say, what should we do when he heard the Spartans were coming,

and the Delphicorica had actually said, either a Spartan king will die or Greece will fall. He knew, he must have believed that oracle. He knew he was going to die, definitely. And secondly, that whole area underneath this great mountain range of Mount Oiter down to the sea where it takes place is entirely sacred to Heracles. And Spartan kings were the direct linear descendants of Heracles. He goes to die at his great hero ancestor's place,

where Heracles was seen during the battles. I mean, this is a very religious sort of self-sacrifice. Heroplies himself sacrificed himself on top of this mountain. That's where he died. So I think that we had a really religious act going on here. How it was then taken up in terms of pan-Hellenic, pan-Greek or Greek propaganda is another issue. We just spend a moment, I'm going to Simon in a second. We just spend a moment talking about the actual battle from Herodotus,

which I've read, actually for the first time, I must have read abbreviations as a kid and all the rest of an intensismist. these 300 Spartans, but with the others, particularly the Spartans, did, you can understand why people like Churchill were intoxicated by this, by this battle and people like Goldie, William Golding, and on and on. And Hitler. Well, fair enough. I'm bonaparte and almost everybody in history.

It was just holding off and holding off thousands of people being thrown at them, and these 300 men held them off. It's a sort of chillingly exhilarating moment. Don't you find? I do. And you believe that that is what happened. Well, I do. I find it less exciting than marathon

because they want. They did something as brave, against similar odds and won. So I actually like success. Simon, they did lose at Thermopylae, and Circuses broke through. And yet Somopoly stands for a great number of things. And I mentioned William Golding a couple of times.

You're a very good essay about Somopoly, and they said a little bit of Leonidas is with me, I am free because of Leon and so on. Can you just contextualize the Mopoli in terms of Greece and us and Orientalism? Yes, this is the great war between the West and the East. It's seen as a history of wars between the West and the East. Homer's Trojan War was the first war of the West against the East. And Herodotus is the man who really gives us this.

He imagines that there was a Greek standing with Xerxes looking at the Spartans. combing their hair before battle. And Xerxes has made to ask, why are they doing this? And he's told, they're preparing to die. They know they're going to die. As Edith was saying. But then,

Xerxes asked, well, why would they do that? How could they fight when there's no king to tell them to fight? And he has to be explained to by the Greek that they fight because they're committed to law, to society itself. And that's where we get the idea of what do we fight for. We fight for our culture. And that's how it starts to turn into a model, not just of extraordinary bravery, but of bravery for a principle.

It's not just being macho. It has to have that principle of law behind it. And that's what Herodotus wants us to take away. So we then start to develop this extraordinary image of we few, we brave, hardy few, who stand up for our values against. And then how do we depict the East? They are massive numbers, full of gold, tricky, unreliable. They take the sneaky pass behind. And they take the sneaky pass behind in order to defeat the...

So we start to develop a model of what we're fighting against, which is the corrupt East. And that model has had an absolutely huge history. Is it fair to say that that is not at all in Homer? That is not at all. So it appears in Herodotus, as it were, is usually invented. In Homer, when the Greeks fight the Trojans, the Trojans speak Greek,

They have the same gods as the Greek. When they meet, they get one perfectly fine. The word barbarian occurs once, but not with reference. It just means language. It just means a foreign language. But after Herodotus and after the Persian wars, we have this idea of the barbarian, the barbarian horde, the mysterious and difficult east.

And in a sense, Herodotus is the man who creates that for us. Isn't there a sense, Stamhlin, in which the Greeks and the Persians had a great deal in common? Are we talking about, again, I'm just bringing this in as another thing, theme and we're trying to pack an awful lot into this program. I'm aware how difficult it is for you people having spent a lifetime on this to condense it. But here we go. Are we talking

about the Greeks having a different concept of ideas beginning a different intellectual history following a different path from that being followed at that time by the Persian conglomerate? Well, there have been Greek cities on what is now Turkey

who have been part of the Persian Empire, of course, and this is what in a sense precipitates the Persian invasion of Greece proper. And they have found themselves profiting really from Persian influences and the influences of Babylon and Egypt and all sorts of things like that. But I think that one of the things that the Greeks in seeing off the Persian invasion is that they're not only seeing the Persians off, they're seeing the Egyptians off and the Babylonians off and all these stupefyingly ancient kingdoms

that the Greeks have always had such respect for. And I think that that in itself gives them an enormous sense of self-confidence. And they do start to then identify their own culture and their own ideas as being something that they can stand up for. I think it's both cultural and political. And I actually think the crucial date is 493 when Miletus, which is the great Greek city that Athens, they revolt for Issa Normir. That means equality of rights under the law. They do not want to have despotic Persian rule.

So democracy is the core. of it, more than culture? Yeah, equality. Yeah, well, it's two things. It's the culture. Sorry, it's equality of rights under the law, and that is already there in Herodotus, and he says this was the beginning of evils for both Greeks and barbarians this particular moment.

And that's why the Athenians send boats, because they're democratic. And secondly, is, in terms of culture, I do think that the really important distinction is that competition between people was publicly encouraged, in fact, was publicly

institutionalised in Greek culture, whether they're in athletics games, whether in musical games, whether in politics, whether in the law. You know, you have two lawyers arguing against each other, that sort of thing. That dialogic concept, competition, everything's in dialogue between two, is not easy to find in monolithic Eastern empires.

Can I pick away this a bit further this time? Because there is, some people, there is, often enough on this programme, we say, we sometimes think of calling it back to the Greeks. Because you think we all know about the Greeks, anything we've turned out of the Greeks, anything we turns up, well, we'll go back there, and we'll get a route, and then we'll branch out from that. That came in, began to come in at that time.

But how far, had, let me put it really, had the Persians won and taken over, would the whole situation that we are in now be very different? Let me just say yes. In the sense that, in this period, after the Persian wars, despite undoubted Persian influence on Greek culture, despite whatever sorts of origins you look for, it is in this period that we start, the development of democracy as a real political, theoretical system,

the development of medicine, the development of philosophy per se, the development of maths and science. Now, without these subjects, the West would have been, they started then. People would say there'd been a lot of maths and science in the Babylonian Empire, they'd been philosophy there, they'd certainly been medicine and so on,

so what are the crucial differences, Simon? That's the really interesting thing. differences, I think what he did mentioned. It's the agonistic spirit competition that allows explicit theory to take place. For me, what makes the 5th century different is not that you do maths

but that you do theory. It's not that you have politics. Politics has always been with us when anybody wants power, you have politics. What the 5th century gives you is the theory of politics, that allows it to be exported and talked about in different ways. You've always had medicine as long as someone's been sick, but we have now theory

of medicine and that sort of discussion of that sort. And that's what the Greek Enlightenment really means. It's that turn to self-conscious reflection about what you're doing. And that's what we tend to take as our origin. It's what the Persians find so baffling

about the Greeks is that they are always quarreling, they are always fighting. And the Persians try and take advantage of that. They will back tyrants against Democrats. They will back Democrats against tyrants. They will try and find families within cities to support against other families. What the Persians really like is a caste, a social order that will take responsibility.

And it's the fact that the Greeks are always fighting so competitive that the Persians find very, very difficult to get a handle on. And the whole Persian ideal, which is one of order of reified solidity and strength and permanence, is very, very opposed to the Greek concept of endless competition, endless conflict. It is more problematic than that, though. I mean, if you'd actually ask an ancient Athenian what was really different between Greeks and Persians, he'd said in Persia, everybody's a slave.

That's what he'd have said. That's the first thing he'd have said. Now, the trouble is that, you know, we can really get into idealising these ancient Athenians very, very quickly. And it's very important to remember that about at least 50% of the city of Athens was enslaved. I just, I think it's really important.

This was not democracy. Because we're talking about the ideals that each side has. I know. I think that the Athenians condemn the port. Persians for the Persian ideals and the Persians condemn the Greeks for the Greek ideals. They are both seeing what each side at miles about the other and condemning it in a sense. So in that sense it is, if you like, an ideological conflict. I know.

But what I'm trying to argue is actually the theory of democracy that Simon's talking about, theorisation of it takes a place against a background where everybody's got slaves. And you could actually argue you can't have a theory of democracy without slavery because it's in the language of slavery that that theory is always formulated, especially in Aristotle's politics. Can we come back to this Athens and Sparta business? We talk about Thomoply in terms of the Spartans, and then there's the Battle of Salamis,

which will come into a minute, and then there's the Spartans come in again at Pletia and perhaps the most decisive send-off. The Spartans turn out in full force and hammer the Persian. Right, but we have there a model for a totalitarian state, a very violent, masculine, totalitarian, military, murdering state. Now, that's somehow got to be accommodated in the Greek idea as well, hasn't it, Sam? It has, and it's been no problem whatsoever for the West to do so.

The Spartan tradition is quite as strong as the Athenian. In fact, if you went back to the 18th century, when the French Revolution was taking place, you'd have found most English people saying Sparta was rather a good thing, since it was avoided revolution. It avoided all those nasty sort of problems that they were having on the continent. It's not by chance that both Stalin and Hitler

idealised Sparta in a particular way, but we shouldn't forget that English people have done rather a lot of that too, because order has always been something attractive to certain sorts of political ideologues. I think the watershed is 1821 when the

Alexander Ipsi Landis invades Ottoman Moldavia and says the Greeks shall be free and kicks off the whole Greek revolution. He actually says that we have to do, again, what Miltadis, who's the hero of Marathon, Themistocles, who's the hero of Salamis, and Leonidas did. He actually puts Athens in with Sparta at that moment. And from then on, whether it's in Bulwer or George Groat or whoever,

the Athenian democracy becomes actually okay. Before that, it's seen as like Ochlocratic, which means the rule of the rabble, the rule of the plebs, the rule of the scruffy people. It's interesting, you bring up the invasion of the attack, on the art of an empire because we are at, we, the West is attacking an empire which has been delineated and against which black propaganda has been directed.

Since Marathons, homopalized, Salamis, was that seriously saying? Were that the cast of thinking, which was more than was unbroken? And some would say, I would say, the late Edward Saeed would have said, still around. I think that the first,

moments of mythologizing these battles as a battle of West against East was almost the day after the battle finished. Throughout the Greek world, it continued. It was the standard rhetorical trope we should be like the men of Thermopyla, the men of Marathon, it went on all the way through the ancient world. And certainly after the Renaissance, when we, when England and the rest of Europe rediscovered classics, it became a central part of every schoolboy's learning. And since we were at war for large periods at that time with the Olympics. Ottoman Empire, earlier still with the Crusades. It meant that we have constantly relived those models in that way.

So I'm afraid, in that particular respect, I think Edward's right. We're slightly going in front of ourselves because Thormoply was a defeat. I mean, it's interesting, it's a bit like Dunkirk, isn't it? It's the defeat that you use as a spur to victory, and a defeat that you somehow, you alchemize into victory. But after that, there was a real victory for the Greeks, at sea, and that was important for the British Empire later as a model, at sea at Salamis, where the Greeks defeated.

the Great Persian Navy. Can you briskly tell us about that, Tom, just to get that through? Well, The defeat of the Spartans of Thaumopoli leaves the road to Athens open. There is no way that Athens can be held. The women and children of Athens have been evacuated. The Greek men have taken to the ships,

and with the other Greek ships, are waiting off the island of Salamis, which is just off Athens. If Leonidas is sort of, if you like, a figure from the Iliads, like Achilles, dying, yying for glory. Then the Athenian leader, Themistakles, is like Odysseus. He is a man who is very adept at trickery and drawing his enemy in.

And this is what he does. The Athenians and the other Greeks are numbered. So they want to negatize the Persian numbers. They want to draw them into the straits which lie between Salamis and the Attic mainland. And he does this by playing a trick. The Mysticlis sends a slave over to Xerxes, saying, the Greeks are about to run away. you better come in and get them.

And because this is essentially what Xerxes wants to hear, he takes the bait, sends the Persian fleet into the straits where the Greeks are waiting, they pounce, and there is a great victory. You couldn't be shorter or more or more decisive than that. Also, a little thing, not such a thing, a massive thing, is the fortune of fortune. The Greeks had discovered a massive silver mine, the Athenians, had discovered a massive silver mine,

and voted the money to the building of a navy rather than some of the citizens said that's divided out between us. And again your man, that your cunning discused, it must have said it should be into a navy. So they had these faster, lighter ships, which meant it.

So we had Salamis, and was not the end of the matter or we still have won more battle before the Persians are seen off, this time are the Spartans? Well, we do, and I think it's very important to remember that the battle

had actually saw them off. It was the one that people talk about Leith, the Battle of Pletia. I really think, if we're going to talk about which one does, all our freedom, blah, blah, blah, depend upon. I would like to talk about Plataire.

Can you just give us a date from that, then? 479. It's the year after Salamis. And Xerxes flees, after his fleet is destroyed, leaving enormous amounts of infantry, which could easily have one again, which in a very, very, very long and hard, brilliant, mainly spart,

and though the Athenians were also involved, that really was the pan-Greek effort at Plataire. extraordinary use of the hot flight, the infantry. What was extraordinary about it? Well, just very, very highly skilled and against bigger numbers and better weapons. It's difficult because the battle takes place on a plane

where the Persians can use their cavalry. The Greek army doesn't want to get onto the planes. The Persian cavalry doesn't want to go up into the hills where the Greeks are. So the genius of the Spartan strategy is to somehow manage to lure the Persians up onto the ground where they shouldn't actually be. And this is what they do. They fake a retreat.

They fake a retreat, which is incredibly hard to do, and only sort of Spartan training would have enabled them to do it. Exactly. Why is it hard to do it? I mean, I'm interested. I'm not trying to. The way Athenians and Spartans' fort was in something called a phalanx, which is a bit like a rugby scrum,

in the sense that there's a large group of men tied together. Tied together? Not tied, literally. But you carry a shield on your left hand, spilled in your right. right hand and your left hand defends the shield. And two phalanxes push against each other, and if one collapses, it's completely routed.

So it's a very, you've got to march, it's got to be absolutely like synchronised marching. The shield is so heavy, it's unbelievably heavy. It's, it's, it's, they talk constantly about people who simply couldn't manage to hold their shield after 40 years old and things. And they remember they fought till they were at least 60. I mean, this is another thing, which, you know,

I won't tell my husband. You mean you're being Sparta into the bedroom? There were lots and lots of grandad's, dad's army out there in all these armies. And also the helmet, you just couldn't hear. That was the other problem with orders being given. Very hard to actually hear them, particularly with the din of battle and everything, but the helmet would block off your ears. It's been annoying, we come into the end of the programme,

what seems the most interesting battle is, and which we know least about. I mean, I know least about it. And historically, I really do believe, the decisive one. The Persians gave up. I think historically, undoubtedly it's the most important. What for me is most interesting for the general line that you're taking here is the way that Salamis is so much more interesting in terms of the mythology.

And it's because the Athenians actually deserted the city. They were given an oracle just to the wooden walls. Nobody knew what that meant until themistically said, let's just get in the ships. But what they actually did was give up the city. And the city was absolutely burnt and destroyed. And that sort of gesture of saying, counts famously, as soon as he said, the city is the men. And so this idea that what we care about, even though we're desperate to think about our own country, it's people fighting together.

That mythology has been terribly important. Yes. And I think the scene of it, the evacuees watching the smoke rising from the Acropolis and knowing that all is at stake in this dreadful battle that is looming, one of the great scenes of history. So did the Greeks, were the Greeks after Platia, Greeks, did we have After those battles, a feeling of the Hellens, not a people, but a language and association. Did we have that, Edith first of all? Yes, yes, clear. And did the Persians, the Persians did not come back.

And so we have, is this a great watershed? Is this the big division? But the next great war is the Periponnesian War. Almost within 20 years, we've got Athens against Sparta, another war that racks the Greek world. So while it's true that we start to develop a notion, a cultural notion, Greekness. There was no institutional Greekness. There was no country Greek. They continued to fight city against

city. There was never a country, a political unit of Greece, until, again, after 1821. I mean, that was when Greece actually happened to the first ever time, politically speaking. But the sense of Greekness is undoubtedly born at this time. And when Leonidas

summons a conference to Sparta before he goes off to fight, he actually, the place it was held was called the Hellenion, the this is where the Greeks are going to talk about defending Greece. But it is after this we have East Gilles play, the Persians, where he begins to describe the Persians as soft and over-exotic and over-luxurious compared with the muscular, might be, use the word Spartan and cunning Greeks.

And that begins then and also the culture begins to strike in that, doesn't it? But in a sense, this is appropriating Persian propaganda and turning it against them, because for the Persians, the wealth and splendour and magnificence of the great king is precisely the point. It's meant to intimidate and overwhelm. And the Greeks take this and say, well, your splendor and your magnificence is actually a proof of your softness and your decadence. And there's this whole idea that the Persian Empire is decadent and doomed to fall, which will ultimately feed into the mythology and ideology of Alexander. Finally, Simon, what reaction was that in the Persian Empire to these...

four battles into these two big defeats, Salamis and Plataea. It's almost nothing that we know about. This great event in the Western world, as we'd like to call it, seems to have had very little impact on the empire which continued. Xerxes continued to be in control. He continued to rule, and the Persian Empire continued for a great number of years until Alexander came along and created a different sort of empire.

So in some senses, if you were a Persian, you might have seen this as a rome. rather misfortune border skirmish rather than the creation of civilisation. Something way out on the outer edge of the blanket. Yeah. Well, there you go.

Well, thank you all very much indeed. I'm sorry we had to gallop once or twice, but there you go. Next week we'll be talking about the sublime. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.com.com. UK forward slash radio 4