Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (3 page)

The critical point about firearms and explosives is not that they suddenly gave Western armies hegemony, but that such weapons were produced in quality and great numbers in Western rather than in non-European countries—a fact that is ultimately explained by a long-standing Western cultural stance toward rationalism, free inquiry, and the dissemination of knowledge that has its roots in classical antiquity and is not specific to any particular period of European history. There is also something radically democratic about firearms that explains their singularly explosive growth in the West. Guns destroy the hierarchy of the battlefield, marginalizing the wealthy mailed knight and rendering even the carefully trained bowman ultimately irrelevant. It is no accident that feudal Japan eventually found firearms revolutionary and dangerous. The Islamic world never developed the proper tactics of shooting in massed volleys to accompany weapons that were so antithetical to the idea of personal bravery of the mounted warrior. The effective use of guns requires the marriage of rationalism and capitalism to ensure steady improvement in design, fabrication, and production, but in addition an egalitarian tradition that welcomes rather than fears the entrance of lethal newcomers on the battlefield.

Even after the fall of the Roman Empire, the West, purportedly now backward and far inferior to the cultures of China and the Islamic world, was militarily strong far beyond what its population and territory would otherwise indicate. During the so-called Dark Ages, the Byzantines mastered the use of “Greek fire” that allowed their fleets to overcome the numerical superiority of Islamic armadas—as, for example, the victory of Leo III in 717 over the far larger Islamic fleet of the caliph Sulaymān. The European discovery of the crossbow (ca. 850)—it could be fabricated more rapidly and at cheaper cost than more deadly composite bows—allowed thousands of relatively untrained soldiers the ready use of lethal weapons. From the sixth to the eleventh centuries the Byzantines maintained European influence in Asia, and no Islamic army after the early tenth century again ventured into western Europe. The
Reconquista
was slow, but steady and incremental. The fall of Rome in some sense meant the spread of the West much farther to the north as Germanic tribes became settled, Christianized, and more Western than ever before.

The dramatic European expansion of the sixteenth century may well have been energized by Western excellence in firearms and capital ships, but those discoveries were themselves the product of a long-standing Western approach to applied capitalism, science, and rationalism not found in other cultures. Thus, the sixteenth-century military renaissance was a reawakening of Western dynamism. It is better to call it a “transformation” in the manifestation of European battlefield superiority that had existed in the classical world for a millennium and was never entirely lost even during the darkest days of the Dark Ages. The “Military Revolution,” then, was no accident, but logical given the Hellenic origins of European civilization.

We should not expect to see precisely in Greek freedom, American liberty; in Greek democracy, English parliamentary government; or in the agora, Wall Street. The freedom that was won at Salamis is not entirely the same as what was ensured at Midway, much less as what was at stake at Lepanto or Tenochtitlán. All ideas are in part captives of their time and space, and much of ancient Greece today would seem foreign if not nasty to most Westerners. The polis would never have crafted a Bill of Rights; in the same manner, we would not turn our courts over to majority vote of mass juries without the right of appeal to a higher judiciary. Socrates would have been read his Miranda rights, had free counsel, never have testified in person on his own behalf, been advised to plea-bargain, and when convicted would have been free on bail during years of appeal. His message, which seemed radical to his Athenian peers, would strike us as reactionary in the extreme. The key is not to look to the past and expect to see the present, but to identify in history the seeds of change and of the possible across time and space. In that sense, Wall Street
is
much closer to the agora than to the palace at Persepolis, and the Athenian court akin to us in a way pharaoh’s and the sultan’s law is not.

THE WESTERN WAY OF WAR

The West has achieved military dominance in a variety of ways that transcend mere superiority in weapons and has nothing to do with morality or genes. The Western way of war is so lethal precisely because it is so amoral—shackled rarely by concerns of ritual, tradition, religion, or ethics, by anything other than military necessity. We should not be held captive by technological determinism, as if the tools of war appear in a vacuum and magically transform warfare, without much thought of either how or why they were created or how or why they were used. Even the monopoly of superior Western technology and science has not always been true—Themistocles’ triremes at Salamis were no better than Xerxes’, and Admiral Nagumo’s carriers at Midway had better planes than the Americans did. The status of freedom, individualism, and civic militarism at those battles, however, was vastly different among the opposing forces. As these encounters reveal on nearly every occasion, it was not merely the superior weapons of European soldiers but a host of other factors, including organization, discipline, morale, initiative, flexibility, and command, that led to Western advantages.

Western armies often fight with and for a sense of legal freedom. They are frequently products of civic militarism or constitutional governments and thus are overseen by those outside religion and the military itself. The rare word “citizen” exists in the European vocabularies. Heavy infantry is also a particularly Western strength—not surprising when Western societies put a high premium on property, and land is often held by a wide stratum of society. Because free inquiry and rationalism are Western trademarks, European armies have marched to war with weapons either superior or equal to their adversaries, and have often been supplied far more lavishly through the Western marriage of capitalism, finance, and sophisticated logistics. By the same token, Europeans have been quick to alter tactics, steal foreign breakthroughs, and borrow inventions when in the marketplace of ideas their own traditional tactics and arms have been found wanting. Western capitalists and scientists alike have been singularly pragmatic and utilitarian, with little to fear from religious fundamentalists, state censors, or stern cultural conservatives.

Western warring is often an extension of the idea of state politics, rather than a mere effort to obtain territory, personal status, wealth, or revenge. Western militaries put a high premium on individualism, and they are often subject to criticism and civilian complaint that may improve rather than erode their war-making ability. The idea of annihilation, of head-to-head battle that destroys the enemy, seems a particularly Western concept largely unfamiliar to the ritualistic fighting and emphasis on deception and attrition found outside Europe. There has never been anything like the samurai, Maoris, or “flower wars” in the West since the earliest erosion of the protocols of ancient Greek hoplite battle. Westerners, in short, long ago saw war as a method of doing what politics cannot, and thus are willing to obliterate rather than check or humiliate any who stand in their way.

At various periods in Western history the above menu has not always been found in its entirety. Ideas from consensual government to religious tolerance are often ideal rather than modal values. Throughout most of Western civilization there have been countless compromises, as what was attained proved less than what Western culture professed as the most desirable. The Crusaders were religious zealots; many early European armies were monarchical with only occasional oversight by deliberative bodies. It is hard to see in Cortés’s small band religion and politics as entirely separate. Not a phalangite in Alexander’s army voted him general, much less king. During the sixth to ninth centuries A.D. there is little evidence that Western forces always enjoyed absolute technological superiority over their foes. German tribesmen were ostensibly as individualistic as Roman legionaries.

Yet, abstract ideas must often be seen in the context of their times: while Alexander’s Macedonians were revolutionaries who had destroyed Greek liberty, there was no escaping their ties with the Hellenic tradition. That shared heritage explains why soldiers in the phalanx, commanders in the fields, and generals at Alexander’s table all voiced their ideas with a freedom unknown in the Achaemenid court. While the Inquisition was an episode of Western fanaticism and at times unrestrained by political audit, the tally of its entire bloody course never matched the Aztec score of corpses in a mere four days at the Great Temple to Huitzilopochtli in 1487. Even on the most controversial of issues like freedom, consensual government, and dissent, we must judge Western failings not through the lenses of utopian perfectionism of the present, but in the context of the global landscape of the times. Western values are absolute, but they are also evolutionary, being perfect at neither their birth nor their adolescence.

In any discussion of military prowess, we should also be clear about the thorny divide between determinism and free will. Throughout this study, we are
not
suggesting that the intrinsic characteristics of Western civilization predetermined European success on every occasion. Rather, Western civilization gave a spectrum of advantages to European militaries that allowed them a much greater margin of error and tactical disadvantage—battlefield inexperience, soldierly cowardice, insufficient numbers, terrible generalship—than their adversaries. Luck, individual initiative and courage, the brilliance of a Hannibal or Saladin, the sheer numbers of Zulu or Inca warriors—all on occasions could nullify Western inherent military superiority.

Over time, however, the resiliency of the Western system of war prevailed, allowing horrible disasters like Thermopylae (480 B.C.), Lake Trasimene (217 B.C.), la Noche Triste (1520), Isandhlwana (1879), and Little Big Horn (1876) not to affect the larger course of the conflict or to lead to an overall Western collapse. Western armies often owed their prowess to brilliant and savage individuals like Alexander the Great, Scipio Africanus, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Richard the Lion-Hearted, and Hernán Cortés, as well as to now nameless gallant individuals: the right wing of Spartans at Plataea (479 B.C.), the veterans of Caesar’s Tenth Legion in Gaul (59–51 B.C.), or the heavy knights at Arsouf (1191), whose battlefield conduct, along with chance and enemy blunders, often changed the course of the battle.

Yet much of what courageous Westerners accomplished must be seen in an overall cultural landscape that afforded them inherent military advantages not usually shared by their adversaries. We must be careful not to judge the record of Western military skill in absolute terms, but always in a relative context vis-à-vis the conditions of the times: scholars can argue over the effectiveness of Western arms, the impressive power of Chinese and Indian armies, the occasional slaughter of European colonial forces, but in all such debate they must keep in mind that non-European forces did not with any frequency and for long duration navigate the globe, borrowed rather than imparted military technology, did not colonize three new continents, and usually fought Europeans at home rather than in Europe. Although important exceptions should always be noted, generalization—so long avoided by academics out of either fear or ignorance—is indispensable in the writing of history.

As examination of these battles shall show, throughout the long evolution of Western warfare there has existed a more or less common core of practices that reappears generation after generation, sometimes piecemeal, at other times in a nearly holistic fashion, which explains why the history of warfare is so often the brutal history of Western victory—and why today deadly Western armies have little to fear from any force other than themselves.

THE DROWNED

IT MUST BE a terrible thing to drown at sea—arms thrashing the waves, lungs filling with brine, the body slowly growing heavy and numb, the brain crackling and sparking as its last molecules of oxygen are exhausted, the final conscious sight of the dim and fading, unreachable sunlight far above the rippling surface. By day’s end in late September 480 B.C., a third of the sailors of the Persian fleet were now precisely in those awful last moments of their existence. A few miles from the burned Athenian acropolis as many as 40,000 of Xerxes’ imperial subjects were bobbing in the depths and on the waves—the dead, the dying, and the desperate amid the wrecks of more than two hundred triremes. All were doomed far from Asia in the warm coastal waters of the Aegean, all destined for the bottom of the Saronic Gulf. Their last sight on earth was a Greek sunset over the mountains of Salamis—or their grim king perched far away on Mount Aigaleos watching them sink beneath the waves. Unlike battle on terra firma, where lethality is so often predicated on the technology of death, and not the landscape of battle itself, war at sea is a primordial killer of men, in which the ocean itself can wipe out thousands without the aid of either man or his weapons. At Salamis most died from water in their lungs, not steel in their bodies.

Originally either a Phoenician or an Egyptian invention, an ancient trireme in battle was a rowing, not a sailing, ship. Usually, 170 sailors powered the vessel. An additional crew of thirty or so marines, archers, and helmsmen crowded above on the decks. Unlike the oarsmen in later European galleys, rowers sat in groups of three, one on top of another, each one pulling a single oar of a standard length. The great strength of the trireme’s design was its extraordinary ratio between weight, speed, and propulsion. The sleekness of the ship and the intricate arrangement of the oarsmen made it possible for two hundred men in a few seconds to reach speeds of nearly nine knots. That quickness and agility ensured that its chief weapon—a two-pronged bronze ram fitted at the waterline of the prow—could smash right through any ship on the seas. So complex was the ancient design of vessel, oar, and sail that in the sixteenth century when Venetian shipwrights attempted to duplicate the Athenian method of oarage, the result was mostly unseaworthy galleys. Modern engineers have still not mastered the ancient design, despite the use of advanced computer technology and some 2,500 years of nautical expertise.

The trireme was also a fragile and vulnerable heavily laden craft that put two hundred men out in the open water with little margin of safety— the oar ports of its bottom bank of rowers were a mere few feet above the waterline. Unlike modern naval warfare, ancient ships offered scarcely any time for the crew to evacuate. Most capsized almost instantaneously when rammed in battle, since even a glancing blow could send water rushing into the ship and quickly toss the crew into the sea. The sailors’ only hope was to make for land or to grab on to any debris that remained floating from the wreckage. For rowers and marines who could not swim—and such unfortunates were numerous in the ancient world and nearly without exception in the Persian fleet—death by drowning would come in seconds. It mattered little that most crews were not shackled like sixteenth-century galley slaves, since triremes could turn over or fill with water without much warning. The long robes of the Persians only made things worse. The playwright Aeschylus, who was probably a veteran of Salamis, eight years later wrote of their helplessness in the water: “The corpses of the Persian loved ones, soaked with saltwater, were often submerged and tossed about lifeless in their long robes”
(Persians
274–76).

Their burial water between the island of Salamis and the Attic mainland was a small strait, not much more than a mile wide. Like most great sea battles of the preindustrial age, the respective fleets fought in sight of land. The battle, involving more than 1,000 triremes, took place in only about a square mile of sea, ensuring that the dead littered the ocean surface and washed up on the surrounding coast. Aeschylus recalls that “the shores of Salamis and all the neighboring coast are full of the bodies of men who perished by a wretched fate” (
Persians
272–73).

Thousands of Egyptians, Phoenicians, Cilicians, and assorted Asians were washed up on the shores of Salamis and Attica, a few marooned on the wrecks of what was left of two hundred ships. Greek sailors finished off the dying at sea with javelins and arrows. At the same time, heavy hoplite infantrymen scoured the beaches of Salamis harpooning the few stranded survivors. Despite Aeschylus’s claim that “the entire armada has perished,” hundreds of fleeing Persian ships managed to row past the carnage to safety, too terrified of the ordered lines of pursuing Greek triremes to pick up their kindred. The Athenian architect of the victory, the admiral Themistocles, after the battle purportedly walked along the shore viewing the remains, and invited his men to plunder the gold and silver from the Persian corpses. According to Aeschylus, the bodies were lacerated by the surf and grotesquely gnawed by marine scavengers.

Salamis—the name is still synonymous with abstract ideals of freedom and “the rise of the West”—is not associated with a bloodbath. Although no battle better deserves such an association, references to the battle disasters during the Persian Wars evoke images of the final Spartan contingent at Thermopylae (480 B.C.), which was wiped out to the man, King Leonidas, the leader of the famous 299 Spartans, decapitated and his head impaled on a stake—or the Persians at Plataea (479 B.C.), who were butchered mercilessly by Spartan hoplites and sent fleeing into the croplands of Boeotia. Yet at least two hundred imperial ships were rammed and sunk at Salamis. Most went down with their entire crews of two hundred rowers and auxiliaries, ensuring that at least 40,000 sailors drowned and countless others were captured or killed as they washed up onshore. Because the strait of Salamis is so narrow and the Persian armada was so large—somewhere between 600 and 1,200 ships—the dead were unduly conspicuous and made a ghastly impression on the Persian king, Xerxes, who viewed the battle from the nearby Attic heights.

Because the frenzied Greeks were determined to annihilate the occupiers of their homeland, and since, as Herodotus points out, “the greater part of the Barbarians drowned at sea because they did not know how to swim,” Salamis remains one of the most deadly battles in the entire history of naval warfare. More perished in the tiny strait than at Lepanto (ca. 40,000–50,000), all the dead of the Spanish Armada (20,000–30,000), the Spanish and French together at Trafalgar (14,000), the British at Jutland (6,784), or the Japanese at Midway (2,155). In contrast, only forty Greek triremes were lost, and we should imagine that the majority of those 8,000 Greeks who abandoned their ships were saved. Herodotus says only a “few” of the Greeks drowned, the majority swimming across the strait to safety. Rarely in the history of warfare has there occurred such a one-sided catastrophe—and rarely in the age before gunpowder have so many been slaughtered in a few hours.

The Greco-Persian Wars, which until the battle of Mycale were fought exclusively in Europe, witnessed terrible butchery—none more awful than the thousands who drowned off the Attic coast. Drowning, in the Greek mind, was considered the worst of deaths—the soul wandering as a shade, unable to enter Hades should his body not be found and given a final proper commemoration. Almost eighty years later the Athenian court would execute its own successful generals after the sea victory at Arginusae (406 B.C.), precisely for their failure to pick up survivors bobbing in the water—and the idea that hundreds of Athenian husbands, fathers, and brothers were decomposing in the depths without proper burial.

Who were Xerxes’ 40,000 sailors thrashing about in the strait of Salamis? Almost all of them are lost to the historical record. We know only a few names of the elite and well connected, and then only from Greek sources. Herodotus singles out only King Xerxes’ brother and admiral, Ariabignes, who went down with his ship. Aeschylus has a roll call of dead generals and admirals: Artembares “dashed against the cruel shore of Silenia”; Dadaces “speared as he jumped from his vessel”; the remains of the Bactrian lord Tenagon “lapping about the island of Ajax”; and so on. He goes on to name more than a dozen other leaders whose corpses were floating in the channel. In a particularly gruesome passage, presented on the Athenian stage a mere eight years after the battle, the playwright has a Persian messenger describe the human mess:

The hulls of our ships rolled over, and it was no longer possible to glimpse the sea, strewn as it was with the wrecks of warships and the debris of what had been men. The shores and the reefs were full of our dead, and every ship that had once been part of the fleet now tried to row its way to safety through flight. But just as if our men were tunny-fish or some sort of netted catch, the enemy kept pounding them and hacking them with broken oars and the flotsam from the wrecked ships. And so shrieks together with sobbing echoed over the open sea until the face of black night at last covered the scene. (
Persians
419–29)

Many of these unfortunates were not Persians but conscripted Bactrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Cypriots, Carians, Cilicians, and men from other tributary states of the vast empire—including Ionian Greeks—who had voyaged to Salamis under coercion as part of Xerxes’ grand muster. The majority who rowed had little say about the conditions of their own participation, and even less desire for fighting in the strait of Salamis. Both Herodotus and Aeschylus relate that any hesitation on their part to row out on the morning of September 28 meant summary execution. One of the most gruesome passages in all of classical literature is Herodotus’s account of Pythius the Lydian, who asked the Great King that one of his five sons be allowed to remain behind to tend the old man when the imperial forces left Asia for Greece. In answer, Xerxes had Pythius’s favorite boy dismembered—his torso on one side of the roadway, legs on the other—so that the vast conscripted army who trudged between the mutilated and decaying parts for hours on end might learn the wages of disobedience. One of the ironies of Salamis is that the heroic Greek resistance, waged to thwart Persian aggression and preserve Greek freedom, actually resulted in the slaughter of thousands of reluctant allied Asian sailors. Under penalty of death, they fought as Xerxes watched the sea battle from his throne on Mount Aigaleos above—his secretary nearby to record his subjects’ gallantry and cowardice for rewards and punishments to follow.

A decade earlier, 6,400 Persians died at Marathon during Darius’s ill-fated initial invasion. Just weeks before Salamis, more than 10,000 imperial troops were sacrificed in the Persians’ “victory” at Thermopylae to break the Hellenic resistance and open the pass into Greece. And at Artemisium near the pass, a storm may have sunk more than two hundred Persian ships, resulting in nearly as many drowned as at Salamis. In the following autumn another 50,000 subjects of Xerxes would die at Plataea, and yet 100,000 more during the last retreat out of Greece. A quarter million of the king’s troops were thus to perish in a vain attempt to take away the freedom of a tiny Balkan country of less than 50,000 square miles.

The end of the Persian Wars signaled not merely a setback for Persia but a catastrophic loss of imperial manpower as well. “Divine Salamis,” as the Greeks commemorated the sea victory, was fought for “the freedom of the Greeks.” The price of that liberation was the mass slaughter of a host of peoples who had come under the whip, not out of religious, ethnic, or cultural hatred of Hellenic culture. Because none of Xerxes’ dead were free citizens in a free society, we understandably know almost nothing about them. There is no Persian play devoted to their memory. No Persian historian, as Herodotus had done at Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea, wrote down the names of the brave. Xerxes issued no civic decree from Persepolis offering commemoration for their sacrifice. Neither public cenotaph nor mournful elegy recorded their loss. We owe it to those anonymous and largely innocent dead to keep in mind that the story of Salamis is mostly the daylong saga of 40,000 men thrashing, shrieking, and sobbing as they slowly sank to the bottom off the Attic coast. As Lord Byron dryly wrote of the unnamed “they”:

A king sate on the rocky brow Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis And ships, by thousands, lay below, And men in nations;—all were his! He counted them at break of day— And when the sun set where were they? (
Don Juan,
86.4)

THE ACHAEMENIDS AND FREEDOM

The Persian Empire at the time of the battle of Salamis was huge—1 million square miles of territory, with nearly 70 million inhabitants—at that point the largest single hegemony in the history of the civilized world. In contrast, Greek-speakers on the mainland numbered less than 2 million and occupied about 50,000 square miles. Persia was also a relatively young sovereignty, less than a hundred years old, robust in its period of greatest power—and largely the product of the genius of its legendary king Cyrus the Great. In a period of not more than thirty years (ca. 560–530 B.C.), Cyrus had transformed the rather small and isolated Persian monarchy (Parsua in what is now Iran and Kurdistan) into a world government. He finally presided over the conquered peoples of most of Asia—ranging from the Aegean Sea to the Indus River, and covering most of the territory between the Persian Gulf and Red Sea in the south and the Caspian and Aral Seas to the north.

After the subsequent loss of the Ionian Greek states on the shores of the Aegean, the mainland Greeks grew familiar with this huge and sophisticated empire now expanding near its eastern borders. What the Greeks learned of Persia—as would be the later European experience with the Ottomans—both fascinated and frightened them. Later an entire series of gifted politicians and renegade intriguers such as Demaratus, Themistocles, and Alcibiades would aid the Persians against their own Greek kin, and yet at the same time loathe their hosts for appealing nakedly to their personal greed. In a similar manner Italian admirals, ship designers, and tacticians would later seek lucrative employment with the Ottomans. Greek moralists, in relating culture and ethics, had long equated Hellenic poverty with liberty and excellence, Eastern affluence with slavery and decadence. So the poet Phocylides wrote, “The law-biding polis, though small and set on a high rock, outranks senseless Nineveh” (frg. 4).

By the time of the reign of Darius I (521–486 B.C.) Persia was a relatively stable empire, governed by the so-called Achaemenid monarchy that oversaw a sophisticated provincial administration of some twenty satrapies. Persian governors collected taxes, provided musters for national campaigns, built and maintained national roads and an efficient royal postal service, and in general left local conquered peoples the freedom to worship their own gods and devise their own means for meeting targeted levels of imperial taxation. To the Greeks, who could never unify properly their own vastly smaller mainland, the Achaemenids’ confederation of an entire continent raised the specter of a force of men and resources beyond their comprehension.

What mystified Westerners most—we can pass over their prejudicial view of Easterners as soft, weak, and effeminate—was the Persian Empire’s almost total cultural antithesis to everything Hellenic, from politics and military practice to economic and social life. Only a few miles of sea separated Asia Minor from the Greek islands in the Aegean, but despite a similar climate and centuries of interaction, the two cultures were a world apart. This foreign system had resulted not in weakness and decadence, as the Greeks sometimes proclaimed, but ostensibly in relatively efficient imperial administration and vast wealth: Xerxes was on the Athenian acropolis, the Greeks (not yet) in Persepolis. An awe-inspiring impression of Persian power was what Greeks gleaned from itinerant traders, their own imported Eastern chattel slaves, communication from their Ionian brethren, the thousands of Greek-speakers who found employment in the Persian bureaucracy, and random tales from returning mercenaries. The success of the Achaemenid dynasty suggested that there were peoples in the world—and in increasing proximity to Greece—who did things far differently, and in the process became far more wealthy and prosperous than the Greeks.

The absolute rule of millions was in the hands of a very few. The king and his small court of relatives and advisers (their Persian titles variously translate as “bow carrier,” “spear bearer,” “king’s friends,” “the king’s benefactor,” “the eyes and ears of the king,” etc.) oversaw the bureaucracy and priesthood, which thrived from the collection of provincial taxes and ownership of vast estates, while a cadre of Persian elites and Achaemenid kin ran the huge multicultural army. There was apparently no abstract or legal concept of freedom in Achaemenid Persia. Even satraps were referred to as slaves in imperial correspondence: “The King of Kings, Darius son of Hystapes, says these things to his slave Gadatas: ‘I learn that you are not obeying my commands in all respects . . .’ ” (R. Meiggs and D. Lewis, eds.,
Greek Historical Inscriptions,
#12, 1–5). The Achaemenid monarch was absolute and, though not divine himself, the regent of the god Ahura Mazda on earth. The practice of
proskynēsis—
kneeling before the Great King—was required of all subjects and foreigners. Aristotle later saw this custom of worshiping men as gods as proof of the wide difference between Eastern and Hellenic notions of individualism, politics, and religion. Whereas the victorious Greek generals of the Persian Wars—the regent Pausanias in Sparta, Miltiades and Themistocles at Athens—were severely criticized for identifying their persons with the Greek triumph, Xerxes, when attempting to cross a choppy Hellespont, had the sea whipped and “branded” for “disobeying” his orders.

Legal codes exist in every civilization. Under the Persians, local judiciaries were left in place at Lydia, Egypt, Babylonia, and Ionia—with the proviso that Achaemenid law superseded all statutes, and was established and amended as the Great King himself saw fit. Every man bobbing in the water on September 28 had no legal entity other than as a
bandaka,
or “slave,” of Xerxes—a concept taken from the earlier Babylonian idea that the individual was an
ardu,
a “chattel,” of the monarch.

Contrarily, in Greece by the fifth century almost all political leaders in the city-states were selected by lot, elected, or subject to annual review by an elected council. No archon claimed divine status; execution by fiat was tantamount to murder; and the greatest vigilance was devoted to preventing the resurgence of tyrants, who had plagued a number of the most prosperous and commercial Greek states in the immediate past. Even personal slaves and servants in Greek city-states were often protected from arbitrary torture and murder. These were not alternative approaches to state rule, but fundamental differences in the idea of personal freedom that would help determine who lived and died at Salamis.

The Persian imperial army was huge and commanded at the top by relatives and elites under oath to the king. At its core were professional Persian infantrymen—the so-called Immortals were the most famous— and various contingents of subsidiary heavy and light infantry, supported by vast forces of cavalry, charioteers, and missile troops. In battle the army depended on its speed and numbers. In place of a heavily armed shock force of pikemen that could shatter horsemen and ground troops, Persian infantrymen were often conscripted from hundreds of different regions, spoke dozens of languages, and were armed with swords, daggers, short spears, picks, war axes, and javelins, and protected by wicker shields, leather jerkins, and occasionally chain-mail shirts. Drill, strict adherence to rank and file, and coordinated group advance and retreat were largely unknown. The Greeks’ dismissive view about the quality of Persian heavy infantry was largely accurate. Some years later, in the early fourth century, Antiochos, a Greek ambassador from Arcadia, said there was not a man fit in Persia for battle against Greeks. There was no need during the creation of the Persian Empire on the steppes of Asia to field phalanxes of citizen hoplites outfitted in seventy-pound panoplies.

The Achaemenid king was not always perched on a throne overlooking the killing ground—like Xerxes at Thermopylae and Salamis—but more regularly fought in a great chariot, surrounded by bodyguards, in the middle of the Persian battle line: both the safest and most logical position whence to issue orders. Greek historians made much of the obvious dissimilarity: Persian monarchs fled ahead of their armies in defeat, while there is not a single major Greek battle—Thermopylae, Delium, Mantinea, Leuctra—in which Hellenic generals survived the rout of their troops. Military catastrophe brought no reproach upon the Achaemenid king himself; subordinates like the Phoenicians at Salamis were scapegoated and executed. In contrast, there was also not one great Greek general in the entire history of the city-state—Themistocles, Miltiades, Pericles, Alcibiades, Brasidas, Lysander, Pelopidas, Epaminondas—who was not at some time either fined, exiled, or demoted, or killed alongside his troops. Some of the most successful and gifted commanders after their greatest victories—the Athenian admirals who won at Arginusae (406 B.C.), or Epaminondas on his return from liberating the Messenian helots (369 B.C.)—stood trial for their lives, not so much on charges of cowardice or incompetence as for inattention to the welfare of their men or the lack of communication with their civilian overseers.

In such a vast domain as Persia, there were in theory thousands of individual landholders and private businessmen, but the economic and cultural contrast with fifth-century Greece was again telling. In classical Athens we do not know of a single farm larger than one hundred acres, whereas in Asia—both under the Achaemenids and later during the Hellenistic dynasties—estates exceeded thousands of acres in size. One of Xerxes’ relatives might own more property than every rower in the Persian fleet combined. Most of the best land in the empire was under direct control of priests, who sharecropped their domains to serfs, and absentee Persian lords, who often owned entire villages. The Persian king himself, in theory, had title to all the land in the empire and could either exercise rights of confiscation of any estate he wished or execute its owner by fiat.

Greece itself had plenty of its own hierarchies concerning property owning, but the difference lay in the posture of a consensual government toward the entire question of land tenure. Public or religiously held estates were of limited size and relatively rare—comprising not more than 5 percent of the aggregate land surrounding a polis. Property was rather equitably held. Public auctions of repossessed farmland were standard, and prices at public sales low and uniform. Lands in new colonies were surveyed and distributed by lot or public sale, never handed over to a few elites. The so-called hoplite infantry class typically owned farms of about ten acres. In most city-states they made up about a third to half of the citizen population and controlled about two-thirds of all the existing arable land—a pattern of landholding far more egalitarian than, say, in present-day California, where 5 percent of the landowners own 95 percent of all agricultural property.

No Greek citizen could be arbitrarily executed without a trial. His property was not liable to confiscation except by vote of a council, whether that be a landed boule in broadly based oligarchies or a popular
ekklēsia
under democracy. In the Greek mind the ability to hold property freely—have legal title to it, improve it, and pass it on—was the foundation of freedom. While such classical agrarian traditions would erode during the later Roman Empire and the early Dark Ages, with the creation of vast absentee estates and ecclesiastical fiefdoms, the ideal would not be abandoned, but rather still provided the basis for revolution and rural reform in the West from the Renaissance to the present day.

While there were vast state mints in Persia, our sources for Achaemenid imperial administration—borne out by the later arrival of the looters and plunderers in Alexander the Great’s army—suggest that tons of stored bullion remained uncoined and that there was a chronic stagnation in the Persian economy. With metals on deposit in imperial treasuries, provincial taxes were more often paid in kind as “gifts”—food, livestock, metals, slaves, property—rather than in specie, illustrative of high taxes and an undeveloped moneyed economy. One of the reasons for the initial rampant expansion and inflation of the later Hellenistic world (323–31 B.C.) was the sudden conversion of precious metals stored in the Achaemenid vaults into readily coined money by the Macedonian Successor kings, who, in transforming a command economy to a more capitalist one, hired out thousands of builders, shippers, and mercenaries.

Persian literature—a corpus of drama, philosophy, or poetry apart from religious or political stricture—did not exist. True, Zoroastrianism was a fascinating metaphysical inquiry, but its reason to be was religious, and thus the parameters of its thought were one with all holy treatises, embedded as it was with a zeal that precluded unlimited speculation and true free expression. History—the Greeks’ idea of free inquiry, in which the records and sources of the past are continually subject to questioning and evaluation as part of an effort to provide a timeless narrative of explication—was also unknown among the Persians, at least in any widely disseminated form. The nearest approximation was the public inscriptions of the Achaemenids themselves, in which a Darius I or Xerxes published his own res gestae:

A great god is Ahura Mazda, who created this earth, who created man, who created peace for man, who made Xerxes king, one king of many, one lord of many. I am Xerxes, the great king, king of kings, king of lands containing many men, king in this great earth far and wide, son of Darius the king, an Achaemenid, a Persian, so of a Persian, an Aryan, of Aryan seed. (A. Olmstead,
History of the Persian Empire,
231)

The emperor Augustus issued similar proclamations in imperial Rome, but there were still a Suetonius, Plutarch, and Tacitus eventually to set the record straight. Just as the Ottomans would later bar printing presses throughout their empire in fear of free expression, the idea of public criticism of the Achaemenids through written documents was literally unknown.

All Persian texts—whether public inscriptions, palace inventories, or sacred tracts—concern the king, his priests, and bureaucrats at large, and confine themselves to government and religion. Even if other avenues of public expression had existed, the Persian victory at Thermopylae could not have been portrayed onstage or remembered in poetry without the approval of Xerxes—and not without Xerxes as chief protagonist in the triumph. The commemoration of the Persian victory in Bactria proves that well enough: “Says Xerxes the king: When I became king, there was within these lands which are written above one which was restless. Afterward Ahura Mazda brought me help. By the favor of Ahura Mazda I smote that land and put it in its place” (A. Olmstead,
History of the Persian
Empire,
231).