Meanwhile, even as they continued their tour of inspection, a great trench was being dug on the southern margins of the marshes. Into this makeshift refuse tip the invaders’ corpses were flung unceremoniously. No memorial for the slaughtered Persian hordes.* Mute and inglorious as their grave was, what better was deserved by men who in life had known nothing of the comradeship of a city, or of liberty from royal diktats, or of the discipline of a phalanx, but had instead milled like the merest herd of beasts, their voices animal screechings, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? The Ionians had labeled the Persians “barbarians”; now, in the aftermath of their great victory the Athenians began to do the same. It was a word that perfectly evoked their fear of what they had seen that early morning on the plain of Marathon: an army numberless and alien, jabbering for their destruction, “gibberish-speakers” indeed. Yet “barbarian,” especially on the tongue of a veteran of the famous battle, could also suggest something more: a sneer, a tone of superiority, or even of contempt—one, certainly, that few Greeks would have dared to adopt prior to that fateful August dawn.
Marathon had taught not only Athens but the whole of Greece a portentous lesson: humiliation at the hands of the superpower was not inevitable. The Athenians, as they would never tire of reminding everyone, had shown that the hordes of the Great King could be defeated. The colossus had feet of clay.
Liberty might be defended, after all.
1. A relief from Nineveh, showing the Assyrian army on a mountain campaign; cavalry predominates. The tribute of horses from Media was vital to Assyria’s efforts to stay ahead in the Near Eastern arms race. (The Art Archive/Musée du Louvre, Paris/Dagli Orti)
2. The head of a king found among the ruins of Ecbatana. If not a fake, then this is almost certainly a representation of Astyages, the dream-haunted last King of Media.
3. The tomb of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae. “Mortal!” an inscription on it is said once to have read. “I am Cyrus, who founded the dominion of the Persians, and was King of Asia. Do not begrudge me then my monument!” (Bridgeman Art Library)
4. A coin illustrating a fire altar. The blaze of fire was profoundly sacred to the Persians, and served as an empire-wide symbol of the power of the Great King. (Ancient Art & Architecture)
5. Bisitun as it appears today, with the main Iran-Iraq road in the foreground. It was ten miles to the south of the sacred mountain that Darius and his assassination squad murdered Bardiya, on the Khorasan Highway that ran below it that he defeated the rebel king of Media, and on its cliff face that he memorialized his great victory over the Lie. (Tom Holland)
6. Darius triumphant, as represented on the cliff face of Bisitun. A prostrate Gaumata grovels beneath his foot. The nine liar kings who dared to challenge him are shown tethered by their necks: Nidintu-Bel, the rebel king of Babylon, is second from the left; Phraortes, the rebel king of Media, third from the left; Vahyazdata, the rebel king of Persia, sixth from the left. The rebel king of the Saka, wearing his distinctive pointed cap, brings up the rear. (R. Woods)
7. The face of the most terrifying state in Greece. A Spartan warrior, long-haired and swathed in a cloak, peers out through the eye slits of his helmet. (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; gift of J. Pierpont Morgan)
8. A mask from the temple of Artemis Orthia in Sparta. The masks hung upon the walls, some of them of young men or soldiers, but many more, like this one, withered and grotesque. In their ugliness lay a reminder to every Spartan of the failure it was his lifelong duty to avoid. (British School at Athens)
9. Athena “Polias”—“The Guardian of the City.” The original icon of the warrior goddess, jealously preserved by the Boutad clan on the Acropolis, was the oldest and most sacred statue in the whole of Athens. (Acropolis Museum)
10. By the sixth century BC, the Athenian aristocracy were rousing themselves from their traditional provincialism. The interior of this Attic drinking cup shows revelers adorned in the turbans and long robes that were characteristic of the international party set. (Ashmolean Museum)
11. Harmodius and Aristogiton. Following the establishment of democracy in Athens, a bronze of the tyrannicides—of which this is a Roman copy—was the only public portrait to be seen in the whole of the city. A squalid crime of passion had been transfigured into a heroic blow struck for liberty. (Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples/Bridgeman Art Library)
12. The site of the great city of Sardis. The splendors that made it the capital of the Persian West have long since vanished, but the imposing acropolis still rises steep and jagged above the plain. (Tom Holland)
13. Ionians bringing the Great King tribute, as shown on a relief at Persepolis. Above them, instantly recognizable in their pointed hats, are the ambassadors of the Saka. (The Art Archive/Dagli Orti)
14. A bronze weight in the shape of a duck, found in the Treasury at Persepolis. Ducks, just like any other user of the imperial road system, would be issued with ration chits by the ever-punctilious Persian bureaucracy. (Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago)
15. Darius and his court, as imagined by a Greek painter of the fourth century BC. A century after Marathon, Darius remained the archetype of royal power. (Museum of Naples)
16. This watercolor of hoplites arming for battle is based on a vase that dates from the decade before the battle of Marathon. The Athenian victory over the Persian invaders in 490 BC was the first demonstration of how lethal Greek armor and weapons might be when brought to bear against the much more lightly armed troops of the East. (akg-images/Peter Connolly)
17. A view of the modern-day plain of Marathon, looking north from the position of the Greek camp to where the Persian camp would have been. (Tom Holland)
18. A bronze helmet worn by a Persian soldier who fought at Marathon. It was dedicated by the victorious Athenians to the temple of Zeus at Olympia. (akg-images/John Hios)