Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome by Victor Davis Hanson Read Free Book Online Page A

a
    stand-off of several days, he resolved to put this to the test. Dividing
    his army, he embarked a sizable task force—including, almost certainly,
    his cavalry—and sent it around the Attic coast to see if its appearance
    in the harbor off Athens would help to unbar the city’s gates. Yet it was
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    precisely this same maneuver that gave the Athenian holding force its
    chance. Against all expectations, moving against a foe widely assumed
    to be invincible, crossing what many of the Athenians themselves must
    have dreaded would prove to be a plain of death, they charged an en-
    emy that no Greek army had ever before defeated in open battle. The
    reward for their courage was a glorious, an immortal victory. Fearful
    still of treachery, however, the exhausted and blood-streaked victors
    had no time to savor their triumph. Instead, in the full heat of day
    they headed straight back for Athens, “as fast as their legs could take
    them.”16 They arrived in the very nick of time, for not long afterward
    Persian transport ships began to glide toward the city’s harbor. For a
    few hours they lay stationary beyond its entrance; then, as the sun set
    at last, they raised anchor, swung around, and sailed away. The threat
    of invasion was over—for the moment, at any rate.
    To be sure, there was no doubt that what had saved Athens on the
    battlefield of Marathon was first and foremost the prowess of its own
    citizens: not merely their courage but also the sheer pulverizing impact
    of their charge, the heavy crunching of spears and shields into oppo-
    nents wearing, at most, quilted jerkins for protection and armed, per-
    haps, many of them, only with bows and slings. Yet something more
    had been in conflict on that fateful day than flesh and metal alone: Mar-
    athon had also been a testing of the stereotypes that both sides had of
    the other. The Athenians, by refusing to play the role al otted them by
    the Persians’ spymasters, had duly served to convince themselves once
    and for al that the watchwords of the democracy—comradeship, equal-
    ity, liberty—might indeed be more than slogans. Simultaneously, the su-
    perpower that for so long had appeared invincible had been shown to
    have feet of clay. The Persians might be defeated, after al . “Barbarians,”
    the Ionians had always cal ed them, a people whose language was gib-
    berish, who went “bah, bah, bah”—and now, in the wake of Marathon,
    the Athenians began to do the same. It was a word that perfectly evoked
    their dread of what they had been forced to confront on the day of their
    great victory, an alien, mil ing numberless horde, jabbering for their de-
    struction. Yet “barbarian,” in the wake of such a battle, could also sug-
    gest something more: a sneer, a tone of contempt. A self-assurance, in
    short, more than fit to go nose to nose with that of a superpower.
    From Persia with Love 25
    Here, then, was a measure of the decisiveness of Marathon: that it
    helped to purge the Athenians of the deep-rooted inferiority complex
    the Greeks had traditionally felt whenever they compared themselves
    to the great powers of the Near East. Nor, as the Athenians themselves
    never wearied of pointing out, had the victory been won on behalf
    of their city alone. In its wake, even those Greeks who loathed the
    democracy could walk that little bit taller, confident that the qualities
    that distinguished them from foreigners might, just perhaps, be the
    mark of their superiority. Not, of course, that a temporary reverse on
    the distant frontier of their empire had done anything to diminish the
    Persians’ own conceit and sense of entitlement; and so it was, ten years
    after Marathon, when Xerxes, Darius’s son and heir, embarked on a
    full-scale invasion of Greece, that the resulting conflict served to pro-
    vide an authentic clash of ideals. Indeed, on the Persian side, Xerxes’
    determination to give form to his sense of global mission was such that
    it