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This chapter focuses on two dimensions of Herodotus' Aeginetan logoi: primarily, in terms of what they attempt to convey about Aeginetan identity prior to and during the Persian Wars; secondarily, in terms of the meta-narrative they construct regarding themes relevant to the subsequent history of Aegina: how her cultural, political, and economic identity contributed to the events which befell her later, especially at the hands of Athens. Herodotus' logoi explore the complexity of Aegina's position, literal and metaphorical, as a Dorian polis with a long-established maritime economy, whose geographical position in the centre of the Saronic Gulf symbolizes the complexities of her situation within the political realities of the later fifth century and the cultural categories and political alliances that came to be dominant in framing them. Here the focus is Aegina's relationship to Sparta and the Peloponnese.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the purpose of the book, which is to throw the maximum possible fresh light on both the consistency of certain themes within the reception of the actual battles of the Persian Wars and the diversity of the ways in which they have been treated. It outlines the actual events that led to the Persian Wars. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter addresses the very different presentation of the Persian Wars by 4th-century historians and by the patriotic Athenian orators, as writers of both forensic and political speeches, including the epitaphioi logoi at which it was customary to catalogue Athenian victories. It is shown that it was the battles in which the Athenians were most involved (Marathon, Salamis) that unsurprisingly featured most prominently, building up an idealized picture of Athens in her finest hour and replacing the uncertainty and ambivalences in Herodotus' narrative with a ‘smooth-flowing teleology, in which each battle marches the Greeks forward to an overall victory’; the discussions of Plataea are equally idealizing in their amnesiac erasure of conflict between different Greek states. The ‘patriotic’ and idealizing strand in the reception of the Persian Wars found its first cohesive and near-uniform expression in the panhellenic ideology of such authors.

This chapter considers the new trends in academic discussion of the Persian Wars in the wake of the reforms of the 1830s, articulated above all in George Grote's work in Greek history. It relates Grote's analysis of the Persian Wars not only to contemporary British legislation but also to German Idealism, in particular the Kantian notion of war as the supreme force bringing man to a state of civilization, and the Hegelian principle of historical dialectic. The Persian Wars, and the advances achieved through them, thus become the foundation text not only of Enlightenment notions of liberty, but of early Victorian civil-democratic society.

Through a diachronic study of the uses to which Aeschylus' Persians has been put, this chapter argues that one of the most important factors underlying the longevity of the Persian Wars traditions has been the identification of the ancient Greeks' struggle against Achaemenid Persia with the Christian West's adversarial relationship with Islam. Although the image of the Ottoman Turk — with his turban, moustache, and curving sabre — certainly affected the iconography of other battles such as Marathon, the identification has been made most prominent culturally since the 16th century by authors revisiting the battle of Salamis. The facile identification of the entire Islamic world with the caricatured ancient Persians staged by Aeschylus has also been a factor informing the West's crude stereotype of the eastern tyrant, Muslim despot, and the polemical terminology of Freedom and Democracy that has often played an unhelpful role by fomenting aggression on both local and global scales.

One artistic genre that has received comparatively little attention in studies of the reception of ancient history is that of the historical novel. This chapter shows that literary snobbery regarding novels concerning the Persian Wars can to some extent be justified — many 20th-century novelistic depictions of the conflict with Persia read simply as exercises in reproducing the Persian Wars topoi with little imagination and few attempts to engage the reader in a believable representation of the historical past. There are, however, some notable exceptions to such sanitized fictionalizations. The chapter focuses on Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire (1998). This version of the Thermopylae story stands out largely because of Pressfield's refusal to shrink from dealing with many of the less appealing aspects of Spartan society and military training, as well as his vivid imagining of the horrors of war and the effects of conflict on the mentality of its very real human participants.

This chapter examines the account written by the Comte de Marcellus, a French diplomat in Constantinople, of a reading of Aeschylus' Persians, in ancient Greek, that took place at a literary evening held in that city in the year before the uprising was launched in 1821. Marcellus' memoir describes a group of Greek intellectuals who embodied ‘classical’ nobility coming together to define a new Hellenism, through the regeneration of the spirit and glory of the Persian Wars. Marcellus' writing is dependent partly on the writings of the militant liberal philhellene Chateaubriand, but much more on the inspiration taken from ancient Greece by Greek intellectuals and revolutionaries including Adamantios Koraes, and especially, the Orthodox cleric and pedagogue Konstantinos Oikonomos, who was responsible for proposing the recitation of Persians in the first place.

Persia's Egyptian situation was the key to Persian involvements elsewhere. This meant that with Egypt secure after 518, Darius was free to undertake expansionistic enterprise beyond existing boundaries into “Scythia” and the Balkans. But this set in motion a series of events that over the next sixty years or so compelled the Persians to accept limits in the west in order to hold on to Egypt and the middle territory. We can link Darius’ expansionistic efforts in the west to the subsequent Ionian Revolt and link that to Persian determination to subjugate Greek mainland states. The Persian threat prompted Athens’ adoption of a maritime strategy based on the creation of a strong fleet. This served to repel the Persian attack on Greece in 480–479 and set the stage for the creation of a Greek super-state in the form of the Delian League, which over the next fifteen years pushed the Persians entirely out of the Aegean and then joined with Egyptian dynasts to challenge Persian control of Egypt. Despite Persian recovery of Egypt, the prospect of continuing Egyptian-Athenian collaboration prompted the Persians to concede the far west in return for recognition of Persian control of Egypt and the middle territory.

This chapter chronicles the beginnings of a new democratic order in the Athenian government via the reforms of Cleisthenes and the new democracy's trial by fire during the Persian Wars. While democracy had no inventor or discoverer, Cleisthenes was credited with reforms that challenged the role of the elite within the existing democratic framework. His was an opposing political ideal, which held that it was the whole body of citizens, not the privileged few, who had the right to political power and the right to control directly the course of political affairs. After discussing the historical literature surrounding his role in the history of democracy, the chapter turns to its tumultuous first four decades struggling through the Persian Wars, before exploring the contributions the series of conflicts had made to the rise of democracy.

Herodotus articulates the continuing presence and relevance of myth in the world of the fifth century. This chapter begins by examining an episode near the end of the Histories, where Herodotus appropriates local, oral mythological traditions in the form of a story about Helen of Troy (9.73). Herodotus' presentation reveals the role of mythic discourse in shaping fifth-century events as well as drawing out wider points about historical processes. The chapter then goes on to address the more sustained and complex example of Mardonius' self-mythicising image, where reference to the mythic past is inflected through the Panhellenic poetic genres of epic and tragedy, and the questions it raises about the purposes and effects of mythic discourse on the twin levels of history and the historian's presentation.

This chapter shows that Augustan Rome's use of the Athenian image of the Persian barbarian, especially the Actium–Salamis equation, is an expanded and revised version of an article originally published in Classics Ireland. It shows how complex were the reasons why Augustus — and his poets Horace and Virgil — found in the Persian Wars material which helped in the creation of the new Roman sense of Self, a new identity that became a cultural requirement in the years following the end of the Republic. In particular, the chapter examines how the original Athenian fusion of the Amazonomachy and the Persian Wars narratives provided fresh poetic and ideological impetus in Virgil's treatment of the Camilla story.

This chapter assesses the impact of Herodotus' account of the Persian Wars in the Hellenistic period. Firstly, it discusses the assimilation of the invasion of Greece by the Gauls in the third century to Xerxes' invasion in the fifth, and highlights some of the difficulties involved in isolating Hellenistic reactions to Herodotus on the Persian Wars. It then examines the testimony of Timaeus of Tauromenium on Gelon's involvement in the Persian Wars. This example hints at marked regional differences in the way the Histories were read; Herodotus' treatment of the Persian War theme helps to explain the controversy over Histories as much as its popularity. A final section argues that Herodotus' opening chapters on the origin of the Persian Wars provide an important interpretative frame for later writers dealing with the theme of East-West hostilities, including Apollonius of Rhodes and Lycophron.

This chapter explores the complexities evident in the presentation of the Persian Wars, mediated heavily through the text of Herodotus, to be found in the Lives of Plutarch. Plutarch's contribution to the development and later reception of the Persian Wars narratives is extraordinarily important, and yet has elicited very little specialist scholarly discussion. Plutarch's Persian Wars are uniquely complex, since their author was a Greek intellectual writing at the site of some of the Persians' worst acts of vandalism. But many centuries after the Persian Wars, under the Roman empire, an administration for which the archetypal image of the heroic Greek repulse of the tyrannical eastern invader had acquired many new and complicated resonances, not least in respect of the Parthians.

After a brief introduction, in which some attention is paid to Persian peculiarities, the rule of subsequent Achaemenid kings is related. The reigns of Cyrus II the Great, Cambyses II, Darius I the Great, and Xerxes I are referred to by Diodorus. A special role in this chapter is preserved for the Greco-Persian Wars. Diodorus’ version of them differs in places from the best-known version, that by Herodotus, and therefore adds to our understanding of these wars (or at least questions the absolute trust at present frequently placed in Herodotus’ account).

This chapter discusses the role played in the Enlightenment by the battlefields of the Persian Wars, shifting the focus of the argument to Thermopylae and Marathon, and the canonization of their status as the places where Liberty was born. The chapter explores the attitudes of visitors to Greece and the Persian War battle sites — especially the scene of the heroic last stand of Leonidas at Thermopylae — from the earlier part of the 17th century until the 18th century. Particular attention is paid to the British expedition in 1751, and the frustrations of scholarly travellers at the failure of the landscape they encountered to match precisely the topography described by Herodotus and Strabo. But the recorded emotional responses of the visitors on their pilgrimages to what they saw as the sacrificial shrine of western liberty ultimately transcended all their empirical anxieties.

This chapter shows that Plato's brilliant parody of a funeral speech, Menexenus wholly undercuts the Athenians' formulaic idealization of their glorious past and the rhetorical conventions they had invented in order to consolidate this ideological procedure. The Atlantis of the Timaeus and Critias is more than an allegorical polis cryptically ‘standing for’ Athenian expansionist naval power: it plays a more ironic role in Plato's use of the Persian Wars tradition; the Atlantis myth examines ‘what kind of victory Athens would have needed to win in order to deserve the encomium Menexenus denies it’. Crucially, the chapter offers a powerful corrective to the dominant traditions seen elsewhere in (primarily) Athenian sources that the Persian Wars were seen by all as a cause only for celebration.

This chapter considers the role that mythology plays in the later, somewhat more ‘historical’ part of Herodotus' work, to see whether there is anything qualitatively different in the way myth is used in these books compared with the earlier ones. The novelty in the use of myth is to be seen in two principal ways. First, in the way in which, on Xerxes' march, mythology is not simply brought into the narrative to provide extra information about an event, person, or place, but to provide a running commentary on the religious and moral quality of Xerxes' expedition: the myths that are mentioned all have a relevance to understanding the nature of that expedition. Secondly, myths take on a new function within the rhetorics of inter-national relations, being used in hostilely ‘protreptic’ and ‘eristic’ ways to promote a particular people's interests. It thus plays a major role in pointing up the deeply fissured nature of the Greek alliance: myth is not a source of unity.

Rudolf Maté's The 300 Spartans (1962) was a commercial success and has enjoyed perennial popularity. More people in the 20th-century world acquired an understanding of the Persian Wars from this film than from any other single source. This chapter draws on archival research into journalistic responses to the film in the USA at the time of its release, and discovers alternative political resonance far more in tune with the domestic concerns of the American heartland than those which have dominated the discussion: Thermopylae has always held a special place in the American imagination as the classical forerunner of the heroic deeds of 1836 when the Catholic mission- cum-fortress known as the Alamo became the ‘cradle of Texan Liberty’. Persia was identified with Mexico and Leonidas with David Crockett and the other heroes of Texas.

This chapter focuses on Aiolian communities and two interrelated episodes in the History: firstly, the first revolt of the island of Lesbos in the North-Eastern Aegean; and, secondly, the episode of Plataia in Boiotia and its clash with its mother-city Thebes. Here the scope of discussion widens, also encompassing kinship relations of the relatedness type, such as panhellenic kinship and the specially intimate relationship between Athens and Plataia. Through close attention to the role of myth in the shaping of perceptions and claims of the present, and vice-versa, and to discourse and narrative, the complexity of intercommunal kinship is explored in the quadrangle Plataia–Thebes–Sparta–Athens.