Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West [Paperback]

This very readable popular history of the 5th-century BC Persian Wars with Greece combines careful historical detective work with a sometimes breezy tone.

I enjoyed this book probably about as much as I enjoyed Holland's "Rubicon"--which is to say, quite a lot. It is solid, credibly researched history as it might be presented by a tabloid journalist: cynical, gossipy, and salted liberally with salacious or incriminating nuggets about its many characters. It is intended for a general audience, not an academic one, and it succeeds very well.

The book has an unusual but well-considered structure. Holland starts off by describing the societies of the protagonists, devoting his opening chapters to Mesopotamia, Iran, Sparta, and Athens. He does an excellent job of showing how different these worlds were from each other, and gives a strong flavor of how their inhabitants thought and behaved. That done, Holland moves on to the wars themselves, with accounts of the campaigns leading to the famous battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis, which we are now in a position to appreciate much better, knowing something of the outlook and worldview of the different players.

Holland's drive to tell a seamless story has him solving all kinds of problems of conflicts in the sources, drawing canny conclusions from wispy or contradictory data. Only occasionally does he draw attention to his reasoning; mostly it is part of the work underlying the flow of his story. And his story does flow.

Sometimes I found that Holland had laid the cynicism on a bit thick. While of course the ancient world, including among its heroes, had its share of scheming, selfish, greedy, backstabbing blowhards, some of the people must have exhibited more noble qualities at least sometimes. You wouldn't know it from reading Holland.

But I get a sense that all this is done with a twinkle in Holland's eye. As though taking such liberties were part of the fun available to the ancient historian, whose subjects (and their families) are many centuries past being able to take legal action. Holland's mission appears to be to make ancient history relevant, interesting, and most of all fun to a wide contemporary audience, and any peccadilloes of scholarly balance are a small price to pay for this bigger prize.

Holland makes the ancient world a very human, indeed an all too human, place. The portentous theme of East vs. West he handles with a light touch. In many other ways too he shows respect for the intelligence of the reader, who, while being fed heaping portions of gossip about our ancestors, is perhaps learning more than he or she realizes.

If you're interested in the history of ancient Greece, but are new to the subject, you could do a lot worse than reading this book.

In his excellent 2003 book, RUBICON, Tom Holland showed that he has a unique ability to take a highly complex situation in ancient history (in Rubicon's case, the career of Julius Caesar and the death of the Roman Republic) and make it not only clear and credible to the well-read history buff, but understandable to the reader who knows nothing about ancient history. RUBICON was a well-balanced history that read with the drama of a novel. After its well-praised reception, Holland turned to his latest book, PERSIAN FIRE, in which he trains his academic mind on the equally dramatic Greek drama of the Persian invasions in the late fifth century - an invasion pregnant with implications for the rise of a democratic Athens as well as its eventual fall.

Like RUBICON, Holland's classical background makes him a natural to explain the peculiarly complicated relationship between Darius and Xerxes, the Persian Emperors who cast hungry eyes at the west; their two invasions, and the eventual triumph of the unified Greeks after many hair-raising challenges. Some of the best-known and best-loved stories of ancient Greece make PERSIAN FIRE at least as dramatic as RUBICON; Pheidippides, running the 26 miles from the battle of Marathon to Athens with word of a miraculous Athenian victory, only to die of exhaustion; crafty Themistocles, who at a crisis in Athenian affairs, sent word to the Persians to blockade the straits at Salamis, thus forcing the Greeks to unify and beat them; most famously and movingly, the death to the last man of the Spartan King Leonidas and his 300 men at the Pass at Thermopylae, a tragic strategic sacrifice that gave the Athenians breathing time against the Persian invasion; the complete destruction of all Athens' temples atop the Acropolis because Themistocles had convinced the Athenians to abandon their city to the Persians and fight from the sea; the panic-stricken embassy to the Oracle at Delphi, when the Athenians were at first told their cause was hopeless, and later cryptically told to depend upon "the wooden walls" - all these facts are commonplace to classical scholars, but they deserve to be retold again for an eternally new audience, for courage and sacrifice is never outdated. Holland brought tears to my eyes in his careful recreation of Thermopylae - but his book does far more.

In a time when cultures of East and West seemed farther apart than ever, Holland concentrates on explaining the mighty Persian culture which, from the time of the victorious Greeks to our own day, was mocked, denigrated, and underestimated. He makes a fairly clear argument that this kind of cultural misapprehension, after the famous Greek victory, led to an alienation between East and West which had not really existed prior to the Persian invasions, and which affects our understandings even today. He shows just why the Persian culture - in many ways, far superior to that of the more primitive Greeks - deserved respect for its own accomplishments, as well as how and why the Greeks came to blow up their honest victories and denigrate their Persian foes. All these points give PERSIAN FIRE a peculiarly modern resonance, as well as telling some of the greatest stories of antiquity with clarity and flair.

I have read Persian Fire twice and am still learning much about both the ancient Persians and Greeks and why their wars created a divide that still exists between Europe and Asia. Highly recommended.

Suzanne Cross
Web Author - Ancient History

This is an extremely well-written book that takes the reader back over 2500 years to discuss the first serious clash between east and west. The problem with writing about events so far in the past is that there are not necessarily many sources for events, and what we have are often quite contradictory. This particular situation is aided by the fact that there are several near-contemporaneous accounts written. Unfortunately, they often disagree with each other, often in very material ways. It is the task of the historical writer to sift through these various, and varied, accounts and attempt to give the reader as close to an accurate tale as is possible. The author succeeds admirably in this, and when he disagrees with certain ancient authors or modern interpreters, he gives his reasons for so doing. We have a truly exciting story of the defense of Greece from the invasion of the Persian Empire. The basic story is fairly well-known to most people, with the important battles (Marathon, Salamis, etc.) retold in every high school history text. This book goes beyond these events, and covers much territory concerning the founding of the Persian Empire, and early Greek city-states, and the inevitable clash that resulted from their proximity. It is a story of a turning point in history that, if it had turned out differently, the world we now know would be quite a bit different. For that alsone this book is well worth reading.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 59 reviews  4.0 out of 5 stars