Persian Fire

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)

19. The King of Kings seated on his throne. This is probably a representation of Darius—in which case the Crown Prince standing behind the throne is Xerxes. Alternatively, the King may be Xerxes himself. Artists at the Persian court were employed to portray idealized representations of royal power, not to draw from real life. (National Museum of Iran, Tehran/Bridgeman Art Library)

20. A frieze of palm leaves and sunflowers from Xerxes’ private quarters at Persepolis. Gardens and the beauties of the natural world were a universal passion among the Persian elite.

21. The Great King, symbolically borne on the shoulders of his soldiers. The invasion of Greece was not merely a military expedition—it was also designed to demonstrate the full scale and reach of royal power. (Sadie Holland)

22. An ostracon cast in the 480s BC, when dread of Persia was starting to infect political life in Athens. This particular shard was cast against “Callias the son of Cratius”; the rough sketch on its reverse side, showing Callias as a Persian archer, makes clear the crime of which he was suspected. (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Athens)

23. Themistocles: “the subtle serpent of Greece.” (Werner Forman/CORBIS)

24. A fragment of a relief from Persepolis, showing a chariot pulled by Nisaean horses. This was the form of transport that Xerxes used to cross the Hellespont. (British Museum)

25. Persian infantrymen, from a frieze discovered at Susa. The richness and beauty of their robes suggest that they belong to the Immortals, the elite squad of 10,000 who served the Great King as his shock troops. (Gianni Dagli Orti/CORBIS)

26. A view of the beach at Artemisium as it looks today. Back in 480 BC, the ships of the Greek fleet could easily be hauled up onto the shingle or launched back into the sea as the movements of the enemy demanded. (Tom Holland)

27. A coin from the fourth century BC, showing a Sidonian warship. Slim, shield-hung and sublimely maneuverable, Phoenician triremes moved faster than anything the Greek fleet could pitch against them. (British Museum)

28. This bust of a Spartan warrior has traditionally been taken to represent Leonidas, the king who lead the 300 men of his bodyguard to their heroic deaths at Thermopylae. Whether it is truly a portrait of Leonidas or not—and the overwhelming probability must be that it is not—it powerfully expresses the resolution and defiance that Spartans were trained all their life to attain. (The Art Archive/Archaeological Museum Sparta/Dagli Orti)

29. Thermopylae, seen from the heights above the East Gate. Back in 480 BC, the flatlands stretching away from the pass to the east would have been submerged beneath the waters of the Malian Gulf. Otherwise, this is essentially the view that Hydarnes and the Immortals would have had as they descended from the mountain pass to attack the Greek holding force in its rear. (Tom Holland)

30. This relief, sculpted some eighty years after the battle of Salamis, shows the midsection of a Greek warship. Banks of straining rowers pull on oars. (Bridgeman/Alinari Archives)

31. Modern-day Salamis. The straits in which the Persian fleet were defeated are now crowded with tankers, warships and speedboats. The topography, however, has stayed essentially the same. This is the view from the entrance to the straits. A full view of them is only possible once a ship has advanced further into the channel. (Tom Holland)

32. Down, and almost out. The Persian defeat at Plataea finished off the Great King’s hopes of conquering Greece for good. (National Museums of Scotland)

33. A view from the Pnyx, where Themistocles rallied his fellow citizens to defiance of the Persian juggernaut, looking eastward toward the Acropolis. On the summit of the sacred rock stand the ruins of the Parthenon: the most beautiful war memorial ever built. (Bridgeman/Alinari Archives)