Persian Fire

Envoi

In 431 BC, the growing tensions between Athens and Sparta finally erupted into open hostilities. The ensuing struggle, which the Athenians called “the Peloponnesian War,” lasted on and off for twenty-seven years. It ended in 404 BC with the total defeat of Athens. Her empire was dismantled, her fleet destroyed and her democracy suspended. Although in the following century she would stage a spectacular recovery, Athens would never again be the predominant power in Greece.

Nor, after 371 BC, would Sparta. One hundred and eight years after Pausanias had won his great victory over Mardonius, the Spartan army was brought to sensational defeat by the Thebans at the village of Leuctra, barely five miles from Plataea. The Thebans, pressing home their advantage, then invaded Lacedaemon. The Peloponnesian League was abolished. Messenia was freed. Sparta, deprived of her helots, was reduced overnight from being the hegemon of Greece to a middle-ranking power.

Over the following decades, the Greek cities would continue to tear themselves apart. Meanwhile, to the north, a new predator was readying itself for the murderous struggle to be the greatest power in Greece. In 338 BC, King Philip II of Macedon, following in the footsteps of Xerxes, swept southward into Boeotia. An army of Athenians and Thebans, attempting to bar his way, was cut to pieces. “We lie here because we strove to give freedom to Greece.” So it was written on the tomb of the fallen. “The glory we enjoy will never age.”¹ Proud words—but not even the most stirring epitaph could obscure the grim reality that Greek independence had effectively been brought to an end. Four years later, and Philip’s son, Alexander, crossed the Hellespont to assault the Persian Empire. Now it was the turn of the Great King to have his power humbled into the dust. Three great battles in succession were lost to the invader. Babylon fell. Persepolis was burned. The last King of Kings suffered a squalid and thirst-racked death. Alexander laid claim to the kidaris of Cyrus, and to an empire that stretched from the Adriatic to the Indus.

For the first time, Greece and Persia acknowledged the rule of a single master.

Even Nemesis, perhaps, might have permitted herself a smile.