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Herodotus, and the Parsis at Thermopylae
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Aakar Patel
In 480 BC, Persia's emperor Xerxes attacked and defeated Greece. He bridged the Hellespont, the slim neck between Europe and Asia now called the Dardanelles, and marched his army of Iraqis, Iranians, Egyptians and Indians across to Macedonia and then south into Greece. Most Greek states on his path surrendered to him. Sparta lost one skirmish against his army and then refused to fight. The people of Athens abandoned their city to Xerxes and fled to an island in the south called Salamis.
Xerxes had invaded in anger, after Athens interfered militarily in one of his colonies on the west coast of Turkey. Reaching Athens, he burnt all of it down, including the Acropolis. Then, realising that the Athenians would not defend their state, took his army back to Asia.
We know all this because it was recorded by a Greek historian, Herodotus, who was born a few years before the invasion. It's a simple and conclusive story. But over the centuries, one part of the invasion, that skirmish with the Spartans, has been used by Europeans to tell a different story. This is the story of freedom-loving individuals (Europeans) defending themselves against slavish barbarians (Asians). And this brave stand of the Spartans, according to the movie '300' and a recent BBC Radio 4 programme called 'In Our Time', "saved civilisation".
It is a bold claim to make, because it assumes that civilisation is entirely European and there was no civilisation on the Persian side. It is also a factually untrue claim on two counts. The first that the skirmish, the battle of Thermopylae, was fought between 300 Spartans and 5.2 million Persians. The second that Xerxes lost the war.
Xerxes is Greek for the emperor's Old Persian name, which was Kshayarsa, from the same root as Sanskrit Kshatriya and the modern caste name Khatri.
Herodotus says Xerxes had 2.6 million fighting men with that number again in support. A total, according to him, of 5,283,220 men (more than the modern armies of China, America, India and Pakistan put together). Even if it were possible to transport such an army 2,500 years ago, there would have been no food in the surrounding countryside to feed so many and so this number is difficult to believe. It is taken as true by a lot of Europeans, including scholars.
The first inaccuracy that we are referring to, however, is not the number of Persians; it is the number of Greeks. Popular history, as can be seen from the title of the famous Hollywood movie, says the Greeks numbered 300.
Herodotus says the Greek force at Thermopylae was made up of 5,200 men, whom he lists by state including 300 from Sparta, plus "all the men that the Locrians of Opus could send". We do not know how many those were. And there are more. Herodotus says each Spartan had Helots assigned to him, who also fought and were killed. These were Greeks from Helos enslaved by Sparta. We are not told how many Helots there were at Thermopylae, but Herodotus tells us that at a later battle, at Plataea, there were seven Helots to a Spartan, which would correspond to 2,100 Helots at Thermopylae. So the Greeks numbered 7,300 men plus the Locrians. This is not an insubstantial force to defend the Thermopylae pass which was, according to Herodotus, one wagon wide at its narrowest and 50 feet at its widest, with a stone wall behind which defenders could stand.
It did not really matter how many men the Persians had: the Greeks had a man opposite each attacker. Herodotus says the Greeks were better armed. They were armoured in bronze with helmets, and their spears were longer than those of the Persians. The Greeks had bronze-faced shields, the Spartan ones being three feet across. The Persians had wicker shields. The battle lasted two days, at the end of which the Persians found a way around the pass and obliterated the Greeks. However, many of the Greeks had fled by then, according to Herodotus, and the deserters included Spartans, so all 300 did not sacrifice themselves. Herodotus says in the end there were 4,000 Greek dead meaning there were at least 3,300 deserters. There were 1,000 Persian dead, but Herodotus says these were only the ones displayed by Xerxes and the rest were buried so that his army would not lose heart at the sight. This might not be true given that it would have been in violation of the Persian manner of disposing the dead in the open, fed to vultures.
The Persians of course were Zarathushtrians, and their descendants are the Parsis of Bombay, Surat, Navsari and Karachi.
It is strange to think that one of our communities fought and defeated Europe, but it is true and the Parsis went on to become the greatest community of India.
After this defeat, the Spartans refused to fight Xerxes, and the Athenians fled. Herodotus says there was a naval battle off Salamis that the Persians lost, but the Persians were not a naval power and the spearhead of the Parsi army, the Zhayedan or the Immortals, were infantry not marines.
At the time, 2,400 years ago, naval battles would not have been conclusive because there was no firepower. Ships, called triremes, were slow and powered by oarsmen on three decks. Fighting was carried out by ramming a ship on its side, immobilising it and, if the ship sank, drowning those soldiers who could not swim. This is not an efficient way to do battle and the Greek naval victory would have meant little. Incidentally, the Greek tragedian Aeschylus fought at Salamis and later wrote the play, The Persians.
Having spent his anger, Xerxes returned to Asia, where he would rule successfully before dying 15 years later, in 465 BC.
He left behind a force headed, according to Herodotus, by his step-brother, which lost a battle against 115,000 Greeks at Plataea the following year. In this battle, 1,300 Indians fought on the Persian side. Herodotus says the Indians, who might have been from Punjab, were dressed in cotton and carried cane bows and cane arrows tipped with iron.
After this defeat, the second Persian force also left for Asia. European history says this sequence "saved civilisation", because in the coming decades Athens would produce the great Plato and Aristotle and the rest of Greek's classical culture that all Europeans now claim. But there is nothing to say that Plato and Aristotle would not have flowered even under Persian occupation.
The war of 480 was not fought between democrats and despots: the Spartans were also led by a king, Leonidas, and they were hardly democratic. They enslaved their own people, the Helots. They killed two Persian ambassadors sent by Xerxes's father Darius, throwing them into a well when they asked for a fistful of earth and water as a sign of submission. The Athenians also misbehaved with Darius's ambassadors, locking them up. Herodotus disapproves of such Greek behaviour and he is himself never prejudiced against the foreigner. He says much of Greek civilisation, including their gods, came from Egypt and he could be right. He thinks the best looking people in the world are Ethiopians. Not once does he refer to people with dark skin as being different. His book is the first work of history ever written. It comprises of nine chapters, each between 50 and 70 pages long and it is over 600 modern pages, beautifully written and very entertaining.
The Persians are shown by him often as merciful. Their rule is never to execute a man for one mistake, and whenever apportioning punishment, to remember the good he did along with the crime. Emperor Darius is shown by Herodotus as grieving after a man who betrays him, a Greek, is beheaded without his knowledge. This is not the behaviour of barbarians. Herodotus uses the word to represent those who, according to Greeks, speak a language that goes 'bar-bar', instead of polished Greek. Hindi also uses 'barh-barh' to indicate gibberish.
Today, all that remains of the Persians who fought at Thermopylae are the Parsis, who still name their sons Xerxes, Darius and Cyrus. Uniquely among Indian corporates, of Tata Sons's stock, 65.8 per cent is held by charities. Ratan Tata only holds 0.84 per cent. Last year Tata Sons, which owns Indian's biggest software firm, one of the world's biggest steel firms and the automobile manufacturer Jaguar-Land Rover, made a profit of Rs3,780 crore ($800 million), giving much away to India's poor.
Herodotus would not have thought them uncivilised.
The writer is director with Hill Road Media in Bombay. Email: aakar@ hillroadmedia.com
Herodotus, and the Parsis at Thermopylae
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Aakar Patel
In 480 BC, Persia's emperor Xerxes attacked and defeated Greece. He bridged the Hellespont, the slim neck between Europe and Asia now called the Dardanelles, and marched his army of Iraqis, Iranians, Egyptians and Indians across to Macedonia and then south into Greece. Most Greek states on his path surrendered to him. Sparta lost one skirmish against his army and then refused to fight. The people of Athens abandoned their city to Xerxes and fled to an island in the south called Salamis.
Xerxes had invaded in anger, after Athens interfered militarily in one of his colonies on the west coast of Turkey. Reaching Athens, he burnt all of it down, including the Acropolis. Then, realising that the Athenians would not defend their state, took his army back to Asia.
We know all this because it was recorded by a Greek historian, Herodotus, who was born a few years before the invasion. It's a simple and conclusive story. But over the centuries, one part of the invasion, that skirmish with the Spartans, has been used by Europeans to tell a different story. This is the story of freedom-loving individuals (Europeans) defending themselves against slavish barbarians (Asians). And this brave stand of the Spartans, according to the movie '300' and a recent BBC Radio 4 programme called 'In Our Time', "saved civilisation".
It is a bold claim to make, because it assumes that civilisation is entirely European and there was no civilisation on the Persian side. It is also a factually untrue claim on two counts. The first that the skirmish, the battle of Thermopylae, was fought between 300 Spartans and 5.2 million Persians. The second that Xerxes lost the war.
Xerxes is Greek for the emperor's Old Persian name, which was Kshayarsa, from the same root as Sanskrit Kshatriya and the modern caste name Khatri.
Herodotus says Xerxes had 2.6 million fighting men with that number again in support. A total, according to him, of 5,283,220 men (more than the modern armies of China, America, India and Pakistan put together). Even if it were possible to transport such an army 2,500 years ago, there would have been no food in the surrounding countryside to feed so many and so this number is difficult to believe. It is taken as true by a lot of Europeans, including scholars.
The first inaccuracy that we are referring to, however, is not the number of Persians; it is the number of Greeks. Popular history, as can be seen from the title of the famous Hollywood movie, says the Greeks numbered 300.
Herodotus says the Greek force at Thermopylae was made up of 5,200 men, whom he lists by state including 300 from Sparta, plus "all the men that the Locrians of Opus could send". We do not know how many those were. And there are more. Herodotus says each Spartan had Helots assigned to him, who also fought and were killed. These were Greeks from Helos enslaved by Sparta. We are not told how many Helots there were at Thermopylae, but Herodotus tells us that at a later battle, at Plataea, there were seven Helots to a Spartan, which would correspond to 2,100 Helots at Thermopylae. So the Greeks numbered 7,300 men plus the Locrians. This is not an insubstantial force to defend the Thermopylae pass which was, according to Herodotus, one wagon wide at its narrowest and 50 feet at its widest, with a stone wall behind which defenders could stand.
It did not really matter how many men the Persians had: the Greeks had a man opposite each attacker. Herodotus says the Greeks were better armed. They were armoured in bronze with helmets, and their spears were longer than those of the Persians. The Greeks had bronze-faced shields, the Spartan ones being three feet across. The Persians had wicker shields. The battle lasted two days, at the end of which the Persians found a way around the pass and obliterated the Greeks. However, many of the Greeks had fled by then, according to Herodotus, and the deserters included Spartans, so all 300 did not sacrifice themselves. Herodotus says in the end there were 4,000 Greek dead meaning there were at least 3,300 deserters. There were 1,000 Persian dead, but Herodotus says these were only the ones displayed by Xerxes and the rest were buried so that his army would not lose heart at the sight. This might not be true given that it would have been in violation of the Persian manner of disposing the dead in the open, fed to vultures.
The Persians of course were Zarathushtrians, and their descendants are the Parsis of Bombay, Surat, Navsari and Karachi.
It is strange to think that one of our communities fought and defeated Europe, but it is true and the Parsis went on to become the greatest community of India.
After this defeat, the Spartans refused to fight Xerxes, and the Athenians fled. Herodotus says there was a naval battle off Salamis that the Persians lost, but the Persians were not a naval power and the spearhead of the Parsi army, the Zhayedan or the Immortals, were infantry not marines.
At the time, 2,400 years ago, naval battles would not have been conclusive because there was no firepower. Ships, called triremes, were slow and powered by oarsmen on three decks. Fighting was carried out by ramming a ship on its side, immobilising it and, if the ship sank, drowning those soldiers who could not swim. This is not an efficient way to do battle and the Greek naval victory would have meant little. Incidentally, the Greek tragedian Aeschylus fought at Salamis and later wrote the play, The Persians.
Having spent his anger, Xerxes returned to Asia, where he would rule successfully before dying 15 years later, in 465 BC.
He left behind a force headed, according to Herodotus, by his step-brother, which lost a battle against 115,000 Greeks at Plataea the following year. In this battle, 1,300 Indians fought on the Persian side. Herodotus says the Indians, who might have been from Punjab, were dressed in cotton and carried cane bows and cane arrows tipped with iron.
After this defeat, the second Persian force also left for Asia. European history says this sequence "saved civilisation", because in the coming decades Athens would produce the great Plato and Aristotle and the rest of Greek's classical culture that all Europeans now claim. But there is nothing to say that Plato and Aristotle would not have flowered even under Persian occupation.
The war of 480 was not fought between democrats and despots: the Spartans were also led by a king, Leonidas, and they were hardly democratic. They enslaved their own people, the Helots. They killed two Persian ambassadors sent by Xerxes's father Darius, throwing them into a well when they asked for a fistful of earth and water as a sign of submission. The Athenians also misbehaved with Darius's ambassadors, locking them up. Herodotus disapproves of such Greek behaviour and he is himself never prejudiced against the foreigner. He says much of Greek civilisation, including their gods, came from Egypt and he could be right. He thinks the best looking people in the world are Ethiopians. Not once does he refer to people with dark skin as being different. His book is the first work of history ever written. It comprises of nine chapters, each between 50 and 70 pages long and it is over 600 modern pages, beautifully written and very entertaining.
The Persians are shown by him often as merciful. Their rule is never to execute a man for one mistake, and whenever apportioning punishment, to remember the good he did along with the crime. Emperor Darius is shown by Herodotus as grieving after a man who betrays him, a Greek, is beheaded without his knowledge. This is not the behaviour of barbarians. Herodotus uses the word to represent those who, according to Greeks, speak a language that goes 'bar-bar', instead of polished Greek. Hindi also uses 'barh-barh' to indicate gibberish.
Today, all that remains of the Persians who fought at Thermopylae are the Parsis, who still name their sons Xerxes, Darius and Cyrus. Uniquely among Indian corporates, of Tata Sons's stock, 65.8 per cent is held by charities. Ratan Tata only holds 0.84 per cent. Last year Tata Sons, which owns Indian's biggest software firm, one of the world's biggest steel firms and the automobile manufacturer Jaguar-Land Rover, made a profit of Rs3,780 crore ($800 million), giving much away to India's poor.
Herodotus would not have thought them uncivilised.
The writer is director with Hill Road Media in Bombay. Email: aakar@ hillroadmedia.com
Herodotus, and the Parsis at Thermopylae
