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

In his new book, "Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West", Tom Holland performed something of a miracle. Working with the limited original documents that still exist, and extracting material from contemporaries of the events, Holland gives us a very clear picture of the events leading up to and including the clash between the Greeks and Persians. The sweep is enormous, and the cast of characters fascinating. The illustrations and maps that pepper the pages are a big help. This is a must read for anyone interested in history and culture.

This is another great history written by Tom Holland, whose last production - Rubicon - covered the transition of Rome from Republic to Empire and also is excellent. Holland has a very conversational style (sometimes too conversational, as in using the word "f***" to describe sexual intercourse), that some will enjoy but some of the more serious mode will find annoying. The book includes many useful maps, interesting pictures, good notes, and a good reference to primary sources. The book covers the rise of the Persian empire through the defeat at Salamis and Plataea. Very readable, engaging, and interesting. This is a great introduction to the subject and clearly shows the significance of the great battles between Greece and Persia and the origins of the Peloponnesian Wars, as well as the nature of the Greek city-states. If you were bored to incomprehension on this subject by wooden readings in high school, this is the perfect cure. They should assign this in high school instead.

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.

(I have read the printed version which is available in England.) After two chapters describing how the Achaemenid Persian Empire grew until it stretched from the Aegean to Hindu Kush, Holland focusses on the attempt in the 5th century BC of the Persians to add the city-states of Greece to their Empire. It is one of the marvels of history how these city-states, rent by external and internal rivalries, managed in the end to preserve their independence, like so many Davids against one Goliath. The very different cultures and institutions of Persians, Spartans and Athenians are very well brought out, and Holland paints a vivid picture of this amazing struggle. His long set-piece descriptions of the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea are quite superb (though I wish the maps, to which one has to refer frequently, were fold-out end-papers instead of being scattered throughout the book). I would not have wishes these passages to be any shorter; but I cannot say the same about other passages, where descriptions, in a somewhat journalistic style, strike me as excessively wordy and repetitive - piling Pelion on Ossa, as it were. But this is a minor cavil about a book which tells a stirring story.

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,