Persian Fire

No book is perfect, and Tom Holland's Persian Fire is no exception. Which is a pity, because a good book on the expansion of the Achaemenid Empire is long overdue, and the author must be praised because he tries to offer a non-Greece-centered account. The book is certainly not bad - I want to stress this because the remainder of this text will suggest otherwise. If you have never read a book on this subject, this is a fine introduction. But it is not perfect.

1

On p.xvii Holland states that "There was much more at stake during the course of the Persian attempts to subdue the Greek mainland than the independence of [Greece] ... Much that made Greek civilisation distinctive would have been aborted." Holland explains that, for example, the Athenian democracy and the philosophy of Plato would not have existed if the Persians had not been expelled (p. xxii, xvii). He is not the first one to make this bold claim. Holland quotes nineteenth-century philosophers like Hegel and Mill, but perhaps it is better to refer to historians - after all, the past is their profession.

As it happens, the importance of the Persian War has been the subject of a famous theoretical discussion between Max Weber and Eduard Meyer, who had, in 1901, written that if the Persians had won the war, "the outcome would have been that some kind of church [..] would have put Greek life and thought under a yoke and would have chained all free dynamics, and the new Greek culture would, like the oriental cultures, have had a theological-religious nature."[1]

2

In his bibliography, Holland quotes the English translation of Pierre Briant's synthesis.[4] The more than 1,000 pages of this book are the culmination of two decades of iranological scholarship, two decades that may be called revolutionary. This is not the place to digress upon the nature of this revolution, but it is safe to say that Briant and the late Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg completely refounded the study of the Achaemenid Empire. Briant's book, although not perfect, is the book to read on the subject, and the author has become some sort of demigod to iranologists.[5]

Holland appears to be unaware of the importance of Histoire de l' Empire Perse. For example, on p.13-14, and in many other places, he refers to Cyrus's Lydian campaign as taking place in 547 BCE. In a note, he adds a reference to the Nabonidus Chronicle, and states that its "applicability [...] to Lydia is almost certain; damage to the inscription prevents it from being inconvertible". Quite the opposite. Since 1977, it has been absolutely certain that it does not refer to Lydia (more...). Briant explains this on p.34 of his book.

This is just one example. Twice, Holland refers to the Gadatas Letter as if it is genuine, which is not the case (Briant, footnote 15). On page 20, Holland says that Cyrus died in 529, which must be 530. Of course these are trivial mistakes, but they are unnecessary.

3

On page 208, Holland takes the Daiva-inscription, which describes how Xerxes put an end to the worship of demons in one of the satrapies, as evidence for the suppression of the Egyptian revolt of 484. But there is not a single piece of evidence (at least not that I am aware of) that confirms that Xerxes interrupted any of the Egyptian cults. On the other hand, it is now certain that in 484 Xerxes proceeded against the Esagila temple in Babylon and took very harsh measures against organizations that were related to the old religion of Babylon. This is clear from the cuneiform evidence, from Herodotus, from Ctesias, and perhaps from Arrian.[6]

The issue is important, because there is now no reasonable doubt that the Babylonian revolt of Šamaš-eriba and Bêl-šimânni took place in 484. And that makes it impossible to write, as Holland does at the end of his book (page 361), that Xerxes returned from Greece because there was a revolt in Babylon. The "general murk of Near Eastern history in this period" he mentions on page 401 is, quite simply, no longer there - at least not here.

The only way out is to assume that there was a second revolt in Babylon in 479. But that is an assumption, nothing more. There is no cuneiform evidence and we are left with Arrian, who -indeed- writes that Babylon was captured by Xerxes on his return from Greece (Anabasis 7.17.2). But Arrian is not a reliable source for matters related to the Esagila, so we essentially have to conclude that we do not know why Xerxes abandoned the Greek war.

4

The book contains more unnecessary mistakes. Cyrus' tomb is not immense and is not directed to the rising sun (p.20, 22). Hippias' brother Hipparchus was not a tyrant (passim). Monotheism does not have its roots in the Persian wars (p.xxii): both Zarathustra and the author of the Deuteronomistic History lived long before the conflict between Greece and Persia. The harems of Persia (p.168) never existed outside Greek phantasies.[7] There was no eclipse when Xerxes left Sardes (p.240; Herodotus' statement [Histories, 7.37] must refer to the eclipse of April 481, when the great king left Susa.) The strait between Artemisium and Magnesia has a width of six miles on page 255, but has grown to ten miles on page 277.

Sometimes, it is Holland's effusive language that creates confusion. He loves lines like "As the storm clouds of seeming Persian invincibility loomed ever darker over Ionia, so strange shadows from the past returned to haunt Athens, too" (p.163). This forced attempt to evoke something, becomes problematic when he writes that people deported by the Assyrians were "naked" (p.4) - very moving, of course, but the reliefs in the Louvre and the British Museum suggest otherwise. Another example: the presumed joy with which the fall of Nineveh was greeted (p.5). However, except for the prophet Nahum, there is no evidence to support this attempt to get the reader emotionally involved: on the contrary, the Babylonians nowhere received support, and subject nations were willing to fight for Assyria.

5

The reader of this review may get the impression that Persian Fire is a bad book. That would be a mistake. I already said that Holland has at least tried to present the events from a different angle. Many of his mistakes are trivial, the correct information can easily be found in Briant's book, and it is not difficult to make some minor changes when the book is reprinted. But the book is, like so many other books, not perfect.