Persian Fire by Tom Holland

Author:Tom Holland [Holland, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Tags: History, Non Fiction
ISBN: 9780349117171
Publisher: Abacus
Published: 2007-06-11T23:00:00+00:00

Clearing the Decks

The notion that any man had only to clap his hands to have a canal dug, a bridge built or a whole continent summoned teeming into arms was, to the Athenians, profoundly alien and alarming. The dust-swept columns of the great temple of Zeus, left abandoned by the Pisistratids when they were forced into exile, loomed as a sobering memorial to the city's distaste for looking up to any leader. The automatic reflex of the Athenian aristocracy, whenever confronted by a tall poppy, had always been to reach for a scythe. For people do not find it pleasant to honour someone else: they suppose that they are then being deprived of something themselves.'25 This was a sentiment common among Greeks everywhere, in any time. Democracy, in that sense, had changed little. Themistocles' father, it was said, hoping to dissuade his son from a career in politics, had pointed out the rotting hulks of warships hauled onto the sand at Phalerum, and warned that such was the fate of every high-flying politician. 'For in Athens, this is how leaders are always treated, when they have outgrown their usefulness.'2''

Certainly, rivalries among the elite remained quite as carnivorous and unforgiving as they had been prior to the establishment of the democracy. Even the towering figure of Miltiades had been speedily dragged down to his ruin. In 489 bc, barely a year after saving his city from annihilation, he had suffered a wound to his thigh while leading an expedition against a city of collaborators in the Aegean and had been obliged to return to Athens, his reputation in sudden tatters. The Alcmaeonids, nostrils twitching as ever, had sniffed blood. Unleashing the talents of an ambitious young politician named Xanthippus, to whom they had already married Cleisthenes' niece, they had brought a prosecution against Miltiades, accusing him, with typical effrontery, of 'deceiving the Athenian people'. Carried in before a baying Assembly, Miltiades had duly been convicted, and would have been hauled out of his stretcher, dragged through the 'Hangman's Gate' and flung down a pit had not the jurors, reluctant to deal with the victor of Marathon as they had previously treated the Great King's ambassadors, voted instead for a crippling fine. Not so crippling, however, as the gangrene that had begun rotting the fallen hero's leg, and which would, within a few weeks of the sentence, finish him off for good. His young son Cimon, somehow scraping together sufficient cash to pay off the fine, had duly inherited the leadership of the Philaid clan, together with a much-depleted fortune, and — it went without saying — an ongoing feud with the Alcmaeonids.

Yet, if the Athenian people, fearful of any situation 'in which one man is able to exercise a wholly disproportionate power over his fellows',27 had been content to see the great Miltiades humbled, that hardly spelled enthusiasm for his rivals. Who, precisely, had been the stooges in the prosecution brought by Xanthippus: the voters in the Assembly or the Alcmaeonids? The answer would not be long in coming.

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