When the Greeks stood together

‘Everyone with a bellyful of the classics,’ Henry Miller said, ‘is an enemy of mankind.’ Was the Brooklyn bronco serious in claiming that indoctrination with ancient literature generated monsters? As readers of The Colossus of Maroussi well know, Miller himself fell under the Greek spell. So, earlier, had the Romantics (with unromantic Periclean Athens), Victorian schoolmasters (with the flog-meister, sodomitic Spartans) and Harold Macmillan, who wanted to be Jack Kennedy’s paidagogos. It all depends which Greece you are looking at, with which preconceptions and through how many veils of a posteriori varnish.

The smug division of the world into Civilised and Barbarian certainly supplied moral sanction for aggressive imperialism. Aristotle’s ethics authorised regarding wogs as natural slaves. Today’s self-flagellating style is to portray the West as impersonating villainy, raining shocking awful fire on the inoffensive East. How the Turks arrived at the gates of Vienna, or the Arabs at Tours, is not a popular question.

Tom Holland’s latest excursion into the ancient world recalls that Greek fire — a potent Byzantine potion of nitre, naphtha and sulphur — was matched by Persian. Fire was the essence of the god Ahura Mazda, under whose hot aegis Xerxes set out to punish the mainland Greeks for backing irredentist ambitions among his Ionian subjects and, in the case of the unforgivable Athenians, going so far as to torch Sardis.

After successfully crossing the Rubicon, Tom Holland now builds a wide bridge of words across the Hellespont. In Gore Vidal’s teasy Levantine novel, Creation, the Persian invasions of Hellas are dismissed as mere police raids. Holland’s vivid rescript of Xenophon and Herodotus (not forgetting Peter Green’s excellent The Greco-Persian Wars) insists that Xerxes was bent on turning Hellas into a permanent satrapy. The Greeks did fight in defence of Freedom (based on slave labour) and what became, with all its faults, Western Civilisation.