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

Tom Holland (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 12, 2007

In the fifth century B.C., a global superpower was determined to bring truth and order to what it regarded as two terrorist states. The superpower was Persia, incomparably rich in ambition, gold, and men. The terrorist states were Athens and Sparta, eccentric cities in a poor and mountainous backwater: Greece. The story of how their citizens took on the Great King of Persia, and thereby saved not only themselves but Western civilization as well, is as heart-stopping and fateful as any episode in history. Tom Holland’s brilliant study of these critical Persian Wars skillfully examines a conflict of critical importance to both ancient and modern history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After chronicling the fall of the Roman Republic in Rubicon, historian Holland turns his attention further back in time to 480 B.C., when the Greeks defended their city-states against the invading Persian empire, led by Xerxes. Classicists will recall such battles as Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis, which raises the question: why do we need another account of this war, when we already have Herodotus? But just as Victor David Hanson and Donald Kagan have reframed our understanding of the Peloponnesian War by finding contemporary parallels, Holland recasts the Greek-Persian conflict as the first clash in a long-standing tension between East and West, echoing now in Osama bin Laden's pretensions to a Muslim caliphate. Holland doesn't impose a modern sensibility on the ancient civilizations he describes, and he delves into the background histories of both sides with equally fascinating detail. Though matters of Greek history like the brutal social structure of the Spartans are well known, the story of the Persian empire—like the usurper Darius's claim that every royal personage he assassinated was actually an imposter—should be fresh and surprising to many readers, while Holland's graceful, modern voice will captivate those intimidated by Herodotus. (May 2)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Dramatizing ancient history--that is, amplifying the historical record's often fragmentary evidence with unknowable detail and inferred emotion--is always a gamble. Done well (think Herodotus), the long dead come alive, and readers are inclined to overlook their suspicions about what liberties the author may be taking with the story's veracity. Done poorly, one risks profaning history and literature alike. In dramatizing the Persian Wars--Athens' most glorious hour and the beginning of its decline into imperialism and hubris--Holland acknowledges the risks and strides boldly forward. The result is an ambitious contemporary retelling of an epic tale that, framed as a conflict between East and West, quietly subverts certain other recent histories' parallels between empires past and present. It has its awkward moments, mostly due to a predilection for melodramatic phrasing; for better or worse, its parallels to modern events are subtle and often implicit. But ultimately, one suspects that Holland's engaging narrative would do Herodotus proud--and it may even prompt readers to find out for themselves. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; Reprint edition (June 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307279480
• ISBN-13: 978-0307279484
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (79 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #79,597 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #30 in Books > History > Middle East > Iran
  • #60 in Books > History > Ancient > Greece

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 56 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good scholarship wrapped in a racy narrative December 10, 2006

By Paul Vitols

Format:Hardcover

This very readable popular history of the 5th-century BC Persian Wars with Greece combines careful historical detective work with a sometimes breezy tone.

I enjoyed this book probably about as much as I enjoyed Holland's "Rubicon"--which is to say, quite a lot. It is solid, credibly researched history as it might be presented by a tabloid journalist: cynical, gossipy, and salted liberally with salacious or incriminating nuggets about its many characters. It is intended for a general audience, not an academic one, and it succeeds very well.

The book has an unusual but well-considered structure. Holland starts off by describing the societies of the protagonists, devoting his opening chapters to Mesopotamia, Iran, Sparta, and Athens. He does an excellent job of showing how different these worlds were from each other, and gives a strong flavor of how their inhabitants thought and behaved. That done, Holland moves on to the wars themselves, with accounts of the campaigns leading to the famous battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis, which we are now in a position to appreciate much better, knowing something of the outlook and worldview of the different players.

Holland's drive to tell a seamless story has him solving all kinds of problems of conflicts in the sources, drawing canny conclusions from wispy or contradictory data. Only occasionally does he draw attention to his reasoning; mostly it is part of the work underlying the flow of his story. And his story does flow.

Sometimes I found that Holland had laid the cynicism on a bit thick. While of course the ancient world, including among its heroes, had its share of scheming, selfish, greedy, backstabbing blowhards, some of the people must have exhibited more noble qualities at least sometimes. You wouldn't know it from reading Holland.

But I get a sense that all this is done with a twinkle in Holland's eye. As though taking such liberties were part of the fun available to the ancient historian, whose subjects (and their families) are many centuries past being able to take legal action. Holland's mission appears to be to make ancient history relevant, interesting, and most of all fun to a wide contemporary audience, and any peccadilloes of scholarly balance are a small price to pay for this bigger prize.

Holland makes the ancient world a very human, indeed an all too human, place. The portentous theme of East vs. West he handles with a light touch. In many other ways too he shows respect for the intelligence of the reader, who, while being fed heaping portions of gossip about our ancestors, is perhaps learning more than he or she realizes.

If you're interested in the history of ancient Greece, but are new to the subject, you could do a lot worse than reading this book.

88 of 100 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent for Both Past and Present June 4, 2006

By Suzanne Cross

Format:Hardcover

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, as well as how and why the Greeks came to blow up their honest victories and denigrate their Persian foes. All these points give PERSIAN FIRE a peculiarly modern resonance, as well as telling some of the greatest stories of antiquity with clarity and flair.

I have read Persian Fire twice and am still learning much about both the ancient Persians and Greeks and why their wars created a divide that still exists between Europe and Asia. Highly recommended.

Suzanne Cross

Web Author - Ancient History

25 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Sifting truth from myth and legend July 31, 2006

By Frank J. Konopka VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

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.