The World

* Soon after Salamis, a Greek of good family was born in Halicarnassus (Bodrum) in Ionia, Persian territory, later moving to Athens, whence he travelled the Eurasian world, visiting Egypt (possibly with an Athenian fleet), Tyre and Babylon before settling in an Athenian colony in Calabria, Italy. When he was thirty-five, he started to write what he called ‘the demonstration of an enquiry’ whose purpose was ‘to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements’. He was Herodotos; enquiry in Greek was historie and he called the book Historiai, inventing history prose as a genre, history as a science of evidence – some of his stories were outlandish but much has been confirmed as fact – but also as a cultural weapon. Even though as many Greeks had fought for the Persians as against them, his history helped create a narrative of western – Hellenic – superiority over barbarous Persian autocracy. Herodotos’ tales were typical of the Greek version of Persian history that influenced all western historiography up to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Europeans traced their cultural superiority over Asians and others to the ancient Greeks.

* He launched the play The Persians by Aeschylus, the first instance of the literature that promoted the legend of Greek superiority over Persian despotism.

* Enslaved persons were often manumitted (freed) – ‘slaves more than freemen,’ wrote Xenophon later, ‘need hope’ – and children of masters and enslaved women were born free (unlike in Atlantic slavery).

* Socrates used this trial to promote his ideas. He was ordered to take poison. Socrates’ student Plato preserved the master’s sayings and proposed an ideal state in his Republic. Their quest for virtue was part of the evolving Greek focus on humanity: his contemporary Protagoras argued that ‘Man is the measure of all things,’ while on Kos a doctor, Hippocrates – whose father and sons were physicians too – started to categorize and diagnose diseases caused by nature and not gods: he was said to have noted that the swelling of fingers could be a sign of heart disease. One of the diseases these doctors identified was called karkinos – the crab – which was later known as cancer.

* The Persian and Greek worlds were thoroughly interlinked. While Greek writers promoted Greek superiority, half the Greeks lived in the Persian empire. Even the victor of the battle of Salamis, the Athenian strategos Themistocles, had ended up serving Xerxes; Alcibiades was as at home with Persian satraps as he was with Spartan kings. Young Cyrus’ commander, Xenophon, now had to fight his way back to Greece, an exploit he recounted in his Anabasis, the first soldier’s memoir – while our source for the Persian court is the Greek royal doctor, Ctesias.

* Darius’ pragmatic mother, Sisygambis, did not mourn him, never having forgiven him for abandoning her at Issus. ‘I have one son,’ she said, ‘and he is King of Persia.’ She meant Alexander.

* Commander of a Thousand, a Greek version of the Persian rank hazahrapatish – Master of the Thousand – that denoted field marshal and chief minister of the Great King.

* Back in Athens, as Alexander, believing himself a god, hacked his way to India, his tutor Aristotle, himself a disciple of Plato, was teaching his Lyceum students about his experiments with natural organisms that established scientific enquiry by experimentation, later the foundation of science, and his philosophy that humans should ‘strive to live according to the finest thing that is within us’ – reason.

* Starting as one of King Philip’s pages, Seleukos was one of the few paladins satisfied with his Persian marriage: he wed Apama, daughter of a Bactrian warlord Spitamana – a happy union that founded one of the great dynasties of the ancient world.

The Mauryans and the Qin

SELEUKOS IN INDIA: THE RISE OF CHANDRAGUPTA

Thanks to his general Seleukos, Ptolemy seized not only Libya but also Cyprus, Judaea (the Graeco-Roman name for Judah), Coele-Syria and much of the Aegean. As a thank-you, in 312 BC Ptolemy lent Seleukos a tiny corps of 800 infantry and 200 cavalry with which he managed to reconquer not just Babylon, where he had been a popular governor, but then, in an astonishing performance of almost Alexandrian proportions, the rest of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.