Aakar Patel at The News:
In 480 BC, Persia’s emperor Xerxes attacked and defeated Greece. He bridged the Hellespont, the slim neck between Europe and Asia now called the Dardanelles, and marched his army of Iraqis, Iranians, Egyptians and Indians across to Macedonia and then south into Greece. Most Greek states on his path surrendered to him. Sparta lost one skirmish against his army and then refused to fight. The people of Athens abandoned their city to Xerxes and fled to an island in the south called Salamis.
Xerxes had invaded in anger, after Athens interfered militarily in one of his colonies on the west coast of Turkey. Reaching Athens, he burnt all of it down, including the Acropolis. Then, realising that the Athenians would not defend their state, took his army back to Asia.
We know all this because it was recorded by a Greek historian, Herodotus, who was born a few years before the invasion. It’s a simple and conclusive story. But over the centuries, one part of the invasion, that skirmish with the Spartans, has been used by Europeans to tell a different story. This is the story of freedom-loving individuals (Europeans) defending themselves against slavish barbarians (Asians). And this brave stand of the Spartans, according to the movie ’300′ and a recent BBC Radio 4 programme called ‘In Our Time’, “saved civilisation”.
It is a bold claim to make, because it assumes that civilisation is entirely European and there was no civilisation on the Persian side. It is also a factually untrue claim on two counts. The first that the skirmish, the battle of Thermopylae, was fought between 300 Spartans and 5.2 million Persians. The second that Xerxes lost the war.
Xerxes is Greek for the emperor’s Old Persian name, which was Kshayarsa, from the same root as Sanskrit Kshatriya and the modern caste name Khatri. More:
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