EMPIRE OF THE GREATS

Not even a 2,000-year smear campaign, instigated by the Greeks, can obscure the staggering achievements of the ancient Persians. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones tells the story of the Iranian dynasty that forged the greatest empire the world had ever known

- Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

Around 1943, Robert Graves penned a poem. In it he took his customary sideways glance at the world of antiquity and chose as his theme the subject of war and propaganda. He focused on the battle of Marathon, fought in 499 BC between the forces of Athens and Persia. Hailed as a magnificent triumph for the Athenians, Marathon had quickly become mythologised in the Greek-speaking world. When the Persians were repelled from Greek soil, the legend of the heroic fight for freedom over despotism was born.

And that's not all. For Europe, in this reading of history, was also born at Marathon. So was the British empire. This is why, writing in 1846, John Stuart Mill could claim that, “even as an event in English history", the battle of Marathon was “more important than the battle of Hastings”.

Robert Graves questioned that stance and preferred to read the fallout of Marathon as the ultimate triumph of a successful and long-lived Athenian propaganda campaign. The poem that Graves penned in 1943 - The Persian Version - is therefore written from the viewpoint of the “truth-loving Persians” themselves. For them, he stresses, Marathon was little more than a "trivial skirmish” at the western fringes of their empire and certainly not the "grandiose, ill-starred attempt / to conquer Greece” that had been dreamed up by the Athenians and sold lock, stock and barrel to British public schoolboys for generations.