Three Epic Battles That Saved Democracy

Stephen P. Kershaw Robinson £30 ★★★★★

What was the most important battle in British history? The Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill thought it was the battle of Marathon, a somewhat surprising judgment given that it was fought between the Greeks and the Persians and took place more than

2,000 years before the British state came into being. But Mill wasn’t being whimsical. His argument was that the Greek victory represented the triumph of democracy over tyranny and established the values that underpin the West to this day.

Marathon is one of the key battles discussed in Stephen P. Kershaw’s terrifically enjoyable account of the invasion of Greece by the Persian king Darius and his successor Xerxes.

The best-known of the battles is the stirring but doomed stand at Thermopylae, where King Leonidas and his Spartans bought precious time for the rest of the Greek forces to assemble. Less well known is the naval operation that accompanied it, and one of the great virtues of Kershaw’s book is the detailed knowledge he brings to bear on the war at sea. The description of the decisive naval battle of Salamis is superbly done, though it does highlight Persian stupidity as much as Greek ingenuity.

Xerxes didn’t actually need to unleash his fleet at Salamis, and nor did the Persian commander Mardonius need to attack the Greek army at Plataea, the battle that finally ended the war. But the Persians suffered from a misplaced superiority complex, fuelled partly by the vastness of their empire and partly by an inability to grasp the inspirational power of freedom. ‘My men are motivated by fear of me, and fight under the lash,’ boasted Xerxes. It was not enough.

What extraordinary people those Greeks were. Brilliant and bloodyminded, earthy yet philosophical, heroic but filled with human frailties. We all owe them a debt of gratitude.

As the novelist William Golding once wrote: ‘A little of Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go where I like and write what I like.’