AFC HANISTAN A MILITARY HISTORY FROM ALEXANDER THE GREAT TO THE FALL OF THE TALI BAN

CROSSROAD OF

EMPIRES

WHEN AMERICAN B-52s WENT INTO ACTION on either side of the Hindu

Kush in the fall of 2001, the military history of Afghanistan came full-

circle. The country that for centuries had stood at the crossroads of

the great civilizations of the Old World was suddenly assailed by the

young superpower of the New. This time it was not the centrality of

Afghanistan but its very isolation from the rest of the globe that

incurred the wrath of foreign arms. Once a coveted prize of empires

and a source of indigenous warrior kingdoms, the southern Asian

country had devolved through the modern era to the status of a buffer

state, then a Cold War battlefield, and finally to a mere hideout—con-

veniently pocked with caves offering refuge to international terrorists.

Yet in the twenty-first century A.D., no less than in the fifth century

B.C., Afghanistan found itself once again enmeshed in combat with the

world's strongest military power. Given Afghanistan's long, varied his-

tory of conflict, this latest development has not been a surprise.

Unlike some mountainous lands, such as Peru, Nepal, and

Norway—even at times Switzerland, its closest European counter-

part—it has never been Afghanistan's lot to exist benignly apart from

the rest of the world. It has instead found itself at the hinge of impe-

rial ambitions since the beginning of recorded history, from the

world's first transcontinental superpower, the Persian Empire, to its

latest, the United States. In between enduring or resisting invasions

from every point of the compass (and most recently from the air), the

Afghans have honed their martial skills by fighting among themselves,

in terrain that facilitates divisions of power and resists the concept of

centralized control. The wonder is that the Afghan people, who at this

writing have experienced non-stop warfare for a quarter of a century,

present the same problems to foreign antagonists today as they did

2,500 years ago. And battles between disparate cultures or religions.AFGHANISTAN

continue to underlie the din of arms. Afghanistan, as ever, remains the

stage for not just clashes of armies but of civilizations.

A geographical map, more than a political one, best explains

Afghanistan's importance over the centuries. It is the easternmost part

of the great Iranian plateau, and given the nearby impenetrable arc of

the Himalayas, it is the primary land conduit connecting the great

empires of Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent.

But conduit is perhaps too soft a term: invasion route would be more

accurate. Afghanistan's claustrophobic passes have borne mute wit-

ness to armies of Persians, Greeks, Mauryans, Huns, Mongols,

Moghuls, British, Soviets, and Americans—among others—including

many of the most famous captains in history. As a strategically vital

piece of real estate, Afghanistan has also given birth to empires of its

own such as the Ghaznavids, Ghorids, and Durranis, who spread fear

of Afghan fighting prowess from Delhi to the Caspian Sea.

The historian Arnold Toynbee once suggested that upon viewing

the rise of civilization from its center in Mesopotamia, the map of the

Old World becomes startlingly clear. He distinguished countries

between blind alleys and highways, and among the latter he thought

two held prominent place: Syria, which was the link between the civ-

ilizations of Europe, Africa, and Asia; and Afghanistan, which was the

nodal point between the civilizations of India, East Asia, Central Asia,

the Middle East, and thence Europe. "Plant yourself not in Europe but

in Iraq," he wrote, and "it will become evident that half the roads of

the Old World lead to Aleppo, and half to Bagram." Toynbee noted

that Bagram was once the site of Cyrus the Great's Kapish-Kanish as

well as Alexander the Great's Alexandria-in-the-Caucasus. He would

have nodded appreciatively had he seen Bagram airfield become the

primary Soviet base in Afghanistan during the 1980s and that at the

onset of the twenty-first century not only American but British,

German, and Australian troops have been disembarking at that strate-

gic spot, nestled in the southern foothills of the Hindu Kush.

When, in geopolitical terms, the center of world gravity existed in

the East rather than in European capitals or, more recently, Wash-

ington, DC, Afghanistan held a crucial role in the fate of nations. But

after enjoying supreme status as a crossroad of empires, its political

importance began to decline during the medieval period. Historian

Rhea Talley Stewart has stated that two men did irreparable damage

to Afghanistan. The first was Genghis Khan, for reasons that will later Crossroad of Empires 3

be examined; the second was Christopher Columbus, who sailed past

the presumed ends of the earth, establishing tremendous avenues for

commerce and conquest that did not depend on the land. "Afghanis-

tan is far less important to a round world," Stewart wrote, "than it

was to a flat one." Once global seapower emerged as an equivalent to

land power (airpower was not yet on the drawing board), the defini-

tion of Afghanistan changed from an essential passageway between

civilizations to a place more desirable as a no-man's-land. It remained

crucial territory in the view of great empires, but in a negative rather

than a positive sense. In the nineteenth century the world's greatest

seafaring empire and the world's greatest land one vied for control of

Afghanistan in a Cold War-like contest known as the "Great Game."

The country was vital to both sides but with the greater interest that

it should not be strong on its own terms but exist ignominiously as a

buffer between larger spheres of influence. During the past two cen-

turies, of course, both participants in the Great Game, Britain and

Russia (as the Soviet Union), found little but grief in their forays into

that buffer.

The uniqueness of Afghanistan lies not just with its location at the

hub of disparate empires; after all, the flatlands of northern Poland

and central Iraq have been equally well trod by rampaging armies.

Afghanistan's continuously violent history is due in equal measure to

the nature of its territory, which has in turn influenced the nature of

its people. However strategically desirable Afghanistan's narrow moun-

tain passes and river valleys, the bulk of the land is unrelentingly

harsh, and where it does not consist of jagged, successive ranges of

heights it is largely desert. The people of this forbidding land have thus

had advantages in defense of their territory, whether on a national,

regional, or local level. It is a land that can be easily invaded but is

much more difficult to hold—and to hold together.

Among Afghanistan's more remote mountain regions are tribes,

still governed on a feudal basis, that have never been conquered.

Neither have they ever been fully subjugated by domestic government.

Invading armies may pass through, seizing sedentary communities on

accessible transit routes, which in Afghanistan are more the exception

than the rule, while among remote heights and deep valleys tribes have

maintained their independence for thousands of years. This is not to

say the country's mountains are populated by hermits or pacifists. On

many occasions the tribes have descended from Afghanistan's tains with devastating results: to participate in collective defense, civil

wars, or expeditions for plunder. When the Afghans have acted in

common cause, their country—though often ravaged—has never been

held down by a foreign power; on the other hand, evidence indicates

that Afghanistan is only capable of unity when its people respond to a

foreign threat. Left to their own devices, Afghans engage in internecine

battles, or simply enjoy freedom—not the kind enforceable by a

Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, or Communist Manifesto, but of more

ancient derivation—unbothered by government at all.

Modern Afghanistan is roughly egg-shaped, at a tilt, within which

four strategically crucial cities form a quadrangle that frames the cen-

tral mountain range, the Hindu Kush. In the west is Herat, in a fertile

valley a short march from the present-day Iranian border. In the south

is Kandahar, on an easy road from Herat and accessible through

mountain passes from India. In the east, on a passable route (except in

winter) from Kandahar is Kabul. In the northern center of the coun-

try, on a decent road from Herat and accessible from Kabul by high

passes across the Hindu Kush, is Mazar-i-Sharif. Just west of Mazar

lie the haunted ruins of Balkh (in Greek, Bactra; in Persian, Zariaspa),

termed by the Arabs "the mother of cities." For at least two thousand

years, Balkh—the legendary birthplace of Zoroaster, the site of

Alexander the Great's marriage and one of Genghis Khan's greatest

atrocities—was a magnificent city that dominated the region; but it is

now a small, hardscrabble village next to an immense mass of ruins

such as fuel the dreams of archaeologists.

Though the country's most important city has changed over the

centuries, the area around Kabul is the key to Afghanistan. The pres-

ent capital, Kabul sits at the center of a strategic quadrangle of its

own. The aforementioned Bagram lies forty-five miles to the north at

the foot of strategic valleys; a high-altitude road from the capital to

the west leads to Bamian in the center of the Hindu Kush, from which

further passes lead to the north and Herat. Some eighty miles south of

Kabul on the route to Kandahar sits Ghazni, once the center of a great

Afghan empire; and eighty miles to the east lies Jalalabad at the head

of the Khyber Pass, the famous, treacherous route to Peshawar in

today's Pakistan and thence to India. Possession of Kabul does not

translate into control of the entire country; but no one can hope to

rule Afghanistan without holding Kabul.

It is important to note that the finite borders of modern Afghan-

istan were only established a century ago, so that any reference to

"Afghanistan" or "Afghans" in prior history requires flexibility. The

word "Afghan" itself did not appear in writing, in Persian lists, until

the third century A.D. To the discomfiture of some, the word in Old

Persian means "noisy," perhaps idiomatically "unruly," or to apply

the kindest translation, "less than sedate." When the British historian-

diplomat Mountstuart Elphinstone visited the country in 1809 he

noted that the people did not call their own land "Afghaunistan," but

were aware that others did. Elphinstone himself described the

"Afghauns" as the Pashtun ethnic group, which he divided into east

(living in current Pakistan) and west. He referred to other parts of the

modern political entity, such as the Hazarat in the center of the Hindu

Kush and the entire territory north of those mountains, as dependen-

cies of the "Kingdom of Caboul."

Afghanistan's borders were delineated by European surveyors at

the end of the nineteenth century with the purpose of creating the best

possible buffer state between British India and the inexorable tide of

Russian annexations in Central Asia. Thus, the Afghan border follows

the Oxus River (Amu Darya) in the north and the Hari Rud in the

west, facing Iran. In the area in between, the Russians pulled a fast

military maneuver to grab a valuable oasis before agreeing to a fixed

line. In the south there has been no argument about the Afghan bor-

der with modern Pakistan's Baluchistan because the entire region is a

desert wasteland, a deathtrap for marching armies and suitable only

for the hardy people who choose to live on it. In the east, a British

commission led by Sir Mortimer Durand painstakingly drew a line

smack through the center of the Pashtun ethnic group with the intent

to limit Afghanistan's political resources while creating every possible

terrain advantage for British defenders of the Raj.

The result was that Afghanistan's modern border in the east, most-

ly unmarked on the ground and occasionally even theoretical on high

mountain peaks, bestows all its advantages on a projected defense of

the jewel in the British crown. Durand didn't realize that in 1947 the

British would vacate India, and he didn't even imagine the state of

Pakistan. The British and Russians nevertheless drew Afghanistan as a

large country of 250,000 square miles (about the size of Texas), dom-

inated across the center by the Hindu Kush with different ethnic

groups lying on either side. The finger of Afghan territory that reaches

out to touch China in the northeast, albeit on a completely useless

fifty-mile, nosebleed border, was forced on Afghanistan by the British

so that Russian territory could not at any point border India.

The effort of European surveyors has borne fruit mainly in the

form of constant civil wars among the Afghan people. The Uzbeks,

Tajiks, and Turkmen north of the Hindu Kush, as well as the Hazaras

among the mountains, have constantly resisted rule by the Pashtuns of

the south; and vice versa. The latter comprise over 40 percent of

Afghanistan's population, but they derive at least as much strength

and moral support from across the porous border with Pakistan. The

recent American war has shown how an Uzbek-Tajik "Northern

Alliance" could be motivated to resist a Pashtun-based government,

even as Pakistan provided many of the Pashtun recruits and provided

refuge for fleeing soldiers once the U.S.-backed North began to win.

Pakistan's dilemma, throughout that conflict as well as during the

Soviet invasion and the following civil wars, has been acute.

A "Pashtunistan," viewed warily by nineteenth-century British,

would no doubt have resulted in a more homogenous state today,

untroubled by ethnic (if not tribal) rivalry and in view of modern arms

disparities perhaps a peaceful state devoted to joining the global econ-

omy. But then, if colonial maps were to be redrawn, all of Africa and

much of the rest of the world would need to realign itself along ethnic

lines, even as Western civilization pursues the concept of diversity

under the banner of individualism. At this writing, the jury is still out.

In the 1990s the former nation of Yugoslavia violently broke apart

along ethnic lines—Slovenians declining to suffer the same govern-

ment as Croatians; Christians and Muslims in Bosnia-Herzogovina

cutting each other's throats in order to establish their own small

states—in an ominous sign for Afghanistan. The Balkan experience,

which paralleled even greater ethnic bloodletting in central Africa,

along with the continuing problem of internecine Afghan strife, signal

one of the major challenges to be faced by more stable powers in the

twenty-first century, and of course is a major reason why U.S. B-52s

have recently been in action over Kabul.

But if the political borders of modern Afghanistan are a recent

invention, the question remains: what is meant by "Afghanistan" in

prior centuries, and, more important, who were, and are, the Afghans?

For centuries an oral tradition was maintained that the original

Afghans were one of the lost tribes of Israel; this earnestly held belief lost popular currency once modern Israel was created after World War

II. From linguists and archaeologists we know that the area was over-

run in the third millennium B.C. by a branch of the Indo-Aryans,

specifically people of the Iranian language group who migrated south

from central Asia. They pushed out the Dravidian people, who moved

farther south into the Indian subcontinent. Today, a Dravidian minor-

ity called the Brahui still straddles the border between southern

Afghanistan and Baluchistan, mystifying anthropologists. They either

evaded the initial wave of invasion, moved back later once it became

clear that the deserts were not overly populated, or perhaps were kept

as slaves in the region by its conquerors. The Indo-Aryans split into

numerous communities as agriculturalists or nomadic herdsmen. But

this initial group, related to others who populated the Iranian

plateau as far west as the Tigris River, comprise only the human

foundation of Afghanistan. Further waves of invasion were to add

more ingredients.

Until the end of the Colonial Age, the history of Afghanistan had

always been intertwined with that of its neighbors: Persians in the

west, Indians in the east, and nomadic steppe warriors to the north. In

ancient times, the battles waged by Persian and Greek kings over

Afghanistan were inseparable from those fought against Scythian

tribes to the north in ancient Sogdia. These are of special interest

because in the century before Christ (or 750 years before Mohammed)

the Scythians were pushed off the steppe en masse and most of them

settled south of the Hindu Kush, in an arc from Iran's Sistan through

southern Afghanistan and modern Pakistan's Sind and Peshawar val-

ley—in other words, the exact area now occupied by the Pashtuns.

Scholars believe that the subsequent period saw the emergence of that

ethnic group and its language, Pashtu. And as the diplomat-historian

Olaf Caroe has described, Pashtu is exactly what one would expect

from an older Iranian language pulled equally across time between

Persian and Indian influences. As for the Pashtuns, not least consider-

ing their fierce warrior culture, a dominant strain among their many

ethnic influences may be what the ancients called Scythian. When

Persia's Cyrus the Great died in lurid circumstances on the banks of

the Jaxartes (Sri Darya), he may well have fallen to people whose

descendants we now call Afghans.

Until the British set to work on the eastern border with their

tripods and graph charts, Afghans were a major force in Pakistan, or as that land was known prior to 1947, India. (It has been said that

according to ancient designations, as well as its possession of the Indus

River, Pakistan has a better claim to be called "India" than its neigh-

bor.) Until the nineteenth century, Peshawar was considered as impor-

tant an Afghan city as Kabul, and was often used as a winter capital.

Quetta, at the foot of the Bolan Pass, was also Afghan, or at least

Pashtun, as was much other territory in today's Sind and Swat,

Kashmir (via conquest), and the entire Northwest Frontier Province.

Ancient writers confuse more than clarify the distinction between

Afghan and Indian, especially with references to "mountain Indians"

or people such as the Parapamisidae: Indians who lived in the

Parapamisus, the Persian word for the Hindu Kush.

But as the centuries have progressed, the question "What is an

Afghan?" has become more easily answered, if more complex, as the

great migrations have ceased and political borders have been drawn.

Today we know that an Afghan is simply someone who comes from

Afghanistan. The term now includes ethnic Pashtuns, Turks (Uzbeks,

Tajiks, Turkmen), mongoloid Hazaras, redheaded Nuristanis, brown-

skinned Brahui, and a number of other groups. But when describing

the Bactrians or Ghaznavids, for example, both of whom ranged far

outside the present political entity, or Greeks and Parthians who

emerged outside but would eventually enter the fold, we are only fol-

lowing elements that would eventually constitute Afghanistan, the

ancient land that just recently received fixed borders.

The rise of the Persian Empire in 550 B.C. marked the beginning of

recorded history, not so much because the Persians wrote down their

experiences (except in lists and pompous edicts carved in stone), but

because they were closely followed by the Greeks who observed that

empire closely. The Greeks, and their equally curious Roman succes-

sors who worked on Greek primary sources, have thus left us the bulk

of what we know about Afghanistan in ancient times. Some of their

conclusions continue to be reassessed by modern archaeologists, but

the Greek-based histories are the best starting point for examining the

early history of Afghanistan.

The Roman historian Arrian states that both the Assyrians and

Medes preceded the Persians as far as the Indus River, but he is unsup-

ported by archaeological or literary evidence. Assyrian probes around

700 B.C. may well have reached the area around Kandahar or even farther which is not to say they conquered it. And the Medes may well

have had a relationship with the areas around Herat and Balkh, but

probably not as a focus of their ambition since they were at constant

odds with the Lydian and Babylonian empires in the west. Any degree

of sovereignty the Afghans ceded to Assyrian or Median incursions

was token or short-lived, if it existed at all, and the first real knowl-

edge of the territory is gained when the Persians arrived.

The founder of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great, did lay claim

to Afghanistan, though in at least two separate marches, and he may

never have crossed the Hindu Kush. In his first invasion, his army

stumbled out of the Masht-i-Dago (Desert of Death) in terrible shape

and was given succor by a people called the Ariaspians, who lived

along the Helmand River. Cyrus called them "The Benefactors," and

he proceeded through Kandahar and then north to the Kabul River

valley. Near Bagram at the foot of the Hindu Kush he founded a gar-

rison city, Kapish Kanish, or Kapisa, but whether he proceeded across

the mountains is unknown.

The evidence of Cyrus's conquest of northern Afghanistan, or

Bactria, is scanty. But one of his first, and certainly his last, campaigns

was against Scythian tribes dwelling between the Oxus and Jaxartes

Rivers, and he established the border of his empire at the Jaxartes,

reinforcing it with a string of seven fortress towns, the largest named

Cyropolis. It's inconceivable that he would have spent so much effort

in today's former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and

Tajikistan without also securing the territory between the Oxus and

Hindu Kush, including the fertile land and thriving civilizations

around Balkh and modern Herat.

After conquering all the territory from Afghanistan to Palestine,

Cyrus died in a vicious battle near the Jaxartes against a nomadic tribe

called the Massegatae. A contemporary account had it that the

Massegatae queen, Tomyris, having declared Cyrus "insatiable of

blood," dunked his head in a blood-filled vessel. (Her act may sound

gratuitous but it did inspire several medieval artists.) Cyrus's son,

Cambyses, never ventured east, instead devoting his short reign to the

successful conquest of Egypt and a stab at Ethiopia. So the best record

we have of Cyrus's achievements comes from the third Achaemenid

king, Darius I, who listed the territories he inherited on a rock face at

Behistun. In Afghanistan, corresponding with the quadrangle of major

cities, these areas were Bactria (Balkh) in the north; Areia (Herat) in the west; Arachosia (Kandahar) in the south; and Gandhara, which,

combined with Paropasmidae, consisted of the stretch from Kabul to

the Peshawar valley, short of the Indus.

The Behistun list of ca. 520 B.C. provides the oldest written

description of Afghanistan; yet it would be skimpy to the point of

meaningless had not the Greek historian Herodotus—who traveled

widely and had sources of his own—elaborated with greater detail. It

is from Herodotus, the "Father of History," that we learn of the

Paktuyke, the northernmost and "most warlike" of Indians, who

dressed and armed themselves much like the Bactrians. It is also from

him that we know Darius commissioned a naval party to explore the

Indus to its mouth. Led by an Ionian Greek named Skylax, the expe-

dition first proceeded east on the Kabul River, probably starting near

Peshawar, and then headed south to the Arabian Sea at present-day

Karachi. Upon receiving a report, Darius immediately conquered the

area, modern Sind, up to the Indus. His subsequent inscriptions, refer-

ring to the new province as Hindush, provide the first distinction

between the peoples we now know as Indians and Afghans. The new

province, of "by far the most numerous people in the world," was

ordered to pay a yearly tribute of 360 gold talents while the region

around Gandhara, including the Paktuans, was taxed 170 talents of

silver, or its equivalent.

Although the Persians established the greatest empire yet seen in

the ancient world, by the fifth century B.C. they had been surpassed in

military ability by the politically fractious but culturally dynamic

Greeks, many of whose colonies overlapped Persian territory. While

the Persians centered their empire in docile Mesopotamia, the evolu-

tion of battle tactics in Greece was at a high pitch, tested repeatedly in

battles between city-states at spears' length, establishing a level of

ferocious, face-to-face combat foreign to the Persian world. In the

wide spaces of Near Asia, the bow had always held first place among

weapons, along with the javelin and a high appreciation for cavalry.

In densely populated, mountainous Greece, long-range arms and fluid

tactical maneuvers were impractical and the land was not rich in

horses. Direct confrontational, or "shock," tactics evolved, fought by

heavily armored citizens called hoplites (shield bearers). Partly ame-

liorating the increased brutality of hoplite warfare, the Greeks wedded

close-quarters combat to rigid discipline in a linear formation called

the phalanx, wherein each man was partially protected by the shield of his neighbor. Culturally, the Greeks still treasured the freelancing

heroes they had studied since childhood from the Trojan War; but in

practical terms, individualism was subordinated to unit discipline, the

hoplites of a phalanx succeeding or failing as one. Because they were

great seafarers and entrepreneurs, situated at the center of Mediter-

ranean commerce, the Greeks were less insular than the Persians and

their armor (bronze for its malleability) and weapons (iron or iron-

tipped) became superior. A Persian bowman would have difficulty

wounding a Greek hoplite covered with armor wielding his round,

yard-wide shield, and if the Greek were allowed to close with his six-

foot spear, the Persian would be defenseless.

In 490 B.C., Darius dispatched a large expeditionary force to sub-

due the Greek peninsula, but it was disastrously defeated at the battle

of Marathon. The Persian infantry broke into a stampede back to its

ships. The Greeks had attacked at a moment when the Persian cavalry

was off foraging or on a mission. Eastern cavalry remained a serious

threat to the Greeks because a phalanx was vulnerable in its flanks

and rear.

Ten years later, Darius's successor, Xerxes I, led a gigantic, full-

fledged invasion of Greece with the largest army in history to that

time. One result was that this gave Herodotus another opportunity to

examine the components of the Persian Empire. The Bactrians, he

reported, wore felt caps like the Medes (and Persians) and were armed

with native cane bows and short spears. The Scythians wore caps stiff-

ened to an upright point and trousers. Aside from bows they carried

daggers and battleaxes. Both contingents were under the command of

Xerxes' brother, a son of Darius married to one of Cyrus's daughters.

Significantly, the Persian satrap of Bactria was always the highest-

ranking prince of the Achaemenid house, often next-in-line to the

throne.

Herodotus described the Areians from today's western

Afghanistan as "equipped like the Bactrians, except that their bows

were in the Median style." The Gandharans, like the Parthians and

Chorasmians who lived by the Caspian Sea, were also fitted out like

the Bactrians. The Paktuans, he said, "wore cloaks of skin and carried

the bow of their country and the dagger." The Indians wore cotton

clothing and carried "cane bows and cane arrows with iron heads."

The Bactrians, Scythians, and Paktuans contributed cavalry, with arms

identical to their infantry counterparts.The largest contingent of cavalry, eight thousand, was provided by

the Sagartians (or Sagartioi), whom Herodotus described as "a nomadic

people who are ethnically Persian and who speak Persian, but dress in

a combination of styles from Persia and Paktuyke." He said they were

armed with no bronze or iron weapons except daggers, relying instead

on leather ropes with a noose at one end. They evidently fought like

rodeo riders. The Sagartians were mentioned on only one of Darius's

lists of conquered peoples, and after the invasion they disappeared from

Greek commentaries. They may have rebelled against Persian control,

or as mounted nomads were simply too difficult to pin to a territory and

were instead included in other satrapal domains. Caroe theorizes that

these people—half Persian and half Paktuan—may have been ancestors

of the Abdali tribe, later called the Durranis, who for centuries have

been the dominant tribe of western Afghanistan.

The Spartans gave Xerxes a bloody warning at the pass of

Thermopylae before all three hundred of them were killed. The

Persians went on to sack the city of Athens, but then the Athenians

destroyed the Persian fleet off the nearby island of Salamis. The Greek

victory at Salamis was one of history's most important battles because

it forced Xerxes and most of his army to retreat. Having lost naval

supremacy, the Great King had to hurry home before the Greek fleet

crossed the Aegean to cut him off at the Hellespont. But he left behind

a large force under his favorite general, Mardonius, to continue the

war. Mardonius was given the pick of the empire's fighting men and

his first choices were the king's personal bodyguard, the ten thousand

Immortals, along with a heavily armored unit of one thousand Persian

cavalry. According to Herodotus, "then he picked all the infantry and

cavalry the Medes, Scythians, Bactrians and Indians had supplied. He

chose every man from these peoples indiscriminately, but he took only

a few at a time from the other allied contingents, making either stature

or proven worth the basis of his selection."

In the months that followed, Mardonius's force was buttressed by

Greek allies, including hoplite infantry from the city of Thebes. In the

spring of 479 B.C., the Persian army once again overran Athens and its

surrounding territory, Attica. Enemy horsemen ran roughshod over

the country, though our primary war correspondent, Herodotus, failed

to distinguish the exploits of the Bactrian, Scythian, and possibly

Sagartian contingents from the Persian cavalry as a whole.

When the two sides came to grips after nine months of jostling, the resulting battle of Plataea was as important to the future of Greek civ-

ilization as Salamis. Herodotus described the clash in an edge-of-the-

seat narrative in which the outcome hung in the balance until the very

end. In the opposing lines he placed the Bactrians, Indians, and

Scythians opposite the troops of small Greek city-states in the center.

The Spartans faced the Persian Immortals on the right while the

Athenians confronted the Thebans and other Persian-allied hoplite

troops on the left. Long days of maneuver preceded the battle, the

Greeks keeping to the hills in order to avoid the devastating thrusts of

enemy cavalry. Finally the Persian infantry, following up a local suc-

cess, appeared in the open field and the Greek infantry—its water sup-

ply cut off by enemy horsemen—emerged on the plain to meet it. The

ensuing battle was ferocious on both sides, the invaders having per-

haps more to lose than the defenders. In Herodotus's account:

In courage and strength the Persians and the Greeks were

evenly matched, but the Persians wore no armor; besides, they

did not have the skill and expertise of their opponents. They

would rush forward ahead of the main body of troops, one by

one, or in groups of ten or so, and attack the Spartiates, only

to be cut down.

Mardonius rode into battle on his white horse, surrounded

by his elite battalion of a thousand first-rate soldiers, and

wherever he put in a personal appearance the Persians made

things difficult for their opponents. As long as Mardonius was

alive, the Persians held their ground and fought back, inflict-

ing heavy casualties on the Spartans.

Mardonius was finally killed by a Spartan warrior and his army

began to collapse. We hear no more about the Persian cavalry, which

must have easily evaded Greek infantry pursuit, but are left with

Herodotus's casualty figures: 257,000 dead on the Persian side

opposed to 91 Spartan fatalities, 16 from the town of Tegea plus 52

Athenians. This is one of the cases where casualty figures related by

Greeks must be considered absurd. Modern scholars estimate that the

forces at Plataea were evenly matched and that a large number on the

Persian side retreated when the battle swung against them. They did

have a difficult time during their retreat back to Asia against the

Boetians, Thessalians, Macedonians, and Thracians in the north of thepeninsula, who quickly switched sides once they realized the Hellenes,

not the Persians, were triumphant. Only scattered remnants of the

army got back to Asia.

Fortunately for the Persians, the Greek world could not achieve

internal unity, and after several decades in which Athens led an alliance

designed to "ravage the lands of the Persian king," the Athenian and

Spartan coalitions on the mainland fell into a brutal conflict that ren-

dered the Greeks impotent to undertake foreign invasions. The

Peloponnesian War, 431-404 B.C., completely exhausted the city-states.

Shortly afterward, however, ten thousand Greek mercenaries cut their

way with relative ease through the heart of the Persian Empire, revali-

dating the superiority of Greek arms. In the fourth century B.C., an

Athenian rhetorician, Isocrates, urged a grand crusade in which the

Greeks would rise en masse to overcome the Persians.

His hopes were fulfilled in the second half of the fourth century

not by the famous city-states of classical Greece, but by Macedon, a

partly mountainous land of rustic Greeks near the top of the Balkan

peninsula. In 359 B.C., a brilliant young king, Phillip II, ascended to

the throne and proceeded to subdue Macedon's surrounding hill

tribes. In a Greek world characterized by city-states tied together

through various coalitions, Macedon became the first nation-state. It

acquired a considerable population (estimated at four million) and a

broad expanse of territory, including wealth in minerals and timber.

Ironically, as Macedonian power grew it was able to acquire an

increasing Hellenistic veneer, as artisans and scholars were hired from

abroad. Aristotle was employed to tutor the king's son and other

young nobles, while the court at Pella became a magnet for Greek and

Persian exiles receiving succor and seeking influence with the rising

young power.

Phillip II also used his expansion of wealth and territory to create

the most powerful army the world had yet seen. In his early years he

had lived in the city-state of Thebes, which briefly, under the brilliant

Epaminodes, had achieved ascendancy in the southern peninsula with

shocking victories over the Spartans. Epaminodes's innovation had

been to use the rigid front of a Greek phalanx to disguise superior

strength at a given point—introducing flexibility into a mode of war-

fare that had become almost ritualistic. In addition, the well-trained

Macedonian infantry adopted an exceptionally long spear, the sarissa,

which, when wielded in successive ranks, gave them a tactical advantageover traditional Greek hoplites. And the Macedonians, along

with their Thessalian allies, developed large formations of heavy cav-

alry, which the Hellenes did not have in abundance. Geographically,

Macedon stood as a bridge between Greece and Persia, and its auto-

cratic political system combined with Hellenic aspirations likewise

straddled the cultural boundary. It was in a fairly perfect position to

conquer both the Hellenes and the Persians.

In 338 B.C., the Macedonian army marched south and defeated a

Theban-Athenian coalition at the battle of Charonaea. The most spec-

tacular maneuver of the day was a cavalry charge led by Phillip's

teenage son against the other side's elite force, the Sacred Band of

Thebes. Of the three hundred warriors, divided into one hundred and

fifty pairs of homosexual partners, all were killed save for forty-six

who were able to surrender. Phillip subsequently forced into existence

a Greek coalition called the Corinthian League, which would materi-

ally support his next ambition, the conquest of the East.

Phillip II was assassinated in 336 B.C., almost on the eve of his

pan-Hellenic crusade against the Persian Empire. By that time his best

general, Parmenio, was already across the Hellespont in Asia Minor,

establishing a foothold for the invasion to come. Upon Phillip's death

many of the cities and peoples he had put under heel revolted. They

did not anticipate that his twenty-year-old heir would be equally as

energetic, and would eventually prove even more ambitious than his

father. The young prince campaigned to the north, ruthlessly subduing

the Illyrian and Thracian hill-tribes in present-day northern Greece

and Albania. Then he responded to a Hellenic revolt by utterly

destroying the city of Thebes, killing its men and enslaving its women

and children. After this horrific demonstration of Macedonian power

the long-planned campaign against the Persian Empire in Asia com-

menced. Afterward the son was not satisfied with the conquest of

Persia alone. He attempted to lead Macedonian arms to the very ends

of the earth, which he mistakenly thought lay just beyond

Afghanistan.