The Queen of Sparta (38 page)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is a story of a remarkable young queen that I found hidden in between the lines of Herodotus – the one variously known as the Father of History and the Father of Lies. It is to him I owe my greatest debt for this work. Other ancients to whom I am indebted include Livy, Plutarch, and Thucydides.

As I am to the ancient, I too am immensely indebted to our modern giants of Antiquity, namely former teacher, Professor Barry Strauss of Cornell and, my friend, Professor Paul Cartledge of Cambridge. I would especially like to acknowledge the influence of Tom Holland, whose
Persian Fire
was one of the main inspirations of this novel, to whom I am personally grateful for being so open with me.

I am also indebted to Peter Green; the two Robins – Waterfield and Lane Fox; – and especially to Victor Davis Hanson, whose brilliant scholarship I have admired far more than his politics, and yet both have been equally critical influences in motivating me to write this novel.

I would also like to acknowledge here the influence of several modern authors who have written about Sparta, including John Carr, W.G. Forrest, Nigel M. Kennell, J.F. Lazenby and Scott M. Rusch, as well as John. R. Hale’s impressive work on Athens. I also wish to acknowledge the works of John Keegan and Richard Holmes and their keen insights on the nature of combat and warfare.

Among the novelists to whom I owe the greatest debt is Steven Pressfield, the influence of whose great novels,
Gates of Fire
and
Last of the Amazons
can clearly be seen in this story. If imitation is the best form flattery, this can be seen in the colour of Cleonice’s eyes, in a quip about the Argives by Cleomenes, and in the reference the alluring presence of Amazons along the northern edges of the Greek world; the credit for all of these is Mr. Pressfield’s.

Though my story takes a very different tack than the Leonidas trilogy of Helena P. Schafer, and deliberately so, I would like to acknowledge my debt to her scholarship and writing.

I wish to warmly thank Sam Barone, whose generous encouragement I have greatly appreciated. I also acknowledge the influence of both Valerio Massimo Manfredi and Bernard Cornwell in writing this novel.

In this list, I should also mention the movie
300
(Zack Snyder, directing) as well as its sequel,
300: Rise of an Empire
(Noam Murro, directing), in spite of my reservations about their portrayals of events and personalities. I also want to acknowledge the influence of Travis Tritt’s lyrics from his song “The day the sun stood still” (from the musical,
The Civil War
– lyrics by Jack Murphy) in Prince Khorrem’s poem on Thermopylae.

Above all, I have nothing but gratitude to those whose support has been the bedrock of this project. In this regard, I want to thank Hannah Vaughan Lee who painstakingly went through repeated iterations of this novel and carefully guided me along the way and my editor, Claire Wingfield, whose professional support and encouragement saw this project through to its successful conclusion. I also wish to mention the support of Charlie Wilson, Natalie Braine, Terry Edge, and Gillian Stern, all of whom helped to shape this book.

I wish to give a big thanks to Dan Prescott for his wonderfully designed cover as well as for the maps and for typesetting the manuscript.

Among others, I wish to acknowledge the encouragement and contribution of Lucy Chester, Peter Wright, Suzy Price, Andrea Volfova, Marlene Nilsson, Marco Kalbusch, Ingrid Koeck and Imran Ahmed Siddiqui, whose individual and collective advice helped shaped the story into the one it eventually became.

Above all, I would like to thank my family for their unwavering support.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

“In war,” wrote the playwright Aeschylus, “truth is the first casualty.” And indeed, history is often written by the victors. In writing this book, I have tried to address two issues. One is to try to present a more balanced picture of events, and that role is primarily given to Sherzada who acts as Gorgo’s foil and sees things from a different point of view. The second is to present an alternative explanation of a well-known story. The Greeks could not have defeated the Persians without a central figure organizing their resistance. And Gorgo, in my view, fits this role perfectly. That she did this by following her father’s apparently mad policies was too compelling a story for me to resist telling. Rather than seeing him as a mad king, I see him as a visionary and a great practitioner of
realpolitik
, something very few Greeks of that era understood. King Cleomenes has been the great unsung hero of ancient Sparta. The story of Gorgo cannot be divorced from that of her father.

Gorgo and her son mysteriously disappear from history not very long after the defeat of the Persians. In this novel, I have tried to offer one explanation of what might have happened to them, as well as the origins of how Sparta and Athens begin to descend down a path which leads them to disastrous conflict that will ultimately sap Sparta’s power and end its predominance in Greece.

While the vast majority of the characters are based on actual historical figures, a very small minority are fictional – among them, Sherzada. He might appear as an historical anomaly, but not an entirely implausible one. Such a person could well have existed. In a world when time and again, the notion of a clash of civilizations has almost become a foregone conclusion, this novel tries to challenge many notions that continue to dog our political thinking.

Like Gorgo, Sherzada too represents an alternative reading of history. It is well-established that the Sakas established themselves in the Indus Valley in the first century
AD
. However, some ancient texts date their presence in the Northern part of the sub-continent even earlier. The ruins of a city called Sakala near modern Sialkot in Pakistan tantalizingly points in that direction. I have also challenged the widely held view that the Persian conquered what are now the Punjab and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces of Pakistan during the reign of King Darius. Instead, I suggest that while the Sakas of the Indus accepted the Persians as their overlords, they did not accept Persian occupation.

The fact that Greek influences reached the Indus Valley before Alexander the Great can be discerned from a variety of sources which indicate far more inter-cultural interactions across a wider area of the globe than is generally accepted.

As to the names and places, where possible I have – with some exceptions – used the Latinized as opposed to the Grecianised spelling. Thus Cleonike is Cleoince, Thraiki is Thrace, Kleomenes is Cleomenes, and Pleistarkhos is Pleistarchus, to give just a few examples. I have also tried, where possible, to “Persianize” the names of the Persian characters rather than use the Grecianised versions that have come down to us in History. So Mardonius is Mardauniya, Artabazus is Artabaz and Bubares is Burbaraz, etc. In some cases, my “Persianized” names are only an approximation of what they must have been in reality.

As for military formations, I have tried to describe them in modern terms only for the sake of simplicity. Deliberately avoiding the rich and often inconclusive academic debate about the size and composition of Spartan military units like
Lochoi
and
Morae
, I have assumed that a
Lochos
is the smaller military unit comprising around 300 troops – roughly the size of a modern army company – and the
Mora
around 600–800 men, roughly equal to a modern battalion. Since each of the urban districts of Sparta were expected to provide troops, I named each multi-battalion regiment after its home district – hence the mention of the Kynosoura Regiment. All of this is to provide a modern reference to help those who interested in understanding how the Spartan army would have been organized at that particular time.

I have used a similar method to describe other military units. A typical Greek battalion, I have assumed, would be roughly the same as a Spartan one, between 600 and 800 men. A Persian battalion, however, would notionally be 1,000 strong. The ancient cavalry equivalent of an infantry battalion would be a regiment, though it might contain far fewer men. It is not clear whether the Greeks had brigade-sized units, though some evidence suggests that they did. A brigade equivalent in all Greek armies would be a composed of several
Morae
or similar battalion-sized units, totalling between 3,000 and 5,000 men. Often, this was the size of a typical Spartan force on campaign. The Latin infantry
Alla
or a Roman Legion of the time would also be the same strength as a brigade and have been described as such in this novel.

On the subject of Roman history, I have deviated from the widely accepted Varronian Chronology (presented by Marcus Terrentius Varro) by three years, having the consulship of Marcus Fabius Vibullanus and Gnaeus Manlius in 477
BC
instead of 480
BC
. This is more in line with the dates presented by Livy. Whilst a decisive battle between the Romans and the Etruscans is mentioned by Livy, it is not given a name. I have called it the Battle of the Fields of Fidenae.

As for the other major battles, most, like Thermopylae and Plataea, did indeed take place. However, Gortys is fictional but would not have been out of place in the Peloponnesus of that era where Spartans sought to reassert their dominance time and again.

Some of the apparently stranger roles in this novel are also based on historic precedents. It is conceivable, for example, for a famous playwright like Aeschylus to serve as an inexperienced naval captain, just as a generation later the popular playwright Sophocles – without any significant military experience – was elected as a general to serve alongside the brilliant Athenian statesman, Pericles, son of Xanthippus. As in the case of Aeschylus in this novel, Sophocles’ duties were largely confined to diplomacy.

I have also put into Gorgo’s mouth some quotes, particularly the “If!” remark in the first chapter, which were attributed to later Spartans. However, there is no reason to assume that Gorgo did not make similar statements.

Finally, some characters have a minor role in this one, but are linked to future novels in which they will play a far more prominent role. A prequel is in the works.