Books 7 to 9 tell the climax of H’s story, the great three-year struggle between Greeks and Persians in Greece itself, and the victory achieved by the Greeks, first in Greece and then also in Ionia (481–479 BCE). H is writing more than thirty years later, when the victory has begun to seem ambiguous to many Greeks—to the Athenians, because they see their great sacrifice and valour in the war disregarded by their erstwhile allies, and their later successes envied and feared (Thucydides 1.73–7); to the rest of the Greeks, because they see the peoples of the Aegean in the 450s and 440s dominated by Athens as they had been by the Persians, and more generally, because many of them view the initiative and energy displayed by Athens in the decades after the Persian Wars as intrinsically dangerous for everybody else. The demos or ordinary Athenian citizen body decisively defeated the Persians in 480 by manning the Athenian fleet; and if we take seriously the picture painted in the early books of Thucydides, we see that Athenian democracy under Pericles—in particular, in its aggressively imperialist ambitions—is regarded by the more conservative Greek states as a dangerous model and one that Athens might try to export elsewhere. As a Corinthian opines in 432 BCE (Thucydides 1.70), ‘[The Athenians] are by nature incapable of either living a quiet life themselves or of allowing anyone else to do so.’
H’s decision sometime about the middle of the fifth century to write a narrative of the Persian Wars, beginning with the growth of Persian power and leaving off at the moment of Greek victory in 479, before the Greeks became overtly divided among themselves, was an act fraught with political significance at the time of writing. Many scholars have assumed that one of H’s purposes in writing was to support contemporary Athens. He is, after all, explicit in giving Athens her due, and he emphasizes that she created the conditions under which victory was possible at all. On the other hand, in recent years a more ironic set of interpretive strategies has been discerned running through his narrative as well. H is unequivocally respectful of Pausanias, the Lacedaemonian general at Plataea, despite rumours of Pausanias’ later collaboration with Persia and moral downfall, while he is grudging in his praise of Themistocles, the architect of Athenian victory and has scarcely anything to say at all about other Athenian commanders. One of the most eloquent spokesmen for the Greek values of freedom and law is the exiled Spartan king in Xerxes’ entourage, Demaratus.
H emphasizes that the victory was almost a defeat; repeatedly in the last books of the Histories the Greeks only barely manage to come together in time to stave off disaster for the moment. What undoes the Persians is not the resources ranged against them by the Greeks (although these were necessary)—it is rather their own inability to look closely at how to use their resources efficiently and a lack of strategic vision. Although the sentiment is expressed by the self-serving and even actively duplicitous Themistocles, H’s most fundamental assessment seems to be the one articulated by Themistocles after Salamis (8.109): ‘It was not we who accomplished this, but the gods and heroes, who did not want to see a single man ruling both Asia and Europe.’ If we go back through the earlier books of the Histories, we understand what Themistocles is talking about: there is an economy, a natural order to the world, that makes it necessary to check the Persian ambition to conquer everything—as Xerxes puts it, to ‘make Persian territory end only at the sky, the domain of Zeus, [so that] the sun will not shine on any land beyond our borders’ (7.8). In H’s understanding, that is not the way the world works; something that gets too big will in its turn become the focus of tisis, ‘retribution’, and become small again. In his narrative of Books 7 to 9 we see how the sequence of events in Greece from 481 to 479 BCE illustrates this principle in action.
In the more confident scholarship of the earlier twentieth century, the theme of aggression, reciprocal violence, and consequent divine retribution in H’s narrative was often viewed as an archaic survival, a rather sentimentalizing and religious patina spread over a more neutrally realistic narrative of events that could be discerned underneath. Today, however, much of what in H’s narrative is expressed in religious terms can be put instead in terms of a political ecology: the sense (certainly understood by the ancient Greeks) that the resources of the earth are finite, and that the balancing that will inevitably occur is a natural one—those who try to discern the underlying balance fare better in the long run than those who follow their own compulsive agendas to the end.
Xerxes is (as his uncle Artabanus points out) a young king, with an unrealistic view of the scope of his power, and unrealistic expectations for his great expedition. We see him at the end retreating from Greece back to Asia and there embroiling himself in a disastrous affair with his own daughter-in-law. Xerxes was in fact killed in a palace revolt in 465 BCE—an event H does not mention but assumes that we know. H is quite clear that as human beings Persians are on the whole no better and no worse than Greeks. Structurally, however, Xerxes’ great expedition to Greece stands as a monument to the dangerous blindness of massive empires and grandiose thinking—but it is also the backdrop against which H has been able to present to us the Greeks’ love of their homeland, their valour against incredible odds, and their deep desire to preserve their freedom.