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As the Greeks retreated, covered by the Spartans, Mrduniya, astride his white horse, charged at the head of a thousand Immortals. The training of the Spartans and the advantage given by their armour broke the lightly armed Persians. A Spartan killed Mrduniya with a slung stone, and the Persians fled. Their undefeated second army tried to retire through Thrace to Asia, but Alexander of Macedon switched sides and massacred many of their troops. The conquest was over^* – but Xerxes had burned Athens, and Persia overshadowed Greece for another 150 years.

While the Greek navy defeated the Persians, commanded by Xerxes’ brother Masišta, at Mycale off Ionia, Xerxes’ love life was destroying his court. First he had fallen in love with Masišta’s wife. In order to spend more time with her, he married his son, Crown Prince Darius, to the daughter of Masišta, Artaynte, but, dropping the mother, he fell wildly in love with the teenager. The queen then uncovered a planned coup by Masišta and his family. At the Nowruz (new year’s) feast, when the king asked her to choose a gift she demanded the Masišta family. Xerxes, his follies exposed, withdrew. The queen ordered a traitor’s death for Masišta’s wife, whose nose, ears, tongue and breasts were cut off and thrown to dogs.

Unsurprisingly Xerxes had lost his mystique: in 465, courtiers murdered him in his bedroom. In the ensuing conspiracy, Darius was outplayed by his brother Artaxerxes (Artaxšaça) who, as Great King, turned again to Greek matters, offering to fund any Greek power that would challenge the empire of Athens, now led to its zenith by the most gifted of all of the Alcmaeon family.

PERICLES, ASPASIA AND THE PLAGUE OF ATHENS

In 431 BC, Pericles, the ‘foremost man in the Athenian democracy’, stood up in the Assembly to recommend war against the city’s rival Sparta. Born in 495, Pericles grew up during the Persian War – his father had defeated the Persians at Mycale. His mother Agariste was an Alcmaeon, niece of the creator of democracy, Cleisthenes, so Pericles was brought up as a prince of democracy in a family mansion, studying philosophy, literature and music, the height of Athenian culture and haughtiness. His wide forehead earning him the nickname Squillhead; he cultivated an air of self-control and reliability in the Assembly. In the early 460s, in his mid-thirties, Pericles backed full democracy. Success in Athenian politics required oratory but also military talent since the most prestigious offices were now the ten strategoi. Pericles excelled at both, annually re-elected to wear the helmet of a strategos, which he did for thirty years.

As a young man, Pericles married a relative with whom he had two children, but they also raised an orphaned Alcmaeonid, Alcibiades, who grew up to be a handsome and gifted youth and who would one day dominate Athens. At home Pericles held a salon,^* attended by the young philosopher Socrates. But in the 440s, when he was in his political prime, he fell in love with a hetaira, a courtesan, one of the cultivated entertainers who performed at symposia, and regarded as very different from the city’s many pornai, street prostitutes. Aspasia of Miletos, the Greek city in Ionia, was a beautiful intellectual, her conversation so fine that wives of Socrates’ friends came to listen to her talk. The Athenians had long outlawed polygamy so when Aspasia moved in, Pericles divorced his wife, allowing him to remarry. But their two sons were infuriated and Pericles was criticized for his love of Aspasia, with whom he went on to have another son.