Fire, that mysterious, useful, kindly thing by which man warms himself, by which he cooks his food, and which, nevertheless, is capable of such horrible destruction, seems to have been associated closely with the power of the good god, Ormuzd. Fire was therefore a sacred element.
The cow, another kindly thing, because of its use to man, was also sacred. In the religion which Zoroaster was brought up in the cow had been sacrificed to ward off evils—with the idea, already noticed, that the more precious to man the thing that he sacrificed, the more favour his sacrifice would win with the gods. Zoroaster taught that it was impious to kill the cow.
It was with this fine and enlightened religion in their hearts, then, that Cyrus and his Persians came conquering the western world. They conquered, but they treated those that they conquered with justice, according to the great teaching of Zoroaster. As they believed in one god over all the earth, they might permit the worship of that god to be carried on according to the various customs that they found where they went, so long as those customs were not altogether base and evil.
And these Persians were a kindly people. That is one of the causes of their victories. In the great story we find this often repeated—that a people living in a mountainous country, in a severe climate, and in surroundings which make their lives difficult and their food hard to get, come down on the inhabitants of a country where the soil is more fertile, the climate milder, and life altogether easier, and drive these easy-going people out before them as if they were sheep running away before wolves. It is a happening which teaches the lesson that the strongest, the most effective, kind of men are those that are accustomed to hardship.
But it is quite clear from all we have seen that those whom the Persians thus conquered were practised warriors. They were constantly fighting. The Persians, however, seem to have come upon them with a kind of fighting to which they were not altogether accustomed. The difference between their methods was chiefly that the Persians were so much quicker in movement. They were fine archers, and they were very fine horsemen. It was this last, their horsemanship, which seems to have been one of the great secrets of their success. They had archers both on horse and on foot, but on horse especially. Their method was to dash down upon the enemy in a swift attack, the cavalry opening out to let the archers on foot shoot their arrows. Then, when they had harassed the enemy with this swift charge, it was not their way to come to close quarters with him, at all events at the first onset, but rather to retire as quickly as they came on, to re-form, and to come back to the attack again.
The enemy, on their retirement, if he did not know their way of fighting, was rather apt to think that they were retreating altogether and were giving up the attack. Then the enemy was inclined to start off in pursuit. That was exactly what suited the Persians, for it meant that when they returned for the next attack they found the enemy more broken up than before and less able to resist. It was by repeated onsets of this nature that they got the formation of an opposing army knocked to pieces; and then, in a final attack, this time pressed closely home, they might, and they generally did, defeat him.
But if it was thus a new style of fighting that the Persians brought with them from the east, they also found themselves encountering a mode of defence against their attack which was strange to them. And this mode of defence came from the west.
In that allied army which we saw the Persians defeating in Asia Minor—the army led by Crœsus, king of Lydia—the Persians were victorious. They were so decisively victorious that Crœsus himself was taken prisoner by them, and the whole strength seems to have been knocked out of the alliance by that single blow. And in the defeated army we saw that there were soldiers from Sparta, which is, as you see on the map, in that most southern and almost detached part of Greece which is called the Peloponnese. The Spartans, therefore, were Greeks, and the Greeks were among those that had the worst of it in this great battle. But, for all that, it was a Grecian mode of fighting that made the best of all defences against the Persian way of attacking. This mode of defence is what was called the "phalanx."
City states
You have to understand that the word Greece in those days did not mean a single nation so much as a collection of small states settled close beside one another. The peoples of the different states were for the most part of the same race, no doubt, just like the Semitic peoples in Syria and Palestine. But they differed from each other in their customs and their ways of government far more than the Semites did. They were very often fighting among themselves and, again like the Semites, found it very difficult to let their jealousy of each other die down and to unite together for defence against a foreign foe. The Spartans were the most warlike of all the Grecian states. Their government was conducted in such a way as to make all the males in the country fighters.