Tom Holland Quotes

I thought, gazing at the beauty of the landscape again, it is as though the fiend has prevailed against the angels, and fixed his throne in a heaven, to rule it as though it were Hell.

It was an article of faith to the Romans that they were the most morally upright people in the world. How else was the size of their empire to be explained? Yet they also knew that the Republic's greatness carried its own risks. To abuse it would be to court divine anger. Hence the Roman's concern to refute all charges of bullying, and to insist they had won their empire purely in self-defense.

Gain cannot be made without loss to someone else.

To control one’s own destiny takes a mastermind. To execute the plans takes a fool.

Winners are the favourites of heaven.

The supreme achievement of the Jewish and Christian scholars of the age was to craft a history of their respective faiths that cast themselves as its rightful and inevitable culmination, and left anything that might have served to contradict such an impression out of the story altogether.

Just like any electorate, they delighted in making candidates for their favors sweat.

This [for opposition leaders to claim royal lineage], in a world ruled by a republic, was what revolution had come to mean.

Once the world of ideas has been transformed, reality cannot hold out for long. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

By shutting out the real world we can live peacefully in ours. We know that a world without pain is a world without feeling . . . but a world without feeling is a world without pain. Kevin

Whatever else it may be, the Qur’an is no work of history. Startlingly, were it not for all the commentaries elucidating its mysteries, all the biographies of the Prophet, and all the sprawling collections of hadiths—none of which, in the form we have them, pre-dates the beginning of the third century after the hijra—we would have only the barest reason to associate it with a man named

A myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound—as Tolkien, that devout Catholic, always argued—a myth can be true. To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it—the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe—that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.

Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar: the last Jewish king ever to rule in Arabia.

Venerable the scorn of the Jews for the Ishmaelites may have been; but it was nothing like so savage as their loathing for the Romans.

So highly did the Roman people prize this ideal of the common good that their name for it – res publica – served as shorthand for their entire system of government.

Kavad himself, if obliged to fight on a Jewish holy day, had been known to request his adversaries for a temporary truce.

As one Saudi professor sternly tells his co-religionists, “Only the writings of a practising Muslim are worthy of our attention.

We always want what we’re not allowed.

Only a few prefer liberty—the majority seek nothing more than fair masters. Sallust, Histories

Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state. However great a citizen might become, however great he might wish to become, the truest greatness of all still belonged to the Roman Republic itself

Only centuries after the death of Jesus—by which time, astonishingly, even the Caesars had been brought to acknowledge him as Christ—did his execution at last start to emerge as an acceptable theme for artists.

Never before had Jewish morality and Greek philosophy been fused to such momentous effect. That the law of the God of Israel might be read inscribed on the human heart, written there by his Spirit, was a notion that drew alike on the teachings of Pharisees and Stoics—and yet equally was foreign to them both.

stories of the Virgin being succoured by a friendly palm tree had actually been a Christian tradition for centuries, and seem in turn to have derived from a legend told by the pagan Greeks, was blithely ignored—as, of course, it was bound to be.

[T]he greater the sense of awe with which a text was regarded, the more complete might be the amnesia as to the original circumstances of its composition.

In the Arab world, at any rate, to doubt the traditional account of Islam’s origins has been to risk death threats, prosecution for apostasy, or even defenestration.61

The dictator himself cast his reforms as a restoration, the sweeping away of clutter. Yet clutter was the essence of the Republic

History, unlike faith, cannot be built upon foundations of sand.

that there existed no earthly empire so great or overweening that it might not one day be dashed to pieces

JULIA: Oldest daughter of Julia and Agrippa. Owner of the smallest dwarf in Rome. Exiled in AD 8.

Time erodes both steel and stone.’ So Ovid had written in the months before his death.

Of all Rome’s seven hills, however, the Palatine was the most exclusive by far.

[T]here [is] no limit to what might not be achieved by an alliance between an imperial monarchy and revelations, if truly believed to be heaven-sent, of a prophet.

While he may forget that he is Caesar, I never forget that I am Caesar’s daughter.

Rome, over the years, had measurably benefited from the influx of foreign talent.

Harmony enables small things to flourish – while the lack of it destroys the great.

Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state.

It was as though the problems of the Republic bored the man appointed to solve them, as though Rome herself were now too small a stage for his ambitions

The dull mind rises to the truth through material

Like unmixed wine, the dictatorship had a taste that was intoxicating and perilous.

If you have a problem with me, text me. And if you don't have my number, you don't know me well enough to have a problem with me.

More people worship the rising than the setting sun,

Honour, in the Republic, had never been a goal in itself, only a means to an infinite end. And what was true of her citizens, naturally, was also true of Rome herself. For the generation that had lived through the civil wars, this was the consolation history gave them. Out of calamity could come greatness. Out of dispossession could come the renewal of a civilised order.

Enthusiasts for empire argued that Rome had a civilizing mission; that because her values and institutions were self-evidently superior to those of barbarians, she had a duty to propagate them; that only once the whole globe had been subjected to her rule could there be a universal peace.

Their delight in posing as aliens, as transients, made a boast out of what should properly have been a cause of shame. ‘To them, a homeland is a foreign country, and a foreign country a homeland

A Roman penis was potent, masterful, prodigious. In a city where the phallus was everywhere to be seen, protecting doorways as a symbol of good luck, guarding crossroads or scaring off birds in gardens, ramrod size was much admired.

The concept of natural law had no place in Torah. Yet Paul – as he struggled to define the law that he believed, in the wake of the crucifixion and the resurrection, to be written on the heart of all who acknowledged Christ as Lord – did not hesitate to adapt the teachings of the Greeks. The word he used for it – syneidesis – clearly signalled which philosophers in particular he had in mind. Paul, at the heart of his gospel, was enshrining the Stoic concept of conscience.

The unspeakable rituals of the heathen, who might think nothing of sacrificing a horse and then making sport with its phallus, were echoed in grim tales of Christian women transforming themselves into equine form, and revelling in the bestial.

The state had the right to know everything, for the Romans believed that even “personal tastes and appetites should be subject to surveillance and review.”4 It was knowledge, intrusive knowledge, that provided the Republic with its surest foundations.

The Roman character had a strong streak of snobbery: effectively, citizens preferred to vote for families with strong brand recognition, electing son after father after grandfather to the great magistracies of state, indulging the nobility’s dynastic pretensions with a numbing regularity.

By AD 800, so redeemed was Arabic from the contempt in which it had once been held that its sound had come to rank as the very music of power, and its cursives as things of pure beauty, refined to a rare and exquisite perfection by the art of its calligraphers. Among the Arabs, the written word was on the verge of becoming a mania. One scholar, when he died in 822, left behind him a library that filled a whole six hundred trunks.

The oath of duty spoken by a legionary, the sacramentum, was of a peculiarly fearsome order, and to break it a terrible thing. The men who swore it, although granted by its terms a licence denied civilians to fight and kill, were simultaneously deprived of rights that were the essence of citizenship.

The news, when it leaked out, caused outrage and horror in Rome. The Republic was never so dangerous as when it believed that its security was at stake. The Romans rarely went to war, not even against the most negligible foe, without somehow first convincing themselves that their preemptive strikes were defensive in nature.

the rabbis of Palestine were acknowledged to hold the advantage over those of Mesopotamia in several distinctive ways: they were more open to those who were not themselves scholars; they were better able to incinerate those who displeased them with a single glare; and they were more obsessively alert to the menace posed by menstruating women.

Another woman, “whose face no one had ever seen outside the door of her house and who had never walked during the day in the city,”2 had torn off her headscarf, the better to reproach the king. Yusuf, in his fury, had ordered her daughter and granddaughter killed before her, their blood poured down her throat, and then her own head to be sent flying.

One day perhaps, when the records of the twentieth century AD have grown as fragmentary as those of ancient Rome, a history of the Second World War will be written that relies solely upon the broadcasts of Hitler and the memoirs of Churchill. It will be one cut off from whole dimensions of experience: no letters from the front, no combatants’ diaries.

When the Senate met for the first time a week after the funeral, on 17 September, it was to confirm that the dead Princeps was indeed to be worshipped as a god. His wife was appointed his priest. This, in a city where all the priesthoods except for those of Vesta were monopolised by men, was unprecedented. Astonishingly, Livia was even given a lictor.

The very word ‘senator’ derived from the Latin for ‘old man’. The meteor of Scipio’s career, though, had blazed from a scandalously youthful age.

that God was closer to the weak than to the mighty, to the poor than to the rich. Any beggar, any criminal, might be Christ. ‘So the last will be first, and the first last.

Nero, by contrast, was the genuine article.

You cannot regulate desire.

When Nero decided to stage a public funeral in the Forum,

The ambition of Dominion is to trace the course of what one Christian, writing in the third century AD, termed ‘the flood-tide of Christ’:

Guests assigned ugly slaves would grumble about it.

The Senate itself, like a battered wife frantic to forestall a beating, had made sure, in the first days of Caligula’s reign, to deny him nothing.

In the early years of Trajan’s rule, Tacitus had looked to the vast expanses of Germany,

Florus had responded with savage reprisals.

The two cities had ended up going to war. The consequences had been ruinous for both

lands studded with famous cities already ancient when Romulus was born.

As a result, a thousand years of civic self-government were brought to an end, and not for another thousand, and more, would it become a living reality again.

The imperium that previously had been shared out among a whole multitude of magistrates was monopolised,

had been obliged to suspend the dole itself.

Summoning her father and her husband, she had told them of the outrage done her,

a ‘Roman empire’. It was to rank as an imperator: an ‘emperor’.

Coloured marble, pompous avenues, urban planning: what were these, if not the prerogatives of kings? No one, in a free republic, could be permitted such sinister grandstanding. This was why, in the last feverish decade before the crossing of the Rubicon, the sudden appearance in Rome of a rash of grandiose monuments had served as portents of the Republic’s ruin.

In a city famed for its wealth, Paul proclaimed that it was the ‘low and despised in the world, mere nothings’,34 who ranked first. Among a people who had always celebrated the agon, the contest to be the best, he announced that God had chosen the foolish to shame the wise, and the weak to shame the strong. In a world that took for granted the hierarchy of human chattels and their owners, he insisted that the distinctions between slave and free, now that Christ himself had suffered the death of a slave, were of no more account than those between Greek and Jew.

The concept of the ‘secular’, first planted by Augustine, and tended by Columbanus, had attained a spectacular bloom. Gregory and his fellow reformers did not invent the distinction between religio and the saeculum, between the sacred and the profane; but they did render it something fundamental to the future of the West, ‘for the first time and permanently’.16 A decisive moment.

The man who greeted the news of the Japanese surrender in 1945 by quoting scripture and offering up praise to Christ was not Truman, nor Churchill, nor de Gaulle, but the Chinese leader, Chiang Kaishek.

[A] history of Islam's origins cannot be written without reference to the origins of Judaism and Christianity - and [...] a history of the origins of Judaism and Christianity cannot be written without reference to the world that incubated them both. The vision of God to which both rabbis and bishops subscribed, and which Muhammad's followers inherited, did not emerge out of nowhere. The monotheisms that would end up established as state religions from the Atlantic to central Asia had ancient, and possibly unexpected, roots. To trace them is to cast a searchlight across the entire civilisation of late antiquity.

Geography could not be bucked. Their bogs and trees shrouded in a perpetual drizzle, Germans were the spawn of their environment. The gods, who had considerately endowed Rome with a climate ideally suited to the growth of a mighty city, had doomed the inhabitants of the chilly North to a backwardness that was at once torpid and ferocious, dull and intemperate. Landscape, weather, people: Germany was unredeemably savage.

Sometimes I wonder: Do I want to gel well? Is all this fear, all this shit I’m going through now worth it? Or should I bury myself back here in the brain and forget about it?” “What’s your answer?” “I don’t know.

Now, speaking as men no longer dared to speak, his daughter had fearlessly arraigned the Triumvirs themselves. ‘Why should we women pay taxes,’ Hortensia had demanded, ‘when we have no part in the honours, the commands, the rule of the state?’23 To this question, the Triumvirs had responded by having the women driven from the Forum; but such was their embarrassment that they did eventually, with much bad grace, agree to a tax cut.

The heroes of the Iliad, favourites of the gods, golden and predatory, had scorned the weak and downtrodden. So too, for all the honour that Julian paid them, had philosophers. The starving deserved no sympathy. Beggars were best rounded up and deported. Pity risked undermining a wise man’s self-control. Only fellow citizens of good character who, through no fault of their own, had fallen on evil days might conceivably merit assistance.

The 'ulama', by tightly controlling what went into the history books, were able to propagate an understanding of their own dazzlingly rich and complex civilization that attributed almost every single thing of value within it to the Prophet, and the Prophet alone. There was no question of acknowledging the momentous roles played in the forging of Islam by countless others - be they autocrats such as Abd Al-Malik or scholars such as themselves.

What had begun as a feud of the kind that had always existed in the Republic—indeed, had formed the essence of its politics—was now spreading a contagion of bitterness and antagonism far beyond the ranks of the two rival factions.

Republic was repeatedly racked by further social convulsions, by demands from the mass of citizens for expanded civic rights, and by continued constitutional reforms—and yet throughout this turbulent period of upheaval, the Roman people never ceased to affect a stern distaste for change.

Five kings followed Romulus on the throne of Rome; and when the sixth, Tarquin the Proud, proved himself a vicious tyrant more than deserving of his nickname, his subjects put their lives on the line and rose in rebellion. In 509 BC, the monarchy was ended for good. The man who had led the uprising, a cousin of Tarquin’s named Brutus, obliged the Roman people to swear a collective oath, ‘that they would never again allow a single man to reign in Rome’. From that moment on, the word ‘king’ was the dirtiest in their political vocabulary. No longer subjects, they ranked instead as cives, ‘citizens’.

These were the class of men, not slaves, who were known by the elites as operae: labourers. Lack of work was such a scourge precisely because there existed across Italy so many men desperate to be hired, to bend their backs, to strain their muscles, to sweat in the sun. Slavery was not a solution to any shortage

Welcome to part one of my author’s note: the inspiration behind this book. Just a few years ago, the wildest thing ever happened to me. During my senior year, Tom Holland secretly enrolled in my high school, the Bronx High School of Science, as an undercover student to learn more about American high schools for his upcoming role as Spider-Man. I was lucky enough to meet and talk to him during his time there (literally still reeling in shock if we’re being honest because w h a t), and I’ve always treasured that experience. Since then, an idea has lingered in the back of my head—wouldn’t this be such an incredible concept for a book?

Hadrian rubbed salt into Jewish wounds by ordering a pagan temple built on the site. Once again, the Jews rose in revolt. Once again, the Romans crushed them. This time, the work of pacification was to prove decisive. Jerusalem was rebuilt as a Roman city. The name of the Jewish homeland, Judaea, was changed to Palestine.

When scholars in Europe sought to justify the Spanish conquest of the New World, they reached not for the Church Fathers, but for Aristotle. ‘As the Philosopher says, it is clear that some men are slaves by nature and others free by nature.’17 Even in the Indies, though, there were Spaniards who worried whether this was truly so. ‘Tell me,’ a Dominican demanded of his fellow settlers, eight years before Cortés took the road to Tenochtitlan, ‘by what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged a detestable war against these people, who dwelt quietly and peacefully in their own land?’18 Most of the friar’s congregation, too angered to reflect on his questions, contented themselves with issuing voluble complaints to the local governor, and agitating for his removal; but there were some colonists who did find their consciences pricked. Increasingly, adventurers in the New World had to reckon with condemnation of their exploits as cruelty, oppression, greed.

To those who do not accept miracles it seems more likely that the Koran is almost certainly a compilation of old texts, not a new document in the seventh century. It is like a lake into which many streams flowed, a work of art that emerged from centuries of monotheistic fusions and debates, before taking its final form in the hands of a prophet in an expanding empire of newly unified Arabs pushing aside the ancient powers of Rome and Sassanid Persia. It is, in Tom Holland’s vivid words, a bloom from the seedbed of antiquity, not a guillotine dropped on the neck of antiquity. It contains bits of Roman imperial propaganda, stories of Christian saints, remnants of Gnostic gospels and parts of ancient Jewish tracts. Holland

Not since the age of Constantine and his heirs had any one man exercised an authority over so wide a sweep of Europe as did the bishop of the ancient capital of the world. His open claim was to the ‘rights of heavenly and earthly empire’;24 his legates travelled to barbarous lands and expected to be heard; his court, in an echo of the building where the Roman Senate had once met, was known as the ‘Curia’. Yet the pope was no Caesar. His assertion of supremacy was not founded on force of arms, nor the rank of his ministers on their lineage or their wealth. The Church that had emerged from the Gregorian reformatio was instead an institution of a kind never before witnessed: one that had not merely come to think of itself as sovereign, but had willed itself into becoming so.

The people of Rome had particular reason to associate a god more commonly worshipped as the patron of prophecy and self-discipline with vicious cruelty. In the Forum, next to the sacred fig tree, there stood the statue of a pot-bellied man with a wine-sack on his shoulder. This was Marsyas, a satyr who had once challenged Apollo to a musical contest, been cheated of the victory that was rightfully his, and then been flayed alive for his presumption. Such, at any rate, was the version of the story told by the Greeks – but in Italy an altogether happier ending was reported. Marsyas, they claimed, had escaped the irate Apollo and fled to the Apennines, where he had taught the arts of augury to the natives and fathered the snake-charming Marsians. Rome was not the only city to commemorate him. Statues of Marsyas were to be found in public squares across Italy.

Another preoccupation fed into this dynamic relationship between discovery and denial: does sexual abuse actually matter? Should it, in fact, be allowed? After all, it was only in the 19070s that the Paedophile Information Exchange had argued for adults’ right to have sex with children – or rather by a slippery sleight of word, PIE inverted the imperative by arguing that children should have the right to have sex with adults. This group had been disbanded after the imprisonment of Tom O’Carroll, its leader, with some of its activists bunkered in Holland’s paedophile enclaves, only to re-appear over the parapets in the sex crime controversies of the 1990s. How recent it was, then, that paedophilia was fielded as one of the liberation movements, how many of those on the left and right of the political firmament, were – and still are – persuaded that sex with children is merely another case for individual freedom? Few people in Britain at the turn of the century publicly defend adults’ rights to sex with children. But some do, and they are to be found nesting in the coalition crusading against evidence of sexual suffering. They have learned from the 1970s, masked their intentions and diverted attention on to ‘the system’. Others may not have come out for paedophilia but they are apparently content to enter into political alliances with those who have. We believe that this makes their critique of survivors and their allies unreliable. Others genuinely believe in false memories, but may not be aware of the credentials of some of their advisors.

The shadow cast by Scipio over his fellow citizens was one that could not help but provoke resentment. The guiding principle of the Republic remained what it had always been: that no one man should rule supreme in Rome. To the Roman people, the very appearance of a magistrate served as a reminder of the seductions and dangers of monarchy. The purple that lined the border of his toga had originally been the colour of kingship. ‘Lictors’ – bodyguards whose duty it was to clear a path for him through the crowds of his fellow citizens – had once similarly escorted Tarquin the Proud. The rods and single axe borne by each lictor on his shoulder – the fasces, as they were known – symbolised authority of an intimidatingly regal scope: the right to inflict both corporal and capital punishment.*2 Power of this order was an awesome and treacherous thing. Only with the most extreme precautions in place could anyone in a free republic be trusted to wield it. This was why, in the wake of the monarchy’s downfall, the powers of the banished king had been allocated, not to a single magistrate, but to two: the consuls.

Why, O my soul, did you fail to be there, to be stabbed by a sword of bitter grief, that you could not endure the piercing of your Saviour’s side by a spear? Why could you not bear to see the nails violate the hands and feet of your Creator?’16 This prayer, written some time around AD 1070, was not just to the God who reigned in glory on high, but to the condemned criminal he had been when he suffered his humiliating death. Its author, a brilliant scholar from northern Italy by the name of Anselm, was a man of noble birth: a correspondent of countesses, an associate of kings.

Augustus, who in almost everything save his ambition was deeply conservative, had far too much respect for tradition ever to think of having such a venerable memorial removed from the Forum. Nevertheless, the statue of Marsyas was troubling to him on a number of levels. At Philippi, where his own watchword had been ‘Apollo’, that of his opponents had been ‘liberty’. Not only that, but Marsyas was believed by his devotees to have been sprung from his would-be flayer’s clutches by a rival god named Liber, an anarchic deity who had taught humanity to enjoy wine and sexual abandon, whose very name meant ‘Freedom’, and who – capping it all – had been worshipped by Antony as his particular patron. The clash between the erstwhile Triumvirs had been patterned in the heavens. Antony, riding in procession through Cleopatra’s capital, had done so dressed as Liber, ‘his head wreathed in ivy, his body draped in a robe of saffron gold’.89 Visiting Asia Minor, where in ancient times the contest between Apollo and Marsyas had been staged, he had been greeted by revellers dressed as satyrs. The night before his suicide, ghostly sounds of music and laughter had filled the Egyptian air; ‘and men said that the god to whom Antony had always compared himself, and been most devoted, was abandoning him at last’.

Sargon, the obscure adventurer who had emerged as though from nowhere to nurture this proud ambition, to extinguish the independence of neighboring city-states and to rule supreme over the “totality of the lands under heaven,” had always remained the model of a Mesopotamian strongman. Almost two thousand years after his foundation of Akkad, he remained the cynosure of great kings. Indeed, in the decades before the Persian conquest, the obsession with him had become a veritable craze. At Susa, the capital of Elam, a victory memorial originally inscribed by Sargon’s grandson had been lovingly dusted down and put on prominent display; in Akkad itself, when a statue of the great man was excavated, Nabonidus had come rushing in high excitement to inspect it, and to supervise its restoration. Museums had sprung up everywhere: at Ur, for instance, the antiquities collection maintained by Nabonidus’ daughter, Princess En-nigaldi-Nanna, had been carefully labeled and put on display for the edification of the public. Meanwhile, in Babylon itself, scholars pored over great libraries of archives, tracing ancient documents, recycling archaic phrases, looking to the distant past to legitimize the needs and whims of their masters. The people of Mesopotamia, living as they did amid the lumber of millennia, had always been profoundly respectful of antiquity. Rather than feeling oppressed by it, they recycled it, cannibalized it, and turned it to their advantage.

To hail a religion for its compatibility with a secular society was decidedly not a neutral gesture. Secularism was no less bred of the sweep of Christian history than were Orban's barbed-wire fences. Naturally, for it to function as its exponents wished it to function, this could never be admitted. The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had become skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences. A doctrine such as that of human rights was far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe could be kept concealed. The insistence of United Nations agencies on "the antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man” was a necessary precondition for their claim to a global, rather than a merely Western, jurisdiction. Secularism, in an identical manner, depended on the care with which it covered its tracks. If it were to be embraced by Jews, or Muslims, or Hindus as a neutral holder of the ring between them and people of other faiths, then it could not afford to be seen as what it was: a concept that had little meaning outside of a Christian context. In Europe, the secular had for so long been secularised that it was easy to forget its ultimate origins. To sign up to its premises was unavoidably to become just that bit more Christian. Merkel, welcoming Muslims co Germany, was inviting them to take their place in a continent that was not remotely neutral in its understanding of religion: a continent in which the division of church and state was absolutely assumed to apply to Islam

Back in the early years of the Persian rise to greatness, while Cyrus was still in Lydia, he had found himself unexpectedly visited by a delegation from across the Aegean Sea. The ambassadors were Greek, but quite different from the Greeks of Asia, whose cities, prosperous and tempting, Cyrus was plotting at that very moment to crush and make his own. The strangers wore their hair long; they sported distinctive red cloaks; they spoke not with the subtlety and sense of propriety that conventionally marked an ambassador’s language, but brusquely, bluntly, rudely. The message they gave the greatest king on earth was simple: Cyrus should leave the cities of the Ionians well alone; if he did not, then he would have to answer to those who had sent them—the Spartans. Evidently, the strangers felt that the mere mention of this name was sufficient to chill the blood, for they added nothing more. Cyrus, turning from them, was obliged to summon a nearby Ionian attendant. “Tell me,” he demanded, all bemusement, “who are the Spartans?