“North to Thrace, Make Your First Right…Or Is It Left?”

This week's essay from one of my classes follows.


One of my children was addicted to alternate history fiction through his high school years. I’m sure more than one standardized test score suffered from his eagerness to get back to the newest Harry Turtledove novel.


My own exploration of alternate histories has been less rigorous, limited largely to fantasies and daydreams. For example, my perspective on the “what if the Axis won World War Two” question is a little out of the mainstream. I don’t see a German-Japanese world. I see a Russian one. Let’s say Hitler’s officers manage to keep him out of the Soviet Union in 1941. Instead, Germany consolidated conquests in the west and actually invaded and occupied Britain. 


At that point, Hitler might well have let democracy squeeze out communism in his pantheon of obsessions. Put his heavy metal alchemists to work brewing up alembics of long range bombers, super submarines, and intercontinental missiles. With the breathing room, Stalin might have taken his time developing, compiling, and finally launching his long-suppressed attack on the Nazi empire. With essentially limitless human and natural resources, the Soviet Union would have swept the Nazis away and replaced them across Europe. With that foundation, it seems feasible for Japan and China to have fallen, eventually, to the Soviets. Voila. A Russian world.


Of course, we can conceive of alternate histories that would have left the world so different that the great wars of the twentieth century never happened. Around 500 BCE, the future rested on a knife edge. The blade was the Persian empire of Darius I, from India and Afghanistan in the east to Turkish Europe (Thrace) in the west, and from Egypt and Arabia in the south to Macedonia in the north. On one side was his north and east—the Scythian peoples and their empire that reached into central Asia, beyond the Caspian and Aral seas. On the other was Greece. Logical annex of Thrace, and gateway to Europe. Darius was inclined to Schythia. Rich in cultural and natural resources, source of military strength, investment for the future.


Disease derailed this logic train. Darius’ wife Atossa contracted a malevolent, overt, visible breast tumor. She was pretty bummed about it. Turned inward and resolutely silent, locked away in her chambers, waiting to die. 


However. At some point, she allowed a Greek slave, one Democedes, to excise the tumor. She survived the primitive surgery. Was grateful. Democedes wanted to go home, and she wanted to get him there. She intervened in Darius’ strategic planning to get the Persian attention shifted from Scythia to Greece, in the hope that adding Greece to the Persian empire would let Democedes return to his land and people.


Darius went to Marathon, the Persians got their butts kicked. Not long after, Atossa’s son Xerxes went to Thermopylae and Artemisia and the Persians got their butts kicked. By the time Persia finally took Greece, it wasn’t a particularly useful or important part of the empire. 


Consider an alternate history. Darius takes Scythia. Gains the enormous natural and cultural resources of an ancient land and important trade route. Builds his strength. Grows his military, industrial, and administrative might. THEN Persia invades Greece. At that point a few farmers at Marathon, Spartan citizens at Thermopylae, and Athenian triremes at Artemisia might not have been sufficient. Persia would have been in Europe, and strong enough to go further west. And then, quite possibly, further east building from the resources of Europe and the Mediterranean world.


The world might well be very, very different now, with the culture of the Persian empire setting the standards in both western and eastern societies. 


Disease is a companion, outcome, and sometimes cause, of war. This is the one case I know of where a cure, however temporary, so altered the course of human history. The biosphere as we know it is in a number of ways a direct result of Atossa’s cancer and surgeon/slave Democedes’ treatment, and the resulting (possibly premature) recalibration of the mighty Persian war machine from east to west.


As Elvis Presley said “if you got a little time to kill”, please surf on over to the other components of this weblog empire:


http://docviper.livejournal.com/
http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/
http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/


And thanks!


Notes


The great-grandparent of alternate history fiction is, of course, The Man In the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. It remains one of the most cogent and imaginative of the Axis-win-the-War novels as well, despite being first published in 1962. Excellent entre to Dick’s work is available here: http://www.philipkdick.com/ 


The story of Atossa and Democedes is recounted nicely in Siddhartha Mukherjee’s outstanding The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner, 2010). The Wikipedia entry for Atossa at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atossa was revised February 2011 to incorporate Mukherjee’s account. 


Will Durant, in The Story of Civilization volume II The Life of Greece, provides what remains a compelling and scholarly description of the ecotone between Darius’ Persia and Greece. 


Mukherjee, Durant, and pretty much everything else written about the interface of ancient Greece and Persia originates with Herodotus. Excellent and incredibly valuable access to English translation of Herodotus and other key sources (what the hell did we do before the internet and projects like this supremely altruistic Tufts University program?) is here:


http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/


I found the passages related to Atossa and Darius via this search string:


http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/searchresults?target=en&all_words=Atossa%2C+Darius&all_words_expand=on&phrase=&any_words=&exclude_words=&documents