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The wild boar

Wild pig of woods, reed beds and hills in Asia and Greece, 6th to 5th century BCE

In the game: Level 3: The Lie, Level 5: The Charter, Level 6: The Bridge of Boats, Level 7: Sardis Burns, Level 8: The Bay of Marathon, Level 9: The Canal, Level 10: The Hot Gates, Level 11: The Finale

The wild boar lived in many of the landscapes that Persian armies and officials crossed, from river thickets to oak woods and hill country. The surviving writers say little about it as an animal. Herodotus uses it in a tale of fate, and Xenophon places hunting in the parks of the Persian elite.

In the game: The boar is drawn as scenery on the Athos, Bagastana, Ister, Marathon, Plataea, Sardis, Susa and Thermopylae levels. No rule reads it. Its placing in Elam, Media and Thrace is the designers' interpretation of habitat, not a statement of any source.

Where the boar lived

Ancient account

No ancient source lists the boar's range for the years of the game. Wet thickets along lowland rivers, oak woods and hill country suited the animal, so its presence in Elam, Media and Thrace is inferred from habitat. The game's placing of boar there is a reconstruction, not something a source states.

Herodotus 1.36

Boar in Herodotus

Ancient account

Herodotus tells how a huge boar ravaged the fields of Mysia, and how the Mysians asked Croesus for help. Croesus sent his son Atys on the hunt, and the Phrygian exile Adrastus killed him by accident with a spear thrown at the boar. Herodotus presents the tale as fate working through a fatal accident.

Herodotus 1.36

Hunting in Persian parks

Ancient account

Xenophon, writing in the fourth century BCE, describes Persian nobles hunting in enclosed parks stocked with game, and the Cyropaedia has Cyrus hunt in such a park as a young man. His picture is later than the game's years and idealised, so it shows how a Greek imagined Persian elite life. Boar is among the game he names in hunting scenes.

Xenophon, Cyropaedia

The king as hunter

Disputed

Hunting was a recognised image of kingship in the Persian world, and scholars discuss how far royal art presented the king as a hunter, mostly of lions. Evidence naming the boar as royal quarry in these years is thin, so the boar's place in that image is uncertain.

P. Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander, 2002

Beasts on the march through northern Greece

Ancient account

Herodotus says that when Xerxes marched, lions attacked the supply camels in the country between the Nestos and the Achelous, and wild oxen lived there too. He does not mention boar in that passage. The game's deer and boar of Thrace come from habitat, not from Herodotus.

Herodotus 7.125-126