Hubris

Two stories are told of the parentage of Helen, the woman whose beauty had first plunged Europe and Asia into war. The best known claimed that she had been a Spartan, hatched from an egg after her mother, the queen, had been raped by Zeus in the form of a giant swan. A second, however, claimed that the queen of Sparta had only ever been the incubator, and that the egg itself had originally been laid by a quite different victim of Zeus's attentions: A goddess, no less, as solemn as she was mighty, as calm as she was fatal. In one hand, she held a bowl containing what was destined to be; in the other, a measuring rod, employed to gauge the scale of mortal excess. Those guilty of “overweening boastfulness” she would bring low. None could withstand her, and the mightiest least of all. It was her habit, when she walked, to treat corpses underfoot. Her name was Nemesis.

Provoke her, and the world itself might be turned upside down. As evidence, the Greeks had always pointed to the career of Croesus, once so prosperous and smug that he had dared, until Nemesis intervened, “to suppose himself the happiest of men.” Yet not even that offense, rank as it was, could compare on a scale of horror with that of the Great King, the King of Kings, the King of Lands: The man whose goal it had been to make himself the master of all mankind. In Greek, only one word would serve to describe such lunatic behavior: hubris. “For this is the crime committed by any man who gains his thrills by trampling on other people, and feeling, as he does so, that he is proving himself pre-eminent.” 

An all too human failing, perhaps, and yet one to which barbarians, by their intemperate nature, and monarchs, by their rank, were particularly prone. The Greeks, who had always suspected this to be the case, now had, in Xerxes, their clinching proof. What had been the fruit, after all, the Great King’s staggering ambition, his unprecedented power, his armies, his fleets, his greatness? A record without parallel of offenses against Nemesis. 

Her vengeance had been swift and sure. “This exploit is not ours,” Themistocles, a man hardly given to modesty, and with much to be immodest about, had piously averred after Salamis. 
“The gods, the heroes who guard our cities, they resented the impious presumption of the king: a man who was not content with the throne of Asia but sought the rule of Europe, too; who treated temples as though they were mere assemblages of brick and mortar; who burned and toppled the statues of the gods, who even dared to whip the sea, and bind it up with chains.”

Treading the blood-manured fields of Plataea, surveying the tangled corpses of the Great King’s finest fighting men, stripping his splendid tent bare, the conquerors of Mardonius could assert the same. All knew to whom the victory was owed. The goddess’s handiwork was clear.

Not that she was finished yet; one final twist remained. Well over a hundred miles from Plataea, on the far side of the Aegean, on the same day as the great victory, a rumor suddenly flew through the Greek fleet that their countrymen had beaten Mardonius in Boeotia. The resulting surge of confidence could hardly have been better timed: for they, too, that afternoon, faced an army of barbarians. 

Leotychides, after months of inactivity, had finally, a few days previously, ventured eastward out of his headquarters and was now anchored in the great harbor of Samos, directly opposite the ridge of Mount Mycale. It was there, on the mountain’s slop, that the Panionium stood, the ancient communal shrine of the Ionians that had served as their headquarters during the great revolt two decades before; south, along the coast, lay the devastated Miletus; and just offshore from her harbors, in the bay, rose the island of Lade. Fateful scenes all, and clear evidence of Nemesis’s hand: for in the war’s beginning was its end.

Nor was it hard to discern the goddess’s hand in the fact that the odds which had so favored the Persians fifteen years previously had now been dramatically reversed. The imperial war fleet, once the terror of the seas, had been sadly reduced. Its ships were battle scarred, its crews demoralized, its squadrons near mutinous. The Phoenicians, once its mainstay, had been dismissed from its ranks altogether. Leotychides, by contrast, had recently received a huge reinforcement in the form of the Athenian battle squadrons: For Xanthippus, having kicked his heels on Salamis all summer, had cheerfully set out for Delos the moment Pausanias had left the Isthmus. As a result, the Allies – in a startling turnaround from the previous summer – now had the advantage of numbers. 

The Persian admirals, sighting the huge force bearing down on them, had promptly abandoned ship. Landing directly in the shadow of Mount Mycale, they hauled their triremes onto the beach, frantically improvised a stockade out of boulders and apple trees, and had barricaded themselves inside it. Athenian, Corinthian, and Troezenian marines landed on the beach near the makeshift fort. The defenders, cheered by the small size of the allied force, poured out of the fort, and the Greeks immediately charged. A desperate fight ensued, with the Persians fighting bravely from behind a makeshift wall of shields; but, in the end, as at Marathon and Plataea, the hoplites rolled over them. 

Meanwhile, Leotychides, having disembarked with the Peloponnesians in the rear of the palisade, gained sweet revenge for Thermopylae by emerging suddenly from a foothill of Mount Mycale and completing the rout. A tiny fraction of the Persians escaped to Sardis; the fleet itself was put to the torch that same evening. Dusk settled over Ionia, and fires lit on the edge of Asia flickered throughout the night. 

One year passed, then another. The Great King did not return.

This inactivity led to much conjecture among the Greeks. Cowardice, effeminacy, and softness were all adduced as plausible explanations. The notion of the barbarians’ decadence, which would have struck everyone as preposterous before Marathon, now struck everyone as simple fact. Nor was it merely the failure of the Persians to launch a third invasion which increasingly nourished this comforting prejudice. Everything about Xerxes’ invasion which had been so terrifying at the time – the teeming numbers of the King of King’s hordes, the limitless resources at his fingertips, the wealth, the show, the spectacle, the extravagance of his train – all, in hindsight, appeared merely to have marked him out as effete. Conquerors of Asia the Persians might have been, but they might as well have been women when measured against the free-born, bronze-clad men of Greece!

Imperial forces had not given up the fight in the Aegean – but they were no longer in the vanguard of a scheme of global conquest. The Great King’s defeat in the West had dealt a fatal blow to that vaunting dream. Persian ambitions were now infinitely more modest: merely to stabilize control of Ionia. Even basking in the afterglow of the victory at Mycale, Leotychides had realized that this was to be the Great King’s policy, and he dreaded the inability of the allies to stand in its way. But when he had proposed the transplanting of the Ionians from their cities and their resettlement on the mainland, Xanthippus had exploded with indignation. He had protested that it was not for the Spartans to propose the dissolution of what were, originally, Athenian colonies; and he pledged his city eternally to the defense of Ionian freedom. And so the claim of Athens to the leadership of the continued war with Persia was made explicit.

One year later and it was formalized as well. An alliance was legally constituted, with its treasury on Apollo’s sacred island of Delos, and subscription fees measured in either ships or cash. The Ionians, the Greeks of the Hellespont, the islanders: Almost all signed up. With the added muscle that was this new Delian League, the Athenians could now take the fight directly to the barbarian. Throughout the 470’s Persian garrisons around the Hellespont were systematically rolled up. The following decade saw even more spectacular successes. Led by Cimon, the dashing son of Miltiades (the hero of Marathon), the Athenians swept the enemy from the Aegean and fostered rebellion throughout Ionia and Caria. The climax of these triumphs came in 466 BC, when Cimon, confronted by the largest concentration of Persian forces since the year of Salamis, won a sensational double victory. First, gliding into the mouth of the Eurymedon (a river in the south of what is now Turkey), he wiped out an entire Phoenician fleet. Next, landing his weary marines on shore, he inflicted the same treatment on the imperial army. It was this battle, once and for all, that destroyed any lingering prospects of a third Persian invasion. Security had been won for Greece at last. The great war, in effect, was over.

But Athens, the city that had secured the victory in the Battle of the Eurymedon, appeared unable to bear abandoning a struggle that had served for thirty long years to define her. So that Persia, in the prayers offered up by the Assembly, continued to be named the national enemy. The treasury of the Delian League was moved from its namesake island to Athens, ostensibly for security reasons. Naturally, the Athenians required that subscriptions to the League be paid in full. Liberty, as they pointed out, did not come cheap. But to many of the increasingly disgruntled allies, Athenian-sponsored freedom was proving a good deal more expensive than slavery to the King of Kings had ever been. 

That a Greek pledged to the overthrow of Persian despotism might himself start to ape the manners of a Persian was not, in the decades that followed the great invasion, a wholly novel paradox. Pausanias, for instance, giddy with conceit, had become a notorious enthusiast for barbarian chic. His countrymen, appalled to see a general of Sparta swanning around on campaign sporting the trousers of a satrap, had grown increasingly suspicious of their erstwhile hero. A mere decade after Plataea, the ephors accused him of plotting to overthrow the state. Pausanias, taking refuge inside a bronze-walled temple on the acropolis of Sparta, was walled up in there to starve. Only at the very last moment was his emaciated body hauled out so that his death would not pollute the shrine. The man who had laughed at the wealth of the Great King’s table only himself to develop a gluttonous taste for Persian cuisine duly expired of hunger.

Nemesis, as ever, proved herself both merciless and witty; and just to emphasize that hubris might prove a failing of Greeks as well as of barbarian kings, she had dragged down, in the weeks that followed Pausanias’s wretched end, a hero even greater than the Regent. 

Themistocles, hated ever since Salamis for having been so persistently and spectacularly right, had already, by 470, been ostracized by his resentful fellow citizens. Now, implicated in Pausanias’s treachery, he had fled Greece altogether. After wanderings and adventures worthy of Odysseus, he had finally ended up in Susa, where Xerxes’ son, the new Great King, had exulted in the capture of his father’s most formidable enemy. “The subtle serpent of Greece,” now that he was defanged, had proved a great favorite of his master; and all the brilliant qualities of his intellect, once so fatal to Persian ambitions, had been put to the service of the Persians. Dispatched to the western front, Themistocles had settled just inland from Miletus, where he had issued coins and run the army, just like a satrap. And so it was, as a royal servitor and as a traitor, that Themistocles, four hundred and fifty nine years before the birth of Christ, breathed his last.

An unsettling precedent, that the savior of Greece should have ended up an enemy of liberty. Even in exile, it seemed to many, Themistocles continued to serve as a model to his city. For increasingly, throughout the 450’s BC, cities freed from barbarian rule found their sense of gratitude of Athens darkening into envy, suspicion, and dread. They could see little difference between the tribute they had once paid to Susa and the subscription that they were now obliged to send to the Acropolis. Already in the 460’s cities that tried to secede from the League had found themselves visited by the Athenian fleet. So, too, in the following decade, had cities not even in the alliance. In 457, for instance, the Athenians put paid to half a century of rivalry by investing their old rival Aegina, dismantling her walls, confiscating her fleet – and then inviting her to join the League. An offer the wretched Aeginetans couldn’t refuse – and of which even the most imperious Oriental despot would have been proud. Men began to recall the first arrival of Athens to her empire as a moment both ominous and fateful: For Xanthippus, it was said, having sailed north from the Battle of Mycalde, had moored off the Hellespont, seized the cables from Xerxes’ bridge as plunder, and then nailed a captured Persian alive to a plank. This crucifixion, looming ever larger in people’s memories, began to seem sufficient to cast all Greece into its shadow.

And yet the Athenians themselves knew better. Great though their city had become, and more powerful, and rich, they never forgot for a moment what she had passed through, what braved, to win such preeminence. “Bulwark of Greece, famous Athens, city of godlike men”: The world that she put in her shadow she also illuminated with her glory. Literally so: for a sailor rounding Cape Sunium might look toward “the shining city, violet-crowned, famous in song,” and see, at a distance of thirty miles, a brilliant flash of light. This was the reflection of the sun upon a burnished spear, held in the grip of a colossal Athena, some thirty-five feet tall, who stood, heroic and beautiful, on the summit of the Acropolis, guarding the entrance to the rock, her gaze serenely fixed in the direction of Salamis. Fashioned out of plunder seized from the barbarians, funded by members of the league and crafted by Phidias, the greatest Athenian sculptor of his day, the bronze rendered physical the whole triumphant course of democracy’s history. A statue of liberty indeed. 

And why not, the Athenians began to wonder, of Greek brotherhood as well? In 449 BC, a direct accommodation was reached at last with the barbarians, bringing to a conclusive end, after a half century of warfare, all hostilities between the Great King and his greatest enemy. In the same year, an invitation was issued by the Athenians to the cities of Greece and Ionia, requesting them to send delegates to a congress on the Acropolis. The ostensible purpose of this proposed conference was to discuss whether the temples burned by the barbarians might now be safely rebuilt (the allies had vowed back in 479, before taking the road to Plataea, that the temples would forever stand ruined as a reminder of Persian aggression). But there was also, hovering over it, an altogether more elevated goal. “Let everyone come and join in the debate on the best way to secure peace and security for Greece,” the invitation declared. 

The Peloponnesians, led by Sparta, responded with scorn. Who exactly, they sneered, was to lead the cities of Greece into this promised golden age? The answer envisaged by the Athenians had been implicit in their invitation: cities that sent delegates would be implicitly ceding leadership to Athens. Sparta, inevitably, refused point-blank to do so. Her allies in the Peloponnese effectively did the same. The conference was aborted. 

Athens shrugged off the setback and instead tightened the screws on her “allies.” The war with Persia might have ended, but the Athenians were in no mood to see the league of defense disbanded just because peace had come to the Aegean. Any hint of recalcitrance from a member state, still more open rebellion, and their crackdown would be merciless. The subscriptions sent to the Acropolis, now nakedly revealed as tribute, continued to be extorted every year. The very word “allies” was replaced by the phrase “cities subject to the Athenian people” – a description that at least was accurate. Far from being united, the Greek world found itself being divided instead into rival power blocs, each led by a city that put her dependents in the shade, and justified her hegemony by boasting of her record in the defense of liberty.

For Athens was not the only city which laid claim to the title of savior of Greece. In the balance, Sparta, her former ally, and now increasingly bitter rival, could set Plataea and – above all – Thermopylae. To the rest of Greece, the Spartans remained peerless as models of heroism and virtue; and nothing, not even their most splendid victories, had done more to cement this reputation than the glorious 300 and their exemplary defeat. “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by/that here, by Spartan law, we lie.” These lines, carved on a simple stone memorial, could be read on the site of the famous last stand: an epitaph as laconic and stern as Leonidas himself. As immortal as well – for Thermopylae, of all the battles fought against the armies of the Great King, was the one most gloriously transfigured into legend. 

Yet the Athenians – as brilliant, as eloquent, as quick-witted as their Spartan opposites were sober – would nevertheless trump its memory. Late in 449 BC, a portentous motion was brought before the Assembly. Only a few months previously Sparta had refused to send her delegates to Athens and agree that the burned temples could now be rebuilt; now the Athenian people voted on the issue without caring for the opinion of the rest of Greece. The proposal to rebuild the monuments of the Acropolis was thunderously passed. Plans for a spectacular makeover of the sacred rock were put into immediate effect.

Such a scheme had long been in preparation. The mover behind it was a Eupatrid (the old noble class) by the name of Pericles, a seasoned political operator who had first demonstrated his passion for eye-catching cultural projects by sponsoring, back in 472, Aeschylus’s celebrated tragedy on the Persians. Pericles certainly brought an unrivaled pedigree to the table: the son of Xanthippus, he was also, on his mother’s side, an Alcmaeonid. This meant, of course, that he was heir to a long family tradition of sponsoring monuments on the Acropolis, but no Alcmaeonid had ever been presented with an opportunity such as Pericles was grasping now. The barbarian holocaust had ravaged the entire summit of the rock, so that it was not a single temple but the whole Acropolis that Pericles was planning to rebuild. By employing the cream of Athenian talent, including the great sculptor Phidias, he aimed to raise, as he put it, “marks and monuments of our city’s empire” so perfect that “future ages will wonder at us, as the present wonders at us now.” In 447 BC, work duly began on a temple designed to be the most sumptuous and beautiful ever built. Subsequent generations would know it as the Parthenon.

However, bold and original though the new monuments were, they still had their foundations deep in the bedrock of what had gone before. The Parthenon, for instance, that daring monument to the new age of Athenian greatness, was being raised on the scorched base of an older, unfinished building: the great temple that had been begun in the 480’s as a celebration of the victory at Marathon. Now, with his plans for the Acropolis, Pericles was looking to enshrine the memory of Marathon for all eternity. Remembrances of the battle were to be everywhere on the sacred rock. Whether in the ground plan of the Parthenon itself, or in trophies raised to the victory, or in friezes illustrating the fighting, the greatest moment in Athenian history was to be celebrated with a brilliance that would proclaim Athens not merely the savior of Greece, but her school and mistress, too.

For those who had fallen at Marathon were not altogether dead. Leave behind the dust and din of the building site on the Acropolis in the morning and an Athenian might reach the battlefield by nightfall. There, silhouetted against the stars, he would see the great tumulus which had been raised over the honored ashes of the slain, and beside it a more recent monument, lovingly crafted out of white marble, barely a decade old. The most potent, and the eeriest, memorial, however, could not be seen – only heard. Every night, ghostly across the plain, strange sounds of fighting would disturb the midnight calm: the ringing of metal, the hiss of arrows, war cries, trampling, screams. No other field of battle that had been contested with the barbarians could boast of such a visitation; and an Athenian, although he would have dreaded to approach the phantoms, would perhaps have found their presence the source of certain civic pride. They had been actors, after all, in the greatest drama in history – when the Athenians had stood alone and contested with the hordes of all Asia for the liberty of Greece. “For they were fathers not merely of children, of mortal flesh and blood, but of their children’s freedom, and of the freedom of every person who dwells in the continent of the West.” Everything stemmed from Marathon; everything was justified by it, too.

Beyond the plain, with its monuments, graves, and ghosts, the road wound on northward, leading over empty hills to a single temple on the slope above the sea. This was Rhamnus, where it was said that Zeus, having pursued Nemesis over the whole world, had finally brought her to earth. From that one rape had been hatched Helen, the Trojan War, and all the long violent story of hatred between East and West. It had brought Datis the Mede and his great armada to Marathon, barely five miles to the south, and “so sure was he that nothing could stop him that he had brought with him a block of marble, from which he intended to carve a trophy in celebration of his victory.” After the defeat of his expedition, the block of marble had been found abandoned on the battlefield; and so the locals had hauled it off to Rhamnus. 

No better place for it could have been imagined – for the temple that stood there above the slope that led down to the sea was sacred to Nemesis. It was clearly her anger at the hubris of the barbarians that had doomed their expedition, and so plans had been made to build a second temple to her, and as a memorial to Marathon. It was intended to fashion the marble into a likeness of the goddess. The great Phidias had even asked to carve it. As on the Acropolis, so at Rhamnus, an Athenian might aim to glimpse the future. If he arrived where the marble block stood, waiting to be carved, he might easily imagine that he could see within the spectral purity of its whiteness a foreshadowing of the sculpture that was to be; that he was catching a glimpse of the face of Nemesis herself.


End of Part One. 

Dorian Spears

Xerxes had a headache. The stubborn Greeks refused to be conquered. First there had been the Ionian revolt. Then the bloody nose of Marathon. Then the stubbornly, suicidally defiant Spartans at Thermopylae. Now, the biggest setback of all, the debacle at Salamis. 

Mardonius, the commander of one of the previous Grecian expeditions, cheerfully dismissed the whole affair as being of sublime unimportance. “What are a few planks of wood?” he sniffed dismissively. “So what if a shamble of Phoenicians, of Egyptians, of Cypriots, of Cilicians have messed things up? It is not as though the Persians had any hand in it. No, my Lord, it is hardly a defeat for us.” 

Indeed, despite the mauling the fleet had received, Xerxes could not initially bring himself to accept that his reach might have been reduced as a consequence. No sooner had his fleet been so thumpingly swept out of the straits than he was attempting to impose his mastery in a fresh and suitably imperious manner: By building a causeway across to Salamis. Rocks were dropped into the shallows, merchant ships lashed together in a desperate attempt to bridge the central depths of the channel. But Greek archers, borne on predatory warships, easily harassed the imperial engineers, until the Great King was reluctantly forced to abandon the project. For a man who had bridged the Hellespont and split the peninsula of Mount Athos, this was an agonizing frustration. Having dreamed only days previously of conquering an entire continent, the Great King now found himself defied by a tiny mile-wide stretch of water. 

Further grim tidings arrived. Reports were trickling in from Sicily of a second Greek victory. Gelon, the precocious tyrant of Syracuse, was said to have inflicted a sensational defeat on the Carthaginians. The destruction of their army had been bloody beyond compare. Below the walls of Himera, 150,000 Carthaginians lay butchered, their general, surprised while making a sacrifice, had immolated himself, and the survivors enslaved. For the Great King, who had instigated the Carthaginian attack as part of his grand plan to conquer all the Greeks, the implications of this news were sobering in the extreme. His ambitions, once so grandiose, seemed suddenly diminished and circumscribed. Dreams of extending the limits of Persian greatness to the setting of the sun counted for little against the reality of a blockaded Isthmus, an unpacified Peloponnese, and a stubbornly unconquered Salamis. What had previously been represented as a campaign of universal conquest had suddenly shrunk to the status of awkward border war. 

As such, of course, it was hardly worthy of the Great King’s attention. Mardonius was quick to seize his chance. “Head back to your regional headquarters in Sardis,” he urged his cousin, “and take the greater part of the army with you, and leave me to complete the enslavement of Greece with men whom I will personally choose to finish the job.” Such a command was precisely what Mardonius had been angling for since the failure of his first expedition more than a decade before. Xerxes, reluctant to spend a second summer campaigning in this backwater, quickly agreed. 

Mardonius would be left with the pick of the army. For one, the size of the army under the King of Kings would be scandalously inappropriate once Xerxes was no longer at its head. For another, against the Spartans, quality, not quantity, counted. The lessons of Thermopylae had been learned well. And so as the ponderous Persian army began to roll out of scorched and ruined Athens, back north to the Hellespont and Asia, Mardonius had his pick of the elite. 

With the quick, heavy cavalry he chose to make up the bulk of his force, he stood a good chance. Thebes and central Greece remained loyal to the Great King. So, too, did the northern satrapies of Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly. Even the imperial fleet, although down, was not out. The carnage of Salamis nonwithstanding, it still outnumbered the allied fleet. There appeared every prospect, come the summer, of Mardonius being able to finish the job. 

Perhaps he would be spared the need. Embarrassing though the intelligence failure at Salamis had been, and devastating in its consequences, the Persian high command still looked to divide and rule. Remarkably, channels were even kept open to Themistocles – at whose suggestion, it will be recalled, the Persians had opted to fight in the straits. 

Only days after Salamis, in a startling display of cheek, he sent Sicinnus scurrying back over the straits with a second message for Persian intelligence: A reassurance that he remained “eager to be of service to the royal cause” and was acting as a restraining influence on the rest of the fleet. Mind-boggling claims, it might have been thought – but the spy chiefs did not, as they must have been itching to do, put Sicinnus to a long and agonizing death. Instead, they sent him back, with a second message for his master. 

Why would Themistocles, at the moment of his greatest triumph, be willing to risk everything simply to keep his options open with the Persians? The answer was not long in coming. Several weeks later, a Spartan embassy arrived at the Persian camp in Thessaly. There, they had bluntly demanded reparations from the Great King for the death of Leonidas. “You will get all the reparations you deserve,” he replied, gesturing to his cousin, “from Mardonius here.” Witty enough – but it did mask a tantalizing possibility: That the Spartans – with a large enough bribe – might be willing to accept the status quo. What did they care for central Greece, and especially Attica?

Of course, none of the victors of Salamis had any interest in destabilizing the alliance, and so no one questioned the Spartans too closely – while they loudly insisted that they had been ordered by Apollo to send the embassy or else they never would have done it and didn’t really mean it anyways. 

Even as the campaigning season drew to a close, the afterglow of the great victory still lit the lengthening evenings. To celebrate their achievement, the various Greek squadrons, returning from a profitable few weeks spent touring the Aegean and extorting money from the islanders, all assembled off the Isthmus. Here, at the temple of Poseidon, a great jamboree of mutual backslapping was held. The sense of relief was immense. “A black cloud,” Themistocles said, “has been swept away from off the sea.”

But not, unfortunately, from off the land – with implications for the alliance that might prove ominous. The Isthmus of Corinth, even as it hosted the great festival of unity, served as a fracture line. If a delegate tired of the celebrations, he could have this brought home to him while paying a call on the neighborhood’s most obvious alternative source of entertainment. There stood, two thousand feet above Corinth, on the summit of the city’s steepling acropolis, a temple dedicated to Aphrodite. Here, complementing the marble statuary could be found an altogether less chilly brand of votive offering: prostitutes. Donated to the goddess by grateful Olympic champions and other such luminaries, these had a reputation so superlative that in Greek “korinthiazein” – “to do a Corinthian”- meant to fuck. 

Patriotic as well as proficient, Aphrodite’s temple whores spent the weeks before Salamis raising urgent prayers to their divine mistress, imploring her to inspire the allies with a love of battle. Any war hero who did take time off from the celebrations at the Isthmus to visit them could look forward to a particularly enthusiastic reception. Then, shattered by the climb (as well as by all his subsequent exertions) he could slump down, admire the matchless view, and see for himself why the alliance that had won at Salamis might be in danger of fracturing. 

To the south stretched the Peloponnese – now, thanks largely to the Athenian fleet, secure from invasion. To the north curved the coast that led to Attica – still wide open to Mardonius. Hardly surprising, then, that the Athenians, as they began returning across the straits to their ruined homeland, kept a nervous eye on the road to the north, to Thessaly. Resentful of the monstrous unfairness of geography, and hardly able to keep from blaming it all on the Peloponnesians, they pressed loudly for a commitment from their allies to send an army north against Mardonius come the spring. The Peloponnesians stonewalled, and the more the Athenians, harping on their roles as the victors of Salamis, tried to shame them into action, the more they dug in their heels, safe and secure behind their walls. 

To the Athenians, as they huddled during that long and cold winter in the blackened ruins of their city, it seemed the fleet that Themistocles had pressed so hard for had done little to win security for the men crewing it, and had instead served only to protect smug Peloponnesians. The voters, who in the brief history of democracy had already proven to have lethally short memories, began to turn on Themistocles. The spin emerged that the decisive point in the battle had not been any of the actions at sea, but rather the storming of Psyttaleia by Areistides “the Just” – Themistocles’s old rival. He had duly been appointing to command the revived Athenian land army, while the Athenian navy, neglected during the preparations for a second Marathon, had refused to commit to the allied fleet as spring arrived and both sides began to prepare for the campaign.

The Spartans, who had signaled their enthusiasm for a second naval campaign by sending one of their two kings – the not altogether inspiring Leotychides – to command it, refused to buy the deal. The result was stalemate. Leotychides, with barely a hundred triremes under his command, skulked around off Delos, too nervous of the Persians to sail any further eastward. Meanwhile, the Persian fleet, correspondingly nervous of the Greeks, skulked around off Samos. The Peloponnesians skulked behind their wall. Mardonius, knowing he had no way of bringing his satrapy to heel unless he could lure the Spartans north of the Isthmus, or somehow secure the Athenians’ fleet, skulked in Thessaly. And the Athenians, trapped impotently in the middle, had little option but to skulk as well. And so the deadlock continued until May, 479 BC.

It was Mardonius who finally moved to break it. Wearying of the secret, shadow diplomacy, he decided to place the Great King’s terms openly on the table before advancing south from Thessaly. He sent as his ambassador to the Athenians that unctuous bet-hedger, Alexander of Macedon. With the rubble-strewn panorama of the Acropolis and the Agora stretching behind him, and oozing honest concern, he warned the Athenian people that their city, of all those that had set themselves against the Great King, “stood most directly in the line of fire.” Two options therefore confronted them. The first was to see their country become a no-man’s land, trampled underfoot by rival armies. The second was to become not merely friends of the Great King, but friends such as would have few rivals for the royal favor throughout the whole dominion of the Persians. A full pardon, a guarantee of self-government, their temples rebuilt at royal expense, an expansion of their territory could all be theirs. “What earthly reason, then, can you have,” Alexander exclaimed, “to stay in arms against the king?”

Perhaps once the Athenians might have accepted. They had fought longer than the people of any other city in Greece, and at far greater cost – and yet the Peloponnesians appeared content to abandon them to their fate. They would have been perfectly justified in accepting the Great King’s offer. But too much had changed, in Athens. A sense of the preciousness of freedom, instilled in the Athenian people by the thirty year experiment that was their “democracy,” and by the experience of having fought to defend it against the most terrifying odds imaginable, had left the Assembly unwilling to barter for peace. “The degree to which we are put in the shadow by the Medes’ strength is hardly something that you need to bring to our attention,” they replied. “We are already well aware of it. But even so, such is our love of liberty that we will never surrender.” Brave words indeed: for the Athenian people, having uttered them, once again faced the prospect of their city’s annihilation. And Areistides, turning to the Spartans: “Get your army into the field as soon as you can.”
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So it was that the barbarian once more swept southwards into Attica and occupied a deserted Athens a second time. King Leotychides, still cruising off Delos, saw, on the western horizon, a distant pinprick of fire, then another, then another in turn, as beacons, linking Attica directly to the imperial information network, broadcast the news of Athens’ fall. Meanwhile, in Lacedaemon, the ephors had been brought an even more unsettling communiqué: Mardonius had sent his envoys across the straits to Salamis and repeated his peace terms to the Athenian evacuees. This time, a prominent nobleman, Lycidas, had dared to speak out openly in favor of accepting them. A straw in the wind – despite the fact that he had subsequently been stoned to death as a would-be medizer, along with his wife and children. Athenian defiance was turning pathological – and so the risk was greater that it might buckle. 

By now it was June, 479. The Spartans were celebrating yet another festival. Once again, just as in the dark days before Marathon, an Athenian embassy arrived in Lacedaemon. Ten days they cooled their heels – again, while they desperately needed military assistance, the Spartans were having a party. On the eleventh day, they finally met the ephors and delivered their ultimatum: Either Sparta’s army must go to war, or Athens would be forced to accept Mardonius’s terms. The ephors, far from panicking, merely smiled. Why, had the ambassadors not heard? Sparta’s army was already on the march.

The Athenians were not the only ones to whom it came as a bolt from the blue. The Argives, seeing Persian interference as a way of recovering their lost prestige, had vowed to obstruct any Spartan expedition before it had reached the Isthmus – but woke up to find the Spartan army already bypassed. “The whole fighting force of Lacedaemon is on the march!” they reported frantically to Mardonius, “and we are powerless to stop it!” Mardonius, still camped out in Attica, had promptly abandoned his attempts at diplomacy and put what remained of Athens – temples, houses, and all – to the torch. Then, determined to learn the Spartans as far north of the Isthmus as possible, he moved north, into Boeotia. Here, guided along the safest paths by enthusiastic liaison officers, he finally halted. He was now in prime cavalry country. The perfect spot to fight a battle.

Here, four miles south of Thebes, Mardonius built his camp beside river Asopus. To the south stretched the gently undulating terrain of Thebes’ oldest enemy, the little town of Plataea, the brave allies of the Athenians. Harsh mountains hemmed in the battlefield, north and south. If the allies fought Mardonius here, there could be no easy retreat to the Isthmus – but neither could Mardonius fall back to Thessaly. A fight here would be a fight to the death. If the allies came, the moment of truth would come as well.
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The road from Megara, freshly repaired from its demolition the previous summer, shuddered under thousands of marching feet. It had never before borne the weight of such an army. Indeed, a Greek expeditionary force to rival it had not been seen since the fabled days of Troy. From Corinth to Mycenae, from Tegea to Troezen, an immense coalition of Peloponnesians had answered the Spartan’s call. The Spartans themselves had put ten thousand hoplites into the field, aided by a host of light-infantry helots. It was the largest army the great city had ever committed to the field. Even the cowards had been mobilized.

Rather, men whom the Spartans branded as cowards – it was not the same thing. One of these was a veteran by the name of Aristodemus, and this was not the first time he had fought the barbarians. Aristodemus had been one of the bodyguard of Leonidas, one of the fabled 300 Spartans. He had fallen ill, along with a fellow Spartan, with an eye infection. The two men had been dismissed and ordered to recuperate. Come the fateful morning of their king’s last stand, however, and Aristodemus’s partner, rising from his sickbed, had instructed a helot to lead him into the fighting, blind as he was. Aristodemus, however, had opted to obey his king’s direct order and return home. There, on his arrival, he had been greeted with revulsion. His fellow citizens branded him “trembler” – the single most shameful word in Spartan lexicon. 

In a city where courage was the greatest virtue, the slightest hint of cowardice could doom a citizen to ignominy. Patches sewn onto a trembler’s cloak marked him. Whether sitting down at his mess table or attempting to join in a ball game, he would be icily ignored by all his former friends. At festivals he would have to stand up or make way for anyone who demanded it – even the most junior. Cruelest of all, his daughters, if he had any, would find it impossible to secure a husband – a typically Spartan eugenicist maneuver designed to prevent the taint of cowardice from spreading to future generations. Such was the life of Aristodemus.

The expedition marched under the command of the only eligible relative of Leonidas: Pausanias, the son of Leonidas’s brother. He was barely in his twenties, and as Regent of Sparta, he was not only commander of the Spartan contingent, but also the commander in chief of all allied forces. The brute fact of their general’s youth would have served to keep Thermopylae, and Leonidas’s death, fresh in all Spartans’ minds. Marching to liberate Greece, they were also after revenge. Aristodemus especially – for it was due to the barbarians that he wore his trembler’s patchwork cloak.

There were others, too, who wanted payback. At Eleusis, Pausanias waited while Aristeides and eight thousand other Athenians ferried themselves across from Salamis. Joining them were six hundred exiles from a second city to be occupied and burned by the Persians: Plataea. Now, a year after fleeing their homeland, the moment of return had finally arrived. It was time to take the road to Plataea. 
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Filtering slowly over the ridges around the city, they would have at last sighted Mardonius’s army. His numbers appeared to slur together in the shimmering summer heat, swarming across the plain. Everywhere, it seemed, there were horses, whether hobbled, or in corrals, or else being ridden across the parched dirt of Boeotia, plume shadowed as they flaunted their speed and proficiency. There could be few among the Greeks who did not feel a tremor of consternation at the sight, but Pausanias himself had no intention of crashing down onto the flat plain to meet the cavalry on ground favorable to the barbarians. Instead, he kept to the foothills, slowly maneuvering his force along the ridge to a point roughly opposite the barbarians, some seven miles east of Plataea. 

Despite Pausanias’s caution, it is unlikely that he felt the same alarm that Mardonius surely did as he saw the full scale of the army snaking through the foothills above him. He never imagined that the fractious Greeks could put an army such as the one he was now facing into the field – in all, 40,000 hoplites. Against these fearsome numbers, he could muster perhaps three times that, but he had no illusions that his infantry, only lightly armed and armored, could hope to meet the Greeks on anything like equal terms. Instead, only two options appeared to present him with likelihood of victory: The first was to somehow lure the allies down onto the plain, and then to trust that their various allied contingents would blunder apart and prove easy meat for his elite cavalry. The second was the favored Persian tactic of strategic bribes to sow dissension and division amongst the allies, and wait for the endemic Greek rivalries to take hold. Horsemen and gold: The two greatest weapons of Persia.

So Mardonius dispatched agents into the Athenian camp, where they soon found willing conspirators. To sharpen their concentration, he dispatched his cavalry on a hit and run raid on the Greek lines. It backfired. The raid served only to boost the Greek morale, for, the Persian commander, a hulking dandy who had ridden into battle sporting a purple tunic and an eye-catching cuirass of golden fish scales, had his Nisaean horse shot out from under him, and wound up dead and exposed on a wagon, being paraded before the allied troops. Shortly afterwards, Areistides uncovered evidence of the conspiracy within his camp and rounded up the eight principle perpetrators. Two fled, the other six were ordered to redeem themselves in battle by the Areistides, living up to his nickname “the Just.” There was no more talk of treachery in the Athenian camp.

Pausanias, encouraged by these minor victories, inched his army along the ridges, moving down closer to the Asopus to challenge the barbarians. He never presented Mardonius with a target, for there was not a spur or ridge in Plataean territory but the valiant Plataeans were there to lead the allies along it. Soon the Athenians were safely ensconced on a hillock on the left of the line, while the Spartans held a ridge on the right, with allied contingents holding the center. 

Standoff. 

Pausanias refused to embrace the nobly idiotic traditions of Greek generalship and charge headlong into battle. Instead, the Spartans clung to their ridge, the Athenians to their hill, the allies their…patch of flat ground, and they dared the barbarians to come on. Mardonius, consulting his seers, also refused to attack, the signs pointing towards a defensive stand. The Greeks feuded, but the alliance did not fracture – indeed, the Greek battle line grew stronger as allied reinforcements continued to trickle in. After 8 days of this, Mardonius lost his patience. 

The elite Persian cavalry finally launched a raid on the Cithaeron passes behind the Greek positions. A huge wagon train, loaded down with provisions and supplies from the Peloponnese, was successfully ambush. The crew were slaughtered, and the Persians cheerfully drove the wagons back into their camp right under the noses of the infuriated, but impotent, Greek forces.

Mardonius was now the one emboldened. His cavalry began to launch raids directly on the enemy positions. His horse archers would gallop to the river and slaughter the Greek teams sent to fetch water. A few hours of this and the Asopus was abandoned entirely to the Persian cavalry. The only source of water left to the entire Greek army was now a single spring, just behind the Spartan’s encampment. Huge lines of men laden with heavy clay jars stretched back for miles from the tiny well. The Athenians in particular had to hike a full three miles each way. 

Difficult, but at least it allowed the Greeks to maintain their forward positions. The Persian cavalry continued its hit and run raids, however, probing up and down the battle line, safe from any retaliation by the slow, heavily-armored hoplites. It seems that eventually one battle group found its way around the Spartan positions entirely. Before them lay the precious spring – apparently left unguarded. Before any Greek reserves could arrive to stop them, the horsemen smashed the wells, choked the spring itself, and then withdrew in triumph. It was a fatal blow to Pausanias’s hopes of maintaining his line. 

At a hurriedly convened council of war, the Greeks weighed their options. To abandon their positions by daylight was impossible – the Persian cavalry would cut them to ribbons. To remain was equally impossible – the allied contingents, already thirsty, were growing hungry as well, as the barbarians continued their policy of raiding the Cithaeron passes. The only solution was a withdrawal by night, to a position two miles to the rear, directly east of Plataea – a difficult and dangerous operation to coordinate, especially when they were already nearly cheek to jowl with the barbarians. 

In the center, the soldiers of different cities were obliged to pick their way through thoroughly unfamiliar terrain, and naturally enough they soon ended up quite lost, arriving in front of the ruins of Plataea, more than a mile to the west of their planned positions. Meanwhile, as the sky brightened, neither the Athenians, nor the Lacedaemonians and Tegeans on the opposite flank, had even begun their retreat. 

The Athenians panicked. It seems that the three divisions, left to cover the retreat, had been prevented by the chaos of the allied withdrawal from even leaving their outposts all that night. And now they were left isolated and exposed before Mardonius’s elite army. So the men of Attica sent a horseman galloping over to the Spartan’s camp, demanding explanations from Pausanias. He found a furious debate raging amongst the Spartan staff officers. A warrior by the name of Amompharetus was demanding for his men the honor of covering the retreat. In the broadening daylight, it was clear that the ridge would have to be held at all costs while the Athenians and Lacedaemonians began their withdrawal. And so it was that Amompharetus and his men, even as Pausanias gave the order for their Spartan comrades and the Athenians to retreat, remained where they were, shields and helmets at the ready, grimly resolved to hold their position for as long as they could. And already, fanning out from the far bank, horsemen could be seen splashing across the river and cantering towards their camp.

Mardonius must have been pleased. The fragmentation of the Greek battle line, the task he had set himself from the start of the campaign, had been spectacularly achieved – and without his once having to fight the enemy on their own terms. Most gratifyingly of all, the Spartans, the supposedly invincible, iron-souled Spartans, were still in retreat, isolated from their allies – and as vulnerable as they would ever be. Risky, of course, to engage a phalanx in open battle – especially a Spartan phalanx – but what better opportunity would he have to tear out the heart of the enemy army? 

So Mardonius, climbing into the saddle of his towering white Nisaean stallion, gave the elite squads of infantry massed around him the fateful order to advance. They began to wade through the shallows of the Asopus. As they did so, all along the Persian battle line, banners were raised amid great cheering, and every unit of Mardonius’s army moved with disordered eagerness down to the river bank and began to splash across.

And now, as the haze of dawn glimmered and was burned up by the rising sun, there shuddered through the Lacedaemonian ranks that “dense, bristling glitter of shields and spears and helmets” which had always served to alert warriors that a time of slaughter was approaching, and that the gods themselves were near. From beside the temple grove where he had ordered his men to halt and prepare for battle, Pausanias could see Amompharetus and his division retreating towards him uphill with measured discipline, even as the Persian horsemen, massing behind them, came wheeling in pursuit. Pausanias heard savage cries from the river as the barbarians forded it, and he watched them come on in a monstrous, banner-swept tide. He knew that soon not only cavalry but the whole weight of Mardonius’s elite army would be battering at his shield wall. Frantically, he sent a messenger to the Athenians, begging them to join him – but too late. The barbarians were already on them.

Alone, then, the Spartans and the Tegeans, 11,500 men, would stand against the elite of a superpower. Already, fired by the wheeling, darting Saka archers, arrows were rattling down upon their shield wall. Then, from behind the horsemen, barely visible through the hail of missiles, and all the more terrifying for it, the measured, thunderous approach of the barbarians’ crack infantry battalions could be felt. Mardonius’s cavalry withdrew; his infantry, keeping their distance from the deadly phalanx, planted a wall of wicker shields and the rain of arrows began to thicken.

The Athenians, meanwhile, received Pausanias’s desperate messenger. Even as Areistides turned and began to lead his men to the Spartan’s aid, however, he felt the earth shaking. Turning, the Athenians saw cresting the hill before them a bristling phalanx: The men of Thebes. The vile medizers had undermined the allied effort at every turn. Thebes, the third city of Greece behind Athens and Sparta, had sold out her countrymen in an effort to move to the lead position. Their hoplites were the most feared in Greece, after the Spartans, of course, and they had long held all Boeotia under their thumb. And now, at the allies’ most desperate hour, the Thebans joined the barbarians. Areistides’ eyes narrowed. There could be no reinforcements for Pausanias. Instead, it was time for a reckoning, time to show the Boeotians the consequences of their medizing. With a yell, the Athenians charged the Theban phalanx even as it charged them. The clash of the two battle lines rang across the battlefield.

More than a mile to the east, Pausanias’s warriors held their discipline. Holding up their shields, they listened from within their helmets to the eerily dimmed his and thud of ceaseless missiles all around them. Men began to stumble and fall, arrows protruding from groins or shoulders, bloody to the fletching; and now, every Lacedaemonian and Tegean began to think, was the time for the phalanx to make its charge across no man’s land, to crash into the wall of flimsy wicker, to stab and trample its tormentors underfoot. But still Pausanias held back his warriors. 

Only once the approval of Artemis for the great enterprise of combat ahead of them had been clearly discerned in a blood sacrifice could he give the order to advance, and the goddess, no matter how many goats were slaughtered in her honor, refused to grant her blessing. At last, in despair, Pausanias raised a prayer directly to the heavens, and a moment later the victims, when they were sacrificed, promised success at last. 

Just as well – for even as Pausanias was ordering the phalanx to advance, the Tegeans had already begun running toward the Persian lines – and a single Spartan with them. Of the Tegeans, who lacked authentic Lycurgan discipline, such intemperance might, perhaps, have been expected; but not of Aristodemus, that graduate of the agoge. And yet the trembler – even though he could hardly be honored for breaking his place in the Spartan shield wall, for throwing himself single-handed upon the barbarians, for killing and being killed in a frenzy so berserk as to be hardly Greek – had, nevertheless, his messmates agreed later, redeemed his name. His courage would long be remembered by the men of other cities as something exceptional. It could be reckoned that Aristodemus had died a Spartan. 

All the same, true glory in Sparta went to those who fought not in the cause of their own selfish honor but as links in a single machine; and great glory, that terrible morning, was won by every member of the phalanx. Only “Dorian spears, clotting the earth of Plataea with the butchery of blood sacrifice” could possibly have secured the victory; for only the men who grasped them had been steeled from birth to fight, to kill and never to yield. Descending the arrow-darkened slope of no-man’s land, smashing into the enemy’s front line, the Spartans faced a test for which their whole lives had been a preparation. Other men, perhaps, shoving against an enemy as teeming, as celebrated, and as courageous as the Persians, would have found their spirits failing, their shield arms wearying, their bodies aching, but not the Spartans. Long though the battle appeared to hang in the balance, they did not cease to grind implacably forward. No matter that the Persians, in their growing desperation, sought to impede their enemy’s advance by taking hold of the Spartan’s spears and splintering them; swords were not so easily snapped, nor the weight of bronze-clad bodies stopped. Still Mardonius, as brave as any man on the battlefield, sought to rally his troops; but by now the Spartans were closing in on the elite that formed his bodyguard, and Mardonius himself, resplendent on his white charger, made an easy target. A Spartan, picking up a stone, flung it at him, and the missile smashed into the side of his skull, and down from his saddle tumbled the cousin of the Great King, the man who had thought to be Satrap of Greece.

Mardonius’s guardsmen, holding their ground heroically, were wiped out where they stood, but the remainder of the army, demoralized by the death of their charismatic general, began to run, and soon the rout was general all over the battlefield. Forty thousand men, led by a quick-thinking officer, managed to escape northward onto the road to Thessaly, but most, stampeding in their panic, made for the fort, and the Lacedaemonians and Tegeans pursued them there. 

There, the barbarians fought back. The fighting was bitter up and down the palisade, as the Spartans sought to force the gate and the desperate Persians struggled to hold it. Missiles rained down from above onto the unyielding bronze of the phalanx’s shield wall, and a great pushing match developed at the gates. The momentum of the allies halted, and began to waver – and then came the sound of singing from the west. 

The Athenians came on, singing a victory paean. Their bitter grudge match against the Thebans had ended with the medizers breaking and fleeing for their city. Now, together at last, the victorious allies forced the palisade. The massacre that followed was almost total: Of the shattered remnants of Mardonius’s army, barely three thousand were spared. And so ended the enterprise of the King of Kings against the West.

Gawking at the wealth and luxury displayed in Mardonius’s camp, the Greeks again found themselves wondering why he had felt such a burning desire to conquer their land, when, self-evidently, he had more than enough already. One trophy, in particular, served to bring home to them the full, improbably scale of their victory: The Great King’s own tent. Xerxes, it was said, leaving Greece the previous autumn, had granted to Mardonius the use of his campaign headquarters; and so Pausanias, parting its embroidered hangings, walking over its perfumed carpets, took possession of what the previous year had been the nerve center of the world. 

Gazing in astonishment at the furnishings, the Regent pondered what it would be like to sit where the death of his uncle had been plotted; and so he ordered Mardonius’s cooks to prepare him a royal dinner. When it was ready, he had a second dinner of Spartan black broth laid out beside it, and invited his fellow commanders to come and admire the contrast.

“Men of Greece,” Pausanias laughed, “I have invited you so that you could appreciate for yourselves the irrational character of the Mede, who has a lifestyle such as you see here laid out before you, and yet who came here to rob us of our wretched poverty.” A joke; and yet, not wholly so. Freedom was no laughing matter. Few of the sweat-stained Greek commanders, gazing at the obscene luxury of the Great King’s table and then comparing it with the bowls of simple soup, could have doubted to what the barbarians owed their defeat, and their own cities their liberty.

Meanwhile, beyond the tasseled doorways of the tent, the helots were hard at work, grubbing through the camp. Ordered by Pausanias to make a great pile of loot, they lugged furniture out of the tents, shoved golden plate into sacks, and pulled rings off the fingers of corpses. Naturally, they refrained from declaring all they found; what they could, they salted away. With these scavengings, the helots hoped to secure their own liberty; but they were ignorant and backward, and so proved easy meat for con men. A consortium of Aeginetans, smelling an easy profit, managed to persuade the helots that their gold was brass, and paid for it accordingly. The helots, comprehensively ripped off, appear not to have won their freedom, but the Aeginetans, it is said, made a killing.