While the Athenians heralded Marathon as the greatest victory in history, in Persia the response to the battle was scorn and disdain. So what if those servants of the Lie had managed to wriggle out of their punishment? The Great King had lost a small border skirmish, true, but Eretria had been punished for her actions (the Greeks were resettled north of Basra) and the cause of Ahura-Mazda and Truth had been advanced far across the Aegean. And, of course, in an empire held together by fear of the power of the Great King, one could hardly make a defeat well-known. Thus, Darius counted the expedition a success.
Nevertheless, one could not let such an insult as the Athenians had given Persia stand. And so Darius began preparations for a new expedition, one much grander in scope than Datis’s punitive foray. Men and arms began gathering from all corners of the empire, in numbers so high that it was said there was no number great enough in the human language to encompass them all. The object of this expedition? To conquer and subjugate all Greece.
However, it was not to be. In 486, after three years of preparation, Egypt suddenly rose in revolt against Darius. This, the rebellion of a rich and prosperous province near the heart of the empire, was far more serious than a minor border war, and so the men who thought they would be marching on Greece found themselves duly diverted to the south, into another Egyptian campaign.
It was at this time that Darius, an old man by now, who had long been ill, at last died. He had a good reign. In the 35 years since he and his six conspirators had assassinated Bardiya and seized the throne, Darius had created the best organization of any empire yet. Roads linked all the far-flung provinces together. The Persian bureaucracy, overseeing the government of the 20 satrapies of the empire, was unrivalled. Peace, order, and stability were the watchwords of the day.
Indeed, nothing became Darius’s reign so much as the smooth manner in which it ended, a stark contrast to the violent manner of its birth. Thirty years before, a succession dispute between two brothers and a war in Egypt had brought one line of kings to extinction. But Darius, who had many sons, suffered no such problems with his succession. Each could look forward to a juicy satrapy to rule upon his death, and for the most worthy, there was the prize of the throne itself. Thus did the Crown Prince Xerxes, the best and brightest of the children of Darius, become King of Kings.
Xerxes, after suppressing the Egyptian revolt and then a second one that broke out in Babylon upon his succession, began once more to resume preparations for the campaign in Europe. He consulted with his generals deep within his capital. Mardonius, who, after the death of Datis at Marathon was the senior Persian commander, argued that a small, elite force of troops would suffice, one that could move fast and hit hard. Militarily, this may have been so, but politically, how could the King of Kings ride to war without the full might of his empire at his back? No, any army that marched would have to be suitable to the dignity of the King of Persia. It would have to draw forces from all corners of the empire, be fantastically large and magnificent. And so the army began to gather in Susa once more.
Xerxes could command not only men, however, but also could reshape the very land and sea to suit the needs of his army. At the Hellespont, the narrow band of water that separated Europe from Asia, pontoons, earth, and plants were thrown down to create a bridge of land for the army to cross. At Mt. Athos, where a storm had wrecked the Persian fleet and ruined Mardonius’s first expedition a decade before, a great work was taken up. A massive canal was dug right across the heart of the peninsula, so that the Persian ships would not be forced to circle the dangerous peninsula. Not even the elements would be allowed to stop the Great King this time.
In the meantime, the democracy in Athens continued its turbulent evolution. The unruly mob was distrustful of all men with undue influence, temperamental, and quick to judge. Being popular one day was no guarantee one would even be allowed within the city the next.
Miltiades, the hero of Marathon, didn't last long. In the aftermath of the great victory, he had agitated for an attack on the islands of the Aegean, to secure the Athenian frontiers. His siege was a shambles, however, and Miltiades himself was wounded. Upon his return, his political opponents gleefully accused him of a treason, and the Assembly quickly convicted him. His sentence of death was commuted to a heavy fine in recognition of his service and his wound, but that mattered little, as Miltiades would die of gangrene from his wound before it could be imposed.
With his exit from the scene, the struggle for control of Athens intensified as ambitious men made use
of the open playing field. And so the Athenians developed a…unique system of dealing with men they found overly threatening: Once a year, within the Assembly, each man would write the name of one prominent politician on a pottery shard, or ostraka. The unfortunate winner of the most votes would then be given ten days to leave Attica, or face the loss of all his property. He would remain “ostracized,” as the Athenians called it, for ten years.
And so one by one, the jealous Athenians, mistrustful of anyone with too much power, ostracized Pisistratids, Alcaemonids, Philiads – no one was safe from the verdict of the ostraka. And in the new, open environment, there was room for a man of suitable ambition and talent to make a name for himself.
Eventually, these men, the first politicians, coalesced into two factions, each around a hero of Marathon: One, the radical faction centered itself on a gifted orator named Themistocles. The other, a conservative coalition of the hoplite farmers who had won Marathon advanced as their champion a stolid old warrior named Areistides, called “the Just” by his supporters. Both, if you will recall, had fought in the dangerous center of the phalanx at Marathon. Now these allies were political rivals.
In 483, as Xerxes’s preparations neared completion, matters came to a head. In Laurium, south of Athens, near a temple of Poseidon frequented by Themistocles, there was discovered an enormous vein of silver. This was the fulfillment of Themistocles’ dreams: With one eye on Persia, he had long been campaigning for Athens to create a fleet. But fleets were expensive propositions, and the old hoplite class had resisted him. Athens’ future lay in good armies of farmer-warriors, as they had proven at Marathon. What good was an expensive status symbol like a fleet? Now, with this newfound bounty, the wily politician had a means of funding this fleet.
In the Assembly, however, when Themistocles proposed this, Areistides reliably rose to meet him. Traditionally, he pointed out, new finds of silver had been distributed amongst the citizens. It was a blatant appeal to the voters’ self interest, hedged about by the weight of tradition. Themistocles, refusing to indulge in scaremongering tactics by pointing to the growing Persian menace, instead whipped up the frenzy of the Athenians by pointing to a much closer enemy: Aegina.
This island, southwest of Athens, had long been at war with the democracy. Its superior fleet had enabled it to survive thus far, and Aeginan piracy had long scourged Athenian shipping. With a fleet, Athens could tip the scales and finally crush the impudent islanders once and for all.
Neither would back down. It became apparent that one or the other of the rivals had to go. Athens was paralyzed as long as both Themistocles and Areistides remained at odds. And so, in January, 482, as the citizens prepared for the ostracism, they were engaging in perhaps history’s first referendum. Considering the stakes, it was perhaps also history’s most important.
And so on the appointed day, the Athenians filed into the Assembly, and one by one, they cast their vote. Two growing piles appeared: One for the radical Themistocles, one for Areistides the Just. Now one was leading, now the other. But gradually, eventually, Areistides’ pile grew larger and larger than his rival’s. Indeed, one poor farmer, not recognizing the great man, approached the old warrior and asked him to write “Areistides” on it. Areistides, nonplussed, asked the old peasant why. “Because,” the farmer replied, “I am fed up with hearing him called the Just all the time.” Upon hearing this, Areistides took the shard, wrote his own name upon it, and then silently handed it back to the man (also note that the only possible source for this story could be old Areistides himself!).
The day ended, the vote was counted, and the result was announced: Areistides was exiled.
Themistocles would have his fleet.
There wasn't much time. Rumors were fast being whispered of movement in the East. The Persian host was on the move. And so, in two years, the Athenians embarked upon the greatest crash shipbuilding and training course in history. Purchasing agents, their purses full of Laurian silver, fanned out across the Aegean, buying as much timber as they could. The citizens of the democracy left their farms and spent days on false rowing benches on shore, learning to pull an oar, taking brief breaks for food and water, then, tired and hot, climbing back on to their cushions and pulling once more. Soon, new triremes began rolling down their slipways into the harbor of Piraeus at the awesome rate of two per week. Each was personally inspected by Themistocles himself. No inferior vessels for the Athenian navy! Each ship of the democracy had to be of the best design, the sleekest, the fastest, the toughest. And all the while, their armor gathering cobwebs in their homes, the hoplites practiced. By now, however, there was no illusion as to the enemy they were training to meet. No one imagined now that they would be rowing into battle against the Aeginans.
In 481, a year after the Athenians had begun to build their navy, Persian agents once more appeared in Greece, just as they had before Marathon ten years before. Canvassing back and forth, they demanded earth and water as tokens of submission from each city, with two ominous exceptions: No agents came to Athens or Sparta. These cities, for their sacrilege ten years before, would not be given a chance to surrender.
And so, as that terrible summer went on, when fear and dread of the impending storm hung heavy over the land, the Spartans took an unprecedented step: They called for a congress of all Greek cities to meet at the Isthmus of Corinth.
Thus it was that 481 years before the birth of Christ, the squabbling city-states of Greece at last put aside their differences and assembled in one place to meet the barbarian threat. Many, such as Athens and Aegina, were technically still at war. No one fought. All recognized that a larger threat, a threat to them all, loomed over Greece.
The decision was made to create a combined army and fleet to meet the invaders. The Spartans, naturally, would have command of the land army. But who would lead the fleet? The Athenians, with their 200 triremes contributing the bulk of the fleet, laid claim to the title, but the Aeginans and other ancient naval states balked at the parvenu. Why should not a state with a maritime tradition lead?
It was Themistocles who provided the solution. Recognizing that no naval state would accept the leadership of another, he proposed that the fleet be led by a city with not a whit of seafaring about it: Sparta. The allies agreed, realizing that giving Sparta yet more prestige was preferable to any other leading.
And so the League of Corinth was established in order to resist the Persians. Two tasks immediately confronted the allies: To boost their own numbers, and to obtain accurate intelligence on Xerxes’s army, which had arrived at Sardis in Lydia that fall.
To address the first concern, their own paltry numbers, the allies sent agents in all directions. Pro-allied factions in fence-sitting cities were boosted. Notable cities such as Thebes, which had not attended the Congress, were called to join the alliance. Envoys were sent to the Greek colonies around the Mediterranean, in southern Italy, Sicily, Spain, and Gaul.
These efforts yielded little fruit. In Sicily, the tyrant of Syracuse, Gelon, from whom the Greeks had expected much (his was the most powerful state in the Greek world, rivaling Athens or Sparta), rebuffed their entreaties. He could not move that year, he said – on the western tip of the island, from their base of Lilybaeum, the forces of a Phoenician colony on the African coast known as Carthage were massing and preparing to march to war on him. Coincidence? The mother Phoenician cities were all under the heel of the Great King, after all. Demoralized and worried, the envoys returned home empty handed.
The other task, the infiltration of the camp of Xerxes, was if anything even more demoralizing. Where once Greek cities had dominated the Aegean, that cold autumn of 481, as the three spies selected by the allies for the task sailed eastwards, they were now sailing undoubtedly into enemy waters.
Silently and carefully, they found the harbor of the Persian navy first. It was nearly enough to convince them to surrender immediately.
From far to the east had come a mighty force: The Phoenicians, the greatest traders and sailors in the world, had contributed nearly 300 triremes. These cities had dominated the waters of the Mediterranean since time immemorial. They grew up pulling an oar. Their ships were unmatched, the skill of their crews approaching perfection. And they were not alone.
From Egypt and from Ionia had come contingents to match the Phoenician squadrons. These satrapies could sail and fight nearly as well as the Phoenicians. But...perhaps, they wouldn’t. They did come from provinces with a history of rebellion, after all. If the Greek spies thought this, they were grasping at straws, however. The total force of the Persian navy was one thousand, two hundred, and seven triremes. Regardless of whether all sailed to Greece, regardless of how many were lost to the summer storms, the Greeks would be facing the most mighty force ever assembled at sea. Would Xerxes’ land army match his navy? They could only tell at Sardis, and so they hurried onward.
The sight dumbfounded them. For miles upon miles, as far as the eye could see, stretched a panorama of tents and campfires, pavilions and training grounds. Men spoke in strange tongues to each other, practiced with outlandish weapons, marshaled and assembled in huge numbers. The hordes of all Asia were assembled. The thousand nations of the Persian Empire prepared to descend upon Greece.
The spies, apparently not so subtle, were unmasked and captured by a Persian cavalry patrol. Quickly identified, they were about to be executed before a messenger from the Great King himself came hurrying up. The captives were spared, and hustled into the presence of Xerxes. After a brief interrogation, they were duly shown about the camp, allowed to take copious notes, and then sent on their way back to Greece. Xerxes was cunning. The morale blow of seeing his army in full would certainly outweigh any intelligence the Greeks gained from doing so.
The report of the agents was terrifying. Millions upon millions of barbarians were gathered, from every nation. At the core of it stood Xerxes and his elite corps of bodyguards: One thousand spearmen, who stood on perpetual guard before his chambers back in Susa, were joined by nine thousand of their comrades to form a body of ten thousand troops: The Immortals. There were elite cavalry squadrons from Persia, Media, Bactria, India, the wide steppes of Asia, the high mountains of the Zagros. And finally, from all subject nations, a teeming mass of spear-fodder. In all, reported later historians in awed breaths, the army was numbered at one million, seven hundred thousand men. 1,700,000,000. The entire world stood united behind Xerxes and the force of Truth, to bring the Greeks out from under the darkness of the Lie.
In the spring, this force moved out.
They moved slowly, ponderously to the north. There, the army stopped at a site ominous to the Greeks. It was a few grassy mounds, alone in a plain in northern Anatolia, not much to look at. However, this site was one of the most significant in history to the Greeks, the source of their oldest stories, the site of their bloodiest war, the birthplace of their mightiest heroes: Troy. Xerxes poured libations upon the ruined stones of the city, his message clear: Asia was coming to avenge the ancient sack of the city. Sparta and Athens would burn in the name of Priam.
The army moved on, and soon came to the Hellespont. There stood the pontoon bridge, the gateway to Europe, and conquest. Before they could cross, however, a massive storm came up and swept the bridge away. Xerxes, furious, had ordered a new one built. He had then lashed the sea several times with a whip, and tossed a pair of fetters into its depths. No more trouble arose, and the new bridge held.
Before he crossed, Xerxes was approached by an old friend, Pythias of Lydia. Pythias, an old, fabulously wealthy man, had fed and bankrolled the army while it stayed at Sardis through the winter. Now, as most of his sons prepared to march to war, he came and asked the Great King that his eldest might be spared to help him on the farm.
Xerxes was scandalized. He, and all his relatives, was prepared to march to battle. How dare this peasant, this slave of the King of Kings, presume special treatment? Such insolence could not go unpunished. Fulfilling the man’s request, Xerxes had ordered Pythias’s eldest son chopped in half, his two halves flung to either side of the road. The army marched between them on its way to Europe.
At last, the crossing could commence. Led by the Immortals, the army began to slowly filter across the great bridge. All day and all night it continued. Dawn came. The crossing continued. Seven days in all it took for the mighty army to cross.
Into Thrace the march continued. The ground shook beneath the boots of so many men at the army’s approach. When they drank, entire rivers ran dry. Entire countrysides were stripped barren, devoid of all life, all to feed the army of the King of Kings. And as spring rolled into summer, they moved through
the territory of their ally, the Kingdom of Macedonia, and descended into Greece.
~
In the south, the Greeks had continued their frantic preparations for the defense. One last attempt had been made to recruit allies – the recalcitrant Argives, still bitter with Sparta, had demanded a thirty year truce and a share in the command as their condition for aid. Impossible demands. Gelon, for his part, demanded command over the entire Greek force. When the ambassadors had recoiled in disgust as this idea, the tyrant had contemptuously sneered, “It seems you have no lack of leaders, my friends – all you need now is to find some men for them to lead!”
Without Gelon’s 200 triremes, many doubted that the Greek fleet of some 300 ships could meet the Persian fleet on anything like equal terms. And without the fleet, any defense of the mountain passes by the hoplites would be meaningless – the Persians could simply outflank the defenders with their fleet, and overwhelm them with numbers.
The Spartans could urge no action. The city was in consternation from the prophecy the Oracle had given them:
Your fate, o inhabitants of the broad fields of Sparta,
Is to see your great and famous city destroyed by the sons of Perseus.
Either that, or everyone within the borders of Lacedaemon,,
Must mourn the death of a king, sprung from the line of Heracles.
To make matters worse, with no help from the Argives, and with their helots agitating for barbarian rule as preferable to the iron fist of the Spartans, they were compelled to keep most of their army at home to prevent a revolt. They would be able to send scarcely any troops north of the Peloponnese.
The Athenians, for their part, had their doubts about their new role in things. With the approach of the barbarian, many dealt with their nerves by newfound nostalgia for Marathon. Many a farmer, during the long hours of practice, itched to bash his oar over smug Themistocle’s head and meet the Persians with spear in hand, as Greeks were meant to do. The politician, facing challenges at home, was in no position to urge the League to action.
The democracy, when it had consulted the oracle, had received even more disastrous words than the Spartans. The Pythia had fallen into a frenzy, screaming for the Athenians to flee, warning of black blood that would drown Attica. Images of fire, carnage, and annihilation. The god of war was coming. Towers crumbled in his wake. The temples of Athens would burn.
The Athenian embassies were stunned. So that was it, then. Their city was doomed. Who could doubt the will of Zeus? As they turned to leave, however, the Oracle spoke once more.
And yet – this word I give you, adamant, a promise:
Everything within the borders of Attica shall fall,
Yes, and the sacred vales of nearby mountain ranges,
But the wooden wall alone, the wooden wall shall stand,
That much Zeus grants to Athena, as an aid to you and all your children.
Men on horses, men on foot, sweeping they come from Asia:
Retreat, for soon enough you will meet with them face to face.
Divine Salamis – you will be the ruin of many a mother’s son,
When the seed is scattered, or the harvest is gathered in.
The oracle’s words, the only slender thread of hope the Athenians had, were disseminated and debated. Themistocles had argued that the wooden wall could only refer to ships – why else refer to Salamis, the island the democracy had conquered long ago, which had touched off the long struggle with Pisistratus and his sons, and the eventual foundation of the democracy? His opponents pointed out the oracle had not referred to which mothers – barbarian or Greek – would mourn their sons. Had not Croesus fallen for just such an error? No, the wooden wall had to refer to the old fence around the Acropolis.
And so once again, the Assembly gathered for a debate, to settle once and for all the means by which Athens would fight the war. The implications of Themistocles’ naval policy were clear: Even if every able bodied man was to pull an oar, the fleet would still be dangerously short of men. No force could be spared to garrison the Acropolis. Athens would be left naked.
That meant that the Athenians could not stay there. Women, children, old – everyone, would have to be evacuated, should the defenses at the passes fail. The voters looked around at their city. They could see its entire history laid out around them – the old temple where the first Alcmaeonid had defeated the first attempt at tyranny. The old temple of Athena raised by the Boutads, those old aristocrats. Half-completed, a new, shining temple to Athena, begun by the voters after Marathon, a labor of love. In the background, the mountain, below which ran the roads to Marathon. How could they abandon all this?
Abandonment was exactly what Themistocles was proposing, however. The Athenians could not again fight the invaders on the beaches. It was possible that they could still be stopped north of Attica. But it was doubtful of the insular Spartans could be persuaded to fight north of the Pelopponese at all. They would only do so if they saw the dedication of the Athenians to protecting their flank: That meant the navy. Thus, to save Attica, they had to be willing to abandon her.
The Athenians, facing the greatest crisis in their history, decided to trust Themistocles. They would fight at sea. They would trust in the wooden walls of the ships.
With Athens at last united, the Greeks sallied forth to meet the invaders. Their first expedition, however, was a fiasco. Informed by the Thessalians of the Great King’s approach, they had searched for a suitable mountain pass to defend, to negate his advantage in numbers. The Thessalians had proposed the vale of Tempe, north of Mt. Olympus. Ten thousand hoplites, under the command of a Spartan nobleman and Themistocles, had duly been dispatched north. Barely had they begun to dig in, however, when scouts had reported that not only were there multiple passes flanking them, but also half of Thessaly had already capitulated to the Persian host, and Persian agents swarmed about them. The allies had been forced into a humiliating withdrawal.
And so the Persians marched on. Day by agonizing day, they grew closer. June turned into July, and July into August. This caused a crisis in Sparta. August was the time of their holy festival – the same that had prevented them from aiding the Athenians at Marathon ten years before. To make matters worse, it was also the occasion of their Olympic Games. No Spartan army could march in August.
The Athenians could not wait. The docks were already in chaos with the evacuation, but now the fleet had to be launched. Scrambling, desperate, the fleet – the lack of manpower made up by volunteers from Plataea – embarked towards Euboea. At the northern end of the island, the straits narrowed to a channel less than six miles across. It was the one place the fleet could hope to meet the Persian triremes on anything like equal terms. The straits were named for the temple of Artemis that stood nearby: Artemisium. But without Sparta, to hold the land passes, what good was a naval defense?
A compromise had to be found. The Spartan army could not fight, but the allies could. Darius had yet to pass through a narrow neck of land near some hot springs, appropriately called the Hot Gates: Thermopylae. If each allied city between Sparta and Thermopylae contributed troops to hold the pass, and if they were stiffened by a crack squad of Spartan hoplites, the best in the city…and if they were led by a king…Thermopylae might be held.
And so it came to pass in the summer of 480 that the king Leonidas marched north to Thermopylae with 300 bodyguards, all with living sons. The message to the allies could not be clearer: The Spartans intended to hold or die. There would be no retreat from Thermopylae.
No comments:
Post a Comment