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.

Nemesis

And so it came to Salamis.

To Xerxes, sitting pretty in the Athenian acropolis, it seemed as if the hand of Ahura Mazda himself was guiding affairs, ensuring the defeat of the servants of the Lie. No one present would have forgotten the fate of the last Greek attempt to defeat a Persian armada. It had only been fourteen years previously that 350 Ionian triremes, outnumbered almost two to one by the Persian fleet, had rowed out to battle off Lade and had been annihilated. The great wheels of time, turning as they did at the command of he who dwelt beyond them, were clearly turning with a quite merciless precision. Once already a fractious alliance of Greek squadrons had disintegrated amid treachery and backstabbing when confronted by the might of the Persian fleet – and now, with a mysterious but no doubt divinely sanctioned symmetry history appeared destined to repeat itself.

Nevertheless, at the council of war Xerxes held to determine the best way to proceed, there were dissenting voices. Demaratus – the exiled Spartan king, now serving Xerxes as an advisor – urged an amphibious operation directly against Lacedaemon. He knew that the Spartans would never come to the rescue of any other Greeks when the flames of war were licking at their heartland. True enough, but storms and enemy action had depleted the imperial fleet so much that the detachment of a small task force from the main body would leave the Greek forces a match for either. And so the proposal was duly vetoed. So, too, was the proposal of the formidable Queen Artemisia of Helicarnassus. She argued strongly against the plan to force a second Lade. Why risk battle when Athens was already captured and autumn was closing in? Better to maintain the standoff and leave the Greek squadrons either to starve or to scatter and sail for home?

A shrewd military analysis, but political considerations forced its veto. For the Great King of Kings to spend a winter on the edge of the world was out of the question. A burned and devastated Athens was no place to administer the world. Having graced the expedition with his divine presence, it was now imperative for him to finish the war before the campaign season drew to a close. Only a thumping victory before the weather turned would do.

Luckily for the Persians, the fractious Greeks were behaving true to form. Just as hatreds, doubts, and fears had riven the Ionian squadrons off Lade, so now off Salamis the Greek fleet was on the verge of a similar implosion. Already, on the day of the burning of the Acropolis, several crews had stampeded and attempted to raise sail for home. That evening, the high command had been fragmented into several factions, Peloponnesians against Athenians and their supporters. Adeimantus had sneered at Themistocles as a refugee and warned him, when he spoke out of turn, that “athletes who start the race before the signal is given are whipped.” “Yes,” the Athenian admiral replied, “and those who are left behind never win the crown.” Only by threatening to withdraw the Athenian contingent from the fleet and sail at once for southern Italy and permanent exile had Themistocles kept the squabbling contingents in line. But would the Peloponnesians, panicking at being bottled up in the straits, and not willing to die to defend Athenian territory, call his bluff?

Persian spy chiefs , with more than sixty years’ experience exploiting Greek rivalries, resolved to find out. A task force of 30,000 Persian troops was duly dispatched to take the road to the Isthmus (Since the road to Megara had been destroyed, and the Isthmus itself solidly fortified across its six-mile length and manned by all the remaining Grecian land forces, there was little chance of them actually storming the gates to the Peloponnese, but the naval forces hardly knew that). The Persians, war songs echoing for miles, weapons glittering brightly, moved out of Athens, rounded Mount Aigeleos, and followed the Sacred Way towards Eleusis. 

The reaction in the Greek camp was consternation. As evening drew on and mutinous sailors were already besieging their captains with demands to sail to defend the Isthmus, the King of Kings tightened the screws even further. Squadrons of the imperial navy bore down on Salamis and began to patrol directly off the island, menacing the escape routes with a perfect show of leisure. The Peloponnesians were on the verge of revolt, “For there they were, stranded on Salamis, obliged to fight in defence of Athenian territory, and certain, if they were defeated, to find themselves trapped and blockaded on an island. And all the while their own country stood defenceless, even as the barbarians, marching through the night, were advancing directly on the Peloponnese.”

Of course, the Persian spies, the undisputed masters of their art, without rival in all the world, were never one to leave things to chance. Even as they menaced the southern contingents with shows of force and shadow-boxing, they also played on the suspicions and fears of those depending on the Peloponnesians for their own defense: The Athenians. Cyrus, and Darius after him, had always bestowed rich rewards on top-level traitors and moles in enemy organizations. What rewards then, for the man who had it within his power to betray the whole Greek fleet, and win the war, and the West itself, for the Great King? Splendid and glorious beyond compare, no doubt. 

We are nowhere openly told of contacts between Themistocles and Persian agents. The murk that veils treachery and espionage is often impenetrable – and all the more so at a remove of two and a half thousand years. But during the Salamis campaign there was waged a war in the darkness, a shadowy counterpart to the din and crash of battle, fought with whispers and rumors and Persian gold, that has no rival. 

It came to pass that that September evening, 480 BC, shortly after the Persian squadrons returned from patrol back to Phalerum, while the Greek admirals, still at loggerheads, were digesting the day’s events, a tiny boat slipped out of the dark ranks of the Athenian fleet and made its way across the straits. Its passenger, as soon as he set foot on dry land, was hurried into presence of Persian high command – for this was Sicinnus, the most trusted slave of Themistocles. He came to deliver a message of utmost urgency: The Greeks, the slave reported, were planning a getaway that very night. “Only block their escape,” came the advice from Themistocles, “and you will have a perfect chance of success.” Themistocles was revolted at his allies’ pusillanimity, and in full sympathy with Xerxes, earnestly longing for a Persian victory, according to Sicinnus’s report. A dazzling intelligence coup indeed.

Persian contingency plans, long prepared in the event of just such an opportunity, were swiftly put into motion. The fleet was ordered to ready itself for battle. Rising from their suppers, oarsmen hurried to their benches, marines to their stations on deck. “Crew cheered crew, all the way down the battle-line,” and then, rank after rank, pulling out of Phalerum into the waiting darkness, they took to sea. No more cheering now – the slightest sound might alert the enemy. Instead, gliding silently through the darkness, they took up their stations of the battle to come in the morning. The Egyptians, two hundred triremes strong, had been ordered to circle the island of Salamis and stopper the narrow bottleneck of the western straits, there to catch Greeks fleeing the slaughter. Others, serrying into ranks of three, took up their positions before the straits – the mighty Phoenician fleet in the place of honor on the right, the unreliable Carians and Cilician squadrons in the center, and the skilled Ionian sailors anchoring the left. Finally, setting the seal on preparations, four hundred soldiers were stationed on an island in the middle of the straits, Psyttaleia, there to slaughter all the men swept onto the island’s rocks during the next day’s battle. Nothing had been left to chance. Not a single Greek would be permitted to escape the Great King’s trap.

Meanwhile, Sicinnus slipped back across to Salamis. On the island the Greek admirals were still quarrelling furiously. At some point towards midnight, it is said, Themistocles slipped out of the meeting. He found waiting for him, cloaked in shadows, an old enemy. Areistides, “the Just,” summoned back from exile along with all the victims of ostracism, had come with a devastating report. He had seen the ominous silhouettes of the Persian fleet slipping out and closing its net around the island. Themistocles urged him to take the news to the other admirals – “for if I report it, they will think that I am making it up.” 

The report of Areistides finally settled the debate. The Peloponnesians were trapped – there was nowhere to run. They would fight in the morning or they would die. And so the Greek fleet, too, began to make its preparations for the morning. Dawn rose on a day as fateful as any in human history – and found every squadron in the Greek fleet primed and nerved for battle.

Over the straits, men later remembered, there glimmered a sudden sense of something uncanny, an almost palpable heightening of intensity in the morning light. To the Athenian marines, before they took their places on deck, Themistocles delivered a speech that would long be remembered, “urging them to consider all that was best in human affairs, and all that was worst – and to choose the former.” Yet not even these words raised as much hairs on the back of men’s necks as did the assurance – one that swept the entire fleet – that the sons of gods who in ancient times had been the guardians of the rocks and groves and temples of Greece were present among them. Men would later speak of seeing phantoms and even ghostly serpents gliding on the surface of water, and of hearing unearthly battle cries echoing around the straits. 

To be sure, there had been something eerie in the air for days. Even Greeks in the Great King’s train appear to have sensed that the heavens might be turning against their master. Walking through the deserted fields of Eleusis before the battle, Demaratus had seen a cloud of dust billowing up from the coast road. The Athenian collaborator had heard the faint singing coming from the Sacred Way as the “iacche”: The chant of joy raised every September by worshippers as they journeyed to Eleusis. Only now it was heading out to sea – towards Salamis. 

Demaratus had urged him to keep the tale silent, as Xerxes, so close to victory, would brook no hints of defeatism. He intended to watch the destruction of the troublesome Greeks personally. And so, even as Greek oarsmen were hurrying to their benches, the Great King, followed by his train of generals, officials, slaves and flunkeys was riding in his chariot past the southern spur of Mount Aigaleos and on to a rocky spur that overlooked “sea-born Salamis.” Below him, as the sun rose behind the King of Kings, an awesome panorama unfolded: The straits, Salamis, the gulf beyond them, and in the far distance, the Isthmus. 

But no fleeing Greek fleet. Instead, stretched in a glittering array from one end of the straits to the other, the forces of free Greece had formed a battle line to confront the mighty navy of the King of Kings. 

But wait, what was this? A squadron of Greek triremes, 40 strong, was speeding north, away from the battle line. Xerxes must have smiled in satisfaction. And so the rout was already starting. The signal to enter the straits must have come, and so the Persians rowed forward to finish the job, and end the war, that had started so long ago in Sardis, once and for all.

But the Corinthians – for it was their ships who were speeding north – were not fleeing. They were merely checking to ensure the Egyptian squadron was not yet approaching, for they had turned around and were already making their way back to the south. And the rest of the Greek fleet? 

As the great mass of the Persian fleet rounded the southern spur of Salamis and flowed around the island of Psyttaleia, they did so without being able to see their enemy. The angle of the channel, and the spray and early autumn mist, precluded it. But then, rising from ahead of them as the front ranks closed in on the Greek positions, they heard singing, and the paean soared to such a pitch that “a high echo rolled back in answer from the island crags.” The Persian admirals might have begun to doubt – but no turning back now, not under the very eye of the Great King himself. But the certainty would have spread from captain to captain that the Great King had, for once, been well and truly conned. The Greek triremes, far from fleeing at their approach, were instead marshaled in a great battle line of their own along the bays and spurs of the island, from the Athenians on the northernmost wing to the Aeginetans in the south; and the ram of every ship was pointed directly at the Persian fleet.

“Eleutheria!” With this cry, “free speech!”, a single ship darted forth from the Athenian ranks and slammed into one of the Phoenician triremes. For a moment, everything was still. Then the battle exploded as both sides charged. 

The Athenian vessels bore names such as “Democracy,” “Independence,” and “Free Speech”. They recognized that they were fighting to defend such concepts from being crushed in their infancy under the royal high heels of an Oriental monarchy. No such names were to be found among the Persian fleet. 

It is a mark of the confusion of the engagement that even the identity of the first ship to engage the barbarians was later vigorously debated: Both the Athenians and the Aeginetans laid claim to the honor. It was impossible to know the truth – the two contigents were fighting at opposite ends of a line that stretched for upward of a mile, and no one in the straits ever had a view of the whole panorama of the battle. No wonder, then, that memories of that grim and glorious day should have been, not of strategy, nor of the performance of rival squadrons, nor of the ebb and flow of the fighting, but rather of stirring deeds and individual heroism, exploits that shone all the more brightly for being set against a backdrop of such clamor and carnage and chaos. 

Most celebrated of all was an Athenian, Ameinias, from the village of Pallene. In the shock of the battle’s opening, he dared to attack the flagship of the Phoenician fleet, a towering vessel commanded by one of the Great King’s own brothers. The royal admiral, infuriated at the impudence of the tiny Athenian vessel, had ordered missiles to be showered on his assailant while he himself led a boarding party – but he was skewered by Ameinias as he made the jump, and was pitched overboard. More ambiguous was the performance of the second of the Great King’s commanders to be attacked by the mad Athenian – none other than Artemisia of Helicarnassus, the same whose own advice, had it been taken, would have avoided the battle altogether. Seeing Ameinias bearing down on her, and panicking, she found her escape route blocked by the trireme of her own vassals – and so resorted to the startling expedient of ramming it herself. Ameinias, presuming that the queen had deserted the Persian cause, moved off in search of other prey. And so it was that Artemisia made her escape. 

Such was the confusion of the fighting that Xerxes, also watching the same incident, had presumed her to be ramming an enemy trireme. “My men have turned into women,” Xerxes is reported to have cried as Artemisia’s warship pulled away from the wreckage of its victim, “and my women into men!” 

His bitterness was understandable – for the Great King, far more clearly than any of his admirals embroiled in the fighting below, could take in the full sweep of the catastrophe unfolding in the straits. He could see how his crack Phoenician squadrons, left leaderless by the death of their admiral, and hemmed in by the Athenians, were being progressively driven back onto shore, or else put into open flight. He could see Areistides the Just, leading behind him the few remaining Athenian hoplites, landing on Psyttaleia. Slingers, archers, and heavily armored marines poured off of allied vessels and won bloody payback for the cornering of the Spartans at Thermopylae. Led by Areistides, the Greeks “dashed over their enemies like a roaring wave, their voices raised in a single cry, hacking at the limbs of the wretched men until the life had been butchered out of every last one.”

Xerxes could mark the chaos that was the result of his squadrons’ attempts to withdraw, as rank after rank of them began to lose formation, cramping one another in the narrows, “their bronze rams smashing the sides of their neighbors, shearing off whole banks of oars.” He could observe in mounting disbelief how a deadly wedge of Greek ships, massing inward, was splitting his fleet in two, leaving the Phoenicians on the right wing of the battle line trapped like tuna fish in a net, there to be speared or battered or hacked to death. And he could reflect, perhaps, that the order to engage the Greeks had been his own. 

Unsurprisingly, the Great King, in his vexation, was testy in the extreme with any survivors of the fiasco. When a group of bedraggled Phoenician captains, attempting to excuse the loss of their ships, had tried to lay the blame on Artemisia and accuse her of treachery, he had them decapitated on the spot. Naturally, it was out of the question for the King of Kings to accept any blame in the disaster, and the Phoenicians, now that their strength had been shattered on the rocks below his throne, could serve him well enough as scapegoats. 

Midday turned to afternoon, and the Persians began to be swept out of the straits. Perhaps half of those triremes that had entered the deadly channel had survived to leave it. Behind them, harrying them as they lurched and limped desperately back to Phalerum, came the Greeks, pursuing them across those same open waters that the Great King had planned to stage his ambush and win the mastery of Greece the night before. 

And so ended the attempt of the Great King to force the straits of Salamis.

The Clouds Burst

Thermopylae, the Hot Gates, was perhaps the most ideal defensive ground on earth. If a stand was to be made against the Great King and his hordes, this was the place to do it. 

The ground was narrow, broken, and rocky. To the south, enormous mountains soared high above the pass, their sheer, impassable cliffs preventing any flanking maneuvers. To the north lapped the shallow waters of the Gulf of Malis. In between there stretched a narrow pass. At each end, called the West and the East Gates, the path narrowed to the tiny width of a single oxcart. In the center, where the trail was nearly 60 feet wide, but where the cliffs rose steepest, men of nearby Phocis had long ago raised a wall for defense: The Middle Gate. It was here that Leonidas and the allied armies would make their stand. 

Their numbers were few – 300 Spartans, with 300 accompanying helot slaves. From the rest of Greece, perhaps 5,000 hoplites in total. 700 came from Thespiae, a small city that had long been under the thumb of nearby Thebes. That city, despite being the third most powerful in Greece, after Athens and Sparta, had sent only 400 men to the pass. It was widely known that Thebes had no heart for the alliance, and were it not for the demands of the Spartan king, likely would have deserted to the Persian side already. And so, as the weight of all Asia descended upon the tiny Greek force, Leonidas would have realized that there were plenty behind him, rooting for him to fail.

Nor was this the only unwelcome news. Shortly after the Greek force had taken position and begun fortifying, word reached Leonidas of a small goat trail, skirting the heights above Thermopylae and descending into his rear – perfectly passable for lightly armed troops. Nothing could be done but to plug it – any Persian force that learned of the pass would be able to encircle the Greeks and so destroy the defensive advantages of the pass. One thousand Phocians, the descendents of the men who had built the Middle Gate, the original defenders of Thermopylae, were dispatched to hold it. Leonidas prayed they would not be attacked – he could dispatch not one Spartan officer to reinforce or guide them, wanting to keep his elite troops alongside him to meet the might of Xerxes head on. The Phocians would have to hold on their own.

Forty miles to the east, the allied admirals were encamped on the beach near Artemisium. The shingle there was largely pebbles and dirty sand, bleak, cold, and exposed. It was now covered in Greek triremes, hundreds upon hundreds, the light ships drawn up on the beach at nights, overwatching the narrow straits. If the massive Persian fleet attempted to move into the straits to flank the army over at Thermopylae, the Greek admirals could launch and have their entire force in the water in a matter of minutes. In the narrow waters of the pass, the Greeks’ inferior numbers and seamanship would count for little, and their heavier arms and armors much. 

Still, they were vulnerable – the fleet of the King of Kings was so numerous that he could send a mighty force down the other side of the island of Euboea, on which they were encamped, and come up on the straits from the south, destroying the fleet just as surely as the army could be destroyed at Thermopylae. 

And so the fleet waited. Three ships were stationed far in advance of the fleet, to provide early warning of the enemy’s approach. For the sailors in the rest of the force, however, there was little to do each day but pace nervously up and down the beach and wait for the war to begin. Brushing sweat out of their eyes, at night (the only time they could relax, for no navy in those island-hopping days could sail at night) they would no doubt be reminded of their forefathers, also encamped on a lonely beach next to their ships in the first great war between Greece and Asia. And so the days dragged by…
Until, suddenly, on the lookout island far ahead, a blaze of fire arced into the night sky! The barbarians were upon them! 

Sidonian warships, moving like ghosts in the darkness, had swooped down and pounced upon the Greek patrol ships. Sidonians had learned to navigate at night. One Greek vessel was captured immediately. Another was taken only after furious fighting – so much so that the Sidonians treated the wounds of one marine and praised him as a war hero. The final ship, an Athenian trireme, had escaped only to run aground on a nearby estuary. 

The fleet at Artemisium was in a panic. Men ran shouting back and forth down the shingle, scrambling aboard their ships, hurriedly shoving off and rowing hard to get into formation. Ships collided, oars were tangled, but at last the fleet was in position and ready to fight. 

But the barbarians did not appear. The Sidonian squadron had merely been on a reconnaissance mission. Despite its early successes, however, the Persian fleet was having difficulties of its own – Greek patrol ships watched three enemy vessels founder upon hidden reefs. Even so, the skittish Greek admirals withdrew halfway down Euboea’s western flank, to Chalcis, ready to either row back to attack or to flee to the Attic coast, depending on the enemy’s moves. They did not have long to wait. That night, a messenger ship came speeding down the channel, bearing word. The Great King’s army was approaching Thermopylae. The Mede was at the Hot Gates. 

~

They came on in their thousands, in their tens of thousands. In their millions. Scrambling over the rocky terrain, spilling out into flatlands along the Malian Gulf. As the nervous Greek defenders looked northwards, they could see nothing but a cloud of dust, vast beyond imagining, rising into the air, blotting out all the sky over Macedonia. The ground trembled beneath the footsteps of millions of feet. The might of all Asia, all the world’s warriors, had been gathered against Leonidas’s tiny force. The army of Xerxes, the King of Kings, had arrived.

While most of the defenders grew terrified at the approach of this horde, the mightiest army ever gathered, Leonidas greeted their arrival with typical Spartan cool. He ordered his entire bodyguard, 300 men, out in front of the Middle Gate, where the Spartans engaged in their typical pre-battle rituals: Combing their hair (worn long in the Spartan style), running, wrestling with each other. Persian scouts saw this, astonished at the brazenness of the Greeks, and scrambled back to report to the king. 
Later in the afternoon, a formal embassy from Xerxes approached the Gates. He promised to shower lands, gifts, and honor upon the Greeks, more than they had ever known – if they would only lay down their arms. The cities that surrendered, he promised, would be richer and more powerful than ever before, if they would only lay down their arms. Leonidas, he promised, would be made the warlord of all Greece, placed in the vanguard as he carried the banners of the King of Kings deep into the heart of Europe – if the Greeks would now lay down their arms. 

Sparta, and her region of Laconia, was famous for shortness and bluntness of speech. So much so, that more than 2500 years later, people can still offer each other laconic replies. So now did Leonidas answer the emissary with typical Spartan candor: Molon labe. Come and get them. 

His steely nonchalance was matched by that of his bodyguard. When another Persian threat pointed out that when they fired their bows, so many arrows would hiss through the air as to blot out the sun. “What excellent news! Then we’ll have our battle in the shade.” 

Heartening as such witticisms were, the Greeks still trembled. Off to their right, the Malian Gulf yawned, conspicuously empty of Greek and Persian warships. As long as the Greek fleet cowered down near Chalcis, Leonidas’s flank was vulnerable to Persian amphibious operations. And to their left, Leonidas could perhaps spot the campfires off the Phocians, holding the narrow goat trail to his rear. If the Persians came against them…

Night fell. No attack came. Runners were sent back to the Peloponnesian cities, desperate cries for reinforcements as soon as the religious festivals ended. But that was not for another week. The Greeks would have to hold. 

Dawn broke. Still no attack. All that day, the Greeks waited, braced for an assault that did not come. Straggling Persian units picked their way into the Great King’s camp, the imperial fleet moved somewhere out in the Aegean – but the Greeks still held the pass. 

The next two days were consumed by a massive storm – a Hellesponter. Every year, in August, sailors dreaded the storms that came down from the narrow straits of Europe and Asia for which they were named. Picking up speed and power all across the Black and Aegean Seas, they would slam into the Greek coast with a fury unmatched by anything save an Atlantic hurricane. For two days, the two armies crouched on the shore near the Hot Gates, watching the weather, scanning the eastern horizon and waited on news of their missing fleets. 

Dawn came on the fourth day after the arrival of the Persians, and far to the south at last Leonidas could glimpse squadrons of ships slowly emerging into view, bearing north. It was the Greek fleet (to the immense relief of the land forces), filtering up back to their stations at Artemisium, having rode out the storm in the safe harbors around Chalcis. Soon enough a trireme came speeding over to inform the army that the Persian fleet had not been so lucky. 

The barbarians, rushing down the coast of Magnesia, had been caught on the open sea by the 
Hellesponter, and hit with its full fury. Hundreds of ships and thousands of sailors had been lost. They began to limp back to harbor opposite Artemisium, abandoning the attempt. 

The allies braced themselves. Four days they had waited for an assault on their positions. The carnage off Magnesia would have been reported to the barbarian high command. The failure to outflank Thermopylae by sea would have been digested. A new plan of attack would be ordered, as the massive army began to quickly exhaust the available supplies of food in the area. On the fifth, then, all the multitudes of Asia would be hurled against them. It would be a battle like no other, one to test the courage of the Greeks more than ever before – not even the on the fields of Troy had they ever faced such a force as this! Leonidas and his Spartans sharpened their spears, polished their shields, and prepared for the dawn, and for what they had trained for all their lives.

~

The sun rose on the fifth day at Thermopylae, and at last the barbarians came on. It was the Medes who had been given the task of clearing the pass. Men who had lived all their lives fighting the narrow defiles of the Zagros, they were masters of mountain warfare. Armored in mail that glittered like the scales of a fish, their very name had long been a terror to the Greeks. Scrambling and swarming over the rocks, they howled and charged straight into the teeth of the phalanx. 

But their spears were short. Their shields were wicker. And this was the form of warfare which the Greeks, and the Spartans, had trained for all their lives.

They slammed into the Greek shield wall and attempted to batter it aside. Within moments of the impact, however, the Spartans had the measure of their foes. Despite the undoubted courage of the Medes, they never stood a chance.

Spears plunged in, punching through wicker, scalemail, and flesh with equal ease. Barbarian spears bounced off of thick bronze hoplons or heavy breastplates. Within minutes, Medan bodies lay thick on the ground. The Spartans, stabbing with long spears and slashing with their swords, had long been an object of horror to their fellow Greeks for their skill at “fighting close to their enemies.” Now the barbarian could share in that horror. 

All day the battle raged. Leonidas, with his characteristic cool efficiency, kept his forces fighting in rotation, so that fresh Greek soldiers were constantly on the battle line. After the initial rush of the Medes, he kept his Spartans in reserve to meet whatever tricks Xerxes might throw at them. 
By the afternoon, the Medes had been handily seen off by the Greeks. The Persians threw in reinforcements from Susa. They met with equal treatment. The Greeks still stood strong in the pass. As the shadows lengthened, however, the Susans fled headlong from the pass. No victory, however – trumpets rang out, and advancing up to the pass, their jeweled weaponry glittering, the exquisite colors of their robes shimmering, came the Immortals, the most dreaded of all the regiments of the Great King, as supreme among the Persians as the Spartans were among the Greeks. Grinning, eager for battle, Leonidas took his Spartans back to the front line to meet them – “and there the Lacedaemonians fought in a manner never to be forgotten.” 

Courage, tenacity, resolve – all these the Spartans displayed, and more. At a signal, they would turn and flee, stumbling headlong backwards, seeming to invite attack in their rear. As their eager enemies pursued, glad to have at last broken the stubborn defenders, another signal would sound, and as one the Spartans would turn, reform the phalanx in an instant, and crash into the disorganized Immortals, slaughtering many. Apart from the casualties, the tactic served to rub the Persians’ nose in the continued battle-worthiness of the Spartans, after a full day of battle and slaughter, amidst all the blood, filth, muck, gore, flies, and chattel in the pass. At last, Xerxes ordered the Immortals to withdraw, leaving the pass, and the day, to the Greeks. 

The next day was much the same. Barbarians plunged at the Greek lines, and died almost as quickly as they can come up. The Greeks held. Whips cracked, barbarians howled. Those in back cried, “Forward!” Those in front cried, “Back!” The Persians tried every trick they could think of. Their sun-blotting arrows make no impression on Greek shields. Their levies of untrained infantry prove no more than spear fodder for the disciplined allies. Another day of hard pounding. The Greeks stand triumphant, though, and that night, they allowed themselves to hope. Perhaps they can do it. Against the assembled might of Asia, with all the world’s warriors gathered against them, they can hold their gates. 

~

The allied fleet had had a much rougher time of it. 

Unpleasant surprise followed fast upon unpleasant surprise. The imperial fleet, storm-battered as it was, still far, far outnumbered the Greek. All day, squadron after squadron limped past the peninsula of Sciathos and assembled on the shore opposite Artemisium. Never before had the despairing Greek admirals seen the sea so black with shipping. More than 800 triremes were present, enough to outnumber the Greeks more than three to one. 

Late in the afternoon, about the time that the Immortals were confidently advancing into the Hot Gates, and while the Persians were staging an intimidatory review of their fleet opposite the Greek, the allies hauled an enemy deserter out of the sea. He gave them ominous news of a squadron of perhaps 200 Persian ships, sailing down the far side of the island of Euboea to take the Greek fleet in the rear. 
Themistocles, the Athenian politician, and commander of the Athenian squadron, argued that this presented an opportunity. Why not sail down and meet the barbarians head on? If enough ships from Attic patrols pursued the Persians, it might be the barbarians and not the Greeks who were caught in a vise. 

To cover the movement, that afternoon the Greeks rowed out opposite the Persians and challenged them to attack. The imperial fleet, eager to swamp the smaller Greek force and end the war then and there, swept down upon them. The Greeks, who were unable to match the Persian skill at seamanship, had developed a tactic to counter this, however. They formed themselves into a circle, their prows facing outwards, and then, as the Persians closed in on this, a phalanx at sea, the allies suddenly rowed out to attack.

Trireme fighting was a difficult thing. The primary weapon of a ship was its ram, on the prow. Three banks of oars propelled the ship (sails were only used in transit, never in battle) hard into its target, and then the rowers would back water and find a new target. Speed and maneuverability were therefore the most desired attributes for warships, and the better the crew, the faster and more nimble the ships were. Marine soldiers were sometimes used to board and capture enemy ships. The ships were low in the water, and few men could swim in those days. Sea battles were thus among the bloodiest of all ancient forms of warfare. 

In the close fighting that ensued after the Greek attack, however, the normal Persian advantages of speed and maneuverability were negated. In the close confines of the strait, with so many ships crammed in, there was little room to maneuver, and so solidity of construction and the skill of the marines were what mattered. Some thirty Persian ships were captured, and when at last sunset ended the fighting, the Greeks were astonished to learn that it was they and not the skilled Ionians or Phoenicians who held the honors of the engagement. Barbarian seamanship might be defeated after all.

Nightfall brought more good news. A second storm lashed the coast near Thermopylae. The Greeks, safe in their harbor at Artemisium, exulted as the wreckage from the battle surged with the storm into the Persian harbors. The barbarians panicked, imagining their doom had come. They were safe enough, however, in their harbors, and the Persian fleet rode out the storm in relative safety.

No such luck for the armada sent to trap the Greek fleet, however. Running blind down the Euboean coast, unfamiliar with the ground, the Persians were shattered in a notorious ship graveyard known as the Hollows. The force was lost almost to a ship. The next day, fifty-three more triremes from Athens reinforced the defenders, and in an evening hit and run raid on the Persian harbor yet more Persian ships were lost. 

The true test of the Greek admirals, however, was yet to come. In two days of battle, the Persians had yet to truly attempt to smash the linchpin of the Greek fleet, and batter their way to Thermopylae and open the path of the army. As the third day dawned, that test would come: The first full frontal assault by the Great King’s navy. 

Less mobile than its adversary, the Greek fleet plugged the straits and opted to wait for the Persians to come to them. Rowers, who had been practicing for only a few short months (or, in the case of the brave Plataeans, weeks), their knuckles whitening as they gripped their oars, crouched on the wooden benches, straining to hear above the groaning of timbers, the lapping of water, and the nervous talk of their comrades the sound of approaching battle. Soon enough, from the marines on deck, the cry went up: The barbarian was closing in. 

“Overwhelming numbers, gaudily painted figure-heads, arrogant yelling, savage warchants.” The sights and sounds of the Persian fleet as it advanced into the channel were terrifying. The impact was pulverizing. All day the Greeks fought desperately to hold the straits, “yelling out to one another that the barbarians should not break through, even as the Persians, looking to sweep the passage clear, sought to annihilate them.” The straits were held – barely. 

Many Greek ships had been sunk or captured. The Athenians had a full half of their ships put out of action. The allies could not afford such losses, and the prospects for holding the straits the next day, which would have been the eighth since the arrival of the Persians, looked bleak. The admirals, as their men ate on the beach that night, paced nervously up and down the gravel shingle, waiting for their daily briefing from the Spartan via their messenger galley. 

The liaison arrived that night in good time. The sailors were still at their suppers around their campfires. The ships were not ready for departure. One glimpse of Abronichus, the captain, changed all that, however, as he came stumbling through the surf in a panic. His face told everyone, before he spoke, that something terrible had happened at Thermopylae.

~

As night fell and the dust settled on the close of the second day of fighting before the pass, Xerxes was furious. Not only had these barbarous Greeks stood defiant against him for nearly a week now, but their resistance was throwing the entire campaign into doubt.

The royal tent, the seat of the Great King’s power and symbol of his majesty, required thousands of pounds of food to service all of its members daily. The army, too, was like a vast horde of locusts, consuming everything in its path. With the delay before Thermopylae, soldiers had been forced to travel farther and farther afield in an attempt to find food. The situation could not last much longer – already soldiers were beginning to tighten their belts, and how could they be expected to fight and die against the Greeks if they knew that their god-king went hungry? 

As always before, where Persian steel proved ineffective Persian gold found the solution. Persian messengers crisscrossed the countryside, offering enormous riches for anyone who could show a path behind the cursed Spartans. With many farmers already facing ruin and devastation from the presence of the army (a danger Alexander of Macedon had understood well. Why else had he panicked at the prospect of a Greek holding force keeping the imperial army in his lands any longer than necessary earlier that summer, at the vale of Tempe?), how long could they be expected to hold out?

Until that night, as it turned out. One Ephialtes, tempted by the lure of Persian gold and eager to see the army gone from his lands, came to the tent of Xerxes, with an incredible story: A narrow goat path stretched up and behind the fearsome Greek line. One that was lightly held. An opportunity at last now beckoned to outflank Leonidas and his pestilential little army. The Greek capacity for backstabbing at last came to the rescue of Persian high command. 

That very night, the Persians moved onto the lower trails of Mount Callidromus. No light troops for this journey. Leonidas had been wrong – Persian Immortals could and would scale this path. Born and bred in the Zagros, eager for revenge against the Spartans, they were the perfect force to make such a journey. 

Their commander was Hydarnes, son of one of the seven conspirators who had overthrown Bardiya all those years ago. His father had held a pass in the Zagros against a vast army of rebel Medes. Now his son was to do the opposite. For hours, they marched, winding through the moonlit trails slowly higher and higher into the mountains. At last, as dawn beckoned over the sea to the east, he came to a small clearing and stopped short: Hoplites! Greek hoplites raced about before him, pulling on armor, scrambling into formation. Hydarnes pulled up short: He wanted his rematch with the Spartans down at the Hot Gates, not here in the pass! Ephialtes, however, pointed out the defenders’ lack of the distinctive scarlet cloaks of the Spartans, and reassured his master that he was likely not facing Leonidas’s warriors. The Immortals drew their bows and fired a withering volley into the half-formed phalanx of the Phocians. The Phocians chaotically withdrew to a nearby hill and prepared to fight to the last – but the Immortals swept past them. Their goal was Thermopylae, not the Phocians. 

Leonidas was alerted to the danger by a Persian deserter and by a Phocian runner scrambling ahead of the Immortals. A choice presented itself to him. If he stayed and fought, the entire force might yet hold both ends of the pass for days yet – but would undoubtedly be wiped out to a man. If he ran, Persian cavalry would race after them on the road out of the Hot Gates, devastating the Greeks. The pass would be clear, five thousand Greek hoplites eliminated from the military balance sheet, and the triumph 
of the Great King would be complete. 

But for Spartans, there was a third option. Spartans had a greater master than any king: Law. Law was their master, and they feared it far more than they did the spears of Xerxes, according to Demaratus, the exiled Spartan king serving as his advisor. Leonidas sent the allies off, preparing to hold the pass with his 300 Spartans to the last. With him were the Thespians, refusing to abandon their allies, and the loyalist Thebans, who had nowhere else to go, as Thebes was doomed to medize once the pass fell. 
And so, as the sun rose on the last day over Thermopylae, some 1500 men fingered their notched and battered weapons, strapped on their armor one last time, and watched as their comrades marched away. The sound of marching feet faded, a slight breeze disturbed the morning air, and then the rearguard was left in silence. Nothing to disturb the peace of the morning – not the Immortals, even then descending the slopes of Callidromus to the west, not Xerxes, who was spending the morning pouring libations to Ahura Mazda for his victory. Leonidas at last broke the silence. “Eat a good breakfast men, for tonight we dine in the underworld.”

At last, at about nine in the morning, the barbarians came on. The colossal mass of the Persian army advanced over the slaughtered corpses of their fellows, over their tangled limbs and distended bellies, over the piles of viscera, straight at the tiny force now standing in the open before the Middle Gate. For a moment, they hold back, then the whips crack and the levies pour forward.
They are crushed against the spear wall by the thousands, but eventually the spears splinter, shatter, and break. They are held back the shields, but those are gradually ripped away. After hours of fighting, the Persian elite moves in for the kill, and the struggle that ensued rivals anything found in Homer, “screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath.” The Greeks fought with their swords, until those were shivered, then fought on with the hilts, with their hands, with their teeth. Leonidas fell early on, and a titanic struggle was fought over his body, which changed hands three times before at last the Spartans dragged it behind their lines. Then from behind, pouring out of the eastern gates, came the Immortals. The allies fell back for one desperate last stand on a nearby hillock. The Thebans were cut off by the great mass of barbarians, pushed against the wall of the pass. They never reached the hillock, but instead died there, cut off from their fellows. The Thespians and the Spartans fought on, covered in arrows, biting and scratching, the brutal battle only ending when every last Greek lay dead in the pass. Among the dead were two sons of Darius, and a brother. More than twenty thousand Persians had died in the three day battle, compared to only 2,000 or so Greeks. 

The Greek fleet, demoralized and near panic, fled that night before the Persian fleet could move in for the kill the following morning. Instead, the imperial sailors toured the battlefield and witnessed the triumph of the King of Kings.

In barely a week, he had turned the Greeks out of a nearly impregnable position and forced his way into Attica. Athens now lay naked before him. The Greeks were scattered, demoralized, and fleeing. One more good push would break their resistance and end the war, and so Xerxes did not pause to wait, but instead immediately sent his massive army into pursuit. The purifying flame of Ahura Mazda and the Truth would now purge barbaric Greece of the Lie. 

~

The Greek fleet raced down the coast. In a laughably desperate attempt to shake the pursuit, at each harbor they left messages inscribed to the Ionians, fellow Greeks, to desert the Persian cause – or at least not fight well. But no time to wait and see if these messages bore fruit. Across the seas to glide into the harbor at Piraeus the fleet went, there to evacuate Athens as the armies of the Great King rolled through Boeotia and into Attica. The Peloponnesians had fled across the Isthmus, to Corinth, and there began building a wall to keep out Xerxes, leaving Athens naked and exposed.

And so into the boats went the Athenians. Across the bay, 30 miles to Troezen, a Peloponnesian city that had generously opened its gates to the Athenians, went a good number of the population while the fleet fought and died at Artemisium. But many, far too many, had refused, had believed Xerxes would be halted at Thermopylae, and now there was no time. And so Athens was in a panic. Families boarded up their homes, trudged through the streets with their luggage, on overloaded handcarts and donkeys, down to the beaches and the docks. 

Athenian wives and matrons on the streets! The opportunities for misbehavior offered to Greek wives in times of crisis had played on Greek husbands’ minds since the Trojan War, of course. But in Athens, Athenian women lived secluded like no other group of women in Greece. They were “brought up under the most cramping restrictions, raised from childhood to see and hear as little as possible, and to ask only a minimum of questions.” Solon himself had decreed that any woman seen out walking the streets should be regarded as a prostitute. Athenian husbands had duly sequestered their women in separate quarters deep within their compounds, and so over the decades the only women who were considered respectable were those one never saw (this did wonders for the sex trade. Solon would be remembered a century later as a man who used state funding to subsidize brothels, on the impeccably egalitarian principle that whores should be available to all). 

And so it was that when Themistocles and his battered fleet limped into the Athenian harbor a few days after the disaster, he found Athens very much not evacuated. The citizenry held the delusional belief that a Peloponnesian army (the same one cheerfully walling themselves in over at the Isthmus at that very moment) would march to their rescue. Themistocles, however, knew that the Spartans, with one king and 300 of his bodyguard dead up in the pass, would countenance no such thing. 

All the while, as sobbing children were shepherded by their fathers through the shallows, and white-faced mothers stumbled in their wake, and vessels of every description plied the waters between Phalerum and the island of Salamis (the same Salamis whose conquest had provoked the reforms of Solon and the tyranny of Pisistratus), time was running out. Six days had passed since the fall of the Hot Gates. The crowds on the beach nervously looked back through deserted Athens for the first glint of metal in the hills, the sign of torches perhaps – the first signs of the approaching barbarian horde. No barbarians appeared – Xerxes had diverted his forces to sack the Oracle at Delphi – and that evening, Athens at last stood deserted.

The city was reconstituted across the narrow straits on the island of Salamis. Shantytowns sprang up around the grain stores on the island. Families daily looked northwards, where, on a clear day, one could just make out a single rock: the Acropolis of Corinth, where the allied armies where now awaiting the barbarian. And in the bay, most inspiring of all, stood more than 250 triremes – storm-battered and battle-scarred, to be sure, but unconquered and resolute. 

That resolution was severely shaken when the army of the King of Kings swept into Attica. Burning all in their path, they poured into deserted Athens. 

Not quite deserted, in fact. Remembering the words of the Oracle, several hundred defenders had barricaded themselves on the Acropolis, behind the “wooden wall” that they believed alone could save Athens. Persian archers advanced, lighting the wall ablaze with fire arrows. The defenders, however, held firm at the top of the ramp to the Acropolis. Growing impatient, eager to send word back to Susa that the stronghold of the Lie had been destroyed, Xerxes ordered the two sons of Hippias the tyrant forward to negotiate with the defenders. Their overtures were rejected and the assault was renewed.
This time, the Persians did not retreat, but stubbornly pressed the attack on the outnumbered defenders. Arrows darted back and forth, boulders crashed and rolled down from above, thrown by the defenders. The chaos of battle was general. But now again the heritage of the men from the Zagros mountains proved useful. The Immortals scaled the rear of the cliff of the Acropolis, and took the defenders in the rear. The Acropolis was stormed, and the defenders were massacred to a man. Then, the Persians put the complex to the torch. What they could not burn they demolished. The Acropolis, the most sacred site in Athens, the storehouse of all her treasures, her heritage and history, the link to her pass, was wiped from the face of the Earth in a matter of hours. 

The pillars of flame and smoke reached high into the sky, and continued long into the night. The horrified Athenians watched their city burn from Salamis. The navy of the Great King, now assured of a safe harbor since Athens had fallen, began to concentrate outside the straits, not needing the stars to guide them the night the Acropolis burned. Fire illuminated their way. 

Dawn came and found the Acropolis a smoking ruin. The Pisistratids, the sons of Hippias, returned at last from exile after more than twenty years, climbed to the top and picked their way across the summit. They came to the most sacred place in the city: The site of the primal olive tree, the gift of Athena. The shrine around it had been flattened. The blackened stump was buried in rubble. The exiles slowly removed the rubble from around it.

And sprouting from the stump was a long green shoot rising to meet the sun. 

The Thermopylae/Artemisium campaign