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.
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