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.
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| The Thermopylae/Artemisium campaign |
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