Hubris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


End of Part One.