Persian Fire

8

NEMESIS

Sucker Punch

And so it came to Salamis.

“You will be the ruin of many a mother’s son.” More menacingly than ever now, with the allied fleet moored off the island, and the Persians at Phalerum, the ambiguities of the oracle were weighing on people’s minds. But it was not only among the Greek high command that Apollo’s teasing words were being debated: the Persians too, ever assiduous in their intelligence work, would surely have learned of the prophecy. “He who revealed truth to my ancestors”:¹ so Darius himself had described the archer god. Yet, respectful of Apollo though the Persians had often shown themselves, their faith in the pronouncements of Delphi was hardly, of course, as instinctive as that of their enemies. There must have been many on the Great King’s staff, puzzling over the phrase “divine Salamis,” who found themselves debating its precise authorship. Perhaps someone aside from the god had breathed a word in the Pythia’s ear. A priest, for instance? Delphi was the center of a great web of international contacts, after all, and Apollo’s servants, with their profound knowledge of current affairs, were as well qualified as anyone to forecast the likely progress of the war.

They would certainly not have forgotten the fate of the last Greek attempt to defeat an imperial armada. Fourteen years previously, some 350 Ionian triremes, outnumbered almost two to one by the Persian fleet, had rowed out to battle off the Milesian island of Lade and been annihilated. Just as Miletus had been the heart of resistance to the Persians then, so Athens was now. And the only potential equivalent to Lade off Attica was, of course, Salamis. Whether Persian strategists believed the Delphic prophecy to have derived from the heavens or from mere mortal calculations, it would certainly have buttressed them in their belief that the hand of a god infinitely greater than Apollo was guiding their affairs. The great wheels of time, turning as they did at the command of he who dwelt beyond them, Ahura Mazda, were clearly grinding with a quite merciless precision. Once already a fractious alliance of Greek squadrons, when menaced by a much larger Persian fleet, had disintegrated amid treachery and back-stabbing—and now, with a mysterious but no doubt divinely sanctioned symmetry, history appeared destined to repeat itself.

To be sure, there were some among Xerxes’ entourage who urged their master not to depend upon this. Demaratus, for instance, with a hearty appreciation of what his countrymen would least like the Great King to do, had advocated the launching of an amphibious operation directly against Lacedaemon—“for you need hardly worry that the Spartans, if the flames of war are consuming their homeland, will bother themselves coming to the rescue of anyone else in Greece.”² True enough; but so depleted had storms and enemy action left the imperial navy that the detachment of even a small task force from the main body of the fleet might leave the Greeks a match for either. The proposal was therefore vetoed. So too—although after more soul-searching—was the advice of the formidable Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus. When the Great King, descending in state upon Phalerum, summoned his admirals to a council of war, hers was a lone voice raised in warning against the plan to force a second Lade. Battle, she insisted, was a pointless risk. Athens was captured, and autumn was closing in. Better by far, then, to maintain a standoff, and leave the Greek squadrons either to starve or to “scatter and sail for their homes.”³ A shrewd analysis, as Xerxes himself was well aware; but time was running out, and he could not afford to adopt it. For the Great King to pass a winter on the remote frontiers of the West was clearly out of the question: a devastated Athens was no place from which to administer the world. Having graced the expedition against Europe with his royal presence, it was now imperative for him to finish the war before the close of the campaigning season. Only a thumping victory while the weather held would do.

How gratifying, then, that the imperial spy chiefs could report to their royal master that the enemy, squabbling and snarling in their camp, were behaving true to form. Just as hatreds, doubts and fears had once riven the Ionian squadrons off Lade, so now, across the straits off Salamis, a Greek fleet appeared to be on the verge of a similar implosion. The proofs of defeatism could hardly be doubted. Already, on the day of the burning of the Acropolis, several crews had stampeded in panic down to their boats and tried to raise their sails ready for flight. That same evening, it was reported, the high command itself had fragmented yet again into rival factions, Peloponnesians against Athenians and their supporters. The insults bandied had been the talk of the whole Greek camp. Adeimantus, it was said, had sneered at Themistocles as a “refugee,” and warned him, when he spoke out of turn, that “athletes who start a race before the signal is given are whipped.” “Yes,” Themistocles was claimed to have retorted bitterly, “and those who are left behind never win the crown.”⁴ Only by threatening to withdraw the entire Athenian fleet from the battle line and sail at once for Italy, and permanent exile, had he ultimately had his way. But it was impossible to say for how long. What if the Peloponnesians, panicking at the prospect of being bottled up in the straits, finally opted to call his bluff? What options then for the Athenians and their fleet?

Persian intelligence chiefs, with more than sixty years’ experience of exploiting Greek fractiousness to draw upon, knew precisely how best to find out. In the wake of the conference at Phalerum, with the Great King’s wish to conjure up a second Lade now clear in his servants’ minds, a contingent of Persian troops was ordered to take the road to the Isthmus. Since the corniche beyond Megara had been destroyed, and the Isthmus itself solidly fortified, the expedition had little prospect of storming the gates of the Peloponnese—but that was not its mission. Leaving Athens, rounding Mount Aigaleos, following the Sacred Way toward Eleusis, the soldiers marched along the southern reaches of the Attic coast. Their weapons glittered brightly. Their war songs could be heard for miles. Their feet, thirty thousand pairs of them, pounded the road. A great cloud of dust, rising in their wake, drifted on the breeze, and was borne across the straits toward Salamis.

Where the reaction was—just as Persian strategists had anticipated that it would be—one of consternation. Mutinous whisperings began to sweep through the Peloponnesian contingents yet again. Then, with afternoon fading into evening, and anxious sailors already besieging their captains with demands to sail for the Isthmus, the Great King gave instructions that the screws be tightened further. Squadrons of the imperial fleet, “bearing down on Salamis, and taking up their stations with a perfect show of leisure,” began to patrol directly off the island—menacing the escape routes.⁵ As the setting sun blazed its reflection across the sea from Salamis to the Isthmus, many Peloponnesians appeared on the verge of insurrection.

For there they were, stranded on Salamis, obliged to fight in defence of Athenian territory, and certain, if they were defeated, to find themselves trapped and blockaded on an island. And all the while their own country stood defenceless, even as the barbarians, marching through the night, were advancing directly on the Peloponnese.⁶

This, since the very earliest days of contact between the two peoples, was how the Persians had always played cat and mouse with the Greeks. News of the wrangling on Salamis, brought to the Great King by his agents, confirmed him in his assurance that he had gauged the character of his enemies to perfection. Now, with the whole Greek fleet apparently at daggers drawn, it was time to bait the trap that he had laid with such cunning. It was almost sunset. The squadrons on patrol off Salamis were ordered back to base.⁷ This withdrawal, performed in full view of the allied lookouts, left the escape route to the Isthmus very obviously—and very temptingly—open. As the Persian admiralty had discovered at Artemisium, Greek sailors were hardly reluctant to conduct a hurried nocturnal retreat if a sudden crisis appeared to demand it. The Peloponnesians, not knowing when the opportunity to bolt from their rat hole might present itself again, would surely feel themselves facing just such a crisis that evening. If so—and irrespective of whether the Athenians agreed to sail with them—they might very well take their chance and flee the straits. Just as had happened at Lade, a Greek fleet would then disintegrate into fragments.

But Xerxes, weighing the odds that evening, still had to know for sure. The ambush could be attempted only once. It was not enough merely to foster division; active treachery was needed, too. The ideal would be a double agent within the ranks of the Greek high command. Fortunate, then, that the Persian intelligence chiefs had long and fruitful experience of recruiting top-level moles. It was, after all, as the royal spymasters would hardly have needed to point out, the bribing of the Samian captains that had doomed the Ionian battle line at Lade. With that delectable precedent before them, it beggars belief that the Great King’s agents, armed with gold and the promise of royal patronage, would not have been active in the allied camp on Salamis. And if so—who might their target have been? The Persians, in the war of nerves that they were waging with such proficiency against the various Greek divisions, would surely have been tempted to launch a two-pronged attack. Even as they menaced the Peloponnesians, pressuring them to flee, they would have been alert to the anxieties and resentments of those who faced being left in the lurch: the Aeginetans, the Megarians—and the Athenians.

“The man who co-operates with me, on him will I bestow rich rewards.”⁸ This, baldly stated, had always been the manifesto of the Persian monarchy. What rewards, then, for the man who had it within his power to betray the whole Greek fleet, and win the war, and the West itself, for the Great King? Splendid and glorious beyond compare, no doubt. Little matter that Themistocles was the native of what for years had been a demon-racked stronghold of the Lie—not now that fire, having consumed the Acropolis, had purged Athens of evil. If they would only prostrate themselves with due contrition before the royal presence, the Athenians might certainly hope to be graced with a pardon—and perhaps even, if they gave good service, with marks of the Great King’s favor. No man in the world, after all, had the power to be more gracious, more generous, more beneficent. “The rewards that I bestow—they are in proportion to the help that I am given.”⁹

We are nowhere openly told of contacts between Themistocles and Persian agents. The murk that veils treachery and espionage is often impenetrable—and all the more so at a remove of two and a half thousand years. What we do know, however, is that shortly after the Persian squadrons had returned from patrol back to Phalerum, and while the various Greek commanders, digesting the day’s alarming events, were reported to be at loggerheads with one another, a tiny boat was slipping out from the dark ranks of the Athenian fleet and making its way across the straits. On board was the trusted tutor of Themistocles’ sons, a slave by the name of Sicinnus. It is possible, since his name derived from Phrygia, a satrapy to the east of Lydia, that he spoke some Persian.¹⁰ It is also possible that his arrival on the mainland did not come as a total surprise to those who met him—for no sooner had Sicinnus set foot on dry land than he was being hurried into the presence of the Persian high command. Certainly, the message that he had to deliver was of the utmost urgency: the Greeks, Sicinnus reported, were planning a getaway that very night. “Only block their escape,” came the advice from Themistocles, “and you will have a perfect chance of success.” Meanwhile, the Athenian admiral himself, revolted by his allies’ pusillanimity, was described by his slave as being “in full sympathy with the king, and earnestly longing for a Persian victory.”¹¹ The imperial espionage chiefs, if they had indeed been fishing for a communication from Themistocles, could hardly have hoped to land better news.

A dazzling coup indeed. The Great King, who had no doubt been alerted to the prospect of an intelligence breakthrough coming that evening, was informed of it at once. Contingency plans, evidently prepared in the expectation of just such an opportunity, were put smoothly into action. The fleet was ordered to ready itself for battle. Rising from their suppers, oarsmen hurried to their benches, marines to their stations on deck. “Crew cheered crew, all the way down the length of the battle-line,”¹² and then, rank after rank, pulling out from Phalerum into the waiting darkness, they took to sea. No more cheering now—for the slightest sound might alert the enemy. Instead, with only the measured beating of their oars to mark their progress, the various squadrons glided through the night to the positions allotted them by their master. One, comprising the two hundred ships of the Egyptians, had been ordered to circle the entire south coast of Salamis, aiming for the narrow bottleneck of the westernmost strait, there to stopper it, in case the Greeks should attempt to escape that way. Others, serrying themselves in ranks of three, cruised into position off the eastern channel, out of which, so their captains had assured them, the panicking Peloponnesians would be bolting at any minute. Just beyond the exit, where it led out to the open sea, there was an island, sacred to Pan, known to the Athenians as Psyttaleia; here, setting the seal on the ruthless efficiency of his preparations, the Great King stationed a garrison of four hundred infantry. Come the midnight breakout, these troops would be “directly in the passage of the expected action, ready for all the men and shattered ships that would soon be swept onto the island’s rocks.”¹³ Nothing had been left to chance. Not a single Greek was to be permitted to escape the Great King’s deadly trap.

Meanwhile, Sicinnus, the slave whose message had led to all of these preparations, had returned to Themistocles. His courage had been astonishing. He would surely have expected to be kept for further interrogation; indeed, it is hard to imagine why he was released, unless it was to carry a message from the Persian spy chiefs back to his master.¹⁴ Nor is it hard to guess what the contents of this communication might have been: the Great King’s final terms; the offer of an amnesty, perhaps, a chance for the Athenians to pick up their families before they sailed off into exile; or the assurance of a privileged future in Attica as favored servants of the King of Kings. Whatever the precise details, Themistocles must surely have breathed a sigh of relief when he read them, for he would have known that he had preserved his daughters from the slave market, his sons from the gelding knife, his fellow citizens from obliteration. Even were the Greek fleet to be wiped out in the morning, the Athenians, at least, would have a claim to the Great King’s mercy.

But there was a second prospect, infinitely more glittering and glorious, that had also been opened up by Sicinnus’ return. The Greek admirals, even as the imperial battle squadrons were embarking upon their secret maneuvers, remained in urgent session, “still quarrelling furiously,” it is said.¹⁵ At some point toward midnight, Themistocles—who had evidently been having a busy time of it, slipping in and out of the meeting—rose to his feet and made his excuses yet again. Stepping outside, he found waiting for him, cloaked in the shadows, an old enemy. Aristeides, the “Just,” summoned back from exile along with Xanthippus and all the other victims of ostracism, had smoothly resumed his place at the very heart of the democracy’s affairs. Returning that same evening from a mission to Aegina, he had seen, as he slipped back toward Salamis, the ominous silhouettes of the Persian fleet fanning out across the gulf to plug the exits from the straits. Themistocles, to whom this news naturally came as little surprise, confessed himself delighted, and told Aristeides that it was all his doing—“for our allies had to be forced into making a stand that they would otherwise have shrunk from, had it been left to themselves.” Then, embracing his old adversary, he urged Aristeides to take the news in to the other admirals, “for if I report it, they will think that I am making it up.”¹⁶

All of which, of course, was to cast the Peloponnesians as hapless stooges. No wonder that the Athenians, in the years to come, would enjoy harping on the story. Even so, there is something strange about it. Aristeides, although he did indeed inform the Greek commanders that their fleet was surrounded, neglected to mention, it appears, that this was courtesy of a trick pulled by one of their own colleagues. Understandably, it might be thought. Yet it is curious that the Spartans and the other Peloponnesians, even once the full details of Themistocles’ stratagem had become public knowledge, betrayed not the slightest hint of resentment toward the man who was supposed to have outsmarted them so comprehensively, but, on the contrary, only lauded him for his cleverness and foresight. Nor, despite being ambushed, as we are told, by Aristeides’ revelation, does it seem that the Greek admirals were thrown into a panic by it. Just the opposite—their dispositions for the morning appeared to reflect the minutest forward planning. Almost as though the news of the Persian blockade had come as no great surprise to them, either. Almost as though they had been complicit in Themistocles’ scheme from the start.

And perhaps they had been. Details of the Salamis campaign only ever come into focus as though through a swirling fog, and then they are either lost, or are so confused that they can be interpreted in any number of ways. Frustrating, of course—and yet there is, in this very murk, a tantalizing glimpse of the contours of an otherwise hidden war, a shadowy counterpoint to all the din and crash and shove of battle. The Persians could legitimately claim to be the masters of the dirty trick, so it should be no surprise that their spy chiefs, arriving in Attica, brought with them the easy presumption of superiority that came naturally to members of the world’s ruling class. Yet, just as the Great King’s admirals should have been warned against any complacency by the performance of the Greeks at Artemisium, so his intelligence agents should similarly have been on their guard. The allies had already demonstrated their proficiency at feints and disinformation. At Salamis, there can be no question that Themistocles, displaying his customary pitiless grasp of psychology, had fed the Persian agents not merely what their master wanted but what he desperately needed to believe was true. Even at his most eager, however, the Great King would surely have discounted the possibility of Athenian treachery, had it not been for the Peloponnesian admirals’ very public flaunting of their own demoralization. Whether they were indeed a squabbling, incompetent rabble with no appetite for fighting in the straits, despite all the lessons they had learned at Artemisium, or rather coconspirators in a devastating sting, we can never know for sure. What is certain, however, is that the Peloponnesian admirals, if they truly had been desperate to make their escape that night, adjusted to the news that they were blockaded inside the straits with remarkable equanimity. Dawn rose on a day as fateful as any in human history—and found every squadron in the Greek fleet primed and nerved for battle.

And over the straits, men imagined, there glimmered a sudden sense of something uncanny, an almost palpable heightening of intensity upon the early morning light. To the Athenian marines, before they took their places on deck, Themistocles delivered an address that would long be remembered, urging them to consider “all that was best in human nature and affairs, and all that was worst—and to choose the former.”¹⁷ Yet not even these words, it may be, raised as many hairs upon the back of men’s necks as did the assurance—one that seems suddenly to have swept the entire fleet—that the sons of gods who in ancient times had been the guardians of the rocks and groves and temples of Greece were present among them: so that men would later speak of seeing phantoms and even ghostly serpents gliding on the surface of the water, and of hearing unearthly battle cries echoing around the straits. That long-dead heroes would rise up from their graves to repel the barbarian invader was a conviction that had been sedulously promoted by the Greek high command. Indeed, it is probable that Aristeides, when he ran the gauntlet of the Persian blockade, had been sailing back with the relics of some Aeginetan heroes, sprung from Zeus himself. There could certainly have been no doubting the urgency of such a mission—and a measure of its success, perhaps, is the fact that the Peloponnesians, near mutinous the evening before, prepared for battle with as much conviction as anyone.

And, to be sure, there had been something eerie in the air for days. Even Greeks in the Great King’s train appear to have sensed that the heavens might be turning against their master. Walking through the deserted fields beyond Eleusis on the day before the battle, Demaratus had seen a cloud of dust billowing up from the coastal road. This could only have been kicked up by the Persian division heading for the Isthmus, but an Athenian collaborator, strolling with Demaratus, had immediately identified the faint singing he could hear coming from the Sacred Way as the “iacche”: the chant of joy raised by worshippers as they journeyed every September to Eleusis. This was impossible, of course, even though it was indeed the time of year for the annual pilgrimage—unless the iacche were being performed by a supernatural procession, in celebration of that great mystery of Eleusis, the return to life of what had appeared to be utterly and irrevocably dead. This, to the Athenian, as he trod the burned soil of his homeland, had proved a most unsettling thought. “I fear,” he said at length, as he gazed towards the dust cloud, “that this presages some great disaster for the king’s forces.” And Demaratus, alarmed though he was by this judgment, had not disputed it. “Only keep quiet,” he urged his companion. “For if your words should reach the ears of the king, then you will be sure to lose your head.”¹⁸

Sensible advice—for Xerxes, in his determination to force a victory, was certainly in no mood to tolerate defeatism. That the failure to wipe out the Greek fleet at Artemisium had been due to a lack of backbone on the part of his servants appeared to him self-evident. Concerned to rectify this, he had issued his captains an uncompromising warning that “should the Greeks succeed in evading the terrible fate planned for them, and slip out through the blockade, then all those responsible would lose their heads.”¹⁹ Conversely, those who fought well would have the supreme honor of having their exploits personally noted by their master—an incentive that had been sorely lacking off Artemisium. So it was that even as the Greek oarsmen were hurrying to their benches, the Great King, followed by a mighty train of generals, officials and flunkeys, was riding out in his chariot past the southern spur of Mount Aigaleos, and round on to “the rocky brow / Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis.” Here, above a temple of Heracles, he ordered his Nisaean horses reined in. As he descended, first onto a golden footstool and then—for the royal platform heels could hardly be permitted to touch bare earth—along a hurriedly unrolled carpet, servants were busy erecting a throne. The Great King had chosen his vantage spot well. Below him, becoming clearer by the minute, there stretched an unrivaled panorama: of Salamis, the straits, the gulf beyond them, and the distant Isthmus. But what, on the waters themselves, did Xerxes see that fateful morning, as the sun rose behind him, and the fateful moment of battle, long awaited, long maneuvered for, dawned at last?

Not what he had been hoping to see, that much at least is certain: not the spectacle of the Greek fleet shattered in his ambush, spars bobbing in the open sea, corpses twisted and heaped upon the rocks of Psyttaleia. The Great King would have been notified before his arrival above Salamis that the anticipated breakout by the Peloponnesians had failed to occur; even so, the spectacle of the Greek fleet drawn up in the narrows below him would still have come as a sore disappointment. And his own squadrons—where were they as dawn broke? A momentous question: for just as the allied strategy was dependent upon fighting a battle in the straits, so the Great King’s admirals had all along been committed to facing the Greeks on the open sea. The resulting stalemate had already endured for three weeks. Only a conviction that their enemy was indeed a hapless rabble would ever have persuaded the commanders of the imperial fleet to break it, and advance with their squadrons into the channel. A decision as fateful as any in the history of warfare; for upon it rested the future course not merely of the battle, not merely of the war, but of Europe and of Western civilization itself. Infuriatingly, we are not told when or why it was made—only that battle, when it was joined, did indeed take place where the Persians had been most desperate not to fight it: within the straits of Salamis.

Historians have generally presumed that the Persians infiltrated these under cover of darkness. Yet this seems improbable.²⁰ The instructions given to the Great King’s captains by their master had been perfectly clear: “guard the exits leading out to the sounding sea.”²¹ It is unlikely, with the threat of decapitation hanging over them, that there had been much enthusiasm that night for bold displays of initiative. The signal failure of the Greeks to come blundering out into the ambush that had been so carefully laid for them would only have confirmed the imperial admirals in their resolve not to budge from their station; for their oarsmen, rowing hard just to prevent their vessels from drifting and fouling the line, had hardly been given the ideal night’s preparation for a battle. It may be that the Great King’s dawn arrival above Salamis prompted some captains, eager for royal favor, to order their ships forward into the channel, and that the whole battle line then lurched and followed them. It is more probable, however, that the sight of its master served only to confirm the fleet in its discipline. While individual captains, no matter how desperately they peered from the prows of their triremes, could make out little of what was happening in the straits ahead of them, they could also see how well placed the Great King was to do it for them. And who better than Xerxes to make the final judgment? Who better to give the nod to a gamble on which so much had come to rest?

It seems likeliest, then, that the order to engage the enemy in the straits was given to the Persian fleet shortly after sunrise, and that it came directly from the King of Kings himself. We do not know how the signal was broadcast, nor whether Xerxes was able to communicate to his admirals a sudden and thrilling spectacle, clearly visible to him from his vantage point above the straits: the apparent disintegration of the whole Greek battle line. Some fifty triremes, veering off in the direction of Eleusis, looked to be in headlong flight, making for that narrow channel off the northwest of the island where, evidently unbeknown to their commander, the Egyptians were lurking. So it had happened at Lade, and so it seemed to be happening now—just as the traitorous Athenian admiral had said it would. Time, then, to close the twin jaws of the trap. Time to finish off Greek resistance for good. Time to enter the straits.

A fearsome din of trumpets, amplified by the closeness of the hills on either shore, and the great mass of the Persian battle fleet, breasting the island of Psyttaleia, rounding the southern spur of Salamis, began to quicken its oar strokes. Phoenicians on the right wing, Ionians on the left, Cilicians, Carians and other contingents in the center, they still, during these first minutes of their advance, had no clear view of the enemy, for the angle of the channel precluded it, and spray and the mists of an early autumn dawn would have veiled the waters. But then, rising from ahead of them as the front ranks closed in on the Greek positions, they heard singing, and the paean soared to such a pitch that “a high echo rolled back in answer from the island crags.”²² Hardly the sound of men in panicked retreat—but there could be no turning back now for the Great King’s fleet, not even if certain captains in the front ranks of the battle line felt a sudden lurching in their stomachs, and a presentiment clammy like cold sweat across their brows that it was they who were sailing into the ambush. Already, stretching far behind them, an immense mass of shipping could be seen, crowding the channel, bobbing on the oar-churned waters, as the various squadrons sought to maneuver themselves into position, struggling not to foul one another in the narrowness of the straits. Hugging the mainland, where the shore was reassuringly thronged with their own troops, the Persian captains could hardly doubt now, as they looked toward Salamis, that the Great King had been well and truly conned. The Greek triremes, far from fleeing at their approach, were marshaled in a great battle line of their own along the bays and spurs of the island, from the Athenians on the northernmost wing to the Aeginetans in the south; and the ram of every ship was pointed directly at the Persian fleet.

Nevertheless, in the last, stomach-knotting moments before battle was finally joined, the imperial admirals must still have hoped that the enemy might prove a rabble: for the Greek warships, as though in trepidation, kept backing ever closer to the shore. But then, just when it seemed as though they would run themselves aground, a single ship came darting out of the ranks of retreating triremes. Men would later claim that those on board it had been stung by the words of a female apparition, a phantom who had materialized suddenly before the Greek line and asked, in ringing scorn, “Madmen, how much further do you propose to back off?”²³ Now the crew gave their answer: pulling hard on their oars, powering their vessel so that it sped across the open waters which still lay between the two battle lines, maneuvering it so that the bronze of its ram, glinting as it sliced through the sea, was aimed at the stern of a stray Persian ship. The rattling of a drove of arrows on the deck, then a crash and a splintering of wood: the first contact of the battle had been made. There was no clean kill, however, for the oars of the two triremes quickly became entangled, so that the vessels were locked together. Seeing this, captains of other ships brought their craft skimming forward in support of their comrades. Soon all were on the move, and the Greeks, as they advanced “with discipline and in perfect order,”²⁴ sang nevertheless with the joy and frenzy of the killing that was to come.

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

The greatest glamour of all attached itself to certain trireme aces. Most celebrated of these was an Athenian, Ameinias, from the village of Pallene. In the shock of the battle’s opening, he dared to attack the flagship of the Phoenician fleet, a towering vessel commanded by one of the Great King’s own brothers. The royal admiral, naturally infuriated by the impudence of his assailant, ordered missiles to be rained down upon the Athenians while he himself led a boarding party—but he was skewered by Ameinias as he made the jump, and pitched overboard. Altogether more ambiguous was the performance of a second of the Great King’s commanders to be attacked by the same Athenian captain: none other than Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus. Seeing Ameinias bearing down upon her, and panicking, she found her escape blocked by the trireme of one of her own vassals—and so resorted to the startling expedient of ramming it herself. Ameinias, presuming that the queen had deserted the Persian cause, duly abandoned his pursuit of her. And so it was that Artemisia made her escape.

And the Great King, seated upon the heights above the battle, saw it all, and was hugely impressed. As mistaken, in his own way, as Ameinias had been, he imagined that the ship sunk by Artemisia had been Greek; for the ferocity of the fighting was such that his aides found it hard to distinguish friend from foe. Yet, while it might certainly prove a challenge on occasion for the royal secretaries, busily scribbling down examples of particular prowess, to transcribe all the details with total accuracy, they and their master could have had few illusions as to the broader progress of the battle. “My men have turned into women,” Xerxes is said to have cried, watching as Artemisia’s warship pulled away from the wreckage of its victim, “and my women into men.”²⁵ His bitterness was understandable—for the Great King, far more clearly than any of his captains embroiled in the actual fighting, could take in the full sweep of the catastrophe unfolding in the straits. He could see how his crack Phoenician squadrons, left leaderless by the death of their admiral, and hemmed in by the Athenians, were being progressively driven back onto the shore, or else into open flight. He could mark the chaos that was the result of his squadrons’ attempts to withdraw, as rank after rank of them began to lose formation, cramping one another in the narrows, “their bronze rams smashing the sides of their neighbors, shearing off whole banks of oars.”²⁶ He could observe in mounting disbelief how a deadly wedge of Greek ships, massing inward, was splitting his fleet in two, leaving the Phoenicians on the right wing of the battle line trapped like tuna fish in a net, there to be speared or battered or hacked to death. And he could reflect, perhaps, that the order to engage the Greeks had been his own.

That he had blundered in giving it would have been evident to him even before the battle had begun. The triremes which he had observed heading north up the channel toward Eleusis, and which the Greeks among his aides would no doubt have identified as Corinthian, had not, once they reached the northeastern cape of Salamis, continued their flight. On the contrary: after scanning the straits which lay between Eleusis and Salamis, the Corinthians had veered round, lowered their sails and masts, and headed back to the battle line. Clearly, far from panicking, they had been engaged on a reconnaissance mission, making certain that the Egyptian squadron, which had been sent around the island during the night, was not now advancing in the Greek fleet’s rear. Which, of course, it was not. The Egyptian squadron, as Xerxes himself was painfully aware, was still eight miles from a battle in which its extra numbers might well have proved crucial, lurking by the westernmost straits, waiting for a Greek escape bid that was never going to come.

Unsurprisingly, the Great King, in his vexation, was testy in the extreme with any survivors of the fiasco. When a group of bedraggled Phoenician captains, attempting to excuse the loss of their ships, sought to lay the blame for it on the treachery of other contingents in the fleet, he had them decapitated on the spot. Naturally, it was out of the question for the Great King himself to accept any responsibility for the catastrophe; and the Phoenicians, now that their strength had been shattered upon the rocks below his throne, could serve him well enough as scapegoats. Yet Xerxes, as he followed the course of the debacle from his command post, must have felt an increasingly embittered consciousness that his own stratagems, devised with such care and with such confidence of victory, had been turned against him. Midday turned to afternoon, and the Persians began to be swept out of the straits. Perhaps half of those triremes that had entered the deadly channel survived to leave it. Behind them, harrying them as they lurched and limped desperately back to Phalerum, came the Greeks, pursuing them across those same open waters on which, the day before, the Great King had planned to stage his ambush and secure his mastery of Greece.

Perhaps the cruelest cut of all came toward sunset. By now, excepting the “lamentations and screams that echoed across the sea” and the bobbing of Persian corpses as they snarled up the oars of the predatory victors, the straits had been cleared of the Great King’s men. There was only one further deed of slaughter left for the Greeks to perform before the coming of “black-eyed night.”²⁷ The four hundred troops stationed by the Great King on Psyttaleia the previous evening had been left stranded at their post, for there had been no opportunity, amid all the panic and desperation of the imperial navy’s rout, to secure their evacuation. Now, having been ordered to serve as the executioners of any Greeks who might be swept onto the rocks, the unfortunate Persians found that they themselves had become the objects of an execution squad. Slingers, archers and heavily armored marines, debouching from allied warships, won bloody payback for the cornering of the Spartans at Thermopylae. Led by Aristeides, the Greeks “dashed over their enemies like a roaring wave, their voices raised in a single cry, hacking at the limbs of the wretched men until the life had been butchered out of them every last one.”²⁸ The rocks were left slippery after the slaughter, and Aristeides’ men, slithering over the corpses, hacked at them with their knives, harvesting their rings and bracelets, or else waded through the red surge of the shallows, scavenging from the dead that they found drifting there. And the sea for miles was filled with the timbers of countless warships, and they slowly drifted and were dispersed upon the swell of the darkening gulf.

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

So Near, So Far

In 484 BC, while Xerxes, back from suppressing the revolt in Egypt, was drawing up his first plans for the conquest of the West, the Mesopotamians had unexpectedly launched an insurrection of their own. Decades had passed since Darius, impaling the man he had contemptuously arraigned as “Nidintu-Bel,” had disposed of the last native “King of Babylon, King of Lands.” These titles, imbued with all the ancient glamour of the city between the two rivers, had been among the more splendid honorifics that the usurper had bequeathed his son. Not, of course—as Darius himself had well appreciated—that titles alone a King of Babylon could make. The Persian grip on Mesopotamia, during the long years of his reign, had become increasingly a matter of securing real estate. Vast swaths of it, confiscated from the hapless natives, had ended up as the personal property of the King of Kings. Other holdings, parceled out to favored servants, had been granted on the understanding that they be settled with colonies of reservists from the distant reaches of the empire. As a result, the mudflats of Mesopotamia, like the huge metropolis that they fed, had begun to fill with immigrants. Walking along the course of a palm-tree-fringed canal, one might pass through whole villages of aliens: Egyptian archers, Lydian cavalrymen, axe-wielding Saka. This, under the rule of the King of Kings, was to be the future of the world: a universal melting pot.

When rebellion erupted on the banks of the Euphrates, Xerxes had therefore moved speedily to crush it. An expedition to the West could hardly have been risked while Babylon, the largest and richest city in the Great King’s dominions, was in ferment. The great capital still held a crucial significance in the Persian order of things. It was not only bureaucrats in the imperial treasury who could testify to that. Just as both Cyrus and Darius had discovered in the ancient city a mirror held up to all their proudest pretensions, so too Xerxes, with his invasion of Europe, was making manifest a vision of global monarchy that had first been dreamed of long previously in Babylon—the original cosmopolis. The camp of the Great King’s forces, thronged with soldiers from every corner of the world, brought to Attica more than a touch of far-distant Mesopotamia. The Athenians too, and the Peloponnesians, and all the Greeks, reaching even to the islands of the far West, were expected soon to add their own numbers to the mix. Once they had been conquered. Once they had only been conquered.

But how to secure that submission was now, after Salamis, a sudden and unanticipated headache. Mardonius, in the council of war that followed the battle, cheerfully dismissed the whole debacle 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 was hardly a defeat for us.”²⁹ Ringingly stated—and an expression of the chauvinism that came naturally to every Persian aristocrat. To the Great King, too, of course—for Xerxes was hardly the man to dispute his countrymen’s bravery and prowess. All the same, he had marched on Greece as more than just the King of Persia: he was, literally, “King of Lands.” The rout of the various squadrons he had summoned to his banner had stung his pride. It was all very well for Mardonius to sneer at the ragbag character of the imperial navy—but that was precisely what had made it, in the opinion of the Great King, such an effective embodiment of his global power.

Nor, despite the mauling that it had received, could Xerxes initially bring himself to accept that his reach might have been reduced as a consequence of the defeat. No sooner had his fleet been swept out of the straits than he was attempting to impose his mastery in a fresh and suitably imperious manner: by erecting 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 it was the Greek archers, not the straits themselves, that ultimately posed the insuperable obstacle to the attempt. The imperial engineers, harassed by predatory warships, provided easy pickings for enemy fire, until the Great King, bowing to the inevitable, was forced reluctantly 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 mile-wide stretch of water.

And by further grim tidings, too. Reports were starting to come in from Sicily, a theater crucial to the Great King’s hopes of extending his power ever further westward, of a second Greek victory.*¹⁸ 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, a city in north Sicily, 150,000 Carthaginians lay butchered; the survivors had all been enslaved; their general, surprised while making a sacrifice, had immolated himself in the flames. For the Great King, as he pondered his next move in an increasingly autumnal Athens, 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. What had previously been represented as a campaign of universal conquest appeared to have shrunk to the status of an awkward border war.

And as such, of course, to have become hardly worthy of the Great King’s personal attention. Mardonius, recognizing this, 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 off the job.”³⁰ Such a commission was precisely what Mardonius had been angling after for years; and the Great King, reluctant to pass a second summer on campaign in Greece, no longer had any reason to oppose his cousin’s strategy. The scale and flamboyance that had characterized the expedition under his own leadership would be scandalously inappropriate once he was no longer at its head. As the task force’s new commander, Mardonius would be judged by only one measure: whether he succeeded in bringing the new satrapy to heel. Against the Spartans and their allies it was quality, not quantity, that would count. The lessons of Thermopylae, bruising though they were, had been well learned. As the Great King, having left a still-smoking Attica behind him, began leading his troops northward, through Boeotia and then into Thessaly, so Mardonius, given a free hand by his cousin, began to cherry-pick the elite.

Top of his wish list was cavalry: mobile, heavily armored, and, in the case of the Saka, able to fire a rain of arrows at any ponderous lines of infantry they might happen to be galloping past. The virtual helplessness of Greek hoplites against such opponents had been demonstrated repeatedly over previous decades and there seemed little reason to doubt that it soon would be again. Nor was Mardonius alone in this opinion. What neutrals made of his prospects can be gauged from the fact that the Great King, despite his failure to subdue Greece, completed a leisurely and unscathed retreat.³¹ To be sure, the allies spun any number of far-fetched anecdotes—claiming that his army had been reduced to eating grass, that it had been virtually wiped out after crashing through an ice-covered river, that Xerxes himself had crossed the Hellespont huddled alone in a fishing boat—but these were all lies. Any tribe or city that dared to betray its oath of submission could expect to meet with an immediate and blistering response. Most opted to play things safe. Thrace, Macedonia and Thessaly all stayed loyal to the King of Kings. So, too, did Thebes and central Greece. Even the imperial fleet, although certainly down, was far from out. The carnage of Salamis notwithstanding, it still outnumbered the allied navy. There appeared every prospect, come the summer, that Mardonius would indeed “finish off the job.”

Or 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. After all, it had not been on the Athenian’s recommendation that the Great King had chosen to fight in the straits—a detail with which Themistocles appears to have made considerable hay. Only days after Salamis, in a startling display of cheek, he had sent Sicinnus back over the straits with a second message for the Persians: 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 allied fleet.³² Mind-boggling claims, it might have been thought—but the spy chiefs had not, as they must have been itching to do, put Sicinnus to a long and agonizing death. Instead, just as on the eve of Salamis, they had opted to send the slave back to his master. We do not know what message they gave him to carry, but there must surely have been one: an amplification of the Great King’s peace terms, no doubt. The Athenian people, still buoyed by their victory at Salamis, could hardly have been expected to accept them—but that was not the point. Just as Themistocles was obviously shadowboxing, so too was the Persian high command. Each side was indicating to the other their appreciation of a guilty secret: that the moment might yet come when it would be in their mutual interests for Athens to be granted a privileged surrender.

But why would Themistocles, at the moment of his greatest triumph, be prepared to send such a treasonous message? The answer, for those skilled in the dark art of interpreting Greek diplomatic maneuvers, had not been long in coming. Several weeks after Sicinnus’ second mission, the Spartans had sent an embassy of their own to the Persian camp. Arriving in Thessaly, where the Great King was preparing to depart for the Hellespont, they had bluntly demanded reparations for the death of Leonidas. The Great King, bursting into laughter, had suddenly fallen silent, as though making private calculations. “You will get all the reparations you deserve,” he had said at last, gesturing to his cousin, “from Mardonius here.”³³ Witty enough—but Xerxes had surely been mulling over more than a menacing bon mot. He would have recognized that behind the Spartans’ seemingly brutish demand there was an intriguing hint: that they just might, if offered a hefty enough bribe, be prepared to tolerate the status quo. A comical notion, of course: the Great King did not negotiate with anyone. Nevertheless, it was, in its implications, full of interest. It would, after all, oblige the Spartans to wash their hands of the whole of central Greece—including Attica. Well might the Great King have paused and furrowed his brow.

And well might the Spartans, their embassy rebuffed, have loudly insisted that they had only sent it in the first place because they had been instructed to do so by Apollo. The Athenians, and everyone else, were happy to take their word for it. None of the Greeks who had triumphed at Salamis had any interest in destabilizing the alliance if they could possibly help it. Even as the campaigning season drew to a close amid autumnal storms, the afterglow of the famous victory still lit the lengthening evenings. To celebrate their achievement, the various Greek squadrons, returned 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 which had served the alliance as its headquarters throughout the summer, a great jamboree of mutual backslapping was held. Sacrifices were offered to the gods, and prizes given. The sense of relief was immense. “A black cloud,” as Themistocles put it, “has been swept away from off the sea.”³⁴

But not, unfortunately from off the land—with implications for the alliance that might prove ominous, as the shrewder Athenians and Spartans had already begun to appreciate. The Isthmus, 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, the goddess of love. 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 had 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 of 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 imminent danger of fissuring.

For from nowhere else could the opportunities and the dilemmas presented by the Isthmus be more readily appreciated. To the south stretched the Peloponnese—now, thanks in large part 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, even as they began returning across the straits from Salamis to their ruined homeland, should have kept a nervous eye on the road to Thessaly. Resentful of the monstrous unfairness of geography, and hardly able to restrain themselves from blaming it 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 that the Athenians, attempting to shame them into action, harped upon their role as the victors of Salamis, the more their partners, snug and smug behind their wall, dug in their heels.

The result, bubbling away beneath the facade of amity presented at the Isthmus, was a toxic brew of resentment and spite. The Peloponnesians, infuriated by Athenian cockiness, made sure that the prize for civic achievement was awarded to Aegina. Then, rather than endure the spectacle of Themistocles strutting around wearing the crown for individual achievement, they split the vote among nominees from their own cities, so that no one won the prize at all. The Athenian response was to start flinging around slanders like mud—including, choicest of all, an accusation that the Corinthians at Salamis had headed north up the channel, not to confront the Egyptians, but because they were fleeing like cowards. Well might the delegates at the Isthmus have reveled in their sense of deliverance from the barbarian menace. Pettiness, envy, backbiting: it was just like old times.

But the Spartans at least, tempted though they may have been to join in the fun, had recognized it as a self-indulgence that their city could ill afford. Their security had to come ahead of even the pleasure to be had from baiting Themistocles. The Athenian fleet, as the Spartan high command was naggingly aware, remained the key to the security of the Peloponnese. Only if Mardonius could somehow win Athens round to the Great King’s cause would he have a hope of breaching the Isthmus. So that the Spartans, displaying the coarse pragmatism that invariably marked their understanding of human nature, opted not to insult the Athenian admiral, but rather to stroke and pet his ego.

Themistocles, his pride still bruised by the small-minded humiliations inflicted on him at the Isthmus, was duly invited to Lacedaemon. There, having crossed the frontier of that ordinarily crabbed and suspicious land, he was greeted with a veritable orgy of flattery. The crown that had been denied him at the Isthmus was now awarded to him at Sparta—“in recognition of his ability and cleverness.”³⁵ He was also presented with a splendid chariot. When he left, he was escorted as far as Tegea by the three hundred members of the Hippeis. No foreigner had previously been given such an honor; but it is likely that the bodyguard was granted to Themistocles for a much more pointed reason as well. His route home took him past Caryae, the city that had been darkly suspected of being in the pay of the barbarians all summer: evidently, the Caryaeans were still in a medizing mood. Beyond their borders there lurked in turn a much more threatening beast: Argos, the dog that had so far signally failed to bark. But it might yet: for the Argives were reported to be in direct contact with Mardonius, and to have promised him “that they would do all they could to stop the Spartans from marching to war.”³⁶ Clearly, then, the Spartans themselves, by bestowing on Themistocles his three hundred escorts, were aiming to remind him not only of the sacrifice that they had made at Thermopylae but of the dangers that still menaced them in their own backyard. By the time that the Hippeis, arriving at Tegea, came to salute their guest and bid him godspeed, the point would have been rammed well and truly home: the Spartans had not the slightest intention of sending an army north of the Isthmus.

Which was hardly, from Themistocles’ own point of view, the ideal boost to his career. Reports of the honors paid to their admiral did not greatly console the Athenian people as they shivered and went hungry amid the blackened ruins of their city. Nor did the suspicion that their fleet, even as it stood guard over the stay-at-home Peloponnesians, was offering minimal protection to the farms and families of the men who were crewing it. Anger and resentment began to grow in the squatter camps that now dotted the city. The hoplite class, whose loathing of Themistocles had only been fueled by his crowing after Salamis, could suddenly smell his blood. Already, over the winter, there had been a concentrated effort to spin the slaughter of the Persian garrison on Psyttaleia as the key turning point of the battle, with Aristeides as its star. Now, as winter began to turn to spring, and the campaigning season of 479 BC drew near, the maneuvering against the hero of Salamis turned increasingly vicious. Voters, as had been proved time and again in the brief history of the democracy, might have lethally short memories. Come the February elections, Themistocles’ reward for having saved his city was to be removed from the command of his precious fleet.³⁷ The admiralship was awarded instead to Xanthippus, the adopted Alcmaeonid. Command of the land forces went to—who else?—Aristeides.

The impact of these changes on Athenian policy was immediate and far reaching. Energies that had previously been devoted to the fleet were now diverted toward preparations for a second Marathon. In spring, when the allied squadrons assembled at Aegina, the Athenians were noticeable by their absence. The Spartans, who had signaled their own enthusiasm for a naval campaign by sending royalty, in the not altogether inspiring person of King Leotychides, to command it, found the Athenians obdurate: no ships would be contributed to the allied fleet until the Spartans had committed manpower to an expedition north of the Isthmus. The Spartans, calling the Athenians’ bluff, 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 that he had no hope of winning his satrapy unless he could lure the Spartans north of the Isthmus, or somehow secure the Athenians’ fleet, skulked in Thessaly. The Athenians, trapped impotently in the middle, had little option but to skulk as well. And so the deadlock continued, all the way into May.

It was Mardonius who finally moved to break it. Wearying of secret diplomacy, yet reluctant to jeopardize its potential fruits, he decided to place the Great King’s terms openly on the table before advancing south from Thessaly. Having ostentatiously consulted a slew of Greek oracles in his effort to reassure the Athenians of his good intentions, he sent as his ambassador that unctuous bet-hedger, King Alexander of Macedon. As the brother-in-law of a Persian general and an official “Friend and Benefactor of the Athenian People,” the smooth-talking monarch must have struck Mardonius as the ideal go-between; and Alexander certainly had a rare talent for making a plausible pitch. 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 in opposition to 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 the 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?”³⁸

Cunningly framed as Mardonius’ offer was to play upon all their darkest suspicions of Sparta, the Athenians must have felt in their hearts that they would be perfectly justified in accepting such generous terms. They had fought longer than the people of any other city in Greece, and at a far greater cost—and yet the Peloponnesians, as Alexander had suavely pointed out, appeared content to abandon them to their fate. Of course, the Athenians themselves, before permitting Alexander to deliver the Persian peace offer, had made sure that there was a high-ranking delegation from Sparta on hand to hear it as well; but still the Spartans, when their turn came to address the Assembly, opted to prevaricate. An offer to take in refugees was not remotely what the Athenian people had been hoping to hear, nor high-minded lectures on the perfidious character of barbarians. “You know that there is neither truth nor honor in anything they say.”³⁹ An aphorism that the Athenian people might well have flung back in the Spartans’ faces.

And perhaps once they would have done. Perhaps once they would have chosen to forsake all their dreams of independence, accept that there might indeed be submission with honor, bow their necks to the King of Kings. But much had changed. 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 now to barter it 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 told Alexander. “We are already well aware of it. But even so, such is our love of liberty, that we will never surrender.”⁴⁰ Brave words indeed: for the Athenian people, having uttered them, once again faced the prospect of their city’s annihilation.

And the Spartan ambassadors? It is hard to believe that they were not moved by such defiance. Even as they left Athens, the squatter camps were starting to empty, as evacuees, for the second time in ten months, began pushing their handcarts down to the beaches. Not that admiration of Athenian spirit necessarily implied any sense of obligation on the part of the Spartans themselves—and yet the ambassadors, on their return, would surely have warned the ephors that the crisis brewing in Attica did indeed imperil Sparta. Stirringly though it had been proclaimed, the Athenians’ love of liberty might yet be pushed to breaking point. Only their illusion that the Spartans were pledged to cross the Isthmus in their defense was serving to keep the talk of appeasement at bay. “Get your army into the field as soon as you can.” Such had been the parting words of Aristeides. “Quickly, before Mardonius appears in our country, you must join with us, and confront him in Boeotia.”⁴¹

So it was that when the barbarian, sweeping southward into Attica, occupied a deserted Athens for the second time, Peloponnesians everywhere felt a sudden tremor of alarm. King Leotychides, still cruising off Delos with the allied fleet, 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 to distant Sardis the news of Athens’ fall. Meanwhile, in Lacedaemon, the ephors had been brought an even more unsettling communication: Mardonius, it was reported, 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, surely—despite the fact that his fellow citizens, cornered and despairing as they were, had promptly stoned the would-be medizer. Lycidas’ wife and children too, surrounded by the women camped out on Salamis, had been similarly pulped to death. Athenian defiance, it appeared, was turning pathological. The more savage it became, and the more suspicious, the greater the risk that it might buckle.

By now it was June. The Spartans, inevitably, were celebrating yet another festival, this time the Hyacinthia, a great spectacle of songs and feasting held in honor of a dead lover of Apollo. Once again, just as had happened in the dark days before Marathon, an Athenian embassy arrived in Lacedaemon desperate for military assistance, only to find everyone having a party.⁴² Behind the scenes, however, wheels were already turning. Ten days the Athenian ambassadors were kept in Sparta. Ten days they cooled their heels. On the eleventh day, their patience finally cracked. They delivered an explicit ultimatum: either the Spartans abandoned their festivities and went to war or the Athenians would be obliged to accept Mardonius’ terms. The ephors, far from panicking, or working themselves up into a fit of righteous indignation, merely smiled, then revealed all. Why, they exclaimed blandly, had the ambassadors not heard? The Spartan army was already on the march.

A true coup de théâtre—and the Athenians were far from the only ones to whom it came as a bolt from the blue. The Argives, having vowed to obstruct any Spartan expedition before it could reach the Isthmus, suddenly woke to find themselves bypassed. “The whole fighting force of Lacedaemon is on the march,” they reported frantically to Mardonius, “and we are powerless to stop it.”⁴³ Mardonius himself, still camped out in Attica, promptly abandoned his attempts to woo the Athenians and put what remained of their city, “walls, houses, temples and all,” to the torch.⁴⁴ Then, determined to lure the Peloponnesians as far north from the Isthmus as he could, he withdrew from Attica into Boeotia. Here, having been guided along the safest paths by enthusiastic Theban liaison officers, he finally halted. He was now in prime cavalry country. The perfect spot to build his camp. The perfect spot to fight a battle.

Four miles south of Thebes, on the bank of the broadest river in Boeotia, the Asopus, Mardonius duly ordered the construction of a palisade. Again he had chosen his position well. Beyond the river there stretched the gently undulating territory of Thebes’ old enemy, Plataea. Beyond the fields of the Plataeans there rose foothills, and beyond them, the heights of a mountain with extensive spurs and ridges, Cithaeron. The allies, if they wished to bring Mardonius to battle, would first have to cross a host of barriers—and cross them knowing that defeat would mean their certain annihilation. There could be no easy retreat back to the Isthmus from Plataea. Nor, equally, for Mardonius, if he lost, back to Thessaly. If the allies came, then the moment of truth would come as well.

The Dorian Spear

Long delayed it may have been, but there were no half measures about the advance of the Peloponnesians from their bunk hole when it came. Making good their demolition work of the previous summer, engineers had already repaired the land route to Megara, and it was just as well that they had not botched their responsibility, for the Isthmus road, shuddering under thousands of tramping feet, had never before had to bear the weight of such an army. Indeed, a Greek expeditionary force to rival it had not been seen since the fabled times of the Trojan War. From Corinth to Mycenae, from Tegea to Troezen, an immense coalition of Peloponnesians had answered the Spartans’ call. Naturally, the Spartans themselves, five thousand of them, almost three-quarters of their city’s total manpower, provided the task force with its most menacing spear thrust. With five thousand further hoplites recruited from the outlying townships of Lacedaemon, and thousands of helots rounded up to serve as orderlies and light infantry, it was almost certainly the largest army that Sparta had ever committed to the field.⁴⁵

Even cowards had been mobilized; or rather—which was not necessarily the same thing—men whom the Spartans had labeled cowards. One of these, an unfortunate veteran by the name of Aristodemus, was particularly grateful to have been given a chance to redeem his honor, for this was not the first time that he had marched to war against the barbarians. Less than a year previously, he had been one of the three hundred who had accompanied Leonidas to Thermopylae. Arriving at the pass, he and a fellow Spartan had fallen sick with an eye inflammation, and the two men had been dismissed and ordered to recuperate. Come the fateful morning of their king’s last stand, however, Aristodemus’ partner, rising from his sickbed, had instructed a helot to lead him, blind as he still was, into the thick of the fighting. Aristodemus, preferring to obey Leonidas’ direct orders, had invalided himself home. There, on his arrival, he had been greeted with revulsion. His fellow citizens had branded him “trembler”: the single most shameful word in the Spartan lexicon.

Harshly unfair—but it was only to be expected, in a city where courage was reckoned the greatest virtue, that the slightest hint of cowardice in a citizen would doom him to ignominy. The life of a “trembler” in Sparta was signally wretched. Patches sewn onto his cloak would alert the whole city to his disgrace. Whether sitting down at his mess table or attempting to join in with 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 cut of all, his daughters, if he had any, would find it impossible to secure a husband: a typically Spartan eugenicist measure designed to prevent the taint of cowardice from being inherited by future generations. Unable to endure these humiliations, the only other survivor of Thermopylae, a liaison officer sent by Leonidas on a mission to Thessaly, had ended up hanging himself. “For after all, when cowardice results in such shame, it is only to be expected that death be preferred to a life of dishonor and obloquy.”⁴⁶

And for Aristodemus, the man who had spurned the chance to die in battle beside his king, the long months following his return from Thermopylae had been particularly bitter. The shadow cast by Leonidas’ end had proved impossible to escape. Mourning in Lacedaemon was not, as it was in, say, Athens, the responsibility only of women. Every man too, whether ephor or helot, was obliged to wail and beat his brow when a king descended to the underworld. To other Greeks, indeed, Spartan lamentations appeared so excessive as to verge on the barbarian. Officially, the obsequies that accompanied a royal funeral lasted for ten days, but Leonidas was no easy ghost to lay to rest. His mutilated corpse, left as food for kites and dogs in a far-distant pass, had never been recovered.*¹⁹ Adding to the pathos of his fate, and a constant reminder to the Spartan people of the loss they had sustained, was the fact that his son, the new king, was just a boy. Cleombrotus, Leonidas’ younger brother, had been serving ably as regent but he, too, during the course of the winter, had died. When the Spartans, then, having resolved to give battle at last, marched out from the Isthmus, they did so under the generalship of a young man barely in his twenties: Pausanias, the son of Cleombrotus. Since he was, as the Regent of Sparta, also the supreme commander of the allied forces, this was a startling weight of responsibility for one so young to bear—but Pausanias himself, whose qualities as a general never entirely outpaced his conceit, shouldered it with insouciance. Even so, the brute fact of their general’s youth must have kept Thermopylae, and Leonidas’ death there, all the more firmly in the Spartans’ minds. Marching to liberate Greece, they were also after revenge. And Aristodemus especially—for it was due to the barbarians that he wore his trembler’s patchwork cloak.

And there were others, too, of course, who wanted payback—men whose losses had been infinitely greater than the Spartans’. At Eleusis, thirty-five miles along the coastal road from the Isthmus, Pausanias waited while Aristeides and eight thousand other Athenians ferried themselves across from Salamis. Also joining the expedition were six hundred exiles from a second city occupied and torched by the invaders: Plataea. Now at last, a year after fleeing their homeland, the cherished moment of return had finally arrived. It was time for the Plataeans, and for everyone else committed to meeting with the barbarian, to take the road to Boeotia.

Heading northward, the allies duly left Eleusis. Soon enough, dusty ridges of limestone and slopes of mangy brushwood began to obstruct any backward glances at the sea. As the advance progressed, so the way ahead of the tramping hoplites turned increasingly rugged, the valleys lonely, the fir-dotted slopes of Mount Cithaeron even more so, the haunt not of men but of wild beasts, deer and bears and lions—and sometimes, for he loved all such deserted spots, of the great god Pan himself. In happier times, the Boeotians had been accustomed to celebrate an eerie festival, wheeling colossal idols of wood from the banks of the Asopus, hauling them all the way up the side of the mountain, and then, at the very summit, incinerating them, so that the conflagration might be seen for miles around, a beacon lit for the gods. The Plataeans, surely, passing beneath the austere heights of Mount Cithaeron, would have pressed ahead now with particular eagerness, for they were just hours away from their city; and the road, after winding past spurs and jagged crags, suddenly opened out, giving them, away to their left, a view at last of their beloved homeland.

But not as they had left it. Their fields were overgrown and their city a blackened shell. Trees for miles around had been leveled. Stripped and raw, the timbers now formed the barbarians’ palisade. Meanwhile, the barbarians themselves, their numbers appearing to slur together in the shimmering heat, swarmed across the plain, and 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 have been few among the Greeks who did not feel a tremor of consternation at such a sight; and Pausanias himself, who was arrogant but certainly not foolhardy, had not the slightest intention of crashing down directly to confront the enemy on ground so favorable to their cavalry. Instead, sternly ordering his men to keep to the foothills, he then maneuvered them into a position roughly opposite Mardonius’ forces—not only above but some seven miles to the east of Plataea. For the city’s six hundred hoplites, the return to what remained of their homes was evidently going to be delayed.

Yet, though Pausanias was proving himself to be cautious, it is unlikely that his first sight of the Persian forces had prompted anything like the alarm that Mardonius must have experienced when he looked up from the banks of the Asopus and saw the full scale of the army snaking across the foothills above him. His agents had certainly brought him some reports of the allied preparations. For days, the mood among the high command had been jittery. At a dinner party hosted by a prominent Theban collaborator, for instance, a Persian officer had turned to his Greek neighbor and whispered that of all the guests around them, and of all the troops camped beside the river, “you will see, in a short time, only a very few left alive.”⁴⁷ Mardonius himself would never have admitted to such defeatism; but neither, not even at his most pessimistic, would he have imagined the ever-fractious allies capable of coordinating a task force such as was now being brought to bear against him on the lower slopes of Mount Cithaeron. On and on, throughout the day, the Greeks descended from the pass, taking up their positions, until, by the time that they were finally embedded, Mardonius found that he was staring at the largest hoplite army ever assembled in a single place: almost forty thousand men.⁴⁸

Against these fearsome numbers, he himself could muster perhaps twice as many again; but he would have had no illusions that his infantry, only lightly armed and armored, could hope to overrun the Greek positions.⁴⁹ Instead, only two options appeared to give him any real prospect of victory. The first was somehow to lure the allies down to the plain, and then to trust that their various contingents, unaccustomed as they were to fighting side by side, would blunder apart and prove easy meat for his cavalry. The second was to sow divisions among the enemy ranks with a strategic deployment of bribes, and then to wait for the endemic rivalries that afflicted all Greek coalitions to take hold. Horsemen and spies: the deadliest weapons, as they had ever been, in the Persian armory.

And Mardonius, looking to coordinate their deployment, decided that his first move should be to resume the war of nerves that he had been waging all summer against the Athenians. The Spartans, it would soon emerge, had been right to suspect a canker of medizm in the refugee camps on Salamis. The murdered Lycidas had not been alone in his pro-Persian views. Other prominent citizens, ruined by the war, resentful of the democracy, hungering to restore their lost fortunes, had also been plotting; and not merely appeasement, but naked treachery. Mardonius, who had lost contact with these collaborators following his withdrawal from Attica, would surely have looked to reestablish communications with them as a matter of urgency; simultaneously, hoping to concentrate the traitors’ minds even as he dispatched agents to infiltrate their camp, he ordered his cavalry to launch a hit-and-run raid on the allied lines.

A cunningly crafted pincer attack—except that it did not go entirely according to plan. First, far from demoralizing the Greeks, the cavalry raid served only to boost their 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 from under him and ended up dead and exposed on a wagon, being paraded before the gawking allied troops. Shortly afterward, the treachery in the Athenian camp was uncovered by Aristeides, who, deciding that he could hardly ignore the plot but not wishing to stick his nose too far into the ordure, contented himself with arresting only the eight most prominent conspirators.⁵⁰ Two of these fled; the other six, ordered to redeem themselves in the coming battle, were released without charge. Aristeides, who had himself been labeled a Mede-lover when ostracized, knew perfectly well what it was to be given a second chance. There was no more talk of treachery, from that moment on, in the Athenian camp.

Yet these setbacks, rather than crippling Mardonius’ strategy, served ironically to give it a second wind. Pausanias, his spirits much boosted, felt sufficiently emboldened to take up a new position, much closer to the Asopus, and therefore to the enemy. Mardonius, hoping to catch the Greeks on open ground, immediately began to hurry along the opposite bank, shadowing them, waiting for a chance to strike. It never came. Pausanias, even as he inched onto the plain, had been sure to move sideways into the territory of Plataea, and there was not a spur along the route he took, not a stretch of elevated ground, but the Plataeans were able to guide the allies along it. By the time that their dispositions had been completed, the Spartans were dug in along a broken ridge on the right of the battle line, and the Athenians were installed on a hillock on the left. The remaining contingents, led by men whose clout could hardly compete with that of Pausanias or Aristeides when it came to securing the safest billets, had to be content with occupying the lower—and therefore more exposed—ground in the center. Mardonius, eyeing up his opportunities from the opposite side of the Asopus, must have felt a quickening of excitement. He may not yet have been in a position to launch a frontal attack—for the fields of Plataea, even at their flattest, still undulated menacingly—but if he could just tempt Pausanias to continue his advance across the river, the Persian cavalry would have him. Mardonius was a practiced Greek-fighter; he knew that the instinct of a hoplite army was always to seek out battle. So when the heavens themselves, speaking through incontrovertible omens, warned the Persian high command not to go on the attack, Mardonius was more than content to listen. Time appeared to be on the side of a policy of wait-and-see: barely five miles away, in Thebes, “food was in abundance, including fodder for the animals”⁵¹ and Mardonius had reserves of treasure enough to flood the whole Greek camp with gold. He did as the gods had advised: he kept to the north bank; he did not cross the river.

But nor did Pausanias. Instead, blunting all Mardonius’ expectations of how a Greek general would behave, he kept grimly to his position. The Spartans clung to their ridge, the Athenians to their hill, everyone else to the fields in between. Although squabbles would periodically erupt between the various contingents—and particularly when the Athenians started throwing their weight around—the feuding never escalated so as to threaten the alliance itself with disintegration. Indeed, far from fracturing, the Greek battle line grew ever stronger: for as first a day passed, and then another, and ultimately a whole week, reinforcements kept trickling in. Eventually, on the eighth day of the standoff, Mardonius lost his patience. His cavalry were ordered to make a raid on the Cithaeron passes. A huge wagon train, loaded down with provisions from the Peloponnese, was successfully ambushed. The drovers and mules alike were massacred. Then, leaving the corpses to litter the foothills where they would be clearly visible to the Greeks down on the plain, the Persians, “once they were sated of slaughter,” drove the wagons back in triumph to their camp.⁵²

Now it was Mardonius’ turn to be emboldened. His cavalry, buoyed by their victory, began to launch raids directly on the enemy positions across the Asopus. Closing in on the Greeks whenever they ventured to approach the river, the wheeling horsemen would leave the shallows a havoc of drifting, feathered corpses, and the allied lines increasingly thirsty. A few hours of this, and the Asopus was abandoned entirely to the Persian cavalry. The only source of water left to the Greeks was now a single spring. As the sun blazed in the pitiless Boeotian sky, jostling lines of parched men began to crowd around the well, armed with buckets, jars and wine sacks. For the Athenians, in particular, the task of keeping themselves supplied with water was grueling: the spring, which rose just behind the Spartans’ encampment, lay a full three-mile trudge away from their own. Yet at least it ensured that they could hold to their hill—and a strong defensive position, with the Persian hit-and-run tactics now being deployed directly along the whole Greek line, was one that the Athenians were reluctant to abandon. A day passed, however, and then a second; and the immobile Athenian infantry, stung and tormented by the ceaseless buzzing of the enemy, began to have second thoughts. Indeed, the bolder the Persians showed themselves, the more infuriated their stationary targets became: “for none of the Greeks could get to grips with the mounted archers.”⁵³ Still the galloping, wheeling horsemen continued to test the limits of their own mobility until, on the third day of their harassing of the allied line, a contingent of Persians succeeded in outflanking it altogether. Rounding the ridge of broken hills on which the Spartans had embedded themselves, the cavalry erupted into the phalanx’s rear. Ahead of them, directly in their path, lay the precious—and, it seems, unguarded—spring. Quickly, before the Greek reserves could arrive to stop them, the horsemen smashed the wells, choked the spring itself, and then withdrew in triumph. A hugely enterprising blow—and one fatal, of course, to all Pausanias’ hopes of maintaining his forward line.

At a hurriedly convened council of war, the Greeks weighed the unappetizing options that now lay before them. To abandon their positions by daylight would clearly be tantamount to suicide: the Persian cavalry would cut them to ribbons. Yet to postpone a withdrawal would be just as disastrous: thirsty already, the Greeks were also starting to go hungry, as the barbarians, raiding the Cithaeron passes, continued their policy of plundering the allied food convoys. The obvious solution, despite all the monstrous risks of confusion that it would entail, was a retreat by night. Pausanias therefore instructed the various allied contingents that, come darkness, they were to withdraw two miles to a new line directly east of Plataea. Here, everyone agreed, their position would be infinitely stronger. The foothills would offer them excellent protection against cavalry. They would be well placed to secure the passes over Cithaeron. They would have plentiful supplies of water. Indeed, there was only one real drawback: the Greeks had to reach their new line first.

And that was no simple matter. In the center, where the soldiers of a whole host of different cities, stumbling through the night, were obliged to pick their way over thoroughly unfamiliar terrain, the retreat soon veered badly off course. Thirsty, hungry and nervous as they were, it was hardly surprising, perhaps, that they should have missed the appointed rendezvous and ended up instead over a mile to the west, almost directly before the ruins of Plataea, where “they scattered and pitched their tents at random.”⁵⁴ Meanwhile, on the wings, the confusion was worse still. As the sky began to lighten, neither the Athenians nor, at the opposite end of the battle line, the Lacedaemonians and Tegeans had even begun their retreat. The three contingents, mandated to serve as rear guards, seem to have found themselves, due to the general chaos and the delay of their allies’ withdrawal, stranded at their outposts throughout the night. And now birds were starting to sing along the river, and the enemy camped out on the opposite bank to stir.

The Athenians panicked. A horseman was sent galloping over the fields to the Spartan camp, to demand what was going on. Arriving there, he found Pausanias and his staff officers engaged in a furious discussion. What precisely was being debated would later be a matter of much controversy. Some would claim that Pausanias was facing direct insubordination: a Spartan officer by the name of Amompharetus was said to have insisted that retreat was no better than cowardice, and refused to obey his general’s orders. A second tradition, however, commemorated the same officer as one of the three Spartans who fought with most distinction at Plataea: hardly an award that suggests a record of mutiny. Far from disobeying Pausanias’ orders, then, it appears likeliest that Amompharetus had been demanding for his men the honor of a uniquely perilous mission: for with the sun about to rise, and the withdrawal of the Lacedaemonians and Tegeans still to begin, a division was desperately needed to hold the ridge until as late as possible. So it was that Amompharetus and his men, even as Pausanias gave the order for their Spartan comrades and the Athenians to start their 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 toward their camp.

Carefully, the Persian scouts reconnoitered all the deserted allied positions. News of the enemy withdrawal, brought back to Mardonius where he waited with the infantry, was soon confirmed for him, as the sun rose, by the dramatic evidence of his own eyes. The fragmentation of the Greek battle line, the task that he had set himself from the start of the campaign, had been spectacularly achieved—and without his once having had to fight the enemy on their own terms. Most gratifyingly of all, the Spartans, the supposedly invincible, iron-souled Spartans, were still in open 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 Mardonius knew that he would never have a better chance to tear out the heart of the allied army. Already the window of opportunity was closing fast. Fail to seize the moment, and the Spartans would complete their rendezvous. So that Mardonius, climbing into the saddle of a 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 in Mardonius’ army, moving in disordered eagerness whether it was with their general’s permission or not, surged forward down the riverbank.

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 uphill with measured discipline, even as the Persian horsemen, massing behind them, came wheeling in pursuit. Pausanias had heard the savage cries of the barbarians from the river, and then watched them cross it in a monstrous, banner-swept tide. He knew that soon not only cavalry but the whole weight of Mardonius’ elite infantry battalions would be assaulting his shield wall. Frantically, while he still had the chance, he sent a messenger to the Athenians, begging them to join him—but the message arrived too late. Even as Aristeides turned and began leading his men crab-wise toward the Lacedaemonian positions, he felt the earth shaking, and saw over his shoulder the battle line of the Thebans drawing down upon them. The clash of the two phalanxes rang across the battlefield; and confirmed Pausanias, a mile away to the east, in all his apprehensions of the worst.

True, there was some relief to be had in the breathless arrival of Amompharetus and his men; but there could be no hope now of any other reinforcements coming to swell the phalanx’s numbers. Alone, then, the Spartans and the Tegeans would have to face Mardonius: 11,500 men against the elite of a superpower. Already, fired by the wheeling, darting Saka, 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 divisions could be felt. Mardonius’ cavalry withdrew; his infantry, maintaining their distance from the bristling phalanx, planted a wall of wicker shields; the rain of arrows began to thicken.

Still the cornered Greeks maintained their discipline. Holding up their shields, they listened from within their helmets to the eerily dimmed hiss and thud of ceaseless missiles all about them. Men began to stumble and fall, the 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 the Greeks 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.”⁵⁵ 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 the 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 from 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 barely Greek—had nevertheless, his messmates agreed later, redeemed his name. Indeed, his courage would long be remembered by the men of other cities as something truly exceptional. To that extent, at least, 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 a blood-sacrifice,”⁵⁶ 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 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 Spartans’ spears and splintering them; swords were not so easily snapped, nor the weight of bronze-clad bodies stopped. Still Mardonius, “as brave as any Persian on the field,”⁵⁷ 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 for 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.

And the Persians, watching him fall, knew the battle lost. Mardonius’ guardsmen, holding their ground heroically, were wiped out where they stood, but the remainder of the divisions, demoralized by the death of their charismatic general, began to run, and soon the rout was general 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. Soon enough, Pausanias was joined before the gates of the fort by the Athenians, whose 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’ army, barely three thousand were spared. And so ended the enterprise of the Great King against the West.

Gawking at the wealth and luxury displayed in Mardonius’ 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, improbable scale of their victory: the King of 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’ 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 in 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 our country to rob us of our wretched poverty.”⁵⁸ A joke; and yet, of course, 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 the loot, they lugged furniture out of tents, shoved golden plate into sacks, and pulled rings off the fingers of corpses. Naturally, they refrained from declaring all that 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.

Hubris

Two stories were 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’ 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.⁵⁹ None could withstand her, and the mightiest least of all. It was her habit, when she walked, to tread 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 took a hand in his career, “to suppose himself the happiest of men.”⁶⁰ Yet not even that offense, rank though 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.”⁶¹ An all too human failing, perhaps; and yet one to which barbarians, by their intemperate nature, and monarchs, by their rank, were peculiarly 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, of 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 bricks and mortar; who burned and toppled the statues of the gods; who even dared to whip the sea, and bind it up with chains.⁶²

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.

But she was not finished yet: one final twist remained. It had always been the practice—and the delight—of Nemesis to cause offenses to ricochet back upon their perpetrator. Now the Great King, far away in Sardis, was about to learn this lesson for himself. The previous summer, having torched the holy temples of the Acropolis, he had dared to vaunt his unspeakable crime by ordering beacons to blaze the news of it across the sea; Mardonius, capturing Athens a second time, had done the same. The beacons still stood; but now securely in Greek hands. Pausanias, ordering them lit, could ensure that the news of his victory would reach the coast of Ionia within a matter of hours. And this, it seems, is precisely what he did.⁶³

It is hard otherwise to explain a haunting coincidence. Well over a hundred miles away from Plataea, on the far side of the Aegean, on the same day as the great victory, “a rumour suddenly flew through the ranks of the Greek fleet that their countrymen had beaten Mardonius in Boeotia.”⁶⁴ The resulting surge of confidence among the crewmen 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 slope, that the Panionium stood, the ancient communal shrine of the Ionians; south, along the coast, lay devastated Miletus; and just offshore from her harbors, in the bay, rose the island of Lade. Fateful scenes all, and clear evidence of Nemesis’ 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 from its wonted pomp. 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 squadron: for Xanthippus, having kicked his heels on Salamis throughout the first half of the summer, had cheerfully set out for Delos the moment that Pausanias was confirmed to have left the Isthmus. As a result, the Allies—in a startling turnaround from the previous summer—now possessed the advantage of numbers. Scanning the horizon nervously, the Persian admirals had only had to glimpse the Greek fleet bearing down on them to jump ship. Landing directly in the shadow of Mount Mycale, they had hauled their triremes onto a beach, frantically improvised a stockade out of boulders and apple trees, and barricaded themselves inside it.

And it was this same stockade that Leotychides, on the day of the Battle of Plataea, decided to attack. Noon, and a wisp of smoke began to rise on the western horizon, soon to be answered by a beacon blazing into life on the heights of Samos. Meanwhile, marines—Athenian, Corinthian and Troezenian—were landing on the beach near the Persians’ makeshift fort. The defenders, cheered by the small size of the allied assault force, emerged from behind their palisade; and the Greeks immediately charged them. 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 them over. 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. Only a fraction of the Persian garrison escaped to Sardis. The fort and all the ships lined up inside it were abandoned. Leotychides, having been sure first to pillage everything he could, torched the Persian fleet that same evening. No longer fighting in defense of their own soil, the Greeks had now gone successfully on the attack. Dusk settled over Ionia, and fires lit on the edge of Asia flickered throughout the night.

“Many are the marks of evidence which prove the hand of the goddess in the affairs of mortal men.”⁶⁵ To the Greeks, it seemed a miracle that they should have prevailed twice on the same day over what was still, after all, the world’s superpower. Leotychides himself could barely credit it. Even back on Samos, having left the Persian fleet to burn across the straits, he and his fellow admirals continued to dread the wrath of the King of Kings. Surely, they imagined, his vengeance was bound to strike at any moment. But it did not. Instead, some weeks after Mycale, it was reported that Xerxes, “in a state of bewilderment,”⁶⁶ had left Sardis altogether, and was taking the long road back to Susa. With him was going most of his army. A raiding party, dispatched from Sardis, did manage to land a blow on that favorite Persian punching bag, the holy shrine at Didyma, and once again cart off a statue of Apollo; but otherwise there was little action from the barbarians. A year passed, and then another; and still 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 began to be regarded by most Greeks as a 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 struck the Greeks as so terrifying at the time—the teeming numbers of the Great 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 may have been; but they might as well have been women when measured against the free-born, bronze-clad men of Greece.

Some even began to wonder if the bloody repulse that the Great King had suffered had doomed his regime altogether. One of these optimists was an Athenian by the name of Aeschylus—a man who had every reason to nurture such a hope. A veteran of both Marathon and Salamis, he had also suffered a bitter personal loss at the hands of the barbarians: for it was his brother who had clung to one of the ships moored off Marathon, and had his wrist hacked off by an ax. Well might Aeschylus have dreamed of the implosion of Persian power. In 472 BC, eight years after Salamis, he gave his optimism a truly visionary rendering at the City Dionysia, the Athenians’ annual drama contest. As the audience, assembling in the shadow of the Acropolis, milled into the theater, they would have seen, wherever they gazed, scars and reminders of their city’s recent ordeal. Behind them, on the sacred rock, the silhouette remained one of devastation still: for the allies—Athenians included—had vowed before taking the field against Mardonius that any temple burned by the barbarians was to be left forever as a ruin, “to serve as witness for generations yet to come.”⁶⁷ The bleachers on which the audience took their seats had been fashioned, almost certainly, out of timbers salvaged from the shattered barbarian fleet; while on the stage itself, it has been plausibly suggested, there may have stood that most spectacular of all battle trophies: the captured royal tent.⁶⁸ If so, then the leather that had once sheltered the King of Kings now provided an awning over the stage of the Dionysia—and the perfect backdrop for the tragedy that Aeschylus had titled The Persians.

Set in Susa, it offered, for the delectation of the Athenian people, a dramatic reconstruction of Xerxes’ return home from Salamis. The king who had left Persia in the full pomp of his majesty was portrayed limping back in rags; the courtiers who had thought to hail a conquering hero were heard wailing in misery. All most enjoyable—and comforting—for the audience, of course. The Great King was indeed cowed, Aeschylus reassured his fellow citizens; and Athens, the city which had defeated him, was now a beacon of liberty to nations everywhere. “For the people of Asia will not endure to remain the slaves of Persia for long; to be strong-armed into paying tribute to their master; to prostrate themselves before him on the ground. Kingship itself and all its power are dead.”⁶⁹ The world, in other words, had been made safe for Athens—and for democracy. No wonder that Aeschylus should have scooped first prize.

Even as he celebrated his victory, though, his fellow citizens would not have been left entirely purged of a residual fear. It was all very well for Aeschylus to claim that Salamis had left the Great King “denuded of men capable of defending him,”⁷⁰ but why, in that case, were Persian garrisons still in Thrace and beside the Hellespont? What were they doing in Sardis? How could they be in every capital of every satrapy, to the limits of the rising of the sun? Far from tottering, the empire of the Great King in truth remained on foundations as solid and formidable as ever. That the mighty edifice had received the odd chip to its western facade was indisputable, but few within the vast extent of the empire would have realized even that. The Great King, after all, was hardly in the habit of broadcasting his failures. If his subjects had ever heard of Athens, then it was only as a city that their master had put to the torch. If they had ever heard of the Spartans, then it was only as a people whose king their master had killed in battle. “May Ahura Mazda, and all the gods, protect me. And may he protect my kingdom. And may he protect all that I have laboured to build.”⁷¹ So Xerxes was in the habit of praying. And who was to say that Ahura Mazda did not listen to him still?

But Aeschylus, imagining “the people of Asia” restless beneath the Persian yoke, had not been indulging entirely in wishful thinking. Why, after all, had the Great King hurried away from Sardis—and why exactly had he failed to return? The solution to the mystery lay far distant from Greece, in that cockpit of the Near East, Babylon. There, late in the campaigning season of 479 BC, even as Xerxes was being brought the disastrous news of Plataea and Mycale, a fresh revolt had broken out.⁷² The Great King, to his horror, had found himself caught between two fronts. Abandoning his campaign on the fractious periphery of his empire, Xerxes had sped back to its heartland—where the insurrection, sure enough, had been easily suppressed. Babylon, taught its lesson once and for all, had remained quiescent from that moment onward. But Xerxes himself, it appears, despite the successful pacification of the rebellion, had also absorbed a painful lesson. Cyrus, Cambyses and Darius had all taken it for granted that the frontiers of Persian dominion would prove infinite. Darius, in particular, that devout and cynical autocrat, had proclaimed that he was entrusted not merely with the right but with a sacred duty to subdue the Lie wherever he found it, to the very limits of the world. At least as pious in the worship of Ahura Mazda as his father, Xerxes had inherited this sense of global mission along with the imperial tiara. This, after all, was why he had led the invasion of the West. But that invasion had failed; and the chariot of the Lord Mazda, ridden with such awful ceremony along the pontoon over the Hellespont, had ended up stolen by a gang of Thracian brigands and dumped in a field. To the Greeks, the bridging of Asia and Europe, and the desire to rule both continents, had always seemed the most fatal of the Great King’s follies; and perhaps, in his heart of hearts, Xerxes had come to agree. Certainly, there would be no more attempts to conquer Europe following his return from Sardis. It was Xerxes, of all Persia’s kings, who had been obliged to accept an uncomfortable truth, and one that for once was not synonymous with his own country’s order: that even the mightiest empires can suffer from overstretch.

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 when basking in the afterglow of the victory at Mycale, Leotychides had recognized that this would be the Great King’s policy, and he dreaded the inability of the Greeks 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 had pledged his city eternally to the defense of Ionian freedom. “And after he and his fellow citizens had expressed themselves with great vigour, the Peloponnesians at length gave way.”⁷³

So it was that the ethnic cleansing of the Greeks from Asia was postponed for 2400 years, until the era of Atatürk; and the claim of Athens to the command of the continued war against 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 islanders, the Greeks of the Hellespont: almost all signed up. With the added muscle that this new Delian League provided them, the Athenians could now take the attack directly to the barbarian. Throughout the 470s BC, Persian garrisons in Thrace and around the Hellespont were systematically reduced. The following decade witnessed even more spectacular successes. Led by Cimon, the dashing son of Miltiades, 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 to have been marshaled 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 upon the imperial army. It was this battle, once and for all, that destroyed any lingering prospect 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 at the Eurymedon, appeared to shrink from a sense of her own achievement: as though she could not bear to abandon 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 as the national enemy. So too that the Athenians, having run the Persians out of the Aegean but still addicted to making war on them, voted to hunt them down in foreign fields. In 460, a huge armada was dispatched to Cyprus and Egypt. Six years of fighting later, it had been comprehensively wiped out. The Athenians, in a panic that the barbarians might now come sweeping back into the Aegean, hurriedly removed the headquarters of the league from Delos to their own city. Even when the Persians failed to materialize in Greek waters, the treasury remained on the Acropolis. Naturally, just as they had always done, the Athenians required that subscriptions to the league be paid in full. Liberty, as they pointed out, did not come cheap. But many of the increasingly disgruntled allies began to mutter that 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 the Spartan people 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 sanctuary inside the bronze-walled temple on the Spartan acropolis, was walled up 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 haute cuisine duly expired of hunger.

Nemesis, as ever, had 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’ wretched end, a hero greater even than the Regent. Themistocles, hated ever since Salamis for having been so persistently and spectacularly right, had already, by 470 BC, been ostracized by his resentful fellow citizens. Now, implicated in Pausanias’ 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,”⁷⁴ now that he was defanged, had proved a great favorite of his new master; and all the brilliant qualities of his intellect, once so fatal to Persian ambitions, had been put to the Great King’s service. Dispatched to the western front, Themistocles had settled just inland from Miletus, where he had issued coins and run an army, just like any satrap. He passed his final days advising the court in Sardis on how best to resist the encroachments of his own countrymen. And so it was, as a royal servitor and as a traitor, that Themistocles, in 459 BC, finally breathed his last.

An unsettling precedent: that the savior of Greece should have ended up the enemy of liberty. Even in exile, it seemed to many, Themistocles continued to serve as a model to his city. For increasingly, throughout the 450s BC, cities freed from barbarian rule found their sense of gratitude toward Athens darkening into envy, suspicion and dread. They could see little difference between the tribute that they had once paid to Susa and the subscription that they were now obliged to send to the Acropolis. Already, in the 460s BC, cities that had attempted to secede from the league had found themselves being 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 which the wretched Aeginetans could hardly refuse—and of which even the most imperious Oriental despot might 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 Mycale, 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 powerful, and rich, they never forgot for a moment what she had passed through, what braved, to win such pre-eminence. “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,”⁷⁵ 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 the 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 half a century of warfare, all hostilities between the Great King and his greatest enemy.⁷⁶ 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.⁷⁷ The ostensible purpose of this proposed conference was to discuss whether the temples burned by the barbarians might now acceptably be rebuilt. 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 prosperity for Greece,”⁷⁸ the invitation declared. An idealistic appeal—and one that invoked, in the first months of the peace with Persia, the spirit of the Athenians’ finest hour. “We are all Greeks,” Aristeides had proudly asserted to the Spartan ambassadors, back in 479 BC, when countering the accusation that his city might side with Mardonius. “We all share the same blood, the same language, the same temples, the same holy rituals. We all share the one common way of life. It would be a terrible thing for Athens ever to betray this heritage.”⁷⁹ And the Athenians, rather than do so, had lived up to Aristeides’ stirring words, and seen their city burn. The evidence of their sacrifice could still be seen cracked and blackened across the Acropolis. Why, the Athenians demanded now, did it require the barbarian to remind the Greeks that they were all Greek? Why could not their own example serve to inspire an era of universal amity and peace?

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 to the Acropolis would effectively be ceding the primacy to Athens. Sparta, inevitably, refused point-blank to do so. Her allies in the Peloponnese dutifully did the same. The conference was aborted. Shrugging off this setback, Athens responded by tightening the screws on those that she could force to do her will. The war with Persia might have been brought to a close, but the Athenians were in no mood to see the league dissolved 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,” having become hopelessly outdated, was replaced by the phrase “cities subject to the Athenian people”—a description that at least had the merit of accuracy. Far from being united, the Greek world found itself divided instead into rival power blocs, each one led by a city that put her dependants humiliatingly in the shade, and justified her hegemony by boasting loudly 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 memory of the three hundred and their exemplary defeat. “Go tell them in Sparta, O passer-by / That here, in obedience to their orders, we lie.”⁸⁰ 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 be reconstructed; now the Athenians voted on the issue without reference to the opinion of the rest of Greece. The proposal to rebuild the monuments on the Acropolis was thunderously passed. Plans for a spectacular makeover of the sacred rock were put into immediate effect.

Such a scheme had been long in the preparation. The mover behind it was a Eupatrid grandee 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 BC, Aeschylus’ celebrated tragedy on the Persians. Pericles certainly brought an unrivaled pedigree to his taste for grands projets: the son of Xanthippus, he was also, on his mother’s side, an Alcmaeonid. This meant, of course, that he was the 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 age wonders at us now.”⁸¹ In 447 BC, work began on a temple designed to be the most sumptuous and beautiful ever built. Subsequent generations would know it as the Parthenon.*²⁰

However, bold and original though all the new monuments on the Acropolis were destined to be, 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 480s BC 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, it was said, 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 in their presence a certain source of civic pride. They had been actors, after all, in the greatest drama in history—when Athens had stood alone and preserved the liberty of all Greece. “For they were the 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.”⁸² 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 a slope above the sea. This was Rhamnus, where it was said that Zeus, having pursued Nemesis across 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 from taking Athens that he had brought with him a block of marble, from which he intended to carve a trophy in celebration of his victory.”⁸³ 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 herself. It was clearly her anger that had doomed the barbarians’ 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 been 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.