The Rise of Athens

The tyrant also recruited to his cause Homer, the father of epic poetry and the matchless celebrant of Greekness. The tyrant ensured that during the Panathenaea he alone of all the poets should have his works recited. There was no authoritative text of Homer’s poems, and it is said that Pisistratus set up a special commission to collect and review the differing versions which had multiplied with time. We have evidence of spurious additions inserted for political reasons (as, for instance, the allegedly invented couplet about Athens and Megara, for which Solon was supposed to have been responsible). In fact, a member of the commission was himself guilty of forgery: he was invited by Hippias to edit a collection of oracular sayings and was caught introducing into it a prophecy he had made up.

If the existence of the commission was not itself an invention, as modern scholars surmise, it was of course not the first time that the Iliad and the Odyssey had been written down. But it is plausible enough that two centuries or so after the poems were composed it was necessary to remove corrupt passages and produce clean and authoritative editions.

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Wherever one turned in Athens, one came up against signs of the tyranny—well meaning, but patronizing. Throughout the city stood Herms; these were busts of Hermes, god of messages, boundaries, and transitions, which were carved in an old-fashioned style with a pointed beard. They topped squared, stone pillars, from the front of which a penis, usually erect, and testicles protruded at the appropriate level. Herms were talismans against harm and guaranteed success in undertakings.

Inscribed on many of them were little moral messages from Pisistratus’s second son.

A reminder from Hipparchus—when out walking, think just thoughts

and

A reminder from Hipparchus—do not tell lies to a friend.

After their father’s death, Hippias and Hipparchus took charge. They were men of very different character. The former was a public-spirited politician who ran the government and was intellectually well equipped to do so. Hipparchus was younger and flightier. A playboy, he liked to be amused. He spent time and energy on love affairs and was fond of the arts. He encouraged Greece’s most famous poets to spend time in Athens. He sent a state warship to pick up a writer of lyric verse, Anacreon, from his homeland of Teos, a Greek city on the Ionian coast, and enticed to Athens Simonides of Ceos, a Cycladic island, with large subventions and expensive gifts.

Anacreon suited his patron, being a celebrant of sex and wine. He famously chased after boys, who were not invariably complaisant.

Young man with the girlish looks,

I want you, but you will not listen,

Unaware you are my soul’s charioteer.

Simonides must have been more to Hippias’s taste; he was a public poet who was commissioned by states and whose work often appeared on memorials. He took a disenchanted view of human nature: “Any man is good when life treats him well, and bad when it treats him badly.”

Even oddities like Lasus of Hermione were welcome; one of his claims to fame was the “hissless hymn.” This was a poem in which the letter “s” was never used.

—

Aristogeiton was losing his patience. An Athenian in his twenties, he was an erastes in love with a handsome teenager, Harmodius. Unusually in such a case he was not an aristocrat, but came from the middle class. The affair was going well and the couple were happy. The relationship seems to have been passionate, but may not have been passionately sexual, for Aristogeiton also had a mistress called Leaena (or Lioness).

However, he had a powerful rival for his eromenos, who would not accept refusal and who just would not go away. This was Hipparchus. He propositioned Harmodius, who turned him down and immediately reported the conversation to his lover.

Aristogeiton was upset, but what could he do? He was afraid that the disappointed lover would use force to have his way with Harmodius. He decided to plot the undoing of the dynasty by cutting down the twin tyrants. Meanwhile Hipparchus tried again to seduce the teenager, but with no better luck. He realized that the snub was definitive.

Despite Aristogeiton’s fears Hipparchus had no intention of resorting to violence. Instead he cast about for a way of insulting Harmodius without revealing his motives for doing so. He arranged for the boy’s sister to be invited to carry a basket in a civic procession; when she arrived she was told to go home on the grounds that she was unfit to take part in the ceremony. The innuendo was that she was not a virgin. Harmodius was furious at the affront, and this made Aristogeiton even angrier.

The couple decided to go ahead with their conspiracy to assassinate Hippias and Hipparchus. The date for the attempt was the Panathenaea of 514; it was chosen because this was the one time in the year when citizens were allowed to carry weapons. To ensure secrecy they recruited only a few plotters, but hoped that once they launched their attack others would spontaneously join in. It was an extraordinarily risky plan, so likely to fail as almost to be suicidal.

Just outside the city wall and the double-arched Dipylon Gate, Hippias was organizing the Panathenaic procession. His bodyguard was in attendance. This was a great state occasion and everything had to be correct.

The lovers were present and watched for their moment. Suddenly they noticed one of their fellow-conspirators go up to Hippias and, with a smile on his face, engage him in conversation. Was the plot being betrayed? Panic-stricken, the would-be assassins rushed into the city and chanced on Hipparchus, the cause of all the trouble. They fell on him at once without thinking of the consequences and fatally wounded him. The tyrant’s bodyguard killed Harmodius, but Aristogeiton managed to slip away in the general confusion. He was picked up later and, Thucydides notes, “died no easy death.”

A tradition has it that he was tortured under the personal direction of Hippias, who wanted the names of fellow-conspirators. Aristogeiton appears to have had a somewhat acid sense of humor, for he only identified men he knew to be among the tyrant’s supporters. He promised to provide further names and asked for Hippias’s handshake as a pledge of safety. When the tyrant took his hand, Aristogeiton jeered at him for taking the hand of his brother’s murderer. Hippias lost his temper and killed the prisoner with his own hand.

—

The main consequence of the affair was that the regime became cruel. This was understandable, but ill-advised. After his brother’s death Hippias executed known and potential enemies of the tyranny. He had Leaena tortured to death for the crime of being Aristogeiton’s mistress.

The mood in the city darkened. Hippias could see that he was losing the consent of the people. It was a mistake his father had never made, but he could not help himself. He saw treachery everywhere and he began to lay plans for a bolt-hole in case he were ever driven from Athens. But where could he go and be safe? The empire of Persia, perhaps? Four years after his brother’s death he fortified a hill at Piraeus on the coast called Munychia. If the worst came to the worst he could escape there, catch a waiting ship and sail away.

Meanwhile the inevitable Alcmaeonids, in exile once more, launched attempt after attempt to unseat the tyrant. When one recalls that Pisistratus had confiscated their estates in Attica years previously, their continuing wealth is something of a mystery. But even in the days of Homer, Greek aristocrats cultivated their counterparts in other states and kingdoms. Political instability was endemic and we must assume that many nobles exported their resources; the record of Pisistratus in Thrace and Miltiades in the Chersonese indicates how investment in undeveloped territories could be extremely profitable. And Solon is unlikely to have been the only man of his class to dirty his hands with trade.

The Alcmaeonids built their own fortress at Lipsydrium, a spur of the densely forested mountain range of Parnes to the north of Athens. But Hippias besieged the place and drove the rebels out. They refused to be cowed. In a drinking song about the defeat they were undaunted. Their fallen comrades were, they chanted,

Fine warriors and from good families,

Who proved then what stock they were made of.

The insurrection failed to make progress not because Hippias was a capable military commander, but for a more fundamental reason. The average Athenian saw no advantage in removing the tyranny simply to reinstall a discredited nobility. How could this obstacle be circumvented?

—

The Alcmaeonids were not beaten. They had a secret weapon—the oracle at Delphi. The temple of Apollo there had burned down in 548, perhaps the result of the careless barbecuing of sacrificial victims or an explosion of exhalations from the fissure beneath the shrine (see this page). A new temple had to be built at the huge expense of 300 talents. A Panhellenic fundraising campaign produced a quarter of the required sum and Delphi found the rest.

The initial contractors failed to complete the temple. The Alcmaeonids, who seem to have acted as a kind of multinational development corporation, took over the project, and as a gesture of goodwill built, at their own expense, a frontage of top-quality Parian marble. The new temple seems to have been splendid. According to Euripides, its twin pediments were “like eyebrows on a smiling face.” Fine sculptural decorations depicted heroes killing monsters and on one of the pediments the Olympian gods were shown exterminating the race of giants.

The head of the Alcmaeonid clan at this time was Cleisthenes. He is the most remarkable of all the statesmen who populate this history, although his first entry on the scene is not to his credit. Unfortunately, his personality has vanished from the record; we know him only through his actions, but these are enough.

Cleisthenes and his clan realized that to overthrow the tyranny was too large a task for them alone, and that they would need outside help. The only Hellenic state with the prestige and the army to expel Hippias was Sparta. The Alcmaeonids were now, evidently, on very close terms with the Delphic officialdom. The new temple was “more beautiful than the plan” and, in the light of its cost, the oracle was short of money. Cleisthenes is reported to have bribed the oracle to advise the Spartans to depose Hippias. Whenever Sparta consulted the god, the priestess always replied: “First of all free Athens.”

Within its limited geographical bounds, Sparta, disciplined and militant, was a great power, and as is the habit of great powers throughout history it liked to interfere in the policies and programs of other countries. About the middle of the sixth century it consolidated its hold on the Peloponnese. It defeated the polis of Tegea, an important religious center in Arcadia, a region in the highlands of central Peloponnese. Argos, a traditional enemy in the northeast of the peninsula, also came under its influence.

At this time one of its two kings was Cleomenes, an energetic and capable general. He was that rare thing, a Spartan genuinely interested in the outside world; his fellow-countrymen thought him unhinged.

Cleomenes was a man with a distinctive history. His father had married his niece, but she turned out to be infertile. The Spartan ephors, who supervised the activities of the two kings, advised him to marry again, have children by a second wife, and save the bloodline. This he did and the outcome was Cleomenes. Then to everyone’s surprise the first wife gave birth to a son, Dorieus. Who should be the heir—the eldest boy or the son of the first wife? When the old king died, it was decided that Cleomenes should succeed. The hapless Dorieus left Sparta and set up as an adventurer. He planned to found a new city in Sicily, but died in battle.

Cleomenes played a leading role in consolidating Sparta’s dominance of the Peloponnese, and wanted his country to be acknowledged beyond doubt as the leading power in Greece. But he knew his limits: he was tempted to come to the assistance of the Ionians when they rose against the Persian king. However, on learning that it took three months to journey inland from the sea to the Great King’s capital, he decided not to help, even though the incautious Athenians sent twenty warships to support the rebels.

Eventually the Spartans agreed to invade Attica and depose Hippias. It is hard to see why; the tyrants had always taken care to be on good terms with Sparta, although they also cultivated friendly relations with its rival Argos. The pressure from Delphi must have played a part, and so may the influence of the expansionist Cleomenes. Most significantly, Sparta liked doing business with aristocratic oligarchies.

Sparta’s first expedition against Athens failed; the foot soldiers were overwhelmed by cavalry from Thessaly, horse-rearing country in northern Greece whose independent-minded tribesmen came to Hippias’s aid. In 510 King Cleomenes was sent with a larger expedition to retrieve the situation. This time the Thessalians were beaten and went home. Hippias took refuge in the Acropolis. His prospects for holding out were quite good, for he had ample supplies of food and drink and the Spartans were not prepared or equipped for a long blockade.

At this point luck intervened. Hippias sent away his five children to a place of safety abroad, but they were captured by the enemy. This broke his spirit. On condition that they were returned to him, he agreed to gather all his possessions and leave Attica within five days. The Athenian ecclesia passed a law removing citizenship in perpetuity from the entire clan of Pisistratids—a sentence that was never to be rescinded. A pillar was set up on the Acropolis listing their crimes and setting down all the family’s names.

Together with relatives and entourage Hippias settled in the polis of Sigeum on the coast of Asia Minor near Troy. Its name means “place of silence.” This was probably an antiphrastic expression—namely, one that signifies the opposite of something’s true characteristics. The weather in the city’s neighborhood was said to be wild and stormy. The destination was a good choice, though, for Pisistratus had annexed the place in the 540s and installed an illegitimate son called Hegistratus as tyrant.

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In the centuries that followed the fall of the tyranny, the contribution that Pisistratus made to the development of Athens was undervalued. Tyrants fell out of fashion and it was in nobody’s interest to give him any credit. In fact, he governed well and greatly enhanced the image of Athens in the wider world. During his long reign he provided stability and calmed social discord.

Above all, he recognized the importance of winning the consent of those over whom he ruled. By sticking to Solon’s reforms, ordinary, hard-pressed citizens were encouraged to believe that they had a stake in their community.

Thucydides acknowledged that for a long time both father and sons displayed “high principles and intelligence in their policy.” Taxes were low, the appearance of the city greatly improved, religious sacrifices properly observed. He continued that Athens

was still governed by the laws which had existed previously, except that [Pisistratus and Hippias] took care to see that there was always one of their own family in office.

If one had to be ruled by a tyrant, Pisistratus was clearly the man to choose. And he laid the ground for the next adventure in the history of Athens. As Herodotus noted, “Athens, which had been great in the past, now became greater still after her deliverance from the tyrants.”

7

Inventing Democracy

A bright light shone on the Athenians, when Aristogeiton

And Harmodius killed Hipparchus;

The two of them made their native land equal in laws.

So reads the inscription on the marble base for a bronze statue group of the star-crossed lovers, which Cleisthenes the Alcmaeonid commissioned. It was written by that celebrated hired hand, Simonides, once in Hipparchus’s employ and perfectly happy then to hail the tyranny. There they stood, proud and righteously angry, as cast by Antenor, a fashionable sculptor of the time. These were the heroes who gave back to citizens their equal rights before the law—code for destroying the tyranny.

Popular songs have survived, which young bloods chorused over their wine at dinner parties.

Darling Harmodius, we know you are not dead.

They say you are in the Islands of the Blest

Where swift-footed Achilles lives.

This is a puzzle. The assassination of Hipparchus in 514 was a botched and rather squalid business, done in a panic and lacking a truly idealistic motive. The regime survived the blow for some years and did not fall to a domestic uprising. Quite the reverse, it was a Spartan king prodded by the exiled Alcmaeonids who gave the Athenians their freedom. But this was generosity of a kind that is very hard to forgive.

Hence the less-than-historical advancement of Harmodius and Aristogeiton to the status of national heroes. Their descendants were granted perpetual freedom from taxation and, it seems, other privileges regularly bestowed on outstanding citizens, such as the right to take meals at public expense in the town hall, exemption from some religious duties, and front-row seats in the theater.

—

Cleisthenes and the Alcmaeonids had won. The tyranny was over and the family was back home where they ought to be. They and the other Eupatridae had every reason to believe that they could slip back into power as if Solon and the five decades of the tyranny had never taken place. However, it was not clear that the mass of the people, the demos, many of whom had followed the star of Pisistratus, would accept this reversion.

The situation was bound to unravel. The details are murky, but Cleisthenes expected a reward for all the expenditure and hard work he and his family had put in over so many years. He deserved to be the leading man in the polis, but now to his annoyance he found he had a competitor. This was Isagoras, a slippery nobleman who had spent the reigns of Pisistratus and Hippias comfortably and safely in Athens. He was in league with secret supporters of tyranny. In 508 he was elected Archon, but Cleisthenes responded by calling the poor and dispossessed out onto the streets.

In turn, the Archon summoned King Cleomenes back from Sparta, who marched into Attica with a small force, expelled seven hundred families opposed to the policies of Isagoras, and attempted to abolish the council, or bouleˉ, established by Solon. Things looked bad for Cleisthenes, who briefly left Attica.

However, the infuriated populace rose in arms and blockaded the Spartans and Isagoras in the Acropolis. The king entered the temple of Athena, but received a cold welcome from the priestess, who rose from her chair and said: “Spartan stranger, go back. Do not enter the holy place.” After three days, the hungry Cleomenes capitulated. He, his troops, and his protégé were allowed to leave under a truce. This inglorious affair was a blow to the king’s prestige, and he meditated revenge.

Cleisthenes decided that so long as the Athenians failed to settle their domestic quarrels, they would go on risking revolution and external attack. Decisive measures were urgently required.

What should these be? No account survives of his thought processes, but we can tell from the outcome the revolutionary nature of his analysis. He realized that time could not be turned back, that the aristocratic moment had passed, and that if the Alcmaeonids and their like were to survive, let alone thrive, only the most radical solution would do.

Acting from the most self-interested of motives, Cleisthenes invented democracy.

He devised a set of extraordinarily complicated and artificial constitutional arrangements. They ought not to have worked, but the Athenians accepted them and put them into effect. They were the template for the world’s first total democracy, which thrived for most of the next two centuries.

As Herodotus puts it, Cleisthenes “enlisted the people into his party of supporters.” He did more than that. He recognized that the ordinary citizen would no longer put up with a top-down system of government of any kind. Although it might seem to be selling out, the best chance of saving the Alcmaeonids from oblivion was to lead the charge for people power (the word democratia is formed from two others—the demos, signifying, as we have seen, the people, and kratos, or power). All being well, they could then continue to play a leading role in the affairs of a grateful polis.

We need to be clear about what Cleisthenes and his fellow-citizens meant by democracy. It was not the representative kind that characterizes modern societies. Athens and the other Greek city-states had very small populations by our standards and it was possible to assemble a majority, or at least a large fraction, of the citizenry in one meeting place, and debate and approve all legislation.

This was an unmediated and extreme version of the democratic idea, but there were some important exclusions. As already noted, only adult Athenian men were entitled to vote in the ecclesia. Women were barred from the political process. There were two other substantial groups that were also prohibited. The city attracted numerous foreigners who settled in Attica and made a good living as craftsmen and merchants; these were the resident aliens or metics. Also Athenians owned slaves—captives of war or purchases on the open market—who had no civic rights. In total, these people amounted to well over a half of the overall population.

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One of the reasons for the emergence of the people as a political force was military. Sometime between 700 and 650, a breakthrough took place in Hellenic warfare, which had important political consequences for hundreds of years. It determined the balance of power in the polis and put paid once and for all to aristocratic hopes of a return to undiluted power.

We know little of military tactics in the deep past, but it seems to have consisted largely of bands of men with warrior leaders and ad hoc citizen militias. If we can trust Homer, Achilles and his like would fight duels and seek out one-to-one encounters after which general fighting would confusedly ensue. We hear little of battlefield maneuvers, and a great deal about courage and glory.

Mirroring the retreat of the nobles and the advance of the citizens, new, well-trained armies of heavy-armed troops gradually replaced the old heroes. These men were called “hoplites.” They were equipped with bronze greaves and corselets—two bronze plates connected by a hinge, which protected the upper part of the body—and bronze helmets. With their left arm they held a circular, convex wooden shield or hoplon (hence the name “hoplite”). They were armed with a short stabbing sword and a long stabbing spear about one and a half times the soldier’s height.

All this metal reduced vulnerability, but by the same token hindered visibility and mobility. However, the hoplite never fought as a lone individual, but as part of a tight formation. This was the famous Greek phalanx. Men stood in close ranks of between four and eight men deep. So long as it stayed in line and did not break up, the phalanx was extremely difficult to beat.

The Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, who lived in the seventh century, summed up the hoplite ethos:

Let each man come to close quarters and wound his enemy

With his long spear or his sword. Also let him set foot

Beside foot, press shield against shield,

Crest upon crest, helmet on helmet

Breast against breast.

This new ethos did have two weaknesses. First, it required flat ground; otherwise soldiers would find it hard to keep together and could be picked off one by one. It is a little odd that the phalanx was invented in a land as mountainous as Greece, and one constraint on hoplite warfare was that there were few places where a battle could actually take place.

Second, a hoplite carried his shield on his left arm and so protected both himself and the right-hand side of his comrade on the left. The closer they were together the less likely they were to be wounded or killed by hostile weapons. But the men who stood at the end of the lines on the right were left partly unguarded. They would involuntarily shift to the right if they saw any danger of being outflanked by the enemy; the comrades on their left would tend to follow suit to avoid their right sides being exposed. The danger was that the line would thin and a gap would open up, which the enemy would attack and widen. Whereupon the phalanx would be either outflanked or penetrated; and the battle would be lost.

Despite these problems, the hoplite army, if well trained and led, was almost invincible. Throughout the Mediterranean world this was widely recognized and trained Greek soldiers found that they could make a good living as mercenaries if for whatever reason they left their native land. The Spartans with their commitment to lifelong military training were particularly effective on the battlefield.

One advantage of hoplite immobility was that casualties in battle tended to be low because hoplites were nervous of running after a defeated enemy and risking a loss of formation. Heavy-armed troops could not run far or fast. Victors mostly allowed the losers to make their escape unharassed, and restricted themselves to stripping the dead and erecting a victory trophy.

Cavalry played a relatively small role in Greek warfare; horses were very expensive to maintain and neither stirrups nor horseshoes had been invented. Riders were usually upper-class men, politically unreliable and of suspect loyalty to the people.

Hoplites were also citizens. Called up from civilian life when circumstance required, they were of the middling sort, affluent enough to afford to buy their own armor and weapons. They were men with a stake in the community, in the success of their polis. Their arrival on the scene and growing influence in the public square meant that, whatever the exact nature of the regime in power, their interests had to be taken into account. Indeed they expected to have a share in political decisions.

The counterpart of the politically active polis was the hoplite army.

—

In the agora near the town hall stood a grand monument. It had a marble base about sixteen meters long by two wide, and on it were set ten life-size bronze statues and at either end two metal tripods, looking like the one the priestess sat on when delivering oracles at Delphi. Around the monument a wooden railing was supported by stone posts. Here public notices of various kinds were displayed—muster rolls for the army, notices of lawsuits, draft laws, lists of young men who had come of age (ephebi). It must have been a busy spot with ever-changing clusters of people looking for information and instructions.

The statues depicted ten legendary heroes of Athens. They were mainly early kings, such as Theseus, and heroes or demigods, such as Heracles. Their collective title was the Eponymous Heroes because they gave their names to ten new tribes into which Cleisthenes divided the citizenry and which replaced the old quartet. These were the guardians of the city and worshipped as such.

The reformer’s reason for inventing new tribes was to eliminate or at least weaken the main political factions (the Coast, the Plain, and the Hills), which were causing all the trouble, creating dissension and instability. He also wanted to reduce the power of the brotherhoods or phratries, which were hereditary subgroups of the old tribes. Every citizen had to belong to one of them and they may have been exploited by aristocratic clans to exert political influence.

Cleisthenes achieved his objective in a very remarkable way. Each of the ten tribes was made to draw its membership from three different regions of Attica: the coast, the interior, and the city of Athens itself. Called trittyes (the thirds), they were usually not contiguous. This meant that members of the same tribe came from different parts of the country. Old local and territorial loyalties were dissolved.

The basic political unit of Athens was the demos: this word did not only mean the whole people (as already explained), but also the village or city ward. Cleisthenes divided the territory of Attica into 139 demes (as they are usually referred to in English). Each deme was allocated to a trittys and so to a tribe. He understood that a democracy at state level would not succeed unless there was also democracy at home and power was devolved to localities.

The deme was a miniature version of the polis. It had its own assembly that passed decrees about local affairs, and elected officials or demarchs. It was in charge of the numerous local festivals and religious ceremonies. It took over from the phratries the responsibility for keeping citizen lists up-to-date and endorsing new citizens when boys came of age. In official documents men were distinguished by their deme rather than (as previously) by their father’s name. In the first instance, a man’s deme was where he lived; but even if he and his descendants moved away to another part of Attica, they remained forever members of the same deme.

It was hard work running a deme, but the experience was useful, for Cleisthenes demanded a great deal from the ordinary Athenian when it came to participation in national affairs.

—

The political life of Athens centered on the agora. It was here during the first years of the democracy that the general assembly, the ecclesia, used to meet. The market stalls were packed away and people gathered in the dusty square to take part in debate, pass laws, and levy taxes.

After ten years or so the assembly was transferred to the slopes of a rocky outcrop called the Pnyx, which overlooked the agora, and finally towards the end of the fifth century it moved to a specially designed shell-shaped platform on the summit of the Pnyx. This could accommodate between eight and thirteen thousand people (the platform was enlarged in the fourth century). The citizen body was numbered in the tens of thousands, so it would appear that only a minority, albeit a substantial one, was willing or available to attend regularly. Of course, at any given time many citizens would be at work in the fields or in the manufacturing industries; others would be abroad on business or serving with the army during the frequent wars that Athens waged.

The ecclesia was the sovereign body of the polis and there was no appeal against its decisions, except (if you were very lucky) to a later meeting. As Aristotle remarked, “the poor have more power than the wealthy, as there are more of them and the decision of the majority is supreme.”

The assembly met on average once every nine days, although additional emergency sessions could be convened if necessary. A quorum of six thousand citizens had to be present for a meeting to be official. Attendance was not exactly compulsory, but strenuous efforts were made to ensure a full house. People brought their own food and a cushion to sit on—unsurprisingly, for meetings could last from dawn till dusk.

From the 480s, three hundred publicly owned slaves, called the Scythian Archers, formed the city’s police force and on assembly days they swept through the marketplace holding a rope covered in red powder and cleared it. Any citizen found absenting himself or with red marks on his clothes could expect to be punished. Speakers addressed the citizens from a special platform or bema. Any citizen was entitled to intervene in debates. Voting was by a show of hands rather than secret ballot.

Not far from the Monument of the Eponymous Heroes stood a substantial building some twenty-five meters square, the Bouleuterion. It was here that the boulē or council met. Cleisthenes abolished Solon’s council based on the old four tribes and replaced it with a new and influential body. It was five hundred strong. Each of the ten new tribes contributed fifty members, probably chosen annually by lot from a long list prepared from deme nominations. The outgoing council vetted those on whom the lot fell. Nobody could be appointed to the council more than twice in their lives and more than once in a decade.

Cleisthenes agreed with Solon that sortition had its uses—ensuring equality of opportunity, deterring corruption, and allowing space for the gods to have their say. Perhaps most significantly, sortition encouraged citizens to keep up-to-date with the political issues of the day, for there was a reasonable chance that at some point they might have to play an active part in public life.

The boulē was the supreme administrative authority in the state and, together with various officials, it managed all public business. Its most important task was to prepare the agenda for the ecclesia, which was only permitted to discuss topics that it had approved.

However, a committee of five hundred was too large to be efficient. The year (360 days with intercalated months, as and when necessary) was divided into ten parts. The fifty councillors from each tribe acted in turn as an executive subcommittee for one tenth of the year or thirty-six days and undertook the boulē’s routine work. They lived in a building in the agora called the Tholos or Roundhouse, slept there and received meals at the public expense. They worked three shifts across twenty-four hours and at least seventeen duty members were always on hand to deal with urgent business. One of their number was appointed president or chairman for the day by lot.

So far as military affairs were concerned, each tribe was required to supply a regiment of hoplites and a squadron of cavalry, which were led by a general, or strategos. These ten officers also acted as admirals of the fleet, as occasion called. For much of the fifth century they played a dominant role in domestic politics.The Athenians had common sense and knew that winning victories on the battlefield or at sea called for experience and talent. They avoided random selection for these posts and allowed successful generals to hold continuous command from year to year as appropriate.

It will be recalled that Solon applied sortition to the appointment of the nine Archons, who used to govern the polis. They included the commander-in-chief, or polemarch (literally, “war leader”). His executive authority declined and over the years the strategoi took his place as the most powerful executive authority not only in the army and navy but also in the square.

—

Another innovation of Cleisthenes was ostracism. The ecclesia voted once a year, if there was demand, on the exile for ten years of a leading politician. Citizens could propose anyone they wished. There was no question of punishment for criminality, rather a desire, in Plutarch’s phrase, to “humble and cut back oppressive prestige and power.” After all, Pisistratus had exploited his position as popular leader and military commander to make himself tyrant. This must be prevented from happening again.

All citizens were eligible to vote in a secret ballot at a special meeting of the ecclesia in the marketplace. They scratched any man’s name whom they wished to see banished on a piece of broken pottery (an ostracon, whence “ostracism”) and deposited it in an urn. A quorum of six thousand citizens was necessary for a vote to be valid. The man with the greatest number of votes against him had ten days to leave the city. If he tried to come back, the penalty was death. Otherwise, he retained all his civic and property rights and, once he had served his term, was permitted to return to Athens and, if he wished, resume his public career.

The odd thing is that ostracism was not in fact implemented for two decades. An ostracism was only held if every January or February the people in assembly decided there should be one. Year after year they voted the proposition down. It is hard to explain this delay; most probably, politicians were nervous that the procedure might backfire on them or in a later year be used against the first citizen to propose it.

—

Sparta was well known for preferring oligarchies as a system of government. It yielded to the temptation of intervening again in the affairs of Athens and calling a halt to the dangerous democratic experiment. Cleomenes had been humiliated once before, and the time had come for vengeance. In 506 he led a substantial army of Spartans and their allies from the Peloponnese against Athens. At the same time the Boeotians attacked from the north and a force from Chalcidice on the island of Euboea crossed the narrow channel to Attica. The prospects for the new democracy were bleak.

But one of Sparta’s allies had second thoughts about the justice of the expedition and marched back to its city. Cleomenes and his fellow-king, Demaratus, quarreled. There was nothing for it but for the Spartans to swallow their pride and slink home. The Athenians then heavily defeated the Boeotians and the Chalcidians in two different battles on the same day, and were even able to annex some of the latter’s territory. Altogether it was quite a result for the demos. Cleisthenes and his revolutionary constitution were safe.

—

What is so astonishing about the reforms of Cleisthenes and the introduction of democracy to Athens is the purity of their logic, their blithe radicalism, and their artificiality. They made no concessions and in that sense were deeply unpolitical. There seem to have been no negotiations. They embody what a contemporary scholar has called “archaic rationality”—that is, a capacity to confront and fundamentally rethink a problem from scratch, and to agree on a logical solution no matter how far-fetched.

As remarkable as the achievement of Cleisthenes was, it was matched by the enthusiasm of the Athenians for change. His constitution lasted with few interruptions for two centuries.

Its operation required the positive commitment of every citizen. A key principle, as Aristotle noted with unspoken disapproval, was that “everyone is governed and governs in turn.” This may not have been too troublesome for the rich, who had time on their hands, but it demanded a great deal from those in employment and, for that matter, the un- or underemployed poor, who might appear to have plenty of unwanted leisure, but in fact spent most of their waking hours trying to scrape together a living.

Some decades later, the state began to pay stipends to juries and members of the boulē. This enabled those with limited resources to play the full part in the life of the polis that Cleisthenes envisaged.

Direct democracy in its fullest and most elaborate form brought with it an unforeseen consequence. One might have thought that the effort required from everyone to make the system work would have been exhausting and dispiriting. Counterintuitively, it seems to have energized the Athenians. There were many causes, to be sure, for the flowering of civilization that was to ensue, but one of them was the injection of constitutional adrenaline that Cleisthenes administered to his native city.

In war too, the Athenian hoplites seem to have been galvanized. Herodotus remarked that equality had a beneficial impact on every aspect of civic life. “Now Athens grew more powerful. And there is not only one but there are proofs everywhere that equality before the law is an excellent thing. Under the tyranny the army was no better in war than their neighbors, but once it was freed of it it became far and away the best of all.” Spartans would say, correctly, that that was to overstate the case, but there can be little doubt that morale in the military was boosted.

—

Despite their best calculations, the Alcmaeonids profited little from the new dispensation they had brought about. Cleisthenes himself disappears immediately, altogether and without explanation. Perhaps he just died, perhaps he was obliged for some reason to quit the scene. We will never know.

Within a generation the clan was reported to be in deep disfavor. In 486 yet another relative called Megacles and two years later Xanthippus, an Alcmaeonid by marriage, were ostracized. An ostracon has survived inscribed with a verse couplet, recalling the family’s guilt over the Cylon affair.

This potsherd says that Xanthippus, son of Arrhiphron,

Is the worst of all the Accursed Family of leaders.

Athenians refused to acknowledge Cleisthenes’ contribution to the expulsion of the tyrants. This was among the reasons for the absurd over-promotion of the charming but incompetent Harmodius and Aristogeiton. Everyone seemed to be singing about them whenever Athenians came together to eat, drink, and celebrate. No wonder if Cleisthenes made his excuses and stepped out of the historical record.

However, it is hard keep a good clan down, and it was not long before the Alcmaeonids were back. As we have already observed and as Cleisthenes must have hoped, the Athenian democracy tended to confide its trust in the very aristocrats whose rule it had supplanted. This may have been due to their adaptability and also perhaps to an unspoken lack of self-confidence on the part of the demos. At any rate, on his return from banishment, Xanthippus was appointed an admiral of the fleet; and, as we shall see, two leading Athenians in the next century, one of them his son Pericles, were Alcmaeonids.

8

Eastern Raiders

The young man was tired out. A professional herald and long-distance runner, his name was Pheidippides. He had been running alone through the night with urgent news from Athens to Sparta, a distance of 140 miles over bad roads, and no roads. He brought terrible news. A Persian army had landed in Attica in force. Spartan help was urgently required, if the invaders were to be repelled and his native city saved from destruction.

It was August 5, 490, and in the hot darkness Pheidippides padded westwards past Eleusis, then Megara, and onwards to the isthmus that divided northern Greece from the Peloponnese. He had to take care not to trip and fall on the uneven shadowed ground. He skirted the great trading city of Corinth and wheeled south towards the city of Argos. He then turned right along a path that led over Mount Parthenium, or the Mountain of the Virgin, into the ancient, wooded highlands of Arcadia.

The hint of chastity was not altogether appropriate, for the place was sacred to the great god Pan, perhaps the randiest of Greek divinities (there was competition). Protector of fields, groves, and glens, he represented wilderness. He had a human torso and arms, but the legs, ears, and horns of a goat. Tortoises whose shells were suitable for making good quality harps lived on the mountain, but locals were careful to leave them alone, believing them under Pan’s protection.

By now the sun was rising high in the sky and Pheidippides paused at a sanctuary dedicated to the god. And there he experienced an epiphany. Pan showed himself to the exhausted runner, whom he filled with holy terror. A modern scholar suggests that this may well have been a hallucination caused by exhaustion and lack of sleep, but that was not how Greeks regarded such events. In their eyes nature mingled with super-nature on easy terms.

The shaggy apparition spoke. “Pheidippides, kindly ask the Athenians why they pay no attention to me, in spite of my affection towards them. Not to mention the fact that I have been helpful to them in the past and will be so again.”

The youth promised himself that he would pass on the message to the authorities at Athens when he returned home, and went on his way, arriving at Sparta in the evening. He had been running for two days. To complete the journey in so short a time was a remarkable athletic feat.

He found the city en fête. The Spartans were staging the Carneia, a festival in honor of Apollo Carneus (the epithet seems to refer to an ancient deity that looked after flocks and herds whom Apollo had subsumed into his own identity). It took place from the seventh to the fifteenth of the month of Carneus (August, roughly). During these days all military operations were forbidden.

At the heart of the celebrations was a ceremony supervised by four young bachelors, selected by lot every four years from Sparta’s tribes. It began with a man wearing garlands running away. He was chased by a band of teenagers with bunches of grapes in their hands. If they caught him it was an omen of good fortune for the state.

Then nine tents, called “sunshades,” were set up in the countryside. In each of them nine citizens, representing Sparta’s phratries, or brotherhoods, and obae, which were population subgroups or villages, feasted together in honor of the god. Pheidippides delivered his message. According to Herodotus, he said: “Men of Sparta, the Athenians ask you to help them, and not stand by while the most ancient city of Greece is crushed and enslaved by a foreign invader.”

The ephors were apparently moved by this appeal and replied that Sparta was willing in principle to supply troops, but not now. The Carnea prevented them, but when the festivities were over and the moon was full on August 11 to 12 they would act.

Were the ephors being sincere? On the one hand the Spartans were devout and made a point of obeying the wishes of the gods; on the other, they had a way of turning events into convenient obstacles. Perhaps they were not displeased at being unable to save the Athenians with all their negligent arrogance. They had humiliated the Spartans when King Cleomenes tried to intervene in the affairs of Attica. They deserved being cut down to size.

Whatever the truth, Pheidippides had no choice but to make his sad way home empty-handed. How was Athens to survive, he must have wondered, and would the old goat-god come to the rescue?

—

The Great King Darius had not put aside his anger with the Athenians, who had sent twenty ships to join the Ionian rebels. He could not forgive either them or a detachment from Eretria, a polis on the island of Euboea with a long record of maritime trading, for having torched the capital of Lydia, Croesus’s old capital and a jewel in the Achaemenid crown. He took the matter personally and just in case it might slip his mind he ordered one of his household to say to him three times before dinner: “Sir, remember the Athenians.”

But he was in no particular hurry. He would address the issue when he was ready. Of greater importance was, as we have seen, a strategic plan to regain control of Thrace, which the Persians had conquered in about 512.

Details are lacking, but Darius’s original intention may have been to extend his empire to the defensible frontier of the river Danube and to control, or at least influence, the unruly kingdom of Macedon. This would have the useful consequence of preventing the sale of Ukrainian grain to Greece and, more especially, to Athens, which was increasingly dependent on food imports. The campaign was tougher going than he had imagined. He found himself obliged to fight Thrace’s uneasy neighbors on the far side of the Danube. Eventually he left for home, handing over the command to one of his generals, who completed the conquest.

The campaign’s most striking achievement was a bridge of boats crossing the Bosphorus, over which his army marched from Asia to Europe. Long after it had been dismantled, two pillars were erected on the European side that recorded all the names of the ethnic groups which contributed contingents to the Persian host.

The engineer who designed the bridge was a certain Mandrocles, a Greek from Samos. He spent some of his fee on a painting of his remarkable feat of construction. It was displayed in a temple of Hera on his home island. An inscription read:

After bridging the fish-rich Bosphorus,

Mandrocles dedicated this to Hera

As a memorial to his bridge of boats,

Winning a crown for himself, and glory for Samos,

For his achievement gave pleasure to king Darius.

A second bridge was built to enable Darius’s foray beyond the Danube.

About fifteen years later, after the quelling of the Ionians, the untameable Thracians rose up in revolt. In 492, the Great King sent Mardonius, one of his most valued officials, to reassert Persian dominance; he was a nobleman who had helped Darius win the throne and was both his nephew and son-in-law. After his confidently expected victory he was to proceed through Macedonia to Greece. There he would teach Eretria and Athens a severe and unforgettable lesson.

At the outset all went well; Thrace was brought to heel and King Alexander of Macedon made his submission, a humiliation that his successors did not forget. But then a great storm wrecked much of the Persian fleet off the dangerous promontory of Athos. Mardonius was wounded and the failure of his expedition damaged his reputation. To enable both kinds of injury to recover, the Great King relieved him of his command.

Darius was not easily put off, and determined on a new expedition against the Greeks. He was egged on by Hippias, former tyrant of Athens. He was an old man now, but still yearned for his native city. He not only wanted to be restored to power, but also to die and be buried at home. Sigeum was an uncomfortable bolt-hole, for the people of Lesbos objected to émigré Athenians in their neighborhood. So he decamped to the Persian court, where he pressed the king to hurry up and punish Athens, and reinstall his rule.

In 491 the Great King decided to test which of the mainland Greek states would side with him or, as the term went, would “medize” (that is, favor the Persians, whom the Greeks sometimes called Medes). He sent envoys demanding earth and water, a well-known token of submission. In some quarters they received dusty answers: the Athenians threw the Persians into a pit as they did to common criminals and the Spartans pushed them down a well. If they wanted earth and water that was where they could find them. These were serious breaches of international custom and practice, according to which ambassadors were sacrosanct.

This time Darius sent his fleet, with a complete army on board, straight across the Mediterranean rather than getting it to hug the northern coastline and having the soldiers march alongside it, as Mardonius had done. He announced that sacred Delos would be spared from the Great King’s wrath, but, soon after the Persians had sailed past, an earthquake shook the island. Many regarded this as a portent of future woes.

—

The imminent threat from the east blew the flames of a local crisis, during which we meet again the ambitious, but eccentric, King Cleomenes of Sparta and witness his last hurrah.

The relations between Athens and the neighboring island of Aegina, a wealthy trading nation despite its small size and population, were and always had been chronically bad. Separated by only a few miles of water, they competed for the same trade and sooner or later one of them would have to give way. In 498 Aegina entered a state of “standing war.” Her fleet sailed along the Attic coast making mischief and raided Phaleron. This was the original port of Athens, although it was more of an unprotected beach than a proper harbor, and so was easy for enemies (and the weather) to attack.

It seemed likely that the island polis would take the side of Persia when its fleet and army arrived. Indeed, it had not hesitated to offer earth and water to the Great King’s embassy when it called. What could suit it better than the final humiliation of its old enemy?

The prestige of the Spartans was rising and they were widely recognized as an informal international ombudsman. So the Athenians filed a complaint with them that Aegina was medizing. It was willing, they claimed, to betray Hellas because of its quarrel with Athens. The islanders intended to march with the invaders.

Apparently on his own initiative, King Cleomenes went to Aegina and tried to arrest some leading Aeginetans, but was repulsed. He was not known for his approval of the Athenian democracy and people whispered he had been bribed to give way. Back in Sparta, his fellow-king Demaratus, with whom he was still on very bad terms, briefed against him.

Cleomenes put a stop to his colleague’s constant sniping. A suit was launched to depose Demaratus on the grounds that he was illegitimate. The oracle at Delphi was consulted and it seems that the priestess was secretly persuaded to find against Demaratus, who fled his homeland and made his way, like Hippias before him, to the court of King Darius, who welcomed him with open arms and gave him land and cities. In effect, he was appointed as a satrap.

Meanwhile, Cleomenes was able to get hold of his hostages and ten Aeginetans were dispatched to Athens for safekeeping. However, his troubles had only begun. It leaked out that he had tampered with the Pythia at Delphi and to evade punishment he escaped to Arcadia where he encouraged dissidents to rise against Spartan rule in the Peloponnese. The authorities were frightened at the damage he might do on the loose to Spartan interests and decided that the wisest course was to forget and forgive. He was recalled and resumed his functions as king.

According to Herodotus, about 490 Cleomenes lost his mind. In modern terms, he seems to have suffered a paranoid episode. For his own and other people’s safety, his family confined him to a wooden pillory, but he persuaded an unwary guard to give him a knife. He

started to mutilate himself, beginning from his shins. Cutting his flesh lengthways, he went on to his thighs, hips and sides until he reached his belly, which he thoroughly shredded.

So died one of Sparta’s larger-than-life statesmen. Cleomenes was charismatic, persuasive, and outward-looking, but also impatient and impulsive. Despite the misgivings of his countrymen, his policy was to exploit Sparta’s growing prestige and give his native land an international role. If he had lived longer he might have led the resistance to Persian aggression.

—

Marathon was a good place for sailing craft to land and soldiers to jump out of troopships drawn up along the shelving beach. That was the advice which Hippias gave the two Persian commanders, the Great King’s brother Artaphernes and Datis, an admiral from Media. The old tyrant was sailing with the fleet and hoped that his new friends would give Athens back to him.

The word “Marathon” means full of fennel plants. The flat, sickle-shaped plain, more than five miles long, will have been aflame with their yellow flowers and feathery leaves as they blossomed among clumps of trees and scrub. It lies between craggy mountains and the sea along the northeastern coastline of Attica. At its northern end a thin spit about one mile long, called Cynosura, or Dog’s Tail, jutted into the sea and a marsh took up half the plain, which was bisected by a torrent that regularly flooded the whole area. A village lay a mile or so inland and upland from the plain. A road ran from a little port called Rhamnus some miles to the north, down through the plain and onwards to Athens.

In early August 490, the Persians arrived at Marathon, which was completely undefended, after a safe journey across the Aegean. Before landing there, they had spent a week on the nearby island of Euboea, laying siege to the town of Eretria. Eventually it was betrayed by a couple of leading citizens. As Darius had instructed, the temples were torched in reprisal for Sardis and the people were enslaved. They were settled in the eastern Persian Empire not far from Susa and an oil well that was exploited for bitumen, salt, and oil (Herodotus found them years later, still speaking Greek). The expeditionary force waited for some days doing nothing; this was to give the Athenians time to consider their position.

It has been estimated that Datis and Artaphernes commanded an army of some 25,000 men. Their total number, including oarsmen and backup staff in charge of logistics, probably reached about 80,000 souls in all. Four hundred merchantmen were needed to transport the military. The Phoenicians, the best sailors of their day, supplied most of the Great King’s warships.

During daylight hours the Persian fleet beached at a safe spot between the large marsh and the Dog’s Tail. They disembarked and made camp, probably across the road running down from Rhamnus where there was an abundant spring. It was a secure position with minimal access from all directions and with an easy line of retreat to the sea.

Datis and Artaphernes had every reason for feeling pleased with themselves. They had not only met their first objective, the destruction of Eretria, but were well on their way to achieving their second. They had established themselves in strength on the soil of Attica. Their next and final goal was Athens, which was only twenty-six miles or a day’s march away. They would flick aside any armed opposition that might present itself en route, as with a fly whisk. They would then sack the city and burn to the ground its temples on the Acropolis.

As twilight came on, from high on the mountainside overlooking the plain of Marathon, someone lit a beacon. It gave watchers in Athens the alarming news that the Persians had landed.

—

How was the city to react? It was clearly the underdog and needed to think of some way of turning the tables. It could only muster a total of nine thousand hoplites, less than half the number of invaders. What is more, Athens had neither cavalry nor archers, whereas the Persians are estimated to have brought with them about one thousand horsemen and a detachment of bowmen. Cavalry was primarily trained to fight other cavalry, but could do a great deal of damage on the flanks of an infantry phalanx. In Greece, only the rich could afford horses and cavalry was identified with the aristocracy; it would be no surprise if the new democracy preferred, even if a little unwisely, to place its trust exclusively in its citizen hoplites.

Military command was in the hands of ten equal generals, as Cleisthenes had ordained, and Callimachus, the polemarch, or “war chief.” This offered the unappealing prospect of conducting a war by committee. The most battle-hardened of these commanders was Miltiades, scion of the wealthy and powerful aristocratic clan, the Philaids.

It was his uncle and namesake who had led some Athenian settlers in the days of Pisistratus to the Thracian Chersonese at the invitation of a local tribe and established a tyranny there. Miltiades’ father, Cimon, famously won the four-horse chariot race at the Olympic Games three times in a row, a feat achieved only by one other sponsor. He dedicated one of his victories to Pisistratus, who gratefully allowed him back to Athens from exile. But Pisistratus’s sons, Hippias and Hipparchus, evidently neither liked nor trusted him and had him murdered; assassins waited for him one night near the Town Hall, the Bouleterion, and ambushed him. Cimon was buried outside one of the city gates beside the grave of his victorious mares.

In about 524 Miltiades went out to recover the family domain, which had fallen back into Thracian hands. He became a vassal of the Great King and took part in Darius’s Thracian campaign. However, his loyalty was skin-deep, and he apparently joined the Ionian Revolt, during which he won control of the volcanic island of Lemnos (nicknamed the “smithy of Hephaestus,” god of fire and crafts). He brought Athenian settlers to live there and, in effect, made the island and its small neighbor Imbros an Athenian possession.

After the suppression of the revolt, Miltiades thought it wise to avoid the ire of Darius and sailed back to Athens. With his military experience and his knowledge of Persian ways, he was an obvious candidate for high military command in the present emergency. But being an aristocrat he had enemies in democratic Athens, who prosecuted him for having run a tyranny over Athenian citizens in the Chersonese. He was acquitted. This was lucky for two reasons. He was in fact guilty as charged and, if convicted, he could never have been elected general.

Callimachus understood that the war would not be won under the command of eleven decision makers, and he had only a modest opinion of his own capabilities. After all, as one of the Archons, he had been appointed by lot. At his suggestion his fellow-commanders agreed to give up their day of command, which they held in rotation one after the other, to Miltiades.

But what strategy should be adopted? In the interval following the terrible news from Eretria, the ecclesia debated the question probably more than once. One option was to hunker down behind the city walls and hope to survive a siege. Alternatively, the hoplites could wait for the enemy to approach and fight a battle in front of the walls. These two options smelled of pessimism and defeat. A third, bolder course was to go out and look for the enemy. A central aim should be to contain the beachhead, wherever the Persians were to land. This was the policy of Miltiades and he persuaded the demos that he was right. At a crucial meeting of the assembly he proposed that the city’s hoplites “provide themselves with rations, set out,” and “meet the enemy at once.” It was also agreed that a number of slaves should be given their freedom so that they could fight the Persians.

—

When the message of the beacon was received on that August evening, the generals at once sent Pheidippides on his fruitless trip to Sparta, and a message for help was also dispatched to the tiny Boeotian city-state of Plataea, an unwilling member of the Boeotian confederation north of Attica and very friendly to Athens. The hoplites got ready to march up the coast road to meet their fate, and either left the city under cover of darkness or awaited the early summer dawn. Each man had a donkey and slave to carry his armor, weapons, and equipment for making camp.

The hoplite army entered the plain of Marathon and encamped beside a precinct or shrine to Heracles. It was a strong position with easy access to water at a spring in the hills and at Marathon village. Trees were felled and piled up on either flank as a protective barrier against the Persian horse. The first phase of a successful campaign had already been achieved, for the coast road to Athens was now guarded and the Persians were held to their beachhead. There was nowhere they could go but away, unless they were to beat the Athenians in battle.

A force of between six hundred and one thousand Plataeans arrived in the Athenian camp, a timely response to the previous day’s appeal. But there was bad news as well. Pheidippides had returned to Athens and it was now certain that the Spartans could not be expected for another six days or so.

At this point both sides had good reasons for holding off from a full, set-piece battle. The Athenians were waiting for the Spartans to finish their festivities and join them. Also, the generals were nervous of taking the field when the Persian cavalry and archers would be free to attack their infantry from the flanks and the rear.

As for Datis and Artaphernes, they were uneasy at the prospect of pitting their probably inferior infantry against the heavily armed hoplites with their reputation for invulnerability—the “bronze men” as they were nicknamed. Also, promisingly, they were in touch with Athenians who supported a return of the tyranny and were willing to betray the city and open the gates to them when the circumstances were right.

It has never been established who these potential traitors were. Many at the time believed they were the Alcmaeonids, but this seems unlikely. As Herodotus points out, the clan had been consistently hostile to the tyrants over the years. Its head, Cleisthenes, had been responsible for the introduction of democracy and in that way had ensured a continuing place for the Alcmaeonids in the public life of Athens. It is true that some members of the family were to be victims of ostracism in the coming years, but turning coat at this stage would have been extraordinarily shortsighted.

So for several days nothing happened. The armies faced one another two or three miles apart and waited. There was no word of the Spartans, but we may assume that Datis and Artaphernes were aware of their probably imminent arrival, an event that would tip the balance of advantage away from the Persians. But there was also no word from the pro-Persian conspirators in Athens.

The Persian high command decided to make a move. To all intents and purposes Athens was undefended; it was obvious that every spare soldier was at Marathon. On the night of August 11/12 Datis embarked a task force with some infantry and the bulk of the cavalry and set sail for the Athenian harbor at Phaleron. He intended to take the city by surprise. Luckily Ionian scouts on the Persian side slipped away from their posts before dawn and delivered an urgent message to the Athenian camp: “The cavalry has gone.”

—

Suddenly Callimachus and Miltiades were short of time. In the absence of the Persian cavalry the prospects for a hoplite victory were much improved. It would probably take Datis and his fleet up to twelve hours of daylight sailing to reach Phaleron and a further hour or so to disembark. Would it be possible for the Athenians to fight and win a quick battle in the morning and then rush back and defend their city in the evening? Miltiades had no doubt that the answer to the question was a loud yes, but the ten generals were evenly divided. Callimachus as polemarch bravely cast his deciding vote for attack.

By about half past five in the morning the Greek army was drawn up across the plain and faced the Persians, who had left their camp and the great marsh behind them. If Miltiades’ plan was to work, the battle would need to be done and won by about nine o’clock. He guessed that, following the Persian habit, Artaphernes would place the best troops of his polyglot army in the center of the line with weaker formations on the wings. And so it happened.

Hoplites were usually massed eight deep, but the numerically superior Persians had a much longer front than that of the Athenians. So, to avoid being outflanked, Miltiades as operational commander thinned his center to three or four ranks at most while strengthening his wings.

He decided to make a virtue of necessity and laid a trap for the enemy. The Persian center would be allowed to press forward and the hoplites would gradually retreat. Meanwhile the Greek wings, one of which included the plucky Plataeans, would defeat the enemy forces in front of them and then wheel about to attack the Persian center from its sides and rear.

At the sounding of a trumpet, the Greeks set off in a brisk march. They broke into a run when they came within range of the archers. The battle proceeded exactly as Miltiades had designed it to do. His center fell back under pressure from the Persians. His wings routed the Persians. The Athenians and Plataeans, writes Herodotus,

having got the upper hand, left the beaten barbarians to make their escape and then, drawing the two wings together into a single unit, they turned their attention to the enemy troops who had broken through the center.

The last stage of the battle was butchery. The Greeks pursued the enemy to their camp and their ships, already launched and ready for departure. Callimachus was killed and the brother of the tragic poet Aeschylus, who was also present, had his hand cut off as he was catching hold of a ship’s stern. Many Persians were struck down and the sea went red with blood. We are told that 6,400 of them lost their lives, but only 192 Greeks.

The defeated general picked up his wounded and sailed away. He had long been waiting for a sign from the Athenian traitors and at last a bronze shield flashed from a mountaintop. Presumably this was a prearranged message, announcing that antidemocrats at Athens were now in a position to hand over their city to the aged Hippias. In response, Artaphernes was seen to turn his bruised armada southwards. A strong wind and a following sea blew them down to Cape Sunium. All might yet be well, he hoped.

It was not much after nine in the morning. A runner was sent to give the good news to Athens (perhaps the services of Pheidippides were used again) and the exhausted victors followed after him as fast as their legs would carry them.

When his ships hove to off Phaleron later that day, Datis spied to his dismay the hoplite army, travel- and battle-stained. It stood outside the city at the Cynosarges, an open-air gymnasium and shrine to Heracles, and looked southwards to the sea and the enemy. The Median commander saw he had lost the race, and also, he now knew, the campaign. There was nothing more to be done than for him and Artaphernes, who arrived with the main fleet, to set a course for home. With them went Hippias, whose expectation of a return to power was over for good. The traitors, whoever they were, kept their thoughts to themselves. For many years there were to be no more tyrants in Athens.

After their festival and the arrival of the full moon, the Spartans sent a force of two thousand men to help the Athenians, but they arrived too late. They offered their congratulations and gloomily toured the battlefield. It was a humbling experience.

—

Marathon was a famous victory. More than that, it was an inspiration, for it proved that the new Athens could infuse its citizens with energy and that democracy was not the incompetent shambles its critics had predicted. The demos could make and stick to decisions, and win a war. What was more, the Great King’s fearsome army had feet of clay. It could be beaten. Free men had overcome the hordes of an oriental despot.

For Darius, by contrast, the defeat was of little or no strategic consequence. It was a pinprick to his prestige, his pride, and his empire, not a wound. However, the setback annoyed him, and he vowed that he would get his own back when occasion allowed.

The Greeks made the most of things. Statues and odes were commissioned. A column was erected to the fallen Callimachus. The few Hellenic dead were cremated and buried under a large, man-made mound, which can still be seen today. Every year a ceremony was held there to honor “those who died in the cause of liberty.” The thousands of dead Persians were treated with less respect. The Athenians claimed they had given them a proper burial, but there was no collective tomb. They were thrown hastily into a trench at the northern end of the plain of Marathon (where a German visitor in the nineteenth century reported finding a loose scatter of human bones on the ground).

—

Just as the Olympian gods joined in the battles between Greeks and Trojans up and down the windy plain of Troy, so various immortals were credited with combating the barbarians on the glorious field of Marathon. These included Athena, the demigod Heracles, and the city’s artful founder Theseus. They and other divinities who had given assistance were honored in various ways: Athena was given a bronze statue on the Acropolis and a treasury was built at Delphi with the inscription: “To Apollo first fruits from the Medes from Marathon.”

A quarter of a century or so later, a fresco of the battle was painted in the Painted Stoa, a colonnade in the agora. It depicted a composite narrative, showing in a single image the different phases of the battle. Miltiades is given pride of place among the ten generals. The guidebook author Pausanias called by in the second century A.D. and has left a record of what he saw. The Plataeans and Athenians

are coming to grips with the barbarians: things are about equal. But in the thick of the battle the Persians are fleeing. They are pushing each other into the marsh. The painting concludes with the Phoenician ships, and with Greeks butchering barbarians as they leap into them. The [eponymous] hero Marathon…is standing there, with Theseus rising out of the earth, and Athena and Heracles.

In the aftermath of victory the Athenians did not forget the epiphany of Pheidippides, for it was reported that the great god Pan had also been seen battling against the invaders. It was essential that he be rewarded and welcomed for the first time into Attica.

A cave near Marathon village was dedicated to his worship and that of the Nymphs, female spirits of the countryside and his amorous companions. The untiring Pausanias said that the place was worth visiting.

The entrance to this cave is narrow and, as you come in, you find “chambers” and “baths” and the so-called Pan’s “herd of goats”—rocks mostly resembling goats.

The cave has been rediscovered in modern times, with cavities holding water and stalactites that, with a touch of imagination, can be seen to resemble goats. Finds in the sanctuary include figurines of Pan and female forms, Attic red-figure pottery, and gold jewelry, which date from the fifth century and onwards into Roman times.

Pan was also given a home in a shallow cave on the northwest slope of the Acropolis where every year he was propitiated with sacrifices and a torch race. Other caves sacred to him have been found on various mountains in Attica, the most ornate being on Mount Hymettus. A certain Archedemos described himself as a nympholept, one seized by the nymphs in an ecstatic and erotic frenzy, and covered the walls of the cave with reliefs and dedicatory inscriptions.

Miltiades dedicated a statue of Pan on the battlefield for which Simonides wrote a brief verse.

I am goat-footed Pan from Arcadia. I was against the Persians

And for the Athenians. Miltiades erected me.

One can almost hear the god bleating with delight in the hills.

9

Fox as Hedgehog

The father took his teenaged son for a walk along the beach at Phaleron, the uncomfortably exposed harbor of Athens. He pointed to the rotten carcasses of decommissioned state triremes, pulled up on the sand and abandoned. He knew the boy was thinking of going into politics and wanted to warn him off. He said: “This is how the demos, the people, treat their leaders when they have no further use for them.”

The youth did not listen to this good advice. His name was Themistocles. Born in about 524, he was ambitious, but suffered from two serious disadvantages. He was half a foreigner, for his mother came from Thrace. Also his father, Neocles, although connected to a good family, was a “man of no particular mark.” The democracy was still new and the best jobs still often went to aristocrats and to men of authentic Athenian stock.

What Themistocles lacked in the way of birth, he more than made up in energy and intelligence. Plutarch, his biographer, reports that he was “impetuous, naturally quick-witted and drawn to a life of action and public affairs.”

He suffered from discrimination, for boys of mixed descent with a foreign mother were looked down on as illegitimate, or nothoi, although they were allowed Athenian citizenship. For their physical training, they were encouraged to enroll at the Cynosarges gymnasium outside the city walls. Heracles, to whom this down-market sanctuary was dedicated, was himself of mixed parentage, being the son of Zeus and a mortal mother. Refusing to accept social disadvantage, Themistocles persuaded some upper-class friends to join him in physical exercise there.

As a schoolboy what he really enjoyed was making mock speeches and learning the arts of the orator, essential for anyone who wished to make his way in the fresh, new, noisy democracy. He showed little or no interest in any subjects intended to be character-forming or where “pleasing accomplishments fit for a free man” were taught (tuning the lyre or playing the harp, singing, dancing, and the like). As a result, he failed to shine at fashionable dinner parties where guests were expected to be competent amateur musicians and play or sing after the meal. Men who thought they were better educated than he was sneered at Themistocles for his boorishness.

His early years in politics were not altogether successful, for he was somewhat too impulsive. In later life he justified himself by saying: “The wildest colts make the best horses, provided that they are properly broken in.”

—

If Themistocles wanted an example of his father’s warning of the fate in store for Athenian politicians, one soon came to hand. This was the rise and almost immediate fall of the victor of Marathon, the great Miltiades.

As a grown man in his early thirties Themistocles fought at Marathon in 490. He was philoprogenitive, twice married and with ten children. He seems to have been a happy family man, for otherwise we can depend on his enemies having briefed the ancient sources.

Themistocles never missed an opportunity to make money. He lived in considerable style, entertaining lavishly and showering his friends with gifts. At Olympia he tried to outdo a young playboy, Cimon, son of the hero of the hour, Miltiades, in the extravagance of the dinners he gave, and in the magnificence of his tents and furnishings. This left a bad impression. It was all very well for a rich young man to behave in this way, but not a statesman.

We have a portrait of the man in stone. He is thick-necked and, although we see only his bust, he gives the impression of a stocky build. He has short, curly hair and a short curly beard, proudly surmounted by a heavy, drooping mustache. He eyes are wide open and he has a broad, sensuous mouth, which carries the hint of a smile. Intelligent, ready to learn, and amused, this is exactly how one might have imagined an experienced political operator who had seen everything and knew everyone.

He became a prominent personality in the ecclesia and was popular with the masses. The first radical democrat in Athenian history, he served as Eponymous Archon in 493. It was during his term of office, or around that time, that the trial of Miltiades took place under anti-tyrant legislation (see this page for more on this). It may very well be that Themistocles had a hand in engineering the acquittal, although he and the old-fashioned aristocrat had almost nothing in common. But Miltiades was the best general around and it was essential that he was available for the approaching Persian invasion. Whoever opposed the enemy was his friend.

But once the battle of Marathon had been fought and won, Themistocles found himself prey to very mixed emotions. When the genius of Miltiades was on everybody’s lips, Plutarch writes, for the most part he

was wrapped up in his own thoughts. He became insomniac and refused invitations to the drinking-parties he usually went to. When people asked him in amazement what the matter was, he replied that the trophy set up on the battlefield in Miltiades’s honor stopped him from getting any sleep.

It was not just envy that motivated Themistocles. He feared that the rise of a forceful nobleman like Miltiades would threaten the democracy. Fortunately, the victorious general was his own worst enemy.

Such was his popularity that the demos happily voted him seventy ships so that he could “make war on the islands that had assisted the barbarians” and, more to the point perhaps, “make them all rich.” Miltiades had his eye on the Cycladic island of Paros, famous for its white marble, which had incautiously contributed one trireme to the Persian fleet.

However, he disciplined some other islands first and so forewarned the Parians of what lay in store for them. They had time to strengthen their defenses and when Miltiades gave them an ultimatum to hand over the large sum of 100 talents or face destruction, they gave him a firm refusal. The Athenians laid siege to the port.

The Parians held out. A month passed and they began to waver. Miltiades opened secret discussions with a local priestess on how the island might be taken. He arranged to meet her at a shrine of Demeter, goddess of agriculture, on a hill outside the town. He went there one night, but badly hurt his knee (or, others said, his thigh) when jumping over the sanctuary wall.

Meanwhile the Parians received a boost to their morale, when they misinterpreted an accidental forest fire on a neighboring island as a beacon signal that help from the Persian fleet was at hand and refused to surrender.

The injured Miltiades had no choice but to return to Athens empty-handed. His enemies—and he had plenty, among both other aristocratic clans and democratic leaders—closed in for the kill. For the second time, he was brought to trial. The Alcmaeonid by marriage, Xanthippus, charged Miltiades with defrauding the state.

The knee had not healed and was turning gangrenous. The general was now so ill that he had to be brought into court on a stretcher. It may be that many of his soldiers and sailors had not been paid. If so this must have contributed to a transformation of the public mood. From hero to antihero can be a short ride.

Superfluously as it turned out, the prosecution called for the death penalty, but instead a massive fine of fifty talents was imposed. Miltiades died before he could pay it. His twenty-year-old son, Cimon, settled the account, nearly bankrupting his clan, the Philaids, in the process.

The general suffered an ungrateful end. But at the museum at Olympia there is a helmet on which is inscribed MILTIADES DEDICATED and is probably the one he wore at Marathon. It is a suitable memorial.

Hardly one year had passed since the victory over the Great King.

—

Many Athenians supposed, self-comfortingly, that the defeat of the Persians was the end of the affair. The barbarians had been given a bloody nose and would not be coming back. Themistocles fiercely disagreed and believed that the recent invasion had been merely a prelude. Like an athlete, wrote Plutarch, he should oil his body and enter the race to be champion of all Hellas. He should put the polis into training for greater games. There was not much time to get ready and Athens could not count on more than a few years’ grace.

Themistocles was right. Darius had been furious with Athens for its intervention in the Ionian Revolt. He had been looking forward to his revenge, instead of which his armada had been easily repulsed. He was now even angrier.

Soon stories filtered out from the east that another expedition against Greece was in preparation, this time much larger than the first. The Great King sent messengers to the main cities throughout his empire with instructions to provide horses, food, warships, and troop transport boats. Men were enlisted into the army. Taxation was raised to cover costs. Herodotus writes: “The announcement of these orders threw Asia into commotion for three years.”

Then fate dealt two disobliging cards. First, in 486 a major revolt, caused by increased taxes, broke out in Egypt, then a Persian province. The Great King was the pharaoh, but a satrap was appointed to run the country. Egyptians were left in no doubt about their subjection. The copy of a statue of Darius in full native regalia has been found in Susa with inscriptions both in cuneiform and hieroglyphs; the original probably stood in Heliopolis. The Persian text reads, in the tones of Ozymandias: “This is the stone statue which Darius the king ordered to be completed in Egypt, so that whoever beholds it in future times will know that the man of Persia has gained possession of Egypt.”

Oh no, you have not, replied the Egyptians and prepared to resist the inevitable punitive invasion. But before the insurrection could be quashed, in November of the same year the Great King died at the age of sixty-four after ruling as Great King for thirty-six years. He was buried with all due ceremony in a tomb carved into a rock face high up a mountainside. In an inscription he presented himself in the most favorable possible light:

What is right, that is my desire. I am not a friend to the man who is a Lie-follower. I am not hot-tempered. What things develop in my anger I hold firmly under control by my thinking power. I am firmly ruling over my own [impulses].

This is not a characterization of the vengeful monarch that the battered Greeks would recognize, but it is a reminder that, provided their subjects were obedient, the Persian kings did offer orderly, predictable, and benevolent government.

Darius’s chosen heir was his son, the thirty-two-year-old Xerxes, who was the grandson of Cyrus on his mother’s side. His first task was to reconquer Egypt, and this with some trouble he did. He imposed a more oppressive regime than his father had done and, insultingly, declined to assume the title of pharaoh.

In 484, the new Great King turned his attention to Hellas.

—

The small boy crawled along the claustrophobic tunnels underground, some of them only two or three feet in diameter and too narrow for most fully grown men. He was one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slave-miners, who extracted silver-bearing ore from rich seams at Laurium in southeastern Attica.

There were three strata of ore, separated by limestone. Mining had been going on for centuries (Xenophon said, “since time immemorial”), probably open-cast to begin with. During the tyranny of Pisistratus systematic exploitation of the mineral resources of Athens began. Shafts were driven down into the ground and galleries opened where slaves, chained, naked, and branded, worked the seams illuminated only by guttering oil lamps. An unrecorded number were children. It was a miserable, dangerous, and brief life.

The mines were state-owned and leased to wealthy speculators. We know of one leading Athenian statesman in the fifth century who rented out a thousand slaves, for one obol per head per day, to a Thracian mine manager, whom he had probably bought and then freed. (An obol could buy a jug containing about six pints of wine; three obols would purchase time with a prostitute.)

The mines brought the state welcome income. Then in 484/3 a shaft was dug through the second limestone crust to reveal the bottom stratum, an apparently inexhaustible new source of silver. Untold riches were to cascade onto Athens and its citizens, like the beautiful Danae whom Zeus visited in a shower of gold. After only one year’s exploitation, the additional annual revenue from Laurium may have been as much as 100 talents or some two and a half tons of pure silver.

It was a miracle and Themistocles had every intention of making the most of it. He knew exactly how the windfall ought to be spent.

—

Archilochus, a seventh-century poet from the island of Paros, whom some compared favorably to Homer, once wrote: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Themistocles certainly had the fox’s cleverness and cunning, but in truth he was also a hedgehog. Throughout the length of his political career he promoted a single overriding idea.

Athens had a navy of sorts, but was more proud of her land army, her hoplites. After all, not so long ago, they had won what many came to regard as the greatest land battle in Hellenic history. But Themistocles believed he had good grounds for arguing that the future of Athens lay elsewhere—at sea.

His thinking was both strategic and tactical. The population of Athens was still growing and, as we have seen, Attica’s bony, largely mountainous landscape was not producing enough food for it. The polis depended increasingly on imports of grain; these were most readily available from the fertile arable lands along the northern littoral of the Black Sea. There was no way that hoplites could guard a long maritime supply line. It would have to be protected by a much stronger fleet.

In addition, more had to be done to encourage trade. Solon had taken action, but it had not been enough. If Athenian warships policed the Aegean Sea they would make sailing safe and so create a favorable climate in which Athens’s merchant navy could carry on its business.

And then, of course, there were the Persians. If and when the Great King came back, the city’s hoplites would be massively outnumbered and would probably be unable to prevent him from invading Attica and even capturing Athens itself. To judge from Marathon, one could not depend on military powers like Sparta. Should the worst come to the worst, a large Athenian fleet could evacuate the population to a neighboring island, such as Salamis, or even sail to Italy and found a New Athens. If it was joined by the navies of other maritime city-states in the Aegean Sea, the Greeks would be able to muster enough triremes to hold off the fleet of Xerxes.

As Chief Archon in 493 Themistocles was in a position to promote his big idea. The first step was to build a new, defensible harbor to replace Phaleron, whose only advantage as a port was that it was visible from Athens. The fleet had to be pulled up the beach, placing it at the mercy either of high seas or hostile ships. It was not fifteen years since the ferocious islanders of Aegina had set fire to the fleet there.

Not far along the coast at Piraeus and five miles from the city there were three closely grouped natural rock harbors. Hippias had already seen the advantages of the site, for this was where he had built his emergency getaway castle. Themistocles persuaded the ecclesia to finance the fortification of Piraeus and the development of the triple harbor. It was a tremendous enterprise, which took sixteen years to complete. Solid walls with finely dressed masonry rose from the ground, which were wide enough to allow two wagons to pass each other abreast.

However, his proposal that, if the polis was threatened by land, the seat of government should be moved from Athens to the new port met with less favor and was shelved. To abandon the Acropolis and the shrines of the gods would almost be sacrilege.

The Archon also laid out a plan to maintain a larger fleet. This was not only expensive but politically sensitive, and failed to win support. If cavalry was the costly prerogative of the aristocrat and the heavily armed hoplite was a member of the affluent middle class, warships were reserved for the poor, the thetes. They were the rabble that had the unenviable task of rowing them. Plato, writing a century later, expressed his disapproval in the offended tones of the respectable rich. Themistocles, he wrote, “deprived the Athenians of the spear and the shield and degraded them to the rowing bench and the oar.” The demos was ready neither to finance more of the greedy poor nor to entrust its own future to the inconstant waves.

However, the new seam of silver at Laurium, when it was discovered nearly ten years later, and continuing fighting with its nearby trade rival, Aegina, changed its mind. The island had not been forgiven for medizing during the Marathon campaign.

A popular suggestion for spending the income from Laurium was to distribute it equally among all the citizens of Athens. It would be the dividend from a highly successful commercial enterprise. Themistocles insisted at the ecclesia that this would be an unpardonable waste. He told the assembly why this “fountain of silver,” as the tragedian Aeschylus called it, would be better spent on the navy. But Aegina, although a genuine nuisance, was only his cover story; his real concern was with Persia. He did not broadcast this partly because he had to purchase wood for his triremes from Macedonia, then a Persian protectorate, and partly because his fellow-citizens refused to take the threat from Xerxes seriously.

Despite strong opposition, approval was finally given in 483/2 to the construction of two hundred triremes. Athenians took the view that if they could not beat the Aeginetans at sea, they could at least outbuild them in the number of warships and in that way overawe them.

It has been estimated that at top speed the shipwrights of Athens could build between six and eight triremes per month. Aegina did not have the resources to compete and watched with dismay the mass production of a navy that would treble the size of their own and the creation of a great port where it could safely shelter. As for Xerxes, he was probably not informed of these events, but if he was he will have dismissed them. His fleet far outnumbered the best that Athens could provide and it was manned by the most respected and feared sailors in the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians.

—

The trireme (“triple-rower”) was a three-banked warship and although it had two square-set sails it was primarily a galley powered by oars. It has been well described as a glorified racing eight. Highly specialist, it was lightweight, rapid, and agile.

A development from the penteconter, an old-fashioned vessel with a single row of twenty-five oars on each side, it appeared around the year 600 and may have been invented by the Egyptians. It was exclusively designed to fight other triremes either by ramming them or boarding them. Its main weapon was a heavy bronze beak fastened to the bow at the waterline and designed to pierce an enemy’s hull.

A trireme was about 120 feet long and 15 wide. Any longer and it would be too heavy and less maneuverable; any shorter and it would have fewer oarsmen and so would have been slower. Its crew typically numbered 170 rowers, usually drawn from the lower classes but also from foreign recruits, some officers, and ten marine hoplites.

The oarsmen sat one above the other in three rows, the two lowest inside the hull and the top row on an outrigger. The men on the outriggers were the only ones able to see the oars strike the water and they supervised and managed the two oarsmen below. The word “trireme” refers to these groups of three.

A trireme could reach eight miles an hour, but cruise more comfortably at about six—or four if rest breaks were rotated for the crew. Everything depended on the weather, but should they row for eight hours, they might travel between eighty and a hundred kilometers in a day. In an emergency and with an experienced crew and a new ship, this distance could be doubled.

The trireme had some near-fatal shortcomings. First of all, it was labor-intensive and extremely expensive to run. A crewman might earn a daily rate of one drachma, and so it could cost a talent to fund merely one trireme for a month. It follows that a flotilla of ten galleys would cost thirty talents for a three-month campaign. A fleet of two hundred ships employed up to forty thousand men and would quickly bankrupt the treasury of most Greek city-states as well as using up more or less all their manpower. A serious defeat or the destruction caused by a storm could produce eye-watering casualties.

Technical deficiencies weakened the potential of the trireme. It required costly and time-consuming upkeep. Sails, rudders, ropes, oars, and masts sometimes had to be replaced in mid-campaign. Hulls would become waterlogged if they stayed in the sea for too long. In order to prevent this from happening, ships had to be pulled from the water every night to dry out. The use of light woods meant that this could be done without too much difficulty, but it left them vulnerable to surprise attacks.

Also the space on board was so cramped that the oarsmen had to be allowed to disembark for various necessary purposes. There was only sufficient storage space for water (two gallons a head per diem) and crews ate and slept ashore. A modern replica of a trireme has been taken out to sea. Volunteer rowers found the stench and heat in their close quarters almost unbearable (of course, we may have higher expectations of tolerable conditions than people did two thousand years ago).

Designed for speed rather than durability, triremes were more likely to be damaged and sunk by storms than by the enemy. Katabatic, or “fall” winds, which rush down vertically at hurricane speeds out of a blue sky, were as lethal then as they are to today’s holiday yachts. No Greek fleet would venture out of harbor during the winter months.

In effect, the trireme was a day boat suitable only for summer sailing.

—

The personality of Aristides could not have been more different from that of his political rival, the wily and imaginative Themistocles. He was a conservative and incorruptible—so much so that he was nicknamed the Just. He was a close friend and follower of Cleisthenes, but if he applauded his democratic reforms at the time he later changed his mind. The man he most admired was the (probably) mythical author of the Spartan constitution, Lycurgus, and he had little sympathy with popular rule.

He made a point of refusing to give or receive favors. Once he was prosecuting a personal enemy in the courts. The jury refused to listen to the defense and insisted on delivering a verdict immediately. Aristides jumped up and supported the defendant’s right to a hearing. On another occasion, when he was acting as arbitrator between two parties, one of them observed that his opponent had done Aristides considerable harm.

“Don’t bother me with that,” he replied. “Tell me what harm he has done you. I’m here to judge your case, not mine.”

Relations between Aristides and Themistocles were cool. Apparently in their youth they fell in love with the same teenager, one Stesilaus of the island of Ceos, and their rivalry continued long after the boy had lost his looks.

The fact that they could not get on with one another is not enough to account for their disagreements. They quarreled on policy too, although the ancient sources do not spell this out. There was a distinction of class, with Aristides defending the aristocracy and Themistocles the lower orders. It is likely that Aristides spoke for the affluent hoplite and attacked the expensive new maritime policy that Themistocles was promoting.

He was not its only opponent. Domestic politics in the ten years following Marathon were poisonous and at last someone seized the weapon of ostracism that Cleisthenes had invented at the time of his reforms, but had lain unused for nearly twenty years (see this page). In vote after vote, there was a ruthless clear-out of aristocratic political leaders, usually on the grounds that they were “friends of the tyrants.” This is odd because some of those ostracized were Alcmaeonids either by blood or by marriage. How can this be, one wonders, when the clan had consistently opposed Pisistratus and his sons for many years past and had suffered exile and persecution as a result?

The answer can only be guessed, but it is a plausible guess. Thanks to the fact that old Hippias, well past his use-by date, had settled at the Persian court and had hoped to be restored to power by Datis and Artaphernes during the Marathon campaign, to be a “friend of the tyrants” meant having pro-Persian sympathies rather than actually wanting to bring back the superannuated system of tyranny. This was why some said it was an Alcmaeonid who flashed a bronze shield from the hills above the battlefield at Marathon. However, it is perfectly conceivable that the Alcmaeonids profoundly disagreed with Themistocles’ confrontational attitude towards the Great King. It was no treason to judge that Athens would not be able to repel a new invasion on a larger scale than the first time around and to argue that it was foolish to provoke Xerxes. In fact, it could be seen as common sense.

It is likely that Themistocles was behind the ostracisms, but he surely knew he was taking a terrible risk. He was deploying a weapon that could easily rebound on the one who wielded it. But he must have felt he had no choice: he knew that his policy to create a large fleet was right and he would do anything to ensure that it was implemented.

—

Modern archaeologists have unearthed a treasure trove of more than eleven thousand ostraca, or potsherds, among the city’s ruins, on which are scratched the names of those proposed for exile. Some fragments fit together; curiously the names of political enemies appear on adjoining pieces. At first sight this is mystifying; but evidently commercially minded Athenians manufactured ostraca for general sale to citizens during ostracism campaigns.

Some potsherds have gossipy comments scratched on them as well as names. So the young Alcmaeonid Megacles, nephew of Cleisthenes, is accused of adultery, greed for money, and an offensively lavish lifestyle. He was stigmatized as being “accursed” (the long-ago crime of murdering the followers of Cylon in sanctuary still stirred high emotions). He was even criticized for rearing horses. This seems unfair, for in 486, not long after his ostracism, he won the chariot race at the Pythian Games in Delphi, which not only conferred great prestige on the victor, but also on his polis.

Pindar, poet laureate of athletes, celebrated the event in language of which the fiercest Athenian patriot would approve. He opened:

“Athens, the mighty city!”

For the strong house of the Alcmaeonids

This is the finest prelude

To lay as foundation stone

Of my chariot song.

Pindar went on to hint at his subject’s troubles, writing of “envy requiting your fine deeds,” but the ode implies that Megacles felt neither shame for his exile nor resentment against his city.

In 482 the last and greatest of the enemies of Themistocles fell victim to an ostracism. On this occasion, in the run-up to the vote, an illiterate farm worker from the countryside went up to Aristides. He handed over his potsherd and asked him to write the name of Aristides on it.

Aristides was taken aback and inquired of the man what harm Aristides had ever done him. “None at all,” he replied. “I don’t even know him. I am just sick and tired of hearing everyone call him the Just.” Aristides scratched his name on the ostrakon and handed it back without a word.

By far the largest number of unearthed potsherds (more than 4,500) for these years name Themistocles. Citizens must have voted against him at every opportunity, although never a majority of them. He will have guessed that his immunity would not last forever, and that one day he would share the fate of the rotting triremes on the beach at Phaleron.

—

But for now he had work to do if he was to transform Athens into the greatest naval power among the Hellenes, for from 484 onwards news trickled in from the east: the Great King was indeed preparing a vast military expedition.

In all the shipyards of his domains, in Cyprus, Egypt, and the great ports of Phoenicia, along the coastline of Asia Minor, and on the southern littoral of the Black Sea, keels were being laid down and triremes and military transports launched in their hundreds. An advance force of engineers and workmen was busy digging a canal about one mile and a half long through the peninsula of Athos. When finished it was wide enough to allow two triremes to pass one another. Ten years previously Darius’s navy had come to grief trying to round Athos; this time history would not be allowed to repeat itself. Also from the Hellespont to Greece roads were constructed or improved and rivers bridged or furnished with ferries.

Nobody needed to ask what destination Xerxes had in mind. There was little time for Themistocles to deliver his ships.

10

Invasion

Xerxes, the Great King, was something of an aesthete and, when he first considered the matter, not in the least interested in leading a fresh invasion of Greece.

Like all upper-class Persians he preferred to cultivate his gardens.

In October 481, en route to Sardis where his army was mustering for the campaign, he passed Callatebus, a town famous for a sweet confection made from wheat and syrup of the tamarisk. Along the road he happened upon a magnificent plane tree. He was so impressed by it that he decorated it with gold ornaments, necklaces and bracelets, and (it is reported) even one of his royal robes. He detailed a member of his army’s elite corps, the Immortals, to stay there and guard it.

To treat a tree as if it were a beautiful woman who needed protection seems like odd behavior, but Persians loved to manage nature and were enthusiastic gardeners. A Persian prince later in the century boasted that, whenever he was not on military service, he regularly did some gardening before dinner. Every imperial palace came with a walled park. Irrigated by water flowing along narrow channels, this was an oasis of green, shady cool in dry landscapes. A combination of a garden and open land well stocked with animals, it was a pleasant place for taking exercise; for hunting with spears and arrows from specially constructed towers; or just going for a ride.

Mardonius, who had lost his fleet in a storm on the way to invade Greece and been discharged from military office, returned to favor under Xerxes and often put the case for a new, more ambitious expedition against the Greeks. To the usual argument for revenge against the Athenians, he added:

Europe is a very beautiful place. It produces every kind of garden tree. The land there is everything that land should be. In short, it is too good for any human being except the Great King.

In other words, Mardonius, going somewhat beyond the evidence so far as rocky Hellas is concerned, was tempting Xerxes with the prospect of acquiring a vast new paradeisor, or paradise.

These exchanges between monarch and commander are retailed by Herodotus and may be no more than a happy trouvaille. But they give a picture of a ruler who regarded his empire as recreation ground on the largest possible scale, who decided everything, but did not take the trouble to do anything himself. That task was left to the servants.

On this occasion, though, after the embarrassing failure at Marathon, the Great King took the highly unusual decision to lead the expedition against the Greeks in person.

—

Xerxes committed himself to the invasion of Greece no later than 484 after rebellious Egypt had been reclaimed. The work of preparation that then began was interrupted by an insurrection in Babylon. But at last, towards the end of March 480 the Great King and his expeditionary force started out from Sardis on the long march up to the Hellespont, through Thrace, and down into Thessaly and Hellas.

It made a splendid and overpowering spectacle. Almost all the adult male members of the royal family were present in one position of command or other. For anyone to apply for exemption from service was to risk terminal disapproval. A multimillionaire, who was a generous donor to the Achaemenid cause and high in favor, told the Great King that all his five sons had joined up.

“I am an old man, Majesty,” he said, “and beg you to release my eldest son to look after me and my property.”

Xerxes lost his temper over what he saw as rank disloyalty. He ordered that executioners should seek out the son, cut him in half, and place the two halves on each side of the road and have the army march off between them.

The procession of men in column of route must have taken hours to pass through this grisly display. First came the baggage and technical units, followed by a mixed body of soldiers from every nationality. It was a colorful, multilingual throng. They accounted for more than half the army. A gap ensued to separate them from the Great King and his entourage.

Two crack brigades of cavalry and spear-bearers, with golden pomegranates on their spear butts, led the way. Ten sacred horses from Media followed, and eight grays drew a sacred chariot for Ahura Mazda, lord of the universe. No human being was allowed to ride on it, so the charioteer walked behind on the ground holding the reins. Then came the Great King himself in his chariot accompanied by a charioteer. When he felt like a rest and some privacy he got down and took his seat in a covered carriage.

After him marched another thousand spear-bearers, with either gold or silver pomegranates on their spear butts, and then another thousand cavalry. The royal escort was completed by the Immortals, ten thousand heavily armed foot soldiers. They were so-called because their number was never allowed to slip; if anyone dropped out as a result of death or illness they were immediately replaced.

The Immortals were well looked after. They were magnificently dressed with lavish gold adornments. Their high status entitled them to bring covered wagons on campaign for their mistresses and to employ well-dressed servants. Camels and other beasts of burden carried the Immortals’ special rations.

An interval of two furlongs preceded the rest of the army, which brought up the rear—another large body of horse and a column of infantry divisions.

—

A question arises. How numerous was this vast mass of humanity? It is a hard one to answer, for government records have not survived and classical historians gave absurdly inflated numbers. Herodotus reports that Xerxes assembled 1,700,000 infantry and 80,000 cavalry. To this he added 20,000 for camels and chariots and 300,000 for Thracians and Greeks recruited en route. As for the fleet, 1,207 triremes at 200 oarsmen per ship add up to an estimated 241,400 men and 36,210 marines at 30 per ship. Additional warships required crews totaling 284,000. Herodotus then doubles the total to allow for camp followers and their animals and hangers-on (among them, we are told, eunuchs, female cooks, concubines, and Indian dogs). This produces a grand total of 5,283,220 souls.

Herodotus must have guessed there was something wrong with his calculations. He wonders: “What body of water did the forces of Xerxes not drink dry except for the greatest rivers?” The logic of logistics, especially regarding the supply of water, argues powerfully against such a multitude. Eating was less of a problem than drinking, for, during the long preparation, large food dumps were placed at suitable intervals along the route from Asia Minor to Greece.

One theory is that Herodotus confused the Persian terms for chiliarch, commander of one thousand, and myriarch, commander of ten thousand men. Remove a zero from the totals given above and the numbers become much more reasonable.

170,000 infantrymen

8,000 cavalry

2,000 camels and chariots

30,000 Thracians and Greeks

210,000

For different reasons modern scholars have come up with similar estimates. If these are more or less correct, Herodotus’s claim would be justified that the army suffered seriously from thirst only three times during the long march to Greece.

—

So far as the fleet was concerned, Herodotus provides figures that, on the one hand, look as if they are authentic and, on the other, are far too high for the warships that reached the narrow waters of Hellas. As noted, he reports a grand total (excluding commissariat boats and transports) of 1,207 warships plus an additional 120 contributed by collaborationist Hellenes from colonies in Thrace and the islands lying off its coast. But we are told that only 600 or so triremes made it to their destination.

The discrepancy is easily explained. About half the fleet was committed to a truly astonishing feat of engineering, which removed them definitively from the battle line. Somehow the Great King and his army had to cross the Hellespont, a stretch of water that separates Asia from Europe. Two pontoon bridges were installed, one some 4,200 yards in length and the other measuring 3,500 yards. Two lines of 360 and 314 triremes and fifty-oared galleys, respectively, were anchored from shore to shore and lashed together.

Gaps allowed merchant ships to sail to and from the Black Sea. Tough but flexible suspension cables, six for each bridge, made from papyrus and esparto grass, were laid on each row of boats and tightened by capstans. Wooden planking, brushwood, and earth with wooden side screens were placed on the cables to create roadways. The cables were pressed down onto the boats, but took some of the weight as well as sharing the strain on the anchors.

The first attempt at a bridge ended badly. It blew away in a storm, provoking Xerxes into an unhinged rage. If we are to believe Herodotus, he had the clerks of the works beheaded. He also ordered that the Hellespont itself should be punished with three hundred lashes and that a pair of shackles be dropped into the sea. The engineers tried again, hoping to keep their heads on their shoulders, and this time they succeeded. It was an absurd case of paranoid majesty.

By June 480 the Great King and his army had arrived at Abydus, a town on the Hellespont near the two bridges. It was from here that legendary young Leander, who had no need for military engineers, used to swim nightly across the channel to spend time with his girlfriend, Hero, until one time he lost his way and drowned.

The Great King held a review of his land and sea forces—or at least a representative fraction, if we bear in mind that fresh water was limited. He had the people of Abydus make him a throne of white marble and place it on a rise of land. As he looked down, the sea was almost invisible for ships. A race was organized, which Phoenicians from the powerful city-state of Sidon won. The coastline and plain were packed with men.

Xerxes congratulated himself for being such a lucky man. But he was under severe strain and a moment later burst into tears.

The Great King’s uncle, Artabanus, asked him what the matter was. Xerxes replied: “I was thinking, and it struck me how pitifully short human life is. Not one of all these people here will be alive in one hundred years from now.”

The king changed the subject and asked his uncle, who had advised against the war, what his opinion was today. His reply was well reasoned, even if the conversation is an invention of Herodotus. Artabanus said: “I am frightened of two enemies.”

“Who do you mean? Is there something wrong with my army? Isn’t it big enough?”

Artabanus explained that the enemies he was thinking of were the land and the sea. Where they were going there were no harbors with the capacity to receive the fleet, and the land would become more and more hostile the further the Persians advanced. If the Greeks failed to give battle, after a short time rocky Hellas would not be able to feed the army, which would starve.

The Great King was much put out and sent his uncle back to the imperial capital, Susa, in disgrace. The order was given to march into Europe. The first to test the bridges were the Immortals, wearing garlands. It took seven days and seven nights for everyone to pass over to the other side.

The army, always shadowed by the fleet, set off on its long westward trek.

—

The Greeks were well aware of black clouds gathering in the east, but (like free states throughout history) dillied and dallied. There was a single exception; thanks to the foresighted Themistocles, by 481 Athens had completed its planned shipbuilding program, intended in the first instance for the war against Aegina, and continued to lay down new triremes.

In August of the same year the polis consulted the oracle at Delphi about the impending crisis. After its delegates had entered the inner shrine and taken their seats, the Pythia, a woman called Aristonice, delivered a terrifying message from the god, according to Herodotus:

You are doomed. Why sit around? Escape to the ends of creation.

Leave your homes and the citadel your city circles like a wheel.

The oracle was on good terms with Persia and it seems that it took the view that resistance to a major invasion by the Great King was futile. It was not alone. The god took care to be well informed and many Greeks were of the same opinion.

The Athenians were devastated by what they had been told, but kept their presence of mind. They took olive branches and went back for a second consultation. “Lord, give us a better oracle,” they asked.

The Pythia tried again. This time, she said, her words would be serious (“adamantine”). She offered a ray of hope, although it was hard to interpret what she meant.

Zeus the all-seeing grants to Athena a wall of wood.

It alone will not fall, but help you and your children.

She added a parting shot.

O divine Salamis, you will destroy women’s sons

When Demeter’s grain is sown or gathered in at harvest.

Although less negative than the first oracular statement, it was also less comprehensible. What was the wooden wall and whose women’s sons were to die at Salamis? When the envoys returned to Athens and reported to the ecclesia, those were the questions that had to be answered.

—

The strategic position facing the Greeks was challenging. There were three places where they might be able to hold up the invader as he marched down from Thrace.

First, there were numerous entrances into northern Hellas and the broad plain of horse-rearing Thessaly. The most important of these was the Vale of Tempe, a five-mile-long defile, but it would be hard to halt the Persian advance there because it was easy to turn this defensive position by passing through another access point not far away. Unsurprisingly, most of the states in the area did not look forward to armies fighting on their own land. They were minded to capitulate to the Great King and medize.

Then, leading out of Thessaly and into central Greece was a narrow pass between the sea and mountains at Thermopylae (“hot gateways,” so-called because of hot springs). The waters were narrow too at Artemisium, northern cape of the island of Euboea. The two places had the signal advantage of being close enough to one another for reasonably speedy intercommunication (a distance of about forty miles by water).

And, third, a last-ditch defense could be mounted at the Isthmus of Corinth between mainland Greece and the Peloponnese peninsula. It was four miles wide and could be fortified.

Any commander planning how to beat the Persians needed to bear some factors, both positive and negative, in mind. The Great King’s men needed food and drink and, of course, had not been able to establish food dumps on enemy territory. However, so long as he maintained command of the seas, transport ships could bring in regular supplies. If anything were to happen to the fleet, the army would find itself in serious difficulties. Xerxes would want to complete a conquest as quickly as possible. If the Greeks could hold up the invaders for long enough they might be able to force a Persian withdrawal.

The Persian fleet was keeping pace with its ground forces. Unless it could be stopped from doing so, it could sail ahead and land troops in the rear of the Greek military positions. Defending successfully the Isthmus of Corinth would do no good if the Persians could simply sail past it and open a bridgehead on the Peloponnese, perhaps from a base on the island of Cythera off its southern coast. On the other hand, there were few large harbors on the peninsula and the Persians were unfamiliar with the lie of the land. We must never forget that people knew little of geography in those days of slow, uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous travel.

One final consideration: a brand-new Athenian fleet alongside those of other Greek poleis could now put up a good show against the Persians. About forty thousand men were needed to man the city’s two hundred triremes. The number of adult male Athenians at this time has been estimated at between forty and sixty thousand (probably at this period nearer the former). Most oarsmen were thetes, members of the lowest socioeconomic class. There were also about 25,000 metics, or long-term foreign residents, who could be conscripted. Both citizens and metics underwent intensive training. Manning all the boats at once was feasible, but placed a serious strain on Athenian manpower.

However, the Greeks were still outnumbered and their warships were heavier and less maneuverable than their Phoenician counterparts. These were good reasons for avoiding battle in open waters. There were only two stretches of sea where it would be safe to fight—Artemisium, as already mentioned, and in the cramped waters between the coast of Attica and the island of Salamis.

It was all too easy to scare oneself into a defensive frame of mind. If the Persian threat was to be eliminated, the question was rather how to win the war than how to avoid losing it. It was to this that the most imaginative political and military mind of the day was looking for an answer. It was the mind of Themistocles.

—

Sparta, by common consent the leading polis of the Hellenes and unmatched on the battlefield, and Athens, the victor of Marathon, convened what they called a Congress of Representatives at Corinth. It met in the autumn of 481 while Xerxes was still training his forces at Sardis. Sparta was in the chair and thirty-one states attended. The Congress’s task was to decide what measures to adopt for a common resistance to the invader. It was an exceptional occasion, for it was almost unheard of for Greek city-states to try to agree on something, or indeed on anything, but without at least a semblance of unity they had no hope of success.

The allies announced an end to their endemic mutual feuds, and in November Athens and Aegina abandoned their on-off, low-level hostilities. Themistocles had a main hand in this general accord, for which Plutarch rightly gives him generous credit:

The greatest of all his achievements was his putting a stop to the wars among Greeks and reconciling Greek city-states with one another. He persuaded them to postpone their differences because of the war with Persia.

We will not go far wrong in also attributing to Themistocles a decision of the Athenian ecclesia to recall all the ostracism exiles: Aristides and Xanthippus were patriots and were to play leading parts in the approaching struggle. Reconciliation abroad was to be matched by harmony at home.

The Congress sent spies to investigate the Great King’s preparations in Asia Minor. They were caught, but, instead of executing them, Xerxes astutely had them shown around his camp so that they could report back the huge scale of the expeditionary force (apparently they did not see the fleet, which meant that the Greeks were much less well informed about Xerxes’ naval strength).

Persian ambassadors were doing their best to persuade Greek city-states to submit in advance to the Great King. In response, the allies voted to confiscate the territories of all that did not join the struggle for survival. They sent their own envoys to bring around those that were reluctant to join an anti-Persian coalition, among them the Thessalians, Argos, Sparta’s longtime bête noire in the Peloponnese, and Thebes together with the other cities in Boeotia.

Appeals for assistance were sent to Crete, Corcyra, and the rich and powerful city-state of Syracuse, which dominated eastern Sicily. Nothing came of these initiatives, and it may well be that Xerxes entered into a pact with Syracuse’s archenemy, Carthage, which was planning an invasion of Sicily. The idea was that Syracuse would come under attack at the same time as the Great King invaded mainland Greece, so preventing it from sending help.

The Congress met again in the spring of the following year. It was time to decide the structure of command in the coalition forces. Everybody accepted that Sparta should have supreme command of the army, but Athens, now the largest Greek naval power, had hoped to be given command of the navy. However, other delegates threatened to leave the coalition if they had to serve under an Athenian. Themistocles, whom the Athenian ecclesia had elected as general (typically, he bribed another likely candidate to stand down at the elections in February), waived his city’s claim in the larger Hellenic interest. He accepted a Spartan, Eurybiades, as overall commander of the allied fleet. Herodotus wrote that the Athenians gave way from the best of motives:

They considered the survival of Hellas to be of supreme importance and, if they quarrelled over the leadership, Greece would face destruction. They were absolutely right. Just as war is worse than peace, so civil strife is much worse than a united war effort.

Spartans saw themselves as a land power and knew next to nothing about naval matters. However, as the historian Diodorus Siculus put it, Eurybiades was in charge, but Themistocles gave the orders.

The northern states made it clear that they would be forced to medize unless Sparta sent some troops to defend the Vale of Tempe. Before the Great King had crossed from Asia to Europe, a force of ten thousand was duly dispatched, but it stayed only a few days. Locals were unhelpful.

Also the troops soon realized that there were other passes from Macedonia into Thessaly that the Persians were more likely to use than Tempe. The last thing they were willing to risk was to have their position turned and to find the enemy in their rear. So they withdrew south to the Isthmus of Corinth and all the northern Greeks and the Boeotians immediately submitted to Xerxes, still some hundreds of miles away.

—

The sacred snake was missing. It inhabited an enclosure at the temple of Athena on the Acropolis. Every day it was given a share of the first fruits of sacrifices to the goddess, usually a honey-cake. Then the priests noticed that the food was being left untouched. They looked around, but could not find the snake anywhere. Was this a bleak portent for the city? Was the goddess abandoning Athens in the face of the Persian invasion?

More likely it was a trick of Themistocles. One would not be surprised to learn that the snake was locked up in a box in his house. He was certain of his war strategy; his problem was to persuade the demos he was right. He believed that the war could only be won at sea and there was a good chance that Xerxes could not be stopped from invading Attica. The departure of the snake was a forewarning that the Athenian population would have to be evacuated for the duration of hostilities, most probably to the island of Salamis and the small state of Troezen across the Saronic Bay from Attica. This was a traumatic prospect that his fellow-citizens found hard to accept.

Themistocles was perfectly willing to manipulate the supernatural to back his rational arguments. So when the delegates to the oracle at Delphi returned home with their mysterious advice, he tried to turn the Pythia’s hexameters to his advantage. It was obvious, he told the ecclesia, probably in the summer of 481, that the wooden walls did not refer, as some thought, to the fence on the edges of the Acropolis. It was a metaphor for the fleet. In the sea lay safety.

And as for the sinister allusion that Salamis would destroy many mothers’ sons, Themistocles disagreed with the idea that the god was predicting a Greek defeat in the island’s waters. If that had been the meaning of the oracle, the verse would have read “O cruel Salamis…” or something of the kind. The phrase “divine Salamis” clearly pointed to a Greek victory and heavy Persian casualties.

The assembly preferred Themistocles’ analysis to that of the oracular experts. At last, he had won the day, for if he was right about the oracle he was also right about his policy of victory at sea and civilian evacuation.

Although there is no evidence, the suspicious mind may detect his secret hand at Delphi. The oracle was on good terms with the Persians. In an edict Darius had written: “The god [Apollo] had spoken complete truth to the Persians.” Themistocles will surely have taken steps to present the Greek point of view, arguing that Greek prospects were greatly improved following the formation of the anti-Persian alliance. Palms may well have been greased to override Apollo’s first disastrous response to Athenian inquiry.

The debate that took place in Athens in 480 was one of the most important in the history of the democracy. Herodotus summarized what the citizens agreed by a substantial majority.

After their deliberations about the oracle, they decided to confront the barbarian’s invasion of Hellas with all their people and their ships in obedience to the god, together with those of the Hellenes who were willing to join them.

“Obedience to the god” was formal wording for fighting at sea and abandoning their beloved city. Detailed arrangements were agreed, and publicized; old men and movable property were to be sent to Salamis and women and children to Troezen. Adult citizens and resident foreigners (metics) were to join their ships, “starting tomorrow.” It must have been at this agonizing juncture that the temple serpent slithered its way down from the Acropolis (or was smuggled out in a box). A dramatic intervention, whether divine or human, had a good chance of stiffening the common will.

A general evacuation probably began in June with Athenian warships acting as ferries. It was a complicated and lengthy operation. The well-to-do who could afford the disruption must have gone first. Farmers will have waited until the harvest was in before leaving. Former Archons on the Areopagus council raised a subscription for those who ran out of money.

Dogs howled at being left behind. Xanthippus, back from exile, sailed off in his trireme and his hound plunged into the water, swam alongside the boat, and staggered out of the waves at Salamis, only to collapse and die.

Political opponents rallied to the common cause. Cimon, the handsome young son of Miltiades with a head of thick and curly hair, and a group of his noble friends who were all riders in the cavalry staged a demonstration to assert the loyalty of the aristocracy and its backing for Themistocles. They dedicated their bridles at the temple of Athena on the Acropolis and then walked down to the coast—to symbolize the fact that “what the city now needed was not brave horsemen but men to fight at sea.”

While most of the population readied itself for departure, a few obstinate old men, who thought they knew more about oracles than Themistocles, joined the officials on the Acropolis and barricaded themselves in.

There was another group whom Themistocles had to win over to his point of view—his allies in the Peloponnese. Many of them believed that it would be best to fortify the Isthmus of Corinth and defend the peninsula. This would mean leaving mainland Greece, including Attica, to its fate. Themistocles made it clear that this was completely unacceptable. The Athenian fleet of two hundred triremes would leave the alliance and probably sail to Sicily where the city would be refounded. This was a serious threat, for the rump of the Greek fleet would be no match for the Persians, who had unchallengeable mastery of the seas.

It was eventually agreed that a stand would be made at the pass at Thermopylae and the waters around Artemisium, exactly what the Athenians wanted. Time was running out and a small army, under the command of the Spartan king Leonidas, marched off north at once. It was now August 480 and the Carneia festival was on again, and this year the Olympic Games, in theory a time of truce. But on this occasion at least some troops were allowed to leave Sparta. Meanwhile the Greek fleet of about 270 frontline warships also set sail (a reserve was left behind to guard Attica, Aegina, and Salamis).

—

The Great King was pleased with himself. With impressive planning and logistical support, a huge army and fleet had been assembled. He did not believe they would face much resistance. Traveling with him was Demaratus, the Spartan king who had been unjustly deposed through the machinations of his fellow-monarch, the late Cleomenes. In 491 he had escaped to Persia where Xerxes’ father, Darius, had given him a warm welcome. For the Persian court Demaratus was a mine of information on all things Hellenic.

“So tell me,” Xerxes asked him, “will the Hellenes stand their ground and use force to resist me?”

“Majesty, shall I tell you the truth or what will please you?”

“Tell me the truth.”

“While I commend all Greeks, what I will say now applies only to the Spartans. There is no way they will accept your stated intention of enslaving all Hellas. Even if the other city-states come to see things your way, the Spartans will certainly oppose you in battle. Even if they can field only one thousand hoplites they will fight you.”

“Demaratus, how can you say such a thing? One thousand men fight my army!”

The Spartan replied that his fellow-countrymen were governed by law, by the rules of their community, and that prohibited them from fleeing in battle. He concluded:

“I am quite willing to shut up, but you did ask me to speak my mind.”

Xerxes made a joke of the conversation and sent Demaratus away gently. But, he told himself, the man was talking rubbish.

11

“The Acts of Idiots”

There was a strange smell in the air at Thermopylae—a mixture of copper and bad eggs, the heavy perfume of broom growing everywhere and a salty undertone of sea. At the foot of a steep cliff hot, sulfurous springs gushed out and ran along gullies cut into the ground. These were called locally The Pots and an altar above them was dedicated to Heracles. A tourist visiting the site in the second century A.D. recalled: “The bluest water I have ever seen was at Thermopylae.”

This was where the Spartans and allies decided was the best place to prevent the Persians from entering central Greece. It was an astute assessment. Thermopylae was a coastal passage; on one side mountains ran down to a narrow strip of land and on the other was the tideless sea, full of marshy banks and shoals.

At the western end of the pass, which Xerxes was approaching, the entrance was only two and a half yards wide. For about a mile the land then opened out to about sixteen yards in width and culminated in an ancient, dilapidated, drystone crosswall with a gateway (the wooden gate itself was long gone). The wall ran along a low spur to the sea. Beyond it stood a mound some 150 feet high. Another stretch of beach and scrub followed, leading to a final eastern passage only wide enough for a cart to drive through.

King Leonidas was a younger son and so had not been brought up as a future king. He underwent the fearsome agoge like any other Spartan male child, and only inherited the throne after the death of his half brother, the able but mentally fragile Cleomenes. A “man much concerned with his courage,” as Diodorus Siculus puts it drily, he arrived at Thermopylae at the head of a force of four thousand men. These included a royal bodyguard of three hundred Spartiates. They were probably supported by nine hundred helots. Because of the Carneia no larger number was allowed (and even that was stretching a point), but after the full moon on September 18, 480, and the end of the festival major reinforcements were promised.

The Spartans were accompanied by more than two thousand hoplites contributed by other Peloponnesian states and on the way they also picked up two Boeotian contingents, including four hundred soldiers from Thebes. Leonidas was especially insistent on the conscription of Thebans, for their city was strongly suspected of siding with the enemy and his call for fighting men would smoke out their true allegiance. In fact, the authorities at Thebes simply sent the king all their malcontents and political opponents.

On arrival at Thermopylae, Leonidas decided to make his stand at the wall, which he had his men repair and strengthen. This was a wise choice, for while the western and eastern passes were narrower, the land alongside them sloped upwards only relatively gently. For all that, Thermopylae was a wonderful defensive position. To his dismay, though, the king learned that the pass could be turned. There was a pathway through the hills that the Persians, if they discovered it, could use to take the Greeks in the rear. To avert that danger some local allies, Phocians, were ordered to occupy a strongpoint on the pathway and repel any outflanking force the Great King might send.

Leonidas was ready.

—

Across the water from the Hot Gates on the northern tip of the island of Euboea stretched a long shelving beach, ideal for drawing triremes out of the water to dry out. Behind lay shallow hills. On a headland a small temple faced the dawn. It was dedicated to Artemis, goddess of wilderness, huntress, a virgin who watched over women in childbirth. The weather could certainly be wild there, as an ancient sunken ship, discovered in 1926, bears witness; it carried one of the masterpieces of Greek art, the famous just over life-size bronze statue of Zeus (or possibly Poseidon) fashioned only twenty years after the Persian invasion. Northwards across the water lay the island of Sciathos and the peninsula of Magnesia, which curled up on itself around the gulf of Pagasae.

It was here at Artemisium that the Greek fleet gathered, apart from the flotilla left behind to guard home waters. After all the Great King might not fall in with the wishes of the Greeks, but, bypassing them, sail out into the Aegean and island-hop towards Attica and ultimately the Peloponnese.

Behind Eurybiades and Themistocles and their ships lay friendly Euboea and an easy escape route south between the island and the mainland. The main disadvantage was that the waters at Artemisium were a little too open fully to counteract Persia’s maritime superiority.

Three Hellenic triremes were stationed at the harbor of Sciathos, a small island north of Artemisium, as lookouts. As Xerxes’ fleet proceeded down the exposed littoral of northeastern Greece, ten of his fastest warships were sent on ahead to locate, if possible, the Greek fleet. When the captains of the triremes saw them approaching they fled. But it was evidence of the great speed of Persian (or perhaps more accurately Phoenician) ships that they had little trouble in catching the three enemy boats.

The Persians picked out the best-looking sailor on the first boat they seized, took him forward, and slit his throat as a human sacrifice. The second crew had rather more luck; one of its marines resisted until he was nearly cut to pieces. When at last he was overcome, his admiring captors coated his wounds in myrrh and bound them up in linen bandages (their other prisoners they treated simply as slaves). The third ship ran aground, but its crew got away and returned by land to Athens via Thessaly.

This success was more than countered by a natural disaster. Reassured by reports from its ten advance warships, the Persian fleet sailed down towards Sciathos and Artemisium. Early one morning, probably on September 11, a northeasterly gale blew up out of a clear sky. An unaccommodating coastline meant that although some ships were out of the water on narrow beaches many were at anchor eight lines deep. The storm was fierce and lasted for four days. There was no chance of riding it out. Those captains who had sensed what was about to happen drove their ships onto the shore; but a large number were driven off their moorings by a rising swell and smashed against rocks. Herodotus claims that four hundred triremes and penteconters were lost “at the lowest estimate.” He exaggerates, but there is no doubt that Xerxes had been dealt a blow.

It was rumored that the Greeks had appealed for assistance to Boreas, god of the north wind. If so, he had listened.

—

At Thermopylae a Persian rider approached the repaired wall behind which Leonidas had made his camp. Some Spartiates happened to be on duty at the time and the scout counted them. He noticed to his surprise that some were stripped naked for exercise and others were combing their hair (which they wore long). How frivolous, he thought. Once he had finished his survey he trotted off and reported back to the Great King, whose army was waiting in Thessaly.

Apparently Xerxes was bewildered by the briefing:

The truth, namely that the Spartans were getting ready to die and to hand out death themselves with all their strength, was beyond his comprehension, and what they were doing seemed to him the height of folly, the acts of idiots.

Xerxes sent a letter to the Spartan king, calling on him to surrender. He wrote: “Hand over your weapons!” “Come and get them,” came the laconic response. On September 17, after four days of fruitless waiting either for the Spartans to withdraw or for all his army to arrive, Xerxes launched a full-scale attack on Leonidas and his tiny force.

Wave after wave broke on the Greek defense, to no effect. Even the famous Immortals were unable to make an impression. The Greeks had longer spears than the Persians and more impenetrable armor. Above all, the Spartans were good at drill. They would turn their backs on their opponents and pretend to be retreating in confusion. The Persians would fall for the trick and rush forward with a great clatter and roar. Then, just at the last minute, the Spartans would about-turn, catch the pursuers off-balance, and inflict heavy casualties.

Xerxes, seated at a vantage point, watched the course of the fighting with growing dismay. After a stormy night, the Persians resumed the onslaught, but with no better luck. The Great King faced an unbreakable stalemate and he had no idea what to do next. Autumn was approaching and the fighting season would be over. And it would not be possible to provision his huge army and navy indefinitely. Unless his luck changed, he would be obliged to make a humiliating withdrawal. Then, unexpectedly, it did change.

A local man called Ephialtes came forward, doubtless as a result of Persian appeals, and volunteered, for a handsome consideration, to show the Persians a track that ran through the hills to just beyond the eastern end of the pass. That very night, with Ephialtes as guide, a detachment of Immortals was dispatched along the route. The Phocian guard heard them rustle dead oak leaves in the dark as they walked along, but Persian archers showered the irresolute defenders with arrows and they immediately fled up the mountainside.

At dawn lookout men came running down from the hills and informed Leonidas of the defeat of the Phocians. He realized that it would not be long before he and his troops were encircled and convened a council. The end was near.

Different opinions were expressed at the meeting, but the king took the view that it would be “unbecoming” for him, his Spartans, and their helots to desert their post. End of discussion. He sent away most of the other contingents, but kept the doubtful Thebans and another group from a Boeotian city hostile to Thebes. Perhaps this was to show that Greek unity could survive the certainty of annihilation. Leonidas told the men who were staying, with dour Spartan wit: “Have a quick breakfast, for you will be eating dinner in the underworld, in Hades.”

To give the Immortals time to come down from the mountain and seal off the back of the pass, the Great King did not resume the onslaught until an hour or so before noon. When his troops reentered Thermopylae they found that the Greeks had advanced in front of their defensive wall. Herodotus tells the stirring tale.

Many of the barbarians fell; behind them the company commanders flogged them indiscriminately with their whips, driving the men forward. Many fell into the sea and were drowned, and still more were trampled alive by one another. No one could count the number of the dead. The Greeks, who knew that the enemy were on their way round by the mountain track and that death was inevitable, put forth all their strength and fought with fury and desperation. By this time most of their spears were broken, and they were killing Persians with their swords.

Leonidas fell fighting bravely and a Homeric struggle ensued to rescue his body, echoing the fight over the corpse of Patroclus in the Iliad. It was recovered just before the approach of Immortals in their rear. Soon completely surrounded, the surviving Greeks withdrew to the mound behind the wall, where they fought tooth and nail to the last man. That is to say, all except for the Thebans, who after fighting bravely (it has to be admitted) stood aside and surrendered.

Anecdotes throw light on opposing attitudes to soldierly honor. Once the last Greek was safely dead, Xerxes toured the battlefield and made his way among the corpses, among them that of Leonidas. Resentful at all the trouble the Spartan king had caused him, he had his head cut off and impaled on a stake. He worried that visitors would see the high price he had paid for his victory and ordered that most of the Persian dead should be buried in shallow trenches or covered with earth and leaves, leaving only one thousand visible.

Two of the three hundred Spartans were suffering from acute inflammation of the eyes (a common ailment in classical times) and, before the fighting started, had been sent back to a village in the rear to recuperate. One of them, when he heard that the Persians had turned the pass, ordered his batman, a helot, to lead him to the battlefield. He plunged into the fray and was killed. The other, a certain Aristodemus, lost his nerve and stayed where he was. When he returned to Sparta he found himself in disgrace. No citizen would offer him a light to kindle his fire or speak to him. He was nicknamed the Trembler.

—

The allies at Artemisium watched the huge Persian fleet sail into Aphetae, a bay on the northern coast of the strait, and saw the land swarming with enemy infantry. By a lucky chance thirteen Persian ships mistook their opponents’ fleet for their own and sailed into captivity, but that was only a minor boost for morale. It did not stop the Greeks from panicking. Perhaps the expedition north had been foolhardy, they thought. Surely they should make their excuses now and leave? But even critics of the forward strategy could recognize the danger in such a move. If the fleet abandoned Artemisium, Leonidas would be left isolated to fend for himself.

However, if Herodotus is to be believed, Eurybiades lost his nerve and decided on flight. The terrified Euboeans petitioned him to wait a little while before leaving so that they could evacuate their women and children to places of safety. When he refused, they had a word with Themistocles and offered him a bribe of thirty talents if he could persuade the high command to stand and fight. He pocketed the money and went to see Eurybiades. He stiffened the Spartan’s resolve with a backhander of five talents, which he pretended to have found from his own pocket (throughout this history we shall find Spartans who were brought up in austerity at home and fell for gold when abroad). The fleet would stay. Themistocles never saw any harm in making a profit from doing the right thing.

On September 17, the same day as that on which the Great King launched his first assault on Leonidas at Thermopylae, the Persian fleet did not come out to fight. This was despite the fact that it had made good, so far as possible, the damage caused by the great storm. Also its commanders now knew that for all their losses they still massively outnumbered the Greeks.

But there was a good reason for inactivity. That afternoon two hundred Persian warships set sail northwards from Sciathos. Once the Greeks lost sight of them, they turned east out to sea and then sailed down the hundred-mile length of Euboea. The plan was to round the island’s southern tips and proceed up the channel between Euboea and the mainland. Their destination was Euripus, a strait only wide enough to allow a single ship to pass through at a time. Here they would wait.

Once the flotilla was in position on the following day, the Great King’s main fleet was to attack and rout the Greeks at Artemisium, whose only escape route was down the channel towards the Euripus narrows. They would be caught in the jaws of a lethal trap.

That was the idea, but secrecy was essential. Luckily, a dissident Greek diver in the Great King’s service swam or rowed unnoticed across the few miles of water from Aphetae to Artemisium and revealed the stratagem. After they had briefly considered a plan to lay an ambush themselves at the Euripus narrows, Eurybiades and Themistocles made the intelligent and brave decision to offer battle at once. It was essential to discover the enemy’s battle tactics and to test the efficacy of their own.

The Persians made no move, so the Greeks challenged them. They rowed into open water from their beach in a line more than two miles long. The Persians responded by coming out themselves and forming an even longer line. They began to outflank and envelop the Greeks, who on a signal backed water and formed themselves into a circle, with all the ships’ bows pointing outwards. This made things difficult for the Persians, who liked to come alongside enemy triremes and board them. By contrast the Greeks preferred to row forward and disable their opponents by ramming them in the side or stern, and for this their hedgehog layout was ideal.

It was a short engagement, which came to an end at dusk. The Greeks captured thirty enemy warships, a minor but significant victory and a boost for morale.

That night Boreas made his second intervention. A tempest raged, torrential and continuous rain poured down, and thunder pealed around the mountain peaks. The main Persian fleet at the open anchorage of Aphetae was badly hit. Apparently corpses and wreckage got entangled with ships’ prows and oars, panicking crews and marines.

The detachment of triremes that was sailing around Euboea was caught in open seas opposite the island’s dangerous southwestern coast. The wind blew them along in the sodden darkness. They had no idea where they were heading and most of them crashed against the barren lee shore. It seems that not one ship survived. If there had been any still afloat, they would have been mopped up by the Athenian reserve of fifty-three warships. Its job had been to guard home waters, but, now that it was obvious that the Great King was not intending a sudden southern push by sea against Attica, it was en route to join the fleet at Artemisium.

The Persians gave themselves twenty-four hours to recover from their latest battering, but, fearful of the Great King’s wrath, they came out from Aphetae again at noon on the following day. Still numerous, they formed up into a crescent and as before tried to outflank the enemy. The Greeks engaged them and fierce fighting ensued. The two sides were just about an even match and both sustained serious losses, but the allied fleet under Eurybiades and Themistocles seems to have had the better of it, for after the fighting was over it controlled the site of the encounter with its corpses and wreckage.

Sore and exhausted, they had reason to congratulate themselves on their performance. But then, as the sun sank, a thirty-oared cutter turned up at Artemisium. It had been stationed off Thermopylae and its job was to report to the fleet any important developments on land. It brought news of Leonidas’s last stand the day before, when, ironically, everything had been quiet at sea.

There was no longer any reason to stay. Themistocles ordered the men to leave their campfires burning so as to deceive the enemy of their intentions. Then the allied warships slipped away as quietly as possible under cover of dark and made their way down the Euripus channel.

With a squadron of the best Athenian triremes Themistocles brought up the rear. He could not stop thinking of cunning plans. The Ionian Greeks had been compelled to contribute triremes to the Great King’s fleet, and the Athenian admiral told his fellow-commanders that he had thought of a way of dislodging their loyalty. At every coastal site where there was drinking water, he had his men carve a message into the rocks. It asked the Ionians to change sides and join their fellow-Hellenes. If they could not do that, they should at least adopt a posture of neutrality. “Fight on purpose like cowards.”

Even if this propaganda had no direct effect, it might at least plant seeds of suspicion in the mind of the Persian high command.

—

The sea fighting at Artemisium was not decisive, but it had the great advantage of substantially reducing the Persians’ numerical superiority. Even more important, it gave the Greeks in general and the Athenians in particular some valuable experience of the realities of warfare at sea. Despite the odds, they saw that they could, just possibly, win. Plutarch wrote:

They learned from their own achievements in the face of danger that men who know how to come to close quarters and have the will to fight have nothing to fear from numbers of ships, brightly painted figureheads, boastful shouts or barbaric war-chants….Pindar understood this when he wrote that Artemisium was

Where the brave sons of Athens erected

The radiant cornerstone of liberty.

12

“O Divine Salamis”

The war was as good as over.

The Great King swept through central Greece in the autumn of 480, meeting no resistance. Despite the fact that the oracle at Delphi was on excellent terms with Persia, most of the local population felt that discretion was the better half of valor and left town. The priests themselves consulted the Pythia as to what to do, and were tersely informed that the god knew how to protect his own property.

And so he did. Although Xerxes probably did not intend to sack Delphi, he sent some troops to secure it. When the soldiers approached, a violent rainstorm broke out that set off an avalanche of rocks; they hastily retreated.

Other places were not so fortunate. Not only did the army help itself to provisions wherever it found them, it also burned and pillaged as it went along. Those who had not yet quit Athens for Salamis or Troezen did so now.

When the Persians entered Attica, they ravaged the countryside, burning temples and villages. Athens was a ghost town. Only the few people on the Acropolis remained. Members of the family of Pisistratus, the long-dead tyrant, were still hoping against hope for a restoration to power. They proposed an honorable surrender, but to no avail. Persian archers occupied the hill of the Areopagus, which faced the entry to the citadel; they shot flaming arrows at the defensive wooden stockade and set it alight. But the Acropolis was almost impregnable and the invaders were unable to storm it until some Persians noticed a path up a steep cliff where the defenders had not bothered to post guards.

When the Athenians saw that enemy soldiers had climbed up onto the Acropolis, they gave up hope. Some threw themselves off the cliffs and died, while others escaped into the inner sanctuary of Athena, where they were found and massacred. Then all the buildings on the citadel were set alight.

Xerxes had accomplished his mission. He had destroyed the holy places of Athens in revenge for the firing of the temples at Sardis all those years ago. It was the most prominent objective of the campaign and he had met it. He sent a jubilant message to the court at Susa and, especially, to Artabanus, whom he had sent home earlier in the year as punishment for his pessimism. The news was received with public rejoicing. People strewed the roads with myrtle boughs, burned incense, and gave themselves over to sacrifices and pleasure. Xerxes was victorious and everyone was going to know about it.

—

But if he was victorious, the Great King had yet to win. That is to say, he had managed to sack Athens and lay waste to much of Hellas, but had not defeated his opponents in a decisive engagement either in the field or on the waves. Would they see sense and surrender, he wondered, or would he have to do some serious fighting?

As for the Greeks, they had not yet lost the war, but they could very well do so in an afternoon. They were unsure what was their best course of action. After sailing down from Artemisium, they put in at the Salamis narrows on the express request of Themistocles. This gave his triremes time to evacuate any remaining fellow-citizens across the water from Attica, after which he joined the others.

A little later, the Persian fleet arrived at Phaleron bay where, according to Herodotus, Xerxes paid it a personal visit. He wanted to meet his commanding officers and seek their guidance for his next step. He asked his commander-in-chief, the great survivor, Mardonius, to chair the discussion. Most of those in attendance, guessing what the Great King really wanted to hear, advised an early engagement with the Hellenes. A dissenting voice was raised. This came from Artemisia, fiery queen of the Greek city-state of Halicarnassus in southwest Caria. She had taken power after her husband’s death and shown herself to be a capable ruler.

In her opinion, Xerxes should not offer battle at sea. “The Greeks will not be able to hold out against you for very long,” she said. “I hear they are running short of food on the island.” The main army was marching threateningly towards the Isthmus and she predicted that the Peloponnesians would think better than to hang around at Salamis just to please the Athenians.

If her intervention is historical, she was making good points. The Greeks were indeed quarrelsome and were finding it hard to maintain their unity. Feeding all the refugees on Salamis island, the entire Athenian polis, was a very difficult task.

But Xerxes had his own problems. With September drawing to a close, the campaigning season would soon be over. In the ancient world, when the weather at sea during the autumn and winter months deteriorated, warships knew better than to venture out of harbor. To be marooned on the cold and windy beaches of Phaleron until the following spring was an unappealing prospect. Not only would the Persian fleet be in danger of further demolition at the hands of Boreas, but merchant vessels would no longer be able to guarantee a reliable supply of imported food. Local provisions would soon run out, if they had not already done so. The Great King’s hordes might face starvation.

Opposition at the Isthmus, now fully fortified with a rampart along its width of four and a half miles, would be fierce. Thermopylae had taught Xerxes a lesson about the enemy’s defensive capability. In theory the fleet could turn the position by landing on the Peloponnese south of Corinth, but this would be difficult for so long as the Greek navy remained intact. The coasts were inhospitable and uncharted. The island of Cythera to the south of the peninsula was well known to Phoenician traders and had plenty of beaches; in theory, it could make a Persian base for operations against Sparta, but both weather and waters were treacherous.

In sum, Xerxes felt he could not afford to wait. A quick victory over the Greek fleet, holed up in Salamis and still heavily outnumbered, was more likely than one against the hoplites behind their wall on the Isthmus. It would, in fact, make a land battle unnecessary. Assuming a Greek defeat, he began work on a mole designed to stretch from the shore of Attica to the island; this would enable his foot soldiers to cross over quickly to Salamis and slaughter the thousands of Athenian refugees there.

—

A very similar debate, in reverse, was being held among the allies. A general war council, attended by commanders of all the allied contingents, sat in almost permanent session. News of the invasion of Attica and the sack of Athens was announced at the meeting and set off a panic. All who contributed an opinion advised retreat to the Isthmus. Eurybiades so decided and the meeting broke up.

Themistocles hurried to the admiral’s ship and argued that the order for withdrawal would break Hellenic unity and if dismissed, the various flotillas would simply scatter to their individual homelands. He persuaded Eurybiades to recall the council. A heated discussion ensued during which Themistocles put the case for fighting the Persian fleet in the narrow waters at Salamis where Greek triremes would have the best chance of victory. He told his colleagues: “If you do not remain here, you will be the ruin of Hellas, for the whole outcome of the war depends on the ships.”

When he saw he was making little headway, he issued an ultimatum. If the decision to leave Salamis was not canceled, the Athenians would renounce the alliance and leave with their families for Italy. There they would found a new polis. This was not a new idea, but had already been in his mind when arguing the case that Athens should invest in a fleet.

The allies had to take the threat seriously, although we do not know how seriously Themistocles meant it. The Greek fleet with approximately 380 warships would be impotent without the two-hundred-and-more Athenian contingent. It would be unable to stop the Persians from sailing wherever they wanted. Wall or no wall at the Isthmus, the Peloponnese would lie open and defenseless to the enemy. Eurybiades rescinded his decision.

A day passed and opinion slid again. The Great King moved his fleet from Phaleron to take up position just outside the Salamis narrows where the Hellenes lay. This was alarming and late in the afternoon another council was called. Once again voices spoke up for reconsideration and retreat. Themistocles feared that Eurybiades might once more feel compelled to alter his ruling.

So he took matters into his own hands. He sent a household slave of his, who was a paedogogus and looked after his children, one Sicinnus, on a special mission. Either a Persian or a Persian speaker, he rowed a boat under cover of darkness to the enemy fleet and delivered a message for Xerxes. He probably gave it to the nearest officers he could find and made a quick exit, but he may have been escorted into the presence of the Great King. Either way, the carefully crafted words of Themistocles reached their intended recipient. In the version of Herodotus they read:

I have been sent here by the Athenian commander without the knowledge of the other Greeks. He is a well-wisher of your king and hopes for a Persian victory. He has told me to report to you that the Greeks are terrified and are planning to escape. All you have to do is prevent them from slipping through your fingers, and you now have an opportunity of unparalleled success. They are at daggers drawn with each other, and will not stand up to you.

As every spy knows, the best cover story is the one nearest to the truth. Themistocles’ account was embarrassingly accurate, but nevertheless it was a trap. The Great King stepped onto the snare and the noose tightened. He ordered his fleet to stay at sea all night outside the narrows to prevent the Greeks from sailing off and sent a detachment to guard the western end of the Salamis bay. Picked Persian infantry was placed on an island called Psyttaleia, which partly blocked the opening of the Salamis channel. Escape was no longer an option for Eurybiades.

Themistocles’ political adversary, Aristides, back from exile like Xanthippus and serving in the armed forces, had just sailed in from Aegina and had noticed Persian triremes gathering off the western coast of Salamis. He called the Athenian admiral out of the council and told him what he had seen. Themistocles asked him to go into the meeting and report that the Greeks were surrounded—they were much more likely to believe Aristides than himself. This he did, but the commanders were unconvinced. Only when an enemy warship defected and gave a full account of Persian movements did they accept the fait accompli. The atmosphere at the council lightened and became constructive.

Attention began to be paid to tomorrow’s battle. Now the allied commanders listened to Themistocles, for whom years of planning were at last coming to fruition. His chief anxiety was to find a way of enticing the Great King’s armada into the narrows. It had to appear that the allies had suffered a catastrophic blow to their morale and were ready simply to be mopped up.

Once Xerxes had accepted the bait, the actual battle should be fairly straightforward. It would be fought in constricted waters, in this way preventing encirclement and lessening the inequality of numbers. A crescent formation would give the Hellenes room for maneuver and opportunities for ramming. The Athenian crews had trained for speed off the mark and for quick turning. Their triremes were lower in the water than those of the Persians and more stable in choppy seas.

—

The narrows of Salamis describe a semicircle leading from the Aegean Sea to the bay of Eleusis. Their opening, past Psyttaleia, is about two thousand yards wide between the coast of Attica and a long thin headland on the left (from an entrant’s point of view), Cape Cynosura (another dog’s tail). The channel narrows somewhat because of a second headland farther back on the left, on which stood Salamis town. Although the water then apparently widens again, the presence of a small island named today after Saint George, once again on the left, effectively reduces the channel to a little over one thousand yards. The water then opens up once more and leads on into the bay of Eleusis. The general effect is of a funnel.

Well known to a local like Themistocles but not to the Persians, a southerly wind, the sirocco, tended to blow in the morning and a swell would push up the channel from the open sea. This was usually followed in the afternoon by a brisk westerly.

With dawn on September 29 the Greek commanders gave pep talks to their marines. The oarsmen pulled the hulls down into the water from beaches on the Salamis coastline. Meanwhile Xerxes seated himself on a gilded stool that had been placed on a spur at the foot of Attica’s Mount Corydallus; a golden parasol warded off the sun. From here he had a splendid and uninterrupted view of events. He was escorted by guards and a bevy of secretaries who noted down instances of heroic or cowardly behavior.

He could see everything the Greeks were doing despite the fact that they were out of sight of the Persian fleet, which had not yet entered the funnel. And what the Great King saw confirmed everything he had heard about disunity and fear among the Greeks. He watched them launch their boats and confusedly make their way northwards towards Eleusis, as if they had no stomach for the fight. A faint-hearted flotilla broke off at top speed and sailed into the distance.

The Persians were certain they would have little trouble disposing of a disorganized and frightened enemy and their vast fleet formed up in close order and tried to squeeze into the funnel. It did so by moving sideways. The highly skilled mariners from Phoenicia held the right wing and advanced obliquely along the coast of Attica up to the point where Xerxes was sitting; they happened to pass an islet that partly isolated them from the body of the fleet. Ionian Greeks were on the Persian left wing; as they maneuvered past Cape Cynosura, they got caught in a traffic jam.

Meanwhile, the Greeks altered their dispositions. They were out of sight of the enemy, but in full view of the Great King, although it was too late for him now to issue new orders. The flotilla that had appeared to be fleeing was in fact holding itself ready in the bay of Eleusis to protect the main fleet from a possible assault by the Persian squadron that was blocking the western end of the channel that separated Salamis island from Megara and the mainland.

The remaining three hundred or so warships changed course and rowed southwards, probably in ten columns. They redeployed into line abreast and, as planned, adopted a crescent-shaped configuration, masking Saint George island. The Athenians on the left wing faced the Phoenicians next to the mainland coast, and triremes from Aegina were on the right across the mouth of a small bay just north of the Cynosura headland.

Then something extraordinary happened. A deafening war chant among the Greek ships warned Xerxes and his sailors that they had badly misjudged the mood of their opponents. Eight years later, the tragic poet Aeschylus wrote a play, The Persians, in which he has a messenger arrive at the Great King’s court at Susa and describe the course of the fighting. It is an eyewitness account, for like practically every other male Athenian citizen the author was there and pulling an oar.

Then from the Hellene ships

Rose like a song of joy the piercing battle-cry,

And from the island crags echoed an answering shout.

The Persians knew their error; fear gripped every man.

They were no fugitives who sang that terrifying

Paean, but Hellenes charging with courageous hearts

To battle. The loud trumpet flamed along their ranks,

At once their frothy oars moved with a single pulse,

Beating the salt waves to the bosun’s chant; and soon

Their whole fleet hove into view.

Before rowing into battle, the Greeks waited for the expected morning breeze. This created a choppy swell and blew the Persian vessels, which were higher and more top-heavy than their Hellenic counterparts, off their bearings and broadside on to their eager opponents. The allies fought in an orderly fashion, ramming enemy warships with their bronze beaks and slicing through banks of oars. The crack Phoenician squadron was pushed towards the Attica shore, broke and fled; Athenian triremes pushed through the resulting gap. Ships in the Persian front line turned back to run before the wind as it veered into a westerly. But there was no space for them and they crashed into those behind them which were pushing forward to join in the action under the Great King’s gaze. On the right the Aeginetans began to curl round into the long Persian flank, so that the Hellenic crescent became a closing circle.

The Persians, who had been at their oars on guard duty through the night (while their opponents had slept by their boats on the beaches of Salamis), were beginning to tire. The wind gradually pushed wreckage out to sea. The Great King’s admiral and half brother, Ariamenes, was downed by a spear and thrown into the water. His body was picked up by plucky Artemisia, who was having an exciting if not altogether constructive time. Her ship was on the point of capture, so she took down her colors and rammed and sank a friendly trireme. Her Athenian attacker turned away, assuming that she was either Greek or had defected. The Great King watched this feat and praised Artemisia’s courage, assuming that she had destroyed an enemy ship. He could see that the tide of battle was turning against the Persians and Herodotus tells us that he remarked of her: “My men have become women and my women, men!”

This was unfair, for the Persians fought bravely, but gradually a confused melee mutated into a confused rout. The funnel emptied. The sea was carpeted with wrecks and drowned men (few Persians could swim). Aeschylus’s Persian bearer of news again:

The Hellenes seized fragments of wrecks and broken oars

And hacked and stabbed at our men struggling in the sea

As fishermen kill tuna or some netted haul.

Aristides landed a detachment of hoplites on Psyttaleia where the Great King’s picked troops were waiting, marooned and helpless. They were all put to death. The rout became general and a ragged pursuit continued till twilight. The battle was over.

—

It was a famous victory—so famous that we easily forget that Xerxes still possessed a formidable navy. He had lost two hundred ships with an unspecified number captured and the Hellenes only forty, but he still had plenty left. The significance of what had happened was unclear to people at the time and the allied high command feared that the Persians were perfectly capable of refitting, regrouping, and fighting again. And this is what they did. The army marched on towards the Isthmus and work continued on building a mole and boat-bridge to the island of Salamis where the evacuated population of Attica were nervously awaiting their fate. It looked as if Xerxes was continuing his campaign.

But the spirit had been knocked out of the armada. The best of it, the Phoenician contingent, had been more or less wiped out, and a headstrong decision of the Great King to blame their surviving commanders for the whole debacle and behead them provoked understandable resentment. Some ships may even have deserted. On October 2 there was a partial solar eclipse, which added to the atmosphere of unease and gloom.

The logistical problems had not gone away and the campaigning season, at least at sea, would soon be over. The reasons that, not many days previously, had impelled Xerxes to attack now persuaded him to leave. On top of that, he was not altogether sure that he still commanded the seas, for he could not count on winning a renewed engagement. The Greeks might well take it into their heads to sail to the Hellespont and destroy the boat-bridges, in which case he and his army would be cut off from home. They would be stuck in hostile territory at the mercy of vengeful Hellenes and insurgent Thracians.

The most sensible course was to declare victory and return speedily to Susa. And who could gainsay him? The Great King did indeed control mainland Greece bar the Peloponnese; he had killed a king of Sparta and had fired Athens. He had substantially extended the empire’s bounds.

If there had been collusion between Persia and Carthage to vanquish the western Greeks of Sicily as well as those in Hellas (see this page), as there may well have been, it did neither of them any good. News arrived during these days that Gelon, the tyrant of Syracuse, and his friend Theron of Acragas, had repelled a major Carthaginian invasion. A decisive battle had been fought at Himera, a Greek city of the island’s northern coast (not far from today’s Palermo). It probably coincided with the Thermopylae campaign. An instinct both for public relations and for neatness fostered an inaccurate belief that it took place on the very day of Salamis.

The Great King set off for home. He returned the way he came and was accompanied by a substantial escort of perhaps as many as forty thousand men. To his dismay, the boat-bridges had been swept away by a storm soon after Salamis, but the returning fleet ferried the Persians from Europe to Asia. Brazenly, Xerxes held splendid victory celebrations when he arrived in Susa. He left Mardonius in Thessaly with an army (it is estimated) of about sixty thousand horse and foot. His task would be to maintain the occupation and, in the following year’s campaigning season, to bring a Hellenic army to battle and destroy it. Much of the Persian horde was demobilized and Mardonius kept only the Iranian troops and some other handpicked detachments. In due course the escort returned to his command after delivering its master to the safety of Asia.

Meanwhile Xerxes dispatched his disheartened fleet to Cyme, a port on the coast of Asia Minor, and the island of Samos where it was to await further orders.

It was sign of his loss of authority that the sacred chariot of the god Ahura Mazda and its eight grays disappeared. Xerxes had left them not far from Macedonia on his way to Greece, but when he returned to pick them up they had gone. The chariot had been given to Thracian inlanders and the horses had been rustled. There was nothing he could do about it.

—

When the Greeks woke up one morning some days after the battle in the narrows, they sent out scouts to locate the enemy navy. The roadstead at Phaleron was deserted. The Great King’s ships had vanished. Eurybiades and Themistocles, who was the hero of the hour, led their fleet in pursuit, although they did not hurry and they did not go far. They laid siege to the medizing island of Andros that lies south of Euboea, but with no success.

Themistocles argued that they should sail to the Hellespont and cut off Xerxes before he could leave Europe. Eurybiades wisely disagreed: it was too late in the sailing season, and despite Salamis the allies were still heavily outnumbered and almost all the islands in the Aegean were on the Persian side. Themistocles gave way. Shameless, and ignorant of the fate of the bridges, he sent a message to Xerxes claiming to have prevented their destruction.

The allies decided to call it a day and returned to Salamis, where they wintered. With the arrival of spring 479, Hellenic unity came under renewed strain. The fleet, still commanded by a Spartan but with an Athenian admiral, the former exile Xanthippus, sailed east to Delos. Oddly, they numbered only 110 ships. Perhaps the allies wanted to save money, for navies were labor-intensive and painfully expensive to maintain. Alternatively and much more probably, Athens temporarily held back its own contingent for political reasons.

It would be no wonder if they did. Paradoxically, Salamis had secured Sparta, a land power, and her allies on the Peloponnese, but it had done nothing for Athens, a sea power, which needed a victory on land before it would be safe for its evacuees to return to Attica. It looked very much as if Sparta was disinclined to risk its hoplites on a military campaign to expel Mardonius from central and northern Greece. The Isthmus was now well fortified and this defensive position could no longer be turned now that the Persian fleet had departed.

The only card in the Athenians’ hand was their triremes. Mardonius tried to persuade them with generous terms to switch sides; he would rebuild the city and the burned temples, give them additional territory, and allow them to govern themselves. They answered with a firm negative and a man who had the temerity to suggest that the ecclesia should at least consider the proposals was stoned to death, along with his wife and children. They pointed out to the Spartans that they could not resist Persia forever, exiled as they still were from their own native land. If the rest of Hellas sat on its hands, they might be obliged to accept Mardonius’s terms. It was hardly necessary to add that 110 ships were far too few to resist Xerxes should he ever send his fleet back to Greece. There would be no second Salamis.

Sparta was delayed from taking military action by yet another religious festival, but eventually and with apparent reluctance it conceded. A substantial army, consisting of 10,000 hoplites, of whom 5,000 were elite Equals (perhaps two thirds of all full adult citizens), plus 35,000 light-armed helots, was sent north under Pausanias, nephew of Leonidas and regent for the dead king’s son, who was still a minor. He picked up contingents from other city-states as he marched along. At Eleusis the united allies swore an oath of fidelity and comradeship: “I shall fight as long as I live, and shall not consider it more important to be alive than to be free.”

—

Mardonius ravaged Athens for a second time in retaliation for his advances having been rebuffed. Modern archaeologists bear witness to the thoroughness of the destruction wreaked by the Persians: in the agora seventeen wells have been discovered filled with debris of the private houses they once supplied with water. On the Acropolis dozens of broken and smoke-blackened statues have been unearthed, and the unfinished predecessor of the Parthenon was demolished (its fluted column drums can still be seen).

The Persian general was delighted that Sparta and its friends had been tempted to come out from behind the wall at the Isthmus, now more or less impregnable. He immediately pulled his forces back from Attica and chose a battle venue in Boeotia where the land was fairly flat and suitable for cavalry maneuvers. He placed his troops in a five-mile line along the northern bank of the river Asopus and built a large square camp in the rear protected by a wooden stockade. He waited expectantly for the enemy to arrive. This would be the decisive contest of the war.

On the southern side of the river a ridge bordered a gently undulating plain that stretched to the foot of a mountain range dominated by Mount Cithaeron. Passes led down into the plain from the Isthmus and Attica. Mardonius had his men clear the area of trees and shrubs that would get in the way of his horsemen. To the southeast stood the small, vehemently anti-Persian and pro-Athenian town of Plataea.

Pausanias commanded a force of an estimated 38,700 heavy-armed infantry and 70,000 light-armed skirmishers with contingents arriving daily from various patriotic poleis. He encamped in order of battle on the lower slopes of Mount Cithaeron. Sparta held the place of honor on the right and Athens with plucky Plataea on the left. Here the allies hoped they would be safe from the attentions of the Persian cavalry.

Some hope. After a few days of inactivity, Mardonius flung his dangerously efficient cavalry at them. Their commander, Masistius, rode ahead of the line, splendidly attired in a corselet of golden scales and a crimson tunic over it. Unluckily, his horse received an arrow in its flank and reared up in pain, throwing its rider. Athenians swarmed over Masistius, who fought bravely for his life. He was protected by his armor, but someone spiked a javelin through the eye-hole of his helmet, whereupon he collapsed and died. His body was put in a wagon and paraded up and down the Greek lines. Herodotus comments: “It was worth seeing for its size and its beauty.”

Pausanias then moved his army from the foot of Cithaeron to the ridge just across the Asopus from the Persians. This was not an ideal position. Its chief advantage was copious water, especially at the Gargaphia spring a little to the south. But by moving so far forward the Greeks were no longer able to protect the passes through which essential food supplies were transported. Also the Persians could outflank the ridge, enter the plain unopposed, and cut Pausanias’s line of communications. In theory, Mardonius could interpose his entire force between the Greeks and the hills.

Neither side made a move for more than a week, and then the worst predictably happened. The Persians destroyed a party of five hundred draft animals carrying provisions as it came down a pass from Megara to Plataea and blocked future convoys. Mardonius launched another great cavalry attack against the ridge and had the spring fouled and choked. Hoplites had no answer to mounted archers and the Greeks did not have any cavalry with which to counter the enemy horse. If they wanted to eat and drink the allied forces would have to quit the ridge.

Mardonius was not without troubles himself. Under cover of darkness Alexander king of Macedon rode from the Persian lines to tell the Greeks that the Persians too were suffering from shortages. He wanted to make sure that, whoever won the imminent battle, he was on the winning side.

Pausanias decided to shift his position for a second time to high ground two miles south in front of Plataea. Surrounded by streams, it was nicknamed the Island and water was plentiful. To avoid the enemy cavalry this complicated maneuver was conducted by night, a difficult feat.

Of course, things went wrong. The center (comprising small contingents from many poleis) seems to have lost its way in the dark and eventually found itself standing outside the walls of Plataea. We do not know whether this was where it was meant to be, but it was able to protect the traffic coming down the passes, no bad thing.

For some reason the Spartans and Athenians on the two wings did not move, and by first light they were still on the ridge. Herodotus explains that, for reasons of honor, the commander of a Spartan battalion refused to obey the order to retreat. Pausanias spent the night trying to make him change his mind. More probably, he learned that the center had gone astray and was not sure exactly where it was. Much wiser to await the clarification of dawn. Once he had located the mislaid troops, he gave the belated order for the Athenians and Spartans to march, with the supposedly recalcitrant Spartan battalion acting bravely as a rear guard to ward off any Persian attempt to interfere.

Mardonius was in the best of humors. Like the Great King at Salamis, he misinterpreted what he saw as disunity, low morale, and incompetence, and ordered an immediate general advance across the Asopus. Were the confusions on the Greek side an accident or a trick? We can never be certain, but it is at least possible that Pausanias wanted to give an impression of disarray. This would encourage Mardonius to take a risk and attack an enemy satisfactorily established on high ground.

—

Pausanias was devout and at every stage of the campaign he sacrificed to the gods and made a move only when the omens allowed it. Now of all moments, as the Persian troops marched up towards his line, the omens stayed resolutely unfavorable. His men were under instructions to sit quietly with their shields in front of them, and await the order to advance. The priest killed victim after victim to no effect and Pausanias turned his face, all tears, to a nearby shrine of Hera, queen of heaven, and begged her intercession. In the nick of time the sacrifices turned propitious and the Spartan general unleashed his men just before they were overrun.

The lines met and clashed, and the Spartans soon found themselves hard-pressed. They sent for help from the Athenians. They would have come, but had just been attacked by Mardonius’s Ionian Greek division (which included medizing Thebans, who knew what fate awaited them if the battle was lost). The Spartans with support from the men of Tegea, an aggressive city-state in the Peloponnese, fought dourly on. The Persians discharged innumerable arrows from behind a barricade of wicker shields.

It slowly became clear that lightly armored Persians were no match for bronze-encased hoplites. The terrain sloped downwards to them and (it seems) it was not possible to deploy the cavalry. The wicker shields were overturned and, although they fought bravely, the men were pushed back. Mardonius on a gray was very visibly in the thick of things, but he was struck down by a flung rock. His wing turned around and fled back en masse to the stockade camp. On the left, the Athenians endured a fierce attack from their fellow-Greek opponents, but in the end, after a bitter resistance, these too gave way and ran straight to Thebes. The troops outside Plataea, which had originally been the Greek center, did not enter the battle before its closing stage.

The cautious Artabanus, who had escorted Xerxes to the Hellespont and returned to Mardonius, had held his forty-thousand-strong force in reserve on the Asopus ridge, from where he could watch the entire field of operations. Once he saw that all was lost, he faced about and marched without stopping until he reached Asia. He outstripped the news of his defeat and nobody attacked him on his journey home.

The Greeks captured the camp inside which tens of thousands of men were trapped in a confined space and spent hours methodically killing them all. They took no prisoners and by the end of the day, it was claimed, nine tenths of the enemy lay dead. Hellenic losses amounted to a modest 1,360 together with an unreported number of wounded.

Pausanias ordered his helots to collect everything of value they could find inside the stockade and on the field. According to Herodotus, they

spread out through the whole camp. Treasure was there in profusion—tents adorned with gold and silver; couches gilded with the same precious metals; bowls, goblets, and cups, all of gold; and waggons loaded with sacks full of gold and silver basins. From the bodies of the dead they stripped anklets and chains and golden-hilted daggers, but they took no notice at all of the richly embroidered clothes which, amongst so much of greater value, seemed of no value.

Someone suggested that the body of Mardonius should be given the same treatment that had been meted out to Leonidas—namely, that his head should be cut off and impaled on a pole. Pausanias replied angrily: “That is an act more appropriate to barbarians than to Hellenes. Don’t ever make a suggestion like that again and be thankful that you are leaving without being punished.”

The Spartan general visited an elaborate, richly furnished tent that Xerxes had left behind for Mardonius, perhaps as a token of his intended return. He ordered the Persian chefs to cook a meal and was astonished by the lavish banquet they produced. He contrasted it with the simple fare his staff prepared for him. “What a fool Mardonius was,” he reportedly remarked. “This was his lifestyle and he came to deprive us of our poverty-stricken way of life!”

—

King Leotychidas of Sparta had been sitting tight on the island of Delos with his 110 ships. He was joined at last by the rest of the fleet—namely, the two-hundred-odd Athenian triremes, under the command of the Alcmaeonid Xanthippus. These had been held back until Sparta and her allies had done the decent thing and marched out of the Peloponnese bound for Boeotia and victory at Plataea.

Some envoys from the Greek island of Samos came secretly to see the king and persuade him “to deliver the Ionians from slavery and expel the barbarian.” After some thought, he agreed and set sail for Asia Minor.

The Persian fleet was much smaller than at Salamis. Morale among the crews, which included a large number of doubtfully loyal Ionians, was very low. The survivors of the Phoenician contingent were so dispirited that they had been sent home. When the Persian commanders at the island of Samos learned the Hellenes were on the move, they decided they were no match for them and withdrew to the shelter of the nearby Mycale headland. There they joined forces with an infantry division that Xerxes had ordered to watch over Ionia during the army’s absence in Greece. They beached their ships and erected around them a stockade of rocks and timber.

The Greeks sailed close inshore to the Persian encampment and had a herald shout to the Ionians to “remember freedom first and foremost” and mutiny. They then disembarked not far off. Marines from Athens and other poleis marched along the beach towards the stockade. Meanwhile, out of sight of the enemy, the Spartans led about half their men up a gully into the hills and along a ridge to come down on the Persians from inland. The idea was not simply to stage a surprise attack, but, by giving the impression that the Greeks were fewer than they actually were, to tempt the Persians into taking the offensive.

The Persian commander nervously confiscated the Samians’ weapons and sent an equally untrustworthy contingent from Miletus to guard the passes that led from the Persian position out of the mountainous promontory. But he could not dismiss all his Ionians.

Just about now a rumor spread through the Greek fleet that Mardonius had been defeated in a great battle. This may have been a pious fiction invented by Leotychidas or possibly genuine news of the defeat of Masistius some days earlier. But it is equally plausible that the information could have been conveyed by a chain of beacons across the Aegean, for it appears that the battle of Plataea and this engagement at Mycale took place on the same day.

The Persians ate the bait and came out from their camp to fight, expecting a quick and easy victory. They planted a wicker shield-wall, as at Plataea, and shot arrows at the oncoming attackers. There was hard fighting with heavy casualties, but as the Athenians and others began to gain the upper hand, the unarmed Samians and other Ionians switched sides. By the time the Spartans turned up at the top of the ridge, there was little for them to do but mop up.

The victory was total. The camp was stormed and all the warships burned. For now, the Great King no longer had a fleet; when he heard what had happened he went into a state of shock. Elite Persian troops had more or less been wiped out and the Ionians went back to their cities with no intention of being conscripted again.

Leotychidas sailed north to the Hellespont to destroy Xerxes’ bridges, in case they had been rebuilt. Even if they had not, he could usefully confiscate the bridging material and capture the massive papyrus and flax cables.

—

The defeat of Xerxes was now complete. This was Greece’s finest hour. For all their squabbling and moral squalor, the allies had stuck together. Over time an idea grew of a historic fight for liberty, waged by a few, the happy few, against the barbarian many. It became a myth that shone ever more brightly with the passage of time. But it was closer than most myths are to the reality of what actually took place. The Persian Empire was an expansionist despotism (if a relatively civilized one) and the Greeks did seek to realize a certain idea of freedom. For Athens victory was proof that its democracy worked.

The Greeks had shown that a hoplite army, even one without cavalry, was more than a match for the best that the Achaemenids could throw at them. This was not a lesson quickly forgotten. The brilliant opportunism of Themistocles and his decision to make Athens into a sea power transformed the geopolitics of the region. The Greeks now ruled the waves. While the failure of Darius’s raid in 490 could properly be discounted as no more than an offense to the Great King’s bella figura, Xerxes had lost the Aegean Sea and most of its islands and could anticipate a new and more successful Ionian revolt along the seaboard of Asia Minor.