King Leonidas also wanted Aristarkhos, Brithos’ father, with him. Both his valour as a warrior, and his experience and wisdom would prove invaluable. Thus father and son found themselves in the same contingent departing for the north.
The mountain people received the news of imminent enrolment and finally realized that they were no longer dealing with rumours. The war had already begun and they too had to prepare for departure. A herald came one morning to the great clearing and proclaimed that all able-bodied Helots must report for enlistment. And so, even Talos had to say goodbye to his mother and join the others down on the plain.
When they reached the city they would be chosen by the Spartan warriors, one by one, to serve as attendants and porters. Talos knew that he wouldn’t be chosen; his deformity would be sure to make them pass him over: no warrior would want a crippled Helot with him.
The Helots were conducted into the great square of the House of Bronze and arranged in three lines. The Spartan warriors, in formation opposite them, left the ranks one by one in order of seniority to select their own servants and squires. Finally it was the youngest warriors’ turn to choose. Talos, petrified, watched Brithos leave the ranks. He crossed the square and began to move down the line until he was directly in front of Talos. Brithos recognized him and fixed him with a mocking expression that made his blood turn to ice. The young Spartan turned to the recruitment officer and said, ‘I want this one.’
‘But, Brithos,’ said the officer, drawing closer, ‘are you really sure? Can’t you see that he’s lame? Leave him for the baggage carriers. Your personal attendant must be both strong and quick.’
‘Don’t worry,’ answered Brithos. ‘This one is strong enough, believe me.’
And so Talos was cast once again into the centre of the whirlwind after having lived for years in peace, if not in happiness.
Going towards the camp that had been set up near the city, he thought with consuming melancholy of Antinea: it had been years since he’d seen her, and perhaps now he’d never see her again. And of his mother, who was still hoping to see him return to their home on Mount Taygetus.
He thought of his grandfather Kritolaos in his tomb covered with oak leaves on the edge of the forest, and poor Krios – all over. Torn from his home, his people, his mother, he was utterly alone now and almost at the complete mercy of his worst enemy. He tried to summon up his courage and not feel defeated. The most important thing was survival, and certainly his young master would have enough to concern himself with, if what he had heard was true.
And so, the moment of departure came without anything happening in particular. He saw Brithos only a few times: when he went to the syssitìa to get his equipment, and when he came to camp to give instructions for the journey. Talos was busy applying new leather straps to the inside of his master’s shield. Brithos entered, took off his cuirass, put it into a corner, and went to sit on a low stool. ‘Is everything ready?’ he asked, without looking at Talos.
‘Yes, sir, everything is ready. I’ve changed these leather straps because they were worn out. The weapon has to be worn close to the arm.’
Brithos fixed him with a questioning gaze. ‘You know a lot of things for a shepherd who has never come down off the mountain.’
‘The elders of my people taught me everything that I needed to know to do this work.’
‘The elders of your people must have taught you some other things, too,’ continued Brithos, watching him intently. ‘You know full well what I’m talking about. I haven’t forgotten, even if years have passed since then, and I don’t think you have either.’
‘No, sir,’ responded Talos dryly, continuing his work, ‘I haven’t forgotten.’
‘I see that the lesson we gave you must have erased certain ideas from your mind. It looks that way, at least. But,’ he continued, removing his shin-plates, ‘there’s still something about you that doesn’t quite convince me. So, when I saw you in the square alongside the other Helots, I decided to find out what it was.’
‘There’s nothing to find out, sir,’ murmured Talos, without lifting his eyes from his work. ‘I’m only a poor shepherd.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Brithos coldly. ‘Strange things have been happening up on your mountains over the last few years. Only a month ago, a deer was found near the Eurotas; it had come there to die, struck by a strange type of arrow that we Spartans have never used. I have the impression that you may know something about it.’
‘You’re wrong, sir, I don’t know anything. I’ve only ever taken care of my flock.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Talos.’
‘And do you know who I am?’
‘You are Brithos, son of Aristarkhos, Kleomenid.’
Brithos stood and began to walk back and forth in the tent. Suddenly he stopped, his back to Talos.
‘And your girl . . . yes, the peasant. What ever happened to her?’
‘Pelias and his family followed noble Krathippos to Tegea and then to Messenia, I believe.’ Talos stood up and when Brithos turned he found the youth directly before him. Talos’ jaw was tight and he fixed him with a firm gaze.
‘Return to your work, shepherd, there is still much to prepare. We’ll be leaving tomorrow.’ He threw his short military cape over his shoulders and walked out.
The next day the army drew up in perfect order: the three hundred Spartiates first, four men by eight for each company, with their Peloponnesian allies behind them. Last came the Helot servants with the carts and baggage.
The king, surrounded by his officers, arrived when it was still dark. The mothers of the new warriors walked behind him. The women would officiate at the traditional ceremony of the consignment of the shield. Dressed in white with their heads veiled, they took their places before the formation of hoplites. The trumpets blared, and each young man stepped out of the ranks, advancing two paces. The trumpets sounded again, and they set the shields with the red lambda that they had received from their fathers on the day of their initiation onto the ground before them.
At a signal from the king, the first woman went up to her own son, picked up the shield and slipped it onto his arm. Firm-voiced, she declaimed the traditional formula: ‘Come back with this or upon it,’ which meant, ‘You shall return with your shield, as a victor. Or, should you fall in battle, you shall be brought back upon your own shield.’
Ismene’s turn came. The king had paid her a terrible honour, breaking with the custom of never putting all of the males of a family on the battlefield and thus risking the loss of the family name; Leonidas had chosen both husband and son.
Ismene knelt, picked up the shield, and rose to her feet facing her son. The grey light of dawn outlined the boy’s dark profile, making the lines of his face seem harder, and for a moment Ismene recognized the expression of the Kleomenid heroes sculpted in cypress wood. She froze, and her voice trembled as she pronounced the formula. The sun appeared behind the mountains as the last of the women returned to her place, and sinister flashes lit up the dark, still group of warriors as they stood before their mothers. With dry eyes, they watched their sons, knowing that they had given birth to mortals. Pain and grief were eternal prisoners in the darkness of their wombs.
The king put the three-crested helmet on his head and gave the signal for departure. Talos listened to the drum roll and then the sound of their pipes: that strange, measured melody that he had heard as a child when he had stolen down to the plain for the first time. The column left the camp and marched down the road for Tegea, heading north.
At the gate of the city, a great crowd had gathered to bid the departing army farewell. The old men, no longer able to bear arms, watched the young warriors with pride: their splendid bronze armour flashing brilliantly now in the sun, their tunics and crimson cloaks, their round shields with the great painted lambda. The eldest of the ephors came forward, and King Leonidas stopped his horse and dismounted. He took off his helmet, freeing his long red hair, and tossed back his
cape.
‘We salute you, O Leonidas our king,’ said the ephor. ‘Sparta wishes your victory and awaits your happy return.’ An ovation rose from the crowd. The king responded by bowing his head. Putting his helmet back on, he leapt into his saddle and again gave the signal for departure. The roll of drums and the sound of pipes was soon lost in the dust along the road to the north.
Two weeks after their departure Leonidas closed ranks at the pass of the Thermopylae, and immediately gave orders to repair the old wall of fortification that blocked the pass. He ordered a group of seven hundred Phocian hoplites who had joined them at the Thermopylae to guard the vulnerable pass of Anopaea, the only route by which the enemy could flank Leonidas’ position. He then arranged for the organization of guard duty and distribution of supplies.
Themistocles learned that the Persian fleet, having doubled the Chalcidice peninsula, was headed south. He went to lie in wait at the Artemision promontory, to protect Leonidas from the direction of the sea, as he had promised. At night, from the stern of the admiral ship, he launched signals with a torch and a mirror to keep Leonidas informed of what was happening. One day, as he was inspecting the fortifications, Leonidas saw one of the men who usually patrolled the road of the pass racing towards him at full speed. The guard leapt off his horse and began, panting, to make his report.
‘Sire,’ he gasped, ‘they’re coming. Hundreds of thousands of them. The rivers dry up when they cross, their fires light up the horizon at night; no one has ever seen such a great army!’ The king immediately gave a series of terse orders. The detachments took their positions in fighting order behind the wall while others remained in front to better survey the situation. They performed gymnastics as they waited, to warm their muscles for the battle. Suddenly, at the top of a hill appeared a Persian horseman. He was easily distinguished by his wide embroidered trousers and by the mitre that he wore on his head. The young Spartiates did not even honour him with a glance, but continued with their exercises as if nothing had happened. The Persian, having observed the scene, spurred his horse and dashed down the hill at a gallop.
‘They’ll soon be upon us,’ said Aristarkhos to Leonidas.
‘I think you’re right,’ responded the king. ‘They have no reason to delay.’
Instead, after about an hour, a squad of horses carrying a banner appeared on the road.
‘They’re not armed,’ observed Aristarkhos. ‘It must be an envoy.’
He was right. The horsemen slowed to a pace and advanced gradually behind the banner, stopping at the foot of the wall. An interpreter who spoke Greek came forward: ‘This is an embassy from Xerxes, the King of Kings, Lord of the Four Corners of the Earth. We wish to speak with your commander.’
Aristarkhos emerged from behind the wall and approached the interpreter, announcing: ‘Our commander Leonidas, son of Anaxandridas, King of the Spartans.’ He moved aside, and Leonidas came out into the open. The three red crests of his great helmet swayed in the wind that blew from the sea.
The Persian ambassador, wrapped in a mantle of blue byssus, wore the sabre of the Immortals with its finely chiselled golden hilt at his belt.
He haughtily pronounced a long discourse, nodding his head to signify that he had finished. The interpreter, with his sing-song Ionic accent, translated: ‘The King of Kings, Xerxes, our Master and Lord of the Four Corners of the Earth, has sent us to say, “O men of Greece, abandon this path. Do not uselessly challenge our ire. All the peoples and all the nations have already surrendered at the mere sight of our soldiers, more numerous than the grains of sand along the seaside. Our desire is to be merciful; we will not take your lives if you surrender, so give up your arms.”’ He paused for a moment. ‘What must I answer?’
King Leonidas, who had remained immobile, staring directly into the Persian’s eyes without so much as a glance towards the Greek interpreter, answered in his hard Laconian dialect. ‘Our arms? Come and get them.’
The interpreter paled, then translated the answer for the ambassador. The Persian stared, stunned by such as outright challenge. Then, with an irritated gesture, he nodded to his entourage, turned his horse, and went off in a cloud of dust.
A short time later, prostrated before his king, he repeated the answer given him. Demaratus, who was in the royal pavilion, advanced towards the throne saying, ‘I warned you, Lord, that even when all the others had submitted, the Spartans would go on fighting.’
The Great King, livid with anger, immediately convened his generals and ordered them to launch the attack: he wanted the Greeks taken alive and brought in chains into his presence. The camp immediately rang out with shouted instructions, trumpets blared the fall-in, and the immense horde began to make its way to the pass.
King Leonidas brought his troops outside the wall. He himself was in the front line on the right wing, Aristarkhos on the left. At a certain point they heard from far off the chilling roll of drums, confused with the neighing of horses and the din made by the iron-rimmed wheels of the war chariots. The gigantic army appeared at the end of the road.
*
The Spartiate warriors, drawn up on the right, pressed close together to create an impenetrable wall of shields, thick with shining spears. With a blood-curdling cry, the Persians suddenly threw themselves into the attack, spilling out onto the Greek front line. The row was terrible: the Persians were used to battling with light weapons and cavalry. Crowded into such a narrow space, they fell by the hundreds, run through by the heavy shafts of the hoplites who were completely protected by their bronze armour.
The combat became frenzied. The Greeks, abandoning their spears as they became unusable, unsheathed their short swords and began battling hand-to-hand. Leonidas’ red crest could still be seen above the dense cloud of dust that had risen, as he led his men onwards in a relentless charge. The three hundred warriors had forced a passage through the enemy lines, trampling the heaps of cadavers on ground made slippery by the blood of the fallen.
The Persian commander, realizing that the Greeks were about to encircle the centre of his formation, gave the order to retreat. Amidst the cries of the wounded and the neighing of the terror-crazed horses, his men began to move back slowly, so as not to totally break up the ranks. Leonidas abruptly also gave an order to retreat, and his men, throwing their shields baldric-wise on their backs, fled quickly towards the wall.
Seeing this, the Persian general assumed that the exhausted enemy intended to withdraw behind the wall, and he shouted out a new order to attack. Encouraged, his men rushed forward in disorderly pursuit, and the order of their formation was soon broken. It was exactly what Leonidas had hoped for; when his men arrived at the wall, they made a swift turnabout, presenting a new front in compact ranks to the enemy.
The Persians arrived headlong in chaotic waves, and they were promptly cut to pieces. Terrified, they attempted a retreat but the officers at their backs drove them on with whips, shouting their orders in a thousand different languages. In that inferno of dust and blood, the solid wall of warriors led by Leonidas advanced, destroying everything in their path. The trumpets finally sounded the retreat, and the soldiers of the Great King, wounded and depleted, abandoned the pass.
King Leonidas turned to his warriors, pulled off his bloody, dented helmet, and launched a cry of victory. He was joined by his men as the rocky gorges of Mount Oeta resounded with their joy.
Talos had watched the whole scene from behind the wall as his companions ran back and forth grabbing blunted weapons and broken spears to be repaired, and bringing new ones to the warriors on the line of combat. When he saw the men at the front double back at a run, he found himself leaning over the bastions; he would eagerly have taken up any arm at hand and leapt into the heat of the fray. He would never have thought that he could be moved by such an impulse! But as the battle unfolded, Talos felt his blood boiling in his veins and an urgent desire to combat among the warriors. He was shaken by his inexplicable enthusiasm for their desperate resistance. He
recognized superhuman valour in their magnificent compact formations as they followed the red crest of their king. And greater yet was his anger at not being a part of the fire that enflamed the combatants brought together in defence of the liberty of many nations.
*
The warriors of Sparta, Trachis and Tegea returned behind the wall, filthy and dripping sweat, wounded, limping. The infantrymen from Mantinea and Orchomenus had beards white with dust, their spears broken and shields rent. Talos saw Brithos with his splendid bronze cuirass decorated in copper, and with him his father Aristarkhos, his face covered by a Corinthian sallet, his great dragoned shield crushed and dented. How he longed to be one of them!
The Helots’ supervisor arrived and barked impatient orders to prepare food and water so the combatants could wash and recover their strength. The wounded were brought to a tent where they were bandaged and taken care of. Other Helots went outside the wall to gather the fallen men and prepare for hurried obsequies.
King Leonidas, indefatigable, went round the camp giving instructions and ordering the shifts of guard duty at the wall. As he rested for a moment without having even taken off his armour, a messenger came with a dispatch: the fleet had confronted the enemy and had succeeded in driving them back.
Themistocles had kept his word, keeping vigil over the sea to protect the small army that guarded the pass. There was no word from the mountain pass of Anopaea where the Phocians guarded the only route over land that could lead the enemy around to the back of the Greek contingent. The king sent a dispatch of his own to Sparta asking for reinforcements. He was sure that the pass could be defended if only fresh troops were available. He didn’t know that his destiny had already been decided: not for any reason would his government have diverted troops from the Corinthian isthmus.
Xerxes couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw his troops returning in such a state. He realized that his army had found no way to deploy its crushing superiority in that narrow alley guarded by a fistful of such courageous men. Demaratus was right: it had been a great error to underestimate the Greeks, and especially the Spartans. Xerxes gave the order to send the best of his troops, the Immortals, to the attack. The camp resounded with cries and laments, and the drums rolled once more. Soon ten thousand Persian warriors, splendidly armed, were lined up in their ranks. They would charge the pass and overwhelm, once and for all, the obstinate resistance of its defenders.
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