Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

  Their conference now concluded, the delegates began exchanging their farewells and leaving for home. The three agents were meanwhile heading for the nearest port, and a ship to Ionia. Spring, and the campaigning season it would herald, was still months away; but at least the Greek allies could now feel that the first blow against the King of Kings and his invasion was being struck.

  The Rape of Europa

  Once, before the coming of the Persians, the Aegean had been a Greek lake. That winter of 481 bc, however, with a crippled Ionia still counting the ruinous cost of rebellion, with Miletus a blackened shell of her former greatness, and Naxos and the other islands having submitted a decade previously to Datis' armada, the journey of the three Greek spies from the Peloponnese was very much a voyage into enemy waters. The nearer they drew to Asia, the more unsettling it became. Evidence of the terrifying scale of Xerxes' preparations was everywhere. Winter was drawing in, but the Aegean sea-lanes were still unseasonably busy. Along the Ionian coast, vessels that had swarmed there from every corner of the eastern Mediterranean crowded the harbours. The Greeks, even in their own backyard, were being swamped. Thirteen years previously, at Lade, the last fleet of a free Ionia had been swept off the sea. Now, with the invasion of Greece itself only months away, the contingents that had contributed most notably to that crushing victory for the King of Kings were back in

  Ionian waters. Any Greek would have recognised them with a sinking heart. Slim, shield-hung and sublimely manoeuvrable, the triremes that would constitute the shock force of Xerxes' fleet had a deadly reputation. The sailors who manned them were universally acknowledged as the most proficient in the world. 'Your borders', as the Judaean prophet Ezekiel put it, 'are in the heart of the sea.'46 He was addressing the city of Tyre, but he might just as well have been speaking to her even wealthier neighbour Sidon, or to Byblos, or to any of the great merchant strongholds that stood on islands or abreast of double harbours along the seaboard of what is now Lebanon. Proudly independent of one another each city may have been, but this, to many outsiders, was a wasted subtlety. The Greeks, certainly, lumped all their citizens together as one single, perfidious crew: Phoinikes — Phoenicians.

  This name, deriving as it almost certainly did from 'phoinix', the Greek word for 'purple', reflected that same blend of admiration and contempt with which they tended to regard any people whom they found threatening. Admiration — because the violet dye which the Phoenicians manufactured from shellfish was definitively the colour of refinement and privilege, an internationally desired luxury product that had helped to fill the coffers of Tyre and Sidon to overflowing. Contempt — because how vulgar it was, after all, how crashingly and irredeemably vulgar, to be defined by an item of merchandise! 'The love of lucre, one might say, is a peculiarly Phoenician characteristic.'47 So Athenian aristocrats liked to sniff. Yet this characterisation of Phoenicians as oily money-grubbers, universal Greek prejudice though it was, might just as easily inspire resentment as disdain. The merchants of Tyre and Sidon were not the only people who had a taste for turning a profit. There were many Greeks who shared it, and who profoundly resented the competition that the Phoenicians gave them. No matter how far they travelled, no matter where they sought new markets, or raw materials, or land for a trading post, 'those celebrated sea-rovers, those sharp dealers, the holds of their black ship filled up with a hoard of flashy trinkets',48 seemed always to have got there first.

  This rivalry, stretching back centuries, extended to the outer limits of the known world. The Phoenicians, their cities quite as hemmed in by mountains as were those of the Greeks, had always set their sights upon the open horizons of the sea. As far back as 814 bc, it was said, the Tyrian princess Elissa, leaving her homeland, had led a great party of colonists along the coast of North Africa until, arriving opposite Sicily, she had founded there a 'new city' — 'qart hadasht', or Carthage — destined to become the greatest metropolis of the West. By the time that Euboean colonists, a few decades later, began nosing their own way westwards, the tentacles of Phoenician trade had already reached to Spain. Soon they were extending even further, into the Atlantic and towards the Equator, to beaches fringed by jungle, where the Carthaginians would trade with impassive natives: gewgaws and baubles for gold.

  The Greeks, listening to these travellers' tales with an envious gleam in their eyes, had found themselves, by and large, too late on the scene to gatecrash the African market; and yet, although frozen out of Africa and Spain by the sophistication of their rivals' commercial networks, they too had discovered in the West a frontier ripe with opportunity. Although their first colony, on the island of Ischia in the bay of Naples, had initially courted Phoenician investors, partnership with the old enemy had not come naturally. Soon enough, throughout Italy and Sicily, it had degenerated into open confrontation. As ever more Greek settlers arrived looking for a new beginning, so the sheer weight of their numbers had begun to tell. On and on they had come, from Euboea, from Corinth, from Megara, from Ionia, a flood of maritime colonisation, unsurpassed in scale until the discovery of America more than two thousand years later. By the turn of the eighth century bc, a new city was being founded in Italy or Sicily virtually every other year. Even the natives had begun to talk of'Great Greece'.

  Certainly, by the time that mass colonisation had finally trickled to a halt in the mid sixth century bc, the wild West was semi-tamed. Determined to overawe the natives where they could not enslave

  them, the colonists had adopted a self-consciously swaggering style. Everything they did was on a monumental scale: walls loomed far vaster in the Greeks' new world than in the old; temples sprawled more grandiosely; colours gleamed brasher and more polychrome. Even the pleasures that men took in the West smacked of intimidation. In Sybaris, a town on the instep of southern Italy and an object of appalled fascination even to her neighbours, dandies would sprawl languidly on beds of rose petals and then complain in a drawl of suffering blisters. In war, their horses had only to hear flautists piping an enemy phalanx into battle and they would start shimmering together in a perfect synchronicity, practising their dance-steps. Even the ruin of Sybaris, when it ultimately came, had been spectacular. Captured by a coalition of its enemies in 510 bc, the city had been obliterated, razed from the face of the earth, so that not a trace of it remained. Success and failure in the West were both lit by a lurid and extravagant glow.

  No wonder that the allies meeting at the Hellenion had resolved, even as they dispatched their three spies eastwards, to send a mission in the opposite direction as well. Enthusiasts for rose-petals and late-night dancing the western Greeks may have been, but they could be fearsome soldiers when the mood took them. A tyrant by the name of Gelon, a ruthless and exuberant adventurer who had seized power in the great Sicilian port of Syracuse four years previously, appeared particularly well qualified to play the role of Greece's saviour. His credentials as a man of action were so impressive as to be unsettling. Already, rather as an Assyrian might have done, he had annihilated three neighbouring cities, transplanting their populations to Syracuse when not selling them into slavery, and raising fleets and armies on an almost Oriental scale. Just the brand of militarism, in short, that might seem to promise much against the King of Kings.

  Except that there was, that same winter of 481 bc, the shadow of a looming crisis over Syracuse as well. Gelon, crashing and swaggering ever further westwards in a bid to expand his supremacy over the whole of Sicily, had found himself colliding with a rival power bloc on the other side of the island, one largely comprised of Phoenician settlements. These, looking around frantically for an ally, had turned for help, as was only natural, from the most powerful Phoenician settlement of all: the city of Carthage. There, the subtle and calculating merchant-princes who guided its affairs had been watching Gelon's progress with mounting alarm. Their Sicilian kinsmen were welcomed with open arms: the opportunity to overthrow the troublesome tyrant of Syracuse while simultaneously indulging in some expansionism of their
own was far too good to let slip. During the autumn of 481 bc, even as the triremes of Tyre and Sidon were gliding northwards into the Aegean, the Carthaginians had begun equipping a fleet and recruiting a fearsome army of mercenaries, ready for a show-down with Gelon come the spring. In the West as well as in the East, it seemed, the Phoenicians were massing. And west and east, it was the Greeks who were to bear the brunt of their drive to war.

  Coincidence? No one in Greece could quite be sure. The spies sent to Sardis, for all that they might be able to nose around a few harbours on their way, had not the slightest hope of tracking down communications — even if they existed — between the Carthaginians and the King of Kings. Nevertheless, suspicion of the long reach of Phoenician cunning came naturally to most Greeks. After all, if the Carthaginian high command had indeed been liaising with Xerxes, attempting to synchronise their twin invasions, then the likeliest suspects as middlemen were agents from the mother-city of Tyre. Some conspiracy theorists, though, fretted that even this might not be the limit of Phoenician malignancy. What if the entire expedition of the King of Kings, the massing of the hordes of Asia, and the extermination of Greek freedom that it threatened, were merely the climax of a feud infinitely more ancient and inveterate? 'Persians in the know', it would be asserted with bald confidence after the war, 'put the blame for the quarrel squarely on the Phoenicians.''19 The hatred between East and West, Asia and Europe, barbarian and Greek: all, according to this theory, welled from a single perfidious source.

  It was stretching paranoia to extremes, of course, to imagine Xerxes the mere tool of a fiendish global conspiracy masterminded from Tyre. The King of Kings went to war on no one's behalf save his own. The Phoenicians, just like any other subject people, were his slaves. They were obliged to pay him tribute, to host a satrap and even, when they sailed to war, to submit to the authority of a lubberly Persian courtier. But that is not to say that the Phoenicians lacked all influence with the imperial high command. The Medes aside, there was perhaps no group of people in the Persians' entire dominion with such ready access to the royal ear. The kings of Tyre and Sidon were perfectly aware that the Great King's expedition would be holed below the waterline without the enthusiastic participation of their fleets. So it had always been. Cambyses, when he founded the imperial navy, had soon discovered the limits of what he could achieve with his new toy. Ordering a task force prepared for the conquest of Carthage, he had been astounded to have his plans vetoed by the Phoenicians, 'on the grounds that it would be an unnatural deed for them to go to war with their own children'.50 The lesson of this startling display of lese-majesty was one that Persian strategists had been quick to absorb. While the levies of other subject nations could be dragooned into war, it was wise to handle the Phoenicians more diplomatically. Slaves though they were, it might sometimes prove counter-productive to rub their noses too brutally in the fact. Better to have them sailing not merely as conscripts but as eager partisans for the cause of the King of Kings. Better, in short, to have them believe that their own interests were also at stake.

  And, of course, in the enterprise of Greece, they certainly were. The Phoenicians, who had provided the Persians with the bulk of their fleet at Lade, had already profited hugely from the destruction of Miletus — a city once quite as much of a commercial hub as Sidon or Tyre. Were Athens to be flattened in a similar manner, and the neutralisation of Corinth and Aegina secured, then the prospects for Phoenician business would glitter promisingly indeed. As a result, enthusiasm in the chanceries of Tyre and Sidon for the Great King's war was unstinting. The Phoenicians brought three hundred ships with them to the Aegean: more than the entire fleet of Athens. Nor had these been patched together in a hurry: Sidon, which competed with Corinth for the title of birthplace of the trireme, had been at the forefront of naval innovation for centuries. The Athenian oarsmen, often with only a few months' practice under their belts, would find themselves, in their first true taste of battle, going head to head with the very best.

  Horrendously outnumbered too. The Phoenicians were far from the only people to have sent a fleet in answer to the Great King's summons. Some, notably the Egyptians and the Ionians, were almost the equals of the Sidonians with an oar. True, both came from satrapies with a track record of rebellion; and perhaps, as they snooped along the harbour-front, the three Greek agents found some hope in this fact. If so, they were clutching at straws. The Persian admiralty, having been caught napping in the early days of the Ionian Revolt, knew better now than to neglect their backs. Command of the Egyptians and Ionians had been placed directly in the hands of two of Xerxes' brothers, and every ship in the armada manned with marines of proven loyalty. Why, then, would anyone in the Great King's fleet risk mutiny and their own annihilation for the sake of the Athenians, who were clearly doomed anyway? No one crowded into the ports of Ionia that winter could have had much doubt on that score. The mammoth fleet would soon start sweeping along the Aegean coastline, and all who stood in its way were bound to be destroyed. The Greek spies totted up 1207 triremes: a figure of suggestive precision.51 Whether all that vast number would embark for Greece and, if they did, whether they would all survive the summer storms unscathed were questions that only the campaign to come would answer. But the odds, even if the Great King lost a quarter of his fleet, even if he lost a half, would still be far from balanced. One simple, brutal fact, to the Greek spies, was menacingly clear. The allies, come the summer, would be facing a force greater than any that had ever been seen at sea.

  And by land? Only a visit to Sardis could answer that question. The Greek agents hurried on. By their third day of travel from the coast, they could see ahead of them, obscuring the silver mountains that loomed to the east, an ominous pall of smoke. Soon, nearing their destination, they began to make out great humps of earth, the cemetery of the ancient Lydian kings; then, dimly through the haze, Sardis itself, the red cliffs of the acropolis framed by steepling walls and surmounted by Croesus' monumental palace. The banners that flapped over the city's battlements, however, one adorned with 'an image of the sun enclosed in crystal', and the other, the royal battle standard, embroidered with the image of a golden eagle52, were those of a monarch mightier by far than Croesus had ever been; and the evidence of his greatness, there before the dumbfounded agents' gaze, stretched for miles far across the plain. The smoke they had seen from the far distance was pluming up from campfires: thousands upon thousands of them. Whether huddled in tents, or practising with their outlandish weaponry or jabbering in their impenetrable tongues, the multitudes of the Great King's army seemed conjured from a world stranger and more barbarous than most Greeks had ever cared to imagine. All the spies' darkest forebodings appeared fulfilled. The remotest reaches of Asia and of Africa had emptied themselves. Millions upon millions would be pouring, in barely a few months, into Greece.

  Or so it seemed. In truth, to count — or even to estimate — such monstrous hordes was no easy matter; and the spies, before they could even start their calculations, were unmasked and apprehended. The men who had arrested them were soldiers, not intelligence officers, and so it never crossed their minds not to have their captives tortured, then put to death. Just as the sentence of execution was about to be carried out, however, captains from the Great King's personal bodyguard came rushing up, frantically ordering that the prisoners must be spared. Led stumbling up the acropolis into the inner depths of the palace, the three spies found themselves, to their astonishment, being personally interrogated by the Great King himself, then escorted on a full tour of the imperial camp. Only once they were laden down with copious notes were they finally sent packing back to Greece.

  And the reports they took with them, just as the Great King had intended they would be, dealt only in terrifying superlatives. What the spies had been shown was nothing less than a panorama of his world-spanning dominions. At its heart the Great King himself and his crack corps of bodyguards: the thousand who attended him personally and bore golden apples on their s
pear-butts, and then a further nine thousand, also hand-picked, with silver apples on their spears, a shock force of warriors known collectively as the 'Immortals' — 'for if one of them were killed or fell sick, a replacement would immediately step forward to fill the gap in the ranks'.53 Then elite contingents of cavalry, from Persia and various subject nations: Media, Bactria, India, the steppes of the Saka. Finally — for the Great King lacked heavy infantry fit to measure against the bronze-clad hoplites of Sparta or Athens — teeming brigades of spear-fodder: exotically armed levies who might not, under normal circumstances, have appeared to a Greek observer as anything other than contemptible foes, but who, rolling forwards in a great torrent of humanity, might be expected to sweep away any shield-wall standing in their path. This, at any rate, was how it was reported back in Greece — for the three spies, reliant on their own dazzled estimates of the Great King's troop numbers, and no doubt on records helpfully provided by their Persian minders, did indeed find themselves talking in terms of millions. One million, seven hundred thousand to be precise — and even that total took no account of the levies that the Great King was planning to recruit as he advanced through Thrace and into Greece.

  Such figures, so colossal as to be virtually meaningless, were almost certainly a grotesque exaggeration. Most historians, forced to make an estimate, would put the army under Xerxes' command closer to 250,000. Even that, however, translated into an invasion force vaster than any previously assembled; and it was hardly a surprise that the Persian propaganda machine, looking to panic the Greeks into despair and perhaps even outright surrender, should have pumped their agents full of disinformation. Statistical sleight-of-hand the muster-lists may have been, of the kind that a talented bureaucracy could pull off in its sleep; but they were not - to the Great King's way of thinking, at any rate - a total fraud. Rather, in the message they proclaimed — that the whole world stood united beneath his banner, and that only the most inveterate of terrorist states could possibly presume to defy it - they expressed the simple truth.