by Tom Holland
And to wait — and to wait some more. June turned to July and still the Great King did not come. Rumour fanned prodigious reports of his advance: of how his army was drinking rivers dry; of how all who
lay on his path were scurrying to offer him earth and water; of the gilded splendour of his regattas and feasts and entertainments. So far, it appeared, his progress through Europe had been less an invasion than a leisurely procession — and already, as July turned to August, the best conditions for campaigning were slipping away. Soon enough, with the Aegean heated to sweltering levels and colder air turning turbulent to the north, the season for summer gales — north-easterlies, or, as the Greeks called them, 'Hellesponters' — would arrive. 'Pray to the winds,' the priests of Delphi advised, in a final message to the allies. 'For they will prove good friends to Greece.'77 A message that all preparing to sail with the Greek fleet took to heart.
Yet, among the people of one city, the dilatoriness of the Great King was starting to prompt sentiments altogether less enthusiastic. For the Spartans, the prospect that they might have to defend Thermopylae during August was a truly excruciating one. Four years had passed since the previous games at Olympia; now, with the moon already waxing, the new games were destined to start when it was full. So too, to compound the agony, was the Carneia. The conjunction of these two festivals portended a period of more than usually sacrosanct truce. How could the Spartans possibly break it? Haunted already by the spectres of the murdered Persian ambassadors, the notion that they might offend the gods with even more impieties was too hideous to contemplate. With the Peloponnese full of potential medisers, and the Argives as ever sniffing the air, the Great King was hardly the only agent of divine retribution ready to hand. No, the Spartans could not possibly march north in August. To do so would be both criminal and lunatic. The Olympic truce could not be broken.
But who were barbarians to respect such scruples? Sure enough, no sooner had August arrived than the news that all Greece had been half dreading and half anticipating duly arrived at the Isthmus: the Persians had begun clearing roads along the foothills of Olympus. The conference broke up at once. In Athens, where the docks were already in turmoil with the demands of the evacuation, any consideration of truces was the last thing on people's minds. Rather — literally — it was all hands on deck. The city's fighting men were frantically scrambled. Some ships — the most disposable - were even entrusted to volunteers from loyal Plataea, 'whose courage and spirit, it was hoped, might serve to compensate for their total ignorance of the sea'.78 Thus, even leaving behind a substantial reserve fleet to guard their home waters, the Athenians succeeded in dispatching to Euboea, not the 100 ships they had originally agreed upon, but 127. Other cities — Corinth and Aegina prominent among them - sent all they could as well. To anyone watching the allied fleet as it rounded the headland of Sunium on its journey north, trireme after trireme, oars churning the water, flashing in and out, the spectacle would have been a stirring one. There were 271 front-line warships in total sailing for Euboea: no doubt only a fraction of the fleet at the command of the Great King, but a brave effort all the same, and inspirational.
Sent in command of it, as had been agreed the year before at the Hellenion, was a Spartan, an aristocrat named Eurybiades. Here, for his countrymen, was a bitter irony. Haunted although they may have been by their dread of breaking the Olympic truce, the contemplation of what other cities were committing to the war effort could hardly help but serve to prick their sense of honour. To man the land approaches as others were to guard the sea lanes: this was hardly a duty that the Spartans could now shrug aside. Somehow, a compromise had to be found, one that might spare them the fury of the gods while simultaneously enabling them to hold true to their sworn commitments. Why not, then, since it was still clearly out of the question for a full army to be dispatched until the Olympic truce was over, send an advance guard to secure the pass? If other cities, lying on the two-hundred-mile road that wound from Lacedaemon to Thermopylae, could be persuaded to swell it with contingents of their own, then even a small force of Spartans might hope to hold out. Particularly if that force were to be drawn from the very sternest, the very toughest of the elite. And particularly — since the message broadcast to the world of Spartan resolution would then be unmistakable — if it were led by a king.
* * *
*No detail better proves the authenticity of Herodotus' sources for Xerxes' crossing of the Hellespont than this: that the Immortals marched to war with their spears held upside down. Assyrian frescoes, which no Greek could possibly have seen, show exactly the same scene, evidence both of the continuity between Persian traditions and those of earlier empires, and of Herodotus' remarkable scrupulousness as a historian.
Leonidas it was who took the perilous commission. As representative of the senior royal line, he would have felt that it was his duty to do so, no doubt — but he may have had a more personal motive, too. The ghosts of the murdered Persian ambassadors were not, perhaps, the only phantoms abroad that summer in Lacedaemon. More than a decade had passed now since Cleomenes, his legs and stomach fretted by a carving knife, had been found twisted in the stocks. What remained mysterious was whether he had perished by his own hand — just punishment for his oracle-bribing, god-baiting impiety — or had been the victim of a brutal conspiracy, one possibly orchestrated by the Spartan high command itself. Either way, Leonidas must have felt himself implicated in his predecessor's horrific end. Cleomenes had been his own kin, after all. The blood had long since been scrubbed away, but the sense of a curse, oppressive, menacing, as close as the August heat, still lowered over Sparta. Leonidas, preparing for his desperate mission, would hardly have forgotten the menacing terms of the oracle: either his city was to be wiped out 'or everyone within the borders of Lacedaemon, Must mourn the death of a king, sprung from the line of Heracles'. It would surely not have escaped his attention either that it was on a peak above Thermopylae that Heracles himself had perished, consigning his mortal flesh and blood to fire that he might then ascend to join the gods. Well, then, might Leonidas have dismissed the Hippeis, that crack squad of three hundred young men who customarily served in battle as the bodyguard of the king, and replaced them with older veterans — 'all men with living sons'.79 A ringing statement of intent. Whatever might happen at the pass — whether glorious victory or total defeat — Leonidas would stay true to his fateful mission. One way or another, he would secure the redemption of his city. There was to be no retreat from Thermopylae.
At Bay
Epic Preparations
Hipparchus, the playboy tyrant whose murder in a lovers' tiff back in 514 bc had been commemorated by the Athenians as a blow struck for liberty, had himself, throughout his reign, always delighted in invention. An ardent patron of architecture, as princes so often are, he had also possessed a rare passion for literature. Travellers could still read, inscribed beneath the erect phalluses that were a somewhat startling feature of way-markers in Attica, pithy and improving verses, composed by the murdered Pisistratid himself. In other ways, too, the Athenians had benefited from Hipparchus' bookish brand of tyranny. It was thanks to his enthusiastic backing, for instance, that the cream of Greek literary talent, who would once have sniffed at Athens as a backwater, had come to regard the city as a cultural powerhouse, and flocked to settle there. So determined had the tyrant been to ferry celebrity poets to his court that he had even laid on a luxury taxi service for them, in the form of a fifty-oared private galley.
Even more than for modern literature, however, Hipparchus' true enthusiasm — and it was one shared throughout the whole Greek world — had been for two peerless epics: The Iliad and The Odyssey, composed centuries previously, and set during the time of the Trojan War. Little was known for certain of their author, a poet named Homer — but he was, to the Greeks, so infinite, so inexhaustible, so utterly the well-spring of their profoundest presumptions and ideals, that only the Ocean, which encompassed and watered all the world, was fe
lt to represent him adequately. No wonder that Hipparchus, looking to put his city on the literary map, had been keen to brand Homer — who was generally, and frustratingly, agreed to have been a native of the eastern Aegean — as somehow Athenian. Pisistratus, Hipparchus' father, when he sponsored an edition of the poet, was even said to have tried slipping a few surreptitious verses of his own into the texts, hymning Athens and her ancient heroes; Hipparchus himself, less vulgarly, had introduced recitals from the epics to the Panathenaea. Not that these were performed in any refined spirit of belle-lettrisme, however, being rather, like the athletic contests that also featured in the festival, ferociously competitive —which was only fitting. 'Always be the bravest. Always be the best.' Maxims, it went without saying, from The Iliad itself.
And regarded by Greeks everywhere, despite Hipparchus' best efforts, as the birthright of them all. The Spartans, for instance, those countrymen of Helen and Menelaus, hardly needed to stage poetry readings in order to parade their affinity with the values of Homer's epics. If the letter of their military code derived from Lycurgus, then its spirit, that heroic determination to prefer death and 'a glorious reputation that will never die',1 to a life of cowardice and shame, appeared vivid with the fearsome radiance of the heroes sung by the 'Poet'. And of one hero more than any other: Achilles, greatest and deadliest of fighters, who had travelled to Troy, there to blaze in a glow of terrible splendour, knowing that all his fame would serve only to doom him before his time. True, the pure ecstasy of his glory-hunting, which had led him to squabble with Agamemnon over a slave-girl, sulk in his tent while his comrades were being slaughtered, and return to the fray only because his beloved cousin had been cut down, was a self-indulgence that could hardly be permitted a Spartan soldier. Nevertheless, that death in battle might be beautiful, that it might enshrine a warrior's memory, even as his spirit gibbered in the grey shadows of the underworld, with a brilliant and golden halo, that it might win him 'kleos', immortal fame: these notions, forever associated with Achilles, were regarded by the Greeks as having long been distinctively Spartan, too. Others might aspire to such ideals but only in Sparta were citizens raised to be true to them from birth.
When Leonidas, leading his small holding force, arrived in early August at the pass of Thermopylae, then, the example of the heroes who had fought centuries previously in the first great clash between Europe and Asia could hardly have failed to gleam in his mind's eye. From Homer, he knew that the gods, 'like birds of carrion, like vultures', would soon be casting invisible shadows over his men's positions — for whenever mortals had to screw their courage to an excruciating pitch of intensity, whenever they had to prepare themselves for battle, 'wave on wave of them settling, close ranks shuddering into a dense, bristling glitter of shields and spears and helmets', they could know themselves passing into the sphere of the divine.2 Certainly, it would have been hard to imagine a more eerie portal to it than Thermopylae — the 'Hot Gates'. Steaming waters rose from the springs that gave the pass its name; the rocks over which they hissed appeared pallid and deformed, like melted wax; a tang of sulphur hung moist in the August heat. All was feverish, dust-choked and close. So narrow was much of the pass that at two points either end of it, known as the East and West Gates, there was room for only a single wagon trail. On one side of this road there lapped the marshy shallows of the Gulf of Malis; on the other, 'impassable and steepling',3 the cliffs of Mount Callidromus, tree-covered over the lower crags, then rearing grey and bare against the unforgiving azure. It was a strange and unearthly spot — and one seemingly formed for defence.
As the locals had long appreciated. Men from Phocis, the valley-scored country that lay between Thermopylae and Delphi, had once built a wall across the pass, blocking off not one of the two bottlenecks at either end but rather a stretch some sixty feet wide, the so-called 'Middle Gate'. Here the cliffs rose at their sheerest and most unflank-able. Leonidas, bivouacking beneath them, immediately set about having the Phocians' wall repaired: no great challenge, for he had brought with him, in addition to his bodyguard, some three hundred helots and five thousand further troops.4 These, alternately cajoled and bullied into joining him, had come mostly from the Peloponnese — but not all. Seven hundred were volunteers from Thespiae, a city in Boeotia that, like Plataea, had long been resentful of Theban weight-throwing and had willingly donated manpower in support of the allied cause — and four hundred had come from Thebes herself. Leonidas, uncomfortably aware that central Greece was rotten with medisers, had made a point on his way to Thermopylae of calling in on the chief conspirators and bluntly demanding their support. The Theban ruling classes, not yet bold enough to refuse a Spartan king, had responded with silken evasions. Confident, however, that Leonidas was embarked on a suicide mission, they had cheerfully permitted 'men from the rival faction',5 those opposed to their medising, to leave with him; and Leonidas, desperate for every reinforcement, had received these loyalists gratefully. Even so, he could have had no doubts, as he gazed out at the shimmering emptiness of the flatlands beyond Thermopylae, scanning the horizon for smears of dust, awaiting a first glimpse of the Great King's monstrous hordes, that there were plenty to his rear who were willing him to fail.
Nor was that the limit of his anxieties. Even as his men were busy digging themselves in, a delegation from the nearby city of Trachis, in whose territory Thermopylae lay, came to Leonidas with some most unwelcome news. The pass, it appeared, was not quite as secure as the strategists back on the Isthmus had cared to presume. There was, skirting the mountainous heights of Thermopylae, a trail. While hardly suited to cavalry or heavy infantry, it was, the Trachians reported, perfectly negotiable by anyone lightly armed. If the barbarians discovered this route, they would surely take it. There was no choice for the defenders of the Hot Gates, but to plug it. Simple enough, it might have been thought — except that Leonidas, with the full strength of the Great King's army about to hurl itself against his position, could ill afford to spare so much as a single hoplite. In the event, as he had little choice but to do, he compromised. A thousand men from Phocis, whose loathing for the medising Thessalians had prompted them to side enthusiastically with the allies, volunteered to guard the trail. Leonidas, banking on their local knowledge and on the likelihood that only light infantry would be sent against them, accepted their offer. No Spartans, not so much as a single officer, were sent to leaven their inexperience. Bracing himself for the coming storm, Leonidas wanted all his elite alongside him. Understandable, perhaps — but a hideous gamble, even so.
Not that the Spartan king was the only commander having to make some awkward calculations. Forty miles to the east, across the Malian Gulf and beyond the narrow straits that separated Euboea from the mainland, the allied admirals were fretting over the state of their own flank. True, the station they had chosen appeared, like Thermopylae, to be a strong one. In contrast to the bleak aspect of the facing coastline, where scrub-covered slopes loomed up from the sea like olive teeth set in gums of naked rock, the northernmost tip of Euboea consisted largely of pebbles and dirty sand. Level and long as this beach stretched, it had been a simple matter for the Greeks to haul their warships onto the shingle, hundreds upon hundreds of them; and since there were no shoals or reefs offshore, only a sudden, precipitous deepening of the sea, it promised to be an equally simple matter, once the Persian fleet was sighted, to launch the fleet again. Where, though — and this was the question gnawing at the self-confidence of the Greeks — would the barbarians be heading? If westwards, towards the straits that led to Thermopylae, then the allied battle-line, pivoting like a door upon a hinge, would be well placed to block their access; but if eastwards, down the outer coast of Euboea, either to strike onwards at Attica and the Isthmus or to swing back up the opposite side of the island and aim for the Greek fleet's rear, then the danger would be grave indeed. The Great King commanded so many triremes that he could easily afford to divide his armada in two and still bring overwhelming force to bear on sepa
rate fronts. The allied admirals therefore risked finding themselves, not barring the straits that separated Euboea from the mainland, but bottled up inside them. As in the pass, so on the beach, forward defence carried the risk of obliteration.
The first two weeks of August slipped by. Still the approaches to the north remained empty. There stretched, across the sea from the increasingly jittery Greeks, a mountainous peninsula known as Magnesia, forested and monster-haunted; and all knew that it was down this inhospitable coastline that the invaders were bound to come, hidden from the sight of all on Euboea, until, funnelling past the island of Sciathos, just off the southern limit of the mainland, they would at last heave into view. Only from Sciathos itself did there appear any prospect of receiving advance warning of their approach, and so three patrol ships were duly stationed on the island, and beacons readied on its hills. Still the sea remained empty of vessels, however — and still, crunching up and down the shingle, wiping sweat from their stinging eyes, the sailors of the Greek fleet kept an anxious watch on Sciathos, and waited for the war to begin. Only at dusk, when the sun set behind the distant peak of Callidromus, could they afford to relax: for no one in the Aegean, where to navigate was to island-hop, presumed to sail across the open sea at night. Then, perhaps, the Greeks could feel themselves transported back to a different age, one in which their forefathers had similarly camped beside their ships on a lonely beach: for although, on a low hill behind them, there stood a temple to Artemis — from which the headland took its name of Artemisium — the strand was otherwise theirs alone.
