Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

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

  Or perhaps he would be spared the need. Embarrassing though the intelligence failure at Salamis had been, and devastating in its consequences, the Persian high command still looked to divide and rule. Remarkably, channels were even kept open to Themistocles. After all, it had not been on the Athenian's recommendation that the Great King had chosen to fight in the straits - a detail with which Themistocles appears to have made considerable hay. Only days after Salamis, in a startling display of cheek, he had sent Sicinnus back over the straits with a second message for the Persians: a reassurance that he remained 'eager to be of service to the royal cause' and was acting as a restraining influence on the rest of the allied fleet.12 Mind-boggling claims, it might have been thought — but the spy chiefs had not, as they must have been itching to do, put Sicinnus to a long and agonising death. Instead, just as on the eve of Salamis, they had opted to send the slave back to his master. We do not know what message they gave him to carry, but there must surely have been one: an amplification of the Great King's peace terms, no doubt. The Athenian people, still buoyed by their victory at Salamis, could hardly have been expected to accept them — but that was not the point. Just as Themistocles was obviously shadow-boxing, so too was the Persian high command. Each side was indicating to the other their appreciation of a guilty secret: that the moment might yet come when it would be in their mutual interests for Athens to be granted a privileged surrender.

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

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

  But not, unfortunately from off the land — with implications for the alliance that might prove ominous, as the shrewder Athenians and Spartans had already begun to appreciate. The Isthmus, even as it hosted the great festival of unity, served as a fracture-line. If a delegate tired of the celebrations, he could have this brought home to him while paying a call on the neighbourhood's most obvious alternative source of entertainment. There stood, two thousand feet above Corinth, on the summit of the city's steepling acropolis, a temple dedicated to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Here, complementing the marble statuary, could be found an altogether less chilly brand of votive offering: prostitutes. Donated to the goddess by grateful Olympic champions and other such luminaries, these had a reputation so superlative that in Greek 'korinthiazein' — 'to do a Corinthian' — meant to fuck. Patriotic as well as proficient, Aphrodite's temple-whores had spent the weeks before Salamis raising urgent prayers to their divine mistress, imploring her to inspire the allies with a love of battle. Any war hero who did take time off from the celebrations at the Isthmus to visit them could look forward to a particularly enthusiastic reception. Then, shattered by the climb as well as by all of his subsequent exertions, he could slump down, admire the matchless view, and see for himself why the alliance that had won at Salamis might be in imminent danger of Assuring.

  For from nowhere else could the opportunities and the dilemmas presented by the Isthmus be more readily appreciated. To the south stretched the Peloponnese — now, thanks in large part to the Athenian fleet, secure from invasion. To the north curved the coast that led to Attica —still wide open to Mardonius. Hardly surprising, then, that the Athenians, even as they began returning across the straits from Salamis to their ruined homeland, should have kept a nervous eye on the road to Thessaly. Resentful of the monstrous unfairness of geography, and hardly able to restrain themselves from blaming it on the Peloponnesians, they pressed loudly for a commitment from their allies to send an army north against Mardonius come the spring. The Peloponnesians stonewalled; and the more that the Athenians, attempting to shame them into action, harped upon their role as the victors of Salamis, the more their partners, snug and smug behind their wall, dug in their heels.

  The result, bubbling away beneath the facade of amity presented at the Isthmus, was a toxic brew of resentment and spite. The Peloponnesians, infuriated by Athenian cockiness, made sure that the prize for civic achievement was awarded to Aegina. Then, rather than endure the spectacle of Themistocles strutting around wearing the crown for individual achievement, they split the vote among nominees from their own cities, so that no one won the prize at all. The

  Athenian response was to start flinging around slanders like mud -including, choicest of all, an accusation that the Corinthians at Salamis had headed north up the channel, not to confront the Egyptians, but because they were fleeing like cowards. Well might the delegates at the Isthmus have revelled in their sense of deliverance from the barbarian menace. Pettiness, envy, back-biting: it was just like old times.

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

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

  Which was hardly, from Themistocles' own point of view, the ideal boost to his career. Reports of the honours paid to their admiral did not greatly console the Athenian people as they shivered and went hungry amid the blackened ruins of their city. Nor did the suspicion that their fleet, even as it stood guard over the stay-at-home Peloponnesians, was offering minimal protection to the farms and families of the men who were crewing it. Anger and resentment began to grow in the squatter camps that now dotted the city. The hoplite class, whose loathing of Themistocles had only been fuelled by his crowing after Salamis, could suddenly smell his blood. Already, over the winter, there had been a concentrated effort to spin the slaughter of the Persian garrison on Psyttaleia as the key turning-point of the battle, with Aristeides as its star. Now, as winter began to turn to spring, and the campaigning season of 479 bc drew near, the manoeuvring against the hero of Salamis turned increasingly vicious. Voters, as had been proved time and again in the brief history of the democracy, might have lethally short memories. Come the February elections, Themistocles' reward for having saved his city was to be removed from the command of his precious fleet.'17 The admiralship was awarded instead to Xanthippus, the adopted Alcmaeonid. Command of the land forces went to — who else? — Aristeides.

  The impact of these changes on Athenian policy was immediate and far reaching. Energies that had previously been devoted to the fleet were now diverted towards preparations for a second Marathon. In spring, when the allied squadrons assembled at Aegina, the Athenians were noticeable by their absence. The Spartans, who had signalled their own enthusiasm for a naval campaign by sending royalty, in the not altogether inspiring person of King Leotychides, to command it, found the Athenians obdurate: no ships would be contributed to the allied fleet until the Spartans had committed manpower to an expedition north of the Isthmus. The Spartans, calling the Athenians' bluff, refused to buy the deal. The result was stalemate. Leotychides, with barely a hundred triremes under his command, skulked around off Delos, too nervous of the Persians to sail any further eastwards. Meanwhile, the Persian fleet, correspondingly nervous of the Greeks, skulked around off Samos. The Peloponnesians skulked behind their wall. Mardonius, knowing that he had no hope of winning his satrapy unless he could lure the Spartans north of the Isthmus, or somehow secure the Athenians' fleet, skulked in Thessaly. The Athenians, trapped impotently in the middle, had little option but to skulk as well. And so the deadlock continued, all the way into May.

  It was Mardonius who finally moved to break it. Wearying of secret diplomacy, yet reluctant to jeopardise its potential fruits, he decided to place the Great King's terms openly on the table before advancing south from Thessaly. Having ostentatiously consulted a slew of Greek oracles in his effort to reassure the Athenians of his good intentions, he sent as his ambassador that unctuous bet-hedger, King Alexander of Macedon. As the brother-in-law of a Persian general and an official 'Friend and Benefactor of the Athenian People', the smooth-talking monarch must have struck Mardonius as the ideal go-between; and Alexander certainly had a rare talent for making a plausible pitch. With the rubble-strewn panorama of the Acropolis and the Agora stretching behind him, and oozing honest concern, he warned the Athenian people that their city, of all those that had set themselves in opposition to the Great King, 'stood most directly in the line of fire'. Two options therefore confronted them. The first was to see their country become 'a no-man's land, trampled underfoot by rival armies'. The second was to become not merely the friends of the Great King, but friends such as would have few rivals for the royal favour throughout the whole dominion of the Persians. A full pardon, a guarantee of self-government, their temples rebuilt at royal expense, an expansion of their territory could all be theirs. 'What earthly reason, then, can you have', Alexander exclaimed, 'to stay in arms against the king?'38

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

  And perhaps once they would have done. Perhaps once they would have chosen to forsake all their dreams of independence, accept that there might indeed be submission with honour, bow their necks to the King of Kings. But much had changed. A sense of the preciousness of freedom, instilled in the Athenian people by the thirty-year experiment that was their democracy, and by the experience of having fought to defend it against the most terrifying odds imaginable, had left the Assembly unwilling now to barter it for peace. 'The degree to which we are put in the shadow by the Medes' strength is hardly something that you need to bring to our attention,' they told Alexander. 'We are already well aware of it. But even so, such is our love of liberty, that we will never surrender.'40 Brave words indeed: for the Athenian people, having uttered them, once again faced the prospect of their city's annihilation.

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

  So it was that when the barbarian, sweeping southwards into Attica, occupied a deserted Athens for the second time, Peloponnesians everywhere felt a sudden tremor of alarm. King Leotychides, still cruising off Delos with the allied fleet, saw, on the western horizon, a distant pinprick of fire, then another, then another in turn, as beacons, linking Attica directly to the imperial information network, broadcast to distant Sardis the news of Athens' fall. Meanwhile, in Lacedaemon, the ephors had been brought an even more unsettling communication: Mardonius, it was reported, had sent his envoys across the straits to Salamis and repeated his peace terms to the Athenian evacuees. This time, a prominent nobleman, Lycidas, had dared to speak out openly in favour of accepting them. A straw in the wind, surely — despite the fact that his fellow citizens, cornered and despairing as they were, had promptly stoned the would-be mediser. Lycidas' wife and children too, surrounded by the women camped out on Salamis, had been similarly pulped to death. Athenian defiance, it appeared, was turning pathological. The more savage it became, and the more suspicious, the greater the risk that it might buckle.