There they waited. Meanwhile, behind them, Greece was in full preparation for disaster. The Athenians decided to expect the worst; a copy of a decree passed by the Council of five hundred has survived:
Resolved by the Council and the People…. To entrust the city to Athena the Mistress of Athens…. The Athenians themselves and the foreigners who live in Athens are to send their children and women to safety in Troezen…. They are to send the old men and their moveable possessions to safety on Salamis. The treasurers and priestesses are to remain on the Acropolis guarding the property of the gods. All the other Athenians and foreigners of military age are to embark on the 200 ships that are ready, and defend against the barbarian for the sake of their own freedom and that of the rest of the Greeks.37
And then Xerxes swept down. In front of the invaders, Thrace surrendered; and then the cities of Macedonia, one by one. Xerxes was marching down into the Greek mainland, and if he could get through the mountains, the cities to the south would be doomed. A troop from Attica had been given the job of keeping an eye on the hidden mountain road, just in case. But the all-important pass of Thermopylae was entrusted to the Spartan troops, seven thousand men under the Spartan king Leonidas (successor to Cleomenes).
This would have been sufficient for the narrow ground on which the Persians and Greeks would meet, had a Greek traitor not gone over to Xerxes and drawn him a map of the mountain road. Xerxes sent a commander to climb through it with the most highly trained of the Ten Thousand, the elite fighters that Herodotus calls “the Immortals.” When they came down on the other side of the mountains, they began to circle around to the rear of the Spartans.
Leonidas, seeing that his force was about to be sandwiched, realized that the battle had already been lost. He ordered all of his men but three hundred to retreat back down to the south. With these last three hundred, along with a few troops from the Greek cities of Thebes and Thespia who refused to leave, he fought a delaying action against Xerxes. Attica was doomed, but if his retreating Spartans could reach the Gulf of Corinth, they might still be able to hold the Peloponnese, along with Troezen, where the women and children were, and Salamis: all that would remain of Greece.
The Spartans fought until they were wiped out. In the battle, Immortals fell as well; two of Xerxes’s own brothers died.38 Later, the heroism of the soldiers who fell at the Battle of Thermopylae would become one of the most famous acts of heroism in history. Xerxes was unimpressed. He ordered Leonidas’s body to be beheaded and nailed up on a cross, like that of an executed criminal.
Plutarch tells us that the Greeks, harassed and desperate, had a brief and violent internal quarrel about what to do next. The Athenian troops in the combined Greek army begged the rest to make a stand in Attica, to protect Athens; but the others had no confidence that they could hold a wide northern front against the huge Persian army. They won the day. The entire force retreated back down into the Peloponnese, where they could mass their ships in the waters around the island of Salamis and also erect a defensive line across the narrow land bridge—the Isthmus of Corinth—that linked the Peloponnese to Attica. The Athenians did so under protest: “angry at this betrayal,” Plutarch writes, “and also dismayed and distressed at being deserted by their allies.”39
At the head of his soldiers, Xerxes marched in triumph to great Athens and overran it. The Persian soldiers burned the Acropolis; from the other side of the water, the Athenians were forced to sit and watch the smoke of their city rise up.
The next events are chronicled by the playwright Aeschylus, who was there. In his play The Persians, a Persian herald returns to the capital city of Susa to report to the queen mother that her son Xerxes has decided to attack the Greeks in the Peloponnese at once:
A Greek appeared from the enemy camp,
whispering to your son that under
cover of night every Greek to a man
would leap to his oar and row madly in every
direction to save his skin.40
The messenger had been sent by the Greek leader Themistocles, who knew that time was on the Persian side. The Greeks, penned up in the Peloponnese without allies, could most easily have been defeated with a slow and damaging war of attrition. The best possible strategy for Xerxes was to sit tight, send his navy around to ring the Peloponnese so that none of the outlying islands could provide aid, and regather himself for an attack.
So Themistocles sent a message to the Great King offering to change sides, and telling him that if he attacked at once, the weary and dispirited Greeks would scatter. Xerxes, convinced, did not bother to ring the island. Instead, he sent ships directly into the narrows to attack the Athenian triremes massed there.
Your son, at once,
deceived by Greek treachery, and the gods’
jealousy, let it be known to all his
captains that when the
sun descended below the horizon, and
darkness covered the dome of the sky,
they were to divide the fleet into three divisions
and block the Greeks’ escape to the open sea,
while other ships surrounded and circled the island.41
This was exactly what Themistocles wanted. The triremes, fast and maneuverable, could fight effectively in the cramped narrows around Salamis, while the more powerful Persian ships were unable to get out of the way of the ramming fronts.
Ship struck ship,
ramming with bows of brass,
breaking away whole prows.
The Greeks began it.
Men on opposing decks let fly their
spears.
We resisted at first, holding our own;
but soon our ships, so massed together,
struck each other head-on in the narrow strait,
bronze beak ramming bronze beak,
destroying oars and benches.
The Greeks then circled round in perfect
order and struck, and hulls were tumbled
wrong-side up, and the sea was no longer
seen for all the wreckage and floating bodies.
And all the shores and reefs bobbing with corpses.42
Persians, raised inland, were not swimmers. Those who fell overboard drowned, almost to a man.
Xerxes, who had sat himself down on a golden stool on high ground to view the battle, grew increasingly furious. This defeat need not have been the end for Xerxes, but his rage ruined him. He ordered the captains of his navy—all Phoenician, from the Phoenician cities that now lay under Persian control—put to death for cowardice. This turned every single Phoenician sailor against him. The Phoenicians, who were experienced at sea, knew exactly why their attack had failed.
Meanwhile, Babylon was rebelling again, and Themistocles was up to his usual schemes. He set free a Persian prisoner of war, who returned to Xerxes primed with the information that the Greek fleet intended to sail up to the Hellespont and rip up the pontoon bridge before Xerxes and his army could get back to it.43 At this news Xerxes decided to go home.
He announced that there would be a substantial reward for anyone who captured Themistocles (a useless gesture) and then marched back up through Macedonia and Thrace with the bulk of his army, leaving behind him a force of soldiers commanded by his son-in-law Mardonius. In effect, Xerxes was leaving Mardonius to die, to save himself from the embarrassment of out-and-out retreat. The Athenians marched across the Isthmus of Corinth, and met Mardonius and his reduced force at Plataea. Pausanias, the nephew of the heroic Leonidas, had inherited his post as general (and was also serving as regent for Leonidas’s young son, now king of Sparta). He led the assault; the Greeks were victorious and Mardonius died on the battlefield. “His corpse disappeared the day after the battle,” Herodotus writes, and no one knows where it was buried.44
This was a two-pronged attack. The navy had simultaneously been sent to confront the remains of the Persian fleet, which had retreated back across the Aegean all the way to the coast of Asia Minor. The Persians,
seeing Greek ships behind them, decided not to risk another sea battle; they beached their ships on the shores of Asia Minor, just west of the mountain called Mycale, and lined up to fight on land.
Tradition held that both battles, Plataea and Mycale, took place on the same day in 479. At Mycale, Persians relied on the Ionian fighters in their ranks to back them up. But when the Greeks approached, the Ionians melted away, back towards their own cities, and left the Persians standing alone. The combined Athenian and Spartan forces drove the Persians back all the way to Sardis, killing them as they went. Only a few ever reached the safety of Sardis’s walls.
The Greek victories at Plataea and Mycale ended the Persian Wars. The loss didn’t make an enormous dent on the Persian psyche, although the Persians did allow their navy to shrink rather than rebuilding it.45 But Greek cities, from Sparta all the way over to the Ionian coast, had joined together in voluntary alliance to defeat a common enemy. It was the first joint action taken by the entire Greek world, a world held together not by political boundaries but by shared customs and language.
Part Five
IDENTITY
Chapter Sixty-Five
The Peloponnesian Wars
Between 478 and 404 BC, Xerxes dies,
and Athens and Sparta declare a Thirty Years’ Peace
which only lasts fourteen years
WITH THE PERSIANS DRIVEN BACK, the newly united Greeks had to decide what to do about the Ionian cities. By joining with the Greeks, the Ionians had publicly declared their defiance of the Persian empire. The poet Aeschylus celebrated their new freedom:
And those who live on Asia’s broad earth
will not long be ruled
by Persian law
nor longer pay tribute
under empire’s commanding grip
nor fling themselves earthward
in awe of kingship
whose strength now lies dead.1
But the Persian strength was far from dead, and Persian troops were still occupying Asia’s “broad earth.” The Aegean lay between the Persians and the Greek mainland, but for the Ionians, the battered bully was standing just on the other side of their city walls.
The Spartans suggested that they simply evacuate the Ionian cities and abandon the land itself to the Persians, since they could not “stand guard over Ionia forever.”2 The Athenian soldiers at once took exception. These were mostly Athenian colonies that the Spartans were blithely proposing to abandon (much as they had abandoned Athens itself during the invasion, content simply to save the Peloponnese). “They put their objections forcefully,” Herodotus says. After a vicious intercity argument, the Athenians managed to convince most of the other Greek contingents to join them in pushing the Persians back from the Ionian coast.
The Spartans, outargued, agreed to stay on; they didn’t want to fight the Persians, but nor did they want Athens gaining power as the leader of the Hellenic League. By staying, they guaranteed that their own commander—Pausanias, victor at the Battle of Plataea, and still serving as regent for the young son of the Leonidas who had died at Thermopylae—would remain the supreme commander of the Hellenic League forces.
And so Pausanias and his navy sailed off to besiege Byzantium, which had been re-occupied by Persian soldiers. The Athenians regrouped under the command of their own native general, Xanthippus, and headed up to the Bosphorus to help out. The siege was successful, and then Persian Byzantium changed hands again and became Greek Byzantium once more.
It was the last time that Athens and Sparta would act as allies.
FURTHER THAN THIS, Herodotus does not go; his history ends right after Mycale. For the next sequence of events we have to go to Thucydides, who wrote his history some seventy years later, and Plutarch, whose Life of Themistocles adds a few details.
According to Thucydides, while the Athenian and Spartan soldiers were besieging Byzantium, the Athenians and Spartans were arguing back at home. After the defeat of Mardonius at Plataea, the Athenian soldiers under command of Themistocles had returned to Athens. Their city had been laid waste; the walls were broken down, the temples on the Acropolis had been hacked and burned, and the sacred olive tree which grew at the Temple of Athena had been chopped down, its stump charred. But in a mere matter of days, a green shoot was seen coming from the stump.3 Athens still lived, and the returning Athenians set about the long task of rebuilding the shattered walls.
News of the rebuilding flew to Sparta. In just a few more days, a Spartan delegation arrived at Athens and demanded not only that the building stop, but that the Athenians “join them in throwing down the remaining walls of the cities outside the Peloponnesus.”4
This was a blatant Spartan attempt to claim the overall lordship of Greece. The Athenians, who had few armed men and no wall, were in no shape to resist the demand. But Themistocles, who never told the truth in a sticky situation, had a plan. He told the Spartans that he would, naturally, come to Sparta right away along with a band of Athenian officials to discuss the problem. He then set out himself for Sparta, travelling at snail pace, and told the other Athenian officials to linger in Athens until the walls were built up to at least a minimum height. Meanwhile, every Athenian who could walk was to drop everything else and work on the walls, ripping down houses if necessary to serve as building material. “To this day,” Thucydides writes, “the [wall] shows signs of the haste of its execution; the foundations are laid of stones of all kinds, and in some places not wrought or fitted, but placed just in the order in which they were brought by the different hands; and many columns, too, from tombs, and sculptured stones were put in with the rest.”5 Excavation has revealed these mismatched stones and columns built into the wall of Athens.
Down in Sparta, Themistocles sat around wondering out loud why his colleagues had not yet arrived, and hoping piously that they hadn’t run into misfortune. By the time they did get there, the wall was up, and Themistocles was able to tell the Spartans that Athens now had defenses and wasn’t about to get Spartan permission to run its own affairs. The Spartans swallowed this defiance, not really being in any condition to fight a walled city, and Themistocles went home.
Over at Byzantium, the Ionians were starting to complain about being under Spartan command. They came to the Athenian commander, Xanthippus, and complained that the Spartan general Pausanias was acting like a tyrant—and, more seriously, was carrying on secret negotiations with Xerxes. This was an accusation that could hardly be ignored, and when the Spartan assembly got wind of it, they summoned Pausanias home to stand trial. Xanthippus took supreme command in his place, which was one up for the Athenians.
Back in Sparta, Pausanias was acquitted. But his career was in ruins; a breath of scandal had done it in. The Spartans sent a replacement commander to Byzantium, but Xanthippus refused to surrender his command. Now Athens, not Sparta, was at the head of the combined forces. The Spartans, piqued, packed themselves up and went home—and so did all of the other soldiers from the Peloponnesian cities.
This was the death knell for the old Hellenic League. But the Athenians simply declared the formation of a new alliance, the Delian League, with Athens at its head. Back at home, Sparta claimed leadership of a Peloponnesian League that included the Peloponnesian cities and no one else.
Pausanias himself, under increasing suspicion and the target of more unproven accusations of treachery (largely fueled by the fact that he had occasionally been seen, in Byzantium, in Persian clothing), eventually realized that he was inevitably going to be re-arrested and tried again. He took sanctuary in an inner chamber of one of Sparta’s temples. At this, Spartan officials walled him in, took the roof of the chamber off, and allowed him to starve to death.6 The man who had saved the Peloponnese died while his own countrymen watched.
65.1 Greece and the Peloponnesian Wars
Nor was this the end of the matter. Back in Athens, Themistocles had started to push his own plans for Athenian security (these involved burning the ships of other Greek cities, and
sailing around to shake money out of the smaller Greek islands).7 Themistocles was, above all, a pragmatist, always willing to sacrifice personal dignity for the sake of getting his way. When other soldiers criticized his suggestions, Themistocles started making public speeches about the great debt that Athens owed him, and how the Athenians ought to do whatever he asked. After a whole course of these, he had managed to annoy enough Athenian men (who, after all, had fought at Mycale too) to get himself ostracized. “This,” Plutarch remarks, “was their usual practice…. Ostracism was not a means of punishing a crime, but a way of relieving and assuaging envy—an emotion which finds its pleasure in humbling outstanding men.”8
This was the shadow side of Greek democracy. The Greeks were not kind to their great men, unless those men had been fortunate enough to remove themselves from the political scene by dying. Marathon had not saved Miltiades; Plataea had done nothing for Pausanias; and Salamis would not save Themistocles. After his ostracism, the Spartans sent messages to Athens telling them that the investigation of Pausanias had found, “in the course of the inquiry,” unspecified proof that Themistocles also had pro-Persian sympathies. The Athenians sent an assassin after their exiled general, but Themistocles was not to be caught so easily. He went on a long journey, always avoiding Greek ships and Greek ports, and finally (pragmatic as always) arrived at the Persian court and offered himself as an advisor on Greek affairs, on condition that Xerxes would agree to pay over the reward for his own capture.
Fortunately, Xerxes seems to have been entertained by this level of cheek. He made Themistocles a present of the reward and told him to “speak his mind about the state of affairs in Greece.” Themistocles did so, but his conversation seems to have been mostly art without matter. His revelations, Plutarch remarks, did not give the Persians any military advantage, but mostly had to do with Greek dress, literature, and food.9 He died in exile at sixty-five, either from illness or from a dose of poison, taken when he could no longer bear his banishment.10
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 55
