Long War 04 - The Great King

by Cameron, Christian

  Men laughed.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re over by Thrace.’

  His whole face lit up. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Let’s go!’

  That story was retold ten times an hour over the next days.

  It is easy for any Greek to make great claims for his city. We are all hopelessly partial. Biased. I admit it. I would put Plataea before Athens or Corinth or Syracusa in everything; even while I suspect our temple of Hera is really small and provincial, I will never admit it. So I’m biased.

  But I think we transformed the fleet.

  Our men came singing. A thousand men who had faced the Persians – and beaten them. Not one Plataean complained about having to row. Men of fifty winters climbed down into the sweltering benches, took up the oars with the same practical interest as they used the spear, the plough or the potter’s wheel, and learned.

  The second night, when the aches were pounding away – when some of the older hoplites had discovered that I was only putting my youngest, fittest Plataeans in armour, and that meant many older men were going to row – we were gorging on Athenian mutton on the beach of Marathonas, and a young Athenian from Cimon’s flagship was complaining about the work – and the dishonour.

  Myron – who had come in person – stood up and put a hand on his back like the old man he was. ‘Dishonour, is it?’ he asked. ‘The only dishonour would be to be left behind. In a hundred years, men will no longer claim descent from the gods. They will only say – my grandsire was there when we warred down the Great King.’

  All conversation stopped.

  ‘But!’ a young man wailed – half in self-mockery, I think – ‘But it’s hot and it stinks of piss down in the benches! My shoulders hurt and I’ve no skin on my hands!’

  Empedocles, son of Empedocles the Old, laughed. ‘I don’t disagree, young man,’ he said. ‘Let’s all take an oath, then. After we beat the Medes, we’ll never row again!’

  The laughter went on for a long time.

  Every commander knows that laughter is precious.

  Mostly, we rowed up and down.

  I confess that I found some irony in the time I’d spent training my phalanx to Spartan-like perfection so that we could use them as oarsmen instead. At least every oarsman understood the basic tactics.

  And because they were my phalanx, and not slaves, I got all my people together on the beach every morning, and told them what we’d do – every signal, every manoeuvre. Most of them didn’t understand a bit of it, at first, but by the end of the first week, when we had our first rumours of contact with the Persian fleet, most men knew when to reverse their benches and when to rest on their oars before the orders were passed. Citizens can be much better oarsmen than ‘professionals’, who are too often broken ex-slaves.

  And farmers are strong.

  Every night, Themistocles hammered home that our tactics must be simple and pure. All the Athenian helmsmen understood the complexity of the diekplous, where you pass through the enemy formation breaking oars and then turn back to envelop their second line. But Themistocles knew better than most men how few of our oarsmen could handle a complex ramming attack.

  It will also help explain things if I say that I took eighty veteran oarsmen from each of my other ships – including Demetrios’s magnificent long killer, the Athena Nike, and I put those, almost one hundred each, into the Athenian public ships and replaced them with Plataeans. In this way, ten of my eleven ships had lower-deck oarsmen who were raw beginners, but upper-deck men and full deck crews of veterans. It also eliminated any possibility of rivalry, and I told them all the first night we were together that we’d share the loot equally – no extra for the officers – a very popular move on my part, let me add. Men love freedom, but loot is . . . more immediate. I put ten Plataean Epilektoi on every deck as marines, saving only Athena Nike and Lydia, which got their own marines back.

  Gelon got a ship. As she was a public ship and had only a number, he called her Nemesis.

  Idomeneaus got a ship. After all, he’d had one before. He called her Hera.

  Leukas got a ship. After much thought, he called her Parthenos, which he claimed was the Greek for a goddess in faraway Alba.

  I gave the fastest of my public ships to Giannis. He called her Sea Horse. He had, after all, sailed and led and fought his way into the Outer Sea and back. He knew almost everything. And I let him have Alexandros to command his marines.

  And of course, I gave the best of the public ships to Sekla. He consulted with a priest of Poseidon and called her Machaira.

  So as soon as we felt that our oarsmen could manoeuvre from column to line and back, Themistocles had us practise forming close together for defence. He assumed we’d always be on the defensive. The strategy that he and Leonidas had evolved was brutally simple – we’d hold out all summer and force Xerxes to retreat before winter came. None of us could imagine that Xerxes was rich enough to keep his army fed and in the field all winter.

  After a few days of practising the most essential single skill of fleet combat – that’s rowing backwards all together, if you don’t know – Themistocles ordered us to try the ‘wheel’.

  It was almost the end of the fleet.

  The wheel is a complex manoeuvre that depends on perfect timing and brilliant control.

  When complete, every ship comes to rest with the stern posts touching and their oars in – you can form as few as fifteen ships like this. It forces your opponents to run in against your bow and to concede the initiative of any boarding action. It allows the force that has formed the wheel to move marines from ship to ship in perfect freedom while every attacking ship has to fight individually. The advantage of the wheel is so great that when a defender forms one, the attacker usually just sails around the outside. There’s not much he can do, unless he can somehow attack from every direction all at once – and even then, remember that the wheel’s defenders have the advantage of interior lines.

  That’s the good part.

  Here’s the bad part. To form the wheel from line ahead, you have to row backwards, get up enough speed to make it to your final resting spot and no more, pull your oars in and steer. If you are going too fast astern, you foul another ship and you may even damage each other. If you don’t pull hard enough, you come to a complete stop on the water in the face of the enemy and, for a bonus, you may be between two other ships with no room to deploy your oars.

  Now throw in untrained oarsmen and hundreds of ships trying to do this all at once.

  The first time we tried, we had formed a grand crescent off the point of Marathon, and my squadron was on the left of the line – that’s where we’d been at Marathon. Greeks can be creatures of habit.

  First we all backed water together – as I said, this is the single most essential tactic of sea warfare, and we did it well enough.

  Themistocles blew a trumpet – a Persian trumpet, no less – and we all began to form the wheel.

  We were in the most difficult position, because we had to retreat, folding the crescent in the other way and ending on the back side of the wheel – a long pull rowing the wrong way. But on that day, it was entirely to our advantage, as the ships in the centre – and how vociferously they’d demanded that position, the Corinthians, of course – were ruthlessly crushed by the amateur crews of the Athenians and the Aeginians. We backed and backed and heard the screams and oars were splintered. Men died.

  A Corinthian trireme rolled and sank, her back broken.

  And the nearest Persian was a thousand stades away.

  It was like Lades.

  The Corinthians and the Megarans were the worst sailors – no, that’s not fair. They had the worst officers. But they had not suddenly raised a hundred new warships as Athens and Aegina, the real sea powers, had done, and consequently they affected to despise all the other ships. Like the Lesbians before Lade, they said they needed no further practice – that their crews were fully trained.

  The Corinthians threatened to go home.<
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  Our Spartan navarch arrived. Eurybiades brought ten ships from the Peloponnesus, and he came almost straight from the Olympics. I have heard him denigrated, and I have heard his leadership derided.

  Men are odd animals. Eurybiades, like Leonidas, and like Arisitides and like Themistocles, wanted nothing but the victory of the allies. Because he was willing to listen to Themistocles – because he was ready to learn from all of us who had more experience of the sea – men deride him. In fact, I believe that he was the best navarch we could have had. He was cautious. He was mature. He would not hurry a judgement.

  He was a Spartan, and would not hear of a contingent refusing to drill, and most importantly, he was a senior officer of the Peloponnesian League. I was present the morning he landed. Themistocles met him on the beach, and Adamenteis hurried across the beach to complain to the Spartans about what he perceived as poor treatment at the hands of Athens.

  He came off his ship into the surf and waded ashore. A pair of helots came and stripped his wet armour and began to dry it. He embraced Themistocles and took my hand.

  ‘You appear to have done well,’ he said, in his dry way.

  Themistocles nodded.

  Just then, Adamenteis came up. ‘He has not done well, and he and his Athenian cabal will wreck everything. Listen – they’ve sent the dregs of their oarsmen and kept all their best men home. Look at the Plataeans! Let them drill. We’ll sit and laugh.’

  The navarch looked at him – a look that I hope no Spartan ever gives me. ‘Are you refusing to drill?’ he asked.

  Adamenteis paused. ‘Refusing? No, but—’

  Eurybiades nodded. ‘Good. We will drill. The king has marched. He depends on this fleet to hold his flank.’

  ‘We’re ready now!’ Adamenteis insisted.

  Spartans do not sneer. I’ve never seen one do so, because to sneer is to mock, and to mock is to be weak – the Spartans know this. They are too proud to mock anyone.

  Eurybiades didn’t smile or frown or change facial expression at all. He merely said, ‘We will sail when I say. You are ready when I decide.’ He paused. ‘Yes? Any questions?’

  Spartans have many failings, but they are good, reliable commanders. We had been unlucky at the Vale of Tempe, but now we had a simple, plain-spoken man who’d served overseas – in Aegypt and Ionia. He was not a master sailor, but he knew the sea and he’d fought ten battles, and he spoke with absolute assurance.

  We spent a third week at drills. Every day. He came aboard each of the squadron flagships and watched our squadrons manoeuvre – usually with Themistocles at his shoulder. Far from ignoring the Athenian democrat, he turned the man into his . . . it’s hard to name the office. His right hand. Many of the innovations that Themistocles lays claim to – even now, the filthy traitor – came from the Spartan navarch, who did not himself care a whit who got credit for anything, so long as the battles were won and the fleet stayed together.

  We had games. After all, we had ten times the men that Leonidas had with the vanguard of the army. The fleet had at least forty thousand men. So, as we did before Lades and before every major military effort, we gave games.

  For the first time, I did not participate.

  I was thirty-five years old. Men of fully mature age sit in the shade and watch the beautiful youths. We don’t compete, and we tell ourselves it is because that would be unfair. I would like to suggest that it is because older men fear to learn that skill and age cannot defeat youth and strength.

  Peisander of the Philaedae won our games, a young Athenian of Cimon’s family. He ran like a deer, jumped as if he had wings and his javelin flew like a bolt from the hand of Zeus. Or so Phrynicus said.

  An Athenian youth – Pericles, an ugly boy with a big head who talked all the time – nonetheless won the two-stade sprint. He was serving as Cimon’s hypaspitos, and poor Niceas had to do all the work and was jealous.

  And off to the west, other men were at the Olympics as if nothing had happened. As if there was no invasion. No Great King.

  At any rate, we all lay in tents on the beach the night after the games – a dinner for all the navarchs commanding the ships and all the victors, crowned in olive. And Eurybiades laid out his strategy.

  ‘We are smaller, and worse trained,’ he said. ‘But all we have to do is to continue to exist – to retreat after every loss, never allow ourselves to be routed or encircled – and we will not lose.’

  It was a long speech for a Spartan.

  And Themistocles followed him. ‘No matter what the disparity in numbers, Xerxes cannot afford to let us separate one piece of his fleet. As long as we always have a clear retreat and sea room, we can win a string of little victories while we train up our rowers. And never risk a big fight. This is why we must master the wheel.’

  No one liked the wheel.

  We didn’t sink any more ships, but we had some very ugly times – somewhere in the third week, I lost almost a quarter of my oars and Nicolas had his collarbone broken when a ship from the Sicyon contingent popped out of the wheel like a pomegranate seed from between a boy’s hands and struck us in the stern – which led to a long series of foulings and a great many curses. Luckily our deck crews were better than our oarsmen, and poled us off before men died – but had the Persians been close, we’d all have died or been made slaves.

  At the end of the third week, Eurybiades admitted he was waiting for other contingents. We had two hundred and sixty-nine triremes and a dozen pentekonters as messengers and scouts, as well as a hundred small merchantmen to keep us supplied.

  Athens supplied a hundred and twenty-five ships, of which eleven were in my squadron, and technically they were Plataean. I’d prefer to say that Athens supplied one hundred and sixteen including Paramanos, and Plataea supplied nine, but you may count us any way you like.

  Corinth promised sixty ships and supplied forty; and two of them slipped away before the fleet sailed and never returned.

  Chalcis in Thrace supplied no ships but manned another twenty hulls built by Athens.

  Megara supplied twenty triremes.

  Aegina, which had sixty ships, supplied eighteen, and those with inferior crews.

  We had a dozen good ships from Sicyon and ten ships from Sparta, or at least led by Spartan officers, and another eight from Epidavros in the eastern Peloponnesus. There was one ship from Hermione and two from far-off Ithaca. Troezen, Styra and Ceos all sent ships. Not many, but what they had.

  If you count your way through them, you’ll find that it was an Athenian fleet with a handful of allies, commanded by a Spartan and full of internal divisions. When Harpagos and I compared it to the Greek fleet at Lades – where we’d had Miltiades and a dozen other first-rate pirates I could name, where we’d had the elite of every Ionian Greek seagoing city – well, we were like to have wept.

  But we didn’t.

  We just talked carefully through what we’d do when the rout began. We worked out where we’d go, and where we’d land. We sent Giorgos back to Piraeus to commandeer one of our merchant tubs, fill it with water and food, and bring it round. Not to share, either. But to give us food and water to outdistance pursuit the first night after the fleet broke up.

  We were by no means the only doomsayers. We were merely the most practical.

  Well, except the Corinthians, some of whom gave up and sailed for home, and the Corcyrans, who never came.

  Practicality, of course, never won anyone their freedom. Caution is seldom the virtue needed in extremis.

  After three weeks on the beaches south of Euboea, Eurybiades ordered us to sea.

  Poseidon, what a mess that was.

  I had good officers and willing men. My ships came off the beach quickly and in good order, and my squadron formed as it rowed, so that we reached our place on the left of the line about an hour after we were ordered to sea.

  There is a current off the point of Schinias, and my oarsmen were kept busy for the next two hours trying to keep us on-station agains
t the flow of the sea. I pitied them, but it was excellent practice, and I tried not to interfere. Besides, I had a Dionysian comedy of epic proportions playing out to my right, seaward, as the great fleet of the allies crept off the beaches, rammed each other, and slunk to their places in line. It was a wonderful thing that we all spoke Greek, so that the curses, imprecations and rage of the helmsmen could be clearly communicated.

  At my elbow, Sittonax fingered his beard and laughed. ‘Just imagine, brother, what it is like in the other fleet. Greeks and Persians and Aegyptians and Phoenicians all together, by all accounts!’

  Harpagos, who was aboard by virtue of having jumped from his own transom to mine, shook his head in silence. I met his eye.

  ‘We’re doomed,’ he said, with Laconic brevity.

  We ran up the coast of Euboea with a fair wind, but Eurybiades forbade us to sail, which was good officering but bad for his popularity. We rowed. We rowed in various formations, and none of them was very good, but it was our first day moving as a fleet.

  Our scouts – Locrians, for the most part, and some Ionians who’d come over from Lesvos and Chios with pentekonters – had chosen us a set of beaches on the western shore of Euboea. Euboea is like a sea-girt extension of my homeland of Boeotia, with beautiful farmland and sandy beaches, too – as close to a paradise as Greece ever gets south of Thessaly. On the western shore, there are broad beaches, but on the eastern shore it is far rockier, and a ship is exposed to the eastern winds and summer storms. The channel between Boeotia and Euboea is so narrow that there’s a bridge – you may recall my father died there.

  We camped, and the next day we passed the narrows two ships at a time. And camped again.

  The Euboeans had been badly handled by the Persians in Marathon year, their two principal cities taken, most of their men of worth killed or sold as slaves, and while there had been talk of recolonising it from Thebes or Athens, no real moves had been made. It is an island half the size of Attica, occupied only by shepherds, and they had done nothing to prepare for the Persians. In fact, before we made our first camp and bought whole herds of sheep, I don’t think they were fully aware of the threat.