The Queen of Sparta (9 page)

Leonidas shouted to the Mantineans, “We will burn you alive in there if you do not come out,” and quickly ordered the outer trees to be set on fire. First in dribs and drabs – one soldier and then two, and then as the fire spread through the grove a huddle of men and then a mob – emerged from the smoking woodland, until finally the entire Mantinean army had surrendered.

Leonidas had them strip almost naked and bade them sit in neat rows on the very ridge the troops had charged up.

“Worthless maggots,” he said as he walked among them, “you are a disgrace to the good name of Greece.

“If my late brother, King Cleomenes, may the gods forgive him, were alive today he would have personally slit your throats. His daughter, my Queen,” Leonidas pointed as she walked towards him, “I am sure would love to do us the honour in his stead.”

Of course, Leonidas was joking, but Gorgo saw the entire Mantinea army shudder in horror as she approached. One or two, she noticed, began to vomit uncontrollably.

“… But killing you would be an insult to our weapons,” continued Leonidas. “The lambs we slaughter have more courage than you ever will. Why did you don your helmets and carry your spears if had no intention of fighting? Why did you not fight and die like men? Why did you run so quickly from this field of honour?” He looked searchingly at the defeated mob. “Is there any among you who has the decency to answer?”

A boy of around eighteen got up and said, “We were afraid of you, Majesty. We were afraid to fight the Spartans.”

“Then you should not have invaded our land.”

“We had no intention of truly fighting you. We thought you would look at how strong our army was and start to negotiate with us. We didn’t expect you to attack us.”

“I never understood this business of negotiations,” said Leonidas, shaking his head. Then he looked at the boy. “Lad, at least, you had the courage to speak up. Perhaps there is someone in this lily-livered rabble of yours worthy of slaughter, after all.”

The boy’s face went white and he immediately sat down again and buried his head in his chest so that he would not be recognized. The Spartans roared with laughter. But Leonidas’ expression became serious.

He walked up the hill alongside the prisoners and said, “Do not go to war, if you do not expect to die. Nothing becomes a man more than courage in battle. It is better to die a hero’s death than to live a thousand years.” He sneered at the Mantineans as he walked through their ranks; the prisoners gaping in awe at this angry Spartan king. “Thousands of years from now, people will honour the brave of our time in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. But no one will remember the Mantineans, or even care. And why should they? You are disgraceful, all of you. Let me never see you again, unless you have any intention of skewering your miserable carcasses on this,” he said, drawing his sword and pointing it at the nearest prisoner. The man cringed with terror and all of the prisoners around him stared in horror at the glinting sword.

“Go home! The lot of you,” he said turning away from them. “You will rue the day you were not killed by the Spartans. You will never join the company of the glorious. You will never dine in Hades with heroes. You will always cower in the shadows. Go home, and live forever!”

Thus Leonidas sent home the Mantinean army, almost naked and in shackles. Along with them he sent a bill to the leaders of Mantinea claiming the cost of the shackles themselves. “Let it not be said that the King of Sparta does not have a sense of humour,” Leonidas told Gorgo afterwards, as he roared with laughter.

As Pleistarchus finished his poetry lesson, Gorgo heard him recite another verse from Tyrtaeus. It was Leonidas’ favourite.
“…
learn to love death’s ink-black shadow as much as you love the light of dawn.
”
And so Leonidas had heroically embraced his fate.

But now the final battle was about to begin.

CHAPTER 9

THE WAX TABLET

Mess of the Kynosoura Regiment

Sparta

The same night

In their younger days, they had instilled fear into the hearts of their enemies; leading Spartan armies to great victories. These five grey-bearded warriors grimly stood around the hearth fire. Sitting in front of them was their young Queen. After a long silence, Gorgo got up and walked up to them, looking each man in the eye. She knew them well – most had granddaughters around her own age. None of these wizened former generals was younger than sixty-five. They had now been called back from retirement to lead men into battle for one last time. And yet she hoped it would not come to that.

“Gentlemen,” said Gorgo, “I am confident that our troops will prevail at Plataea.”

The men grunted in approval.

“But you know better than I the fog of war,” she continued. “And should the tide turn against us there, be prepared to defend Sparta with all you have.”

The oldest commander rose. He bowed deeply to her and said, “Under your guidance, Gorgo ‘Bright Eyes’, victory is assured.”

Gorgo acknowledged the old soldier’s words with a polite nod. Sparta’s soldiers and politicians saw her as their guiding light in this war. But this had not always been the case. And it would not have been, had it not been for a curious incident three years earlier.

It was late afternoon and Gorgo was playing in the courtyard with little Pleistarchus. They were playing a version of Olympic hockey along with children of the household Helots, using sticks and a soft ball of leather.

Thus absorbed, she did not notice that an officer of the Company of Knights was standing waiting on her until he cleared his throat and said, “Majesty, your presence is requested in the Gerousia this very instant. Please accompany me.”

She soon arrived at the Hall to see it full of commotion. Whereas Spartan men always looked so calm in battle, in the Gerousia they were in complete disarray. As she walked silently to the centre, she felt some of the men turn in surprise, for they had never seen a woman among them.

Gorgo could not help a flutter of excitement inside this hallowed Hall. Even kings were not above the laws made here.

She quickly saw Leonidas was looking very pensive and not a little frustrated. Next to him sat a tall lean man, his Eurypontid co-King, Leotychidas, a dull man by all accounts. Gorgo’s father had made him co-King after removing his predecessor. He had seen Leotychidas as nothing more than a pliable tool and had treated him as such. But the fact that he was reluctant even to command armies caused Leonidas to despise him. Fearing Leonidas’ temper, Leotychidas had the sense to keep his mouth shut on most occasions, letting Leonidas do the talking, and even the thinking … not to mentioning the doing … for him.

But on this day, both were looking equally glum.

“Your Majesties, you have summoned me here?”

“No,” said a tired but respectful voice. “It is the Gerousia that has summoned you here, Majesty.”

Gorgo turned to see it was the Senior Ephor who had spoken.

“We have a problem,” he said, “and we were wondering if you could help us solve it.”

“I would be most honoured,” she had said, a little too eagerly – a young Queen, after all.

At the Ephor’s signal, a slave presented her with a folding writing-tablet. It was an ordinary writing-tablet, covered with wax on which words or characters could be written and then easily erased. But the tablet was covered with several inscriptions in different languages, including Greek. And none of them made any sense, especially the Greek.

“This slave claims that his master is an adviser to Great King Xerxes, but sympathetic to the Greeks. He has sent a message for the leaders of Sparta. We have tried everything but we cannot find the message. The slave swears his master did not tell him anything about the message or what it is. We are having a problem trying to find the message in all the inscriptions scribbled on this tablet.”

Gorgo could have roared with laughter. “Have you tried scraping the wax off?” she asked the Ephor.

“What?” he said, “… And destroy all this writing? The message is somewhere in these inscriptions.”

“This writing can easily be erased and re-written. The message is not here. Has it occurred to you that it may be underneath the wax?”

“Underneath the wax?”

“Yes.”

“A hidden message?”

“Yes.”

“You want us to scrape the wax off?”

“All of it!” she insisted.

The Ephor looked around the Hall and then he looked at the Kings. Leotychidas regarded him blankly, but after a moment’s thought, Leonidas nodded. Still hesitating, the Ephor gave the attendants orders to scrape off the wax. Carved into the wood underneath wax was the message. Of course, it was in code. A quick examination told Gorgo that the words had been arranged in a repetitive sequence.

“A pen and a parchment, if you please?” she asked the Ephor, who promptly gave her his.

It did not take her long to decipher and when she was done, she read out the message:

King Xerxes, the new Persian King, is preparing a mighty army to wreak vengeance on the Greeks. The destruction of Sparta is one of his objectives.

Thirty-seven pairs of eyes looked on in amazement.

“Majesty, how did you know that the message was underneath the wax?” asked one of the Gerousia members.

“It was obvious, you idiot,” she thought to herself. However what she said was, “Since in your wisdom, you gentlemen had eliminated all other possibilities, I thought we might try this. Perhaps it was a lucky guess.”

She humbly bowed to the Hall and quietly left, leaving behind thirty Gerousia members, the five Ephors, and the two Kings. Since that day she had been invited to every single session of the Gerousia. However, what intrigued her was the identity of the man who had sent that secret message.

The news of the impending invasion had plunged Sparta and the rest of Greece into a state of panic. For this was the largest army anybody had ever seen, its strength estimated at almost two million men. Some put the numbers even higher. Later they heard stori
es of this army drinking rivers dry. It was less of an army, and more of a pestilence descending on Greece.

Strangely enough, Gorgo was pleased. This was a vindication of her father’s fears and thus it finally provided her with the opportunity to put her father’s vision into practice. She suggested to Leonidas to create the Hellenic League – a patriotic alliance to resist the invaders.

Furthermore, she asked him to establish its headquarters at Corinth, one of Sparta’s strongest allies. This would help to keep the Peloponnesian states together, and by proximity make it easier for the Spartans to manipulate, if not control, the League.

But not all the Greek states joined the League. As the Persian threat started to materialize, many Greek states decided that they would give in to the invaders. Others prevaricated, delaying the ‘when’ but not the ‘if’ of submitting to the Persians. In contrast, those states who came over to the Spartan side were actually a minority, and sometimes joined for no better reasons that their local rivals were planning to go over to the enemy. At the heart of this disunity lay the hatreds and rivalries many Greek states and cities had for each other.

Gorgo’s concerns, however, lay closer to home. She was afraid that in spite of her best efforts all their plans could fail if the leadership of the Spartan army refused to follow her plans. This was because the
Boule
– or War Council – that governed it had a mind of its own. But so did Gorgo. She started pestering Leonidas to let her attend the meetings. Ever the stickler to Spartan tradition, he repeated that women were not allowed there. But then one day she confronted him and said, “If the Gerousia can benefit from my help, so can the Boule.”

Leonidas snorted, “The Boule is not like the Gerousia. Soldiers do not like women telling them what they should do.”

“Nor did the members of Gerousia,” she retorted, “until they had no other choice. Do not come to me, my Lord, after you lose your first battle.”

“Very well,” sighed Leonidas. “You can attend the meetings, as long as you listen and don’t speak.”

So Gorgo went to her first meeting of the Boule. It was full of tough, no-nonsense men, eager to make a name for themselves, and ambitious for victories. She soon knew the company was not exactly comfortable with her presence. This they showed by completely ignoring her, expecting her to sit quietly at the rear-most table.

The meeting was always held in one of the regimental messes, with the two Kings sitting on the high table, while the Captain of the Knights stood behind them. The six generals of Sparta were seated, in order of seniority, from right to left around the mess-table, facing their Kings. Leonidas often conducted these meetings alone, with Leotychidas absent on one excuse or another.

Gorgo listened in horror as the War Council authorized the dispatch of a virtually the entire army to join the Athenians at a pass called Tempe in the north near the Greek border with Thrace. The Spartan ‘no show’ at Marathon was still pricking the sensibility of these generals. They did not want to allow the Athenians to beat the Persians again on their own.

Gorgo could not maintain her silence. “Why do Spartan men prefer to lose reason before losing face?” she asked as the Generals seated in the rows in front turned to look at her. “Gentlemen, tell me. How will a few thousand Greeks stop millions of Persians?”

While others tried to restrain themselves, one of the younger generals blurted out, “We Spartans do not ask how many are the enemy, but where they are. The Persians will enter Greece from the north, and it is in the north that we shall defeat them.”

The other generals nodded forcefully. She wanted to reason with them, but decided to keep her views to herself, at least for the time being.

And sure enough, a large Spartan force was sent to Tempe to join the Athenians. Soon afterwards, everything descended into a farce. The Spartan commander Evaeneutus took an immediate dislike to his Athenian counterpart – none other than the brilliant, if arrogant, Themistocles. Both spent more time quarrelling with each other than trying to find the best way to stop the enemy. And when they finally got around to it, they realized that they had picked the wrong place to block the Persians. The pass could easily be outflanked and turned, by land as well as sea. The Persians could even bypass it completely and avoid confronting their troops at all, and thus cut them off from the rest of Greece, rendering both Athens and Sparta virtually defenceless. And when the local rulers of the area began to defect to the Persians, the two allied armies beat a hurried retreat. So the Spartan army returned home without a fight. Tempe was a narrowly avoided disaster.

As soon as the army returned, Gorgo went without invitation to the Boule.

“Gentlemen, you consider yourself the best warriors in Greece, as you should. You consider our troops superior to the enemy, which indeed they are. But the fact is no army, no matter how good, can overcome an immensely larger one without a strategy. To defeat the enemy, we have to think differently; plan differently; and act differently. Remember, gentlemen, what we are up against now is a monster of great size and strength. We have all heard, since our childhood, stories of how our great heroes fought and overcame powerful enemies. Of our own ancestor, Heracles, who slew the Hydra, not by brute force, but by logic. Of Odysseus, who killed the Cyclops using deceit and trickery. And then there was Perseus, who used his wits and the reflection of light to slay Medusa, that fearsome, ugly Gorgo.”

There was gentle laughter at the deliberate pun on her own name.

“Our heroes defeated mightier adversaries through skill and cunning. Xerxes’ army cannot be beaten in a single battle. We have to defeat it by shrewd strategy. We need to wear it down, sap its strength and undermine its morale. At the same time, we need to strengthen our alliances, build up our defences, and raise more troops so that in the end we can have the upper hand.”

She turned her gaze to Leonidas, who said, “Tempe has shown our carelessness. We do need a strategy.” Then he smiled, “… And perhaps we may have turn to a Gorgo to win this war.”