Thermopylae (12 page)

Although the Delphic oracle took its usual care to make doubleended pronouncements (for instance, which nation’s women
⁵
s sons would die?), the mention of Salamis and of the wooden wall are quite specific. Pessimists took it all as a further warning of defeat, while others maintained that the wooden wall must mean the palisades of the Acropolis. The policy of Themistocles, however, had long been centred around Salamis. He saw the island as not only the place to which the government and army of Athens must withdraw if their city was captured, but also the area in which his new navy might best take on the Persian fleet in constricted waters, where the greater numbers of the enemy might well prove of no advantage but even a hindrance. It was up to him to convince the people, in the great debate that followed the second Delphic pronouncement, that his interpretation was the correct one. It is evidence of the powers and skill of this remarkable man that, despite his many enemies’ among the conservatives, despite the fact that his argument was a somewhat thin one, he somehow managed to win the day. His oratory was Churchillian as he pointed out that it was freedom which mattered above all. Cities could be rebuilt, but they were nothing in themselves. The essence of the state lay in its citizens. Themistocles appealed to the people over the heads of his opponents, and the people responded. His war-policy was overwhelmingly approved.

Troezen in the Peloponnese, which was reputedly the birthplace of the legendary King Theseus of Athens, was chosen as the place to which the women and children of Athens should be evacuated. The people of this comparatively insignificant city-state responded magnificently to this renewal of the ancient blood-tie. The old people together with household goods were to go to Salamis, while the treasurers and priestesses were to remain on the Acropolis (this for the sake of public morale). General mobilisation was proclaimed, the fleet was to be manned, and all men under fifty were expected to serve. The salient aspect of policy was that, when the triremes had been manned and furnished for war, one hundred of them were to proceed to meet the enemy at Artemisium off Euboea, while the other hundred were to cruise off Salamis and Attica. The point that must be remembered was that this whole operation, as conceived by Themistocles and approved by the Assembly, applied to the Athenians only. What the reactions of the Peloponnesian allies would be was an unknown factor. They might think very differently.

Themistocles now had the hard task of persuading the Peloponnesians against their ‘defence of the Isthmus’ policy. The Spartans, the Corinthians, and the inhabitants of Athens’ old-time enemy, Aegina, had to be made to realise that a forward defence of Greece was essential. It is not difficult with hindsight to see that a strategy which rested upon a defence-line across the Isthmus would certainly have failed. All the Aegean islands opposite the coast had either medised or in any case could easily be rendered ineffective by the Persian fleet. Nothing would have been easier with the weight of sea- and land-power to isolate the Peloponnese and then invade it. The Isthmus of Corinth defence-line would have proved in those days as easy to turn as that of Maginot in this century. A combination of Greek military skill with naval power, if most judiciously used, might just turn the scales against the Persians. The unlikelihood of success if one operated without the other had to be made clear. (Events were to do so in any case.) The shadow of Marathon, somewhat naturally, haunted all discussion. If the Greek hoplites had triumphed before on land, why should the same not happen again ? The answer should have been plain to all but the most conservative-minded. The expedition of Xerxes, on its vast scale, was designed to conquer Greece and all the Grecian West. First Greece, then the Ionian islands, then Sicily, and then the rich colonies in Italy - this was the intended progression of conquest.

Part of Themistocles’ strategy was inevitably dictated by the very natural Athenian suspicion that the Spartans might let them down, might rely on the defence of the Isthmus, might (for whatever given reason) procrastinate and turn up late - as they had done at Marathon. If the worst came to the worst and northern Greece was overrun, the Spartans might come to the conclusion that they could stay secure in the Peloponnese. They and the other allies had to be convinced that, on this occasion, it was all or nothing for every state which had declared to hold their ground against the might of the invader. For the first time in their history the Greeks had to learn to co-operate with one another. In only one respect did the Athenians have an advantage over the Spartans. If Attica fell and Athens was overrun, they would - even if worsted in a sea-battle - still have some ships left. The survivors could ‘do a Dunkirk’ and (after collecting women and children from Troezen), they could abandon Greece, sail south and then west across the Ionian Sea, and plant a new colony in Sicily or Italy. The Spartans, with their small fleet, were condemned to fight on the land - with no escape.

The agreed strategy of the Congress at Corinth had originally been for the Greeks to fight as far forward in Greece as possible. In the spring of 480, before Xerxes had crossed into Europe, they had acted on an appeal from Thessaly and sent a force of 10,000 hoplites to hold the ‘Mount Olympus Line’ at the coastal pass of Tempe. The idea of holding a line as far to the north as possible was sensible enough in itself, but the pass at Tempe could easily be turned. Themistocles himself had commanded the Athenian contingent and a Spartan named Euainetos the Lacedaemonian. It is significant that the latter was not a member of the royal family, and therefore that the Spartan contingent was not a major one - or one of the kings would have gone at its head as was the custom.

The Athenians must have provided the main body of the force. It had become obvious from early on that the chosen position was impossible to hold. Not only was it bypassed by two routes to the west of Olympus, but the local tribes, far from being co-operative, had already determined on a Persian victory. Agents of the Great King had been active in the area for some time, offering inducements to the northern Greeks not to put up any resistance. Quite apart from that, it was well enough known that the Aleuadae were pro-Persian, while Alexander of Macedon was in fact a vassal of Xerxes.

The latter, a smooth charmer, and ostensibly attached to the Greek cause, had a brother-in-law who was a Persian general (somewhat difficult to explain away) and had no intention of being involved in what he clearly saw as a coming victory for the Persians. However, he was trusted by the Greeks (possibly because he had once run in the Olympics and nearly gained a crown) and they went to him as a reliable source of information. So he was - up to a point - for naturally he knew the northern area far better than the Athenians or the Spartans did. He demonstrated the grave defects of the Tempe pass as a holding-place, and advised them to pull back while there was still time. The Spartan Euainetos was convinced, and Themistocles must have felt relieved. The loss of 10,000 hoplites, as well as about the same amount of lightly armed men who accompanied them, would have been an intolerable blow at the very start of the campaign.

Although he was in favour of an action, even if only a delaying one, as far north of Attica as possible, Themistocles must always have held to his original conception of a fleet engagement at a point carefully chosen to the Greek advantage. The Greek force accordingly had withdrawn, sometime towards the end of May, and marched south. Both the hoplites and their accompanying soldiers were no doubt pleased to be moving back nearer to their homes. Greeks at that time rarely engaged in battles outside their local known territory. The inhospitable and treacherous northern mountain area (full of semi-barbarians and Greeks who had ‘sold out’ to the enemy) could never have induced in them the instinctive patriotism of Marathon.

The withdrawal from the Pass of Tempe provided the background to the thinking of the League Congress when it met for the last time before ‘the thunder of the chariots in the north’ had made itself ominously heard. It was hardly surprising that the return of the hoplite force had resulted in the immediate defection of nearly all the northern Greek states, especially Thessaly and Boeotia, which now saw themselves as having been abandoned. Alexander of Macedon had long ago made his choice, for he had seen from the beginning that, if the Persian host was held up on his territory by a delaying action, it would strip his own land barren. Better by far that they should pass swiftly through Macedonia.

It seems astonishing that even at this late hour the spokesmen should have been bickering and politicising (but modern Greeks under somewhat similar circumstances have done so to this day). Athens had earlier made the greatest concession of all: she had agreed that her fleet should come under the over-all command of a Spartan. Since Athens represented by far the greatest naval power in Greece, her action in doing so was admirable - even if it was largely forced upon her by the fact that the Peloponnesian allies would not accept an Athenian in charge. Themistocles most probably made this concession because he knew that, in the end, it was his strategy that would have to be adopted, and that the size of the new Athenian fleet in comparison with the composite numbers of the Spartan and others would, when it came to action, determine the tactics. ‘Realising that if they quarrelled about the command, Greece would be lost’, Athens (which almost certainly means Themistocles) was prepared to swallow her pride.

Green comments:

Most of July was wasted… . The Spartans, in particular, had their usual religious objections to campaigning at such a season. Their chief festival, the Carneia, fell on or about 20 August, at the time of the full moon; so, that year, did the quadriennial Olympic Games, during which all warring Greek states sank their differences and competed together in relative friendship.

As had been said before, although these religious, or quasireligious, obligations may seem odd to a modern, they were far from so to an ancient Greek, who lived in a world surrounded by totems and taboos that often obfuscated his thinking. One definitely rational piece of thinking that had marked the Athenian decisions promoted by Themistocles was to recall those who had been exiled under the system of ostracism - although possibly not to home itself, but only to the island of Salamis. It seems clear, at any rate, that in her hour of need Athens was prepared to use all the brains that she could summon - even if they were hostile to the man or party in charge. Aristeides responded (as might be expected from what one knows of his character) and so did Xanthippus. Hipparchus, on the other hand, had joined the ‘Quislings’, who sought their future with Xerxes and looked for revenge - and power -when both Athenians and Spartans were beaten into the ground.

Old Artabanus in the wise counsel that he had given to Xerxes -and for which he had been sent back home - had summarised the problems which would follow upon an invasion of Greece. Since the Greeks clearly thought along the same lines, and since their thinking determined their strategy in the face of this apparently overwhelming threat, his words, as given by Herodotus, are worth repeating:

I warned your father - my own brother Darius - not to attack the Scythians, those nomads who inhabit a land without cities. He would not listen to me. Quite confident that he could overcome them he invaded their land. Before he returned home many brave soldiers who had accompanied him lay dead. But, my lord, you intend to attack a nation infinitely superior to the Scythians: one with a reputation for immense courage, both on land and sea… . The Greeks are reputed to be great fighting men - something one can well judge from the fact that the Athenians on their own destroyed the large army that we sent against them…. I strongly urge you to abandon this plan.

Artabanus’ advice was based sensibly and primarily upon logistics. The Persians would be far from home, their lines of communications extravagantly extended, and, as he reminded Xerxes, ‘God tolerates pride in no one but himself. It is always the large buildings and the tall trees that are struck by lightning. This is God’s way of bringing the lofty to their proper level. Often a great army is destroyed by a small one… .’

The Greeks in their councils, quite apart from the formal League at Corinth, had already seen that their best hope lay in allowing the Persians to over-extend themselves. There could be no hope of defeating so vast an army in a pitched battle. However superior the hoplites had proved themselves at Marathon, this time sheer weight of numbers would overwhelm them. The Greeks had little in the way of archers and the same could equally be said of their cavalry. Their only chance lay in finding a suitable defensive line to check the invaders, for however brief a period, while the main engagement took place at sea in a position which they had carefully selected. Tempe had proved too far forward, the surrounding inhabitants pro-Persian, and their flank easily turnable. Geography determined the line which they finally decided to hold.

Greece is a mountainous country and, as Artabanus had already pointed out to Xerxes, its coast is singularly inhospitable. To the east and north of Athens the long fish-shaped island of Euboea lies like a defensive shield. Its eastern coast offers no harbours and any fleet finding this bleak shore to leeward in the event of a blow would be in great trouble. It was now high summer and, after the indecisive vagaries of the
prodroms
, the real ‘Greek wind’ had set in to blow. The
Meltemi
, as it is called, is almost as steady as the Trade Winds of the oceans. It can be relied upon throughout most of the summer to be constant from a northerly direction, as the colder air from the Black Sea and Russia beyond flows down steadily to replace the hot air which lifts over all the Aegean, the Mediterranean, and Africa. Dying away only slightly at nightfall (but still leaving a pitching and lumpy sea), the
Meltemi
can be expected to blow at anything between Force 6 to 8 on the Beaufort scale, at times even reaching gale force. Such conditions can render sailing difficult in the Aegean even for modern coasters, caiques, or well-found sailing boats. For the trireme, labouring under oars, and even the wind from astern, the
Meltemi
was hardly a friend.