Thermopylae (17 page)

On the day following the great debate (probably 17 August) the decision was taken, again on the initiative of Themistocles, to attack the Persian fleet to the north of them. It was difficult once more to convince Eurybiades and the other commanders of the wisdom of such an offensive move. Having agreed to stay at Artemisium they were now in favour of letting the enemy come down to them. What probably turned the scales was not only the eloquence and possibly even blackmailing tactics of Themistocles (he knew who had received bribes) but also the first-hand report from Scyllias of the sorry state in which the storm had left so many of the enemy. They were not all in one place, but dispersed over a number of anchorages and it should be possible to cut out at any rate some of them before the main body could assemble. In any case it was high time that they took the measure of the Persian fleet and had a chance to compare their own battle tactics with theirs.

Late in the afternoon the Greeks made their move to the north, taking confidence in the fact that by starting at such a time they would, if things went against them, be able to withdraw to Artemisium towards nightfall. The Persians, for their part, could hardly believe that so small a force compared to their own was daring to come out to the attack. They got under way at their leisure, being confident of annihilating them. The Greek ships were heavier and slower and the Phoenicians and others felt sure that, with their greater speed and manoeuvrability, they would easily capture them. However, since they were putting out from a number of harbours at different times, while the Greeks advanced in battle-array, Themistocles’ optimism was justified. His force managed to sink a number of the enemy and put several others to flight. But, as the Persian numbers built up, they were gradually able to try an encircling movement known as the
periplous
: a tactic designed to constrict the Greeks so that they would fall foul of one another, thus becoming an easy prey. (The technique was similar to that of the seine net in fishing.) To forestall this, the well-trained Athenians and their allies responded by forming ‘into a close circle - bows outward and sterns to the centre’. Known as the
kuklos
, this was not only an excellent defensive tactic but it enabled the circle, at a given signal, to explode outward, each trireme striking at the nearest enemy. The Persians learned to their cost how highly trained was the adversary whom they had started by regarding with contempt. Although Xerxes had promised a reward to whoever should first capture one of the famed ships of Athens not a single Greek was taken, while thirty Persian ships were captured, among the prisoners being the brother of the king of Salamis in Cyprus, ‘a man of repute in the enemy force’. As darkness came down the triumphant Greeks withdrew. It had been a satisfactory action from their point of view, enabling them to take the measure of the enemy. It also served to remind them that, in a long engagement, they would not have been able to cope with the overriding numbers of the Persian fleet.

It was on this same day, 18 August, that Xerxes had given the orders for the assault to begin on the Spartan position at Thermopylae. He could not wait much longer for the navy to achieve a victory and for the store ships to come back up the coast to bring more victuals. Although the preparation that had gone into the establishment of supply-dumps on the way had been excellent, the fact was that, once into Greece, the army was bound to go forward like a huge snake, eating its way as it moved. The raid carried out by Leonidas in the plain and the valley of the Spercheius must have left little in the immediate path of the army. The Greek fleet (until, he hoped, surprised from the rear) still faced his own navy at Artemisium. On the other hand, it would seem that only a handful of men guarded this pass between the mountains and the sea. It was clearly time to make a move by land. Early on the morning of that day, while Themistocles was still trying to convince his commanders to make an attack on the Persians in the evening, Xerxes decided to make a frontal assault on the Spartan position. It was poor tactics, and everyone on the staff must have known it, but it seemed the only action possible.

In that narrow place which lay before them across the summer-hot plain, the vast weight of the army could not be deployed. They were clearly committing themselves to an engagement that could only suit the enemy (and Demaratus with his trained eye must have recognised that Thermopylae was ideal for a hoplite action). Neither Demaratus as a southerner from the Peloponnese, nor any of the Persians, nor any of the Ionian Greeks to be found in the camp, yet knew about the ‘secret’ of Kallidromos. To these invading foreigners the only immediate route lay through the pass ahead. When Ephialtes came forward with the news of an alternative, it was only in this respect that he could be considered a traitor to the Greeks. The Persians, accustomed as they were to a mountainous land and able to view the country in front of them (easy to discern the hill-slopes behind the savage pass), would sooner or later have discovered the way to circumvent the Greeks. For the moment, though, it seemed that the only course was to try to overwhelm the force that opposed them.

Herodotus’ statement that Xerxes was filled with rage because, although he had given the defenders of the pass four days in which to withdraw, they still made no move almost certainly reflects his sustained portrait of the Great King as an Oriental tyrant. It was only with considerable reluctance, one suspects, that Xerxes gave the order for first the Medes and then the men from Susa to attack. On the reason why these divisions should have been chosen as the spearhead Ephorus has the interesting and possibly accurate comment that Xerxes put the Medes in first either because he thought they were the bravest of his men (unlikely from a Persian monarch) or ‘because he wished to see them destroyed, since the Medes had a proud spirit, the supremacy exercised by their ancestors [over the Persians] having only recently been destroyed’.

The Medes were commanded by Tigranes the Achaemenid and were equipped in the same manner as the Persians, who had indeed adopted it from the Medes in the first place. They wore domeshaped helmets of hammered bronze or iron, a jacket of fish-scale mail with a sleeved embroidered tunic over it, long trousers, and carried light wicker shields. Their arms consisted of short spears, a dagger, and bows with a quiverful of short arrows. Although admirably suited for a certain type of warfare in the mountains, or in deserts, or in the great plains of Asia, such protection and such armament was woefully inadequate against the hoplite line which they were now about to encounter. Those were brave men indeed who now moved forward against the wall of huge bronze shields, the intimidating (and highly protective) helmets, the bronze cuirasses and leg guards which gleamed defiantly as they advanced across the plain and into the defile. It was true that the Persians’ shower of arrows might ‘darken the sun’ (an advance report, about which one Spartan had remarked, ‘Good, then we shall fight in the shade’), but when it came to close-quarter work, as it must, the weapon that would be dominant was the long Greek spear. ‘The fox has many tricks and the hedgehog one good one’, and at the Hot Gates the bristling hedgehog would prove more than formidable.

‘The Medes charged,’ writes Herodotus, ‘and in the ensuing struggle many of them fell; but others took their place, and in spite of savage losses they refused to give up.’ This is fair and accurate war-reporting, but his subsequent comment bears the bias of later Greek attitudes and must be dismissed: ‘They made it clear enough to any observer, as well as to the king himself, that he had indeed many men in his army, but few soldiers.’ It is doubtful perhaps if he had, even among the Immortals, soldiers of the calibre of the Spartans, but he had the same quality of men who had conquered a vast empire. As for their courage, it cannot be dismissed.

As man after man fell in the narrow pass so another came forward to take his place. Finally, the Medes were withdrawn. Now, even the carefully bred toughness of the Spartans was put to the test as a fresh wave - the men of Susa - came up against them. The bodies piled upon bodies may have given the fresh arrivals a shield behind which to kneel down and fire their arrows, but even so they could not break the Greek line. One must imagine the scene not as it is told in picture and story books - a simple row of grim Spartans facing the whole of the onslaught - but a regular and organised changeover of hoplites, Spartan-officered, but composed out of all the small allied force. It was growing late in the afternoon, probably about the same time that the Greek fleet was achieving its tactical if limited success against the Persians, when Xerxes and his staff decided to clear the pass before the end of the day. It was time for a breakthrough. The Immortals were ordered forward.

The Immortals, the crack Guards division which was now ordered out against the Greeks, will have advanced with something of the same military precision as that of the Spartans. They represented the dignity of the most highly professional men-at-arms in the Persian Empire. It was the regiment into which every Elamite, Mede or Persian soldier wished to enrol. They went out across the plain with their general Hydarnes under the keen eye of their monarch. ‘They advanced to the attack full of confidence that they would overcome the opposition without much trouble.’

Brave they were and disciplined they were, but they found, as had the Medes and others before them, that in the confines of the pass their numbers were a hindrance rather than a help. Once again their short spears could not penetrate that formidable bristling line of the Greeks, nor their arrows pierce the great bronze shields. As countless wars have shown, courage is not enough. Against superior weaponry even the bravest must fail, and when those better weapons were wielded by men whose whole life had been nothing but a preparation for war the outcome was inevitable. Herodotus memorably describes one of the Spartan battle-tactics that caused havoc among the Immortals.

One of the feints they used was to pretend to turn and fly all at once. Seeing them apparently taking to their heels, the barbarians would pursue them with a great clatter and shouting; whereupon, just as the Persians were almost upon them, the Spartans would wheel and face them, and in this about-turn they would inflict innumerable casualties upon them. In doing this, the Spartans had some losses too, but only a few. In the end, since they could make no headway towards winning the pass, whether they attacked in companies or whatever they did, the Persians broke off the engagement and withdrew. It is said that Xerxes, who was watching the battle from his throne, three times sprang to his feet in fear for his army.

To watch his finest troops, who came under his own personal command, suffering such savage losses, must have been intolerable and dismaying to the Great King. No doubt Demaratus found it a convenient moment to be absent from the royal circle and to hold his tongue.

The Spartans and the allies could now withdraw, bandage their wounds, eat some very necessary food and take their rest. Even for the hardest of men it had been a hard day and, although the sight of the dead in the pass served to remind them of the heavy losses they had inflicted on the enemy, all of them knew that tomorrow would be an inevitable repetition of the day that was over. The night, too, was to prove a savage one. Yet another storm blew up, ‘with torrential rain and with loud thunder from Mount Pelion
⁵
. The fact that Herodotus mentions the rain and the thunder indicates that this storm was of quite a different vintage from the ‘Helles-ponter
⁵
that had caused the damage to the Persian fleet before. Some scholars in the past have confused or combined these two storms into one, but it is abundantly clear that they were of a completely different nature. When the Persian task-force had been despatched to round Euboea and cut off the Athenians from the south the first storm had blown over. No doubt it was reckoned, on a good average estimate of Aegean conditions, that several days or more of clear weather might follow upon this first hard gale. It is not all that unusual, however, after the first imbalance in the weather has taken place, for subsidiary bad weather to follow as the barometric levels sort themselves out and the air temperatures over land and sea re-adjust. Herodotus remarks, as with some surprise, that ‘it was now the middle of Summer
⁵
- that is, that it was a very strange thing to happen. But this was not so; it was the third week in August and, as the meteorological tables show, the continuity of the good weather associated with the meltemi is no longer to be relied upon. The wind that now blew up, with its accompanying torrential rainfall, was a typical sirocco from the south-east. (Somewhere down over Egypt the khamsin, the hot desert wind, had started to blow and, picking up water-vapour from the sea on its way, now discharged it as the swollen air struck the mountainous flanks of Greece.)

The result was yet another disaster for the Persians at sea. (Rightly had the Delphic oracle advised the Athenians to ‘pray to the winds’.) The 200-ship force which, showing remarkable speed, had nearly rounded Euboea was caught off the area known as ‘The Hollows’ near Carystus, at the very southern end of the island. A few hours more and they would have been into the Euboea Channel but, as it happened, they could not have been in a worse place when the roaring southerly struck. ‘It found them in the open sea - and miserable was their end. The storm and rain caught them … and every ship, unable to see where they were going for the rain, was forced to drive before the wind and ran upon the rocks.’

The claim of Herodotus that every ship was destroyed seems suspect. If the sirocco did indeed strike the ships while they were off the series of bays at the head of which Carystus stands, it seems unlikely that none of them will have been able to make port in Carystus itself - and Carystus was pro-Persian. If, on the other hand, the Persians were still off the eastern end of Euboea (more likely in view of the time factor), then some of them will certainly have been able to run back north with the wind under their sterns. But of one thing there can be absolutely no doubt; they never rounded Euboea. The southerly gale finally put paid to the clever, but always risky, stratagem of despatching the 200 ships to take the Athenians in the rear. Of this we can be quite certain, for the fifty-three Athenian ships which had been guarding the approaches by Chalcis picked up some of the storm-shattered advance-guard of the Persians, interrogated them and, having discovered the extent of the disaster, the Athenians promptly sailed north to join Themistocles at Artemisium.