Thermopylae (23 page)

The death of a Spartan king, far from his home, fighting on behalf of all Greeks, may have symbolised this new concept of unity. It had little effect upon the general view of the Peloponnesians that, since Attica and Athens itself were clearly doomed, the original plan of holding the line at the Isthmus was the right one. Under the command of Cleombrotus, the younger brother of Leonidas, some 30,000 Peloponnesians manned a defensive line across the Isthmus, a little south of the slipway used for the land-transport of vessels between the Aegean and the Gulf of Corinth. While all this frenzied activity was taking place on the Greek side the army of Xerxes continued its inexorable advance and began to enter Boeotia, at which point the looting and the vandalising that had characterised their progress through Phocian territory was ordered to cease. The Boeotians, through the good offices of Alexander of Macedon, had already negotiated their surrender and their willingness to act in concert with their old enemies in Thessaly. They, too, had come out in favour of the Persian cause.

From Boeotia part of the Persian army turned westwards and moved towards Delphi. It is unlikely that there can ever have been any intention of plundering and sacking that rich shrine - that ‘Navel of the Earth’ - for Delphi, always remembering the clemency displayed to Delos in the expedition of Darius, had undoubtedly shown a pro-Persian bias through its ‘inspired’ utterances, both before and during the campaign of Xerxes. The question is worth asking - was Delphi and its priesthood Machiavellian in its attitude towards the Greco-Persian conflict, or was it no more than concerned with its own survival as the Fountain of Wisdom? There is no proof, but it seems possible that Delphi had taken Persian gold in return for giving pessimistic utterances to Greek cities; above all, to Syracuse, to Athens, to Argos, to Crete, and to Sparta. Delphi was primarily a great religious centre for all of the Greekspeaking world but, in the course of being established as such, it had long been involved in the field of politics. (In very similar fashion, at various periods in its history, the Papacy, in order to survive, has been drawn into making accommodations with temporal powers.)

Delphi was spared. Although the inhabitants of Delphi were themselves of Phocian stock they had, over the years, tended to dissociate themselves from their rural brothers. They had certainly made no efforts during the invasion to help them in any way, but had preserved a strict neutrality. Xerxes, therefore, had no reason to subject the territory of Apollo to the same treatment that had been handed out to the unhappy people of the devastated land of Phocis. According to Greek authorities the Great King sent 4000 men to seize the shrine and carry off the immense wealth of treasures that had accumulated there over the years. Now, with the exception of the Prophet of the Oracle, Aceratus, and sixty men (the latter presumably staying to guard the treasures against any local vandals) all the inhabitants of Delphi, men, women and children, had fled the area, some taking to the heights of Parnassus, others going to Amphissa, and yet others proceeding by boats from the Gulf of Itea across to Achaea. The shrine, then, and all its temples and buildings were, in effect, left undefended. If it was Xerxes’ intention to loot this rich and most sacred place in Greece, one can but wonder at his strange failure to do so. The answer, as legend had it, was that Apollo, by miraculous intervention, drove away the advancing column. What must strike a modern commentator on the events as singular, to say the least, is that none of the treasures of Delphi had been removed to safe-keeping; neither taken over to Achaea nor hidden in the mountain caves (especially the large and hard-to-find Corycian Cave - used by refugees in the Second World War) whither a number of Delphians had fled for safety. The story as promulgated to all later Greeks was that Apollo had personally assured the Priest of the Oracle and all the people of Delphi that he could, and would, take care of his own. Thus arose the very convenient tale of heavenly thunder, vast rocks being torn from the slopes of Parnassus and hurled at the invaders, and a great voice shouting from the innermost sanctuary itself, while two giant warriors suddenly emerged and pursued the Persian column headlong back to Boeotia from the sacred precincts.

One does not need to be cynical to doubt these stories. What is necessary, however, is to try to understand why - if such was the will of Xerxes - Delphi was not seized and looted. There are two comparatively simple answers to this question: first, that Delphi had all along collaborated with Persia; and, secondly, that after the ultimate Greek victory it was more than necessary for the Delphic priesthood to establish Greek faith in this most enduring of all their oracular shrines. If people asked later why Xerxes did not destroy, burn and loot Delphi as he had done already with numerous sacred places in Phocis, and as he was to do in Athens itself, the only answer that could be given was a miraculous one. Indeed, to simple people the fact that/unimportant villages on Parnassus and the town of Daulis nearby had been set afire and destroyed - while Delphi had been spared - could only suggest divine intervention. It is just possible (although there is no evidence) that there was a secret agreement between Xerxes and Delphi, but this seems unlikely and, furthermore, unnecessary. On the verge of triumph, as it seemed, Xerxes would have had to be as blinded with hubris as Herodotus often tends to picture him to contemplate so gross a folly as to destroy the shrine. Delphi, whether bought with Persian gold or not, had served his cause well and if, as a Zoroastrian, he did not find it difficult to equate Apollo with Ahuramazda, the Principle of Light, he would hardly have treated this major place of worship with such sacrilegious contempt. Delos and Delphi between them might well become, under the Persian domination of Greece, two great centres from which the truth as revealed by Zoroaster might be disseminated among the pagan Greeks.

By the end of August the main body of the Persian army was into Attica. The advance guard was already on the outskirts of abandoned Athens and the fleet had rounded up into Phaleron Bay. Behind them both army and fleet left a trail of devastation. It was natural enough that the Great King and his advisers should take the ruthless path of destroying the towns, villages, and temples of their enemies, for such was the normal way of conquest in the face of determined hostility. In any case, certain victory beckoned, and they never for a moment had reckoned that their troops would have to spend many months in a ruined land. Their destruction of the crops was an act of stupidity for, even if the conquest of all of Greece had gone ahead according to plan, it would still have been necessary to maintain an army of occupation during the months that were to come. However, their flank to the east on Euboea was secured, most of the inhabitants having taken to the hills, and it is significant that Xerxes did not even bother to divert troops to occupy the island. Presumably such raids as were carried out by his fleet as they moved down the channel were sufficient to have neutralised the towns and fishing villages in that area, while Carystus in its bay to the south remained friendly and provided a useful guard-post over the Euboea-Andros passage into the Aegean.

In Athens, meanwhile, the evacuation continued apace, the panic departure of the last citizens being speeded by the news that the sacred snake, reputed to guard the Acropolis, had not been eating the ration of honey-cake which was ritually put out for it. The snake, therefore, was presumed to have left the sanctuary - assuredly a sign of doom. It is possible, as Plutarch suggests, that Themistocles (he was quite wily enough) had a hand in promulgating this story so as to speed the departure of the last inhabitants. Another tale has it that in order to provide money for some of the penniless he gave it out that the ornament of the Gorgon’s head which was set into the breastplate of the statue of Athene had been stolen. It may be presumed that this was of gold, and it is just possible that in the general panic some vandal had indeed managed to remove it, to be converted in due course into ready cash. In any case this missing adornment gave Themistocles the pretext to have the bags and baggage of the evacuees searched, thus revealing, as might well be expected, that some of the citizens had far more money and valuables on them than they either needed or, in some cases, could have acquired honestly. These were put into the public fund which had already been opened to provide the commanders of the fleet with enough money to pay their troops and oarsmen. In any case, there is no further reference to this doubtless archaic Gorgon-ornament in subsequent history.

It was three months after he had crossed the Hellespont and had first set foot in Europe that Xerxes gazed on the city which had defied him, lying empty and abandoned before his conquering army. Although, as has been said, his progress should - and possibly could - have been somewhat faster, it was no mean feat to have reached the capital of his enemies in such a time. He stood where no other Persian monarch had ever stood before and beheld the key to Europe before him. Syracuse in distant Sicily may have been in one sense a richer city, but Athens metaphorically represented the capital of the West and of all the rich lands that fringed the Mediterranean basin. From his far-travelled Phoenician advisers he knew the basic geography of this sea even as far as the Straits of Gibraltar and, indeed, beyond that - for had not their ancestors, at the behest of the Pharaoh Necho, well over a century earlier, circumnavigated all of Africa? He knew of Spain and its trading posts and metal mines, of the French littoral and the great port at Massilia, of the Balearics, the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, of southern Italy, and of the wealth of Etruria to the north… . All, with the help of his Carthaginian allies, should ultimately come under the control of the East. The Great King must have envisaged all this in terms of a vast expansion of the Persian Empire - something that would make even the achievements of Cyrus and Darius appear comparatively minor. Like all great conquerors, what he was, in effect, dreaming of was a change in world-history quite beyond his immediate comprehension. At this far remove in time it is just possible to envisage what a Persian-Carthaginian conquest of all the Mediterranean lands might have brought about - though not what would have ultimately succeeded it. Such speculation is perhaps as fruitless as changing the direction of some famous chess-game with the benefit of hindsight. Xerxes, in any case, had the next immediate move upon his hands - the capture of the Acropolis of Athens. Not until the high point of the city and its shrine were in his hands could he send the couriers back to Susa with the news of his triumph.

The defenders of the Acropolis were a curious mixture: the stewards, or treasurers, of the sanctuary and, in the words of Herodotus, ‘a number of poor men who lacked the means to get themselves to Salamis’. (From one’s knowledge of later wars one may feel assured that the rich had removed their families to safety a long time ago.) Another reason given for some of these poorer and simpler members of society staying behind in the last of their sacred and ancient places was that they believed the words of the Delphic oracle - ‘the wooden wall will not be taken’ - to refer to the out-of-date wooden palisade that surrounded the Acropolis. Certainly, it required some sophistication of thinking to equate the wooden wall with the new Athenian navy, even though this was the interpretation that Themistocles had cared to place upon it. There can be no doubt about the courage of these men who stayed behind on the Acropolis but, unlike Thermopylae, their defence had no tactical, let alone strategic, significance. The Acropolis could be bypassed or starved out; this small precipitous rock had no relevance to the war as such; its value to those who defended it, and to Xerxes who ordered his troops to attack it, was purely symbolic.

The wooden wall which protected part of the Acropolis was on the western side, and it did not take the Persians long to site themselves on the Areopagus rock facing it and open fire on the defences with ‘arrows with burning tow attached to them’. This ‘Wild West’ technique was admirably successful, and it was not long before these inadequate defences were set alight and shown to be as valueless as most oracles - if, of course, the defenders had read the Delphic utterance correctly! Even so, the steepness of the approach proved a deterrent, and Xerxes despatched a group of pro-Persian Athenians to reason with the defenders. These were members of the Peisistratid family who had never given up hope of a return to an aristocratic government of Athens - which meant, of course, by themselves. These collaborators were suitably rebuffed, so an attack was ordered against the smouldering wall. The defence had been prepared for this and had stacked up boulders, and possibly drums from unfinished columns, which they rolled down against the Persians as they toiled up the harsh slope. This was warfare at its most primitive, something for which the Acropolis of Athens, as well as those high points of other cities, had been carefully chosen in ancient days. The Persians were beaten back, ‘and for a long time Xerxes was baffled by his inability to capture the defenders’.

Quite how long a time the defence of the Acropolis caused Xerxes to be delayed is something that has given rise to much debate, principally because Herodotus ceases his time-count upon the occupation of Athens itself and does not resume it until after the battle of Salamis. Eager to get on with the story-telling aspect of his history, he does not bother too much with the missing two or three weeks between Xerxes’ arrival at the city and the fateful battle. It cannot be believed, however, that the defence of the Acropolis, gallant though it was, held up the attackers for more than a few days at the most. The rest of the time, as will be seen, was largely spent by both sides in watching each other like wary boxers circling in a ring, waiting for one party or the other to declare his intentions or make some fatal error.

The fall of the Acropolis, which one may guess (but no more) as having occurred early in the first week of September 480, was swift and sudden. As well as being mountain-men the Persians were long skilled in siege warfare and attacks on supposedly impregnable citadels. Trained soldiers and their commanders made a careful reconnaissance of the rock, looking for a place so apparently unscalable that the limited number of defenders would necessarily have neglected it. Finally they found it ‘in the front part of the Acropolis, but behind the approach to the gates - a point which was left unguarded because it was not believed that any man could climb it’. A special assault group finally made it silently in the dark of the night, coming out on to the Acropolis near the shrine of Aglaurus, and made their way straight for the gates. Once these were opened the waiting Persians burst in and the slaughter of the