Thermopylae (29 page)

It was hardly surprising that his detractors in Athens seized the opportunity to attack him for accepting these honours from that harsh warrior-caste down in the Peloponnese. (Already one senses in the air that terrible future war between Athens and Sparta which was to break the ‘Bulwark of Hellas, glorious Athens, city of godlike men
⁵
.) Herodotus gives us one revealing story:

Back in Athens he came in for a deal of abuse from a certain Timodemus of Aphidna, whose hatred of Themistocles was his only claim to distinction. Mad with jealousy, he reviled him for going to Sparta, and maintained that he had earned his honours there not by his own merit but merely by the fame of Athens. The continual repetition of this taunt at last drew from Themistocles a reply: ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said; ‘I should never have been honoured as I was if I had been born a Belbinite - and you wouldn’t, Athenian though you are!’ (Belbina was an unimportant islet off Cape Sunium.)

There can be little doubt that Themistocles was arrogant in his time of triumph and this spelled his certain downfall. Throughout that winter his enemies were actively campaigning against him and circulating stories to his discredit. The landowning aristocracy had good reasons for mistrusting any extension of Themistocles’ naval strategy. Mardonius and his forces were to the north and the next attack, it was quite clear, would not come by sea but on land. For this reason, above all, it was essential to secure the participation of the powerful Spartan army and it might be conjectured that the reason why the Spartans had feted Themistocles was that they wished his naval policy to be pursued, thus preserving the Peloponnese and their own army from being the object of the forthcoming offensive. One thing is certain: in the elections in the spring of 479 Themistocles, if he gained any place at all in the command, was relegated to some insignificant role. Two men whom he had previously contrived to have sent into political exile received the principal generalships for the campaign of that year. Aristeides, predictably, was put in command of the land forces, and Xanthippus of the navy. There could hardly have been a more bitter blow to the victor of Salamis and the man who had worked so hard to create the new navy of Athens - the ships which were ultimately to give her her empire. There is no record of any comment by Themistocles who, indeed, seems to have taken no further active part in the war. His sentiments, one suspects, may have been akin to those expressed by Winston Churchill centuries later: ‘… at the onset of this mighty battle, I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure … at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.’ In the whole of the rest of Herodotus’ history of this great war there is only one other brief and unimportant reference to Themistocles.

Xerxes’ winter march to the north is represented by Herodotus and Aeschylus as something as disastrous and demoralised as the retreat of Napoleon from Moscow. Crossing the frozen Strymon river a number of the troops are said to have fallen through the thin ice and drowned. It is possible that some, impatient of delay, did essay the ice and drown, but a point to remember is that the river had been bridged before the campaign had started and the whole army had passed over without incident. Then again a grim picture is painted of food shortage, of troops starving and dying of dysentery, but once again one suspects that many of these lurid details were added in later years like colourful touches (in the fashion of Delacroix) to remind all who came after - and particularly the Persians - of the folly of attempting to invade Greece.

The time taken by Xerxes to reach the Hellespont, forty-five days, or half that of the advance, is made to suggest a panic-stricken rout. On the contrary, since there was no opposition to deal with at any point - no Thermopylae, for instance - and since the fleet had been able to make its way up to the Hellespont to receive the army, with no Greek fleet interposing, it sounds like a reasonable speed for withdrawal. The bridges of boats, as might have been expected, had been broken by the onset of winter’s gales. Nevertheless the army passed over into Asia without any significant incidents being recorded - and there can be no doubt that Greek writers would have made much of it if there had been any disaster at sea. The northern lands through which the march took place, Thessaly, Macedonia and Thrace, did not shift from their loyalty to the Great King - something they might possibly have done if the army’s retreat had been the Napoleonic disaster that the Greeks later made it out to be. Men who had fallen ill on the march were left behind in friendly Greek cities to be taken care of, and the strong garrisons such as Eion, Doriscus, and other places, guaranteed that the Persian hold over the country was as secure as ever.

The only exception to the rule occurred in December that year when some of the towns in the Chalcidice area, mostly notably Potidaea, revolted against the Persian rule. Potidaea was the most well-placed to do so, being situated astride the neck of the Pallene peninsula and virtually unassailable except by sea - and Mardonius had no fleet. Other towns of Pallene also joined in the revolt. Olynthus to the north, standing at the head of the Gulf of Torone, was unwise enough to join them, but the town did not have the strongly defensive position of Potidaea. The revolt began at about the time that Artabazus, a remarkably fine soldier, in company with 6000 of the handpicked Persian corps, had just turned hack after escorting the Great King as far as his crossing of the Hellespont. Having laid siege to Potidaea, which he could see would prove a tough nut to crack, he decided to make an example of Olynthus: a far easier proposition. The city was besieged and taken, and the inhabitants driven out and slaughtered. Artabazus, wisely, instead of garrisoning it with Persian troops, and knowing the hatred so often felt by one Greek township for another, offered the governorship of Olynthus to a man from nearby Torone, whose citizens were only too delighted to enlarge their sphere of influence.

It was always the same with the Greeks, Artabazus must have reflected; by playing upon their mutual rivalries and hatreds, as well as by the transference of a little gold, you could usually get your way without a protracted siege. Potidaea was another matter, but he soon managed to get in touch with Timoxenus, the governor of the troops from nearby Scione. The two managed to communicate by a method that was probably not unusual in ancient siege warfare - that of writing a message and binding it around an arrow-shaft. What exact arrangements were being made for the betrayal of Potidaea we do not know, for the spy-link was discovered through the Persian arrow on one occasion failing to fall in the right place. It ‘struck a Potidaean in the shoulder. As usually happens in war, a crowd collected round the wounded man… .’ (A nice touch of realism!) The message was found and taken to the commanders. The astonishing thing is that Timoxenus was not accused of treachery and summarily executed, but ‘in order to spare the people of Scione from being branded as traitors for ever after’ no action was taken. Knowing the nature of the Greeks, this seems almost unbelievable. It suggests that either others were in the plot, or that Timoxenus was so popular with his own men that his execution would have caused them to withdraw - and Potidaea needed all the troops possible to man its walls.

Artabazus now settled down to a protracted three-month siege. Soon the spring would be upon them and he would have to march to join Mardonius for the campaign. He must have been on the point of withdrawing, when a sudden and unexpected natural phenomenon occurred. Owing, very likely, to an underwater earth-tremor the sea-level of the almost tideless Aegean suddenly dropped, leaving a shallow passage across which troops could wade to attack the exposed end of the city-wall. Artabazus acted promptly and sent an advance force to cross the channel with the idea of taking the city from the rear. Unfortunately for the Persians (as happens on occasions in Malta and southern Sicily with a somewhat similar phenomenon known as the
marrobio
) the sea suddenly came flooding back. Those of the troops who were not drowned were killed by the Potidaeans who came rushing out in small boats. Later - and with good reason - they ascribed this victory to the sea-god Poseidon, also known as the Earth-Shaker. They attributed the Persian disaster to the fact that they had desecrated Poseidon’s shrine and statue which had formerly stood outside the walls. Artabazus lifted the siege and marched to join Mardonius. Potidaea had been an irritant, but neither it nor the Pallene peninsula represented any real threat to communications.

Mardonius, although his troops had wintered well in Thessaly, was not without his problems. It was true that he was in the position of ruler or satrap of the whole of northern Greece from the Hellespont down to Athens, but the ‘Greek problem’ was far from solved. The whole of the Peloponnese was still untouched and there lay the military core - even discounting the hoplites of Athens - which must be smashed before all these Greeks could be added to the Persian Empire. It was true also that the attack of Persia’s Carthaginian allies on Sicily had been repulsed, but Sicily and then the rest of the western Mediterranean could be won, once Greece itself had been conquered. The question was - how to achieve it? Beyond him lay the stark, mountainous land, with its limited agricultural plains, the narrow isthmus of Corinth, fringed on both sides by the ‘bitter water’, and then the little-known Peloponnese, largely dominated by these Spartans, a small handful of whom had dared to challenge the whole of the Great King’s army. Nothing suggested an easy campaign. Mardonius was more than a simple general; he was a strategist and a diplomat. Throughout the winter Persian agents had been as active as before, down in the Peloponnese, doing their best to ensure that the cities which had long had good reason to be hostile to Sparta would not help their old adversaries any more than they had in the previous year. There can be little doubt that money and promises were exchanged, but the situation had changed considerably since Xerxes and the whole army had trampled over northern Greece and Attica. Even the Argives, who are said to have promised that they would prevent the Spartans marching north (an improbable thought), must have hesitated. Salamis must have been in the minds of even these land-bound peoples; they knew that the Athenians’ fleet - repaired over the winter - was still in being, so too that of Aegina, Corinth, Megara, and even Sparta. They knew also that the demoralised Persian fleet was far away and that any action which would follow must almost certainly be a military one. Mardonius might well ravage Attica again, but would he be able to storm the Isthmian line and, even if he managed to do so, how could he manage the conquest of the Peloponnese without a fleet? There can be no doubt that they made promises, took Persian gold, but still laid off their bets. The year before Xerxes had looked like an odds-on-favourite, but the same could not be said in the early spring of 479.

The real threat to Mardonius and his commitment to conquer the rest of Greece for Xerxes clearly lay in the Greek fleet, which to a large degree might be equated with the fleet of Athens. He knew well enough that the Athenians and the Spartans were very different types of Greeks - the one brilliant, volatile, and magnificent seamen; the other dour, conservative, and an aristocratic military caste. It was no secret that, even though they had fought together at sea in the previous year, their differences outweighed their Greek consanguinity. ‘Divide and rule!’, so wise an imperative to all nations with imperial aspirations, was something that Mardonius, son-in-law of Darius, must have learned from his earliest days. And these Greeks were so easy to divide! Since the Athenians lay nearest to hand, since their land was ravaged, and since they were only even now attempting to repair their devastated city, they seemed the easiest target. They had felt the harsh stroke of the Great King and would be unlikely to wish to evacuate Attica once again. They could hardly expect, in any case, to repeat their deceitful success of Salamis. They were therefore clearly the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Greek axis, to be tempted into withdrawal from the conflict.

The charming, smooth-talking Alexander of Macedon was once again used as a go-between and sent down by Mardonius to propose terms to the Athenians which, on the surface, might have seemed acceptable to a people under such military threat, and who could not, furthermore, be confident that the Peloponnesian land forces would come to their aid. The very fact that Themistocles, the author of Greek victory at sea, had been down in Sparta suggested that he might have been conniving with the Spartans - as many Athenians thought that he had. Mardonius, as a politician well versed in the wiles of the court at Susa, knew how bitter a blow it must have been to Themistocles to find that he no longer had control of the Athenian navy, and that he had been relegated to some almost insignificant place in the Greek command. A bitter man, thrust out of favour, who nevertheless commanded the affections and respect of the ‘navy party’, might possibly be able to detach the fleet from the control of the hoplite class; the landowners with whom the men at the oar-benches had little or nothing in common.

Alexander faithfully relayed the message which had been given him by Mardonius, and which one can have no doubt came all the way from Xerxes himself: ‘I am willing to forget all the injuries that Athens has done me. So, Mardonius, first give the Athenians back their land; and secondly, let them take whatever other territory they wish [a rich inducement], and have self-government. If they are willing to come to terms with me, you are also to rebuild the temples that I burnt.’ This was the personal message from the Great King in Susa, but Alexander, taking his lines now from Mardonius, went on to elaborate:

Why then - I ask you - are you so mad as to take arms against the king? You can never defeat him, and you cannot hold out for ever. You have seen his army, its size, and what it can do; you know, too, how powerful a force I have under me now. Even should you beat us - and, if you have any sense, you cannot hope to do so - another force many times as powerful will come against you. So stop trying to be a match for the king, at the cost of the loss of your country and continual peril of your lives. Come to terms with him instead … Make an alliance with us, and so keep your freedom.