Thermopylae (30 page)

Such terms, generous enough on the surface, had yielded fruit in other parts of the Persian Empire, and in any case the Athenians were prepared to deliberate upon them for as long as possible. The reason for this was obvious. ‘In Sparta the news of Alexander’s visit to try to bring about an alliance between Persia and Athens caused consternation.’ No doubt it did. With Athenian seapower allied to Persian military might the Peloponnesians would stand no chance. Their Isthmian line would be bypassed and the steamroller of Persia would soon be down before the unwalled city. There was also, apparently, an oracle to the effect that ‘the Dorians would one day be driven from the Peloponnese by the Persians and Athenians’. One might suspect that so curiously explicit an oracle could only have had an Athenian hand behind it and, indeed, even wonder whether the discredited Themistocles could in some way have been involved in its circulation. In any case, the news that the Persians and the Athenians were sitting down in Athens for a long series of talks about forming an alliance caused a panic in the Peloponnese. Sparta swiftly despatched an embassy to Athens.

The Spartans, however, seem to have had good grounds for suspicion that the Athenians were only playing for time, and that they could never in fact reconcile themselves to the idea of being a client state of Persia. After all, although the Persian terms might appear acceptable to an Aegean island or to a city in Ionia, the Spartans knew the nature of the Athenians, knew their pride in their state, their navy, and their inextinguishable love of freedom. They pointed out Alexander’s untrustworthy character and the fact that he was only a ruler because the Persians permitted him to be: he was the lackey of Xerxes. How, they asked, could the Athenians even consider such proposals, which would be a betrayal of all of Greece? These were fine-sounding words which inevitably found an echo in Athenian hearts, but what they had hoped for was a guarantee of the Peloponnesian army. They were not to get it. Indeed, the Spartans even went so far as to reproach the Athenians, pointing out that this war had only started because of Athenian intervention in Ionia, and it now threatened to engulf the whole of Greece. This was true enough, for at the time of the Ionian revolt the Spartans had carefully remained uninvolved. Fence-sitting was part of the Lacedaemonian conservative policy. All that they were prepared to offer the Athenians at this crucial moment was sympathy with their hardships through the ruin of their city and the loss of the harvest, and an agreement to provide them with economic aid and ‘support for all the women and other non-combatant members of your households, for as long as the war lasts’. This was ominous indeed. The Athenians had thought they had had the Spartans over the proverbial barrel with the veiled intimation that they might accept the Persian proposals but, to their consternation, they now found that the Spartans were not duped. Before Salamis, Themistocles had scared the Spartans badly when he had threatened to withdraw the Athenian fleet and found a new Athens far away in southern Italy, but the Spartans knew now that the Athenians would never leave their beloved city and their land.

There was nothing for it but for the Athenians to make an open rejection of the proposals brought by Alexander:

We know as well as you do that the Persian strength is many times greater than our own… . Nevertheless, such is our love of freedom, that we will defend ourselves in whatever way we can. As for making terms with Persia, it is useless to persuade us; for we shall never consent. And now tell Mardonius, that so long as the sun keeps his present course in the sky, we Athenians will never make peace with Xerxes.

This was fine Churchillian stuff, fully in the vein of . . we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender’. There can be no doubt that the full speech as reported by Herodotus does represent with some accuracy what was said at the time. The Athenians, like the British in 1940, needed such a rallying call and, with or without allies, they had no option but to brace themselves for the coming struggle.

To the Spartans the Athenians then made a declaration which was clearly designed to shame them if possible into guaranteeing the Greek alliance with the backing of their military might.

No doubt it was natural that the Lacedaemonians should dread the possibility of our making terms with Persia; none the less it shows a poor estimate of the spirit of Athens. There is not so much gold in the world nor land so fair that we would take it for pay to join the common enemy and bring Greece into subjection.

Aristeides (for it was probably he) went on to say that the Athenians would never forgive nor forget the destruction of their city, the desecration of the Athenian temples, shrines and sacred places, and then he made a dramatic call for Pan-Hellenism: ‘Again, there is the Greek nation - the community of blood and language, temples and ritual; our common way of life; if Athens were to betray all this, it would not be well done’.

The implication here is clearly that it ‘would not be well done’
either
, if the Peloponnesians betrayed their ‘Greekness’. He went on with some distinct element of sarcasm to thank the Spartans for their kindness in offering to look after the Athenian women and non-combatants - ‘Nothing could be more generous’ But still the Athenians would carry on, and had no wish to be a burden on their Peloponnesian neighbours. One can almost hear the barb striking home, and see the embarrassment on the faces of the Spartan ambassadors. The sting came in the tail: ‘That being our resolve, get your army into the field with the least possible delay; for unless we are much mistaken, it will not be long before the enemy invades Attica - he will do it the instant he gets the news that we refuse his requests. Now, therefore, before he can appear in Attica, it is time for us to meet him in Boeotia.’

The implication was clear. This was from now on to be a hoplite war. The Spartans’ courtship of Themistocles and the ‘navy party’ had back-fired. The landowners, the bronze men, the military, were now in command. The Athenian fleet, unlikely to be challenged again, would be kept as a last resort, possibly to do just what Themistocles had threatened them with before - re-establish Athens elsewhere. Herodotus concludes the eighth book of his
Histories
with a line as succinct as anything ever written by Hemingway, and as laconic as anything that a Spartan might have said: ‘Athens had given her answer; and the Spartan envoys left for home.’

Early in the spring of 479 the news came through that the Persian fleet, a large part of which had wintered at Cyme in Ionia, was assembling at Samos. It looked as if a sea-offensive might yet be mounted to combine with the advance of Mardonius’ army. It was, however, nothing like the confident armada that had surged through the Aegean the previous year. Samos, with its two great harbours, was an ideal place for assembling a fleet to strike westward across the Aegean, but this was a demoralised and depleted assembly of ships, no more than 300 in all according to Herodotus. It seems that one reason for its presence on the island was to keep an eye on the Ionians as much as anything else. After the reverses at Artemisium and the defeat at Salamis the heart had gone out of the principal constituents of the Persian naval arm, the Egyptians and Phoenicians, who would seem to have returned to their own countries once the army had been transported across the Hellespont, and to have taken no further part in the war. Most of the sailors and oarsmen of the fleet at Samos were probably Ionian Greeks, but to make sure of their trustworthiness they carried Persian marines aboard and were commanded by three Persian admirals, each one, presumably, being in charge of a hundred ships.

There had indeed been an abortive attempt at a coup on the island of Chios, the plot being betrayed by one member of a seven-man junto. The other six managed to escape and made their way to Aegina where the Greek fleet was assembling under the supreme command of yet another Spartan, King Latychidas. They informed him that all Ionia was ripe for revolt, that the Persian fleet was demoralised, and urged him to attack Ionia. Whether this would have been wise or not, the fact was that the Greek fleet which had assembled that year was only a third of its previous size, no ships, and was therefore of an essentially defensive nature. Athens was now dominated not only by the hoplite party, but also by the very necessary requirements of land defence. It is clear that her contribution to the Greek fleet was little more than nominal, and she had mobilised 8000 hoplites ready for the attack that must inevitably come from Mardonius in the north. There was another good reason why the Athenians may have decided to keep a large part of their fleet laid up. It was the only card they had to play against the Peloponnesians who, apart from working hard on the defences of the Isthmian wall, showed no signs of sending their army to Attica. If the Spartans and their allies would not come to the help of Athens on land, then the Athenians must look to their own defence and not dissipate their men and energies on the sea.

Late in the spring of that year, after Alexander of Macedon had returned with the Athenian rejection of the Persian proposals, Mardonius began his march south. The spring rains were over and it was time to give these insolent Athenians a second lesson, before moving on to break the resistance of those in the Peloponnese -which largely meant the Spartans - and hand all Greece over to his king and lord, with himself presumably becoming the satrap of the land. The Thessalians, who had long accepted that they were part of the Persian dominion, were naturally pleased to see him gone. It was not only that their leading dynasties were totally committed to the Persian cause, but they must have been eager to see his army eating elsewhere. The attitude at Thebes was different. The Thebans hated the Athenians, and undoubtedly saw themselves, in the event of a Persian victory, as being the natural leaders of the new Grecian kingdom which would be established under Persian control. They did their best to persuade Mardonius to make their city and their country the command headquarters for the campaign and to break up the Greek unity (which had never really existed) by bribing one city and another in the Peloponnese not to support the Spartans. ‘Send money to the leading men in the various towns’, they said, ‘and by doing that you will destroy the unity of the country, after which you will easily be able, with the help of those who take your part, to crush those who still oppose you.’ Mardonius was not of their opinion. He wanted to present Xerxes with a fine military victory, to reoccupy Attica, level Athens to the ground, and then, perhaps, make use of the Great King’s money to destroy the Peloponnesians. He was a politician, true, but he was above all a soldier and it was as such that he wished to be able to give his lord the rich prize of Greece. He had gone so far as to arrange a chain of beacons through the Aegean islands, so that the news of the second occupation of Athens could be signalled across the sea, whence the Persian couriers would take it swiftly to Xerxes in his palace at Susa.

King Latychidas meanwhile had advanced with his depleted fleet down into the Cyclades, but does not seem to have dared to move farther east than the sacred island of Delos. Similarly, there was no aggressive movement by the Persian admirals on the far side of the Aegean at Samos. At this point in the year, the enemy fleets did no more than glare at each other - and somewhat uneasily at that. The opening moves on the great chessboard of 479 were standard, and even fumbling. Mardonius moved south; the Athenians, receiving no support from the Peloponnesians, withdrew from Athens for a second time; Mardonius reoccupied Athens. One thing which the unimpeded march of the Persians forced upon the Athenians was the reactivation of their fleet which, clearly, they were not going to leave behind to be burned. This now meant that the Greeks were potentially far stronger at sea than the Persians, but it also meant that in their diplomatic battle with their Peloponnesian allies the Athenians had lost a valuable bargaining piece. They no longer held the trump of a fleet ‘in being’, which they had been able to play against the Peloponnesians’ refusal to move beyond their Isthmian wall.

At this desperate moment in the fortunes of the Athenians, withdrawn again to Salamis, while Mardonius prepared to level their partly rebuilt city to the ground, the latter, shrewdly assessing the situation, sent over to Salamis a Greek from the Hellespont area as an envoy. He offered the Athenians yet again the same terms as Xerxes had previously given them: generosity itself, on the surface, since their land was once more occupied and their beloved capital in his hands. There is absolutely no doubt that the iron determination of the previous year had deserted some of the Athenian councillors. One of them, whose name has come down to us in different variants (possibly because the later Athenians were unwilling to commemorate the event), who spoke out in favour of accepting the Persian proposals, was lynched on the spot. This was far from typical of Athenian behaviour - even less so, if one credits the tale, was the subsequent stoning of his wife and children. The envoy, Murychides, who witnessed this alarming scene, was allowed to return unharmed to his master with oral and visual evidence that the Athenians still totally rejected the overtures of the Great King.

Two separate missions in the subsequent weeks were sent off to Sparta, both, in differing degrees, bearing the same message: unless the Spartans were prepared to march north and defend Attica they would very soon find themselves left totally alone. Although the various historians are silent on the subject, one might possibly conclude that the threat made by Themistocles the previous year was never entirely absent from their allies’ minds. The people of Athens, and only they, still had enough ships to withdraw a large part of their population from Salamis and Troezen, and found a new city in the rich, comparatively unpopulated lands to the west. Sicily and southern Italy always presented them with an option - ‘O my America! my new-found-land.’ The Spartans, the other Peloponnesians, even the citizens of mercantile Corinth, did not have sufficient shipping to offer their people a large-scale evacuation. The envoys returned exasperated. The Spartans, who were far more religious for superstitious) than the Athenians and who could in any case at that moment still afford to indulge in formalities, were celebrating the Hyacinthia; a summertime festival, deriving very probably from the eastern Attis/Adonis rituals. Herodotus comments that ‘the people were on holiday and thought it most important to give the God his due’. He adds, which seems far more significant: ‘It also happened that the wall they were building across the Isthmus was almost finished and about to have the battlements put on.’