[1] King Darius, the son of Hystaspes, was already thoroughly displeased with the Athenians because of their attack on Sardis, but the arrival of news of the battle of Marathon made him far more furious, and his determination to launch a strike against Greece increased. He lost no time in sending messengers around to the towns and cities with instructions to raise an army; every community was required to provide considerably more men than they had before, as well as ships, horses, supplies, and transport vessels. Asia was in turmoil for three years as a result of these demands, what with the selection and preparation of the best men for the campaign against Greece. In the fourth year Egypt, which Cambyses had enslaved, rose up in revolt, and this made Darius even more determined to attack both places.
[2] While Darius was preparing to attack Egypt and Athens, a serious dispute arose among his sons over the issue of the kingship, since it is traditional in Persia for the king to appoint a successor before setting out on a campaign. Now, even before he became king, Darius had three sons by his first wife, the daughter of Gobryas, and after his accession he had another four by Atossa the daughter of Cyrus. The eldest of the first three was Artobazanes, and the eldest of the younger four was Xerxes. They would never have fallen out if they had the same mothers, but as it was Artobazanes argued that he was the eldest of all Darius’ children and that it was universal practice everywhere for the eldest son to succeed to the kingdom, while Xerxes argued that Atossa was the daughter of Cyrus, who had gained the Persians their independence.
[3] The arrival of Demaratus the son of Ariston in Susa coincided with this situation, when Darius had not yet given his decision. Demaratus had been deposed as king of Sparta and fled Lacedaemon into self-imposed exile. When he found out about the quarrel between Darius’ sons, he went to Xerxes (or so the story goes) and suggested an extra argument, in addition to those he had already used. He should point out, Demaratus said, that by the time he had been born Darius had succeeded to the kingdom and was the supreme commander of Persia, whereas at the time of Artobazanes’ birth Darius was still a private citizen; and he should argue that it would therefore be neither right nor proper for preference to be given to anyone except him. Even in Sparta, Demaratus assured him, it was customary for the kingdom to pass to the younger son in cases where the elder sons were born before their father became king but the younger son was born after his accession. Xerxes did as Demaratus suggested, and Darius realized the justice of his claim and made him king. In fact, though, it is my opinion that Xerxes would have become king even without this advice by Demaratus, because Atossa was all-powerful.
[4] After appointing Xerxes as his successor, Darius turned his mind to military matters. But then, a year after the Egyptian rebellion, while he was in the middle of his preparations, it so happened that Darius died, after a reign of thirty-six years in all, before he had the chance to punish either the rebellious Egyptians or the Athenians. After his death the kingdom passed to his son Xerxes.
[5] Now, Xerxes was at first rather reluctant to make war on Greece, although he carried on raising an army to attack Egypt. However, Mardonius the son of Gobryas was at court, and there was no one in Persia who had more influence with Xerxes. Mardonius was his cousin, the son of Darius’ sister, and he argued as follows: ‘Master, it’s wrong for the Athenians to go unpunished for all the harm they’ve done Persia. It’s true that for the time being you had better continue with the business you have undertaken, but once you’ve curbed the arrogance of Egypt, you ought to march against Greece. It will enhance your reputation, and also make people think twice in the future before attacking your territory.’ This was his argument for retaliation, but he also invariably added the rider that Europe was a particularly beautiful place, where every kind of cultivated tree grew and the soil was excellent; it was a place, he said, which no one but the king of Persia ought to own.
[6] He argued in this way because he wanted to stir things up and also because he wanted to become the governor of Greece. Eventually he succeeded in winning Xerxes round to his point of view. There were other factors which helped him convince Xerxes. In the first place, a deputation arrived from the Aleuadae, the ruling family of Thessaly, offering their complete support and inviting him to invade Greece; in the second place, the Pisistratidae who were resident in Susa not only echoed what the Aleuadae were saying, but also offered him further inducements. They had brought with them to Susa an Athenian called Onomacritus, an oracle-monger who specialized in collecting the oracles of Musaeus. The Pisistratidae had patched up their quarrel with Onomacritus, who had been banished from Athens by Hipparchus the son of Pisistratus when Lasus of Hermione had exposed his insertion into the text of Musaeus of an oracle to the effect that the islands lying off Lemnos were going to sink out of sight into the sea. Hipparchus sentenced him to exile for this, despite the fact that he and Onomacritus had been very close friends before. At the time in question, however, he had gone with the Pisistratidae up to Susa, and whenever he came into the king’s presence he would accompany their high-flown compliments of him with a recital of some of his oracles. He never mentioned any oracle in his collection which threatened catastrophe for the Persians, but selected only the most auspicious ones and recited those; in this way he expounded how the Hellespont was fated to be bridged by a man of Persia, and how Xerxes could get his troops to Greece. So Xerxes was being lobbied both by Onomacritus with his oracles and by the Pisistratidae and the Aleuadae with their proposals.
[7] After Xerxes had been persuaded to attack Greece, he first sent an expedition, in the year after Darius’ death, against the rebels. Once he had crushed the rebellion and reduced the whole population of Egypt to a state of even worse slavery than they had experienced under Darius, he left his brother Achaemenes the son of Darius in charge of the country. Some time later, during his administration of Egypt, Achaemenes was murdered by a Libyan called Inaros the son of Psammetichus.
[8] After his conquest of Egypt, and just before undertaking the expedition against Athens, Xerxes summoned the pick of the leading Persians to a meeting, because he wanted to hear what they had to say and also to make public his intentions. When the meeting was convened, Xerxes said, ‘Men of Persia, I am introducing no new custom here; I am simply drawing on traditional Persian ways. After all, as far as I can gather from our elders, there has never been a time when we have not been at war, ever since Cyrus deposed Astyages and we took over from the Medes. It is the god who steers us in this direction, and so we prosper as we follow his guidance time and again. There would be no point in recounting all the victories Cyrus, Cambyses, and my father Darius won, and all the peoples they annexed, because you are already well aware of their achievements. But what about me? When I became the king of Persia, I began to wonder how to avoid being left behind by those who preceded me in this position of honour, and how I might increase the Persian empire just as much as they did. And after a lot of thought I found a way for us not only to win glory and gain land which, so far from being smaller or meaner than what we currently have, is in fact more fertile, but also to exact retribution and compensation from our enemies. The reason I have convened this meeting, then, is to tell you my plans.
‘I intend to bridge the Hellespont and march an army through Europe and against Greece, so that I can make the Athenians pay for all that they have done to Persia and to my father. Now, Darius was getting ready to march against these men as well, as you know, but he died before he managed to punish them. So on his behalf, and on behalf of all Persians, I will not rest until I have captured Athens and put it to the torch. The Athenians were the original aggressors against me and my father. First they marched against Sardis along with our slave, Aristagoras of Miletus, and burnt its sacred groves and sanctuaries to the ground; then you all know what they did to us when we landed an army in their country under the command of Datis and Artaphrenes.
‘That is why I have decided to make war on them. Besides, I have come to the conclusion that we will benefit from the enterprise in a number of ways. If we conquer them and their neighbours—the inhabitants of the land of Pelops of Phrygia—we will make Persian territory end only at the sky, the domain of Zeus, so that the sun will not shine on any land beyond our borders. With your help I will sweep through the whole of Europe and make all lands into a single land. If my information is accurate, once we have eliminated those I have mentioned, there will be nobody left—no town or people—capable of offering us armed resistance. And so the innocent will bear the yoke of slavery along with those who have wronged us.
‘Here is what you can do to please me. When I let you know that the time has arrived for you to come, you should all do so without hesitation. I will reward the one who brings with him the best-prepared force with the kinds of gifts which are valued most highly in our country. So much for what you should do. But I don’t want you thinking that I refuse to take anyone else’s views into consideration, so the matter is now open to debate. Please feel free to speak your mind.’
[9] After he had finished, Mardonius spoke up. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you are the greatest Persian there has ever been, nor will there ever be anyone to equal you in the future either. Throughout your speech you made some excellent and extremely valid points, but particularly important was your promise not to let those despicable Ionians—the ones living in Europe—get away with making fools of us. We conquered the Sacae, the Indians, the Ethiopians, the Assyrians, and plenty of other important races, and we now hold them in slavery. Why? Not because they did us any wrong, but just because we wanted to increase our dominion. It would be a terrible thing, then, for us not to punish the unprovoked aggression of the Greeks.
‘What do we have to fear? The number of troops they can muster? Their wealth and the power it gives them? No, we know how they fight and we know that their power is limited. We have overcome and hold subject their offspring—the so-called Ionians, Aeolians, and Dorians, who settled here on our continent. I myself already have personal experience of campaigning against these men at your father’s command. I got as far as Macedonia, which is not far from Athens itself, without meeting any opposition.
‘Besides, from all I hear, the Greeks usually wage war in an extremely stupid fashion, because they’re ignorant and incompetent. When they declare war on one another they seek out the best, most level piece of land, and that’s where they go and fight. The upshot is that the victors leave the battlefield with massive losses, not to mention the losers, who are completely wiped out. What they should do, since they all speak the same language, is make use of heralds and messengers to settle their differences, since anything would be preferable to fighting. If they had absolutely no choice but to go to war, they should find a battleground where it is particularly hard for either side to defeat the other and fight it out there. It’s because the Greeks go about things in the wrong way, then, that I marched as far as Macedonia without them getting to the point of fighting.
‘So, my lord, who is going to oppose you? Who is going to threaten you with war when you come from Asia at the head of a massive army and with your whole fleet? I am sure that the Greeks are not so foolhardy. But suppose I’m mistaken in this opinion; suppose their rash foolishness encourages them to confront us in battle. Then they will discover that when it comes to military matters there is no one in the world to match us. Anyway, we should leave nothing untried. Nothing comes of its own accord; people invariably get things as a result of their own efforts.’
[10] There Mardonius stopped, once he had made Xerxes’ proposal seem plausible. No one else had anything to say—certainly, no one dared to voice an opinion contrary to the one before them—until Artabanus the son of Hystaspes broke the silence, relying on the fact that he was Xerxes’ uncle. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘unless opposing views are heard, it is impossible to pick and choose between various plans and decide which one is best. All one can do is go along with the opinion that has been voiced. However, if opposing views are heard, it is possible to decide. Think of a piece of pure gold: taken all by itself it is impossible to tell that it is pure; only by rubbing it on the touchstone and comparing gold with gold can we tell which one is best. I told your father, my brother Darius, not to attack the Scythians, people with no established settlement anywhere, but he didn’t listen to me; he was sure he could defeat the nomad Scythians. So he launched a campaign against them and when he came back he had lost a great many brave fighting men from his army. But this campaign you’re planning, my lord, is against men who are vastly superior to the Scythians; they have the highest reputation for bravery on both land and sea. There is danger involved, and it is only right for me to point it out to you.
‘You say that you will bridge the Hellespont and march through Europe to Greece. Now, suppose you suffer defeat in a land or naval engagement, or even in both. After all, these Greeks do have a reputation as fighters. In fact, we can assess their abilities from the fact that the Athenians alone destroyed an army of the size of the one that invaded Attica under Datis and Artaphrenes. Anyway, suppose things don’t go their way in both spheres, but that they engage us at sea, defeat us, and then sail to the Hellespont and dismantle the bridge. That is where the danger lies, my lord.
‘I don’t have any special expertise that leads me to this conclusion; it’s just that disaster very nearly overwhelmed us once before under similar circumstances, when your father built a pontoon bridge across the Thracian Bosporus, bridged the River Ister, crossed it, and invaded Scythia. On that occasion the Scythians did everything they could to persuade the Ionians, whose job it was to guard the bridges across the Ister, to dismantle the causeway. And if Histiaeus the tyrant of Miletus had gone along with all his fellow tyrants, rather than opposing their view, that would have been the end of Persia. However terrifying it is even to hear it said, the whole of the king’s affairs depended on a single man.
‘You should not choose to run that kind of risk when you don’t really have to. No, listen to me instead. Dissolve this meeting now, think things over by yourself and then later, whenever you like, give us whatever orders you see fit. In my experience, nothing is more advantageous than good planning. I mean, even if a set-back happens, that doesn’t alter the fact that the plan was sound; it’s just that the plan was defeated by chance. However, if someone who hasn’t laid his plans properly is attended by fortune, he may have had a stroke of luck, but that doesn’t alter the fact that his plan was unsound.
‘You can see how the god blasts living things that are prominent and prevents their display of superiority, while small creatures don’t irritate him at all; you can see that it is always the largest buildings and the tallest trees on which he hurls his thunderbolts. It is the god’s way to curtail anything excessive. And so even a massive army may be destroyed by a small force if it attracts the god’s resentment and he sends panic or thunder, until they are shamefully destroyed. This happens because the god does not allow anyone but himself to feel pride. The offspring of haste in any venture is error, and error in turn tends to lead to serious harm. Benefits come from waiting; even if they aren’t apparent at first, one will discover them in time.
‘So that is my advice to you, my lord. As for you, son of Gobryas, you should stop making rude and defamatory remarks about the Greeks when they don’t deserve them. By disparaging the Greeks you encourage the king to march against them; in fact, I think that is exactly what all this effort of yours is for. But I hope this campaign never materializes.
‘Slander is a truly terrible thing, because it involves two men ganging up to wrong a single victim. The one who casts the aspersions does wrong by accusing someone in his absence, and the other person does wrong by believing the lie before he has found out the truth. Meanwhile, the person who is missing from the discussion is the victim of the situation in the sense that he has been defamed by the one person and has acquired a bad reputation in the other one’s mind.
‘However, if there is absolutely no help for it and we must make war on these Greeks, then consider this proposal, Mardonius. While the king stays here in Persia, in his homeland, you pick your men, take an army of any size you want, and lead the expedition. Let each of us gamble the lives of our children on the outcome. If matters turn out as you say they will for the king, let my children be put to death, and I will join them; but if things turn out as I am predicting, let your children suffer that fate, and you too, if you make it back home. If you aren’t prepared to run this risk, but are still determined to take the army overseas to Greece, I can tell you what news of Mardonius will reach the ears of those who stay behind here: they will be told that Mardonius was the cause of a great disaster for Persia, and that you were then torn apart by dogs and birds somewhere in Athenian territory or somewhere in Lacedaemon—that is, if this doesn’t happen earlier, on the way there. Then you will know what kind of men you are trying to persuade the king to attack.’
[11] Xerxes was furious at Artabanus’ words. He responded as follows: ‘It is only because you are my father’s brother, Artabanus, that you are safe from the consequences of your insolence. But for your craven cowardice I will humiliate you by not taking you with me on this expedition to Greece; instead, you will stay here with the women. I will achieve everything I said I would just as well without your help. If I fail to punish the Athenians, may I no longer be descended from Darius, son of Hystaspes, son of Arsames, son of Ariaramnes, son of Teïspes, ⟨and⟩ from Cyrus, son of Cambyses, ⟨son of Cyrus,⟩ son of Teïspes, son of Achaemenes. I am sure the Athenians will do something if we do not; to judge by their past moves, they will certainly mount an expedition against our country, since these are the people who burnt down Sardis and invaded Asia. It is impossible for either side to withdraw now; the only question at stake is whether or not we actively take the initiative. And in the end either all Persia will be in Greek hands, or all Greece will be in Persian hands; there is no middle ground in this war. It is fair, then, that we should be the ones actively to seek revenge now, since we were the first to suffer, and it will also let me find out about the disaster that is supposed to happen to me if I make war on these men—men whom even Pelops of Phrygia, a slave belonging to my forefathers, defeated so thoroughly that the people and their country still bear the name of their conqueror even today.’
[12] That was the end of the speeches. Later, during the night, Xerxes was still worried by the view Artabanus had expressed. He thought it over during the night and he became quite convinced that it was not in his best interests for him to march on Greece. After this change of heart, he fell asleep, and during the night he had the following dream, or so the Persians say. Xerxes dreamt that a tall, handsome man stood over him and said, ‘Are you changing your mind, Persian? Are you deciding against taking an expedition to Greece, although you have already told the Persians to raise an army? You will not benefit from this change of mind, and the one you see before you will not forgive you. No, keep to the course of action you decided on during the daytime.’ In Xerxes’ dream, after delivering this speech, the man flew away.
[13] In the light of day he dismissed the dream as insignificant, and he convened a meeting, attended by the same Persians who had been at the previous conference, and said to them: ‘Men of Persia, forgive me for the fact that I have changed my mind. I have not yet reached the peak of my mental powers, and the people urging me on to the course of action we adopted did not give me a moment’s peace. What happened was that when I heard Artabanus’ point of view, at first my youthful temper came to the boil, so that the words I blurted out were inappropriate, not the kind of speech which should be addressed to one’s elders. But now I concede that he was right, and I am going to adopt his plan. So since I have changed my mind and decided not to attack Greece, you can stop gearing yourselves up for war.’ The Persians were delighted with what Xerxes said, and prostrated themselves before him.
[14] That night, however, when Xerxes was asleep, the same figure appeared to him again in a dream and said, ‘So, son of Darius, you have gone before the Persians and called off the expedition, have you? You have disregarded my words and treated them as if they came from a nobody. Well, know this: if you do not go out on this campaign immediately, this is what will happen. You have risen rapidly to a position of prominence and importance, but you will be laid low again just as swiftly.’
[15] This dream terrified Xerxes. He leapt out of bed and sent a messenger to summon Artabanus. When he arrived, Xerxes said, ‘Artabanus, I wasn’t in my right mind at first, when I responded to your good advice with rudeness, but before too long I changed my mind and came to see that I should act on your suggestions. Yet I find myself unable to do so, even though I want to! You see, ever since I’ve backed down and changed my mind, I’ve been haunted by a dream figure who does not approve of what I’m doing at all. In fact he threatened me just now, and then disappeared. If this dream is being sent by a god and he will be satisfied only when the campaign against Greece takes place, the same dream should wing its way to you as well, and give you the same instructions it did me. I think this will happen if you take all these clothes of mine and put them on, sit on my throne, and then later go to sleep in my bed.’
[16] At first Artabanus was reluctant to comply with this command, because he did not think it right that he should sit on the royal throne. In the end, however, he was compelled to do as he was told. But first he said, ‘In my opinion, my lord, it is all the same whether one has good ideas oneself or is prepared to listen to someone else who is offering good advice. Though you have both of these qualities, you keep company with bad men and that leads you astray. This is like what they say about the sea: in itself there is nothing more useful for the human race, but the winds that lash it refuse to let it be itself. It wasn’t so much that I was upset at being rebuked by you, but that when the Persians were faced with two plans, one of which would increase our abusiveness, while the other would curb it, by pointing out how wrong it is to train the mind to be constantly seeking more than it has at the moment... when we were faced with these two points of view, what really upset me was that you chose the one which would be more dangerous not only for yourself, but for Persia too.
‘And now, just when you’ve changed your mind about the expedition to Greece and started preferring the better plan instead, you say that you’re being haunted by a dream figure, the emissary of some god, who refuses to let you cancel the expedition. In actual fact, though, dreams don’t come from the gods, my son. I have lived many more years than you, so I can explain what these dreams are that drift into us. The visions that occur to us in dreams are, more often than not, the things we have been concerned about during the day. And, you see, we have been extremely occupied with this expedition for some days now.
‘However, if I’m mistaken in my assessment of this particular dream, if there is something divine about it, you yourself have already summed the matter up in a few words: let the dream appear to me with the same orders that it has given you. But the chances of its appearing to me are unlikely to be increased whether I am wearing your clothes or my own, or whether I am sleeping in your bed or my own—that is, if it is going to appear anyway. After all, whatever it is that you see in your dream is surely not so naïve as to mistake me for you on the basis of the clothes I am wearing. No, what we have to find out is whether it considers me too insignificant to be worth appearing to, whatever clothes I am wearing, and doesn’t appear,† I mean, if it continues to appear, I too would have to admit that it is supernatural. However, if I have to sleep in your bed—that is, if that’s the way you want things to be and you are not to be deflected from your purpose—then all right, let’s see if it appears to me too when I have fulfilled these conditions. But until then I won’t change my mind.’
[17] Without saying any more, Artabanus did as he was told, but he expected to demonstrate that Xerxes’ words were without substance. He put on Xerxes’ clothes, sat himself down on the royal throne, and then later went to bed. And while he was asleep the same dream figure came to him as had appeared to Xerxes. The figure stood over Artabanus and said, ‘So you’re the one who has been trying to discourage Xerxes from attacking Greece, are you? And you claim that it is your concern for him that makes you do so? Well, you will not escape punishment, either now or in the future, for trying to deflect the inevitable. And Xerxes has already had the consequences of future disobedience explained to him.’
[18] Artabanus dreamt that as well as making these threats the phantom was about to burn his eyes out with red-hot skewers. He uttered a loud cry, jumped out of bed, and sat himself down next to Xerxes. First he described what he had seen in his dream, and then he said, ‘The reason I tried to stop you giving way completely to your youthful impetuousness, my lord, was because I am one who has in the past often seen mighty powers brought low by relative weaklings. Also, I know what harm can come from excessive desire: I remember what happened to Cyrus’ expedition against the Massagetae and to Cambyses’ campaign against the Ethiopians, and I myself took part in Darius’ attack on the Scythians. Knowing this, I was of the opinion that happiness for you—and happiness that everyone would recognize—lay in remaining peacefully at home. But since your impetuousness is god-given, and since the destruction overtaking the Greeks is apparently heaven-sent, it is my turn to back down and change my mind. Let the Persians know about the visions you have received from the god and tell them to carry on with their preparations in accordance with the first orders you issued; and then make sure that, since the god commands it, you do everything you must.’
This is what Artabanus said. The dream had encouraged them so much that at daybreak the next day Xerxes told the Persians what had happened, and Artabanus, who had previously shown himself to be the only dissenting voice, gave his open and enthusiastic support to the enterprise.
[19] Later, with Xerxes all intent on his campaign, he had a third dream one night, in which he saw himself wearing a garland made out of sprigs of an olive-tree whose branches overshadowed the whole world, but then the garland disappeared from his head. He described the dream to the Magi and they interpreted its reference to the whole world as meaning that he would gain dominion over the whole human race. After the Magi had interpreted the dream in this way, every one of the Persians who had convened for the meeting immediately rode back to his own province and devoted himself wholeheartedly to carrying out his instructions. Each of them wanted to be the one to win the rewards Xerxes had promised. In this way Xerxes had every part of the continent searched in the process of raising his army.
[20] Xerxes spent four whole years after the conquest of Egypt preparing and equipping his army, and in the course of the fifth year he set out on his campaign with a huge body of men. Of all the armies we know of, this was by far the largest. The army with which Darius attacked Scythia was tiny by comparison; so was the Scythian army which invaded Media on the heels of a Cimmerian force and succeeded in conquering and occupying almost the whole of inland Asia (something for which Darius later tried to punish them); and so, by all accounts, was the army with which the Atridae attacked Ilium, and the army the Mysians and Teucrians raised—this was before the Trojan War—with which they crossed the Bosporus, invaded Europe, conquered the whole of Thrace, reached the coast of the Ionian Sea, and marched as far south as the River Peneius.
[21] The combined total of all these armies, even with some others included, would not equal Xerxes’ expeditionary force. After all, was there any Asian people he did not lead against Greece? And was there any source of water, apart from huge rivers, they did not drink dry? He had ships supplied from here, land forces from there; some were required to provide horsemen, others transport ships for horses (as well as men for the campaign), others longships for the pontoon bridges, others both provisions and ships.
[22] In the first place, because the previous expedition had come to grief while sailing around Athos, he spent about three years making sure he would be ready for Athos when the time came. Elaeus in the Chersonese was made the headquarters, triremes were stationed there, and troops of all different backgrounds were set to work in relays, under the whip, digging a canal. The local inhabitants of Athos worked on the excavation as well. The work was supervised by two Persians, Bubares the son of Megabazus and Artachaees the son of Artaeus. Now, Athos is a large, famous, inhabited mountain jutting out into the sea; where it joins the mainland, it is shaped like a peninsula and forms an isthmus about twelve stades wide, and the terrain there, between the Acanthian Sea and the sea off Torone, is level, with low hills. On this isthmus, where Athos ends, there is the Greek settlement of Sane. Beyond Sane, within Athos itself, are Dion, Olophyxus, Acrothoüm, Thyssus, and Cleonae—places which the Persian king now intended to turn into island instead of mainland communities.
[23] These are the communities on Mount Athos. The way the invaders went about the excavation was to draw a straight line across the isthmus near Sane and then assign each of the various nationalities a section of land to dig. Once the trench had become deep, some men stood at the bottom and carried on digging, while others passed the earth that was constantly being dug out to others who were standing on platforms further up the diggings, who in turn passed it on to others, until it reached the top, where the earth was taken away and disposed of. Everyone else apart from the Phoenicians found that the steep sides of the trench kept collapsing and doubling their work-load, but then they were making the width at the top of the trench and at the bottom the same, which was bound to cause something like that to happen. But the Phoenicians, who are invariably practical, showed their usual skill on this occasion: once they had been assigned their plot of land to work on, they set about making the opening at the top of the trench twice as wide as the actual canal was to be, and gradually reduced the width as they dug down, until by the time they reached the bottom they were working to the same width as everyone else. A local field was turned into a business centre and market-place, but flour was brought from Asia in large quantities.
[24] On reflection it seems to me that Xerxes ordered the digging of the canal out of a sense of grandiosity and arrogance, because he wanted to display his power and leave a memorial. After all, he could have saved all that hard work and had the ships dragged across the isthmus, but instead he ordered a channel to be dug for the sea, wide enough for two triremes to be rowed abreast along it. The same men who were given the job of digging the canal were also set to work bridging the River Strymon.
[25] So this is how he was making the canal. Xerxes also had cables made out of papyrus and white flax for the bridges. This task was assigned to the Phoenicians and Egyptians, who were also in charge of leaving the army’s provisions in safe storage, to prevent either the men or the yoke-animals going hungry during the march to Greece. Xerxes also got detailed information about the places they would pass through, and then had various people take the provisions from all over Asia in transport vessels and ferries and deposit them at the various most suitable locations along the way. They took the largest quantity of provisions† to a place in Thrace called White Cape, but other places allocated for deposits of supplies were Tyrodiza in Perinthian territory, Doriscus, Eïon on the River Strymon, and Macedonia.
[26] While these men were getting on with their assigned tasks, the whole land army assembled at Critalla in Cappadocia and set out from there with Xerxes for Sardis. He had given orders for every single contingent that was to join him on the overland route to assemble there. I cannot say which of the provincial governors received the king’s promised reward for bringing the best-equipped force; I have no idea if they were even assessed in this respect. Anyway, they crossed the Halys into Phrygia. On their way through Phrygia they reached Celaenae, where two rivers rise—the Meander and one called the Catarractes, which is just as large as the Meander. The Catarractes rises right in the main square of Celaenae and issues into the Meander. Another feature of the square of Celaenae is that the skin of Marsyas the silenus is hanging there, where it was put, according to local Phrygian legend, after Marsyas had been flayed by Apollo.
[27] A Lydian called Pythius the son of Atys had been waiting for Xerxes to reach Celaenae. He provided lavish meals for the whole of Xerxes’ army, as well as for Xerxes himself, and he also said that he would like to help finance the war. Xerxes responded to this offer by asking some of the Persians who were there who this man Pythius was and how he could afford to make such an offer. ‘My lord,’ they replied, ‘he’s the one who gave your father Darius the golden plane-tree and vine. He’s the richest man in the known world, apart from you.’
[28] Xerxes was surprised to hear this last comment of theirs, so he then put his question directly to Pythius. ‘How rich are you?’ he asked. ‘My lord,’ Pythius answered, ‘I won’t dissemble or try to pretend that I don’t know how well off I am. I do know, and I will tell you exactly what I have. You see, as soon as I found out that you were on your way down to the Greek Sea, I checked up on the details of my financial position, because I wanted to give you money for the war. I discovered that, once everything is totted up, I have 2,000 talents of silver and I’m just 7,000 staters short of having 4,000,000 gold Daric staters. I would like to give all of this to you. My slaves and my farms make me enough to live on.’
[29] Xerxes was delighted with this offer. ‘My Lydian friend,’ he said, ‘you’re the first person I’ve met since leaving Persian territory who has been glad to feed my troops, let alone come before me and, of his own accord, offer money to help finance the war. You have not only lavishly entertained my men, but this offer of yours is extremely generous. I’m going to give you something in return. I’d like you to have the honour of being my guest-friend, and I’ll give you from my own treasury the 7,000 staters you need to make up the full 4,000,000 staters. Then I’ll have rounded the number off nicely to 4,000,000, instead of your being 7,000 short. Please keep what you already have, and do make sure that you never change. For I can tell you that you will never regret this kind of behaviour, now or in the future.’
[30] With these words Xerxes did as he had promised. Then he carried on his way. He passed by the Phrygian town of Anaua and a lake which produces salt, and came to the sizeable Phrygian city of Colossae, where the River Lycus disappears underground into a chasm before reappearing after about five stades and then becoming yet another tributary of the Meander. After Colossae the army proceeded to the border between Phrygia and Lydia and came to the town of Cydrara, where fixed into the ground there is a pillar which was originally set up by Croesus, with an inscription indicating the presence of the border.
[31] Across the Phrygian border and in Lydia, the road forks and one can either turn left towards Caria or right towards Sardis. If one takes the right-hand branch, one is bound to cross the Meander and come to the town of Callatebus, where craftsmen make a local speciality, a sweet syrup of tamarisk and wheat. As he was travelling along this road Xerxes came across a plane-tree which was so beautiful that he presented it with golden decorations and appointed one of the Immortals as guardian to look after it. A day later he reached the capital city of Lydia.
[32] The first thing he did after arriving in Sardis was send heralds to Greece to demand earth and water and to tell them to be ready to provide meals for the king when he came. These heralds were sent everywhere in Greece except Athens and Lacedaemon. This was not the first time the Greeks had received a demand for earth and water: Darius had sent heralds round before. But Xerxes sent the message all over again because he was sure that the places which had refused Darius’ demand before would now comply out of fear; so he sent his heralds because he wanted to find out whether or not this was true.
[33] He next got ready to march to Abydus. Meanwhile, his men had been bridging the Hellespont from Asia to Europe. On the Hellespontine Chersonese, between the towns of Sestus and Madytus, a rugged headland projects into the sea opposite Abydus. (This is the place where, not long after the events we are talking about, the Athenians under the command of Xanthippus the son of Ariphron captured a Persian called Artayctes, the governor of Sestus, and nailed him alive to a plank of wood, because he used to have women brought to him in the sanctuary of Protesilaus in Elaeus and commit sacrilege with them.)
[34] The Phoenicians and the Egyptians who had been assigned the task set about building their bridges (the Phoenicians using white flax and the Egyptians papyrus), taking Abydus as their starting-point and directing their efforts towards the headland on the opposite coast—a distance of seven stades. They had just finished bridging the straits when a violent storm erupted which completely smashed and destroyed everything.
[35] This news made Xerxes furious. He ordered his men to give the Hellespont three hundred lashes and to sink a pair of shackles into the sea. I once heard that he also dispatched men to brand the Hellespont as well. Be that as it may, he did tell the men he had thrashing the sea to revile it in terms you would never hear from a Greek. ‘Bitter water,’ they said, ‘this is your punishment for wronging your master when he did no wrong to you. King Xerxes will cross you, with or without your consent. People are right not to sacrifice to a muddy, brackish stream like you!’ So the sea was punished at his orders, and he had the supervisors of the bridging of the Hellespont beheaded.
[36] The men assigned this grotesque task carried out their orders, and another team of engineers managed to bridge the Hellespont. They made a solid wall of penteconters and triremes, 360 of them to support the bridge on the side nearest the Euxine Sea and 314 on the other side, with the ships at an angle for the bridge nearest the Euxine, but aligned with the current for the bridge nearest the Hellespont, to take the strain off the cables. Once they had the boats all massed together, they let down anchors on extra-long hawsers on both sides—from the pontoon on the Euxine side to counteract the winds blowing from within the Euxine, and from the westward, Aegean pontoon to counteract the winds from the west and south. They left a gap in the penteconters and triremes at two points,† to let small boats sail past at will on their way to or from the Euxine. Then they attached cables to the land and wound them taut on wooden windlasses; this time they did not use just one kind of cable for each bridge, but assigned each pontoon two cables of white flax and four of papyrus. In thickness and in fineness of quality there was nothing to tell between the two kinds of cable, but with a weight of a talent per cubit of length the flaxen ones were proportionately heavier. With these bridges in place across the straits, they sawed sleepers equal in length to the width of the pontoon, laid them neatly on top of the taut cables in a row, and then tied them down.† Next they put brushwood on top of the sleepers, evened it out, put soil on top of it, and stamped the soil down. Then they ran a fence along either side, high enough to stop the yoke-animals and the horses† looking over it and being frightened by the sight of the sea.
[37] At last all the work on the bridges was finished, and also all the work at Mount Athos—that is, as well as the actual canal being completed the moles at the mouths of the canal had been built, to stop the surf from silting up the openings. Once it was known that these projects had been completed, Xerxes’ army waited out the winter and then early in spring left Sardis fully equipped and set out for Abydus. Just as they were on their way, however, the sun abandoned its station in the sky; it disappeared, despite the fact that there were no clouds and it was a particularly bright, clear day, and day was replaced by night. Once Xerxes had realized what he was seeing, he became worried and asked the Magi to interpret the omen. They said that the god was foretelling the abandonment by the Greeks of their towns and cities, because in their view the sun prophetically symbolized the Greeks, and the moon themselves. Xerxes was very pleased to hear this, and he proceeded with the invasion.
[38] Now, Pythius of Lydia had been terrified by the omen from the sky. Emboldened by Xerxes’ generosity towards him, he went to the king while he was directing the departure of the army from Sardis, and said, ‘Master, I’d like to ask you a favour—an easy one for you to grant, but it would mean a great deal to me.’
Xerxes had no idea at all what the favour was that Pythius had in mind, so he told him he would grant him it and asked him what it was. Encouraged by Xerxes’ words, Pythius said, ‘Master, I have five sons, all of whom have to march with you against Greece. Please, my lord, take pity on me in my old age and release one of my sons, the eldest one, from military service, so that he can look after me and manage my property as well. But take the other four with you—and may you return home with all your objectives attained!’
[39] ‘Damn you!’ Xerxes replied in a rage. ‘Look at me: I am going in person to make war on Greece, and I am taking with me my sons, brothers, relatives, and friends. How dare you mention a son of yours, when you are no more than my slave, and should follow in my train with your whole household, wife and all? A man’s spirit lives in his ears—do you understand what I’m saying? If a man hears something good, his body is suffused with joy, whereas if he hears something bad, he loses his temper. Before, your past good deeds and your promises for the future made you my benefactor, and you will not boast that your good deeds surpassed the king’s in generosity; now that you have changed, however, and are behaving offensively, you will not get what you deserve, but less. Your hospitality will protect you and those four sons of yours, but you will pay with the life of the fifth son—the one you especially want to keep by your side.’ As soon as Xerxes had given Pythius this answer, he ordered those of his men who were responsible for such matters to find the eldest of Pythius’ sons and to cut him in half. Then they were to place one half on the right of the road and the other half on the left, so that the army would pass between them.
[40] Once his orders had been carried out, the army filed through. At the front were the baggage-handlers and the yoked animals, and then came a confused mass of soldiers, with all the different peoples and tribes indiscriminately mixed up together. These two groups made up over half of the army, and then there was a break in the formation, which meant that they had no contact with the king. A thousand picked Persian horsemen led the king’s retinue, and behind them came a thousand spearmen, also élite fighting men, who marched with their lances pointing down at the ground. Next, magnificently caparisoned, came the ten sacred ‘Nesaean’ horses, named after the huge Nesaean Plain in Media which produces these tall horses. The place behind the ten horses was taken by the sacred chariot of Zeus, which was drawn by eight white horses. Following them on foot (because no human being is allowed to mount the seat of this chariot) came the charioteer, with the reins in his hands. Behind him came Xerxes himself, seated on a chariot drawn by Nesaean horses. Beside him stood his charioteer, Patiramphes by name, whose father was a Persian called Otanes.
[41] This was how Xerxes left Sardis, but he used to get out of his chariot and into a covered wagon instead, if he felt so inclined. He was followed by the 1,000 bravest and noblest Persian spearmen, who carried their lances in the usual fashion, and then another 1,000 élite Persian horsemen, and after them came the 10,000 best remaining Persian soldiers on foot. The men in this brigade carried spears whose butts ended in pomegranates rather than spikes; 1,000 of them had golden pomegranates on their spears and enclosed the other 9,000, who had silver pomegranates. (The troops who marched with their lances pointed towards the ground also had golden pomegranates, and the ones who came right behind Xerxes had golden apples.) After this brigade of 10,000 came a 10,000-strong contingent of Persian cavalry, then there was another gap of two stades, and finally the rest of the army brought up the rear, all massed together indiscriminately.
[42] So the army made its way from Lydia to the River Caïcus and Mysia. After the Caïcus they marched, with Mount Cane on their left, through the territory of Atarneus to the town of Carene. Then they crossed the plain of Thebe, bypassing Atramytteium and Antandrus, which is a Pelasgian settlement, and, leaving Mount Ida on their left,† they entered the district of Ilium. While they were spending a night at the foot of Ida they encountered their first thunderstorm, with high winds, and quite a large number of them were killed.
[43] When the army reached the Scamander, which was the first river they had come across since leaving Sardis and setting out on their journey that failed to provide enough water for the men and animals and that they drank dry—anyway, when Xerxes reached the Scamander he wanted to see where Priam had ruled, so he climbed up to the citadel, looked around, and heard the whole story of what had happened there. Then he sacrificed a thousand cattle to Athena of Ilium, and the Magi offered libations to the dead heroes. The following night fear spread throughout the army, but in the morning they left there and continued on their way, passing Rhoeteum, Ophryneum, and Dardanum (whose territory borders that of Abydus) on their left and the territory of a Teucrian tribe called the Gergithes on their right.
[44] While they were in Abydus, Xerxes decided that he would like to survey his whole army. A dais of white stone had already been made especially for him (he had ordered it in advance from the people of Abydus) and set up on a hill there. From this vantage-point he could look down on to the sea-shore and see both the land army and the fleet. As he watched them he conceived the desire to see the ships race; the contest duly took place and was won by the Phoenicians from Sidon. Xerxes took great pleasure in the race, and indeed in the whole army.
[45] The sight of the Hellespont completely covered by his ships, and the coast and plains of Abydus totally overrun by men first gave Xerxes a feeling of deep self-satisfaction, but later he began to weep.
[46] When his uncle Artabanus (the one who had at first freely expressed his opinion and advised Xerxes not to attack Greece) noticed that Xerxes was crying he said, ‘My lord, a short while ago you were feeling happy with your situation and now you are weeping. What a total change of mood!’
‘Yes,’ Xerxes answered. ‘I was reflecting on things and it occurred to me how short the sum total of human life is, which made me feel compassion. Look at all these people—but not one of them will still be alive in a hundred years’ time.’
‘That’s not the saddest aspect of life,’ Artabanus replied. ‘It’s not just that life is short, but also that there’s no one on earth, including these men, whose happiness is such that he won’t sometimes wish he were dead rather than alive—and this is a thought that occurs frequently during one’s lifetime, not just once. We are so overwhelmed by tragic accidents and illness that, however short life actually is, it seems long. So people look forward to dying, as an excellent way to escape from life with all its troubles. And this just goes to show how grudging the god is, because all we get is a taste of how sweet life may be.’
[47] Xerxes’ response to this was as follows: ‘Let’s hear no more about human life, Artabanus; you have described it well. We shouldn’t talk about bad things when involved in good things like our current project. But tell me this: if your dream hadn’t been so unambiguous, would you have kept to your original point of view and been reluctant for me to march on Greece, or would you have changed your mind? Tell me the truth.’
‘My lord,’ Artabanus replied, ‘I pray that the final outcome of the dream is in accord with what we both want. But it’s true that I am still, even now, out of my mind with fear. There are a number of reasons for this, but the main difficulty I see is the presence of precisely those two factors which are your worst enemies.’
[48] ‘What an extraordinary thing to say!’ Xerxes retorted. ‘What can you mean? What are these two worst enemies of mine? Do you find anything wrong with the size of my land army? Do you expect it to be outnumbered to any extent by the Greek forces? Or perhaps you think our fleet, or our infantry and navy combined, will prove to be smaller than theirs? If you think that our situation is inadequate in this respect, let’s have further troops raised as quickly as possible.’
[49] ‘My lord,’ said Artabanus, ‘no intelligent man could find fault with this army or navy as regards their size. In actual fact, if you were to assemble further troops, the two factors I have in mind would became even more of a problem. The two factors are the land and the sea. As for the sea, there’s no harbour anywhere, as far as I can tell, with the capacity to shelter this fleet of yours in the event of a storm and so keep your ships safe. In any case, you don’t need just one such harbour, but a lot of them, all along the coastline you’ll be sailing past. Since there are no adequate harbours, then, it’s important to see that chance controls men rather than men controlling chance. So that’s one of the two factors I was talking about. What about the other one? The land is your enemy in the sense that if you happen to meet with no resistance, the further you advance the more the land becomes your enemy, as you are enticed ever onward. Men can never get enough success, and so what I am saying is that, if you meet with no opposition, the chances of starvation are increased the more land you gain and the more time you spend getting it. A man of true calibre is one who combines fear when laying his plans, so that he weighs up everything that might happen to him, with courage in carrying out those plans.’
[50] ‘That all sounds perfectly reasonable, Artabanus,’ Xerxes replied, ‘but you still shouldn’t be afraid of everything or give everything equal weight. If you were to give everything equal weight in every situation you found yourself in, you’d never do anything at all. It’s always better to adopt a positive outlook and experience danger half the time than to worry about everything and avoid experience altogether. You may dispute every proposal, but as long as you can’t come up with an alternative course of action which is demonstrably safe, there’s nothing to tell between you and the person making the risky proposals, and so your argument should not be regarded as any stronger than his. Anyway, we’re only human, so how can we know where safety lies? We can’t, in my opinion. Prizes are invariably won, then, by those who are prepared to act, rather than by those who weigh everything up and hesitate.
‘You can see how powerful Persia has become. If those who ruled before me had shared your point of view, or even if they hadn’t, but had people like you to advise them, you’d never have seen our country make so much progress. In fact, what they did was run risks—that’s how they brought Persia to its current position of power, because great achievements are never won without great risks. So we are simply imitating them; we are on the road at the best time of year for campaigning, and by the time we get back home we will have conquered the whole of Europe. Nowhere will we encounter any unwelcome experiences such as shortage of food, because we’re taking a good supply of provisions with us on the road, and also because wherever we go we’ll get food from the local inhabitants of that land. The people we’re attacking have farms—they’re not nomads.’
[51] Next Artabanus said, ‘My lord, although you don’t want me to worry about anything, will you let me give you one piece of advice, on the grounds that complex affairs inevitably require further thought? In my judgement, you shouldn’t lead the Ionians against their Athenian fathers, even though the Ionians have been tribute-paying subjects of Persia ever since Cyrus the son of Cambyses conquered the whole of Ionia except Athens. It’s not as if the Ionians are essential for us to be able to overcome our enemies, and if they come with us they’ll either have to reduce their mother city to slavery or help her win her freedom. In other words, they’ll have to choose between committing a terrible crime and behaving with integrity. If they choose the first option, they won’t really help us that much, but if they choose the second option they could do a great deal of harm to your army. Under these circumstances you should also bear in mind the truth of the old saying that the end is not obvious at the beginning.’
[52] ‘Artabanus,’ Xerxes replied, ‘this idea of yours is more misguided than anything else I’ve heard you say. There’s really no need for you to worry about the Ionians changing sides. We have irrefutable proof of their worth, and you yourself were there to witness it, along with everyone else who was involved in Darius’ Scythian expedition. The annihilation or preservation of the whole Persian army depended on them, and they behaved with proper loyalty, without a hint of iniquity. Besides, they have left their children, wives, and property behind in our country, and that means that they are unlikely even to think about making trouble. So you needn’t worry about them either. What I want you to do instead is dismiss these anxieties and protect my household and my kingdom, because I am choosing you to be the sole guardian of my royal sceptre.’
[53] With these words Xerxes sent Artabanus back to Susa. His next action was to summon the most distinguished Persians to a conference. When they were all there he said, ‘Men of Persia, I have convened this meeting to ask you to prove your bravery and avoid disgracing the important and valuable achievements of our predecessors. I want each of us individually, and all of us together, to commit ourselves wholeheartedly to this task; after all, it is the benefits to be won by all of us alike that spur us on. Your orders, then, are to prosecute the war with vigour, because my information is that the men we’re attacking are valiant, and this means that if we get the better of them there’s no other human force that will resist us. So now let us pray to the gods who are responsible for Persia and then cross over to Europe.’
[54] They spent the rest of the day getting ready for the crossing. The next day, while they waited, because they wanted to see the sun come up, they burnt all kinds of perfumed spices on the bridges and strewed myrtle branches on the road. At sunrise, Xerxes poured a libation from a golden cup into the sea and, facing the sun, asked the sun-god to avert any accidents which might stop him from reaching the outer limits of Europe and conquering the whole continent. At the end of this prayer he threw the cup into the Hellespont along with a golden bowl and a Persian sword—an akinakes, as they call it. I cannot tell precisely whether these objects were thrown into the sea as offerings to the sun or whether he had come to regret having lashed the Hellespont and was trying to make amends by giving them as gifts to the sea.
[55] Once Xerxes had finished, the crossing began. The foot-soldiers and all the cavalry contingents used the bridge nearest the Euxine Sea, while the yoke-animals and the camp-followers used the other bridge, the one nearest the Aegean. The brigade of ten thousand Persian soldiers went first, with every single one of them wearing a garland; the rest of the army followed with all the different peoples and tribes mixed up together. The day passed with these two groups making the crossing. On the next day the first contingents to cross were the horsemen and, also wearing garlands, the battalion who carried their lances pointing towards the ground. They were followed by the sacred horses and the sacred chariot, then came Xerxes himself with his personal guard of spearmen, and then the troop of a thousand horsemen, followed by the rest of the army. While the land army was crossing, the fleet too made its way over to the opposite coast. I also once heard a version in which the king was the very last person to make the crossing.
[56] Over on the European side, Xerxes watched his army crossing the Hellespont under the whip. It took seven days and seven nights of unbroken activity for his army to finish the crossing. There is a story that after Xerxes had crossed the Hellespont a local Hellespontine man said, ‘Why, Zeus, do you disguise yourself as a Persian man and take the name of Xerxes instead of Zeus? If you want to devastate Greece, why do you bring the whole of mankind with you, when you could do it by yourself?’
[57] Once the whole Persian army had crossed over into Europe, they were just setting off on their journey when a really extraordinary thing happened: a horse gave birth to a hare. Xerxes dismissed it as insignificant, though its meaning was transparent. It meant that although Xerxes would walk tall and proud on his way to attack Greece, he would return to his starting-point running for his life. There had been another omen for him in Sardis: a donkey had given birth to a foal with both male and female genitals, the male set above the female ones.
[58] Xerxes dismissed both these omens as unimportant and carried on his way, accompanied by the land army. The fleet sailed west along the coast out of the Hellespont with Cape Sarpedon as their destination, where their instructions were to wait for Xerxes’ arrival. The foot-soldiers, however, headed east, in the opposite direction from the fleet; they marched overland through the Chersonese with the tomb of Helle the daughter of Athamas on their right and the town of Cardia on their left, and right through the middle of a town called Agora. But after rounding what is called the Black Gulf and crossing the river after which the gulf is named, the Black River (which was not large enough to avoid being drunk dry by the army), they travelled west past an Aeolian settlement called Aenus and Lake Stentoris, until they reached Doriscus.
[59] Doriscus is a part of Thrace consisting of a coastal region and an extensive plain, through which a large river called the Hebrus flows. A royal fortress had been built there—the one called Doriscus—and a Persian garrison posted by Darius ever since the time of his Scythian expedition. This struck Xerxes as a suitable place for him to order and count his troops, and he proceeded to do so. Once the whole fleet had arrived in Doriscus, Xerxes had the captains bring their ships to the coast by Doriscus. This coastline, which ends at the famous Cape Serreium, was inhabited by Cicones a long time ago, but now there is a Samothracian settlement called Sale and another town called Zone there. The ships were beached along this coastline and hauled up out of the water to dry. And so Xerxes spent this time at Doriscus counting his troops.
[60] I cannot give an exact breakdown of how many men each contingent contributed to the total, because not one person has recorded this information, but it turned out that there were 1,700,000 men altogether in the land army. The census was conducted as follows. Ten thousand men were assembled in a single area and packed as closely together as possible; a circle was drawn round the outside of the body of men (who were then dismissed) and a waist-high wall was built around the circle. Then more men were introduced into the enclosed area, and so on until everyone had been counted. After the census, the men were organized into contingents based on nationality.
[61] Here are the peoples which made up Xerxes’ army. First, there were the Persians, dressed as follows. On their heads they wore tiaras, as they call them, which are loose, felt caps, and their bodies were clothed in colourful tunics with sleeves (and breastplates)† of iron plate, looking rather like fish-scales. Their legs were covered in trousers and instead of normal shields they carried pieces of wickerwork. They had quivers hanging under their shields, short spears, large bows, arrows made of cane, and also daggers hanging from their belts down beside their right thighs. They were commanded by Otanes, whose daughter Amestris was Xerxes’ wife. In times past the Greeks used to call Persians Cephenes (even though both they and their neighbours called them Artaei), but then Perseus, the son of Danaë and Zeus, came to Cepheus the son of Belus, married his daughter Andromeda, and had a son, whom he called Perses. Cepheus had no male children, so Perseus left Perses there, and as a result the Persians are named after Perses.
[62] The Median contingent wore the same clothes as the Persians, since it was in fact a Median style of clothing, rather than a Persian one. Their commander was an Achaemenid called Tigranes. Medes used to be called Arians by everybody, but when Medea of Colchis left Athens and arrived in their country—this is what the Medes themselves say—they too changed their name.
The Cissian contingent was clothed and equipped in the Persian style, except that they wore turbans instead of caps. They were commanded by Anaphes the son of Otanes.
The Hyrcanians also had the same equipment as the Persians, and were commanded by Megapanus, who later became the governor of Babylon.
[63] The Assyrian contingent wore on their heads either bronze helmets or plaited helmets of a peculiarly foreign design which is hard to describe. Their shields, spears, and daggers resembled Egyptian ones, and they also carried wooden clubs with iron studs, and wore linen breastplates. These are the people the Greeks call Syrians, but they were called Assyrians by the Persian invaders. Their commander was Otaspes the son of Artachaees.
[64] The Bactrian contingent wore headgear which was very similar to that of the Medes, and were armed with native cane bows and short spears. The Sacae, a Scythian tribe, had as headgear kurbasias whose crowns were stiffened into an upright point, and wore trousers. They carried native bows and daggers, and also battleaxes called sagareis. They were in fact Scythians from Amyrgium, but they were known as Sacae because that is what the Persians call all Scythians. The commander of both the Bactrian and Sacian contingents was Hystaspes, the son of Darius and Cyrus’ daughter Atossa.
[65] Indian gear consisted of cotton clothing, cane bows and cane arrows with iron heads. For the duration of this expedition they were assigned to the command of Pharnazathres the son of Artabates.
[66] The Arians were equipped like the Bactrians, except that their bows were in the Median style. Their commander was Sisamnes the son of Hydarnes.
Also fitted out like the Bactrians were the Parthians and Chorasmians, commanded by Artabazus the son of Pharnaces; the Sogdians, commanded by Azanes the son of Artaeus; and the Gandarians and Dadicae, commanded by Artyphius the son of Artabanus.
[67] Caspian equipment consisted of jackets, native cane bows, and akinakeis. Their commander was Ariomardus the brother of Artyphius.
The Sarangae were conspicuous for their coloured clothing. They wore knee-high boots and carried bows and Median-style spears. They were commanded by Pherendates the son of Megabazus.
The Pactyes wore jackets and were armed with native bows and daggers. Their commander was Artayntes the son of Ithamitres.
[68] The Utians, Mycians, and Paricanians were fitted out like the Pactyes. The Utians and Mycians were commanded by Arsamenes the son of Darius, and the Paricanians by Siromitres the son of Oeobazus.
[69] The Arabians wore belted zeiras and carried on their right sides long, reflexible bows. The Ethiopians were dressed in leopard skins and lion pelts, and were armed with bows made out of palm fronds. These bows were long, at least four cubits in length, and their arrows were short and tipped not with iron but with a head made from sharpened stone—the kind of stone they also use to engrave signet-rings. They carried spears as well, whose heads were made out of gazelles’ horns sharpened like the head of a lance, and also studded clubs. When they go into battle they paint half of their bodies with chalk and half with ochre. The commander of the Arabians and the Ethiopians from south of Egypt was Arsames, the son of Darius and Cyrus’ daughter Artystone, who was his favourite wife. He had a statue of her made out of beaten gold.
[70] So Arsames was the commander of the Ethiopians from south of Egypt, as well as of the Arabians, but there were two lots of Ethiopians in the army. The eastern Ethiopians were assigned to the Indian contingent; these Ethiopians are exactly the same as the others to look at, but they speak a different language and their hair is different. The eastern Ethiopians have straight hair, while the Libyan ones have curlier hair than any other people in the world. The Asian Ethiopians were equipped more or less in the same fashion as the Indians, except that they wore a head-dress consisting of a horse’s scalp, including the ears and mane. The mane acted as a crest, and the horse’s ears were stiffened into an upright position. Instead of regular shields they had targes made out of crane skins.
[71] The Libyans came wearing leather clothing and armed with javelins whose ends had been burnt into sharp points. Their commander was Massages the son of Oärizus.
[72] The Paphlagonian contingent wore plaited helmets on their heads and were armed with small shields, medium-sized spears, and javelins and daggers as well. On their feet they wore native boots which reached halfway up their shins. The Ligyan contingent had the same equipment as the Paphlagonians, and so did the Matieneans, Mariandynians, and Syrians (whom the Persians call Cappadocians). Dotus the son of Megasidrus was in command of the Paphlagonians and the Matieneans, and Gobryas the son of Darius and Artystone was in command of the Mariandynians, Ligyes, and Syrians.
[73] The Phrygians’ equipment was very similar to that of the Paphlagonians, with only minor differences. According to the Macedonians, the Phrygians were called Briges for as long as they lived in Europe next to the Macedonians, but then when they moved to Asia they changed their name along with their country. The Armenians were fitted out just like the Phrygians—but then they were originally emigrants from Phrygia. Artochmes, who was married to one of Darius’ daughters, was in command of both the Armenians and the Phrygians.
[74] The Lydians’ equipment was not very different from Greek. A long time ago, the Lydians were known as Maeonians, but they changed their name when they named themselves after Lydus the son of Atys. The Mysians wore a native style of helmet on their heads and were armed with small shields and javelins whose ends had been burnt into sharp points. They were originally emigrants from Lydia, and are also known as Olympieni, after Mount Olympus. The Lydians and the Mysians were under the command of Artaphrenes the son of Artaphrenes, who was jointly responsible, with Datis, for the invasion at Marathon.
[75] The Thracian contingent wore fox-skin caps on their heads and were dressed in tunics with colourful zeiras on top; their feet and lower legs were covered in boots made out of fawn-skin. They also carried javelins, bucklers, and small daggers. After they moved from Europe to Asia they were called the Bithynians, but, as they say themselves, before that they were called the Strymonians, because they lived on the River Strymon. They say that they were driven out of their original homeland by the Teucrians and the Mysians. These Asian Thracians were commanded by Bassaces the son of Artabanus.
[76] 〈The Pisidae〉† carried small shields of untreated oxhide. Every man among them was armed with two hunting-spears in the Lycian style, and wore a bronze helmet on his head. Each helmet had the ears and horns of an ox, also in bronze, attached to it, and had a crest as well. They wore red cloths wrapped around their lower legs. There is an oracle of Ares in their country.
[77] The Cabalians (who are known as Lasonians, despite being of Maeonian stock) were fitted out in the same way as the Cilicians, and so I will describe their equipment when I come to the Cilician contingent in my account.
The Milyans carried short spears and wore cloaks fastened with a brooch. Some of them had Lycian-style bows and wore on their heads helmets made out of leather. The whole Milyan contingent was under the command of Badres the son of Hystanes.
[78] The Moschians wore wooden helmets on their heads and carried shields and spears which were short, but with long points. The Tibarenians, Macrones, and Mossynoecians had the same equipment as the Moschians. The Moschians and Tibarenians formed a single contingent under the command of Ariomardus, the son of Darius and Parmys, who was the daughter of Smerdis and granddaughter of Cyrus. The Macrones and Mossynoecians together formed another contingent under the command of Artayctes the son of Cherasmis, who was the governor of Sestus on the Hellespont.
[79] The Mares wore plaited native helmets on their heads, and carried small shields of animal skin and javelins. The Colchians wore wooden helmets on their heads, carried small shields of untreated oxhide and short spears, and were armed with knives as well. Pharandates the son of Teäspis was in command of the Mares and the Colchians.
The Alarodian and Saspeiran troops were equipped like the Colchians, and commanded by Masistius the son of Siromitres.
[80] The tribes who had come from the islands in the Red Sea to take part in the expedition—the islands where the Persian king settles the people known as ‘the Dispossessed’—closely resembled the Medes in respect of both clothing and weaponry. These islanders were commanded by Mardontes the son of Bagaeus, who was one of the Persian commanders a year later at the battle of Mycale, where he died.
[81] These were the tribes and peoples who marched by land and were organized into infantry contingents. I have already given the names of the commanders of this division, whose job it was also to organize and count the troops, and to appoint officers to take charge of the brigades of 10,000 and the battalions of 1,000; the leaders of the companies of 100 and the sections of 10 were appointed by the brigade-commanders. There were also other officers in command of the various regiments and tribal units. Anyway, the commanding officers were as stated.
[82] The High Command, in charge of these officers and of the whole infantry division, consisted of Mardonius the son of Gobryas, Tritantaechmes the son of Artabanus (the Artabanus who had been opposed to the Greek expedition), both of whom were nephews of Darius and cousins to Xerxes,† Smerdomenes the son of Otanes, Masistes the son of Darius and Atossa, Gergis the son of Ariazus, and Megabyzus the son of Zopyrus.
[83] These people were the supreme commanders of the whole infantry division except for the Ten Thousand. This brigade of ten thousand picked Persian troops was commanded by Hydarnes the son of Hydarnes, and was known as the Immortals. The reason for this name was that as soon as a place in the battalion became vacant, as a result of death or illness, it was immediately filled by someone else, so that the battalion remained at exactly ten thousand, no more and no less. In the whole army, the Persians were turned out best, and physically they were the bravest fighters as well. Their equipment has already been described, but they were also conspicuous for the huge amount of gold they wore about their persons. They also brought covered wagons for their concubines, sizeable and well-equipped retinues of slaves, and their own personal provisions, separate from those of the other soldiers, transported by camels and yoke-animals.
[84] These nations were all horsemen, but they did not all provide cavalry units. Here is a list of those that did. The Persian cavalry were fitted out in the same fashion as their infantry, except that some of them wore headgear of beaten bronze and iron.
[85] The Sagartians, a nomadic people who are ethnically Persian and who speak Persian, but dress in a combination of styles from Persia and Pactyice, supplied eight thousand horsemen, who were armed, as is the custom in their country, with no bronze or iron weapons except daggers. The main weapons they rely on in battle are ropes plaited out of leather thongs. What they do when they engage an enemy is throw these ropes, which have a noose at one end, and then pull in to themselves whatever it is they hit, which might be a man or a horse. Their opponents are entangled in the coils and dispatched. That is how the Sagartians fight. They were detailed to join the Persian contingent.
[86] The Medians and Cissians both had the same kind of equipment as their infantry units. The Indians were fitted out in the same way as their countrymen on foot, but rode war-ponies and chariots, to which they harnessed both horses and wild donkeys. The Bactrians and Sacae† both had the same kind of equipment as their infantry equivalents. The Libyans were also equipped, as far as their bodies were concerned, no differently from their countrymen on foot, and they too all drove chariots. The Pactyes† and the Paricanians also had the same equipment as their infantry equivalents. The Arabians too had the same equipment as their infantry, but they all rode camels, which were just as fast as horses.
[87] These were the only peoples that were mounted. The total number of horsemen in the army was eighty thousand, not counting the camels and the chariots. The horsemen were all organized into regiments, with the Arabians detailed to bring up the rear, because horses cannot abide camels, and in that position their camels would not alarm the horses.
[88] The field commanders of the cavalry division were two sons of Datis called Harmamithres and Tithaeus. Illness had kept the third cavalry commander, Pharnouches, in Sardis. Just as they were about to set out from Sardis, he had an unfortunate accident. A dog ran under the feet of the horse he was riding and the horse, which had not seen the dog coming, took fright, reared up, and unseated him. After his fall he began to vomit blood and developed consumption. His house-slaves lost no time in carrying out their master’s orders about what to do to the horse: they took it to the place where it had thrown him and cut off its legs at the knees. So this is how Pharnouches came to lose his command.
[89] The total number of triremes was 1,207, supplied by various nations as follows. The Phoenicians and the Palestinian Syrians supplied three hundred triremes; their equipment consisted of helmets very similar in style to Greek ones, linen breastplates, rimless shields, and javelins. According to their own tradition, these Phoenicians used to live a long time ago on the Red Sea, but then they moved to the coastal region of Syria which they currently occupy. This part of Syria, all the way to the border with Egypt, is known as Palestine.
The Egyptians supplied two hundred ships. They wore plaited helmets on their heads and carried curved shields with wide rims, naval spears, and large battleaxes. Most of them also wore breastplates and carried long knives.
[90] Next, the Cyprians contributed a hundred and fifty ships. Their outfit basically resembled Greek gear—tunics and so on—but members of their royal families wore turbans wound around their heads. People on Cyprus have a variety of ethnic origins, according to their own traditions: Salamis, Athens, Arcadia, Cythnus, Phoenicia, and Ethiopia are all mentioned.
[91] As for the Cilicians, who supplied a hundred ships, they wore native helmets on their heads, carried bucklers made out of untreated oxhide instead of shields, and wore woollen tunics. Every man was armed with two javelins and a sword which closely resembled the Egyptian knife. Cilicians were originally known as Hypachaeans, but then they were named after a Phoenician called Cilix the son of Agenor.
The Pamphylians came with thirty ships and Greek arms and armour. These Pamphylians are descended from people who accompanied Amphilochus and Calchas during the Trojan diaspora.
[92] The Lycians contributed fifty ships. They wore breastplates and greaves, and carried cornel-wood bows, cane arrows without flights, and javelins. They also had goatskin capes slung around their shoulders, and on their heads felt caps trimmed with feathers. They were armed with daggers and billhooks. The Lycians originally came from Crete and were called Termilae, but then they were named after an Athenian called Lycus the son of Pandion.
[93] The Dorians from Asia supplied thirty ships. They had Greek equipment and originally came from the Peloponnese.
The Carians supplied seventy ships and were equipped in the Greek style, except that they also had billhooks and daggers. In an early section of my work I have already mentioned what the Carians used to be called.
[94] The Ionians contributed a hundred ships and had Greek clothing and weaponry. According to the Greeks, while the Ionians lived in the part of the Peloponnese now called Achaea—that is, before Danaus and Xuthus came to the Peloponnese—they were called Aegialian Pelasgians, but later they were named after Ion the son of Xuthus.
[95] The Aegean islanders supplied seventeen ships and were dressed and equipped like Greeks. They too were Pelasgian in origin, but were called Ionian for the same reason that the Ionians from the twelve communities were, who were originally from Athens.
The Aeolians (who according to Greek tradition are another Pelasgian people) contributed sixty ships and had Greek clothing and weapons.
All the communities of the Hellespont except Abydus (whose inhabitants had been given by Xerxes the job of guarding the bridges, which meant that they had to stay at home) contributed a hundred ships to the expedition. Their clothing and weapons were Greek. They were Ionian and Dorian colonists.
[96] There were Persian, Median, and Sacian marines on board every ship. The best ships were those the Phoenicians supplied, and the best of these were the ones from Sidon. Every naval unit was under officers native to the country supplying the ships, as was also the case with the infantry contingents, but I am not going to give the names of these officers, because they are not required by this account of my investigations. In the first place, none of the officers in charge of any of the units of the various peoples was particularly distinguished, and in the second place, there were as many officers as there were communities in every country. Besides, they were not there as military commanders, but were just as much slaves as all their fellow soldiers, since all power and authority over the various national units was invested in the Persian commanders I have already mentioned.
[97] The commanders of the fleet were Ariabignes the son of Darius, Prexaspes the son of Aspathines, Megabazus the son of Megabates, and Achaemenes the son of Darius. Ariabignes (whose parents were Darius and Gobryas’ daughter) was in command of the Ionian and Carian squadrons, Achaemenes (who was a full brother of Xerxes) was in command of the Egyptians, and the other two were in command of the rest of the navy. Counting triaconters, penteconters, light vessels, and small horse-transport ships, the fleet was found to consist in total of 3,000 ships.
[98] After the commanders, the most notable men in the fleet were Tetramnestus the son of Anysus, from Sidon; Matten the son of Siromus, from Tyre; Merbalus the son of Agbalus, from Aradus; Syennesis the son of Oromedon, from Cilicia; Cyberniscus the son of Sicas, from Lycia; Gorgus the son of Chersis and Timonax the son of Timagoras, both from Cyprus; and from Caria Histiaeus the son of Tymnes, Pigres the son of Hysseldomus, and Damasithymus the son of Candaules.
[99] I pass over all the other officers, because there is no need for me to mention them, except for Artemisia, because I find it particularly remarkable that a woman should have taken part in the expedition against Greece. She took over the tyranny after her husband’s death, and although she had a grown-up son and did not have to join the expedition, her manly courage impelled her to do so. Artemisia was her name, and she was the daughter of Lygdamis; her father’s family came from Halicarnassus, and her mother’s was Cretan. She came with five ships and with men from Halicarnassus, Cos, Nisyros, and Calydna under her command. Hers was the second most famous squadron in the entire navy, after the one from Sidon. None of Xerxes’ allies gave him better advice than her. All the places I have listed as being under her command were Dorian in nationality, since the Halicarnassians were originally from Troezen and the others from Epidaurus.
[100] So much for the fleet. When the army had been counted and organized into units, Xerxes decided that he would like to ride among them in person and review them. Later, then, that is exactly what he did. He rode on his chariot past each and every tribal unit and asked questions, with his scribes taking notes, until he had gone from one end of the army to the other and reviewed both the cavalry and the infantry. Then he had the ships hauled back down into the water and he exchanged his chariot for a Sidonian ship; he sat under a golden canopy and sailed past the prows of the ships, asking the same kinds of questions about each group of ships as he had done with the land army, and having notes taken. The ships’ captains had sailed about four plethra from the shore and were riding at anchor, all in a row, with their prows facing land and their marines armed and ready for battle. Xerxes reviewed them while his boat passed between the prows of the ships and the shoreline.
[101] Once he was back on land afterwards, he sent for Demaratus the son of Ariston, who had accompanied him on the expedition against Greece, and when he arrived he said, ‘I have a mind now, Demaratus, to question you about something I want to know. You are Greek, and from what you and other Greeks I’ve spoken to have told me, you come from one of the most important and powerful Greek cities. So tell me: will the Greeks stand their ground against me? Will they resist? It seems to me that all the Greeks, and even the combined forces of the entire western world, would be incapable of withstanding my advance, unless they formed a unified front. But I want to hear what you have to say about this.’
In response to this question Demaratus asked, ‘Would you like a truthful answer, my lord, or a comforting one?’ Xerxes told him to be honest and promised that he would not find himself in a less favourable situation than before.
[102] So Demaratus said, ‘My lord, you have asked me to tell the whole truth—the kind of truth that you will not be able to prove false at a later date. There has never been a time when poverty was not a factor in the rearing of the Greeks, but their courage has been acquired as a result of intelligence and the force of law. Greece has relied on this courage to keep poverty and despotism at bay. I admire all the Greeks who live in those Dorian lands, but I shall restrict what I have to say to the Lacedaemonians alone. First, then, there’s no way in which they will ever listen to any proposals of yours which will bring slavery on Greece; second, they will certainly resist you, even if all the other Greeks come over to your side. As for the size of their army, there’s no point in your asking how, in terms of numbers, they can do this. If there are in fact only a thousand men to march out against you (though it may be fewer or it may be more), then a thousand men will fight you.’
[103] Xerxes’ response was to laugh and say, ‘Demaratus, how can you say such a thing? The very idea of a thousand men fighting an army the size of mine! Now, come on. You say you used to be these people’s king, so tell me: would you be prepared to fight ten men, for example? Of course not, but if everything you’ve told me about your political system is true, it is right that you, their king, should take on twice as many men as anyone else: that is in keeping with your customs. If each of them is worth ten men from my army, I’d expect you to be worth twenty. That would fit in with what you’ve been telling me. I suppose they are men like you and the other Greeks I’ve met, with the same qualities as you, and bodies of the same size. But if that’s so, are you sure these proud boasts you Greeks make are not just nonsense? Look, let’s be completely rational about this. How could a thousand men—or ten thousand or fifty thousand, for that matter—when every man among them is as free as the next man and they do not have a single leader, oppose an army the size of ours? After all, let’s suppose there are five thousand of them: we will then outnumber them by more than a thousand to one! If they had a single leader in the Persian mould, fear of him might make them excel themselves and, urged on by the whip, they might attack a numerically superior force, but all this is out of the question if they’re allowed their freedom. As a matter of fact, it is my belief that the Greeks would find it hard to take on just the Persians, even if they had the same number of troops as us. No, we’re the only ones who have the quality you’re talking about—at least, a few of us do. After all, there are men in my personal guard who would be prepared to fight three Greeks at once. But you’re just talking rubbish from a position of ignorance.’
[104] ‘My lord,’ Demaratus replied, ‘I knew from the start that I wasn’t going to endear myself to you if I spoke the truth, but you insisted on absolute honesty, so I told you how things stand with the Spartans. How much I love them at the moment you know perfectly well, since they deposed me, robbed me of my ancestral rights, and made me a stateless exile, while your father took me in and gave me a home and an income—the sort of act of kindness it would be sheer stupidity for anyone to reject rather than appreciate. I’d rather not take on a single opponent, let alone two or ten—an ability I’m certainly not claiming to have. If I had no choice in the matter, however, or if so much was at stake that I was motivated to do so, I’d gladly fight—especially one of those men who claims to be a match for three Greeks. That’s how the Lacedaemonians are: they’re as good as anyone in the world when it comes to fighting one on one, but they’re the best when it comes to fighting in groups. The point is that although they’re free, they’re not entirely free: their master is the law, and they’re far more afraid of this than your men are of you. At any rate, they do whatever the law commands, and its command never changes: it is that they should not turn tail in battle no matter how many men are ranged against them, but should maintain their positions and either win or die. If this seems nonsense to you, I shall hold my peace from now on. I only spoke because you insisted. I only hope that everything goes satisfactorily for you, my lord.’
[105] Xerxes laughed and made a joke of this reply by Demaratus. He was not at all angry, but dismissed him civilly. After this conversation with Demaratus, Xerxes made Mascames the son of Megadostes governor of Doriscus, where they were, to replace the man Darius had appointed. Then he continued marching through Thrace towards Greece.
[106] Mascames, whom Xerxes left in Doriscus, was a man of such calibre that he was the only one who regularly received rewards from Xerxes, year after year, for being the best of all the governors appointed by either himself or Darius. Xerxes’ son Artaxerxes continued the honour by rewarding Mascames’ sons in the same way. Before Xerxes’ campaign governors had been appointed to posts all over Thrace and the Hellespont, but afterwards all of them were expelled by the Greeks except Mascames in Doriscus. No one ever succeeded in getting rid of him, although there were plenty of attempts to do so. That is why the Persian king, whoever it may be at any given time, still sends gifts.
[107] The only one of the governors expelled by the Greeks who was considered a good man by King Xerxes was Boges, the governor of Eïon. In fact, Xerxes never stopped singing his praises, and he heaped honours on his surviving sons, who lived in Persia. And Boges certainly deserved nothing less than high praise. During the siege of Eïon by the Athenians under Cimon the son of Miltiades, he could have left under a truce and returned to Asia, but instead he stuck it out to the bitter end, because he did not want the king to gain the impression that he had survived through cowardice. When there were no provisions left within the stronghold, he made a huge pyre, cut the throats of his children, wife, concubines, and house-slaves, and threw their bodies on to the fire. Next he stood on the wall and flung all the gold and silver there was in the town into the Strymon, and finally he threw himself on to the fire. For this his memory is still held in high esteem among the Persians even today, as it should be.
[108] So Xerxes set out from Doriscus towards Greece. On the way he conscripted everyone he came across into his army. He was able to do this because, as I explained earlier, the whole country as far as Thessaly had been conquered first by Megabazus and then by Mardonius, who between them enslaved it and reduced it to the status of a tribute-paying subject. After leaving Doriscus the first places he passed were the walled towns owned by Samothrace, the most westerly of which is a place called Mesambria. Near Mesambria is a Thasian settlement called Stryme, and between them flows the River Lisus, which did not have an adequate supply of water for Xerxes’ army, but was drunk dry. A long time ago this region was called Gallaïce, but nowadays it is known as Briantice; strictly speaking, however, it within the territory of the Cicones, as is Doriscus.
[109] Having crossed the now-dry bed of the Lisus, Xerxes passed the Greek towns of Maronea, Dicaea, and Abdera. His route also took him past a couple of famous lakes—Ismaris, which is situated between Maronea and Stryme, and Bistonis, which is near Dicaea and is fed by two rivers, the Trauus and the Compsatus. There was no well-known lake near Abdera for him to pass, but he crossed the River Nestus, which flows into the sea there. His route next took him past the mainland towns founded by Thasos. The territory of one of these towns, Pistyrus, includes a lake of about thirty stades’ circumference, which teems with fish and is very brackish indeed; the yoke-animals were the only ones to drink from it, but they drank it dry. So these were the Greek coastal towns which Xerxes passed on his left.
[110] Here are the Thracian tribes through whose territory he travelled: the Paeti, Cicones, Bistones, Sapaei, Dersaei, Edonians, and Satrae. Some of them lived on the coast, and they went along with their ships, while the inland tribes from this list of mine were all forcibly conscripted into the land army—all except the Satrae, that is.
[111] The Satrae have never been subject to anyone, as far as we know; they are the only tribe in Thrace to have retained their independence all the way up to my day. They live in a region of high mountains which are thickly wooded with all kinds of trees and covered with snow; they are also extremely good fighters. They are the ones who have the oracle of Dionysus in the highest part of the mountain range in their country. The pronouncements at this shrine are interpreted by the Bessians, a sub-tribe within the Satrae, and as at Delphi it is a prophetess who is the mouthpiece, and her utterances are no more elaborate than those of her counterpart at Delphi.
[112] After skirting this region, Xerxes next passed the strongholds of the Pierians, one of which is called Phagres and the other Pergamus. He made his way right past the walls of these towns with Mount Pangaeum on his right; this is a massive, lofty mountain where there are both gold- and silver-mines, which are worked by the Pierians, the Odomantians, and especially the Satrae.
[113] North of Mount Pangaeum live the Paeonians, Doberes, and Paeoplae, whose lands Xerxes skirted as he continued west. In due course he reached the River Strymon and the city of Eïon, where Boges (whom I mentioned a short while ago) was the governor, since he was still alive at this time. The country around Mount Pangaeum is called Phyllis; its western border is formed by the River Angites, which is a tributary of the Strymon, and its southern border is formed by the Strymon itself. The Magi sacrificed white horses to the Strymon, looking for a favourable omen.
[114] These were far from being the only magical rites they performed at the river. Afterwards, they crossed the river at Nine Ways (a place in Edonian territory), where they found the Strymon bridged. When they learnt that the name of the place was Nine Ways, they buried alive nine local boys and girls in the ground there. The practice of burying people alive is a Persian custom, because I hear that in her old age Xerxes’ wife Amestris too had fourteen children, whose parents were distinguished Persians, buried alive as a gift on her behalf to the god who is supposed to live underground.
[115] To the west of the route the army took after the Strymon is a stretch of shoreline where the Greek town of Argilus is situated. This shoreline and the district inland of it are called Bisaltia. Xerxes marched past Argilus and then, with the bay off Posideium to his left, crossed the plain of Syleus, bypassing the Greek town of Stagirus, until he fetched up at Acanthus. Along the way he drew into his army men from every single one of these places, as well as from the places around Mount Pangaeum. The pattern was the same as the one I have already described: he added ships to the fleet from the people living in coastal regions and gained contingents for the land army from those living inland. The road taken by King Xerxes and his army is still in my time an object of reverence in Thrace: the Thracians avoid ploughing it up or sowing crops on it.
[116] On arriving at Acanthus, Xerxes proclaimed a pact of guest-friendship between himself and the Acanthians. He presented them with a set of Median clothing and complimented them on their enthusiasm for the war, which he could see, and on their work on digging the canal, which he was told about.
[117] During Xerxes’ stay in Acanthus Artachaees, who had been in charge of the construction of the canal, happened to die of disease. Artachaees was an Achaemenid who was very highly regarded by Xerxes; he was the tallest of the Persians (being only four fingers short of five royal cubits) and he had the loudest voice in the world. Xerxes was deeply upset at his death and gave him a magnificent funeral and burial; the whole army helped to raise his burial mound. On the advice of an oracle, the people of Acanthus have instituted a hero-cult of Artachaees, which involves calling on him by name. So King Xerxes grieved for the death of Artachaees.
[118] The Greeks who received the troops and provided hospitality for Xerxes were so completely ruined that they lost their own homes. For instance, when the Thasians entertained and fed Xerxes’ army on behalf of their mainland settlements, they gave the job to Antipater the son of Orgeus, who was as distinguished a man as any on the island, and he showed that the meal had cost four hundred talents of silver.
[119] More or less the same figures were produced by those from other towns and cities who were responsible for entertaining the army. The meal was ordered a long time in advance and was taken very seriously. As soon as they heard from the agents who were travelling around delivering the message, the inhabitants of the towns would spend many months dividing up their grain and preparing wheat-meal and barley-meal; they would also locate the best cattle money could buy and fatten them up. They kept birds in cages and waterfowl in ponds for the entertainment of the troops. They had gold and silver cups, bowls, and tableware in general made—although these were for the king himself and those who shared his table, while for the rest of the army they only had to provide food. By the time the army arrived, they would have a pavilion pitched and ready, which Xerxes himself could use as a staging-post on his journey, while the rest of the army stayed out in the open. When it was time for the meal to be served, all the hard work fell to the hosts, while their guests ate their fill. Then they would spend the night there, and on the next day they used to take down the pavilion and appropriate all the movables before marching off, leaving nothing behind, but taking it all with them.
[120] This was the occasion of a bon mot by Megacreon of Abdera. He put it to the people of Abdera that they should go in full force to the city’s sanctuaries, taking their wives as well, to beg the gods to avert half the troubles that might be waiting for them in the future, and to offer heartfelt thanks for the past, because it was not King Xerxes’ habit to eat twice a day! His thinking was that if the people of Abdera had been ordered to prepare a midday meal as well as an evening meal, they would either have had to leave before Xerxes’ arrival or, if they had stayed put, would have been crushed more miserably than anyone had ever been.
[121] Anyway, despite the pressing difficulties, the various townspeople did what they were required to do. Next, after Acanthus, Xerxes sent the fleet on ahead and told his commanders to have it wait for him at Therma, because he had found out that this town lay on his most direct route. Therma is situated on the Gulf of Therma, and has, in fact, given its name to the gulf. As for the land army, during the journey from Doriscus to Acanthus, it had been divided at Xerxes’ orders into a formation consisting of three columns. He had detailed one of these columns, under Mardonius and Masistes, to march along the coast, keeping pace with the fleet; he had another third of the army, commanded by Tritantaechmes and Gergis, take an inland route; and the final column marched between the other two, with Smerdomenes and Megabyzus in command, and with Xerxes himself in their midst.
[122] However, the fleet was now sent on ahead by Xerxes. It sailed along the canal that had been excavated on the peninsula of Athos and through to the gulf where Assa, Pilorus, Singus, and Sarte are situated. Additional troops were recruited from these places, and then the fleet steered for the Gulf of Therma. It rounded Ampelus, the headland in Toronian territory, and sailed past Torone, Galepsus, Sermyle, Mecyberna, and Olynthus—Greek towns from which they recruited both ships and troops. Sithonia is the name of the district where these towns are.
[113] Xerxes’ fleet cut across from Cape Ampelus to Cape Canastra, which is the part of Pallene that projects furthest into the sea. Next they recruited both ships and men from Potidaea, Aphytis, Neapolis, Aege, Therambus, Scione, Mende, and Sane, which are the settlements on Pallene (or Phlegra, as it was formerly known). They sailed on past this region towards their destination, and took on additional troops from the communities near Pallene and bordering the Gulf of Therma—namely, Lipaxus, Combreia, Haesa,† Gigonus, Campsa, Smila, and Aeneia. The region where these towns are situated is still called Crossaea. After the last of the places on this list of mine, Aeneia, the fleet sailed into the actual Gulf of Therma and came to the region called Mygdonia. Finally they reached their destination; they put in at Therma, and also Sindus and Chalestra on the River Axius, which forms the border between Mygdonia and Bottiaeis, where two settlements, Ichnae and Pella, occupy a narrow strip of land on the coast.
[124] So Xerxes’ fleet was lying at anchor off the coast from the River Axius to the town of Therma, including the settlements in between, waiting for the king to arrive. Meanwhile Xerxes and the land army were making their way from Acanthus, taking the direct route overland to their destination, Therma. They marched through Paeonia and Crestonia to the River Echeidorus, which rises in Crestonia, flows through Mygdonia and issues by the marshes of the River Axius.
[125] As they were making their way through these regions, night after night lions used to come down from their usual hunting-grounds and attack the camels in their baggage train. They did not harm anything else, man or beast, but savaged only the camels. I wonder what it was that made the lions ignore everything else and attack the camels, when this was a type of creature that was completely unfamiliar to them—one they had never seen or come across before.
[126] There are large numbers of lions in these parts, and also wild oxen, whose enormous horns are imported into Greece. The lions’ territory is bounded by the River Nestus, which flows through Abdera, and the Acheloüs, which flows through Acarnania. No lions are found anywhere in eastern Europe east of the Nestus or in the rest of the continent west of the Acheloüs; they only ever occur in the region between these two rivers.
[127] After reaching Therma, Xerxes had his troops bivouac there. The camp spread out all along the coast from Therma and Mygdonia to the Lydias and Haliacmon, two rivers which combine and form the boundary between Bottiaeis and Macedonia. While the invaders were encamped in those parts, of all the rivers mentioned only the Echeidorus, which flows from Crestonia, failed to provide enough water for the army, and was drunk dry.
[128] From Therma Xerxes could see the vast bulk of Mount Olympus and Mount Ossa in Thessaly. He found out that half-way between them there was a narrow ravine, with the River Peneius flowing through it, and was told that there was a way into Thessaly there. This made him want to sail to see the mouth of the Peneius, because his plan was to take the inland route through the peoples living in northern Macedonia and past the town of Gonnus to Perrhaebia, which was the safest route, according to the information he had. Having conceived this desire, he acted on it. He boarded the Sidonian ship he always used for this sort of occasion and gave the signal for the rest of the fleet to put to sea as well, leaving the land army where it was. Once he got to the mouth of the Peneius, Xerxes was greatly astonished at what he saw. He summoned his guides and asked them if it was possible to divert the river and to have it enter the sea elsewhere.
[129] There is a story that Thessaly, which is completely surrounded by vast mountains, was long ago a lake. To the east Mount Pelium and Mount Ossa form a barrier because their foothills merge; the barrier to the north is Olympus, to the west Pindus, and to the south Othrys. Thessaly consists of a basin in the middle of these mountains. A large number of rivers enter this basin, five of which—the Peneius, Apidanus, Onochonus, Enipeus, and Pamisus—are particularly well known. They descend from the mountains surrounding Thessaly, each with its separate name, and meet on this plain, where they all join to form a single river; then they issue into the sea through a narrow ravine. As soon as they have joined together, the name of the Peneius takes over and the others all lose their names. The story goes that in ancient times this ravine—this outlet—did not yet exist; so these rivers, and Lake Boebeis as well, which did not yet have their modern separate names, but still channelled the same volume of water as they do nowadays, flowed down and made the whole of Thessaly an inland sea. According to native Thessalian tradition, the ravine through which the Peneius flows was made by Poseidon. This is not implausible, because the sight of this ravine would make anyone who thinks that Poseidon is responsible for earthquakes, and therefore that rifts formed by earthquakes are caused by him, say that it was the work of Poseidon. For it seems to me that this rift in the mountains was caused by an earthquake.†
[130] When Xerxes enquired whether there was any alternative outlet for the Peneüs into the sea, the guides knew the answer and said, ‘No, my lord, there is no other way for this river to reach the sea. This is the only exit there is, because Thessaly is entirely surrounded by mountains.’ To this Xerxes is supposed to have replied, ‘The Thessalians are no fools. Now I see why they took the precaution a long time ago of conceding to me. The main reason, as it turns out, is that it would take hardly any time or effort to gain control of their country. All one would have to do is dam the ravine so as to divert the river away from it and alter its course, and that would let the water loose on their land, until the whole of Thessaly apart from the mountains would be flooded.’ He was referring to the fact that the Aleuadae of Thessaly had been the first Greeks to surrender to him—a move which Xerxes took to be an offer of friendship from the whole country. Having made this remark, he finished looking the site over and then sailed back to Therma.
[131] He stayed in Pieria for quite a few days, because a third of his men were engaged in cutting through the Macedonian mountains to enable the whole army to pass through them and reach Perrhaebia. During this period the heralds he had sent to Greece to demand earth arrived back, some empty-handed, some with earth and water.
[132] The following Greek peoples gave the king earth and water: the Thessalians, Dolopians, Enienians, Perrhaebians, Locrians, Magnesians, Malians, Achaeans of Phthiotis, and, led by the Thebans, the rest of the Boeotians except the Thespians and Plataeans. These peoples were the object of an oath sworn by those of the Greeks who resisted the Persian invasion to the following effect: that after the successful conclusion of the war all those who had surrendered of their own free will to the Persian, despite being Greeks, were to have a tenth of their property made over to the god of Delphi. These were the terms of the oath sworn by the Greeks.
[133] No heralds were sent by Xerxes to Athens and Sparta with a demand for earth because Darius had done exactly that earlier, and the heralds had been hurled into the Pit in Athens, and into a well in Sparta, with the suggestion that they fetch earth and water from there to take to the king. That is why Xerxes did not send men to demand earth and water from Athens and Sparta. I am not in a position to say what happened to the Athenians as a result of their treatment of the heralds. It is true that their land and their city were devastated, but in my opinion that was not due to their treatment of the heralds.
[134] The Lacedaemonians, however, felt the force of the anger of Talthybius, Agamemnon’s herald. In Sparta there is a shrine of Talthybius, and his descendants, called the Talthybiadae, live there and have the right to act as heralds for Sparta whenever the state needs to send an official message. Following the business with the Persian herald the Spartiates could not receive favourable omens from any of their sacrifices. This went on for quite a time, until the Lacedaemonians became annoyed and alarmed. After a large number of general assemblies, they issued a proclamation to find out whether any of the Lacedaemonians was prepared to die for Sparta. Two aristocratic and wealthy Spartiates, Sperthias the son of Aneristus and Bulis the son of Nicolaus, volunteered to let Xerxes punish them for the deaths in Sparta of Darius’ heralds, and so they were sent to Persia by the Spartiates to be executed.
[135] Their remarkable bravery was matched by equally impressive words. On their way to Susa they went to Hydarnes, a Persian who was the military commander of the coastal peoples of Asia, who put them up and gave them dinner. During the course of the meal he asked them, ‘Why, men of Lacedaemon, do you refuse to be on good terms with the king? Look at me and my situation: you can see that the king knows how to reward good men. The same goes for you too, because he already thinks well of you: if you were to surrender to him, he would probably grant both of you domains to rule in Greece.’
‘This recommendation of yours, Hydarnes,’ they replied, ‘is not based on a balanced assessment of the situation. You have only half the picture. Although you know what it’s like to be a slave, you’ve never experienced freedom and you have no idea whether or not it’s a pleasant state. If you had experienced it, you’d be advising us to wield not spears, but even battleaxes in its defence.’
[136] That was their reply to Hydarnes. From his house they made their way up to Susa. The first thing that happened, once they gained an audience with the king, was that Xerxes’ guards ordered them, and tried to force them, to fall down and prostrate themselves before the king. Their response to this was to declare that even if the guards were to hurl them headlong down on to the ground they would never do any such thing, not only because it was not the Greek way to prostrate oneself before another human being, but also because that was not what they had come for. Having overcome this obstacle, they then said, ‘King of Persia, the Lacedaemonians sent us to pay the penalty for the death of the heralds in Sparta.’ That was more or less what they said. In reply Xerxes magnanimously said that he was different from the Lacedaemonians: whereas in murdering the heralds they had broken a code of practice followed by the whole of mankind, he would not behave in the very way he was criticizing them for, or release them from their guilt by killing them in return.
[137] So for the time being the anger of Talthybius died down because the Spartiates had taken the appropriate action, even though Sperthias and Bulis returned home. However, it awoke again many years later, during the war between the Peloponnesians and Athens, according to the Lacedaemonians. What happened does seem to me to be a particularly clear case of divinity at work. That it was heralds who bore the brunt of Talthybius’ anger, and that it did not finally die down until it had worked itself out, was only right; but what makes me certain that it was the work of the gods is that it fell on the children of the men sent to the Persian king to appease this anger in the first place—on Nicolas the son of Bulis and Aneristus the son of Sperthias (this was the Aneristus who captured Halieis, a colony of Tiryns, by landing there in a merchant ship filled with men). Nicolas and Aneristus were sent with a message from Lacedaemon to Asia, but were betrayed by the Thracian king Sitalces the son of Tereus and by a man from Abdera called Nymphodorus the son of Pythes; they were taken prisoner at Bisanthe on the Hellespon† and shipped back to Attica, where they were executed by the Athenians, along with a Corinthian called Aristeas the son or Adeimantus. But this happened many years after Xerxes’ expedition, and I now resume my earlier narrative.
[138] Although the ostensible target of Xerxes’ expedition was Athens, it was in fact the whole of Greece. The Greeks had been aware of this for a long time, but they did not all react in the same way. Some of them had given earth and water to the Persian king and so were confident that he would not harm them. Others, however, had not given these tokens of submission and so were terrified, first because there were not enough ships in Greece to confront the Persian advance, and second because most of them did not want to take an active part in the war, and were therefore eagerly collaborating with the Persians.
[139] At this point I feel impelled to express an opinion which I am not going to keep to myself, despite the fact that it will offend a great many people, because I believe it to be true. If the Athenians had taken fright at the danger that was bearing down on them and had abandoned their country, or if they had stayed put where they were but had surrendered to Xerxes, no one would have tried to resist Xerxes at sea. What would have happened on land, then? Even if the Peloponnesians had built wall after defensive wall across the Isthmus, the Lacedaemonians would still have been let down by their allies, not out of deliberate treachery, but because they would have had no choice, in the sense that they would have fallen one by one to the Persian fleet. So the Lacedaemonians would have been left all alone, and in that situation they would have shown their mettle and fought bravely and well—and died nobly. Or an alternative scenario, instead of this one, is that before matters went this far they would have seen that the rest of Greece was collaborating with the Persians and so they would have come to terms with Xerxes. But in either case Greece would have come under Persian rule, because I cannot see what good the defensive wall built across the Isthmus would have done with Xerxes controlling the sea.
As things are, however, anyone who claims that the Athenians proved themselves to be the saviours of Greece would be perfectly correct, because the scales were bound to tilt in favour of whichever side Athens joined. Once they had decided that their preference was for Greece to remain free, it was they who aroused the whole of the rest of Greece (except those places which were already collaborating with the Persians) and, with the help of the gods, repelled the king’s advance. Not even the fearsome and alarming oracles that came from Delphi persuaded them to abandon Greece; they held firm and found the courage to withstand the invader of their country.
[140] For when some emissaries sent from Athens to Delphi entered the temple and took their places (after having performed the prescribed rites in the sanctuary and generally prepared themselves to consult the oracle), the Pythia, whose name was Aristonice, gave them the following prophecy:
Fools, why sit you here? Fly to the ends of the earth,
Leave your homes and the lofty heights girded by your city.
The head is unstable, the trunk totters; nothing—
Not the feet below, nor the hands, nor anything in between—
Nothing endures; all is doomed. Fire will bring it down,
Fire and bitter War, hastening in a Syrian chariot.
Many are the strongholds he will destroy, not yours alone;
Many the temples of the gods he will gift with raging fire,
Temples which even now stand streaming with sweat
And quivering with fear, and down from the roof-tops
Dark blood pours, foreseeing the straits of woe.
Go! Leave my temple! Shroud your hearts in misery!
[141] These words completely disheartened the Athenian emissaries. The doom foretold for them plunged them into utter despair, but then Timon the son of Androbulus, who was one of the most distinguished men in Delphi, suggested that they should go back, this time with branches of supplication, and consult the oracle again, as suppliants. The Athenians took his advice and said to the god, ‘Lord, please respect these branches with which we come before you as suppliants, and grant us a more favourable prediction for our country. Otherwise we will never leave your temple, but will stay right here until we die.’ At this request of theirs the oracle’s prophetess gave them a second prophecy, which went as follows:
No, Pallas Athena cannot placate Olympian Zeus,
Though she begs him with many words and cunning arguments.
I shall tell you once more, and endue my words with adamant:
While all else that lies within the borders of Cecrops’ land
And the vale of holy Cithaeron is falling to the enemy,
Far-seeing Zeus gives you, Tritogeneia, a wall of wood.
Only this will stand intact and help you and your children.
You should not abide and await the advance of the vast host
Of horse and foot from the mainland, but turn your back
And yield. The time will come for you to confront them.
Blessed Salamis, you will be the death of mothers’ sons
Either when the seed is scattered or when it is gathered in.
[142] This oracle was less harsh than the previous one, and that is certainly what the emissaries thought, so they had it written down and then returned to Athens. Back in Athens, they gave their report to the people, and various interpretations of the meaning of the oracle were proposed. The two which clashed most strongly were as follows. Some of the more elderly citizens argued for the view that the god was predicting the survival of the Acropolis; in times past the Athenian Acropolis had been surrounded by a defensive stockade, so they came to the conclusion that the ‘wall of wood’ referred to this stockade. Others, however, maintained that the god was talking about ships, and tried to get the Athenian people to abandon everything else and concentrate on preparing a fleet. But those who claimed that the ‘wall of wood’ meant ships failed to make sense of the last two lines of the Pythia’s prophecy:
Blessed Salamis, you will be the death of mothers’ sons
Either when the seed is scattered or when it is gathered in.
The view that the ‘wall of wood’ was a fleet was confounded by these words, because the official interpreters of oracles took them to mean that if the Athenians took steps to engage the enemy at sea off Salamis, they were bound to lose.
[143] Now, there was in Athens a man called Themistocles the son of Neocles who had just recently risen to a position of prominence. He claimed that the conclusion the interpreters had come to was not quite right. His argument was that if the oracle had really been directed against Athens it would have been phrased in harsher terms; rather than ‘Blessed Salamis’, it would have said ‘Cruel Salamis’ if the inhabitants were doomed to die there. No, the true interpretation of the oracle, he argued, was that the Persians, not the Athenians, were the target of the god’s words. So he advised them to get the fleet ready for a battle at sea, on the grounds that the ‘wall of wood’ referred to the fleet. The Athenians decided that Themistocles’ explanation of the oracle was preferable to that of the official interpreters who would rather they did not prepare for battle—whose advice, in fact, was that the Athenians should not resist at all, but should abandon Attica and find somewhere else to live.
[144] This was not the first time that Themistocles’ point of view had prevailed at an important moment. Once before, when there were huge surpluses of public funds generated by the mines at Laurium and the Athenians were planning to divide it among themselves at the rate of ten drachmas a man, Themistocles had persuaded them to drop this idea of sharing the money out and to use it instead to build two hundred ships for the war, by which he meant the war against Aegina—a war which, at the time in question, proved to be the salvation of Greece, because it forced the Athenians to turn to the sea. In fact, the ships were not deployed in the war for which they had been built, but they were available at Greece’s hour of need. So Athens had already built these ships, and they felt obliged to undertake a further programme of shipbuilding as well. After due consideration, prompted by the oracle, they decided to go along with the god’s advice and commit all their personnel to meeting the Persian invasion of Greece at sea, with the assistance of any other Greeks who were prepared to join them.
[145] So much for the oracles received by the Athenians. All the Greeks who had the best interests of Greece at heart held a meeting at which they exchanged opinions and pledges. The first concrete result of the debate was that they decided to lay aside all mutual antagonism and end any wars that were currently being fought among themselves. There were a number of these conflicts outstanding, but the most serious one was the war between Athens and Aegina. Once they learnt that Xerxes and his army were at Sardis, they also decided to send spies to Asia to keep an eye on Persian affairs. Other messengers were to be dispatched to Argos, to see if they would join the league against Persia, and to Sicily (specifically to Gelon the son of Deinomenes), Corcyra, and Crete to ask for help for Greece. The idea was to try to find a way to unite the whole of the Greek world—to get everyone to think and act in concert—on the grounds that all Greeks were equally threatened by the imminent danger. Gelon was supposed to have enormous resources, far greater than those available to anyone else in Greece.
[146] Their first step, once they had formed these plans and patched up their feuds, was to send three spies into Asia. These men went to Sardis and carefully observed Xerxes’ army, but they were caught and interrogated by the commanders of the land army. They were condemned to death, and were just being taken away for execution when Xerxes found out what was happening. He disapproved of the commanders’ decision and sent some of his personal guards with instructions to bring the spies back to him, if they found them alive, which they did. They brought them before the king, and so he found out why they had come to Sardis. His reaction was to tell his guards to take the men on a guided tour of the whole of his infantry and his cavalry, and when they had feasted their eyes on everything to send them unharmed on their way to any country they wanted.
[147] The reason he made these arrangements, he explained, was that the execution of the spies would have deprived the Greeks of the opportunity to gain advance notice of the incredible size of his forces. The loss of three men would hardly have hurt his enemies, but if the spies got back to Greece, he said, the news of his immense power would in all probability make the Greeks give up their own freedom without the expedition even taking place, so that the Persians would not have to trouble themselves with undertaking a campaign.
There was another occasion when his thinking ran along similar lines. When he was in Abydus he saw supply ships carrying grain through the Hellespont from the Euxine Sea, on their way to Aegina and the Peloponnese. When some of his courtiers realized that these were enemy ships, they were prepared to seize them and they glanced at the king, waiting for him to give the order. Xerxes asked them where the ships were sailing to. ‘To your enemies, master,’ they said, ‘with a cargo of grain.’ And he replied, ‘Well, isn’t our destination the same as theirs? And isn’t grain included among our supplies? So they’re taking the grain there for us—what’s wrong with that?’
[148] So the spies were sent home to Europe after having a good look around. The next thing the Greeks in league against the Persians did, after sending the spies off on their mission, was send a delegation to Argos. Now, according to the Argives, they had already been informed at the beginning about the Persian initiative against Greece, and they realized that the Greeks would try to enlist their support against the Persians, so they sent emissaries to Delphi to ask the god what would be the most advantageous course for them to take, considering that the loss of six thousand men, killed by Lacedaemonian troops under Cleomenes the son of Anaxandridas, was still in the recent past. It was this loss, in fact, they say, that prompted them to consult Delphi. The reply they received to their question from the Pythia was as follows:
Argos, loathed by your neighbours, but dear to the immortal gods—
Keep your spear indoors, take up a defensive position.
Defend the head, and the head will preserve the body.
This statement by the Pythia had been made some time before. When the Greek delegation arrived in Argos, they presented themselves before the Council and delivered the message they had been entrusted with. The Argive reply was that they were ready to comply, as long as they got Lacedaemonian agreement to a 30-year peace treaty with them and as long as they were given the command of half the allied forces. They claimed that it would be only fair, in fact, for them to have full command, but that they would still be satisfied with half.
[149] Now, the oracle had forbidden the Argives from entering into an alliance with the Greeks, but despite that, in this Argive version of events, the Council gave this reply to the messengers. Their desire for a 30-year treaty outweighed their anxieties about the oracle, because they wanted their sons to be able to reach adulthood in this period. They were worried, they said, in case without such a treaty they might find themselves under Lacedaemonian control for ever, if on top of the calamity that had already befallen them they met with another disaster, this time at the hands of the Persians. The Spartan members of the Greek delegation replied to the Council’s proposals by saying that they would refer the matter of the treaty back to a more numerous body than they constituted, but they had been authorized to respond on the question of leadership. And so they pointed out that they had two kings, whereas the Argives had only one, and that while this made it impossible for either of the two Spartan kings to lose his command, there was nothing to stop the Argive king’s views carrying the same weight as those of their two kings. Faced with this situation, the Argives claim, they were so disgusted by the Spartiates’ selfishness that they preferred to be ruled by the Persians rather than give way to the Lacedaemonians; so they told the Greek delegation that they had to leave Argive territory before sunset, or else be treated as enemies.
[150] So much for the Argive version of these events. Throughout Greece, however, one hears a different version, to the effect that Xerxes sent a herald to Argos before committing himself to the invasion of Greece. On arriving in Argos the Persian herald is supposed to have said, ‘Men of Argos, here is the message from King Xerxes to you: “According to our traditions, we are descended from Perses, whose father Perseus was the son of Danaë, and whose mother was Andromeda the daughter of Cepheus—which means that we are descended from Argive stock. It follows that it would be wrong for us to make war on you, since you are our ancestral line, and it would be wrong for you to take up arms against us by siding with others; instead you should keep yourselves to yourselves and stay where you are. After all, if everything goes according to plan, you will be second to none in my estimation.”’
According to this version of events, the Argives were so taken by Xerxes’ message that they did not put themselves forward or make any demands on the Greeks at the time, but later, when the Greeks tried to enlist their support, they made the demands mentioned above because they knew that the Lacedaemonians would refuse them any share in the leadership and so they would have an excuse for doing nothing.
[151] There are people in Greece who claim that the following story, which concerns events that happened many years later, confirms this alternative version. An Athenian delegation consisting of Callias the son of Hipponicus and several colleagues happened to have gone to the Memnonian city, Susa, on other business, and they coincided with an Argive delegation which had been sent to ask Artaxerxes the son of Xerxes whether the pact of friendship they had entered into with Xerxes was still in place, or whether Artaxerxes regarded them as enemies. King Artaxerxes assured them that the pact was definitely still in place, and that there was no city which found more favour with him than Argos.
[152] Now, I am not in a position to say with absolute certainty that Xerxes did send this message to Argos and that an Argive delegation did go to Susa to ask Artaxerxes about their friendship. The only version of events I am prepared to affirm is the one told by the Argives themselves. I do, however, know this much: if everyone in the world were to bring his own problems along to market with the intention of trading with his neighbours, a glimpse of his neighbours’ problems would make him glad to take back home the ones he came with. In other words, there are worse things in the world than what the Argives did. I am obliged to record the things I am told, but I am certainly not required to believe them—this remark may be taken to apply to the whole of my account. After all, one can also hear it said that it was actually the Argives who invited the Persians to invade Greece, since they had come off badly in their conflict with the Lacedaemonians and felt that any situation was preferable to their present distress.
[153] So much for what was said about the Argives. The allies also sent another deputation (which included Syagrus, who was the Lacedaemonian representative) to Sicily, to meet with Gelon. Now, Gelon was descended from a man who was born on the island of Telos, off Triopium, but who settled in Gela. When Gela was colonized by emigrants from Lindos in Rhodes, led by Antiphemus, this ancestor of Gelon’s went with them. In time this man’s descendants came to hold, as a hereditary post, the priesthood of the chthonian goddesses. The first of their forebears to gain the office was a man called Telines. What happened was that some Geloans came off worst in a political dispute and were banished to the town of Mactorium, inland from Gela, and Telines managed to restore them to Gela without relying on force of arms, but only the implements sacred to the goddesses. I cannot say where he got these implements from, or whether they were actually his already, but in any case he used them to restore the exiles, on the condition that his descendants should hold the priesthood of the goddesses. This is the information I was given, but it seems remarkable to me that Telines managed to achieve such a difficult feat—the kind of feat that is normally achieved only by men of exceptional bravery and manly strength—when according to the inhabitants of Sicily Telines was, on the contrary, a rather soft and effeminate person.
[154] So that is how Telines gained this office. When the tyrant of Gela, Cleander the son of Pantares, died (or rather, was killed by a Geloan called Sabyllus), after a reign of seven years, his brother Hippocrates became tyrant. On his accession Gelon, who was a descendant of Telines the priest, served among his personal guards—a sizeable unit which also included Aenesidemus the son of Pataïcus.† A short while later, however, he was promoted to the command of all the cavalry in recognition of his bravery, because whether they were besieging Callipolis and Naxos or Zancle and Leontini, or fighting a combined force of Syracusans and large numbers of native non-Greeks—wherever Hippocrates went to war, Gelon fought with the highest distinction. Apart from Syracuse, none of the places I have mentioned avoided being brought under Hippocrates’ dominion. The Syracusans were defeated at the battle of the River Elorus, but the Corinthians and Corcyrans saved them by negotiating a deal whereby Syracuse had to give Hippocrates the town of Camarina, which was originally a Syracusan settlement.
[155] Hippocrates had been tyrant for the same number of years as his brother when he met death at the town of Hybla during a war against the Sicelians. Gelon then pretended to support Hippocrates’ sons Euclides and Cleander against the Geloans, who wanted an end to their subjection, but in fact, once he had defeated the Geloans in battle, he usurped the kingdom from Hippocrates’ sons and installed himself as tyrant instead. After this piece of good fortune, a coup at Syracuse resulted in the expulsion of the Landowners, as they are called, by the general populace and the Landowners’ own slaves (who are known as the Cyllyrians); Gelon engineered the return of the Landowners from their new base in Casmene to Syracuse and added Syracuse to the places under his control, because no sooner had he set out against them than the Syracusan people surrendered both themselves and the city to him.
[156] Now that he had Syracuse, he was less interested in the government of Gela; he let his brother Hiero take care of Gela while he proceeded to strengthen Syracuse, which was the only place he cared about. In no time at all Syracuse shot up and began to flourish. In the first place, he demolished the town of Camarina and moved all the inhabitants to Syracuse, where he enrolled them as citizens, and then he did the same to half the inhabitants of Gela. Also, when the Megarian community in Sicily agreed to terms after being besieged by him, he took the men of substance, and instead of killing them as they expected, because it was they who had started the war, he moved them to Syracuse and added them to the citizen body. As for the general Megarian populace, who were not to blame for the war and therefore expected to remain unpunished, he brought them to Syracuse too—and sold them for export from Sicily. He treated the Euboean community in Sicily in exactly the same way, with the same distinction between rich and poor. The reason for this, in both cases, was that he regarded the general populace as extremely annoying to live with. So these tactics had enabled Gelon to become a tyrant of considerable importance.
[157] To resume: when the Greek deputation arrived in Syracuse, they met with Gelon and said, ‘The Lacedaemonians and their allies have charged us with trying to enlist your help against Persia. You have heard, of course, about the threat to Greece, and how a Persian is planning to bridge the Hellespont, bring an army drawn from all over the east out of Asia, and invade Greece. He claims that Athens is his target, but in fact he intends to gain control over the whole of Greece. Now, you have gained a position of great power, and your rulership of Sicily means that quite a large portion of Greece is in your hands, so we are asking you to support those of us who are fighting for the freedom of Greece and join our struggle. With all Greece united, we form a powerful body of fighting men and we become a match for the invaders, but if some of us sell out and others refuse to help, and if the sound part of Greece remains small, then there is a distinct danger of the whole of Greece falling into hostile hands. If Xerxes defeats us in battle and makes us his subjects, you should not expect him not to pay you a visit. No, you should take precautions: by helping us you are helping yourself. Well-planned action invariably wins a favourable outcome.’
[158] In response Gelon laid into them. ‘It is only self-interest,’ he said, ‘that has made you Greeks dare to come here and ask me to join forces with you against Persia. But I asked you, some time ago, to help me take on a foreign enemy, when I was locked in combat with the Carthaginians; I urged you to avenge the murder of Dorieus the son of Anaxandridas by the Segestans; I offered to help you liberate the trading-centres which have proved highly advantageous and profitable to you. But did you come to help? No, not for my sake or to avenge the murder of Dorieus. For all you care, the whole of Sicily might be in foreign hands. As it happens, though, things went well for us, and our position even improved. But now it’s your turn: war has come to you, and now you think of Gelon. Still, although your treatment of me was disgraceful, I will not reciprocate. I am in fact prepared to help you by providing 200 triremes, 20,000 hoplites, and contingents, each 2,000 strong, of archers, slingers, and light-armed horsemen. I also guarantee to supply the whole Greek army with grain for the duration of the war. There is one condition, however: that I should be the supreme commander of the Greek forces against Persia. If this condition isn’t met, I won’t come myself and I won’t send any troops either.’
[159] This was too much for Syagrus. ‘“Surely he would groan aloud”,’ he said. ‘Agamemnon the son of Pelops would groan long and loud, if he heard that Spartiates had been robbed of their leadership by Gelon and Syracusans. Enough! Let’s hear no more of this idea that we should surrender the command to you! If you want to help Greece, fine—but rest assured that it will be under Lacedaemonian leadership. If you can’t stand taking orders from others, you’d better not join in.’
[160] Faced with the hostility evident in Syagrus’ words, Gelon came up with his final offer. ‘My Spartiate friend,’ he said, ‘when insults descend on a man his anger tends to rise. However, although your words were patently insulting, you haven’t persuaded me to be rude in return. Given how strongly attached to the leadership you are, it’s hardly surprising that I should be even more attached to it, since I have under my command an army many times the size of yours and a much larger fleet. But in view of your antagonism, we will moderate our original proposal. If you lead the land army, I will have the fleet; or if you prefer the naval command, I am perfectly prepared to take the land army. It’s up to you: you must either be content with this proposal or leave here without gaining the kind of reinforcements I have offered.’
[161] It was the Athenian representative who replied to this offer of Gelon’s, cutting in before Syagrus had a chance to speak. ‘Syracusan king,’ he said, ‘Greece sent us on this mission to you because we needed an army, not a leader, but you seem to be refusing to send an army unless you achieve your goal of winning a position of authority over Greece. As long as† you were asking for the supreme command of the Greek forces in their entirety, we Athenians were happy to keep quiet, because we knew that the Laconian representative would be capable of replying for us as well. But now that you have withdrawn to a position of asking for the command of the fleet rather than all the Greek forces, we should tell you how things stand. Even if the Laconian representative were prepared to let you gain control of the navy, we would not. The navy is ours, unless the Lacedaemonians themselves want it. If they want this command, we won’t stand in their way, but we won’t let anyone else have it. It would make a nonsense of our having acquired the largest seagoing force in Greece if we were to concede the command to Syracuse. After all, we are Athenians, the most ancient race in Greece, the only ones to have remained in the same homeland for all our history. Even the epic poet Homer declared that at Ilium there was no one better at deploying and marshalling troops than an Athenian, so there is no blame attached to us for saying it.’
[162] ‘Yes, my Athenian friend,’ Gelon replied, ‘it looks as though you have the commanders—but you won’t have the men for them to command. Since you obstinately refuse to give anything away, but want it all, the sooner you leave, the better. Go home and tell Greece that the spring has been taken from her year.’
[163] After conducting this business with Gelon, the delegation set sail for Greece. The situation did cause Gelon some alarm, in case Greece might not have the resources to overcome Persia, but he could not stand the idea of going to the Peloponnese and having to take orders from Lacedaemonians, when he was the tyrant of Sicily; he found that prospect intolerable. So having ignored that path, he took another one. As soon as he heard that Xerxes had crossed the Hellespont, he sent to Delphi a man from Cos, Cadmus the son of Scythes, with an escort of three penteconters. Cadmus carried with him a great deal of money and words of friendship, and his instructions were to wait and see which way the war went. If Xerxes won, he was to give him the money, and also earth and water on behalf of Gelon’s subjects, whereas if the Greeks won, he was to return to Sicily.
[164] Some time earlier, Cadmus had become the tyrant of Cos on his father’s death. Although his reign was secure and he was in no danger, from a sense of justice he voluntarily handed the reins of government over to the Coan populace. He then emigrated to Sicily, where he took over the city of Zancle from the Samians and settled there, changing its name to Messana. So this was how a sense of justice brought Cadmus to Sicily, and it was because Gelon knew him as an honest man from personal experience as well that he gave him this mission. Perhaps the most significant testimony Cadmus left to his morality, in a lifetime of moral behaviour, was that although he could have seized the enormous sum of money Gelon had entrusted to him, since it was his to dispose of, he did not choose to do so, and after the Greek victory at sea and Xerxes’ retreat, he returned to Sicily with the full amount of money.
[165] Another story one hears from the inhabitants of Sicily is that even though it would have involved taking orders from the Lacedaemonians, Gelon would have helped Greece if it had not been for the actions taken by Terillus the son of Crinippus after his expulsion from Himera by the king of Acragas, Theron the son of Aenesidemus. At more or less the same time as the events we have been talking about, Terillus brought to Sicily an army of 300,000 Phoenicians, Libyans, Iberians, Ligyes, Elisyces, Sardonians, and Cyrnians, under the command of the Carthaginian king, Hamilcar the son of Hanno. One of the things which persuaded Hamilcar to support this invasion was that he was a guest-friend of Terillus, but the decisive factor was the enthusiasm for the project displayed by Anaxilaus the son of Cretines. Anaxilaus, who was married to Terillus’ daughter Cydippe, and who was the tyrant of Rhegium, gave Hamilcar his own children as security and brought him in to support his father-in-law’s attack on Sicily. It was because of this situation, they say, that Gelon could not help the Greek war effort, and so sent the money to Delphi instead.
[166] The Sicilians also say that the day on which Gelon and Theron beat Hamilcar of Carthage in Sicily happened to be the very same day that the Greeks beat Xerxes at Salamis. Hamilcar—a Carthaginian on his father’s side, but his mother was from Syracuse—had become the king of the Carthaginians thanks to his courage. My information is that during the battle, when defeat was imminent, he vanished and was never seen again, alive or dead, anywhere on earth, although Gelon searched for him everywhere.
[167] The Carthaginians themselves have a plausible explanation for this. They say that throughout the battle between their non-Greek troops and the Greeks (in other words, from early in the morning until late in the evening, because that is how long the engagement lasted), Hamilcar stayed in the camp burning sacrificial animals whole on a huge pyre and seeking favourable omens; he happened to be pouring libations on the victims when he saw that his troops were being repulsed, and he threw himself into the flames. So the reason he was never found, on this account, is that he was burnt to ashes. In any case, whether this Phoenician explanation for Hamilcar’s disappearance is correct, or whether something else happened, as the Carthaginians and Syracusans say,† the Phoenicians offer him sacrifices and have built monuments in his memory throughout their colonies, including their most important colony, Carthage itself. Anyway, so much for events in Sicily.
[168] Here is what the Corcyrans said and did in response to the Greek delegation. They were visited by the same group of messengers as had gone to Sicily, and the arguments used to appeal for their assistance were identical to the ones used on Gelon. Their immediate reaction was to promise to send reinforcements and to help the war effort, on the grounds that they could not just stand by and watch Greece being destroyed. After all, they said, the fall of Greece would inevitably be followed the very next day by the loss of their own freedom, so they had to do all they could to help.
This response of theirs had a specious attractiveness, but their sympathies lay elsewhere, and when it came to actually sending help they did man sixty ships, which eventually set sail, but then they put in at the Peloponnese and rode at anchor off Pylos and Taenarum in Lacedaemon, while they too waited to see how the war would turn out. They did not anticipate a Greek victory, but expected that the Persians would easily win and would gain control over the whole of Greece. So their actions were deliberately designed to enable them to say to Xerxes, ‘My lord, because of our considerable resources, and because we could have supplied a good number of ships—more than anyone else except Athens, in fact—the Greeks tried to enlist our help in the war, but we did not want to oppose you or do anything that might displease you.’
They hoped that this speech would win them better treatment than the other Greek states, and I imagine that is exactly what would have happened. But they also prepared an excuse they could offer to the Greeks, which they did in fact resort to later, because when the Greeks accused them of not sending help, they said that they had manned sixty ships, but then found it impossible to round Cape Malea because of the Etesian winds. That, they said, was why they had failed to reach Salamis; it was certainly not cowardice that had made them miss the battle. This was how they deflected the Greeks.
[169] The response of the Cretan communities to the Greeks appointed to try to enlist their help was jointly to send emissaries to Delphi to ask the god whether it was to their advantage to help Greece. The Pythia’s reply was as follows: ‘Fools, are all the tears Minos has made you shed for the help you gave Menelaus not enough for you? And what was the reason for Minos’ anger? Because you helped the Greeks avenge the abduction of the woman from Sparta by a foreigner, while they did not help avenge his death in Camicus.’ When the Cretans heard this reply, they refrained from providing any assistance.
[170] For there is a story that Minos’ search for Daedalus took him to Sicania (now called Sicily), where he met a violent death. After a while, at the god’s urging, all the Cretans except the Polichnians and the Praesians launched a major military strike against Sicania. For five years there they besieged the town of Camicus (which is inhabited nowadays by people originally from Acragas), but they were unable to take it, and could not stay any longer either since they were faced with starvation, so they eventually abandoned the siege and set off back home. During their return voyage, when they were off Iapygia they met a heavy storm and were driven ashore. Their boats were wrecked and they could no longer find any way of getting back to Crete, so they stayed where they were, founded the community of Hyria, and became Messapians of Iapygia instead of Cretans, exchanging life on an island for life on the mainland. Now, various colonies were founded from Hyria, and it was these colonies that the people of Tarentum were trying to lay waste, many years later, when they suffered a major defeat. In fact, this is the greatest slaughter of a Greek population that we know of. It was not only the people of Tarentum who were involved in the disaster, but the citizens of Rhegium too, who went to support the Tarentines, at the insistence of Micythus the son of Choerus. Three thousand died from Rhegium, and there was no counting the number of Tarentines who lost their lives. Micythus, a former house-slave of Anaxilaus, had been left in charge of Rhegium; he was the man who was banished from Rhegium, moved to Tegea in Arcadia, and set up all those statues in Olympia.
[171] However, this incident involving Rhegium and Tarentum is an addendum to my account. According to the Praesians Crete, which was now depopulated, was colonized by others, especially Greeks. Then, two generations after Minos’ death, the Trojan War took place, and it is clear that Menelaus received help of high quality from Cretans during the war. But when they got back from Troy their payment was that both they and their domestic animals were stricken with starvation and disease, until Crete was once again depopulated. Present-day Cretans are a third wave of immigrants, and share the island with the remnants of the previous inhabitants. So that is what the Pythia was reminding them of when they were planning to help the Greek war effort.
[172] The Thessalians originally collaborated with the Persians only because they had no choice in the matter. They made it plain that they did not like what the Aleuadae were up to, because as soon as they learnt that Xerxes was poised to enter Europe, they sent messengers to the Isthmus, where representatives from all over Greece—at least, from those Greek states which had the best interests of Greece at heart—had gathered for a conference. When the Thessalian messengers got there they addressed them as follows: ‘Men of Greece, if you want to shelter not just Thessaly but the whole of Greece from war, you have to guard the pass through Mount Olympus. We’re ready to help you in this, but we can’t do it alone: you must send a good-sized army. Otherwise, you can be sure that we will come to terms with Persia, because we don’t feel that we should stand alone and die for you just because we’re in such an exposed position compared to the rest of Greece. If you refuse to come to our help, there’s no other pressure you can bring to bear on us, because we are already under the strongest pressure there is—impotence. We will try on our own to find some means of saving ourselves.’ That was the Thessalians’ speech.
[173] In response, the Greeks decided to send a land army by sea to Thessaly to guard the pass. The army duly assembled and set off by sea through the Euripus, to Alus in Achaea, where they disembarked and left their ships. From there they made their way to Thessaly and arrived at Tempe, where they pitched camp at the pass which runs beside the River Peneius from coastal Macedonia into Thessaly, between Mount Olympus and Mount Ossa. There were approximately ten thousand Greek hoplites assembled there, reinforced by Thessalian horsemen. The division commander who had been chosen to lead the Lacedaemonian troops, despite not being of royal lineage, was Euaenetus the son of Carenus, while the Athenians were under the command of Themistocles the son of Neocles. However, they stayed there only a few days, because a message arrived from Alexander of Macedonia, the son of Amyntas, advising them to pack up and leave the pass, without waiting to be trampled underfoot by the advancing army, whose size and naval capacity were detailed in the message. Now, this message seemed to them to contain good advice, and Alexander appeared sympathetic to the Greek cause, so they did as he suggested. It seems to me, however, that the deciding factor was fear, induced by the fact that they had found out that there was another route into Thessaly from inland Macedonia, running through Perrhaebia via Gonnus—which was in fact the route Xerxes’ army took. So the Greeks returned to their fleet and made their way back to the Isthmus.
[174] So much for the expedition to Thessaly, which took place when Xerxes was on the verge of crossing over into Europe from Asia, and was already in Abydus. Given that they had been abandoned by their allies, the Thessalians did collaborate with the Persians—so wholeheartedly in fact, and with so little trace of their former hesitancy, that they turned out to be more useful to Xerxes in the war than anyone else.
[175] On arriving back at the Isthmus, the Greeks tried to decide, in view of what Alexander had said, how and where to wage war. The point of view that won the day was that they should defend the pass at Thermopylae. It looked narrower than the pass into Thessaly, and it was also nearer home.† They certainly did not know of the existence of the path which led to the downfall of those Greeks who fell at Thermopylae until they arrived there and heard about it from the Trachinians. So they decided to prevent the Persians from entering Greece by defending this pass. Meanwhile the fleet was to sail to Artemisium in Histiaeotis, so that each of the two forces would be close enough to learn the other’s situation.
[176] The terrain in these two places is as follows, taking Artemisium first. The expanse of the Thracian Sea narrows down to a sound between the island of Sciathos and Magnesia on the mainland, and after this sound comes Artemisium, a beach on the Euboean coast, with its sanctuary of Artemis. As for the pass through Trachis, it is, at its narrowest point, only half a plethron wide. In actual fact, though, this is not the narrowest part of the region thereabouts; both before and after Thermopylae the pass narrows even further, until at Alpeni, which is after Thermopylae, it is no more than a cart-track, and before it, at the Phoenix River near the town of Anthela, it becomes a mere cart-track again. The western part of Thermopylae is a tall, sheer, inaccessible cliff which stretches away to Mount Oeta, while to the east of the road there is only marshland and the sea. In the pass there are warm bathing-pools, which the local inhabitants call the ‘Pots’, and an altar to Heracles is located there. There was once a wall built across the pass, with a gate added a long time ago. The Phocians built the wall, prompted by fear, when the Thessalians came from Thesprotia to live in Aeolis, which they now hold. So because the Thessalians were trying to conquer them, the Phocians took this precautionary measure, and also at roughly the same time let the warm water run down into the pass so as to corrugate the ground with gullies, and did everything they could to prevent the Thessalians invading their territory. The original wall had been built a long time ago, and most of it was by now lying in ruins as a result of the passage of time, but the Greeks decided to restore it there, to keep the Persians out of Greece. There is a village lying very close to the road, called Alpeni, and the Greeks reckoned on being able to supply themselves with provisions from there.
[177] These, then, were the places that the Greeks thought would suit them. They looked at all the possibilities and realized that the Persians would be unable to take advantage of their superior numbers or make use of their horsemen there, so they decided that this was the place to meet the invader on his way into Greece. When news came that the Persians were in Pieria, they brought their meeting to an end and set out from the Isthmus—the land army for Thermopylae and the fleet for Artemisium.
[178] So the Greek forces went their separate ways to war, with due speed. Meanwhile, the people of Delphi were busy consulting the god because they were frightened about their own future and that of Greece as a whole; the oracular response was that they were to pray to the winds, which would prove to be important allies of Greece. The first thing the Delphians did, having accepted the validity of the oracle, was communicate its details by messenger to the Greeks who wanted freedom, and thereby earn the undying gratitude of these Greek states, who had been terrified of the invaders. The next thing the Delphians did was build an altar to the winds in Thyia (the place is named after Thyia, the daughter of Cephisus, who has a precinct there), and offer propitiatory sacrifices to them—a practice initiated by that oracle which has continued right up to today.
[179] Xerxes’ fleet was ready to set out from Therma, but first their ten fastest ships headed for Sciathos, where there was an advance guard of three Greek ships, one from Troezen, one from Aegina, and one from Attica. At the sight of the Persian ships in the distance, the Greeks fled.
[180] The Persians gave chase and the ship from Troezen, whose captain was Praxinus, fell into their hands straight away. They then took the best-looking marine on board up to the prow and slit his throat, since they counted the best-looking of the first batch of Greek prisoners they captured an auspicious sacrificial victim. The name of the man who was slaughtered was Leon—a name which was perhaps partly responsible for his fate.
[181] However, things did not go so smoothly for the Persians in the case of the Aeginetan trireme, under the command of Asonides. This was due to one of the marines, Pytheas the son of Ischenoüs, whose bravery was unsurpassed that day. Even after the capture of his ship, he fought on until his whole body had been hacked to pieces. At last he fell to the deck, but he was not dead. There was still breath in him, and the marines from the Persian ships were so impressed by his courage that they took a great deal of care to keep him alive. They dressed his wounds with myrrh and wrapped them in bandages made out of fine linen cloth, and when they got back to their encampment they proudly showed him off to the whole army and treated him well, while the rest of the prisoners from the Aeginetan ship were treated as slaves.
[182] So two of the Greek ships had been captured. As the third one, whose captain was an Athenian called Phormus, was trying to escape it ran aground on the silt-banks at the mouth of the Peneius, so that only the ship fell into Persian hands. None of the Athenian crew did, because as soon as they had run the ship aground, they leapt out and found their way back to Athens via Thessaly.
[183] Beacons on Sciathos let the Greeks who were stationed at Artemisium know what had happened. The news made them afraid, and they changed their anchorage from Artemisium to Chalcis so that they could guard the Euripus, but they left lookouts on the Euboean hills. Three of the ten Persian ships were dispatched† to the reef called Myrmeca, which lies between Sciathos and Magnesia. Once the Persians had taken a stone pillar out there and set it up on the reef, the whole fleet set out from Therma, now that the way was clear. It was eleven days since the king had marched out of Therma. The pilot who was particularly responsible for showing them the way through the reef in the sound was a man from Scyros called Pammon. After a full day’s sailing the Persians reached Sepias in Magnesia—or rather the beach which lies between the town of Casthanaea and Cape Sepias.
[184] Now, so far, up to the time they reached Sepias and Thermopylae, the Persian forces had been unharmed. My estimate is that their numbers at this point were still as follows. First, on board the 1,207 ships from Asia, there was the original complement drawn from over Asia of 241,400 men, allowing for two hundred men per ship. Each of these ships also carried, in addition to their native crew, thirty marines—Persians, Medes, and Sacae—who made up an additional complement of 36,210. I shall add on to these two figures the crews of the penteconters, on the assumption that there were more or less eighty men per penteconter. Since there were, as I mentioned earlier, three thousand of these boats, then there were presumably 240,000 men on board them. So the total naval force that was drawn from Asia comes to 517,610. There were 1,700,000 in the infantry and 80,000 in the cavalry. I shall also add the Arabian camel-riders and Libyan charioteers, of whom there were 20,000, by my calculations. The total number of men, therefore, from both the fleet and the land army comes to 2,317,610. And so far I have mentioned only the armed forces Xerxes brought from Asia itself, and I have not taken into account the camp-followers or the supply ships and their crews.
[185] Then there were the men brought from Europe; their numbers must still be added to this total, but only an estimate is possible. The Greeks from Thrace and the islands off Thrace provided a hundred and twenty ships, with 24,000 men on board. Then 300,000 would be my guess as to the number of men recruited into the land army from Thrace, Paeonia, Eordia, Bottiaeis, Chalcidice, Brygia, Pieria, Macedonia, Perrhaebia, Enienia, Dolopia, Magnesia, Achaea, and the communities on the Thracian coast. When all these tens of thousands are added to the figures from Asia, the total number of fighting men comes to 2,641,610.
[186] Given a fighting force this large, I imagine that the camp-followers and the crews of the light vessels for grain transport and also of all the other ships that accompanied the armed forces would surpass rather than fall short of the number of fighting men. But suppose I assume that there was exactly the same amount, neither more nor less. In that case, for every ten thousand fighting men, there will be ten thousand of the others. It follows that the number of men led by Xerxes the son of Darius up to Sepias and Thermopylae was 5,283,220.
[187] This is the grand total of men in Xerxes’ expeditionary force; as for the women—cooks and concubines—and eunuchs, no one can possibly know how many of them there were. The same goes for the yoke-animals and other beasts of burden, and the Indian dogs: again, no one could possibly give a reliable estimate of their numbers. In short, it does not surprise me in the slightest that the waters of some rivers should have failed; what I find far more astonishing is the logistics of feeding all those tens of thousands of people. Suppose each person was given a choenix of wheat a day and no more, then 110,340 medimni would be used up every day, not counting the food consumed by the women, eunuchs, draught-animals, and dogs. Nevertheless, among all these thousands upon thousands of men, there was not one who had more of the looks or the height to deserve the position of supreme power than Xerxes himself.
[188] So the fleet set sail and put in at the beach between the town of Casthanaea and Cape Sepias in Magnesia, with the leading ships moored just offshore and the rest riding at anchor behind them. It is not a large beach, and so there were eight rows of ships at anchor projecting from the shore into the sea. They passed the night in this formation, but early in the morning there was a change in the clear, calm weather. The sea became choppy and they were lashed by a violent storm coming from the north-east on a strong wind—the wind called the Hellespontine by those living in the region. Some of the men noticed that the wind was rising and, if their mooring made it possible, they hauled their ships ashore before the storm struck; these were the crews and the ships that survived. All the ships which the storm found out at sea, however, were either driven on to the so-called Ovens of Mount Pelium or the beach, or wrecked on Cape Sepias itself or at the town of Meliboea, or run aground at Casthanaea. It was a monster of a storm, quite impossible to ride out.
[189] There is a story that the Athenians had appealed for help to Boreas, the north wind, as a result of receiving another oracle, this time urging them to appeal for help to their son-in-law. Now, according to Greek legend, Boreas, the north wind, is married to Orithyia, the daughter of Erechtheus—that is, a woman from Attica. The Athenians, it is reported, interpreted this as a marriage connection and concluded that Boreas was their son-in-law. So there they were, at battle stations off Chalcis in Euboeoa. At some point, either when they noticed that the storm was rising or before that, they performed sacrifices and called on Boreas and Orithyia to come to their aid and to destroy the Persian fleet, as they had before off Mount Athos. Now, whether or not this was why Boreas struck the Persians as they were lying at anchor, I cannot say. In any case, the Athenians say that Boreas had come to their help in the past and that on the occasion in question what happened was his doing, and when they got home they built a sanctuary to him on the banks of the River Ilissus.
[190] The most conservative estimate of how many ships were lost in this disaster is four hundred, along with innumerable personnel, and so much valuable property that a Magnesian called Ameinocles the son of Cretines, who owned land near Sepias, profited immensely from this naval catastrophe. In the following days and months gold and silver cups were washed ashore in large numbers for him to pick up; he also found Persian treasure-chests, and in general became immeasurably wealthy. However, although he became very rich from all that he found, he was unlucky in other respects; like other people, he had his share of grief—in his case the horrible accident of killing his own child.
[191] An untold number of supply vessels, such as those carrying grain, were lost. In fact, the commanders of the fleet became worried about the Thessalians attacking them while they were vulnerable from the disaster, so they built a tall, protective palisade, made out of the remains of wrecked ships. The storm raged for three days. Finally, the Magi performed sacrifices and set about soothing the wind with spells, and also sacrificed to Thetis and the Nereids, until the storm died down on the fourth day—or maybe it did so of its own accord. They offered sacrifices to Thetis because the Ionians told them that this was the place from where she had been abducted by Peleus, and that the whole of Cape Sepias was sacred to her and her fellow Nereids.
[192] On the fourth day the storm stopped. The day after the start of the storm the look-outs on the Euboean hills raced down from their posts and let the Greeks know all about the wrecking of the fleet. When the Greeks heard the news, they gave prayers of thanks and poured libations to Poseidon the Saviour, and then sailed back as fast as they could to Artemisium, on the assumption that there would now be few ships to oppose them. Back in Artemisium, they remained at battle stations. This was the origin of the worship that still goes on at Athens of Poseidon as the Saviour.
[193] Once the wind had abated and the sea had grown calm, the Persians hauled their boats back down to the water and sailed along the coast of the mainland, around the Magnesian headland, and then straight into the gulf at the end of which Pagasae is situated. On this gulf in Magnesia there is a place where Heracles is supposed to have been left behind by Jason and his companions from the Argo during their voyage to Aea to fetch the fleece. He had been sent ashore in search of water, because they were planning to stock up on water and then steer for the open sea—which is why the place is called Aphetae. It was here that Xerxes’ men dropped anchor.
[194] Now, for some reason fifteen ships from the Persian fleet put to sea long after the rest, and they somehow spotted the Greek fleet at Artemisium. In fact, they thought it was their own fleet, and they sailed right up to them—and fell into enemy hands! This Persian squadron was under the command of a man from Cyme who was the governor of Aeolis, Sandoces the son of Thamasius. King Darius had once had him crucified, having found him guilty of accepting a bribe to adjudicate a case unfairly when he was one of the royal judges; but he continued to ponder the matter while Sandoces was actually hanging on the cross, and he came to the conclusion that his crimes against the royal house were outweighed by the good he had done. At the same time he realized that he had acted with more haste than wisdom, so he released him. So Sandoces escaped death at the hands of King Darius and lived on, but it was his fate not to escape a second time, when he sailed into the Greek fleet. As soon as the Greeks saw the Persians approaching them, they realized their mistake; they put to sea and easily captured the enemy ships.
[195] On board one of these ships, and therefore captured by the Greeks, was Aridolis, the tyrant of Alabanda in Caria. On another ship was the commander of the Paphian troops, Penthylus the son of Demonoüs, who had brought twelve ships from Paphos, but had lost eleven of them in the storm off Sepias. Now he sailed with his one remaining ship into Artemisium and was taken prisoner. The Greeks questioned these men, extracted all the information they wanted about Xerxes’ army, and then sent them in chains to the Corinthian Isthmus.
[196] So the Persian fleet (all except the fifteen ships under Sandoces’ command that I have mentioned) reached Aphetae, and three days later Xerxes and the land army arrived at Malis, having passed through Thessaly and Achaea. While he was in Thessaly, Xerxes had set up a horse-race, pitting his own horses against the local Thessalian stock, because he had heard that Thessalian horses were the best in Greece. As a matter of fact, though, the Greek horses were easily beaten. The only Thessalian river which proved insufficient for the army’s needs and was drunk dry was the Onochonus, but in Achaea even the largest river, the Epidanus, was reduced to a trickle.
[197] While Xerxes was at Alus in Achaea his guides, who wanted to be generally informative, told him a local story, ‘The Affair of the Sanctuary of Zeus the Devourer’, to the effect that some time after Athamas the son of Aeolus had conspired with Ino and brought about Phrixus’ death, an oracle instructed the Achaeans to impose on Phrixus’ descendants the following ordeals: the senior member of the clan had to keep away from the People’s House (as the Achaeans call their town hall), where they had guards posted. If he entered, he could not leave except to be sacrificed. Furthermore, the guides went on, the potential sacrificial victims fled out of fear in large numbers to another country, but as time went on they returned and, if they were captured entering the town hall, the guides explained how the one who was to be sacrificed was decked all over with garlands and accompanied out of the town hall with a ceremonial procession. It is the descendants of Phrixus’ son Cytissorus who endure this rite, and the reason is that when an oracle told the Achaeans to make Athamas the son of Aeolus a scapegoat for their country and they were about to begin the ritual slaughter, Cytissorus came from Aea in Colchis and protected Athamas, and thereby brought the anger of the god down on his descendants. When Xerxes came near the sacred grove, after hearing this story, he not only kept away from it himself, but also gave orders that no one in his army was to go near it either, and he treated the house of the descendants of Athamas with the same reverence he showed the precinct.
[198] That is what happened in Thessaly and Achaea. After these regions, Xerxes came to Malis and followed the coastline of the gulf, where the sea rises and falls every day. The gulf is surrounded by a strip of low-lying land which varies in width from broad to narrow, and then there are the so-called Rocks of Trachis—tall, inaccessible mountains which enclose the whole of Malis. As one approaches the gulf from Achaea, the first community one comes to is Anticyra, on the River Spercheius, which rises in Enienian country and issues into the sea. About twenty stades further on there is another river called the Dyras; this is the river which, in legend, sprang out of the ground to help Heracles when he was on fire. Another twenty stades away there is a third river, called the Black River.
[199] Five stades away from this Black River is the town of Trachis, built where the strip of land between the mountains and the sea is at its broadest; the plain here is 22,000 plethra in extent, in fact. South of Trachis the mountain range enclosing the area is broken by a gorge through which the River Asopus flows past the foothills of the mountains.
[200] South of the Asopus there is another river, not a large one, called the Phoenix, which rises in these mountains and joins the Asopus. This is where the strip of land is at its narrowest; a carttrack has been made there. Thermopylae is fifteen stades away from the Phoenix, but between the two lies the village of Anthela, which is on the Asopus where it issues into the sea. Here, where the strip of land is broad, there is a sanctuary of Demeter of the Amphictyons, with a meeting-place for the Amphictyons, and a shrine to Amphictyon himself.
[201] So King Xerxes took up a position at Malis in Trachis, while the Greeks were encamped in the pass at the place whose usual Greek name is Thermopylae, although the local inhabitants and their immediate neighbours call it just Pylae, the Gates. With the two armies in their respective positions, Xerxes was in control of everywhere from Trachis northwards, and the Greeks were in control of the whole Greek mainland to the south.
[202] The Greeks who stood against the Persian king at Thermopylae were as follows. As regards heavy infantry, there were 300 Spartiates, 500 from Tegea and another 500 from Mantinea, 120 from Orchomenus in Arcadia, and 1,000 from the rest of Arcadia; then there were 400 from Corinth, 200 from Phleious, and 80 from Mycenae. These were the Peloponnesian contingents, and then Boeotia supplied 700 from Thespiae and 400 from Thebes.
[203] Further heavy infantry was supplied by the Opuntian Locrians and Phocians; when summoned, the Locrians sent every available man and the Phocians sent a contingent of a thousand, since the allies sent messengers to them, appealing for help. In the message they claimed that they were no more than the advance guard of the Greek alliance and that the rest were expected any day; they added that the sea was being guarded and defended by the Athenians, Aeginetans, and other naval contingents. ‘There is nothing for you to fear,’ the message went on. ‘After all, it is nogod, but a mortal human being who is advancing on Greece. At birth, for every man there is or ever shall be, misfortune is part of the mixture—and the greater the man the greater the misfortune. The invader is mortal, and therefore in his case too results will fail to live up to his expectations.’ When they heard this the Locrians and Phocians sent help to Trachis.
[204] Each of these contingents had its own commander, supplied by the respective communities, but the supreme commander, and the most impressive man among them, was the Lacedaemonian, Leonidas the son of Anaxandridas. From Anaxandridas he traced his ancestry back to Heracles via Leon, Eurycratidas, Anaxander, Eurycrates, Polydorus, Alcamenes, Teleclus, Archelaus, Hegesilaus, Doryssus, Leobotes, Echestratus, Agis, Eurysthenes, Aristodamus, Aristomachus, Cleodaeus, and finally Hyllus, who was the son of Heracles. Leonidas had come to rule over Sparta as a result of an unforeseeable situation.
[205] Leonidas had no designs on the kingship because he had two elder brothers, Cleomenes and Dorieus. But then Cleomenes died without a male heir, and Dorieus was already dead too, having lost his life in Sicily, and so the kingdom devolved on to Leonidas, who was the natural choice because he was the older remaining son (Anaxandridas had another son, Cleombrotus, but he was the youngest) and also because he had married Cleomenes’ daughter. So he went to Thermopylae then, with the traditional unit of three hundred select fighting men, all of whom already had sons. On his way he also recruited the Thebans I mentioned in the above list, whose commander was Leontiadas the son of Eurymachus. Leonidas singled these Thebans out and made a particular point of recruiting them, because they were strongly suspected of collaborating with the enemy. So he appealed for their help in the war because he wanted to find out whether they would supply men for him to take or whether they would shy away from such open support of the Greek alliance. They did send troops, but in fact their sympathies lay elsewhere.
[206] The Spartans sent Leonidas and his men on ahead in the hope that the sight would inspire the rest of the allies to arms, and discourage them from joining the ranks of those who were already collaborating with the enemy, as they might if they got the idea that the Spartans were holding back. Later—that is, after celebrating the festival of Carnea, which was holding them up—they planned to waste no time in sending every available man to join Leonidas, leaving behind in Sparta only a defensive unit. In fact, the rest of the allies were also planning to do more or less the same: the Olympic festival happened to coincide with these events, so they all sent only an advance guard, because they did not expect the battle of Thermopylae to be decided so quickly.
[207] That was their intention, but meanwhile the Persians drew near the pass, and the thoughts of the terrified Greeks at Thermopylae turned to escape. The Peloponnesians in general were beginning to think that they should return to the Peloponnese and hold the Isthmus, but this idea made the Phocians and Locrians furious, so Leonidas voted in favour of their staying where they were, but at the same time sending messengers around the various towns and cities, ordering them to send aid, since there were not enough of them to resist the Persian army.
[208] The Greeks were busy trying to decide what to do when Xerxes sent a scout on horseback to see how many men he was up against and what they were doing. While still in Thessaly he had received a report that a small force, led by the Lacedaemonians and the Heraclid Leonidas, had assembled at the pass. So the scout approached the Greeks’ camp and kept them under close surveillance; but he could not see the whole force, because some of them were out of sight behind the now-repaired wall, where they had taken up defensive positions. Others, however—and it happened at this time to be the Lacedaemonians—were posted outside, where their arms and armour lay in front of the wall, and he was able to take stock of them. He watched them in a variety of occupations, such as exercising naked and combing their hair; this surprised him, but he took careful note of their numbers and then made his way back to Xerxes, without meeting any opposition. No one set out after him, and in fact he met with total indifference. When he got back he gave Xerxes a thorough report on what he had seen.
[209] Xerxes listened to what the scout had to say, but he could not understand that in actual fact the Greeks were getting themselves ready to kill or be killed to the best of their ability. Their behaviour struck him as laughable. He sent for Demaratus the son of Ariston, who had accompanied the expedition, and asked him about everything in the scout’s report, item by item, in an attempt to understand what was going on with the Lacedaemonians. ‘I told you about these men before,’ Demaratus said, ‘when we were setting out for Greece. You laughed at me then, and found my ideas about what would happen in this war absurd, just because I take pride in nothing so much as in trying to be honest to you, my lord. But listen to me now. These men have come to fight us for the pass and they are getting ready to do just that. It is their custom to do their hair when they are about to risk their lives. But you can rest assured that if you defeat these men and the force that awaits you in Sparta, there is no other race on earth which will take up arms and stand up to you, my lord, because you are now up against the noblest and most royal city in Greece, and the bravest men.’
Xerxes found what he was saying completely unbelievable and asked him again how such a small body of men was going to resist his army. ‘My lord,’ Demaratus replied, ‘if things do not turn out as I say, you can treat me as you would any other liar.’
[210] Xerxes still did not believe him. He let four days go by, because he expected the Greeks to run away at any moment, but they did no such thing. What seemed to him to be their stupid impudence in staying stung him to anger, and on the fifth day he sent his Median and Cissian troops against them, with orders to bring some prisoners back alive to him. The Medes rushed the Greek position and died in large numbers, but more men pressed forward, and despite the heavy losses the attack was not driven back. They made it plain to everyone, however, and above all to the king himself, that although he had plenty of troops, he did not have many men. And so the battle continued all day.
[211] After a while the Median troops were withdrawn, badly mauled, and their place was taken by the Immortals, as Xerxes called them—the Persian battalion commanded by Hydarnes. It was expected that they would easily finish the job, but when they came to engage the Greeks, they were no more successful than the Medes had been. The result was no different, because the factors were the same: they were fighting in a restricted area, using spears which were shorter than those wielded by the Greeks, and could not take advantage of their numerical superiority. The Lacedaemonians fought a memorable battle; they made it quite clear that they were the experts, and that they were fighting against amateurs. This was particularly evident every time they turned tail and pretended to run away en masse; the Persians raised a great cry of triumph at the sight of the retreat and pressed forward after them, but the Lacedaemonians let them catch up and then suddenly turned and faced them—and cut the Persians down in untold numbers. However, a few Spartiates would be lost as well during this manoeuvre. Once their attempt on the pass had proved a complete failure and they had not gained the slightest foothold in it, whether they sent in regiment after regiment or whatever tactics they used for their attack, the Persians withdrew.
[212] During this phase of the battle, as he watched his men attacking the Greek positions, it is said that fear for his army made the king leap up from his seat three times. The next day, after the first day of fighting had passed as described, the conflict went no better for the Persians. They went into battle in the expectation that the Greeks would no longer be capable of fighting back, given that there were so few of them and that they had already taken so many casualties. But the Greeks formed themselves into units based on nationality which took turns to fight, except for the Phocians who were posted on the heights above to guard the path. On finding that things had not changed from their experiences of the previous day, the Persians pulled back.
[213] Xerxes did not know how to cope with the situation, but then a Malian called Ephialtes the son of Eurydemus arranged a meeting with him, with information for which he hoped the king would pay him handsomely. Ephialtes told him about the mountain path to Thermopylae, and so caused the deaths of the Greeks who had taken their stand there. Later, he went into exile in Thessaly because he became afraid of reprisals from the Lacedaemonians, and while he was there the Amphictyons met at Pylaea and the Pylagori had him proclaimed a wanted criminal, with a price on his head. Later still, he was killed by a man from Trachis called Athenades—at some point he had returned from Thessaly and was living in Anticyra—and although Athenades’ reasons for killing him, which I will explain later, had nothing to do with the battle of Thermopylae, the Lacedaemonians still honoured him for it. In any case, Ephialtes did die later.
[214] There is another story according to which Onetas the son of Phanagoras of Carystus and Corydallus of Anticyra were the ones who gave the king this information and showed the Persians the way around the mountain, but personally I do not believe it. In the first place, one must bear in mind that the Pylagori, representing the Greeks, did not put a price on the heads of Onetas and Corydallus, but on Ephialtes of Trachis, and they had presumably carried out a thorough investigation of the facts. In the second place, we know that this was the reason for Ephialtes’ exile. It is true that even though Onetas was not from Malis he could have known about this path, if he had often visited that part of the country, but in fact it was Ephialtes who showed the Persians the way around the mountain along the path, and I hereby record his guilt.
[215] Xerxes was delighted with Ephialtes’ offer, which was just what he needed. He lost no time in sending Hydarnes and his men on this mission. They set off from the Persian camp at dusk. It was the local Malians who discovered this path. They once guided the Thessalians along it to attack the Phocians (this was the occasion when the Phocians built the defensive wall across the pass to guard against military incursion); in other words, the pernicious use of this discovery of theirs has been known to the Malians for a long time.
[216] Here is a description of the path. It begins where the River Asopus flows through the gorge, proceeds along the ridge of the mountain—the Anopaea, which is also what the path is called—and ends at Alpeni (which is the first settlement in Locris after the border with Malis), at the rock called the Melampygus, where the seats of the Cercopes are and the pass is at its narrowest point.
[217] So this is what the path is like. The Persians crossed the Asopus and made their way along the path throughout the night, with the heights of Oeta on their right and those of Trachis on their left. By daybreak they had reached the peak of the ridge where, as I said earlier, a thousand Phocian hoplites were on guard, with the job of protecting their own country and defending the path. Down below, the pass was being held by the Greeks already mentioned, but the path across the mountain was being guarded by Phocian volunteers who had put themselves forward to Leonidas for the job.
[218] The Phocians did not notice the Persians as they were on their way up, because an oak forest entirely covers the slopes of the mountain. However, they perceived their presence once they were at the top because it was quiet and calm and the Persians naturally could not avoid making a great deal of noise by stepping on the leaves under their feet. The Phocians had only just got to their feet and were still arming themselves when the Persians reached them—and were astonished at the sight, because they had not expected to meet any opposition, and here were men arming themselves for battle. Hydarnes asked Ephialtes what country the enemy force was from, because he was worried in case the Phocians might be Lacedaemonians. Ephialtes put him right, and then Hydarnes got his men into battle formation. The Phocians came under fire from a hail of arrows and retreated up to the top of the mountain; they were convinced that the attack was aimed exclusively at them, so they prepared to fight to the death. It was this conviction that prompted their retreat, but Ephialtes, Hydarnes, and the Persians just ignored them and quickly got on with climbing down the mountain.
[219] The first warning the Greeks in Thermopylae got was when the diviner Megistias inspected the entrails of his sacrificial victims and declared that death would come to them at dawn; secondly, and also while it was still dark, some deserters told them that the Persians were circling around behind them. Thirdly, after daybreak, the look-outs ran down from the heights to warn them. The Greeks discussed what they should do, but there was no unanimity: some argued for not abandoning their post, others put the opposite case. Subsequently, after the meeting had broken up, some of the Greeks began to trickle away back to their various home towns all over Greece, while others prepared to stay where they were with Leonidas.
[210] One also hears it said that Leonidas himself told them to leave because he wanted to spare their lives, but believed that it would be wrong for him and the Spartiates who were there to desert the post they had originally been sent to hold. On this version of events, which I myself strongly incline towards, when Leonidas saw that his allies were demoralized, and unhappy about facing the coming danger with him, he told them that they could go, but that it would not be right for him to leave. Staying there would, he felt, win great renown, and would also preserve Sparta in its prosperity. For in the very early days of the war the Spartiates had consulted the oracle at Delphi about the coming conflict, and the Pythia had predicted that either Lacedaemon would be laid waste by the Persians or their king would die. The prediction, in hexameters, went as follows:
Here is your fate, inhabitants of spacious Sparta:
Either your great and glorious city will be destroyed
By men descended from Perseus, or that will not be,
But the borders of Lacedaemon will mourn the death
Of a king descended from Heracles. For neither the might
Of bulls nor yet that of lions will check the foe head on,
Since he has the might of Zeus. Nor, I declare, will he
Be checked until one of the two has been thoroughly rent asunder.
So I think it was reflection on this prophecy, combined with his desire to lay up a store of fame for the Spartiates alone, that prompted Leonidas to let the allied personnel go. I prefer this to the view that those who left went in disarray after a difference of opinion.
[221] I have a telling piece of evidence to support this view too, which is that Leonidas made no attempt to hide the fact that his reason for sending Megistias away was so that he might avoid sharing their fate. Megistias of Acarnania (who is said to trace his ancestry back to Melampus) was the diviner who was attached to this Greek force; it was he who foretold what was going to happen by inspecting the entrails of his sacrificial victims. However, although he had permission to go, he stayed, but sent away his only child, a son, who had come along on the expedition.
[222] So off went the allied personnel Leonidas had told to leave, in obedience to his wishes. Only the Thespians and the Thebans stayed behind to support the Lacedaemonians. The Thebans did so reluctantly and unwillingly (in fact, Leonidas kept them there as hostages, as it were), but the Thespians, under the command of Demophilus the son of Diadromes, were very glad to stay; they refused to go off and leave Leonidas and his men, but stayed and died with them.
[223] At sunrise Xerxes performed libations and, about the middle of the morning, he launched his attack. Ephialtes had told him to wait only until then, because the way down the mountain is more direct and far shorter than the path he had taken up and around the mountain. So Xerxes’ forces moved forward, and so did Leonidas and the Greeks; in fact they advanced far further into the broader part of the neck of land than they had at first, since they were taking to the field to meet death. On previous days, they had been trying to hold the defensive wall, and they had made sorties into the narrows of the pass, but now they engaged the enemy outside the narrows. Persian casualties were high, because their regimental commanders wielded whips and urged every single man ever onward from behind. Quite a few of them fell into the sea and died there, but even larger numbers were trampled alive underfoot by their comrades, until the dead were beyond counting. For the Greeks knew they were going to die at the hands of the Persians who had come around the mountain, and so they spared none of their strength, but fought the enemy with reckless disregard for their lives.
[224] By now most of their spears had been broken and they were using their swords to kill the Persians. Leonidas fought to the death with the utmost bravery during this mêlée; and with him fell other famous Spartiates too, whose names I was told as men who proved their worth. In fact, I learnt the names of all the three hundred. A number of eminent Persians fell there too, including two of Darius’ sons, Abrocomes and Hyperanthes. They were his sons by Phratagoune, the daughter of Artanes, who was the brother of King Darius, and whose father was Hystaspes the son of Arsames. Artanes arranged his daughter’s marriage to Darius and later bequeathed her his whole estate, because she was his only child.
[225] So two of Xerxes’ brothers fell during the battle there. The Persians and Lacedaemonians grappled at length with one another over the corpse of Leonidas, but the Greeks fought so well and so bravely that they eventually succeeded in dragging his body away. Four times they forced the Persians back, and the contest remained close until Ephialtes and his men arrived. With their arrival, the battle changed: as soon as the Greeks realized they had come, they regrouped and all (except the Thebans) pulled back past the wall to where the road was narrow, where they took up a position on the spur—that is, the rise in the pass which is now marked by the stone lion commemorating Leonidas. Here the Greeks defended themselves with knives, if they still had them, and otherwise with their hands and teeth, while the Persians buried them in a hail of missiles, some charging at them head on and demolishing the wall, while the rest surrounded them on all sides.
[226] For all the courage of the Lacedaemonians and Thespians, a Spartiate called Dianeces is said to have proved himself the bravest. Before battle was joined, they say that someone from Trachis warned him how many Persians there were by saying that when they fired their bows, they hid the sun with the mass of arrows. Dianeces, so the story goes, was so dismissive of the Persian numbers that he calmly replied, ‘All to the good, my friend from Trachis. If the Persians hide the sun, the battle will be in shade rather than sunlight.’ This is a typical example of the quips for which Dianeces of Lacedaemon is remembered.
[227] The next bravest Lacedaemonians after Dianeces are said to have been two brothers, Alpheus and Maron, sons of Orsiphantus. The most distinguished Thespian was a man called Dithyrambus the son of Harmatides.
[228] They were buried on the spot where they fell, and a memorial has been set up there to them and to those who died earlier in the battle, before Leonidas sent some of the Greeks away. The inscription on the memorial reads:
Here once were three million of the foe
Opposed by four thousand from the Peloponnese.
Apart from this general inscription, the Spartiates have their own separate one:
Stranger, tell the people of Lacedaemon
That we who lie here obeyed their commands.
And there is one for the diviner as well:
This is the memorial of famed Megistias,
Cut down when the Persians crossed the Spercheius,
A seer who clearly saw the approach of his doom,
But could not stand to leave the leader† of Sparta.
The Amphictyons commissioned these epigrams and pillars in honour of the dead, with the exception of the one for Megistias the seer, which Simonides the son of Leoprepes wrote because they were guest-friends.
[229] There is a story about two of the three hundred, Eurytus and Aristodamus. Apparently, they had been released from active service by Leonidas and were laid up in Alpeni with extremely severe eye infections. Under these circumstances, they could have opted for joint action and either been evacuated together to Sparta or have died along with their comrades, if they chose to stay. Either course of action was open to them, but they ended up disagreeing and coming to different decisions. When Eurytus heard that the Persians had found a way round the mountain, he called for his weapons, buckled them on, and told his helot to take him to join the fighting. The helot guided him there, but then fled, while Eurytus charged into the fray and was killed. Faint-hearted Aristodamus, however, stayed away from the fighting. Now, if Aristodamus had been the only one who had been sick and had gone home to Sparta, or if they had both made the journey together, I think the Spartiates would not have been angry; but since one of them died while the other avoided death, even though he had no better excuse for doing so, they were bound to be furious with Aristodamus.
[230] However, it is only in one version of the story of Aristodamus’ safe return to Sparta that he used his illness as an excuse. Others say that he had been sent out of the camp as a messenger, and although he could have got back in time for the battle, he did not want to; he prolonged his journey instead, and so survived, whereas the other messenger with him arrived back while the battle was still being fought and met his death.
[231] Anyway, back in Lacedaemon, Aristodamus met with abuse and disgrace—the latter in that no Spartiate would give him a light for his fire or talk to him, the former in that he was nicknamed Aristodamus the Coward. But he completely redeemed himself at the battle of Plataea.
[232] Another one of the three hundred, a man called Pantites, is also said to have survived because he was away carrying a message to Thessaly, and when he got back to Sparta, the story goes on, he met with such dishonour that he hanged himself.
[233] The Thebans under Leonidas’ command fought for a while alongside the Greeks against the Persian forces because they had no choice in the matter. However, as soon as they saw that the Persians were gaining the upper hand, they seized the opportunity afforded by Leonidas and the rest of the Greeks charging off to the hill to part company with the others. Then they held out their hands in surrender and approached the Persians. They explained—and this was nothing but the truth—that they had collaborated with the Persians and had been among the first to give the king earth and water, but had then been forced to come to Thermopylae; they could not, then, be held responsible for any set-backs the king had incurred. The Thessalians verified the truth of what they were saying, and so the Thebans were spared. However, things did not go perfectly for them; some of them were killed as they were approaching the Persian lines, and at Xerxes’ orders quite a large number of them, beginning with their commander Leontiadas, were branded with the king’s mark. This was the Leontiadas whose son Eurymachus, many years later, was murdered by the Plataeans after he and the four hundred Thebans under his command had captured their city.
[234] So much for the Greeks who fought at Thermopylae. Xerxes had a question for Demaratus, so he summoned him and began as follows: ‘You’re a good man, Demaratus. It is your honesty that has convinced me of this, for things turned out exactly as you said they would. So tell me: how many Lacedaemonians are there left? And how many of them are as good at fighting as the ones we have just met? Or are they all that good?’
‘My lord,’ Demaratus replied, ‘Lacedaemon consists of a number of communities, and its total population is therefore very large. But—to tell you what you want to know—there are about eight thousand men in the city of Sparta in Lacedaemon, and while all of them are the equals of the ones who fought here, the rest are good, but not up to the same standard.’
‘Demaratus,’ Xerxes went on, ‘what can I do to defeat these people with the least amount of trouble? Please tell me. After all, you were once their king, so you know their plans inside and out.’
[235] ‘My lord, if you’re seriously consulting me,’ Demaratus replied, ‘here is the best advice I can give you, which is what you deserve. You should consider sending a convoy of three hundred ships from your fleet to Laconia. There’s an island off the coast called Cythera, and Chilon, the wisest man ever born in Lacedaemon, once remarked that the Spartiates would be better off with the island at the bottom of the sea rather than sticking out of it. He was always expecting trouble from it—in fact, exactly the kind of trouble I’m describing. I don’t mean that he foresaw yourexpedition, but he was worried about anyone sending a convoy, no matter who. So your men should use the island as a base from which to make that worry real for the Lacedaemonians. With their own private war on their doorstep, there’s no danger of them coming to help while the rest of Greece is being conquered by your land army, and once the rest of Greece has been enslaved, Laconia will be isolated and vulnerable. Now, what will happen, in all probability, if you don’t do this? There’s a narrow isthmus on the Peloponnese; all the Peloponnesians will form a confederacy designed to resist you, and then this isthmus will be the place where you should expect to meet far fiercer fighting than you have met so far. If you take my advice, though, this isthmus and the Peloponnesian communities will surrender without putting up a fight.’
[236] Now, Xerxes’ brother Achaemenes, the commander of the fleet, happened to be there during this conversation and was afraid that Xerxes would be won over to Demaratus’ suggestion, so he spoke up next. ‘It looks to me, my lord,’ he said, ‘as though you are allowing yourself to be influenced by someone who resents your successes and may even be sabotaging your whole enterprise. Actually, that’s the kind of behaviour Greeks relish; it’s typically Greek to envy success and hate being outdone. If on top of our present disasters, when we’ve just had four hundred ships wrecked, you send another three hundred away from the main body of the fleet on a mission to the coast of the Peloponnese, our enemies will be a match for us in battle. On the other hand, if you keep the fleet intact, it will prove very awkward for them and they’ll have nowhere near our capacity. Besides, the fleet as a whole will support and be supported by the land army if they advance together, whereas if you separate them, your army will be no use to the navy and the navy will be no use to you. What you should do, I think, is come up with a plan that serves your own interests well, without taking the enemy’s side of things into consideration—without thinking about where they’re going to wage war, what they’ll do, and how many of them there are. They can be left to worry about their own business, while we do the same with ours. Any battle in which the Lacedaemonians confront the Persians is not going to heal the wound they have just received at all.’
[237] ‘I think you’re right, Achaemenes,’ Xerxes said. ‘I’m going to follow your advice. Demaratus genuinely thought that his plan was in my best interests, but your ideas are better than his. But I don’t believe that he doesn’t have my best interests at heart. I base this assessment not only on previous advice he has given me, but also on the fact that when someone resents a colleague’s success, his hostility manifests itself in silence; if his colleague seeks his advice, he wouldn’t suggest what seems to him to be the best course of action—unless he is one of those rare individuals, a man of exceptional virtue. On the other hand, no one feels warmer towards another person’s success than a guest-friend, and he will do the best he can to help if asked for his advice. Demaratus is my guest-friend, and so in the future I order everyone to refrain from speaking ill of him.’
[238] After this discussion Xerxes made his way through the bodies of the dead. When he came to Leonidas’ corpse and was told that this was the Lacedaemonian king and commander, he told his men to cut off his head and stick it on a pole. This, to my mind, is the most convincing piece of evidence (although there is plenty more) that during his lifetime Leonidas had been more of an irritation to King Xerxes than anyone else in the world. Otherwise he would never have acted with such abnormal violence towards his corpse, because the Persians are normally the last people in the world, to my knowledge, to treat men who fight bravely with disrespect. Anyway, the men who were given the job carried out his orders.
[239] I shall now return to a point in my account where something was omitted before. The Lacedaemonians were the first to find out that Xerxes was mounting a campaign against Greece, and so they sent a deputation to the Delphic oracle, where they received the prophecy I mentioned a short while ago. But the way they learnt about the impending campaign was remarkable. Demaratus the son of Ariston, who was living in exile in Persia, did not, I imagine (and it stands to reason too), feel affection for the Lacedaemonians, but one might still wonder whether he did what he did out of affection or actually to gloat over them. As soon as Demaratus, who was in Susa, heard of Xerxes’ decision to march on Greece, he wanted to tell the Lacedaemonians. This was very risky—what if he should be caught?—and the only way he could find to get the message to them was to take a folding writing-tablet, scrape off the wax, and write about the king’s decision on the bare wood of the tablet. Then he covered the message up again with melted wax, so that during its journey the tablet would not arouse the suspicions of the guards on the route. When it reached its destination, the Lacedaemonians did not know what to make of it. Eventually, however, according to what I heard, it was Gorgo, the daughter of Cleomenes and wife of Leonidas, who guessed the tablet’s secret by herself. She suggested that if they scraped off the wax they might find a message on the wood. They took her advice, found the message and read it, and then passed the message on to all the other Greek states. Anyway, that is what is supposed to have happened.†