7
Hipparchus, the playboy tyrant whose murder in a lovers’ tiff back in 514 BC had been commemorated by the Athenians as a blow struck for liberty, had himself, throughout his reign, always delighted in invention. An ardent patron of architecture, as princes so often are, he had also possessed a rare passion for literature. Travelers could still read, inscribed beneath the erect phalluses that were a somewhat startling feature of way-markers in Attica, pithy and improving verses, composed by the murdered Pisistratid himself. In other ways, too, the Athenians had benefited from Hipparchus’ bookish brand of tyranny. It was thanks to his enthusiastic backing, for instance, that the cream of Greek literary talent, who would once have sniffed at Athens as a backwater, had come to regard the city as a cultural powerhouse, and flocked to settle there. So determined had the tyrant been to ferry celebrity poets to his court that he had even laid on a luxury taxi service for them, in the form of a fifty-oared private galley.
Even more than for modern literature, however, Hipparchus’ true enthusiasm—and it was one shared throughout the whole Greek world—had been for two peerless epics: The Iliad and The Odyssey, composed centuries previously, and set during the time of the Trojan War. Little was known for certain of their author, a poet named Homer—but he was, to the Greeks, so infinite, so inexhaustible, so utterly the wellspring of their profoundest presumptions and ideals, that only the Ocean, which encompassed and watered all the world, was felt to represent him adequately. No wonder that Hipparchus, looking to put his city on the literary map, had been keen to brand Homer—who was generally, and frustratingly, agreed to have been a native of the eastern Aegean—as somehow Athenian. Pisistratus, Hipparchus’ father, when he sponsored an edition of the poet, was even said to have tried slipping a few surreptitious verses of his own into the texts, hymning Athens and her ancient heroes; Hipparchus himself, less vulgarly, had introduced recitals from the epics to the Panathenaea. Not that these were performed in any refined spirit of belle-lettrisme, however, being rather, like the athletic contests that also featured in the festival, ferociously competitive—which was only fitting. “Always be the bravest. Always be the best.” Maxims, it went without saying, from The Iliad itself.
And regarded by Greeks everywhere, despite Hipparchus’ best efforts, as the birthright of them all. The Spartans, for instance, those countrymen of Helen and Menelaus, hardly needed to stage poetry readings in order to parade their affinity with the values of Homer’s epics. If the letter of their military code derived from Lycurgus, then its spirit, that heroic determination to prefer death and “a glorious reputation that will never die,”1 to a life of cowardice and shame, appeared vivid with the fearsome radiance of the heroes sung by the “Poet.” And of one hero more than any other: Achilles, greatest and deadliest of fighters, who had traveled to Troy, there to blaze in a glow of terrible splendor, knowing that all his fame would serve only to doom him before his time. True, the pure ecstasy of his glory-hunting, which had led him to squabble with Agamemnon over a slave girl, sulk in his tent while his comrades were being slaughtered, and return to the fray only because his beloved cousin had been cut down, was a self-indulgence that could hardly be permitted a Spartan soldier. Nevertheless, that death in battle might be beautiful, that it might enshrine a warrior’s memory, even as his spirit gibbered in the gray shadows of the underworld, with a brilliant and golden halo, that it might win him “kleos,” immortal fame: these notions, forever associated with Achilles, were regarded by the Greeks as having long been distinctively Spartan, too. Others might aspire to such ideals but only in Sparta were citizens raised to be true to them from birth.
When Leonidas, leading his small holding force, arrived in early August at the pass of Thermopylae, then, the example of the heroes who had fought centuries previously in the first great clash between Europe and Asia could hardly have failed to gleam in his mind’s eye. From Homer, he knew that the gods, “like birds of carrion, like vultures,” would soon be casting invisible shadows over his men’s positions—for whenever mortals had to screw their courage to an excruciating pitch of intensity, whenever they had to prepare themselves for battle, “wave on wave of them settling, close ranks shuddering into a dense, bristling glitter of shields and spears and helmets,” they could know themselves passing into the sphere of the divine.2 Certainly, it would have been hard to imagine a more eerie portal to it than Thermopylae—the “Hot Gates.” Steaming waters rose from the springs that gave the pass its name; the rocks over which they hissed appeared pallid and deformed, like melted wax; a tang of sulfur hung moist in the August heat. All was feverish, dust-choked and close. So narrow was much of the pass that at two points either end of it, known as the East and West Gates, there was room for only a single wagon trail. On one side of this road there lapped the marshy shallows of the Gulf of Malis; on the other, “impassable and steepling,”3 the cliffs of Mount Callidromus, tree-covered over the lower crags, then rearing gray and bare against the unforgiving azure. It was a strange and unearthly spot—and one seemingly formed for defense.
As the locals had long appreciated. Men from Phocis, the valley-scored country that lay between Thermopylae and Delphi, had once built a wall across the pass, blocking off not one of the two bottlenecks at either end but rather a stretch some sixty feet wide, the so-called “Middle Gate.” Here the cliffs rose at their sheerest and most unflankable. Leonidas, bivouacking beneath them, immediately set about having the Phocians’ wall repaired: no great challenge, for he had brought with him, in addition to his bodyguard, some three hundred helots and five thousand further troops.4 These, alternately cajoled and bullied into joining him, had come mostly from the Peloponnese—but not all. Seven hundred were volunteers from Thespiae, a city in Boeotia that, like Plataea, had long been resentful of Theban weight-throwing and had willingly donated manpower in support of the allied cause—and four hundred had come from Thebes herself. Leonidas, uncomfortably aware that central Greece was rotten with medizers, had made a point on his way to Thermopylae of calling in on the chief conspirators and bluntly demanding their support. The Theban ruling classes, not yet bold enough to refuse a Spartan king, had responded with silken evasions. Confident, however, that Leonidas was embarked on a suicide mission, they had cheerfully permitted “men from the rival faction,”5 those opposed to their medizing, to leave with him; and Leonidas, desperate for every reinforcement, had received these loyalists gratefully. Even so, he could have had no doubts, as he gazed out at the shimmering emptiness of the flatlands beyond Thermopylae, scanning the horizon for smears of dust, awaiting a first glimpse of the Great King’s monstrous hordes, that there were plenty to his rear who were willing him to fail.
Nor was that the limit of his anxieties. Even as his men were busy digging themselves in, a delegation from the nearby city of Trachis, in whose territory Thermopylae lay, came to Leonidas with some most unwelcome news. The pass, it appeared, was not quite as secure as the strategists back on the Isthmus had cared to presume. There was, skirting the mountainous heights of Thermopylae, a trail. While hardly suited to cavalry or heavy infantry, it was, the Trachians reported, perfectly negotiable by anyone lightly armed. If the barbarians discovered this route, they would surely take it. There was no choice for the defenders of the Hot Gates, but to plug it. Simple enough, it might have been thought—except that Leonidas, with the full strength of the Great King’s army about to hurl itself against his position, could ill afford to spare so much as a single hoplite. In the event, as he had little choice but to do, he compromised. A thousand men from Phocis, whose loathing for the medizing Thessalians had prompted them to side enthusiastically with the allies, volunteered to guard the trail. Leonidas, banking on their local knowledge and on the likelihood that only light infantry would be sent against them, accepted their offer. No Spartans, not so much as a single officer, were sent to leaven their inexperience. Bracing himself for the coming storm, Leonidas wanted all his elite alongside him. Understandable, perhaps—but a hideous gamble, even so.
Not that the Spartan king was the only commander having to make some awkward calculations. Forty miles to the east, across the Malian Gulf and beyond the narrow straits that separated Euboea from the mainland, the allied admirals were fretting over the state of their own flank. True, the station they had chosen appeared, like Thermopylae, to be a strong one. In contrast to the bleak aspect of the facing coastline, where scrub-covered slopes loomed up from the sea like olive teeth set in gums of naked rock, the northernmost tip of Euboea consisted largely of pebbles and dirty sand. Level and long as this beach stretched, it had been a simple matter for the Greeks to haul their warships onto the shingle, hundreds upon hundreds of them; and since there were no shoals or reefs offshore, only a sudden, precipitous deepening of the sea, it promised to be an equally simple matter, once the Persian fleet was sighted, to launch the fleet again. Where, though—and this was the question gnawing at the self-confidence of the Greeks—would the barbarians be heading? If westward, toward the straits that led to Thermopylae, then the allied battle line, pivoting like a door upon a hinge, would be well placed to block their access; but if eastward, down the outer coast of Euboea, either to strike onward at Attica and the Isthmus or to swing back up the opposite side of the island and aim for the Greek fleet’s rear, then the danger would be grave indeed. The Great King commanded so many triremes that he could easily afford to divide his armada in two and still bring overwhelming force to bear on separate fronts. The allied admirals therefore risked finding themselves, not barring the straits that separated Euboea from the mainland, but bottled up inside them. As in the pass, so on the beach, forward defense carried the risk of obliteration.
The first two weeks of August slipped by. Still the approaches to the north remained empty. There stretched, across the sea from the increasingly jittery Greeks, a mountainous peninsula known as Magnesia, forested and monster-haunted; and all knew that it was down this inhospitable coastline that the invaders were bound to come, hidden from the sight of all on Euboea, until, funneling past the island of Sciathos, just off the southern limit of the mainland, they would at last heave into view. Only from Sciathos itself did there appear any prospect of receiving advance warning of their approach, and so three patrol ships were duly stationed on the island, and beacons readied on its hills. Still the sea remained empty of vessels, however—and still, crunching up and down the shingle, wiping sweat from their stinging eyes, the sailors of the Greek fleet kept an anxious watch on Sciathos, and waited for the war to begin. Only at dusk, when the sun set behind the distant peak of Callidromus, could they afford to relax: for no one in the Aegean, where to navigate was to island-hop, presumed to sail across the open sea at night. Then, perhaps, the Greeks could feel themselves transported back to a different age, one in which their forefathers had similarly camped beside their ships on a lonely beach: for although, on a low hill behind them, there stood a temple to Artemis—from which the headland took its name of Artemisium—the strand was otherwise theirs alone.
And so their spirits soared,
as they took positions down the passageways of battle
all night long, and the watchfires blazed among them.
Hundreds strong, as stars in the night sky glittering
round the moon’s brilliance blaze in all their glory
when the air falls to a sudden, windless calm . . .6
Then, one morning in mid-August, at the most unexpected time of the day, just after dawn, a blaze of fire rose suddenly on Sciathos. The enemy had been sighted. A first battle had already been fought. The result had been, for the Greek patrol ships, a humiliating rout. As though from nowhere, and even as the stars were still glimmering, a squadron of ten Sidonian triremes had swooped down upon Sciathos—for the Phoenicians, unlike their rivals, had learned to navigate the open sea by night.7 Comprehensively ambushed, the Greek patrol ships had then been outpaced as well. One had surrendered almost immediately, and the throat of the best-looking prisoner had been ritually cut above the prow as a dedication to the gods: first blood to the Sidonians. The second, by contrast, had been captured only after furious fighting. Indeed, the enemy had been so impressed by the prowess of one particular Greek marine that, having finally overwhelmed him, they had treated his wounds with myrrh, wrapped them up in bandages, and feted him as a war hero. The third ship, an Athenian trireme, had successfully evaded its pursuers only to run aground on a mud flat off an estuary. Not the most glorious start to the defense of Greek liberty.
Meanwhile, back at Artemisium, all was alarm and consternation. Unclear whether the fire beacon on Sciathos heralded the approach of the entire barbarian fleet, crews stumbled over pebbles and waded through shallows in a frantic struggle to launch their ships. As the hours passed, and no enemy reinforcements appeared, it became evident that the Sidonians, rather than forming an advance guard, were engaged only on a reconnaissance mission. Despite its spectacular early successes, this was not going entirely to plan: Greek patrol vessels, skirting the gap between Sciathos and the mainland, watched as three of the enemy triremes foundered on a hidden reef. Nevertheless, back at Artemisium, the Greeks continued to launch their own ships, and then, once they were afloat, to aim for the straits off Euboea and the mainland, as though in headlong panic. Nor, giving even more of an impression of craven-heartedness, was any attempt made to secure the capture of the Sidonians; not even when, with a brazen display of coolness, they began to build a way marker on the hidden reef. It was as though the Greeks, flaunting their own demoralization, were positively looking to have it reported back to the Persian high command.
And perhaps they were. Of course, bearing in mind the full force of the hammer blow that was about to fall on them, a certain twitchiness was only to be expected. It may even have spread to the very top. Eurybiades, the high admiral, was hardly the most inspiring of leaders. As a Spartan, he appears to have felt doubly uncomfortable at finding himself on board a ship so far removed from the Peloponnese. His main contribution to allied strategy was to moan repeatedly that “the Persians were invincible at sea.”8Yet Eurybiades, although the commander, was hardly in command. Effective leadership of the Greek fleet lay instead with the admiral of its largest contingent—and Themistocles had always argued for holding a forward line. Why, then, would he have sanctioned a withdrawal from Artemisium? His nerve, at any rate, could hardly be doubted: he had fought at Marathon; he knew what it was to face the barbarian and not turn tail. He would also have remembered how the celebrated victory had been won. He and his comrades in the weakened center, forced back by their enemy’s advance, turning the barbarians’ own onslaught against them, so that their flanks could be rolled up, had suckered the Persians into a lethal trap. Arrogance, the arrogance of an enemy who believed himself invincible, could, if manipulated with due cunning, transform even a seemingly overwhelming weight of numbers into a liability: such appears to have been the lesson that Themistocles had absorbed from his previous engagement with the enemy. Hence, it may be, his opting to retreat from Artemisium. Withdraw before the Persian battle fleet, tempt it into the narrow straits off Euboea, cramp it for room, attack it—and finish it off, perhaps. A long shot—but long shots had worked before against the Mede.
Not on this occasion, however. The trap had been sprung—but there was no one to take the bait. The day passed, and still the lookouts on the heights of Euboea reported the sea lanes from Magnesia empty. The Greek warships, rather than return to Artemisium, withdrew instead further south. Chalcis, where the weary oarsmen finally paused for breath, lay midway down the western coast of Euboea. From there, dependent on the news brought to them by their lookouts of the Persian fleet’s intentions, the Greeks would be well positioned either to make a dash for the comparative safety of the Attic coastline or return the way they had come, back to the defense of Leonidas’ flank. The oarsmen themselves, with the great ridge of Euboea now positioned like a shield between them and the open sea, and the heat growing ever more sweltering, could certainly feel a measure of relief at being away from the exposed beaches of Artemisium—for sweltering heat in late summer invariably portended a Hellesponter. It was mariners’ lore in the Aegean never to trust the weather after August 12—and August 12 had already come and gone. Still the days slipped by. Still there were no fresh sightings of the Persian fleet. Still there was no easing of the heat. The Greeks, hunkered down at Chalcis, kept their eyes fixed on the warning beacons atop the high Euboean hills, dabbled their toes in the cooling currents of the sea, and did as Apollo had advised them: offered up prayers to the winds.
They also serve who only stand and wait. If Leonidas, on his lonely sentry duty at Thermopylae, was primed for death, then Themistocles, just as surely, had his heart set on survival. Glorious as it was, having left home and family behind, having journeyed to war in a distant land, having staked one’s life in a supreme contest of valor and endurance, then to fall in battle, yet so also, in Greek tradition, might a hero display an instinct for self-preservation and be no less a hero. Achilles, offered by his mother the alternatives of a happy but obscure old age or an early death and undying glory, had not hesitated; but Homer, in his second great epic, had sung the exploits of a man who made a very different choice. Odysseus, as barrel-chested as Themistocles and quite as much a “man of twists and turns,” had wanted nothing more, having sacked Troy, than to return home to his wife. In the cause of achieving that, he had held no ploy, no deception, no ruse beneath him. This was why Athena had admired him and honored him above all her favorites: for “here among mortal men,” as she told Odysseus, “you’re the best at tactics, spinning yarns, and I am famous among the gods for wisdom, cunning wiles, too.”9 So it was that she loved the Athenians, who were held to be the most intelligent of the Greeks; and so it was, too, whenever the impossible appeared suddenly possible, and the solution to a seemingly insuperable problem began to glimmer into view, that a mortal could know Athena stood by his side. Themistocles, weighing up the odds of battle, turning fresh stratagems over in his mind, would surely not have confined himself to raising prayers to the north wind alone.
“In league with Athena set your own hand to work”: so the proverb went.10 For the moment, however, the initiative had slipped from Themistocles’ grasp. His next move would depend on what others did first: the Persians—and the gods of the winds. Still there were no new developments—and still the temperature rose. Then, at last, some ten days, perhaps, after the Greek fleet had abandoned its station at Artemisium, there was a sudden wake-up call. A thirty-oared cutter, captained by an Athenian, a crony of Themistocles named Abronichus, came speeding down the straits to Chalcis. Appointed at the start of the campaign to serve as the liaison officer between Leonidas and the Greek fleet, Abronichus brought his friend alarming news. The phony war, it appeared, was over. The Great King’s army was approaching Thermopylae. The Mede was at the Hot Gates.