Lookouts were hardly needed to warn of the approach of the King of Kings. Well before the first Persian reconnaissance units began spilling out over the flatlands along the shore of the Malian Gulf, Leonidas would have known that a force beyond computation was closing in on him. Cloudless the August sky may have been, but the horizon to the north was lost behind a haze of dust. Ever filthier, thicker, more swirling it grew; and then the earth itself, trampled beneath thousands upon thousands of kicking feet, began to tremble. Such, rendered literal, was the power of the Great King: that he could shake the world. For years, his agents had inflicted on the Greeks a strategy of creeping terror; and now, at last, the terror was at their gates.
For the defenders of Thermopylae, gazing in horror across the bay, the spectacle of the Great King’s hordes was of an order beyond their darkest imaginings. On and on, the din of their progress now thunderous, shimmering in and out of view, borne upon rolling breakers of choking dust, the barbarians advanced. To the Greeks, wiping grit from their watering eyes, feeling the earth beneath them shiver for hour after ceaseless hour, the reports of the three spies sent to Sardis, who had spoken of Asia being emptied, and of millions being mustered against them, must have seemed horrifically confirmed. Panic began to grip the tiny army. All except the Spartans, that is, who maintained their customary composure; and Leonidas, even as he sought to steady nerves among the allies, ordered his bodyguard to hold a position beyond the wall. Soon enough, clattering up through the West Gate, there came a Persian outrider. None of the three hundred looked up. Some combed their long hair, as was the Spartan habit when preparing to face death. Others, their naked bodies slippery with oil, ran or grappled with one another; not strenuously, however, for “on campaign, the exercising required of the Spartans was always less demanding than normal . . . so that for them, uniquely, war represented a relaxation of military training.”11 The Persian scout, having surveyed this scene in astonishment, then wheeled round and galloped away. No attempt was made by the Spartans to stop him.
Later in the day, a formal embassy from Xerxes approached the Hot Gates. Leonidas, who would surely have met it beyond the wall so that the ambassadors could not see how few men he had under his command, was informed of the Great King’s terms. The defenders, if they laid down their arms, might have a free passage back to their homes; the title “Friends of the Persian People” would be granted them; “and on all the Greeks who accepted his friendship, King Xerxes would settle more lands, and of better quality, than any they currently possessed.”12 To many of the Peloponnesians, already itching to scuttle back to the Isthmus, these proposals only confirmed them in their sudden enthusiasm for a retreat from the pass; but the Phocians, for whom the Isthmus might as well have been in Egypt for all the protection it afforded them, responded with fury to the prospect of abandoning Thermopylae. So too, unsurprisingly, did Leonidas; and since he was the commander in chief, and a Spartan king to boot, his resolution was sufficient to sway the waverers. The allies would stay where they were. The pass would be held. When the Great King’s embassy, returning to the Hot Gates, demanded that the Greeks hand over their arms, Leonidas’ defiance was aptly laconic: “Molon labe”; “Come and get them.”13
His countrymen had always prized such gems of cool. The bleaker the circumstances, the more imperturbable a Spartan was trained to be: and Leonidas, perfectly aware that sangfroid was the best morale booster that he could offer his wavering allies, naturally looked to his bodyguard to back him up with some steely nonchalance of their own. They did not disappoint. When the barbarians fired their arrows, one of the locals pointed out tremulously, so many would hiss through the air as to blot out the sun. The Spartans, who were in the habit of dismissing arrows as mere spindles, womanish and cowardly, affected to be colossally unfazed. “What excellent news,” one of them drawled. “If the Mede hides the sun, then so much the better for us—we can fight our battle in the shade.”14
Yet, inspiring though such witticisms surely were, they must have struck Leonidas as perilously close to gallows humor. He knew that in truth the situation facing his men was even graver than most of them appreciated. Themistocles and the Greek fleet, still praying for storms, remained at Chalcis. With Artemisium abandoned, there was nothing now to stop the Persian fleet, once it arrived off Euboea, from heading directly for the shallows off Thermopylae. Such a moment, with the Great King already installed beyond the Hot Gates, could hardly be far off. As Leonidas scanned the eastern horizon, searching for distant masts, he would have watched the deepening of twilight over the Malian Gulf and the blazing of campfires in the pass with profound relief. Night had come—and the Persian fleet had not. The allies still held Thermopylae. But for how much longer? Nervously, men glanced above them. The moon, almost full, gleamed in a cloudless, windless sky. So it would also be gleaming over distant Olympia, and Lacedaemon too. Even though Leonidas had sent messengers to the Isthmus earlier that afternoon with a desperate appeal for reinforcements, he knew that there was little chance of it being answered—not for another week or so, at least, until the games at Olympia and the Carneia were over. And time was running out.
Dawn broke. Still there came no hints of an imminent assault upon the pass. Along the coastal road, straggling units of the Great King’s army and his baggage train picked their way toward his camp. Beyond the Malian Gulf itself, the straits remained empty of Persian shipping. The imperial fleet was surely out there somewhere, closing in from the north, making for a rendezvous with the King of Kings—but where? Perhaps the new day would bring the answer. The sea, touched by the rays of morning, stretched away calm and clear, framing the blue silhouette of Euboea. Far distant, to the northeast, rose the peaks of Magnesia. All was still: curiously, brightly, menacingly still. A sailor, bred to recognize the moods of the Aegean, might have read what the moment portended; but there were few sailors at Thermopylae. The change in the weather, then, coming abruptly as it did, on a sudden howling of wind, must have struck them as something eerie and unearthly, as the breath of the gods indeed. Seemingly from nowhere, a gale began to sweep across the bay, whipping up the waves, lashing the defenders of the Hot Gates with plumes of spray. The light of the dawn darkened to blackness, and thunder rumbled distantly over the Aegean.15 The Hellesponter, much yearned for, long prayed for, had come at last—“and all the sea began to boil with it, like water in a pot.”16
Two days the storm raged. Two days the allies remained huddled beside the Middle Gate, the Spartans with their scarlet cloaks wrapped tightly about them, as the gales swept in from the sea. Two days the barbarians bided their time, making no assault on the pass. Instead, both sides watched the weather, scanned the eastern horizon, and sweated on news of their missing fleets. By the third morning of the storm, with the winds at last starting to ease, flotsam, drifting in from the straits off Euboea, could be glimpsed across the Malian Gulf, bobbing on the choppy waters. Then, distant across the gray sea, squadrons of ships began emerging into view, straining against the winds, bearing north. The Greek fleet had survived the storm; and now it was returning, to the immense relief of the small army at Thermopylae, to its station at Artemisium. The links in the chain had been reforged. The front, for the moment, at any rate, could be held. And still no certain sighting of the enemy fleet.
Reports brought that evening by the liaison officer serving at Artemisium suggested why. Heading for the Sciathos gap, the barbarians had been caught on the open sea. The coast of Magnesia, battered by the full force of the gale, was said to be littered with corpses, spars and gold. The precise number of ships lost to the storms was as yet a matter of conjecture, but there were some among the Greek fleet who dared to claim “that there would be only a few left to oppose them.”17 Hardly, of course, a forecast that Leonidas himself could echo: on the plain beyond the West Gate, the barbarian campfires still blazed numberless. There too the carnage off Magnesia would have been reported. The failure to outflank Thermopylae by sea would have been digested. A new plan of attack would have been ordered, and urgently, for the Great King, with hundreds of thousands of mouths to feed, could hardly afford to kick his heels. The implications for Leonidas and his tiny army that evening appeared self-evident—and menacing. Four days they had waited for the Great King to make a frontal assault on their position, and on the following morning, the fifth, all the multitudes of Asia would surely be hurled against them. Their resolve and courage would be put to a test such as few men had ever had to face before; not even in the days of song; not even on the fields of Troy. Combing their hair, sharpening their weapons, burnishing their shields to a dazzling brightness, the Spartans prepared for the dawn, and for what, all their lives, they had been raised to give: a display of the art of killing.
And sure enough, sunrise coming, the barbarian came as well. It was the Medes who had been given the task of clearing the pass. These were men skilled in all the requirements of mountain warfare, well armored too, their mail coats glittering like the scales of iron fish, and their very name had long been a terror to the Greeks. Leonidas, however, had chosen his position carefully, and the Medes, practiced though they may have been at climbing the defiles of the Zagros, found it impossible to scale the cliffs of the Middle Gate and outflank the defenders’ line. Nor, in the closeness of the pass, was there sufficient space for them to unleash what might otherwise have proved an equally lethal strategy: the firing of a rain of arrows so heavy as to serve the sweltering Spartans as a sunblock. Instead, breasting the pass, hurrying to the attack, the Medes found themselves with little choice but to charge directly at the shield wall and attempt to batter it aside. But this was the form of warfare in which all hoplites, supremely, were battle trained; and the shields of the Medes were fashioned of wicker, while their spears were much shorter than those of the Greeks.
So it was that their weight of numbers, although it might have appeared overwhelming, failed to tell. Never before having tested themselves against the barbarian, the Spartans would have known within seconds of the first impact that they had the measure of their assailants. There could be no doubting the bravery of the Medes, men prepared to throw themselves against a line of bristling spears and shields, but they provided, even in their fish scales, easy prey for a wall of bronze-clad professional killers. Within minutes, the front had taken on the character of a charnel house. The Spartans employed their spearheads and swords to eviscerate, and their skill in “fighting close to their enemies”18 was a thing of horror to their fellow Greeks. Now, in the hellish closeness of the Hot Gates, the Medes learned to share in that dread. Those who fell did so with gaping wounds; those still on their feet found themselves soused with blood, slithering over entrails, stumbling over the growing piles of the dead.
For the Greeks too, though, straining to hold their positions against the seething crush of the enemy, the fight was desperate. Butting back their assailants with their heavy shields, jabbing, slashing, hacking all they could, feeling the sun steadily heating up the bronze of their armor, soaked in sweat and blood, those in the line of battle could hardly be expected to hold their position all the day. Nor were they: for Leonidas, with cool efficiency, ensured a regular transfusion of fresh troops to the front. Those withdrawn could remove their armor, have a drink, and bandage their wounds. Even a Spartan might sometimes need to catch his breath.
And particularly so because Leonidas, uncertain what further tactics the King of Kings might employ, needed his elite corps primed to cope with any sudden emergency. All day the battle continued to rage, until the Greeks, having seen off the Medes, and then reinforcements from Susa, found themselves, as the shadows lengthened, facing precisely such a moment of crisis. A glittering of jeweled weaponry, a shimmering of exquisite colors, and the Immortals, the most proficient and dreaded of all the Great King’s regiments, as supreme among the Persians as the Spartans were among the Greeks, advanced into the pass. To meet them, Leonidas ordered all his bodyguard back to the front line—“and there the Lacedaemonians fought in a manner never to be forgotten.”19Courage, strength and resolution they displayed, as was only to be expected; but also a murderous talent for the tactical maneuver. At a signal, they would turn, stumble, appear to flee in panic; and then, as the enemy surged forward in triumph, their discipline momentarily forgotten, the Spartans would wheel round, reform their line with a fearsome clattering of shields, and hack down their pursuers. This tactic was doubly demoralizing to their assailants: for, apart from the casualties that it inflicted, it served to rub their noses in the brute fact of the Spartans’ continued battle worthiness, even after a whole day’s fighting, even amid the heat, and the blood, and the stench and the flies. Reluctant to squander his best troops fruitlessly, the Great King at length ordered their withdrawal, and the Immortals retreated back through the West Gate. The pass was left to the evening shadows, the carnage and the Greeks.
That night, amid the distant rumbling of thunder over Magnesia, rain started lashing down over the battlefield, slowly turning it into a mulch of gore and mud. In the piles of tangled corpses, the jewelry around the necks of Xerxes’ slaughtered guardsmen, sparkling in the light of the sentries’ guttering torches, would have appeared to mock the filth of slaughter. And the pretensions of the King of Kings as well? So Leonidas would have wanted desperately to believe. But he would have known better than to surrender to complacency. Though his position had demonstrated itself impregnable to a frontal assault, it still remained only as strong—or as weak—as its flanks. Messengers from the Phocian camp high on the slopes of Callidromus, having slithered and stumbled their way down to Thermopylae, reassured Leonidas that the mountain approaches were empty; but communication with the fleet at Artemisium that night, so violent had the weather turned again, was out of the question. Just as during the previous storm, Leonidas could only listen to the screaming of the winds, hug his red cloak about himself, and hope for the best.
And perhaps, for his peace of mind, this was just as well—because a day that could be viewed by the defenders of Thermopylae as a triumph of obduracy had been passed by the admirals at Artemisium in a very different spirit.20 Unpleasant surprise had followed fast on unpleasant surprise. The Persian fleet, far from being almost utterly destroyed, as optimists among the Greeks had hoped, had proved very far from finished. It may have been storm-battered—but throughout the early afternoon, as squadron after squadron, having limped past Sciathos and rounded the headland of Magnesia, began massing on the shore opposite Artemisium, the Greeks had watched with a mounting sense of despair. Never before had any of them seen the sea quite so black with shipping. Even after the havoc wreaked by the storms, the Persians could still muster perhaps eight hundred triremes, sufficient to outnumber the allied fleet by almost three to one. Not even the accidental blundering into their base of fifteen enemy ships and the capture of their crews had done much to cheer the Greeks. Now that they could see the Persian fleet before them, a bare ten miles away across the open sea, there were many who began to argue for a second withdrawal, and urgently, before the barbarians could complete their repairs. This talk had grown louder and louder—to the consternation of the locals, who were already twitchy at the prospect of being abandoned to the Mede. Soon they had sent a frantic delegation, first to Eurybiades, and then, when he turned down their request, to Themistocles, begging the allies to stay. Themistocles, who was as appalled as the Euboeans at the prospect of evacuating Artemisium, had nevertheless cheerfully demanded a backhander for his services. Having salted most of it away for himself, he then used the surplus to grease the palm of Eurybiades. This was hardly the style of backbone-stiffening favored by Leonidas, but it was just as effective. Eurybiades and the other admirals duly agreed that the allied fleet would stay at Artemisium and hold the line.
No sooner had the high command resolved this, however, than it was thrown into renewed panic. In the late afternoon, at around the same time as the Immortals were advancing against the Hot Gates, and while the Persian squadrons, with all the ostentation they could muster, were staging an intimidatory review off the opposing coast, the allies hauled a Greek deserter from the enemy fleet, one Scyllias, out of the sea. A professional diver, who claimed to have swum the ten miles to Artemisium entirely underwater, the news he brought with him had a credibility that his boasting maybe lacked; certainly, it was sufficient to chill the blood of the listening admirals. The enemy, Scyllias reported, while the main body of their fleet was being repaired, had detached two hundred seaworthy vessels to make their way unseen down the eastern coast of Euboea, round its southern tip, and then back up its western side. Here, raising its head again, was the Greeks’ worst-case scenario: that they might find themselves bottled up, with the barbarian both ahead of them and blocking off their escape. A moment of mortal peril, to be sure—and yet, as Themistocles was quick to point out, Scyllias’ intelligence spelled opportunity as well as danger. Detach a sizable squadron from the fleet at Artemisium, send it down the straits between Euboea and the mainland, trust to the gods that the patrols off Attica would pursue the two hundred Persian ships when they caught sight of them, and it might be the barbarians who found themselves trapped in a vise.
All a massive gamble, of course—but the Greeks, if they were to have any hope of halting the Persian advance, had little choice but to trust occasionally to audacity and luck. A resolution was duly passed: “to put to sea and meet the enemy ships that were sailing round Euboea.”21 Naturally, since it was essential not to alert the barbarians on the opposite shore to any thinning of the main fleet at Artemisium, the detachment would be able to leave only after nightfall—and after the Greeks, if they possibly could, had demonstrated to the enemy that they had no intention of cutting and running. This they did by boldly venturing out from their positions into the open sea, challenging the Persians to attack them—which the Persians, confident in the crushing weight of their numbers, and the greater skill of their crews, duly did. Even as the sun began to set behind the western peaks of the mainland, their fleet was sweeping down hungrily across the open channel, swamping the much shorter line of the Greeks, looking to envelop it, crush it and end the war there and then. The Greeks, however, anticipating this tactic, had prepared a maneuver specifically designed to counter it: forming themselves into a circle, their rams pointed outward, like the spines of a hedgehog rolled up tightly into a ball, they then moved out suddenly to the attack. The Persians, in the close fighting that followed, found their superior speed and agility negated. Some thirty of their ships were captured, and when twilight, deepening over the Aegean, at length brought the fighting to the end, it was the Greeks, to their astonishment and delight, who could claim the honors of the engagement. Barbarian seamanship, it appeared, might be countered, even defeated, after all. No better fillip could have been imagined for those crews facing a perilous night-time voyage.
Then, of course, came the gale. As rain drummed down on the ships of the Greek fleet, so the winds, screaming in from the south-east over the bleak strand of Artemisium, quickly shredded any prospect of a midnight getaway. Fortunately for the allies, however, that was not the limit of the storm damage: for wreckage from the evening’s battle soon began to be swept up-channel toward the enemy positions, where it fouled the oars of the rolling patrol ships and filled the harbors with bobbing spars and corpses. Buffeted by yet another storm, and still licking their wounds from the unexpected mauling they had received at the hands of the Greeks, it was now the turn of the Persians to be thrown into a panic—“for they imagined that the hour of their doom had come.”22 As it proved, they imagined wrong: the harbors in which the fleet had taken sanctuary the previous day served to shelter it from the worst depredations of the gale. No such refuge, however, for the two hundred ships sent south around Euboea, for the savage eastern coast of the island, with its jagged rocks and cliffs, was a miserable place to be caught off during a storm. The armada, it is said, “running blind before the wind and rain,” was shattered upon a notorious black spot known as the “Hollows”; and certainly, irrespective of whether all the ships were lost, as the Greeks would later crow, the gale had spelled their mission’s end.23
By the following afternoon, reports of the shipwreck were reaching Artemisium, and the Greek admirals, confident that their lines of retreat were no longer threatened, could afford to breathe a huge sigh of relief. Not that they had any intention now of abandoning their forward position. Prospects for holding the front suddenly appeared as rosy as they had looked bleak the day before. Good news was coming in from everywhere: reinforcements, fifty-three ships fresh from Athens; the destruction, in an evening hit-and-run raid, of a squadron of Cilician ships; the briefing, brought by Abronichus, the liaison officer, that Leonidas and his men had withstood a second day of hard pounding at the Hot Gates. If the Great King could not make a breakthrough soon, his army would start to starve. It was already late in the campaigning season, and the barbarians were far from home. If they could merely avoid defeat, and keep the Mede at bay, that, for the Greeks, would surely prove victory enough.
But the true test, for the allied fleet and its ability to hold off the enemy, was still to come. The Persians, laboring desperately to make their remaining ships fully seaworthy again, had not yet attempted to smash the linchpin of the whole Greek line that, if forced, would open the way to Thermopylae: the straits between Euboea and the mainland. The third day of battle dawned and the Greeks, watching from Artemisium, could have had little doubt that the moment of truth was coming at last. Squadron after squadron of the barbarian fleet—Phoenician, Egyptian, Ionian—began massing in the open channel. Now, after all the skirmishing, all the shadowboxing, it was to come: the first full frontal assault by the Great King’s navy on the Greek positions. Rowing out to block its passage, men who had first pulled on an oar just months—or, in the case of the Plataeans, weeks—before braced themselves for the fight.
Less mobile than its enemy, the Greek fleet, having plugged the straits, then opted to wait for the Persians to force the attack. Rowers, their knuckles whitening as they gripped their oars, their noses wrinkling against an overpowering stench of sweat and loosening bowels, sat crouched on their wooden benches, straining to hear above the creaking of timbers, the lapping of the water, and the nervous talk of their comrades the approaching tide of battle. Soon enough, from the marines on deck, the cry went up: the barbarians were closing in. “Overwhelming numbers; gaudily painted figure-heads; arrogant yelling; savage war-chants”:24 such were the sights and sounds of the Persian advance as it fanned out across the channel. The impact, when it duly came, was pulverizing. All day the Greeks fought desperately to keep the enemy at bay, “yelling out to one another that the barbarians should not break through, even as the Persians, looking to sweep the passage clear, sought to annihilate them.”25 Somehow, despite the fearful battering they received, the Greeks managed to hold the straits—but only just. Numerous ships were sunk or captured, losses which the smaller allied fleet could ill afford; many others were disabled. The Athenians, who had borne the brunt of the enemy assault throughout the battle, had a full half of their fleet put out of action. Prospects of holding the straits the following day looked bleak. Disconsolately, the Greeks began gathering wreckage from the battle, piling it up on the sand to serve as pyres for their dead, while their admirals, anxious faces lit by the funeral fires, debated what to do next. By now, the locals, who had seen the shattered state of the Greek fleet and already drawn their own conclusions as to its prospects, were driving their livestock down to the seafront, in the hope that they might be included in any evacuation. Themistocles, recognizing that the abandonment of Artemisium might indeed be a necessity, and not wishing his already battle-weary men to have to row through the night on empty stomachs, ordered the cattle barbecued.
Yet the mood along the fire-dotted beach that night, even amid all the weariness and disappointment, was not entirely one of despair. The Greeks had faced the Great King’s armada in open battle and lived to tell the tale. Great things had been achieved at Artemisium—and not all of them owing to the winds. The allied fleet remained intact as a fighting force; and withdrawal, if it did come, would be strategic and orderly. Not that any final decision could be made either way until news had arrived from the Hot Gates—for synchronization with Leonidas and his army remained the key to the whole campaign. And none of the navy knew what had happened at Thermopylae. As dusk turned to night, the admirals had to play a waiting game. Up and down the shore they crunched, breathing in the mingled scents of beef and burning human flesh, casting their gaze across the channel to the distant lights of the Persian positions, and waiting for Abronichus to deliver his daily briefing from the Spartan king.
His small galley arrived that night off Artemisium in good time. The sailors, gathered around their campfires, were still at their supper. The ships had not yet been readied for departure; no sense of crisis gripped the camp. One glimpse of Abronichus’ face, however, as he came stumbling through the shallows, and all that changed. Everyone who saw him knew, even before he spoke, that something calamitous had occurred at Thermopylae.