One day every year, just as winter was thawing into spring, the Athenians became strangers in their own city. Their temples were roped off and placed strictly out of bounds. Their doors were smeared with pitch. Their relatives, their children, even their slaves were kept off the streets. In the privacy of their own homes, seated at separate tables, racing to drain separate jugs, forbidden to talk until their drafts had been drunk, the Athenians celebrated the Anthesteria: the festival of new wine. No occasion gave better opportunities for a joyous family riot. Children as young as three, crowned with wreaths of flowers and brandishing their own tiny jugs, would be allowed to join in the drinking contest and then to totter round unsteadily, gawking at the scenes of celebration. “Couches, tables, pillows, covers, garlands, perfume, whores, appetisers, they’re all there, sponges, pancakes, sesame buns, pastries, dancers, good ones too, and all the favorite songs.”43 Whores aside, perhaps, no other festival in the Athenian calendar came quite as close to the spirit of modern-day Christmas.
Yet as the muffled sounds of merriment drifted out from behind glistening, black-painted doors, the streets were not wholly abandoned. Demons were believed to be abroad: spirits of evil, harbingers of disaster. People called them “Keres,” specters from beyond the city walls. Only at sundown did the Athenians feel able to cry out in relief, “Away with you, Keres—for the Anthesteria is over!”44 The pitch-coated doors were flung open, men spilled out onto the streets, and the ropes were taken down from around the temples. The rhythms of daily life returned to Athens.
But what if these rhythms were to vanish and never return? This was the question that had been haunting the city ever since Themistocles, earlier in the summer, had persuaded the Athenian people to evacuate their homeland. Perhaps there were aliens more menacing even than ghouls. An unsettling ambiguity cast its shadow over the Anthesteria. “Keres,” thanks to a peculiarity of the Attic accent, might easily be pronounced “Kares”—“Carians,” or “the people of Caria.” These, neighbors of the Ionians in the southwest corner of what is now Turkey, had been among the very first barbarians to intrude upon the consciousness of the Greeks. For centuries they were emblematic of foreignness, and of Asia. They had fought, it was said, in the first great war between East and West, on the side of the Trojans; and unlike their cousins in Ionia, they had never submitted to the rule of Greek settlers. Even though Halicarnassus, the great metropolis of Caria, had owed its original foundation to colonists from the Peloponnese, Greeks were only one ingredient in what had become, over the centuries, a complex melting pot. The city was, to Athenian eyes, at any rate, disturbingly mestizo. Peculiar customs, florid and exotic, flourished there. Why, it was even ruled by a woman: Queen Artemisia. So “masculine” was this alarming female’s “spirit of adventure”45 that it had prompted her to sign up with the imperial battle fleet. Decked out in golden jewelry, draped in purple robes and perfumed with expensive scents she may have been, but her proficiency as an admiral could hardly be doubted. So well captained were her triremes, indeed, that they had a reputation second only to the squadrons of Sidon. If the barbarians could not be halted before they reached Attica, then Artemisia and her warships might soon be gliding into Piraeus. “Keres” or “Kares,” it would hardly make much difference which word was used: aliens would be walking the streets of Athens—and they would not be vanishing at sunset.
Perhaps it was only to be expected, then, that many Athenians, even as their countrymen fought and died at Artemisium to win time for the evacuation of Attica, dragged their feet. This was certainly no reflection on the quality of provision that had been made for them in exile. The gates of Troezen, a city safely in the Peloponnese, some thirty miles across the Saronic Gulf from Piraeus, had been open to refugees from Athens since the onset of the crisis. Miserable though it was to be homeless—and perhaps peculiarly so for an earth-born Athenian—the Troezenians had already proved to be remarkably generous hosts: every nervous mother arriving in their city was given public welfare, every child free education, and even carte blanche to pick fresh fruit from groves and orchards. Nevertheless, back in Athens, the very success of the evacuation provoked a renewed bout of anguish. The more that families could be seen boarding up their homes, trudging through the streets with their luggage, pushing overloaded handcarts down to the beaches and the docks, the more it struck those too upset or angry to join them that the world had been turned upside down.
And how ominous a sign of the times it was that wives and mothers—respectable Athenian matrons!—were on the streets at all. The opportunities for misbehavior that an international crisis might offer women had been preying on the minds of Greek husbands since at least the days of the Trojan War. In Athens, however, such anxieties had a particular resonance. “Brought up under the most cramping restrictions, raised from childhood to see and hear as little as possible, and to ask only a minimum of questions,”46 Athenian women lived a life of seclusion without parallel elsewhere in Greece. The peculiar character of the democracy demanded nothing less. The capacity of women to stir up mischief in public life had been a cause of alarm to thoughtful reformers well before the revolution of 507 BC. Concerned to instruct the elite in the virtues of self-restraint, Solon had found any hint of female showiness particularly insufferable, and had made stringent efforts to rein it in. Rather than permit daughters of the aristocracy to flaunt their wealth and taste in public, he had taken the simple, if drastic, step of decreeing that any woman seen “walking the streets, out and about,”47 should be regarded as a prostitute. Athenian husbands—or at least those with sufficient floor space to immure their wives in separate quarters—had seized the opportunities presented by this legislation with relish. Increasingly, over the decades, the law had ensured that only women whom no one ever saw could be regarded as respectable. Simultaneously, of course, it did wonders for the sex trade.
So much so that Solon, a century after his death, would be remembered gratefully by the Athenian citizenry as a man who had used state funding to subsidize brothels, on the impeccably egalitarian principle that whores should be available to all. This tradition—since the great reformer’s attitude toward women was almost certainly one of stern indifference—was probably a distortion; but it does suggest how the right to cruise for prostitutes had come to be seen by many citizens as a foundation stone of democracy. Like the statue of the tyrannicides in the Agora, or the rows of seats carved out of the Pnyx, the Athenian red-light district, vibrant with riot, suffering and pleasure, served as one of the supreme monuments to the new order. Whores were to be seen everywhere in the Ceramicus, whether sunning themselves topless outside brothels, brawling in squalid back alleys or haunting tombs beyond the city limits. Menaced by this flamboyant visibility, their respectable sisters shrank and grew ever less visible before it, so that it had soon become the convention, under the democracy, not even to mention the name of a married woman in public. Indeed, the carnivorous nature of Athenian politics being what it was, the only real impact that even the most virtuous of wives could have upon the career of her husband was as a liability. For a politician, there was only one thing worse than not being talked about, and that was having his family talked about. Many citizens, watching matrons and whores jostling each other on their way down to the beaches, were so appalled that they flatly forbade their own wives to join the exodus.
As a result, when Themistocles, having led his battered fleet safely back from Artemisium, finally limped into Piraeus, he found to his horror that Athens was very far from evacuated. It was he, of course—ever “the man of twists and turns”—who had posted the appeals to the Ionian squadrons to mutiny; but he knew better than to bank on any implosion of the imperial battle fleet. Or on the Peloponnesians, for that matter. There were many in the upper reaches of Athenian society, trusting in private assurances from the Spartans, who clung to the desperate hope that an allied army might soon be marching to their rescue. Not Themistocles. In a pass far distant from the Peloponnese, a king of Sparta and all his bodyguard lay dead, and there was nothing the Athenians could say or do now that would persuade the Spartans to commit more of their troops to a foreign field. The response of the allied delegates at Corinth to the news from Thermopylae could hardly have made that clearer. Unanimously, the Peloponnesians had voted to look to their own backyard. Even as the Great King’s outriders were closing in on Attica, an army of workmen, under the direction of Leonidas’ younger brother Cleombrotus, was busy at work erecting a wall along the five-mile width of the Isthmus, “hauling blocks of stone, and bricks, and wood, and sandbags, not resting a minute, labouring night and day.”48 Others had already set to demolishing the road to Megara, a narrow and precipitous corniche hacked out of the flanks of coastal cliffs, and effectively the only land route that an army could follow to—or from—the Isthmus. With each landslide that crashed from the road into the shallow coves below, the Peloponnesians were abandoning Attica ever more surely to its fate.
Even the gods, it appeared, were despairing of Athens now. No sooner had Themistocles returned to the Assembly and frantically renewed the evacuation order than there came eerie news from the Acropolis. The sacred serpent, whose presence beside the tomb of Erechtheus had served generations of Athenians as an assurance that their city would never fall, was reported by its attendants to have left its honey cake uneaten, and disappeared. Word swept across the panicking crowds “that Athena herself had abandoned the city, and was pointing them the way to the sea.”49 All highly opportune for Themistocles, of course; as was, just as suspiciously, a second discovery, made even as refugees were surging to the coast with their luggage. The sacred serpent, it seemed, was not alone in having vanished from the Acropolis; so too, filched from around the neck of that holiest of statues, the self-portrait of Athena Polias, had a golden gorgon’s head. Themistocles, loudly protesting his outrage at this sacrilege, immediately set to ransacking the bags of particularly wealthy citizens. When, as invariably he did, he found sacks of gold squirreled away among the luggage, he would impound them on the spot. These confiscations, combined with a whip-round among former archons, served to raise a substantial sum of money: a financial reserve that the Athenian people, now that they were passing into exile, might soon have little choice but to depend upon for their welfare.
And all the while, as sobbing children were shepherded through the shallows by their fathers, and mothers with wild, white faces clutched their head scarves tight about them and stumbled in their wake, and vessels of every description crowded the waters off Phalerum and Piraeus, time was running out. Six days had passed since the forcing of the Hot Gates. With Athens increasingly a ghost town, those thronging the beaches began to glance ever more anxiously over their shoulders, scanning the horizon for smudges of dust, a glint of metal, a dot of fire. Still nothing. By the evening, when Athens stood empty at last, the only movement in all the great expanse of the abandoned city was that of dogs, bewildered by the sudden quiet. Many, faithful to their owners, had followed them down to the beaches, running along the sands, howling at the boats as they disappeared. Xanthippus, it is said, having been summoned back to Athens along with all the other victims of ostracism, but now heading off into exile again, had looked behind him as he sailed away from the mainland, only to see his own dog paddling desperately in pursuit. Reaching dry land at last, the exhausted creature had scrabbled up onto the rocks, whined and then expired.50
Xanthippus’ destination, and that of all his fellow citizens, was Salamis. Here, across the narrow straits from Mount Aigaleos, the Athenian people had resurrected a semblance, however ghostly and impoverished, of the city they had just abandoned. A few women and children—those laggards for whom the journey to Troezen had grown too perilous—were now camped out there. So too, symbols and guardians alike of the constitution, were the magistrates of the democracy. The elderly, whose wisdom in a time of crisis was rated an invaluable resource, had been settled on the island since the very start of the evacuation, along with the city’s treasures and grain reserves. And now, most stirring of all, weather-beaten and battle-scarred though they were, their timbers bearing the marks of frantic labors in the shipyards, there lay in readiness off the bays of Salamis some 180 Athenian triremes: a wooden wall indeed. Well might Themistocles, pointing to the fleet, insist that his countrymen, even in exile, still remained citizens of “the greatest city in all of Greece.”51
A claim which he would be obliged to cling to as though it were a life raft in the hours that followed his arrival on Salamis. Athenian ships were not the only ones visible from the island. For the past two days, as Themistocles and his men had ferried refugees from Attica, the other allied squadrons had been lurking in the straits. That the Peloponnesian admirals had agreed to wait there for the length of the evacuation said much of the bonds of fellowship forged at Artemisium. Both their orders and their personal inclinations would have urged them to head immediately for the Isthmus. From Salamis, distant across the blue of the gulf, it was just possible to make out a stub of rock framed against the sky: this tantalizing landmark was the acropolis of Corinth, the watchtower of the Peloponnese, and barely five miles south of the Isthmus wall. Perhaps predictably, then, it was a Corinthian, the young and fiery commander Adeimantus, who took the lead in the council of war that immediately followed the return of Themistocles to the allied fleet. Leave for the Isthmus at once, he demanded of Eurybiades and his fellow admirals. Concentrate naval and military resources together. Join with the army already massed along the Isthmus. There were bays and gulfs enough around Corinth to guard the flank of a battle line. And if disaster did overtake the fleet—well, at least the Peloponnesians “might then find a refuge among their own people.”52
Hardly, of course, an argument designed to thrill an admiral from Athens—nor those from Aegina and Megara—and it might have been thought, since these men were in command of around three-quarters of the Greek fleet’s total of 310 triremes, that their objections would prove decisive.53 Not a bit of it. The risk facing Themistocles and his two colleagues was the same one that had haunted the war effort from the start: that the alliance might fragment and disintegrate. Outnumbered probably two to one as the Greek fleet still was, not even the Athenians could afford to go it alone. Any split among the allied squadrons would sink all hopes of victory.
And it was victory that Themistocles was aiming for—not merely a holding operation, as was envisaged by Adeimantus, but a decisive crippling of the Great King’s whole naval capacity. To convince his colleagues that this ambition was more than just the fantasy of a desperate exile, he drew on the one thing that could unite them, and gloriously so: their joint memories of the Artemisium campaign. Themistocles knew that battle in open waters—which the Greeks would face if they made their stand off the Isthmus—favored the enemy. “But battle in close conditions,” he urged, “works to our advantage.”54 This was the lesson he had drawn from the day of the fiercest fighting, when the allied squadrons—although battered—had successfully held the passageway between Euboea and the mainland against the full weight of the barbarian fleet. The straits in that battle had been some two or three miles across; at Salamis, if the barbarians could only be lured into them, the waters were half a mile wide at most. “If everything goes well—and the prospects for that are not unreasonable—then we can win.”55
And here, for all the soaring self-confidence with which it had been delivered, was a judgment quite as rooted in the experiences of everyone who had fought at Artemisium—the Peloponnesian admirals included—as in the fertility of the Athenian’s ever-scheming brain. Themistocles himself well appreciated this, for he had, to a degree that none of his opposite numbers could remotely rival, made a career out of persuasion. Democracy, in its first decades, had proved an exacting school. No one in the world was now better practiced at getting his own way than a successful Athenian politician. The effectiveness of Themistocles’ pitch can be gauged from the fact that when, midway through the council of war, messengers arrived with the terrifying news that the barbarians had been seen entering Attica, “setting fire to the whole country,”56 the meeting did not break up in panic. Nor, despite the blood-curdling realization that the Persian fleet might be gliding into Athenian waters at any moment, and perhaps blocking off the escape routes, did the Peloponnesians press their demands for an immediate withdrawal. Instead, all of the high command agreed that the fleet would stay where it was: off Salamis. Themistocles, for the moment at any rate, had convinced the doubters.
And this despite the fact that he was now, in the eyes of his fellow admirals, that most despised of all creatures—“a man without a country.”57 Such a label was not entirely accurate, of course—not while Salamis remained in Athenian hands. Nor, even with the Persian cavalry clattering fast toward the city, had Athens herself been wholly surrendered: one stronghold, the sacred heart of Attica, still held out. Not even the iconoclastic Themistocles had ever proposed that the Acropolis should be abandoned. Instead, by a vote of the Assembly, it had been agreed “that the treasurers and priestesses remain on it to guard the property of the gods.”58 Other Athenians as well, those too stubborn to go into exile, had taken refuge there. The defenders, having had weeks to provision themselves and to erect barricades—“wooden walls”—across the ramp, could now plausibly regard themselves as well braced for a lengthy siege.
Yet their spirits, all the same, must have quailed at their first sight of the enemy. No better view could have been had of the arrival of the Great King into Athens than from the heights of the sacred rock. Fire, incinerating the blessed fields and groves of Attica, heralded Xerxes’ coming. Gazing from the western battlements, the defenders watched impotently as the royal banners were raised triumphantly over their city. The hordes of the Great King’s army were already swarming everywhere, taking possession of the familiar streets, laying waste the defenders’ homes. In the Agora and on the slopes of the Areopagus, the hill which rose between the Pnyx and the Acropolis, engineers could be seen sinking boreholes: evidently, the barbarians were too mistrustful of the Athenians even to drink their water. Other work parties busied themselves with looting and stripping the city bare. Most horrifying spectacle of all for the defenders on the Acropolis to have to endure was that of the bronze tyrannicides, those potent symbols of the democracy, being lowered from their plinth, crated up, and readied for transport. No doubt the Pisistratids, back in their homeland at last, had explained to their masters the precise significance of the statues. A perfect trophy to adorn the halls of Susa.
Meanwhile, above the Agora, the Great King had established his command post on the Areopagus. Archers were ordered onto the hill, and instructed to shoot fire arrows at the barricades blocking the ramp of the Acropolis. The wooden wall—“betraying the defenders”59—was soon ablaze, but the defenses beyond it held firm. The Great King, anxious to send the good news to Persia that the nest of daivas had been smoked out, began to grow impatient. Summoned to the royal presence, the Pisistratids were duly dispatched up the ramp to negotiate with their obdurate countrymen. Their overtures were rejected. The assault on the ramp was renewed. Arrows fizzed, and boulders, levered over the side of the fortifications by the defenders, crashed and rolled. The chaos of battle was general.
But now, with the Athenians at full stretch, the Great King’s officers began surveying the opposite end of the Acropolis. Here, where the drop was so sheer that not even a single guard had been stationed, elite forces finally succeeded in scaling the face of the cliff. As at Thermopylae, so now, talents honed in the Zagros enabled the Great King to stab a Greek garrison in the back. The Acropolis was stormed. Many of the defenders hurled themselves off the battlements in preference to waiting to be slaughtered. Others sought sanctuary in the temple of Athena. The Persians, naturally, massacred the lot. Then, as their master had ordered, they put everything on the summit of the rock to the torch. What would not burn they demolished, toppled or smashed. The great storehouse of Athenian memories, accumulated over centuries—the city’s very past—was wiped out in a couple of hours.
Plumes of thick smoke, billowing up from the inferno, began to blacken the Attic sky. To the Athenians, standing frozen upon their ships, or on the slopes of Salamis, the message they advertised was one of purest horror. To their allies too, watching as evening turned to night, and still the silhouette of Mount Aigaleos was lit an angry red, the spectacle was barely less demoralizing. In others, however, also on the sea that night, it would have prompted very different emotions. The Great King’s admirals, who had not wished to arrive off Athens until they could be certain that the city’s harbors were secured, had taken their time to rendezvous with the army. Now, however, with the whole of the Attic coastline, from Sunium to the Acropolis, a blaze of burning temples, the Persian victory was being broadcast far out to sea. There was no need for any of the Great King’s squadrons, if they were still making their way to port that night, to rely on the stars: their oars, beating the waters, would have churned up waves illuminated by fire.
Dawn showed the Acropolis a blackened, smoking ruin. Once a nest of demons, now purged by flames, it stood cleansed at last of the Lie. The principles of Arta had prevailed, and Xerxes, the Lord Mazda’s servant, had performed his bounden duty to the Truth. In witness of this, the Great King, having summoned the Pisistratids to his presence again, gave them orders to ascend the Acropolis, “and there offer sacrifices according to their native custom”60—for they alone, of all the Athenians, had stood firm against the blandishments of the Lie. Gratefully, the returned exiles duly climbed onto the cinderscape. Over broken statues and toppled columns and the charred corpses of their slaughtered countrymen they picked their way, to that most sacred spot on the otherwise barren summit, where the primal olive tree, the city’s gift from Athena, had always stood. The shrine built around it had been systematically flattened, but a blackened stump was soon unearthed beneath the rubble. Tenaciously, as they had always done, the living roots still clung to the rock.
And sprouting from the stump—a certain miracle—a long green shoot was rising up to meet the sun.