Thermopylae (24 page)

Athenians and the plundering and firing of the Acropolis began. Some of the defenders, realising all was lost, threw themselves down to death from the walls, while others made for the sanctuary of Athene. But Athene, guardian and patroness of these mercurial and intractable people of the city that bore her name, was not to be accorded the respect shown to Apollo, Lord of Light. All the people on the Acropolis, including those in the sanctuary, were slaughtered, the temple was stripped of its treasures, and then the whole area was set on fire. Xerxes was at last absolute master of Athens.

He wasted no time in sending the great good news by courier to Artabanus in Susa. His triumph, for the moment at least, must have seemed almost complete and the king’s pleasure was surely increased by being able to tell his uncle Artabanus that he, Xerxes, had confounded the latter’s pessimism. What had the old man said: ‘Your two worst enemies will be the land and the sea’? Well, here the Great King stood, watching the Acropolis go up in flames, having reached Athens in three months, having defeated the so-called unconquerable Spartans at Thermopylae, and having driven the fleet of Athens before him down the Euripus Channel. Artabanus had cautioned him about there being no harbours on all the coast? Yet, here in Phaleron Bay, the principal naval base of the Athenians, his fleet was safely secured. What Xerxes perhaps forgot was the conclusion of the old man’s speech all those months ago, when they had stood together at Abydos: ‘Remember, I beg you, the truth of the old saying, that the end is not always to be seen in the beginning.’ Westwards in Salamis, however, the Greeks saw that great fire in the sky and felt their hearts sink. There would be much debate between them before they could bring themselves to face these conquerors of Athens, the new rulers of Attica and of all northern Greece.

It is significant that the next day Xerxes seems to have been worried by the fact that he had permitted this sacking and desecration of Athens’ temple. Unlike Darius, who was sagely tolerant towards other religions in his great empire, Xerxes had a touch of the fanatic in his nature, as he had shown in his treatment of the polytheism of Egypt. Nevertheless, although he placed his faith firmly in Ahuramazda and the teachings of Zoroaster, he seems to have felt uneasy at the desecration of so ancient a shrine. He was in Europe now, another part of the world altogether from Asia

Minor and the East with which he was familiar. … It might just be possible that in these foreign lands the local gods possessed some kind of power? It would be unwise to give any offence at this crucial stage in his great campaign.

‘[So] on the following day he summoned to his presence the Athenian exiles who were serving with the Persian forces, and ordered them to go up into the Acropolis and offer sacrifice there according to Athenian usage… . The Athenian exiles did as they were bidden.’ Herodotus goes on:

I mention these details for a particular reason: on the Acropolis there is a spot which is sacred to Erechtheus - the ‘earth-born’, and within it is an olive tree and a spring of salt water. According to the local legend they were put there by Poseidon and Athene, when they contended the possession of the land, as tokens of their claims to it. Now this olive was destroyed by fire together with the rest of the sanctuary; nevertheless on the very next day, when the Athenians, who were ordered by the king to offer the sacrifice, went up to that sacred place, they saw that a new shoot eighteen inches long had sprung from the stump. They told the king of this.

(This is a very pleasant instance of the use of hindsight in symbolism while, as Burn has pointed out, the story contains some of the earliest description of the topography of the Acropolis as well as its legends.)

The destruction of the Acropolis naturally caused consternation at Salamis and some of the commanders (not the Athenians, one feels sure) ‘hoisted sail for immediate flight’. During the days that followed there seems to have been incessant debate, and conference after conference between the Greek admirals. Eurybiades, nominally commander-in-chief, who had shown so little wish to engage the Persians earlier from the Artemisium base, was naturally in favour of withdrawal to the Isthmus where the Peloponnesian army was concentrated. Plutarch tells an anecdote which shows how high passions were running:

Themistocles, however, opposed this plan and it was then that he uttered a remark which became famous. Eurybiades had said to him: ‘You know, Themistocles, at the games they thrash anybody who starts before the signal?’ To this Themistocles replied, Yes, but they do not crown anybody who gets left at the post.’ At this point Eurybiades lifted up his staff of office as if to strike him. Themistocles, maintaining his self-possession, said: You can hit me if you like, but still you must listen to me.’

Eurybiades conceded that this was true and the debate continued, with Themistocles naturally doing all that he could to preserve the unity of the fleet in the very place where they were already -Salamis. One commander, growing irritated by Themistocles’ argument, and eager no doubt to see the old original plan of the defence of the Isthmus put into action, sarcastically pointed out that Themistocles had no right to speak at all. He was a man without a city. (It is possible that he waved with the back of his hand towards the smoke that still lifted from the Acropolis.) Themistocles, therefore, was in no position to tell men who still belonged to a city and a state what they should do about the conduct of the war. The latter’s reply was characteristically Churchillian in its fire and vigour:

It is quite true that we have given up our houses and our city walls, because we did not choose to become enslaved for the sake of things that have no life or soul. But what we still possess is the greatest city in all Greece, our 200 ships of war, which are ready to defend you, if you are still willing to be saved by them. But if you run away and betray us, as you did once before, the Greeks will soon hear the news that the Athenians have found for ourselves as free a city and as fine a country as the one they have sacrificed.’

There could be no doubting the menace behind the words. Without the Athenian fleet there could be no possible means of holding the Isthmus or any part of the Peloponnese. Once the Athenian fleet was withdrawn, not only the disciplined core of the Greek navy collapsed but also all co-ordinating authority. Herodotus gives an interesting detail, which is not in Plutarch’s account of this meeting, that Themistocles even went so far as to name the place to which the Athenians would withdraw. This was Siris in the Gulf of Taranto, which Themistocles (somewhat dubiously) claimed had long belonged to Athens. It hardly mattered - he might as well have named ruined Sybaris. Thither, he said, the Athenians with their fleet would withdraw (having presumably collected the women and children from Salamis and Troezen). The scarcely exploited richness of Italy was well enough known to all Greeks, and the Athenian fleet would have encountered practically no opposition in making a landing and establishing a new city in many a suitable place. Vast areas of the Mediterranean were at that time as open to colonisation by the sea-borne Greeks as were America and other lands to the Europeans of later centuries.

Even among the vociferous and volatile Greeks, a great silence must have followed these words.

The debate was carried on all night, but there can be no doubt that from that moment it was, in effect, concluded. Eurybiades and his Peloponnesians knew when they were beaten, and in any case Aegina and Megara (both of whom would have been thrown to the wolves if the fleet had withdrawn) came out in favour of staying at Salamis and fighting it out as Themistocles had suggested. Since Aegina was providing thirty triremes and Megara twenty they, combined with the Athenians, formed about three-quarters of the whole fleet. As Themistocles - despite Athenian opposition - had cannily recognised months before, the concession to the Peloponnesians that the commander-in-chief of the fleet should be a Spartan mattered little. In the long run, what would matter was who had the commanding number of ships. He had already pointed out to Eurybiades and the other commanders the disadvantages of fighting off the Isthmus, because this would involve a battle in open waters where the greater numbers and the better manoeuvrability of the Persian ships would give them an immense advantage over the Greeks. He himself had always known that Salamis was the key. Themistocles was not only a brilliant diplomat, wily politician, admirable strategist, but also a master-tactician. There have been few men like him in history. Herodotus now records the conclusion of his speech: words which sound so authentic that, although it cannot be a direct quotation, they read as if they had stayed engraved in the memory of someone who was there:

Now for my plan: it will bring, if you adopt it, the following advantages; first, we shall be fighting in narrow waters, and there, with our inferior numbers, we shall win, provided things go as we may reasonably expect. Fighting in a confined space favours us but the open sea favours the enemy. Secondly, Salamis, where we have put our women and children, will be preserved and thirdly - for you the most important point of all - you will be fighting in defence of the Peloponnese by remaining here just as much as by withdrawing to the Isthmus - nor, if you have the sense to follow my advice, will you draw the Persian army to the Peloponnese. If we beat them at sea, as I expect we shall, they will not advance to attack you on the Isthmus, or come any further than Attica; they will retreat in disorder, and we shall gain by the preservation of Megara, Aegina, and Salamis - where an oracle has already foretold our victory. Let a man lay his plans with due regard to common sense, and he will usually succeed.

If there was much debate going on among the Greek allies as to the future conduct of the war, the same can equally be said of the councils of their enemy. There was one salient difference, however; the Greeks seem to have reached their decision as to how to act within a night or two of the burning of the Acropolis. The persuasive brilliance of Themistocles, coupled with the adherence to his views of Aegina and Megara, and also of Adeimantus, the Corinthian leader (much maligned by Herodotus), and the final acquiescence of Eurybiades had seemingly produced a united front - something rare enough among allies. Xerxes and his advisers were not faced with such a simple choice as the Greeks: to defend Salamis or withdraw to the Isthmus. The Greeks, for one thing, were in their home waters, every cable of distance and every fathom of depth of which they knew as natives of this sea. The Persians (as old Artabanus had warned) were far from home and they were faced with problems of logistics that did not affect the Greeks to anything like a similar degree. For one thing the army was largely dependent upon sea-borne supplies (always hazardous even in modern wars), and for another there was the time factor: they were into the month of September. If August storms had caused such havoc among the fleet, what could be expected in a few weeks’ time when, as all seamen knew, the Mediterranean weather almost invariably broke in violent equinoctial gales? It was true that the army could advance without opposition until they reached the Isthmian line defended by the Peloponnesians, but they would still need to be supplied - and how could that be achieved with the Greek fleet gathered
en masse
at Salamis? It might have been possible, as Demaratus had suggested after Thermopylae, if Xerxes could have divided his fleet, sending one part down to harass the Peloponnese while keeping the other to engage the Greeks at sea but, as his brother Achaemenes had pointed out to him at the time, his fleet was no longer large enough to submit to such a division. Although it might not seem so at a superficial glance, yet Xerxes was even more between the Devil and the Deep than his opponents. He had left devastated and conquered (therefore unfriendly) territory behind him, and to the north of that were lands that had happily medised - but how far, if things went against him, could he trust such collaborators? And then, if it came to that, how far could the Ionian ships in the fleet really be relied upon if things looked black? They were, after all, Greeks by blood, and their subservience to Persia had only been achieved by siege and fire and the sword. (Few of the Ionians or the Aegean islanders did in fact desert Xerxes, most of the latter abstaining out of a terrified neutrality.)

Neither Xerxes nor his advisers were fools, and he had among his naval staff some of the greatest mariners of antiquity - Phoenicians who had tangled with the Greeks often enough and who had formed the backbone of the Pharaohs’ fleet long before Egypt had come under the dominance of Persia. They would have been among the first to point out that they could not maintain a supply line to the army if it was encamped in the Isthmus, so long as the powerful Greek fleet could strike out from Salamis. To the Persians, then, as to the Greeks, the island of Salamis represented the key to the whole campaign. In capturing deserted Athens, even with the burning of the Acropolis (symbolic and little more), they had set the Great King’s seal upon all of northern Greece. But they remembered Thermopylae and they had certainly not forgotten Artemisium. South of them lay Sparta and the indomitable warriors who had inflicted such grave losses on the finest troops of the Persian army. Just to the west of them lay those ships from which ‘they had been happy to make all speed back to their moorings’ after their last encounter.

Athens had been no more than a husk, but Salamis represented the kernel of Athenian government and of Greek resistance. They had learned by now that their faster triremes, especially given their numerical superiority, would be capable of enfolding the Greeks in a half-moon battle-line in the open sea and gradually constricting the enemy until they became enmeshed with one another like fish in a seine net. They had learned to their cost, however, that in constricted waters the heavier Greek ships with their immaculate discipline were a match for them. The limited area of Salamis, therefore, was clearly a trap. Was it possible to attack the island and destroy the Greek headquarters, thus cutting off the head from the whole Greek body, without risking a fleet engagement? Herodotus to the contrary (who maintains that the operation was conceived after Xerxes had decided on withdrawal), it seems probable that some later and generally considered inferior sources were correct: Xerxes decided to run a mole out from the mainland near modern Perama to what in those days was an islet and which is now a half-submerged reef. The ancient sea-level of the Mediterranean was lower than it is today. For a king who had bridged the Hellespont and who had cut a channel through the land behind Mount Athos, the idea of bridging an area less than a mile in width did not seem at all impracticable.