Persian Fire (31 page)

Not that ambition was his only motivation. While nothing that Themistocles did was ever entirely divorced from self-interest, he had seen in the poor not merely voters but the future saving of his city. A startling notion to his peers; 'yet it was the genius of Themistocles that he could gaze far into the future, and penetrate there every possibility, both for evil and for good'.
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More clearly than any of his elders, the tyro politician recognised that the best chance for his city's survival lay not on dry land but on the sea — and that any warship would depend for power upon the massed muscle of its rowers. This was hardly a convincing prognosis, it might have been thought, when Athens possessed barely a harbour, let alone a battle fleet. Themistocles, however, his gaze fixed in visionary fashion upon the long term, was undaunted. Drawing up his manifesto, he began to argue for the urgent downgrading of the existing docks and their replacement by a new port at Piraeus, the rocky headland that lay just beyond Phalerum beach. The shoreline there afforded not one but three natural harbours, enough for any fleet, and readily fortifiable. True, it lay two miles further from the city than Phalerum, but Themistocles argued passionately that this was a small price to pay for the immense advantages that a new harbour at Piraeus would afford: a safe port for the Athenians' ever-expanding merchant fleet; a trading hub to rival Corinth and Aegina; immunity from Aeginetan privateers. And perhaps, in due course, if the money could be found and the circumstances appeared to demand it, then perhaps, just perhaps, a naval base as well. . .

Themistocles, who had no wish to alarm the landed gentry with wild talk of sea power, chose not to belabour this final point. Yet its shadow, in that spring of 494
bc
, was palpable across Athens. The news from the East was darkening daily. The Persian war fleet was finally on the move. The Ionian leaders, it was reported, smuggling themselves ashore onto the spur of Mount Mycale, then skulking up its side like refugees in their own land, had assembled at the Panionium, their long-abandoned communal shrine. There, clearing away the weeds, they had resolved to make their stand against the Persians, and stake their future on a single, desperate throw. The revolt, as its leaders were agonisedly aware, was now on a razor's edge: 'On one side, freedom — on the other slavery, and the slavery of runaways, at that.'
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No choice had been left the Ionians but to man every warship that they could, to throw in their every last reserve. Round the cape of Mycale they had sailed, south towards Miletus and the small island of Lade. There, two miles outside the great city's harbours, they had made their base. Beyond them were six hundred enemy warships — and the prospect of a decisive battle. Yet, for days, as though overwhelmed by the monstrous scale of the looming engagement, neither side had ventured to stir; and nerves, across Ionia, across Athens, across the whole Greek world, began to jangle. Still the stalemate continued; and still, on harbour fronts everywhere, men waited anxiously for the news.

Then, towards summer, tidings at last, as bleak and flame-lit as had always been dreaded. The Ionians, starving on their tiny island base, had proved easy prey for enemy agents. When their fleet, advancing to meet a sudden Persian attack, had sailed out into the bay of Miletus, its line of battle had promptly crumbled. Some captains from Samos, the island facing Cape Mycale, had cut a private deal with the Persians, not merely to save their own skins but to doom the city in whose commercial shadow they had lived for so long. As whole squadrons copied the renegades' example and began turning tail, defeat for the rest of the Ionian fleet had become inevitable — and the position of Miletus untenable. With corpses washing up in their harbours, disease rife in their streets, and all hopes of victory now lost in the waters off

Lade, the Milesians had soon succumbed to the assault of the Persian siege-engines; and Artaphernes, taking possession of the city, had wreaked upon it a terrible, almost Assyrian, revenge. The jewel of the Aegean, once the favoured ally of the Persian king, had been given over completely to fire. Her men had been slaughtered, her women raped, her sons castrated, her daughters enslaved. As the wretched survivors, tethered in the train of wagons piled high with the treasures of their holiest shrines, began shuffling off on their long journey to the work-camps and harems of Persia, they had passed settlers heading the other way, loyalists granted possession of their land by Artaphernes. Such was the fate that the Great King had sworn would befall all rebels against his power; and as the Great King had sworn, so, sure enough, it had come to pass.

Where next would he fix his gaze? Did the shadow of his anger have any limits? If news of the obliteration of Miletus was greeted in Athens and Eretria by naked terror, there ran through their neighbours, too, a palpable shudder of apprehension. Preoccupied with their own squabbles as they always had been, even the most parochial Greek cities were now obliged to lift their gaze and recognise in Persian power a new and prodigious factor in their calculations. But to what effect? There were many options open — and not all of them glorious. The Argives, for instance, whose enthusiasm for liberty ran a very distant second to their loathing of the Spartans, had made up their minds even before the fall of Miletus.
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Flourishing one of the bogus genealogies that had long been a feature of their foreign policy, Argive ambassadors had crossed to Sardis and informed the startled Persians that they were in fact descended — roll of drums — from an ancient king of Argos. A somewhat far-fetched theory, it might have been thought; except that the putative ancestor dredged up by the Argives, a gorgon-slaying, princess-rescuing hero by the name of Perseus, certainly sounded as though he might have been an ancestor of the Persians. A murky compact had duly followed, for Persians and Argives alike had excellent reasons for indulging the fantasy that they were relations: the former could anticipate a welcome base in the

Peloponnese; the latter could rub their hands and dream of a Sparta reduced to rubble by their distant cousin, the King of Kings.

The Spartans themselves, despite a hostility to Persia that dated back to their rebuff at the hands of Cyrus, had long been content to regard Argive pretensions of kinship with the barbarians as pathetic rather than menacing. That quickly changed, however, as the grim news from Ionia began to arrive. A victorious Persia, a revanchist Argos: here was a prospect risen from the Spartans' darkest nightmares. Cleomenes, having originally spurned the chance to fight the barbarians in Ionia, now looked to strike at them in a manner far more calculated to bring a glow to his countrymen's hearts: by assaulting Argos. In the summer of 494
bc,
even as the Persians were pulverising the rebel forces in Ionia, Cleomenes duly led his countrymen northwards on their own mission of annihilation. Nothing was permitted to stand in their way. Informed by his seers that an Argive river-god would doom the Spartans if they crossed his waters, Cleomenes snorted, 'How very patriotic of him,' and disdainfully took another route. Next, having shattered the Argive army in a great battle beside the village ot Sepeia and pursued the survivors to a sacred grove, he called out to individual Argives that their ransom money had been paid. As they emerged from the sanctuary, Cleomenes had them executed one by one. When the remaining fugitives finally rumbled this murderous trick, Cleomenes coolly ordered the incineration of the holy grove.

A shocking crime, of course — as shocking, in its way, because ordered by a Greek, as the harrowing of Miletus. Even though Cleomenes, to spare himself the taint of sacrilege, had ordered helots to fire the grove, the black smoke that billowed up from the holocaust, greasy and polluted with human flesh, provided a gruesome statement to other cities of Spartan intent. No threat to Lacedaemon would be tolerated. Argos, culled of an entire generation, dismembered of her territory, left so enfeebled that even tiny Mycenae was able to wriggle free of her grip, stood as a mutilated example of what might result from any challenge to Spartan power. The Persians too could count themselves included in the warning. Any invasion would be met with implacable resistance. Sparta was pledged to hold her ground and fight, no matter what.

It seemed, then, as though Athens might not have to stand alone against the vengeful King of Kings after all. Yet the Athenians themselves, by the winter of 494 BC, appeared paralysed by that same indecision which had so fatally afflicted their Ionian cousins. Perhaps they were numbed by the continuing bleakness of the news from across the Aegean. Ionia, once so prosperous, so brilliant, so fair, was reported to have become a wasteland. Weeds rose in the footsteps of the Persian reprisal squads; fugitives who had taken to the hills were being harried by dogs and human dragnets; those few Milesians not to have been deported sat shivering amid the blackened ruins of the birthplace of philosophy. The prospect that they might share a similar fate was almost too much for the Athenians to bear. In the spring of 493
bc
, when a tragedy was staged at the City Dionysia that drew not on a scene from mythology, as the audience had been expecting, but directly on the fall of Miletus, 'everyone in the theatre was moved to tears'.
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The tragedy was promptly banned and the playwright, as a punishment for having invented agit prop and upset the citizenry so, was heavily fined. The Athenians' response to the Persian threat seemed to be to bury their heads deep in the sand.

And yet, just as they knew in their hearts that the Great King's task force was coming, so they knew that its arrival would leave them with only two effective options: to appease, collaborate, surrender — or to fight. The choice could not be put off for much longer. Evidence for that was everywhere. No sooner had the theatre goers wiped away their tears than another vivid reminder of the storm clouds gathering to the east had arrived in Phalerum harbour. Miltiades came trailing clouds of glory: having fought the barbarians far more heroically than any other Athenian had done, he had escaped the vengeance of the Persian fleet by the skin of his teeth, dodging a squadron sent specially to intercept him and being pursued all the way to Athens. But he also had many enemies closer to home: hated by his peers and feared by the people, his glamour appeared ill suited to an embattled democracy. No sooner had he disembarked than he found himself being prosecuted 'for his tyranny in the Chersonese'.
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The trial was set for later in the year.

Much more would hang on the verdict than the fate of Miltiades alone. Would the Athenians have the courage to acquit a man they had long feared as a potential tyrant, yet whose track record as a Mede-fighter was second to none; or would they surrender instead to the more immediate — and traditional — pleasures of factionalism; Every citizen was bound to have a view; but the one with the greatest influence promised to be the chief archon, the annual head of state. This was sufficient to give a particular edge to the elections of 493
bc
; and when victory was won by a candidate firmly identified with the anti-appeasement cause, Miltiades must surely have breathed a deep sigh of relief. True, Themistocles was much given to envy, and the temptation to work for the ruin of a charismatic rival must have been considerable; but he resisted it. Miltiades, brought to trial, was acquitted. Shortly afterwards, he was elected military head of his tribe — one of ten generals charged with providing advice and support to the Athenians' supreme commander, the war archon. This, as surely as the burning of the grove at Sepeia had been, must have appeared to Persian spies a defiant statement of intent. It certainly served to give Miltiades a critical influence over the formulation of his city's defence policy. The democracy, it appeared, had finally made up its mind. The Athenians, like the Spartans, had committed themselves to fight.

No one in Athens had the slightest doubt that the Great King was personally resolved upon the destruction of the democracy. When Darius had been brought the news that Sardis was burning, it was said that he had called for his bow, that awful totem of royal power, and fired an arrow high into the air, praying to Ahura Mazda as he did so that he might punish the Athenians as they merited. Such was his fury that the royal appetite was supposed never entirely to have recovered from the shock. Day after day, it was rumoured, year after year, every time that Darius sat down at his table to eat, a servant would whisper softly into his ear, 'Master, remember the Athenians.'
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No mean feat, of course, for a previously obscure people on the very edge of the world to be mentioned daily within the inner sanctum of Persepolis. The Athenians, even as they made their flesh creep by imagining themselves singled out for the Great King's vengeance, could also feel a certain shiver of desperate pride at the idea. Indeed, the fact that Darius had signally failed to come sweeping across Asia against them suggested that they might just possibly be flattering themselves. Certainly, the true scale of the Great King's empire and the demands upon his attention were utterly beyond the comprehension of most Greeks. Cleomenes, informed during the course of his abortive interview with Aristagoras that Susa lay more than three months' march beyond the sea, had leapt up in startled disbelief; and yet, east of Susa, the Great King's dominions took a further three months to cross in turn. It would have been small comfort for the Athenians, as they awaited their hour of doom, but teaching them a lesson was not the only, nor even the most pressing, of Darius' concerns.