Persian Fire (33 page)

But the key question for Persian strategists was whether the Greeks to the south would show themselves similarly sensitive to the political weather. In 491
bc
, a year after the conquest of Macedonia, ambassadors were sent on a exploratory tour of Greece, with demands for earth and water. Most cities, gratifyingly, scurried to oblige. Some, however, did not. Two, in particular, could not have made their adherence to the darkness of the Lie, and to the
daiva,
those 'spawn of evil purpose',
³²
any clearer. In Athens, not only were the Great King's demands dismissed out of hand, but his ambassadors, in blatant defiance of international law, were put on trial by the Assembly, convicted and put to death. Perhaps — given that Athens was a proven terrorist state, and that the man who had initiated the diplomats' execution was Miltiades, a notorious fugitive from the Great King's justice — this outrage was no surprise. More shocking, and more disturbing in its implications, was that the Spartans chose to blacken themselves with an even worse act of sacrilege. There was no trial for the Great King's ambassadors in Sparta: instead, flung down a well, they were told before they drowned that 'if they wanted earth and water, they could find it there'."

This, in its naked defiance, its savage wit and its cavalier disregard for religious convention, was a spectacular that had Cleomenes' fingerprints all over it. The Athenian democracy, it appeared, had indeed arrived at an accommodation with the Spartan king who had twice tried to destroy it. When the Athenians, discovering that Aegina had handed over earth and water to the Great King, reported the news to Sparta, Cleomenes travelled in person to berate the medisers. The merchant-princes of Aegina, however, with their dependence on international trade, were reluctant to offend the great superpower to the east — even on the say-so of a Spartan king. Searching for a way to outflank Cleomenes, they appealed to Demaratus, his fellow king. Demaratus, grateful for any opportunity to stab his hated rival in the back again, eagerly pledged his support. The Aeginetans were encouraged to stand firm. Cleomenes was rebuffed.

Covert though Demaratus' role in this business had been, however, it was not so covert that his colleague failed to sniff it out. Cleomenes' counter-thrust, delivered immediately on his return to Sparta, was brutal and cunningly aimed. Resolved now to finish oft his insufferable colleague once and for all, Cleomenes approached Demaratus' cousin, a spiteful nonentity by the name of Leotychides, and promised him the throne if he would help bring down his kinsman. Leotychides, unsurprisingly, jumped at the chance. As his enemies were well aware, Demaratus had an old skeleton just waiting to be dragged out of the closet. Tangled though the circumstances of Cleomenes' own birth were, those of his fellow king were hardly less so. Demaratus' mother, the once plain girl granted the gift of loveliness by the apparition ot Helen, had become such a beauty that the King of Sparta, overwhelmed by her charms, had used his royal muscle to abduct her from her husband. Seven months later, the new-queen had given birth to a son. But was the father the king or the commoner? A question long settled, it might have been thought, by the fact that the queen's son — Demaratus himself — had by 491
bc
been on the throne for twenty-four years. A mere detail to Cleomenes, though; and when Leotychides, raking up the issue of Demaratus' legitimacy, proposed taking the case to Delphi for arbitration, judicious bribes to the priesthood had already guaranteed Apollo's complicity.

The oracle duly pronounced against Demaratus. Back in Sparta he was formally deposed by the ephors, and Leotychides, pliable and venal, took his place. Accompanied by his new colleague, Cleomenes promptly returned to confront the Aeginetans, who this time, rather than dare defy two Spartan kings, capitulated on the spot. They even agreed, when Cleomenes demanded it, to hand over hostages as a token of their good behaviour to their bitterest foes, the Athenians. No longer would a Persian task force arriving off Attica be able to use Aegina as a base. Cleomenes, long reviled by his neighbours, suddenly found himself widely lauded for his selfless labours 'in the common cause of Greece'.'
¹
'
¹
Persian agents were confirmed in their judgement of the Spartan king as their most dangerous and able foe, and the major obstruction to the Great King's plans for the West.

Yet all was far from lost. As the Persians had often had good cause to appreciate, there was no Greek front so united that it might not at any moment disintegrate. Just when Cleomenes appeared to have shored up his position for good, news of the bribes that he had given Delphi suddenly leaked out. The scandal burst over Sparta. Outrage was universal. Cleomenes, caught red-handed for once, was forced to flee the city in disgrace. Not, of course, that exile was a fate he was remotely prepared to take lying down. Disdaining to beg his fellow citizens for permission to return, he sought to intimidate them instead. Cleomenes had always had a talent for setting the cat among the pigeons, but now it led him into blatant treachery. Reversing the policy of divide and rule that he had promoted to such effect throughout his reign, he sought to rally the northern Peloponnese to his personal cause — and to such effect that his jittery countrymen lost their nerve and hurriedly invited him back. But hardly in a forgiving mood; and Cleomenes, by returning to Sparta, was effectively sealing his doom. It began to be whispered that he was mad. The Spartans themselves blamed alcohol. The Argives preferred to see in Cleomenes' decline sure proof of the anger of the gods. Whatever the cause, though, virtually everyone agreed that the king who only a year previously had been hailed as the bulwark of Greece was now a lunatic. There were few complaints when his two surviving half-brothers, Leonidas and Cleombrotus, late in 491
BC,
had him certified and locked up in the stocks. Nor were many eyebrows raised when his corpse was found the following morning, slices of flesh carved off his legs, hips and belly, a bloodstained knife dropped in the dirt by his side. The verdict, one that pushed plausibility to its outer limits but was nevertheless universally accepted: suicide.

So perished the Great King's most formidable enemy in Greece. With him also passed a style of leadership — unscrupulous, to be sure, but decisive and proactive — that the naturally cautious Spartans had never ceased to find alarming. Indeed, the squalid circumstances of Cleomenes' end did much to confirm them in their suspicion of strong leaders altogether. True, Leonidas, the new king, was his brother's successor in more ways than one, for he had married, with her father's blessing, Gorgo, Cleomenes' only child — as wealthy as an heiress as she had been precocious as a little girl. All the same, Leonidas remained, as a man new upon the throne and possibly tainted by fratricide, an unknown quantity: he was bound to take some time to find his feet. Who else was there, then, with the Persian hammer-blow threatening, to take a lead? Leotychides? He was too busy crowing over the wretched Demaratus. The Gerousia? Or the Ephorate? Both were instinctively conservative bodies, far less likely to sanction a policy of forward defence than Cleomenes had been. Persian spies, feeding intelligence back to Sardis that winter, had much good news to report of Sparta. The turmoil in the city, the faction-fighting that would have struck Darius' strategists as so inveterately Greek, appeared to offer them their perfect opening: the opportunity to strike at Athens and take her out while she stood alone.

A chance not to be missed. In the early weeks of 490
BC,
the long-awaited invasion order was finally given. A large army, 'powerful and well equipped', totalling perhaps some 25,000 men in all, marched out from Susa.
³⁵
With Mardonius still recovering from his injuries, command of the expedition was entrusted to two other generals with detailed knowledge of the western front: Artaphernes, son and namesake of the satrap in Sardis; and, as effective supremo, Datis the Mede, the seventy-quarts-a-day veteran of the Ionian revolt, and a man who, unusually for a member of the imperial elite, had such a specialised understanding of the enemy that he could actually speak some faltering Greek. The strategy these two commanders were to follow had been mapped out for them directly by the Great King: cross the Aegean with an immense armada, bring the benefits of Persian rule and peace to all the islands, and then, that objective completed, 'reduce Athens and Eretria to slavery, and bring the slaves before the king'.
³⁶
The conquest of the rest of Greece, including Sparta and the Peloponnese, was to wait; and yet, even as Darius' instructions stood, the planned expedition was an ambitious one. Certainly, as an amphibious operation, it promised to be on a scale not witnessed since the invasion of Egypt thirty-five years before. On top of that, the plan not to hug the coast but to island-hop directly to Greece was as bold and innovatory a strategy as any that even Darius had conceived.

Yet Datis and Artaphernes can have had little doubt as to their ultimate success. Every day's journey westwards brought them fresh evidence of the barely believable scale of the Great King's resources: the labour gangs toiling to maintain the roads, whole populations sometimes, transplanted from the furthest reaches of the earth; the guards, stationed beside every bridge, every flotilla of pontoons, every mountain pass; the troops in their own rear, not merely Persians and Medes, but levies drawn from even further east, Bactrians, Sogdians and axe-wielding Saka. What was Athens to peoples such as these? Not even a name. Yet on they marched, directed by the will of their far-off, all-seeing king; and every evening, no matter where they halted, these men from the steppes, from the mountains, from the villages of Iran, they would be provisioned out of monstrous depots, supplied punctiliously with jugs of wine, and loaves of bread, and barley for their horses. And when at last, having passed through the Syrian Gates and descended into the plain of Cilicia, on the south-eastern coast of modern-day Turkey, they found there waiting for them an immense fleet of ships, some built as weapons of war, others as horse-transports. Up the gangplanks they climbed, men and horses alike; Datis gave the order; and the armada pulled out to sea.

Rumours of its approach were soon filtering through to Greece. No one there was unduly alarmed. Although the monstrous fleet was clearlv bound for the Aegean, even to the jumpy Athenians it hardly seemed to be an imminent threat. Plenty of Persian fleets had been seen off Ionia before, after all — and they had always sailed northwards, hugging the coast, on to the Hellespont. What reason to think that this fleet would take a different course"! Onwards the armada glided, past the ruined harbours of Miletus, towards the straits between Mount Mycale and the island of Samos — or so it appeared. But then, just by Samos, something wholly unexpected: the fleet suddenly changed its course. A shudder of disbelief passed through all those watching from the shore. The Persians were not continuing northwards but heading west! There could be only one possible explanation: Datis and his task force were embarked for the open sea, for Greece — for Attica.

And as the Persian fleet fanned out across the Aegean, so its commander gave a master-class in the arts of empire-building. First: shock and awe. Gliding into the harbour of a startled Naxos, he took belated revenge for the debacle of the expedition there a decade previously by torching the city and rounding up the natives as slaves, dragging them on to his ships in chains as their homes and temples burned. Next: win hearts and minds. Arriving off his next port-of-call, the island of Delos, holy throughout the Greek world as the birthplace ol Artemis and Apollo, Datis reacted to the news that the Delians had fled before his approach with injured innocence. 'You men illumined by the sacred,' he expostulated, 'what a strange notion of me you must have, that you run away in this manner!'
³⁷
This might have been thought a disingenuous complaint - for the Persians, after the fall of Miletus, had thought nothing of sacking the holy oracle of Didyma and carting off its great bronze statue of Apollo to Ecbatana. But the Delians were sorely mistaken if they imagined that this stern treatment of the rebels' shrine had in any way implied disrespect for great Apollo! After all, it was the rebels themselves who had shown the god of light the grossest disrespect, by turning to the Lie and thereby surrendering his holy oracle to the night-bred pollutions of the
daiva.
Datis, resolved that this theological subtlety should not be lost on the Greeks, duly staged a spectacular demonstration ot his devotion to the Lord Apollo, standing before the god's altar and burning in his honour barrowloads of frankincense. Then, his point expensively made, he returned to the fleet to continue his tour of the islands, receiving their submission, taking hostages, press-ganging troops. None thought to resist him. The twin clouds of smoke — one belching black from the flames of burning Naxos, the other white and perfume-scented, rising to the nostrils of Apollo himself — had done their work. It was as though the armada, heading for Eretria and Athens, still sailed beneath their shadow — and as though that same shadow were drifting westwards, inexorably, to plunge all Greece into darkness.