Admittedly, this swelling of his task force with a vast babel of poorly armed levies would generate any number of headaches for the Great King's harassed commissariat. Transporting an army of the size envisaged by Xerxes across the Aegean was clearly out of the question: the only possible way to Athens was by land. This in turn would require wonders of preparation: the Hellespont would somehow have to be bridged; roads driven through the wilds of Thrace and Macedonia; harvests planted, garnered, stored. Burdensome demands on the logistics teams appointed to deal with them, of course — and yet, for the Great King himself, as glorious a manifestation of his power as any number of victories in battle. To tame a wilderness, to conjure from the living earth scenes of order and ripening plenitude: what more perfect image of his global mission could be conceived? The Persians, hemmed in all around by mountains and barrenness, had always regarded the ability to make a desert bloom as the surest mark of any statesman. The satrap who could demonstrate to the Great King's satisfaction 'that he had fostered the cultivation of his province, planted it with trees, and seeded it with crops,'
18
was invariably marked down as a high-flyer. Present the Great King with a prize vegetable, and even the humblest gardener might be fast-tracked on the spot. As one of Xerxes' heirs was supposed to have said, when given a monstrous pomegranate, 'It should be no problem for someone who can grow fruit of this size, it seems to me, to make a small city just as correspondingly great.'
Even the Great King himself boasted of green fingers, justifiably, too — for the voting Xerxes, when not practising with his bow or fording icy streams, had spent happy afternoons out in the garden, 'planting trees, cutting and collecting medicinal roots'.
2
" Indeed, perhaps only the hunt could rival gardening as a passion of the court. To combine the two was, for a Persian, true fulfilment. Rare was the satrapal capital that did not have its own park, well stocked with game, but also, planted beside lakes and murmuring streams, pavilions and lovingly manicured lawns, plants of every description, herb gardens and flower beds, pear and apple trees, pines and cypresses, sunk into the soil and perfumed with the scents of exotic blooms. Empire, not for the last time, had fostered a mania for botany. Darius, even amid the labours demanded of any conscientious universal monarch, had always kept himself abreast of the latest horticultural innovations, tirelessly encouraging his satraps to experiment with cuttings and collect rare seedlings. Mardonius, it was said, eager to stoke his cousin's war-fever, had assured Xerxes that Europe was one vast garden-centre, 'the nursery of every kind of tree'.
2
' As news began to spread through Persepolis that the invasion of Greece would be going ahead, the royal gardeners could begin rubbing their hands with as much glee as anyone at the prospect of rich pickings.
'Paradaida',
the Persians called their exquisitely beautiful parks, a word transcribed by the Greeks as
'paradeisos'
— 'paradise'.
22
Entering one, walking beside the coolness of a crystal-watered stream, surveying natural wonders transplanted from every corner of the empire - rare beasts, rare trees, rare flowers — the Great King might indeed imagine himself in heaven. And yet, a paradise offered him more than merely a sanctuary, a refuge from all the miseries and banalities of mortal life. Everything that he could delight in, 'the beauty of the trees, the perfect accuracy with which they had been planted, the straightness of the lines they formed, the regularity of their angles, the multitude of exquisite scents that mingled together and filled the air',
23
had been ordered according to his pleasure. Similarly, for he was the King of Kings with the whole world at his fingertips, might he command nature to be ordered anywhere.
For-just as he could illustrate with a sweep of his hand to his gardeners how a line of cypresses should be planted, so also, by laying his finger on a map, might he redraw the sea and the land. Where the waters of the Hellespont flowed, brushwood and tightly packed soil, spread out over an immense pontoon, were to unite Asia and Europe; simultaneously, further west along the Aegean coast, a great canal, hacked out from the isthmus below Mount Athos, was to free the Persian fleet from having to round the treacherous peninsula from which the mountain rose. There, two years before Marathon, Mardonius had lost his fleet, a disaster rendered all the more horrific, so it was claimed, by strange prodigies of nature: for sea-monsters, thrashing amid the boiling waves, were said to have gorged themselves on the drowning sailors, while white doves, born out of the spray, had risen and fluttered above the carnage, 'this being the first time these birds had appeared in Greece, never before having been witnessed there'. No further such eruptions of the bizarre were to be panther caged within a paradise was no danger to those who looked at it through the golden bars of its pen, so the sea-monsters off Mount Athos, no matter how many Persian ships were to pass them on their way towards Athens, would be left to salivate in vain
And all of Greece would quake. To build a canal wide enough to permit two warships to piss, deep enough so that their hulls would not scrape the bottom, and one and a half miles long, here was a commission beyond the scope of any mortal man — saving only one. As the hammer-blows echoed far beyond Mount Athos, beating out a message of insistent and clamorous terror. All of Asia was stirring. The Great King was drawing near.
The notion that any man had only to clap his hands to have a canal dug, a bridge built or a whole continent summoned teeming into arms was, to the Athenians, profoundly alien and alarming. The dust-swept columns of the great temple of Zeus, left abandoned by the Pisistratids when they were forced into exile, loomed as a sobering memorial to the city's distaste for looking up to any leader. The automatic reflex of the Athenian aristocracy, whenever confronted by a tall poppy, had always been to reach for a scythe. For people do not find it pleasant to honour someone else: they suppose that they are then being deprived of something themselves.'
25
This was a sentiment common among Greeks everywhere, in any time. Democracy, in that sense, had changed little. Themistocles' father, it was said, hoping to dissuade his son from a career in politics, had pointed out the rotting hulks of warships hauled onto the sand at Phalerum, and warned that such was the fate of every high-flying politician. 'For in Athens, this is how leaders are always treated, when they have outgrown their usefulness.'
2
''
Certainly, rivalries among the elite remained quite as carnivorous and unforgiving as they had been prior to the establishment of the democracy. Even the towering figure of Miltiades had been speedily dragged down to his ruin. In 489
bc
, barely a year after saving his city from annihilation, he had suffered a wound to his thigh while leading an expedition against a city of collaborators in the Aegean and had been obliged to return to Athens, his reputation in sudden tatters. The Alcmaeonids, nostrils twitching as ever, had sniffed blood. Unleashing the talents of an ambitious young politician named Xanthippus, to whom they had already married Cleisthenes' niece, they had brought a prosecution against Miltiades, accusing him, with typical effrontery, of 'deceiving the Athenian people'. Carried in before a baying Assembly, Miltiades had duly been convicted, and would have been hauled out of his stretcher, dragged through the 'Hangman's Gate' and flung down a pit had not the jurors, reluctant to deal with the victor of Marathon as they had previously treated the Great King's ambassadors, voted instead for a crippling fine. Not so crippling, however, as the gangrene that had begun rotting the fallen hero's leg, and which would, within a few weeks of the sentence, finish him off for good. His young son Cimon, somehow scraping together sufficient cash to pay off the fine, had duly inherited the leadership of the Philaid clan, together with a much-depleted fortune, and — it went without saying — an ongoing feud with the Alcmaeonids.
Yet, if the Athenian people, fearful of any situation 'in which one man is able to exercise a wholly disproportionate power over his fellows',
27
had been content to see the great Miltiades humbled, that hardly spelled enthusiasm for his rivals. Who, precisely, had been the stooges in the prosecution brought by Xanthippus: the voters in the Assembly or the Alcmaeonids? The answer would not be long in coming. Two years after the death of Miltiades, citizens began flocking into the Agora, where a large voting pen had been erected especially for the day, with officials carefully scrutinising all those who passed through it to ensure that no man voted twice. By the ten entrance-ways, one for each tribe, lay piles of broken pottery. Each Athenian, as he bent to pick up a shard, knew that he was laying claim to a feared and fearsome right. Once, in the time before the democracy, exile had been a fate inflicted by armed menaces at the whim of faction leaders, ruinous and brutal in its effects; now, for the first time, it was to be imposed as a measured sentence of the sovereign people. Every citizen, registering his vote on the back of a piece of pottery, was obliged to choose a prominent politician's name. At the end of the day, all the shards —
'ostraka',
as the Greeks called them — were to be sorted into piles and counted. The citizen with the largest number of nominations would then have ten days to leave Attica. He would not, as exiles had once done, suffer the loss of his property or his civic rights — but nor, for ten years, would he be permitted to return home. He was to remain, as the Athenians put it, 'ostracised'.
This, a deadly weapon against the ambitions of any over-mighty family, had remained untested in the democracy's arsenal ever since Cleisthenes had first provided for it, twenty years before.
28
That the Athenians had voted to unleash it in the aftermath of Miltiades' downfall suggests how resolved they were not to become the patsies of feuding clans. A people who had seen off the Great King certainly no longer felt obliged to live in the shadow of turbulent aristocrats. First to be cleared from the deck was Hipparchus, the notorious pro-Pisistratid, who, as archon in the previous decade, had been widely suspected of collaborating with Hippias and Artaphernes. The following year, 486
bc,
it was the turn, not surprisingly, of an Alcmaeonid to get the push. Two years later, Xanthippus himself, reaping the due reward of his rise to prominence, was likewise dispatched. Philaids, Pisistratids, Alcmaeonids: all, in the years following Marathon, had effectively been decapitated. If the establishment of democracy had been a velvet revolution, then ostracism was a guillotine that cut off heads but spilt no blood.
And naturally, as in all revolutions, the elimination of an elite of power-brokers left the field clear for more agile, more adaptable, more opportunistic rivals to take their place. The Alcmaeonids were not the only citizens to have felt themselves diminished by the blaze of the victor of Marathon; nor was it only grandees who hankered after a place in the sun of the Assembly's favour. One man in particular, who had found the glory won by Miltiades a peculiar agony, suffering sleepless nights as a consequence, to the extent of being put right off his drink, was already moving adroitly to take advantage of the cull. Themistocles, who certainly did not lack for enemies himself, was aware that by continuing to pursue his political ambitions he was risking his own ruin. But even though, from the first ostracism, he had been a popular candidate for exile, with mounds of
ostraka
cast against him every year, he possessed one crucial advantage. The abuse that might be scrawled angrily against the names of other candidates for exile — 'traitor', perhaps, or 'Datis lover', or even, roughly sketched on to the occasional shard, the figure of a bowman with a Median cap — could hardly be levelled against Themistocles. Unlike most of those actually condemned to ostracism, he had always been consistent in his opposition to the King of Kings. The great harbour complex of Piraeus, begun during his archonship, and now, almost a decade later, the largest and best-fortified port in Greece, stood as bristling evidence of that. Indeed, as Themistocles had now begun arguing openly, all that was needed to complete the transformation of Athens into a naval power of the top rank was a fleet.
A tempting prospect for the poorer classes, perhaps — but hardly for the landowners and farmers who had so recently triumphed at Marathon. Themistocles was pressing for some two hundred ships to be built: the manpower required to propel such an immense navy would leave few citizens to fight on land, as was traditional, with shield and spear. Was the hoplite class really expected to vote itself into liquidation? And who, perhaps even more pressingly, was to fund Themistocles' extravagant naval programme? Warships did not come cheap: a fleet of them was perhaps the most expensive status symbol to which any city could aspire. Listening to Themistocles' proposals, the rich could have a shrewd idea as to who were likeliest to be stung for the bill. No wonder, then, with the elimination of those traditional spokesmen for reaction, the heads of the great families, that the upper classes had to cast around desperately for an alternative champion. They did not have far to look. Aristeides, the general who had stood alongside Themistocles in the weakened centre at Marathon, had begun to emerge by the mid-480s
bc
as his bitterest and most effective opponent. Even in their characters the two men appeared formed for rivalry. While Themistocles was labelled a chancer, a man of superlative duplicity and cunning, Aristeides was hyped by his followers as the ultimate model of upright, homespun virtue. Whereas Themistocles was notorious for pocketing bribes at any opportunity, his rival had a reputation for poverty so stern and honest that when, after Marathon, the Athenian army had set off on its desperate foot-slog to Phalerum, it was Aristeides who had been left behind on the battlefield, entrusted with the loot. 'The Just', his admirers liked to call him: a moniker which the great man, without the faintest embarrassment, had made his own.
1
'