Persian Fire (51 page)

Yet Xerxes, though anxious about the rumbling in his soldiers' stomachs, knew that there were others who would be feeling the pinch even worse. The presence of the Persian army on their doorstep threatened local landowners with ruin. Since responsibility for this regrettable state of affairs clearly stopped with Leonidas and his pestilential little army, the obvious - indeed, the only - way for the natives to spare themselves utter destitution was to help the Great King flush the Hot Gates clear of its obstruction. Surely, then, Xerxes had to trust, where the spectacle of royal invincibility had so far failed to recruit a guide, self-interest was bound to succeed?

And so in the end it did, as, amid the dust and disappointments of the second day's fighting, the Greek capacity for back-stabbing came to the rescue of the Persian high command. For almost a week the imperial army had been encamped before Thermopylae — and now, at last, an informant was brought cringeing into the royal tent. His name was Ephialtes, a native of the plain on which the Persian army was camped, and he it was who revealed to his interrogators that Callidromus did indeed possess a secret. 'In the hope of a rich reward, he told the king about the trail which led over the mountain to Thermopylae'
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— and even offered, in the truly fatal act of treachery, to serve the invaders as their guide.

Immediately the fearsome machinery of the imperial army was set into smooth and deadly motion. Late in the day though it already was, further delay was clearly out of the question: the ascent of Callidromus was ordered for that very night. Nor was it to be attempted by the light infantry that Leonidas had presumed would be the only troops capable of making such a journey. The Immortals, their toughness bred amid the uplands of Iran, were a squad made for such an adventure. Bloodied the previous day in the pass, there was not a man among them who would not have relished his chance of revenge. For their commander, in particular, the mission had a particular piquancy. Hydarnes was son and namesake of the co-conspirator with Darius who, forty-one years previously, had held the Khorasan Highway against a vast army of rebel Medes. Now, given the perfect opportunity to add to his family's battle honours, Hydarnes would serve Darius' son, not by holding, but by clearing a vital pass.

He and his ten thousand men left at dusk. Their route began several miles west of the Hot Gates, west too of Trachis and of the Asopus gorge above which it stood.
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Behind them, as they began their ascent, watch-fires were already starting to dot the plain, but soon the view of the camp was lost. Fortunately, just as Ephialtes had said it would be, the trail was easy to follow, and the moon, the fateful Carneian moon, full in a cloudless sky, outshone even the brilliance of the August stars. For hours the Immortals marched, through silver light and shadow, swinging left across the broad plain which stretched beyond the high cliffs of Trachis, down into a valley and then over the River Asopus. Here, beyond the far bank, the way at last grew steeper. Even now, however, despite being weighed down by shields and armour, the Persians could still make their ascent without zig-zagging, and after an hour or so, breasting a fringe of oaks and pines, they reached the edge of another wide plateau. Ahead of them, past more woods, and over occasional stretches of open grass, the path wound on, still climbing, but gently once more, and the Immortals, picking up speed again, began to round the peak that now loomed between them and Thermopylae. Between them and their view of the eastern horizon, too. But gradually, as the stars began to fade, so the marching Persians could sense the coming of morning, and that the sun, bright with the eternal beauty of Ahura Mazda, would soon be rising over the Hot Gates. The gradient began to flatten out. The Immortals passed into a wood of oaks. Even beneath the trees, however, the way ahead of them remained perfectly visible, for not only was it growing lighter by the minute, but the recent gales had swept bare the trellis of branches above them. The leaves, already dry, crackled underfoot. Then, above the rustling and the tramping of ten thousand pairs of feet, there came a sudden ringing: the sound of metal.

Stepping forward to the edge of the trees, the Immortals' commander saw, to his consternation, a garrison of hoplites blocking his path. He had clearly taken them by surprise, for the Greeks were still struggling to pull on their armour; but Hydarnes, who had learned the hard way not to underestimate the Spartans, wanted his rematch with them at the Hot Gates, not on the heights above the pass. When Ephialtes, however, pointing to the lack of scarlet tunics and cloaks among the enemy, reassured his master that he was not facing Leonidas' men, but the soldiers of another city, most likely Phocis, Hydarnes immediately gave his men the order to attack. Drawing their bows, the Immortals duly fired a withering volley at the half-formed phalanx. The Phocians, lacking the strategic good sense that would have been supplied to them, perhaps, by the presence of a Spartan officer, and taking it for granted that the barbarians had marched through the night with the specific goal of wiping them out, retreated chaotically to the top of a nearby hill. Here they steeled themselves to make a heroic final stand — only to see the Immortals sweep contemptuously past them, and continue along the open path.

Hydarnes, as he began his descent towards the Hot Gates, now had to presume that there was a Phocian runner on the trail ahead, hurrying to alert Leonidas. It is unlikely that this reflection greatly unsettled him; it may even have been Persian strategy to give the Greeks warning of their doom. Shortly before sunrise, and the Immortals' clash with the Phocians, a deserter from the Great King's camp had slipped into the Hot Gates. He was an Ionian, one Tyrrhastiades — motivated, he insisted, purely by concern for his fellow Greeks. Perhaps he was — except that there appears to have been more than a whiff of the Persian dirty-tricks department about his arrival. Quite apart from the fact that it is unusual for rats to join a sinking ship, the timing of his appearance in the Greek camp had shown every sign of the most careful calculation. Too late to enable Leonidas to reinforce the Phocians, it simultaneously tempted him with the hope that there might yet be the chance of a withdrawal. Which was, of course, precisely what the Great King wanted him to believe: for the

Greeks, if they opted to defend both ends of the Hot Gates against the pincer movement being deployed against them, might yet hold the pass for days. Catch them retreating on the open road, however, and the Persian cavalry would have no problem cutting them to pieces. The pass would be clear, five thousand Greek hoplites would have been eliminated from the military balance sheet, and the Great King's triumph would be complete.

But would Leonidas take the bait? The commander-in-chief of the Allied League, desperate not to see his whole army lost, but also pledged, as a Spartan king, not to abandon Thermopylae, had a third option. Once it had been confirmed that disaster could be read in the entrails of goats killed in sacrifice, he summoned the bleary-eyed leaders of the other contingents to a council of war. Confusion and alarm, not surprisingly, was general at this meeting, with some refusing to countenance evacuation, while the majority demanded that it begin at once. Leonidas, silencing the uproar, announced that it was the intention of his bodyguard to hold the breach against the enemy, no matter what was thrown against them. Then he not merely permitted but positively ordered the main body of the army to leave, and as fast as possible, to give itself every chance of surviving to fight another day. The Thespians, famously cussed, refused to abandon their posts; so too — for with their city now doomed to medise, they had nothing to return to, save the prospect of being purged — did the loyalist Thebans.
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Leonidas ordered the helots to remain at the Hot Gates as well, to help the Spartans prepare for battle, to serve as light infantry and to die in the cause of their masters' freedom. Some 1500 men in all, then, fingering their notched and battered weapons with clammy fingers, feeling the sun's first rays against their faces, trying not to let their expressions betray their emotions, whether of scorn, resignation or envy, watched their comrades pack up their armour, leave the camp and head south.
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A fading of the sound of marching feet, a dispersal of white dust on the morning breeze, and the tiny holding force was left alone to the reek and the closeness of the pass. Nothing to disturb the calm came from the westward slopes of Callidromus, down which

Hydarnes and his Immortals were even at that moment descending; nothing to suggest that the barbarians were drawing near. As yet, there was nothing from the West Gate, either. 'Eat a good breakfast,' Leonidas advised his men, 'for tonight we eat in the underworld.'
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Meanwhile, in the royal tent, breakfast was also being taken, but no doubt in a far cheerier mood. A more relaxed one as well: for Xerxes, although he had risen at dawn to pour libations to the sun, wished to give Hydarnes a chance to reach the pass before he launched his own attack. Finally, at around nine o'clock, he gave his generals the nod, and the colossal mass of his army began its advance. Even before they reached the pass, the stench of death, given sound by carrion flies, would have seemed to shimmer like the dust clouds and the heat; and when they entered the Hot Gates, they would have seen ahead of them the tangled limbs of their slaughtered fellows, bellies swollen, or else ripped apart, abdomens pale, the viscera spilled across the ground. The enemy, too, were in the open; for rather than staying behind the wall of the Middle Gate, as they done during the two previous days' fighting, the Greeks had advanced beyond it, braced to fight, not in relays, but in a single, bristling mass. For a moment, appalled by the sight of these men of bronze and blood, the Great King's troops held back; then their officers, brandishing whips, began to lash them forwards. Scorned as Greek propaganda though this detail often is, there seems no real cause to doubt it. Weight of numbers, now that it could more effectively be brought to bear against the enemy, was a crushing advantage that the Persian high command had every reason to exploit; and the use of untrained levies, at least during the hellish opening of the battle, must have struck them as the most cost-effective way of neutralising the long spears of the Greeks. Trapped between their own military police and the fearsome, bronze-tipped, blood-bespattered Greek phalanx, the hapless levies had little choice but to shamble forwards, to be crushed against the shield-wall or else drowned in the shallows, falling in their hundreds upon hundreds, to be sure, but also, as they did so, gradually splintering the Greek spears into matchwood.

And then it was, it seems, when all the shafts had been snapped, that the Persian elite moved in for the kill. What followed was battle as
The Iliad
had described it: the clash of mighty champions, 'screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath',''
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Among those who fell were two sons of Darius, and a brother — and then Leonidas himself. A desperate struggle, fittingly Homeric, was fought over the dead king's body, until the Spartans, in the ferocity of their anguish and despair, hauled it back to temporary safety. But then, from behind them, just above the eastern exit from the Hot Gates, there came the glinting of spear-tips amid the scrub of the slope: the Immortals had arrived. Menaced from all sides now, the surviving Greeks retreated back beyond the wall, aiming for a small hillock in the shadow of the Middle Gate. There — although the Thebans, separated from their fellows, and forced against the cliff-face, never reached it — the Spartans and the Thespians made their final stand. Feathered with arrows, slathered with gore, they resisted to the end. Even when their swords shivered, they used the hilts as knuckle-dusters, or else fought with their teeth, their fists, their nails. Only when every last Spartan and Thespian lay dead, the dust blood-slaked, the corpses piled high, could the struggle be reckoned over, and the pass the Great King's at last.

Xerxes himself, entering the Hot Gates at around midday, was both elated by the sight of Persian banners fluttering over the battlefield, and revolted by the carnage. As was his duty to the men who had fallen in his cause, he gave instructions for trenches to be dug, and the bodies of his dead to be laid in them, then reverently covered with earth and leaves. He left the corpses of the Greeks to rot, while those few Thebans who had chosen to fling down their weapons rather than be slaughtered he ordered to be chained and branded. That he was in no mood for magnanimity was hardly surprising; for, despite his brilliant success in destroying, after only two and a half days' fighting, the Greeks' seemingly impregnable position, it had been no part of his battle plan that so many of the defenders should escape annihilation. Another pinprick was soon to come; for the Greek fleet, it was reported to him the following afternoon, had staged its own successful evacuation, having skulked away in the dead of night to safer waters. The Persian fleet, crossing to Artemisium in the morning, had found nothing of the enemy save for the smoking embers of camp-fires and the well-gnawed bones of cattle. Fugitives the Greeks may have been, humiliated by land and sea —butit seemed that they were still resolved to carry on the fight.