Persian Fire (55 page)

Meanwhile, Sicinnus, the slave whose message had led to all of these preparations, had returned to Themistocles. His courage had been astonishing. He would surely have expected to be kept for

Salamis

further interrogation; indeed, it is hard to imagine why he was released, unless it was to carry a message from the Persian spy chiefs back to his master.
¹⁴
Nor is it hard to guess what the contents of this communication might have been: the Great King's final terms; the offer of an amnesty, perhaps, a chance for the Athenians to pick up their families before they sailed off into exile; or the assurance of a privileged future in Attica as favoured servants of the King of Kings. Whatever the precise details, Themistocles must surely have breathed a sigh of relief when he read them, for he would have known that he had preserved his daughters from the slave-market, his sons from the gelding-knife, his fellow citizens from obliteration. Even were the Greek fleet to be wiped out in the morning, the Athenians, at least, would have a claim to the Great King's mercy.

But there was a second prospect, infinitely more glittering and glorious, that had also been opened up by Sicinnus' return. The Greek admirals, even as the imperial battle squadrons were embarking upon their secret manoeuvres, remained in urgent session, 'still quarrelling furiously', it is said.
¹⁵
At some point towards midnight, Themistocles — who had evidently been having a busy time of it, slipping in and out of the meeting — rose to his feet and made his excuses yet again. Stepping outside, he found waiting for him, cloaked in the shadows, an old enemy. Aristeides, the 'Just', summoned back from exile along with Xanthippus and all the other victims of ostracism, had smoothly resumed his place at the very heart of the democracy's affairs. Returning that same evening from a mission to Aegina, he had seen, as he slipped back towards Salamis, the ominous silhouettes of the Persian fleet fanning out across the gulf to plug the exits from the straits. Themistocles, to whom this news naturally came as little surprise, confessed himself delighted, and told Aristeides that it was all his doing — 'for our allies had to be forced into making a stand that they would otherwise have shrunk from, had it been left to themselves'. Then, embracing his old adversary, he urged Aristeides to take the news in to the other admirals, 'for if I report it, they will think that 1 am making it up'.
¹⁶

All of which, of course, was to cast the Peloponnesians as hapless stooges. No wonder that the Athenians, in the years to come, would enjoy harping on the story. Even so, there is something strange about it. Aristeides, although he did indeed inform the Greek commanders that their fleet was surrounded, neglected to mention, it appears, that this was courtesy of a trick pulled by one of their own colleagues. Understandably, it might be thought. Yet it is curious that the Spartans and the other Peloponnesians, even once the full details of Themistocles' stratagem had become public knowledge, betrayed not the slightest hint of resentment towards the man who was supposed to have outsmarted them so comprehensively, but, on the contrary, only lauded him for his cleverness and foresight. Nor, despite being ambushed, as we are told, by Aristeides' revelation, does it seem that the Greek admirals were thrown into a panic by it. Just the opposite — their dispositions for the morning appeared to reflect the minutest forward planning. Almost as though the news of the Persian blockade had come as no great surprise to them, either. Almost as though they had been complicit in Themistocles' scheme from the start.

And perhaps they had been. Details of the Salamis campaign only ever come into focus as though through a swirling fog, and then they are either lost, or are so confused that they can be interpreted in any number of ways. Frustrating, of course — and yet there is, in this very murk, a tantalising glimpse of the contours of an otherwise hidden war, a shadowy counterpoint to all the din and crash and shove of battle. The Persians could legitimately claim to be the masters of the dirty trick, so it should be no surprise that their spy-chiefs, arriving in Attica, brought with them the easy presumption of superiority that came naturally to members of the world's ruling class. Yet, just as the Great King's admirals should have been warned against any complacency by the performance of the Greeks at Artemisium, so his intelligence agents should similarly have been on their guard. The allies had already demonstrated their proficiency at feints and disinformation. At Salamis, there can be no question that Themistocles, displaying his customary pitiless grasp of psychology, had fed the Persian agents not merely what their master wanted but what he desperately needed to believe was true. Even at his most eager, however, the Great King would surely have discounted the possibility of Athenian treachery, had it not been for the Peloponnesian admirals' very public flaunting of their own demoralisation. Whether they were indeed a squabbling, incompetent rabble with no appetite for fighting in the straits, despite all the lessons they had learned at Artemisium, or rather co-conspirators in a devastating sting, we can never know for sure. What is certain, however, is that the Peloponnesian admirals, if they truly had been desperate to make their escape that night, adjusted to the news that they were blockaded inside the straits with remarkable equanimity. Dawn rose on a day as fateful as any in human history — and found every squadron in the Greek fleet primed and nerved for battle.

And over the straits, men imagined, there glimmered a sudden sense of something uncanny, an almost palpable heightening of intensity upon the early morning light. To the Athenian marines, before they took their places on deck, Themistocles delivered an address that would long be remembered, urging them to consider 'all that was best in human nature and affairs, and all that was worst — and to choose the former'.
¹⁷
Yet not even these words, it may be, raised as many hairs upon the back of men's necks as did the assurance — one that seems suddenly to have swept the entire fleet — that the sons of gods who in ancient times had been the guardians of the rocks and groves and temples of Greece were present among them: so that men would later speak of seeing phantoms and even ghostly serpents gliding on the surface of the water, and of hearing unearthly battle-cries echoing around the straits. That long-dead heroes would rise up from their graves to repel the barbarian invader was a conviction that had been sedulously promoted by the Greek high command. Indeed, it is probable that Aristeides, when he ran the gauntlet of the Persian blockade, had been sailing back with the relics of some Aeginetan heroes, sprung from Zeus himself. There could certainly have been no doubting the urgency of such a mission — and a measure of its success, perhaps, is the fact that the Peloponnesians, near mutinous the evening before, prepared for battle with as much conviction as anyone.

And, to be sure, there had been something eerie in the air for days. Even Greeks in the Great King's train appear to have sensed that the heavens might be turning against their master. Walking through the deserted fields beyond Eleusis on the day before the battle, Demaratus had seen a cloud of dust billowing up from the coastal road. This could only have been kicked up by the Persian division heading for the Isthmus, but an Athenian collaborator, strolling with Demaratus, had immediately identified the faint singing he could hear coming from the Sacred Way as the
'iacche':
the chant of joy raised by worshippers as they journeyed every September to Eleusis. This was impossible, of course, even though it was indeed the time of year for the annual pilgrimage — unless the
iacche
were being performed by a supernatural procession, in celebration of that great mystery of Eleusis, the return to life of what had appeared to be utterly and irrevocably dead. This, to the Athenian, as he trod the burned soil of his homeland, had proved a most unsettling thought. 'I fear', he said at length, as he gazed towards the dust cloud, 'that this presages some great disaster for the king's forces.' And Demaratus, alarmed though he was by this judgement, had not disputed it. 'Only keep quiet,' he urged his companion. 'For if your words should reach the ears of the king, then you will be sure to lose your head.'
¹⁸

Sensible advice — for Xerxes, in his determination to force a victory, was certainly in no mood to tolerate defeatism. That the failure to wipe out the Greek fleet at Artemisium had been due to a lack of backbone on the part of his servants appeared to him self-evident. Concerned to rectify this, he had issued his captains an uncompromising warning that 'should the Greeks succeed in evading the terrible fate planned for them, and slip out through the blockade, then all those responsible would lose their heads'.
¹⁹
Conversely, those who fought well would have the supreme honour of having their exploits personally noted by their master —an incentive that had been sorely lacking off Artemisium. So it was that even as the Greek oarsmen were hurrying to their benches, the Great King, followed by a mighty train of generals, officials and flunkeys, was riding out in his chariot past the southern spur of Mount Aigaleos, and round on to 'the rocky brow  Which looks o'er sea-born Salamis'. Here, above a temple of Heracles, he ordered his Nisaean horses reined in. As he descended, first onto a golden footstool and then — for the royal platform-heels could hardly be permitted to touch bare earth — along a hurriedly unrolled carpet, servants were busy erecting a throne. The Great King had chosen his vantage spot well. Below him, becoming clearer by the minute, there stretched an unrivalled panorama: of Salamis, the straits, the gulf beyond them, and the distant Isthmus. But what, on the waters themselves, did Xerxes see that fateful morning, as the sun rose behind him, and the fateful moment of battle, long awaited, long manoeuvred for, dawned at last?

Not what he had been hoping to see, that much at least is certain: not the spectacle of the Greek fleet shattered in his ambush, spars bobbing in the open sea, corpses twisted and heaped upon the rocks of Psyttaleia. The Great King would have been notified before his arrival above Salamis that the anticipated breakout by the Peloponnesians had failed to occur; even so, the spectacle of the Greek fleet drawn up in the narrows below him would still have come as a sore disappointment. And his own squadrons — where were they as dawn broke? A momentous question: for just as the allied strategy was dependent upon fighting a battle in the straits, so the Great King's admirals had all along been committed to facing the Greeks on the open sea. The resulting stalemate had already endured for three weeks. Only a conviction that their enemy was indeed a hapless rabble would ever have persuaded the commanders of the imperial fleet to break it, and advance with their squadrons into the channel. A decision as fateful as any in the history of warfare; for upon it rested the future course not merely of the battle, not merely of the war, but of Europe and of Western civilisation itself. Infuriatingly, we are not told when or why it was made — only that battle, when it was joined, did indeed take place where the Persians had been most desperate not to fight it: within the straits of Salamis.

Historians have generally presumed that the Persians infiltrated these under cover of darkness. Yet this seems improbable.
²⁰
The instructions given to the Great King's captains by their master had been perfectly clear: 'guard the exits leading out to the sounding sea'.
²¹
It is unlikely, with the threat of decapitation hanging over them, that there had been much enthusiasm that night for bold displays of initiative. The signal failure of the Greeks to come blundering out into the ambush that had been so carefully laid for them would only have confirmed the imperial admirals in their resolve not to budge from their station; for their oarsmen, rowing hard just to prevent their vessels from drifting and fouling the line, had hardly been given the ideal night's preparation for a battle. It may be that the Great King's dawn arrival above Salamis prompted some captains, eager for royal favour, to order their ships forward into the channel, and that the whole battle-line then lurched and followed them. It is more probable, however, that the sight of its master served only to confirm the fleet in its discipline. While individual captains, no matter how desperately they peered from the prows of their triremes, could make out little of what was happening in the straits ahead of them, they could also see how well placed the Great King was to do it for them. And who better than Xerxes to make the final judgement? Who better to give the nod to a gamble on which so much had come to rest?

It seems likeliest, then, that the order to engage the enemy in the straits was given to the Persian fleet shortly after sunrise, and that it came directly from the King of Kings himself. We do not know how the signal was broadcast, nor whether Xerxes was able to communicate to his admirals a sudden and thrilling spectacle, clearly visible to him from his vantage point above the straits: the apparent disintegration of the whole Greek battle-line. Some fifty triremes, veering off in the direction of Eleusis, looked to be in headlong flight, making for that narrow channel off the north-west of the island where, evidently unbeknown to their commander, the Egyptians were lurking. So it had happened at Lade, and so it seemed to be happening now — just as the traitorous Athenian admiral had said it would. Time, then, to close the twin jaws of the trap. Time to finish off Greek resistance for good. Time to enter the straits.