Persian Fire (57 page)

But how to secure that submission was now, after Salamis, a sudden and unanticipated headache. Mardonius, in the council of war that followed the battle, cheerfully dismissed the whole debacle as being of sublime unimportance. 'What are a few planks of wood?' he sniffed dismissively. 'So what if a shamble of Phoenicians, of Egyptians, of Cypriots, of Cilicians have messed things up? It is not as though the Persians had any hand in it. No, my Lord, it was hardly a defeat for us.'
²⁹
Ringingly stated — and an expression of the chauvinism that came naturally to every Persian aristocrat. To the Great King, too, of course — for Xerxes was hardly the man to dispute his countrymen's bravery and prowess. All the same, he had marched on Greece as more than just the King of Persia: he was, literally, 'King of Lands'. The rout of the various squadrons he had summoned to his banner had stung his pride. It was all very well for Mardonius to sneer at the rag-bag character of the imperial navy — but that was precisely what had made it, in the opinion of the Great King, such an effective embodiment of his global power.

Nor, despite the mauling that it had received, could Xerxes initially bring himself to accept that his reach might have been reduced as a consequence of the defeat. No sooner had his fleet been swept out of the straits than he was attempting to impose his mastery in a fresh and suitably imperious manner: by erecting a causeway across to Salamis. Rocks were dropped into the shallows, merchant-ships lashed together in a desperate attempt to bridge the central depths of the channel. But it was the Greek archers, not the straits themselves, that ultimately posed the insuperable obstacle to the attempt. The imperial engineers, harassed by predatory warships, provided easy pickings for enemy fire, until the Great King, bowing to the inevitable, was forced recluctantly to abandon the project. For a man who had bridged the

Hellespont and split the peninsula of Mount Athos, this was an agonising frustration. Having dreamed only days previously of conquering an entire continent, the Great King now found himself defied by a mile-wide stretch of water.

And by further grim tidings, too. Reports were starting to come in from Sicily, a theatre crucial to the Great King's hopes of extending his power ever further westwards, of a second Greek victory. Gelon, the precocious tyrant of Syracuse, was said to have inflicted a sensational defeat on the Carthaginians. The destruction of their army had been bloody beyond compare. Below the walls of Himera, a city in north Sicily, 150,000 Carthaginians lay butchered; the survivors had all been enslaved; their general, surprised while making a sacrifice, had immolated himself in the flames. For the Great King, as he pondered his next move in an increasingly autumnal Athens, the implications of this news were sobering in the extreme. His ambitions, once so grandiose, seemed suddenly diminished and circumscribed. Dreams of extending the limits of Persian greatness to the setting of the sun counted for little against the reality of a blockaded Isthmus, an unpacified Peloponnese. What had previously been represented as a campaign of universal conquest appeared to have shrunk to the status of an awkward border war.

And as such, of course, to have become hardly worthy of the Great King's personal attention. Mardonius, recognising this, was quick to seize his chance. 'Head back to your regional headquarters in Sardis,' he urged his cousin, 'and take the greater part of the army with you, and leave me to complete the enslavement of Greece with men whom I will personally choose to finish off the job.'
³⁰
Such a commission was precisely what Mardonius had been angling after for years; and the Great King, reluctant to pass a second summer on campaign in Greece, no longer had any reason to oppose his cousin's strategy. The scale and flamboyance that had characterised the expedition under his own leadership would be scandalously inappropriate once he was no longer at its head. As the task force's new commander, Mardonius would be judged by only one measure: whether he succeeded in bringing the new satrapy to heel. Against the Spartans and their allies it was quality, not quantity, that would count. The lessons of Thermopylae, bruising though they were, had been well learned. As the Great King, having left a still-smoking Attica behind him, began leading his troops northwards, through Boeotia and then into Thessaly, so Mardonius, given a free hand by his cousin, began to cherry-pick the elite.

Top of his wish-list was cavalry: mobile, heavily armoured, and, in the case of the Saka, able to fire a rain of arrows at any ponderous lines of infantry they might happen to be galloping past. The virtual helplessness of Greek hoplites against such opponents had been demonstrated repeatedly over previous decades and there seemed little reason to doubt that it soon would be again. Nor was Mardonius alone in this opinion. What neutrals made of his prospects can be gauged from the fact that the Great King, despite his failure to subdue Greece, completed a leisurely and unscathed retreat.
³¹
To be sure, the allies spun any number of far-fetched anecdotes — claiming that his army had been reduced to eating grass, that it had been virtually wiped out after crashing through an ice-covered river, that Xerxes himself had crossed the Hellespont huddled alone in a fishing boat — but these were all lies. Any tribe or city that dared to betray its oath of submission could expect to meet with an immediate and blistering response. Most opted to play things safe. Thrace, Macedonia and Thessaly all stayed loyal to the King of Kings. So, too, did Thebes and central Greece. Even the imperial fleet, although certainly down, was far from out. The carnage of Salamis notwithstanding, it still outnumbered the allied navy. There appeared every prospect, come the summer, that Mardonius would indeed 'finish off the job'.

Or perhaps he would be spared the need. Embarrassing though the intelligence failure at Salamis had been, and devastating in its consequences, the Persian high command still looked to divide and rule. Remarkably, channels were even kept open to Themistocles. After all, it had not been on the Athenian's recommendation that the Great King had chosen to fight in the straits - a detail with which Themistocles appears to have made considerable hay. Only days after Salamis, in a startling display of cheek, he had sent Sicinnus back over the straits with a second message for the Persians: a reassurance that he remained 'eager to be of service to the royal cause' and was acting as a restraining influence on the rest of the allied fleet.
¹²
Mind-boggling claims, it might have been thought — but the spy chiefs had not, as they must have been itching to do, put Sicinnus to a long and agonising death. Instead, just as on the eve of Salamis, they had opted to send the slave back to his master. We do not know what message they gave him to carry, but there must surely have been one: an amplification of the Great King's peace terms, no doubt. The Athenian people, still buoyed by their victory at Salamis, could hardly have been expected to accept them — but that was not the point. Just as Themistocles was obviously shadow-boxing, so too was the Persian high command. Each side was indicating to the other their appreciation of a guilty secret: that the moment might yet come when it would be in their mutual interests for Athens to be granted a privileged surrender.

But why would Themistocles, at the moment of his greatest triumph, be prepared to send such a treasonous message? The answer, for those skilled in the dark art of interpreting Greek diplomatic manoeuvres, had not been long in coming. Several weeks after Sicinnus' second mission, the Spartans had sent an embassy of their own to the Persian camp. Arriving in Thessaly, where the Great King was preparing to depart for the Hellespont, they had bluntly demanded reparations for the death of Leonidas. The Great King, bursting into laughter, had suddenly fallen silent, as though making private calculations. 'You will get all the reparations you deserve,' he had said at last, gesturing to his cousin, 'from Mardonius here.'
³³
Witty enough — but Xerxes had surely been mulling over more than a menacing
bon mot.
He would have recognised that behind the Spartans' seemingly brutish demand there was an intriguing hint: that they just might, if offered a hefty enough bribe, be prepared to tolerate the status quo. A comical notion, of course: the Great King did not negotiate with anyone. Nevertheless, it was, in its implications, full of interest. It would, after all, oblige the Spartans to wash their hands of the whole of central Greece — including Attica. Well might the Great King have paused and furrowed his brow.

And well might the Spartans, their embassy rebuffed, have loudly insisted that they had only sent it in the first place because they had been instructed to do so by Apollo. The Athenians, and everyone else, were happy to take their word for it. None of the Greeks who had triumphed at Salamis had any interest in destabilising the alliance if they could possibly help it. Even as the campaigning season drew to a close amid autumnal storms, the afterglow of the famous victory still lit the lengthening evenings. To celebrate their achievement, the various Greek squadrons, returned from a profitable few weeks spent touring the Aegean, and extorting money from the islanders, all assembled off the Isthmus. Here, at the temple of Poseidon which had served the alliance as its headquarters throughout the summer, a great jamboree of mutual back-slapping was held. Sacrifices were offered to the gods, and prizes given. The sense of relief was immense. 'A black cloud', as Themistocles put it, 'has been swept away from off the sea.'
³⁴

But not, unfortunately from off the land — with implications for the alliance that might prove ominous, as the shrewder Athenians and Spartans had already begun to appreciate. The Isthmus, even as it hosted the great festival of unity, served as a fracture-line. If a delegate tired of the celebrations, he could have this brought home to him while paying a call on the neighbourhood's most obvious alternative source of entertainment. There stood, two thousand feet above Corinth, on the summit of the city's steepling acropolis, a temple dedicated to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Here, complementing the marble statuary, could be found an altogether less chilly brand of votive offering: prostitutes. Donated to the goddess by grateful Olympic champions and other such luminaries, these had a reputation so superlative that in Greek
'korinthiazein'
— 'to do a Corinthian' — meant to fuck. Patriotic as well as proficient, Aphrodite's temple-whores had spent the weeks before Salamis raising urgent prayers to their divine mistress, imploring her to inspire the allies with a love of battle. Any war hero who did take time off from the celebrations at the Isthmus to visit them could look forward to a particularly enthusiastic reception. Then, shattered by the climb as well as by all of his subsequent exertions, he could slump down, admire the matchless view, and see for himself why the alliance that had won at Salamis might be in imminent danger of Assuring.

For from nowhere else could the opportunities and the dilemmas presented by the Isthmus be more readily appreciated. To the south stretched the Peloponnese — now, thanks in large part to the Athenian fleet, secure from invasion. To the north curved the coast that led to Attica —still wide open to Mardonius. Hardly surprising, then, that the Athenians, even as they began returning across the straits from Salamis to their ruined homeland, should have kept a nervous eye on the road to Thessaly. Resentful of the monstrous unfairness of geography, and hardly able to restrain themselves from blaming it on the Peloponnesians, they pressed loudly for a commitment from their allies to send an army north against Mardonius come the spring. The Peloponnesians stonewalled; and the more that the Athenians, attempting to shame them into action, harped upon their role as the victors of Salamis, the more their partners, snug and smug behind their wall, dug in their heels.

The result, bubbling away beneath the facade of amity presented at the Isthmus, was a toxic brew of resentment and spite. The Peloponnesians, infuriated by Athenian cockiness, made sure that the prize for civic achievement was awarded to Aegina. Then, rather than endure the spectacle of Themistocles strutting around wearing the crown for individual achievement, they split the vote among nominees from their own cities, so that no one won the prize at all. The

Athenian response was to start flinging around slanders like mud -including, choicest of all, an accusation that the Corinthians at Salamis had headed north up the channel, not to confront the Egyptians, but because they were fleeing like cowards. Well might the delegates at the Isthmus have revelled in their sense of deliverance from the barbarian menace. Pettiness, envy, back-biting: it was just like old times.

But the Spartans at least, tempted though they may have been to join in the fun, had recognised it as a self-indulgence that their city could ill afford. Their security had to come ahead of even the pleasure to be had from baiting Themistocles. The Athenian fleet, as the Spartan high command was naggingly aware, remained the key to the security of the Peloponnese. Only if Mardonius could somehow win Athens round to the Great King's cause would he have a hope of breaching the Isthmus. So that the Spartans, displaying the coarse pragmatism that invariably marked their understanding of human nature, opted not to insult the Athenian admiral, but rather to stroke and pet his ego.