Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (8 page)

The Athenians had been building ships for three years when Xerxes launched his attack. At thirty-eight he already ruled an empire that stretched from the Sahara Desert to the Caspian Sea, and from the Balkans to the Hindu Kush. At the corners of his realm ran the four great rivers of the known world: the Nile, the Danube, the Oxus, and the Indus. Through its heart ran the Tigris and Euphrates, rivers that had nurtured kingdoms and empires for centuries. The new king saw more in his expedition to the west than pious fulfillment of a vow. When the Athenians burned the temple of the Mother Goddess at Sardis, they provided the Great King with a justification for a holy war. The punishment of Athens would inevitably lead to the conquest of the other Greeks and then Europe all the way to the Atlantic. Great empires must grow, and Xerxes had inherited an empire at its zenith.

The Persians believed that God, or in their case the all-powerful deity Ahura Mazda, fought on the side of the big battalions. Having first dealt with rebellions in Egypt and Babylonia, Xerxes levied troops from all parts of his empire for the invasion of Greece. The resulting horde was so elephantine that it took six months to make its way from the capital at Susa to the coast of the Aegean Sea. The king’s relays of mounted couriers took only thirteen days to cover the same sixteen hundred miles. The motto of these riders was remembered through the ages: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor dark of night keeps these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed course.”

Like his mail carriers Xerxes was inexorable, but at a walking pace. The royal field pavilion, which had to be pitched anew at every night’s stopping place and struck every morning, was the size of a concert hall. Magi carrying portable fire altars marched beside the king’s chariot. To keep his brothers and other kinsmen out of trouble at home, Xerxes brought them along with him. His own attendants, including concubines, cooks, pastry chefs, musicians, bath attendants, astrologers, keepers of the wardrobe, and baggage handlers were an army in themselves. Close to Xerxes were the two royal intelligence officers known as the Great King’s Eye and Ear. Important Greek exiles also accompanied the king: these turncoats would guide the army’s course after it entered Europe and looked forward to ruling their native lands on Xerxes’ behalf once the Persians restored them to power. From Sparta came a banished king named Demaratus; from Athens, sons of the old tyrant Hippias. After spending half a year on the Royal Road, the grand army settled down in Sardis to pass the cold and rainy winter months. Poised at the eastern edge of the Greek world, the Persians would launch their invasion at the beginning of spring.

Even before then Xerxes intended to dazzle his puny antagonists with two amazing feats. The first would allow his army to walk into Europe. His corps of engineers spanned the Hellespont with a pair of pontoon bridges, connecting Asia to Europe with gigantic cables of papyrus and esparto grass. The hulls of more than six hundred galleys would be anchored
in the stream to carry the two roadbeds. The second marvel would enable the triremes of Xerxes’ fleet to cut through dry land. For almost three years other royal engineers had been directing huge gangs of workmen as they dug a canal through the peninsula at Mount Athos. By entering Greek waters through this canal, the armada would bypass the dangerous cape where stormy winds once wrecked Darius’ fleet.

With these two superhuman achievements Xerxes hoped to shock and awe his enemies into submission. From his winter quarters the Great King sent heralds to the Greeks in his path, demanding earth and water. This symbolic offering showed that the people had yielded their land to the king. When the heralds finally returned, months later, it was clear that the war of nerves had been well worth the trouble and expense. All the cities and peoples north of the pass at Thermopylae capitulated. Only a few in central and southern Greece refused. They would join the Spartans and Athenians in the fight for freedom, regardless of the odds.

By the time Xerxes and his army appeared in Asia Minor, the Greeks had at last begun to take united action. The Spartans, traditional leaders and arbiters of Hellenic affairs, called a council at the Isthmus of Corinth. All the cities who meant to resist the Persians sent representatives. The council met beneath the tall pine trees in the sanctuary of Poseidon, god of the sea and lord of horses. That autumn, with the Great King sitting in state at Sardis and his canal and bridges nearing completion, the newly convened council decided to send three spies across the Aegean to ascertain the size of the enemy forces. It turned out to be an unexpectedly dangerous mission. While collecting information in the Persian camp, the three spies were apprehended, tortured, and sentenced to death. Xerxes himself, however, gave the order to spare their lives. He was delighted with this chance to provide the Greeks with up-to-date, eyewitness accounts of his army. The spies were freed, given a tour of the entire camp, and then sent back to the Isthmus. Their report was a shock to all.

In attempting to estimate the size of the Persian forces, the Greeks were dealing with numbers beyond their ability to count or comprehend. In the end they put the number of fighting men at somewhere between one and three million, and the number of triremes at over twelve hundred. The ships were not actually Persian, since the Persians were not a maritime people. Instead the Great King levied triremes from the seafaring nations within his empire—Phoenicia, Egypt, Syria, Cyprus, Cilicia, Caria—and from eastern Greek cities. Four royal Persians, kinsmen of the king, had been appointed as admirals of the monstrous naval force, but local rulers commanded the various contingents of the fleet. One of these leaders was a woman: Artemisia, queen of the Greek city of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor and the lone female combatant among all the hundreds of thousands of men who followed Xerxes to Greece.

The Greeks may have been deceived about the exact tally of triremes in Xerxes’ armada, but it was no illusion that the Persians held an overwhelming advantage in numbers of ships, not to mention wealth, engineering, communications, siegecraft, and unified command. Whether his forces numbered in the millions or the thousands, Xerxes had paid the Athenians and the rest of the Greeks the compliment of attacking them with the largest combined army and navy ever assembled up to that time.

After receiving the spies’ report, the council voted to seek more allies within the Greek world. They sent an embassy to Sicily to solicit help from Gelon, the powerful tyrant of Syracuse. Originally a colony of the Corinthians, Syracuse had become one of the richest and strongest Greek cities. For this prestigious mission, Themistocles saw to it that an Athenian envoy accompanied the Spartans. During the negotiations at Syracuse the Athenian envoy put forward the idea that his city might lead the resistance at sea while the Spartans took charge on land, an idea that the Spartans seemed initially to accept. They had fewer than a dozen warships of their own, and the hostile masses of helots in the Spartan countryside made them always reluctant to send troops overseas. However, the diplomatic mission to Syracuse was a failure. The western Greeks had troubles of their own. Inspired by Xerxes’ example, Phoenician colonists at Carthage in North Africa were planning their own attack on the Greek cities in Sicily.

The council’s other appeals for help were also fruitless. In the end, out of hundreds of Greek city-states and islands scattered throughout the Mediterranean, only about thirty joined the alliance against the Persians. Given the odds, the wonder was not that there were so few but that there were any. What made the Spartans, Athenians, and others willing to fight?

Part of the answer lay in a raw Greek spirit of independence, a fierce and fanatical zeal for liberty. Their rough and rocky land had bred a race of tough, self-reliant people. Greek cities were as obstinate as individual citizens in jealously guarding their freedom. For centuries this spirit had kept the Greeks divided against one another. Now at last it helped them unite against a common enemy.

Certain rational and strategic calculations, too, made resistance more than a forlorn hope. The man who saw them most clearly was Themistocles. Each city-state had sent one deputy to the council at the Isthmus. The life-or-death nature of the emergency forced the cities to grant decision-making powers to these deputies, powers that in peacetime they would never have possessed. No arrangement could have given Themistocles greater influence. Back home at Athens, in the Assembly or the Agora, he was merely one of the ten generals elected for the year, criticized and challenged daily (as were all Athenian leaders) by his colleagues and fellow citizens. At the Isthmus he suddenly became the voice of Athens. The Spartans were the nominal leaders, but even they soon acknowledged Themistocles as the mastermind behind the allied strategy.

In Themistocles’ judgment, the most vulnerable element in Xerxes’ forces was the navy. Seemingly an invincible fleet of unprecedented size and grandeur, the huge armada was in truth a shambling giant. While the land army of cavalry, spearmen, and archers had a solid core of Persians and Medes, the empire’s power at sea lay entirely in the hands of subject peoples. Below the level of the four royal Persian admirals the fleet was a hodgepodge of nationalities, languages, and nautical traditions (or lack thereof). It was unlikely that the various contingents would be capable of any coordinated maneuvers. Their loyalty to Xerxes was questionable too. And Themistocles, moved by cunning
mêtis
rather than noble heroism, believed that the Greeks should aim their strongest blow at the enemy’s weakest link.

In the meetings at the Isthmus, wily Themistocles was waging two campaigns at once. Behind his public efforts to devise a winning strategy lurked a second and covert goal: to stake out a position for Athens as joint leader with Sparta. Luckily for him, Spartans seemed by nature slow to act. This slowness gave quicker-witted men, whether friends or enemies, plenty of opportunities to seize the initiative. Themistocles began by urging that all the allies give up hostilities among themselves, beginning with the longstanding feud between his own city and Aegina. The vision of Athens as peacemaker and unifier made a compelling image. With it Themistocles launched his undeclared campaign.

Next, he brought the council over to his idea of meeting the barbarian “as far forward as possible.” In early spring the alliance undertook its first military action: an expedition to block the Persian army at the narrow Tempe gorge in Thessaly. A Spartan named Euainetus led his country’s contingent, and Themistocles himself in a seemingly equal role led the Athenians. With ten thousand troops to ferry northward, the expedition launched Athens’ new fleet of triremes on its maiden voyage. Within a few days of arriving at Tempe, however, Euainetus and Themistocles learned that the Persians would have a choice of several passes through the mountains, and the Greeks could not hope to guard them all. Equally demoralizing was the discovery that Xerxes had not yet even crossed into Europe and might not reach Thessaly for months. So Tempe was abandoned. The Greeks boarded their ships and rowed home.

After this fiasco Themistocles rejoined the council at the Isthmus, where a new plan was devised for the defense of central Greece. When the Persians came, the Greeks proposed to divide their forces. The Greek army would block Xerxes’ army at the narrow pass called Thermopylae or the “Hot Gates,” while the Greek fleet would oppose the Great King’s armada in the nearby Artemisium channel. The new plan suited Themistocles very well. With the enemy still so distant, however, he made no headway against the allies’ reluctance to actually send their troops and ships northward.

Where were the Persians? As the Athenians and other Greeks were rowing home from their misbegotten expedition to Tempe, the Persians had still not entered Europe. Xerxes was holding reviews and regattas for his ships on the Asiatic shore of the Hellespont. The boat races were a diversion to pass the time while the army prepared to cross the two new pontoon bridges. An unexpected disaster had disrupted the royal plans. Before anyone had crossed the bridges a violent storm broke the huge cables and swept the original spans downstream. Furious at the delay, the king beheaded the overseers and ordered his men to beat the unruly waters of the Hellespont with whips. After a new engineering team rebuilt the bridges in record time, Xerxes marched grandly across to the European shore in the midst of his army. It took a month for the entire horde to cross.

In the rough country beyond the Hellespont, the army trekked overland while the ships coasted along toward Mount Athos. They avoided the deadly cape by rowing through the newly dug canal. With numbers increased by galleys levied from Greek cities along the way, the fleet rejoined the army at Therma on the Macedonian coast. Here Xerxes called a halt. His troops and rowers rested as the engineers smoothed a road through the mountains. From his new base Xerxes could gaze south toward the high peak of Mount Olympus. Its snowcapped summit was the dwelling place of Zeus and the other Greek gods. On a whim, Xerxes cruised down the coast on his fastest trireme, a Phoenician ship from the city of Sidon, to view Mount Olympus and the vale of Tempe from the sea. The holy mountain was now part of his empire, and it seemed inevitable that all the lands ruled by those gods would soon be his also.