Spartan (16 page)

‘Sire,’ he gasped, ‘they’re coming. Hundreds of thousands of them. The rivers dry up when they cross, their fires light up the horizon at night; no one has ever seen such
a great army!’ The king immediately gave a series of terse orders. The detachments took their positions in fighting order behind the wall while others remained in front to better survey the
situation. They performed gymnastics as they waited, to warm their muscles for the battle. Suddenly, at the top of a hill appeared a Persian horseman. He was easily distinguished by his wide
embroidered trousers and by the mitre that he wore on his head. The young Spartiates did not even honour him with a glance, but continued with their exercises as if nothing had happened. The
Persian, having observed the scene, spurred his horse and dashed down the hill at a gallop.

‘They’ll soon be upon us,’ said Aristarkhos to Leonidas.

‘I think you’re right,’ responded the king. ‘They have no reason to delay.’

Instead, after about an hour, a squad of horses carrying a banner appeared on the road.

‘They’re not armed,’ observed Aristarkhos. ‘It must be an envoy.’

He was right. The horsemen slowed to a pace and advanced gradually behind the banner, stopping at the foot of the wall. An interpreter who spoke Greek came forward: ‘This is an embassy
from Xerxes, the King of Kings, Lord of the Four Corners of the Earth. We wish to speak with your commander.’

Aristarkhos emerged from behind the wall and approached the interpreter, announcing: ‘Our commander Leonidas, son of Anaxandridas, King of the Spartans.’ He moved aside, and Leonidas
came out into the open. The three red crests of his great helmet swayed in the wind that blew from the sea.

The Persian ambassador, wrapped in a mantle of blue byssus, wore the sabre of the Immortals with its finely chiselled golden hilt at his belt.

He haughtily pronounced a long discourse, nodding his head to signify that he had finished. The interpreter, with his sing-song Ionic accent, translated: ‘The King of Kings, Xerxes, our
Master and Lord of the Four Corners of the Earth, has sent us to say, “O men of Greece, abandon this path. Do not uselessly challenge our ire. All the peoples and all the nations have already
surrendered at the mere sight of our soldiers, more numerous than the grains of sand along the seaside. Our desire is to be merciful; we will not take your lives if you surrender, so give up your
arms.”’ He paused for a moment. ‘What must I answer?’

King Leonidas, who had remained immobile, staring directly into the Persian’s eyes without so much as a glance towards the Greek interpreter, answered in his hard Laconian dialect.
‘Our arms? Come and get them.’

The interpreter paled, then translated the answer for the ambassador. The Persian stared, stunned by such as outright challenge. Then, with an irritated gesture, he nodded to his entourage,
turned his horse, and went off in a cloud of dust.

A short time later, prostrated before his king, he repeated the answer given him. Demaratus, who was in the royal pavilion, advanced towards the throne saying, ‘I warned you, Lord, that
even when all the others had submitted, the Spartans would go on fighting.’

The Great King, livid with anger, immediately convened his generals and ordered them to launch the attack: he wanted the Greeks taken alive and brought in chains into his presence. The camp
immediately rang out with shouted instructions, trumpets blared the fall-in, and the immense horde began to make its way to the pass.

King Leonidas brought his troops outside the wall. He himself was in the front line on the right wing, Aristarkhos on the left. At a certain point they heard from far off the chilling roll of
drums, confused with the neighing of horses and the din made by the iron-rimmed wheels of the war chariots. The gigantic army appeared at the end of the road.

*

The Spartiate warriors, drawn up on the right, pressed close together to create an impenetrable wall of shields, thick with shining spears. With a blood-curdling cry, the
Persians suddenly threw themselves into the attack, spilling out onto the Greek front line. The row was terrible: the Persians were used to battling with light weapons and cavalry. Crowded into
such a narrow space, they fell by the hundreds, run through by the heavy shafts of the hoplites who were completely protected by their bronze armour.

The combat became frenzied. The Greeks, abandoning their spears as they became unusable, unsheathed their short swords and began battling hand-to-hand. Leonidas’ red crest could still be
seen above the dense cloud of dust that had risen, as he led his men onwards in a relentless charge. The three hundred warriors had forced a passage through the enemy lines, trampling the heaps of
cadavers on ground made slippery by the blood of the fallen.

The Persian commander, realizing that the Greeks were about to encircle the centre of his formation, gave the order to retreat. Amidst the cries of the wounded and the neighing of the
terror-crazed horses, his men began to move back slowly, so as not to totally break up the ranks. Leonidas abruptly also gave an order to retreat, and his men, throwing their shields baldric-wise
on their backs, fled quickly towards the wall.

Seeing this, the Persian general assumed that the exhausted enemy intended to withdraw behind the wall, and he shouted out a new order to attack. Encouraged, his men rushed forward in disorderly
pursuit, and the order of their formation was soon broken. It was exactly what Leonidas had hoped for; when his men arrived at the wall, they made a swift turnabout, presenting a new front in
compact ranks to the enemy.

The Persians arrived headlong in chaotic waves, and they were promptly cut to pieces. Terrified, they attempted a retreat but the officers at their backs drove them on with whips, shouting their
orders in a thousand different languages. In that inferno of dust and blood, the solid wall of warriors led by Leonidas advanced, destroying everything in their path. The trumpets finally sounded
the retreat, and the soldiers of the Great King, wounded and depleted, abandoned the pass.

King Leonidas turned to his warriors, pulled off his bloody, dented helmet, and launched a cry of victory. He was joined by his men as the rocky gorges of Mount Oeta resounded with their
joy.

Talos had watched the whole scene from behind the wall as his companions ran back and forth grabbing blunted weapons and broken spears to be repaired, and bringing new ones to the warriors on
the line of combat. When he saw the men at the front double back at a run, he found himself leaning over the bastions; he would eagerly have taken up any arm at hand and leapt into the heat of the
fray. He would never have thought that he could be moved by such an impulse! But as the battle unfolded, Talos felt his blood boiling in his veins and an urgent desire to combat among the warriors.
He was shaken by his inexplicable enthusiasm for their desperate resistance. He recognized superhuman valour in their magnificent compact formations as they followed the red crest of their king.
And greater yet was his anger at not being a part of the fire that enflamed the combatants brought together in defence of the liberty of many nations.

*

The warriors of Sparta, Trachis and Tegea returned behind the wall, filthy and dripping sweat, wounded, limping. The infantrymen from Mantinea and Orchomenus had beards white
with dust, their spears broken and shields rent. Talos saw Brithos with his splendid bronze cuirass decorated in copper, and with him his father Aristarkhos, his face covered by a Corinthian
sallet, his great dragoned shield crushed and dented. How he longed to be one of them!

The Helots’ supervisor arrived and barked impatient orders to prepare food and water so the combatants could wash and recover their strength. The wounded were brought to a tent where they
were bandaged and taken care of. Other Helots went outside the wall to gather the fallen men and prepare for hurried obsequies.

King Leonidas, indefatigable, went round the camp giving instructions and ordering the shifts of guard duty at the wall. As he rested for a moment without having even taken off his armour, a
messenger came with a dispatch: the fleet had confronted the enemy and had succeeded in driving them back.

Themistocles had kept his word, keeping vigil over the sea to protect the small army that guarded the pass. There was no word from the mountain pass of Anopaea where the Phocians guarded the
only route over land that could lead the enemy around to the back of the Greek contingent. The king sent a dispatch of his own to Sparta asking for reinforcements. He was sure that the pass could
be defended if only fresh troops were available. He didn’t know that his destiny had already been decided: not for any reason would his government have diverted troops from the Corinthian
isthmus.

Xerxes couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw his troops returning in such a state. He realized that his army had found no way to deploy its crushing superiority in that narrow alley
guarded by a fistful of such courageous men. Demaratus was right: it had been a great error to underestimate the Greeks, and especially the Spartans. Xerxes gave the order to send the best of his
troops, the Immortals, to the attack. The camp resounded with cries and laments, and the drums rolled once more. Soon ten thousand Persian warriors, splendidly armed, were lined up in their ranks.
They would charge the pass and overwhelm, once and for all, the obstinate resistance of its defenders.

The news arrived quickly at the Greek camp, brought by a sentinel stationed at the entrance to the pass. ‘Sire, a second attack is arriving, but these are different: they’re marching
in silence, in compact ranks. They seem to be a much more disciplined corps.’

Leonidas had a moment of discouragement – how could he ask his weary men to take up the arms that they had just laid down? How many fresh troops could the Persian king draw up against his
depleted men? He sounded the fall-in; the men, in silence, re-formed their ranks in front of the wall. Those who had fought in the front line passed to the third and those who had been in the rear
guard moved to the front lines. The Persians advanced in cadenced steps, in a close formation.

‘They’ve drawn up in a phalanx,’ said Leonidas to Aristarkhos, ‘but their spears are shorter than ours. Give orders to minimize the space between one man and the next as
much as possible.’

Aristarkhos shouted the order, and with a metallic roar the front of the army closed up: only the heavy ash-wood spears protruded from the bronze wall of shields, forming an impenetrable
barrier. The king nodded towards the wall and a group of Helots gave breath to the pipes and rolled the drums. The enemy phalanx continued with measured steps, lifting a cloud of dust from the
ground still littered with corpses.

The warriors moved onto open ground. At an order from their king, drawn up to the extreme right, they charged. The two formations collided with a frightful clangour: for a moment the fronts of
both armies wavered uncertainly, since neither could push the other back.

The tense wail of the pipes could be heard along with the roll of drums, until King Leonidas, with a roar, charged forward like an enraged animal with his three hundred
eirenes
behind
him. He ran a Persian officer through, chopped in two another who was blocking his path, and advanced with unrestrained rage as Aristarkhos protected him from lateral attacks with his huge
shield.

Xerxes, who had had his throne placed on a nearby hill to contemplate the victory of his troops, jumped to his feet as he realized what was happening. King Leonidas had spotted him and was
trying to break through the Persian formation to get at him. The King of Kings grew pale: that relentless helmet with its three vermilion crests was cutting a swathe through the body of his army.
He had nearly succeeded in opening a passage through which the entire Greek army would spill out onto the Great King himself to decapitate the horde of invaders. Appalled, Xerxes gave the order to
retreat; the Immortals, decimated, fell rapidly back to the hill, re-formed their phalanx and moved backwards gradually so that the retreat would not be transformed into a rout.

For five long days, there was no further sign of the enemy army and Leonidas began to hope that he would receive reinforcements. Then, one moonless night, his sentinels saw a signal light
blinking repeatedly out at sea. A boat moored on the beach a short time later, and the man who got out asked to confer immediately with the king. Leonidas was in his tent at that moment, speaking
with Aristarkhos. The messenger entered bowing and said; ‘Sire, I must tell you things that are meant only for your ears.’

‘Speak freely,’ answered the king. ‘This man is the most valorous warrior of Sparta and faithful to me.’

‘Sire,’ continued the messenger, ‘my commander Themistocles salutes you and wishes you to know that he continues to keep his word. But now the entire fleet is at risk of being
surrounded by the enemy, and we have no choice but to retreat. To this he adds that he has learned that no reinforcements will be sent from Sparta, because the ephors and the elders refuse to
divert men from the isthmus. Your valour has been great and your death would be no advantage for the Greeks, so gather your men on the beach and later this night our ships will come to embark them
and bring them to safety on the Corinthian isthmus.’

King Leonidas paled, realizing that he had been completely abandoned. Without betraying his emotions he answered calmly, ‘You shall refer the following to your commander. “King
Leonidas has answered: Greetings, your words are of great comfort to us because the word of a friend is always precious even in extreme moments, but I cannot consent to your invitation. We must not
disobey the orders that have been given us. We will fight as long as our strength endures, then we will fall honourably as befits a warrior.” Go now, and may the gods be with you.’

The messenger saluted him, baffled by such superhuman resolve, and slipped through the night back to his boat. Hoisted onto the admiral’s trireme a short time later, he referred the
king’s response to his general, who was still awake by the light of a lamp in the quarterdeck.