Thermopylae (2 page)

481 Spring. Xerxes sets out from Susa.

Autumn. Sends demands for submission from Greek states. Spends winter in Sardis.

480 Spring. Xerxes crosses the Hellespont.

Greeks withdraw their advance force from the Pass of Tempe.

hate June-early July. While Xerxes and the army move south the Persian fleet heads for the canal cut behind Mount Athos.

Mid-August. Bulk of Greek fleet moves up to Artemisium. Leonidas and his small holding-force march north to Thermopylae.

Leonidas fortifies the pass at Thermopylae and raids the country to the north of it.

The Persian fleet is caught in a storm off the Greek coast north of Cape Sepias and suffers considerable losses.

c. in August. Themistocles persuades the other Greek naval commanders to attack the Persian fleet which is regrouping after the storm in the Gulf of Pagasae.

On the same day Xerxes orders his crack troops forward for the first attack on the Spartan position. They are repulsed with heavy losses.

In a further great storm part of the Persian fleet, which had been sent to round Euboea, is wrecked off the southern coast of the island.

Second day of the Battle of Thermopylae. The Persians are again badly defeated. The Greek fleet scores another small victory.

Third day of the Battle of Thermopylae. During the previous night Xerxes’ imperial guard, the Immortals, have outflanked Leonidas by following the route over the mountains behind the pass. In the morning Xerxes orders another frontal attack on the Spartan position. Meanwhile the Immortals have come down the mountain and take the Spartans from the rear. Leonidas and a chosen handful die to a man. On the same afternoon the Greek fleet scores an important victory over the Persians at Artemisium. (The day that Thermopylae was overrun was possibly 20 August - the day of the Spartan festival, the Carneia, which had been the cause of the main body of their army being withheld.)

The same night, on hearing the news, the Greek fleet withdraws from Artemisium, southward down the Euboea Channel.

23 August (?) Xerxes’ army advances into southern Greece. By the end of the month the main body of the army is into Attica itself.

hate August. Failure of the Persian-inspired Carthaginian attack on Sicily.

First week of September. The fall of the Acropolis of Athens.

c. 20 September. The Battle of Salamis. A few days after this crushing defeat Xerxes and the main body of the army begin their withdrawal from Greece.

480-479 Winter. A picked body of the Persian army under General Mardonius remains behind in Thessaly to prepare for an offensive in the spring.

479 hate spring. Mardonius and his army march south. Attica is once again overrun and Athens reoccupied. The Athenians once more withdraw to Salamis.

Early summer. The Spartans and their allies march north to join up with the Athenians. Mardonius relinquishes Athens and Attica. He withdraws to Thebes and his Greek allies in that area. The Persians encamp on the north bank of the River Asopus, covering the roads leading to Thebes itself.

479 Plataea. The final battle. The Persian invasion is over.

The whole of the East was on the move. So indeed it must have seemed to some peasant, looking up bewildered from his patch of land, as the army surged past like a river in spate. Day after day, as if driven by the hunger that sometimes forces great masses of the human race to migrate in search of new pastures, thousands upon thousands of men had been passing through the lowlands of Asia Minor. They were men of many races: Persians, Medes, and Bactrians, Arabs on camels, mountain men from Caucasus, Libyans driving chariots, and horsemen from central Iran. There were even primitive Ethiopians painted in savage style, whose Stone Age weapons contrasted strangely with the sophisticated armour and swords of the immaculate Persian royal guard. It was the year 480 B.C. and Xerxes had given the order for the invasion of Europe.

The King’s writ had gone forth, and when he himself went to war, every nation, tribe and race within the vast Persian Empire was expected not only to furnish its due contingent of men, but those men must also be led by their own kings, leaders, or princes. All were vassals of the Great King, who had described himself in an inscription at Persepolis: ‘I am Xerxes, the King, King of Kings, King of the lands … son of Darius the king, the Achaemenian; a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan, of Aryan stock.’

The eldest son of Darius by the elder daughter of Cyrus, Xerxes was thirty-eight years old. Although the picture of him that was subsequently drawn by Greek historians and dramatists shows us a traditional Oriental tyrant, it is noticeable that Herodotus himself concedes a number of virtues to this arch-enemy of his people. Xerxes, as he depicts him, is capable of compassion as well as of regal munificence. He had, as was natural for a Persian of his rank and breeding, not only a love of the chase but also a rich appreciation of the natural beauties of the world. A deeply religious man, he was a Zoroastrian. While the great achievements of Greece in philosophy, science, and speculation about the nature of the universe largely lay in the future, the amoral Gods of the Homeric world were still dominant in the religious conceptions of most Greeks. Xerxes, however, believed in the inspired message that Zoroaster, the prophet, had left behind many centuries before. What distinguished the religion of the Persians from that of the contemporary Greeks has been summed up by H. Humbach, the translator of verses which are ascribed to Zoroaster:

It is really the knowledge of the directly imminent beginning of the last epoch of the world, in which Good and Evil would be separated from one another, which he gave to mankind. It is the knowledge that it lies in every individual’s head to participate in the extirpation of Falsehood and in the establishing of the kingdom of God, before whom all men devoted to the pastoral life are equal, and so to re-establish the milk-flowing paradise on earth.

An inscription at Persepolis made early in the reign of Xerxes records the ruler’s dedication to his religious faith: ‘A great god is Ahuramazda, who created this earth, who created man, who created peace for man; who made Xerxes king, one king of many, one lord of many.’

Xerxes, as his conduct shows, was prepared to concede that other variants of religious belief were recognised in various guises by other nations. In his conquest of ‘rebellious lands’, primarily Egypt, he had done his best to uproot the polytheism that he had found rampant everywhere. But the one thing that the Greeks, against whom he was now to wage war, could not ever accept was the fact that Xerxes, like all Eastern potentates, claimed for himself the divine right of kings — ‘one lord of many’.

The invasion of Greece, which was about to take place, was in no sense a religious war: such a concept had hardly evolved, except, perhaps, among the Jews, who saw themselves as God’s chosen people destined to bring the light of their knowledge of God to the heathen by whom they were surrounded. No, what the Greeks resented above all - though almost every small area and city-state was at variance with the other - was the assumption that any man could call himself the God-appointed ruler of all other men. What, on the surface, almost united Greece in the struggle that was to follow was the simple survival instinct. The invasion of Greece made the turbulent, brilliant people of this mountainous and largely inhospitable land aware that they shared one thing in common: a belief in the individual human being’s right to dissent, to think his own way, and not to acknowledge any man as a ‘monarch of all I survey’. Curiously enough, the state of Sparta, which was to play a large part in the campaign, was the only one where men had evolved a constitution in which the individual was trained and disciplined to be totally subordinate. The difference was that the Spartans were indeed subject, although not to a ‘Great King’, but to the concept of the State itself. Perhaps Demaratus, the exiled king of Sparta, who actively helped Xerxes in his campaign, put it best: ‘Even though the Spartans are free, still they are not wholly free. The law is their master, and they fear this more than thy people fear thee.’

Xerxes in his great proclamation at Persepolis, after recording how he had put down a rebellion in what one presumes was Egypt, had it inscribed that:

Within these lands there were places where formerly the
Daevas
had been worshipped. Then by the will of Ahuramazda I uprooted the cult of the
Daevas
, and made proclamation: The
Daevas
shall not be worshipped. Where formerly the
Daevas
had been worshipped, there did I worship Ahuramazda according to Truth and with the proper rite. Much else that was ill done did I make good. All that I did, I did by the will of Ahuramazda. Ahuramazda brought me aid until I finished my work. Thou who shalt come after me, if thou shalt think, ‘May I be happy while alive and blessed when dead,’ have respect for the law which Ahuramazda has established, and worship Ahuramazda according to Truth and with the proper rite.

The false gods (
Daevas
) whose worship Xerxes had forbidden were, in this case, the vast pantheon of Egypt. It is significant that there are no statues of Xerxes in Egypt. Where the great Darius had been tolerant in his treatment of foreign religious practices, Xerxes would seem to have taken the commands of Zoroaster more literally. It was not without some crusading zeal that he now set in motion the invasion of Greece. With the aid of Ahuramazda he would avenge his father’s defeat at the hands of the Greeks, and bring these dissident worshippers of false gods within the divine rule of Persia and its monarchy.

He had set out from Susa in the spring of 481. On 10 April of that year there had been an eclipse of the sun (Herodotus wrongly assigns this to the year 480). Not unnaturally, in view of the immensity of the preparations, and the fact that Darius himself had suffered defeat on a similar expedition, this eclipse caused considerable concern, if not consternation, in the court and among the people.

However, the Magi (the wise men who watched the stars and attended to religious rituals), primed with knowledge of the Universe that had been largely acquired from the absorption of Babylon into the Persian Empire, hastened to reassure the Great King. It is possible that, from the Babylonian astronomers, they had learned that the moon is the eclipsing body. Their explanation of the event was completely consistent with this. The sun, they said, symbolised the Greeks and the moon the Persians. The eclipse was not an ill omen therefore. It showed that the Greeks were destined to be overshadowed and conquered by the Persian moon.

Having spent the winter in Sardis, while all the contingents of his army assembled ready for their march north in the following spring, Xerxes could certainly reflect that he and his advisers, his ministers and his overseers of the various work-forces had done all that was possible to obviate any obstacles in their path. His invasion of Europe was so well planned that one is astonished at such efficiency and logistical preparation at such an early date. When one compares the inefficiency of the Crusades many centuries later, or even the relatively poor comprehension of the necessity for long-scale planning and forethought in major wars and campaigns right up to the twentieth century, one can only marvel at the organisation and bureaucratic competence of the Persian Empire. While the Greeks were inclined to see in the preparations made by Xerxes no more than that
hubris
or megalomania which they associated with all despots and Oriental monarchs, there is - to modern eyes - nothing to show that Xerxes and his staff were anything other than magnificent planners, on a scale undreamed of at that period in history.

The preparations for this massive expedition against their country had been known to the Greeks for years. It was not possible that they could have been kept secret, for they involved an immense task force, and works of so extravagant a nature that they almost rivalled the building of the Pyramids. First of all, Xerxes had no intention of allowing his fleet to be brought to ruin off the stormy peninsula of Mount Athos - as had happened to the fleet of Darius during his invasion of Greece ten years previously. The expedition of Xerxes was four years in preparation, and one of the main projects was the digging of a canal through the isthmus of Mount Athos. The mountain, as Herodotus writes, ‘is very well-known and high and stands out into the sea. It is inhabited, and on the landward side where the heights end there is a kind of isthmus roughly a mile and a half wide. All of this is level land or small hillocks…. The inhabitants [of the mountain] Xerxes now intended to turn into islanders.’

He goes on to describe how the canal through the low land was cut. Conscripted Greeks from the neighbouring areas were used for much of the labour, while skilled workmen were also brought over from Asia Minor. Outstanding among them were the Phoenicians (one of the most technologically advanced people of that era, and the nation which also formed the backbone of the Persian fleet). Herodotus makes the comment that, while the other ‘nations’ engaged on the task of digging the canal had constant trouble with landslips, caused by the fact that they dug their part of the canal like a simple ditch with straight sides, only the Phoenicians realised that the digging must be much wider at the top in order to leave what engineers call an ‘angle of rest’. (Centuries later similar difficulties had to be overcome during the digging of the Suez Canal.) ‘They proved their remarkable skill,’ he writes, ‘for, in the section that had been allotted to them, they dug a trench twice the width required for the canal itself when finished. Digging at a slope they narrowed it as they went further down so that at the bottom their section was as wide as the rest.’

Everything was provided for: there was the equivalent of a canteen for the workmen, with grain brought from the homeland, as well as a forum or meeting-place, and an open market - proof in itself that the workmen were paid in coin. Herodotus’ conclusion about the gigantic labour of the canal was that the whole thing was no more than yet another example of the ostentation of Xerxes. ‘There would not have been any difficulty’, he wrote, ‘in having the ships dragged across the isthmus on land, yet he gave orders for the canal to be made so wide that two warships could be rowed abreast [down its length].’ The historian was thinking, of course, of the practice at Corinth of dragging ships across the isthmus which connects northern Greece with the Peloponnese. His great mistake, however, was to equate the routine passage of merchantmen and warships between the Gulf of Patras and the Aegean Sea with the emergent movement of a large fleet into hostile waters. While waiting to take their turn for haulage overland, they might well have been overwhelmed by one of the sudden and violent storms that quite often afflict the Aegean.