Thermopylae (22 page)

Hamilcar had intended on that day to make a great sacrifice to the Greek sea-god Poseidon, not only to ensure victory but most probably to show his new helpers from Selinus how much he welcomed them and thanked one of their most important gods for their assistance. A huge altar had been prepared, the fire had been lit and the slaughtered animals were sending up their tribute of burning flesh to Poseidon when the Syracusan cavalry were welcomed into the camp as the eagerly awaited reinforcements from Selinus. No sooner were they through the gate than they set about firing tents, ships, and anything that would burn to add to the general confusion. Within minutes the troops of Theron had struck from the east while the troops out of Himera poured over the frontal defences of the camp. The Suffete Hamilcar dressed in priestly robes and officiating over the great offering to Poseidon was a figure that could hardly escape notice. He was cut down in front of the blazing sacrificial altar and his body hurled on to it to join the previous victims. Despite the totally unexpected nature of the attack the battle was not won without considerable hand-to-hand fighting and there was even a moment when some of the Greeks, thinking victory was theirs, broke ranks and began looting. A counter-attack of hardy Spanish troops, which for a moment threatened the Greek position, was staved off by Theron, who ordered the troops with him to fire all the tents on the landward side, thus creating a flaming, smoking barrier between the Greeks on the one side and the enemy on the other. The news of Hamilcar’s death must have served to complete the demoralisation of his army and, in their ensuing flight, hundreds of them were slaughtered. Gelon had given orders for no quarter to be given. A large number of survivors, however, managed to make their escape to a hill position (most probably Mount Calogero about five miles west of Himera) where they proceeded to dig themselves in. Gelon had the hill surrounded, but made no move to attempt any assault on the Carthaginian position. He knew something that these foreigners to Sicily could hardly be aware of: Calogero is waterless. In August, under the ‘lion sun’ of Sicily, men who had been fighting and then running and climbing could hardly hold out for long. Thirst drove them to surrender, and this time their lives were spared. Something like half of Hamilcar’s army now became Greek slaves: they would work for the rest of their lives enriching with their labour the cities of their Sicilian masters.

As for the fleet, one can do no more than presume, since accurate accounts are not available, that all the beached ships behind their protective palisade were destroyed. The squadron of twenty triremes that had been cruising offshore put in hastily and took off all the survivors from the army that they could carry - too many as it turned out. On their way homewards they too ran into a storm and, according to Diodorus, all but a single vessel were lost. One thing is certain: the Sicilian expedition was such a disaster that Carthage, terrified that the triumphant Greeks might swoop down and sack their great city by the sea, sent ambassadors to Gelon to sue for peace. He could afford to dictate his own terms and exacted a large indemnity of 2000 talents, while Theron’s beautiful daughter, Damarete, the wife of Gelon of Syracuse, was presented with a golden crown worth 100 talents. One of the most beautiful of all Greek coins, the Damaretia, which shows a winged Victory, a chariot and, below, a submissive lion (in the coinage language of the time, almost certainly symbolic of Carthage), was minted from the Carthaginian indemnity. On the obverse, familiar from thousands of reproductions, is a female head surrounded by dolphins, usually identified with the fountain-nymph Arethusa of Syracuse -and possibly a portrait of Damarete herself.

The battle of Himera, which for many years to come eliminated the Eastern and African threat to Sicily and the West, was rightly recognised at the time for what it was - a brilliant victory that rivalled that of Salamis. It was hardly surprising that popular tradition, even within the memory of those who had been living at the time, should maintain that these two great victories had taken place on the same day. Victory in the West together with victory at home in Greece showed, as it were, a divine blessing spread over the Greek cause. Aristotle, as Burn points out, was sceptical about such a temporal coincidence. It is indeed very unlikely, for the battle of Salamis was fought on or about 20 September 480. This was late in the year for warfare in those times, but necessitated by Xerxes’ protracted progress through Greece, the delay occasioned by Thermopylae, the fleet losses by storm, and by the Greek action at Artemisium. It is very unlikely that the Carthaginian landing in Panormus Bay, followed by the action at Himera, occurred at such a late date. Hamilcar, in his concerted action with Xerxes against the Greeks, would hardly have waited until September (when the weather in the central Mediterranean usually breaks) to move his entirely shipborne army from north Africa across to Sicily. There was very little delay - and no opposition - between his initial landing and his investment of Himera. He suffered a grave misfortune in encountering a mistral while the fleet was on passage, but this, while it occasioned the loss of a great many transports, did not delay him for days, let alone weeks. It seems probable, therefore, that the Carthaginian armada arrived off Sicily in August. (July would have been a better month to make a seaborne assault, but the administrative difficulties of mustering a great army of allies from various quarters of the Mediterranean in those days of primitive communications could well account for this.) In conclusion it seems safer to rely upon that native Sicilian historian, Diodorus, who states categorically that the battle at Himera took place on the same day as Thermopylae - that is, 20 August, rather than 20 September, Salamis. It was somewhat natural that tradition should later equate the two decisive Greek victories, but it is far more likely that Gelon was triumphant in Sicily on or about the day that Leonidas and the Three Hundred were dying in the rocky pass in distant Greece.

Three days after the fall of Thermopylae the main body of Xerxes’ army was moving south and, now that there was no opposition, they had the choice of a number of routes. Some probably passed through the ravine of the Asopus river, while the transport and baggage-wagons will have followed the coastal road through Locris. A squadron of cavalry and crack troops had already gone on ahead to clear the way through to Athens. There would be no resistance. With the collapse of the Greek defence at Thermopylae and the withdrawal of their fleet from Artemisium everything was clear for the Persian advance by land and sea. Xerxes was naturally anxious to confirm that the way was open and, hearing that some Greek deserters had arrived in his camp, had them sent for and interviewed by an interpreter. The men were from Arcadia and ‘having nothing to live on, wanted employment’. These would-be mercenaries present an interesting problem, for why would Arcadians come all the way from southern Greece merely to seek employment when they could certainly have found this among their fellow Greeks at the defence-line of the Isthmus ? It seems more than likely that, even if they were actively pro-Persian, they would not have journeyed so far to bear arms for Xerxes’ cause. If they were violently anti-Spartan (like Argos), all they had to do was stay in Arcadia and join the Persians when they occupied the Peloponnese. The answer must surely be that these renegades came from the 2120 Arcadians who had joined up with Leonidas as he marched north to the Isthmus. They had fought in the first two days at Thermopylae and had left with the other allies when Leonidas had prepared for his last stand. They had seen the unbelievable manpower of the Persian army and they knew that even a Spartan king and those lords of the Peloponnese, the Spartiate warrior-caste, were not invincible. It was hardly surprising that they should wish to join what they must surely have seen as the inevitable victors. It must also be remembered that at this period in Greek history there was little or no ethnic patriotism (even though Thermopylae may have helped to promote it). A man belonged to his city-state, his small land area, his ‘clan’ almost, long before he had any concept of‘Hellas’ or of all mainland Greeks forming a nation. It was not for over a hundred years, when Alexander the Great had united Greece by force and established his vast empire, that this sense of nationhood was achieved.

Xerxes asked these Arcadians what the other Greeks were doing at the moment, wanting very naturally to find out whether the Athenians were busily fortifying their city or whether all the Greeks had withdrawn to hold the line at the Isthmus. Now the Arcadians, if they had indeed come up from the south or were, as seems almost indisputable, deserters from the remnants of Leonidas’ army, would have known what every Greek knew. Quite apart from the Carneian festival on 20 August, at the second full moon of the month, it was also the year for the Olympic games which were held at the time of the same full moon. Although, in view of the invasion, there were many Greeks who could not attend, the fact remained that even in the face of the attack upon their homeland the games were still being held (something else that sounds unbelievable to a modern, but in no way surprises Herodotus). ‘… [Xerxes] was told in reply that the Greeks were celebrating the Olympic festival, where they were watching athletic contests and chariot-races.’ The king, imagining that for the Greeks to indulge in athletics when his army was threatening to engulf their country, naturally jumped to the conclusion that these Greeks (he knew their mercenary nature) must only be doing so because there were prizes of immense value to be won. He was astounded to hear that it was not for gold or silver that they were competing but for ‘the wreath of olives which it is our custom to give’. The son of Artabanus (Xerxes’ uncle who had been sent home for giving him sage advice about the dangers attendant on the expedition) was so astonished when the interpreter repeated these words that he exclaimed in a loud voice to the King’s brother-in-law: ‘Good heavens, Mardonius, what kind of men are these that you have brought us to fight against - men who compete with one another for no material reward, but only for honour!’ It is reasonable to suspect that the young man was immediately marked down as being defeatist like his uncle and unsuitable for promotion… .

After what Herodotus calls ‘the disaster at Thermopylae’ (with his pro-Athenian bias he was not willing to see that the Spartan stand at Thermopylae had made Artemisium possible), the march of the Persian army was now facilitated by the Thessalians. The Phocians, who had, however inefficiently, fought for the Greek cause, were not to be persuaded by the Thessalians’ offer to protect them against the wrath of the Great King if they were given a large sum of money. The Thessalians, in any case, hated the people of Phocis for having quite recently - and most successfully - rebelled against them, and their own pro-Persian attitude was more than offended by the Phocians’ sharp reply that, whatever other people did, the men of Phocis ‘would on no account be traitors to Greece’. Encouraged by the active collaboration of the people of Thessaly, Xerxes determined to make an example of Phocis, its fertile land, and all its people. Small states which dared to make a stand against his inexorable advance should be taught so savage a lesson that all the others would quickly learn that it was better to collaborate than to try for independence. (Once again, as throughout so much of this distant war, the twentieth-century reader is likely to be reminded of the actions of the Germans in the Second World War and of the Russians in Eastern Europe subsequently.) In the words of Herodotus: ‘All Phocis was overrun; the Thessalians did not let the Persians miss a bit of it, and everywhere they went there was devastation by fire and sword, and towns and temples were burned.’ In the gracious valley of the Cephisus no village or township was spared and, as in all wars, ‘some women were raped successively by so many of the soldiers that they died’. Nevertheless, most of the population managed to escape, either by taking to the hills in the area of Parnassus or fleeing westward to Amphissa on the far side of the great massif. The smoke of the burning towns and farms and temples could be seen for miles away, and the pro-Persian inhabitants of Orchomenus could congratulate themselves on their political foresight. The news of the devastation was spread far and wide by the fleeing refugees and it will not have been long before the inhabitants of even the remotest hamlets in Attica will have learned the fate that lay in store for them.

In Athens itself, the news of the fall of Thermopylae and the withdrawal of the fleet from Artemisium will have been received quite quickly; either by a series of couriers, a fast cutter, or by signal-fires. Despite Themistocles’ earlier arrangements for the evacuation of the greater part of the population it is clear that, as so often happens, there were many who had been unwilling to comprehend that their land and even their city would ever be seriously threatened by the invaders. Few of them were in a position to know how small was the holding force that had gone north to Thermopylae. Now they learned the horrifying truth that an army led by Spartans had been defeated, and that a Spartan king had perished. This was the writing on the wall with a vengeance: even the Athenians, proud as they were after their victory at Marathon, conceded in their hearts that the Spartans were the most formidable soldiers known to man. A shudder ran round the community that had stayed behind. Where, for instance, was the major force from the Peloponnese that should have come up to reinforce Leonidas? ‘The Athenians’, as Plutarch put it, ‘pressed them [the Peloponnesians] to make a stand in Boeotia and protect Attica, just as they themselves had gone out by sea to fight in defence of the rest of Greece at Artemisium, but nobody would listen to them; instead, the remainder of the allies refused to budge from the Peloponnese.’ In this decision the Greeks from the south were, for once, quite right: no amount of men that they could muster would have been able to stem the Persian advance, once their army had begun to swarm all over the land to the north.

Panic set in. Every available craft was commandeered and, no doubt, there was a good deal of black-marketeering being done by boat-owners as farmers and prosperous citizens, who had hitherto neglected Themistocles’ previous warnings and arrangements, now sought to make their getaway. Both Plutarch and Aelius Aristides describe the heart-rending scenes as husbands and wives were parted, most of the women and children joining their predecessors in Troezen, old men being left behind, and pet dogs howling and running to and fro as their masters embarked. The fleet had rounded Sunium and made up for Salamis Sound where they took aboard all the refugees that they could. No doubt it was the sight of their fleet, upon which they had staked everything, retreating to Salamis, that completed the desperation of the remaining Athenians. Here was tangible evidence indeed that everything to the north was lost and that soon it would be the turn of their beloved city. Apart from Troezen, whither most of the more provident citizens had sent their wives and children long ago in June, and which now received a further influx of refugees, Salamis took many of these late-comers. Even Athens’ former mortal enemy, Aegina, opened its homes and hearths to this sudden, last-minute influx of Athenians. Aegina’s action is remarkable in showing that, at long last, deep-rooted enmities were forgotten in the face of the imminent destruction of everything that the Greek-speaking peoples, however much their states had been at variance, now faced together.