Thermopylae (25 page)

The first part of the construction would, it seemed, be easy enough, for Xerxes had almost unlimited manpower at his disposal, and the men were set to work building out a stone causeway on a substratum of rocks to the nearby islet. At the same time Phoenician merchantmen were brought along close to the shore of the mainland, where the Greeks could not get at them. The next part of the operation would entail lashing the merchantships together (somewhat as had been done at the Hellespont) and bridging the channel between the islet and what is now St George’s Island. This would have been by far the most difficult part of the operation, for it would have laid the vessels open to attacks by individual or concerted forces of Greek triremes, and in any case, St George’s Island (largest of what were then called the Pharmakoussae) was strongly held by the Greeks. It was unlikely that they would tamely permit this floating bridge to reach the shore. If, however, this could have been achieved, the crossing between the island and the coast of Salamis itself was only a few metres of comparatively shallow water. Clearly the Persians must have intended to protect the ship-bridge across the channel by keeping off the Greeks with heavy archery fire - and their army, as we know, had an abundance of archers. Curiously enough, in the end it was the Greeks who made successful use of this military arm, which they usually tended to neglect. We have it on one authority that the major part of these archers were from Crete (Cretan archers had long been renowned for their skill), who must of necessity have been mercenaries since their great island was not involved in the war. In any case their continuous harassment of the Persian workforce soon made it clear that the project, which in theory had looked so easy, was impracticable. It is very doubtful if even the mole out to the nearby islet was ever completed, and certainly the bridge of boats can never have got under way for it would have proved a navigational hazard in the subsequent battle and would certainly have been recorded as such by Herodotus and others.

It was clear that the Persians, like the Greeks, were now faced with only one solution - a sea battle. Xerxes’ naval commanders were, therefore, summoned to a conference: the kings of Sidon, of Tyre, of Arvad (all Phoenicians), and then the others (mostly Greek) in order of their seniority. Xerxes himself presided over the meeting but left the conduct of the proceedings and the consultation with these experienced seamen to his son-in-law Mardonius. It seems as if the Great King, already foiled in his attempt to bridge the narrows of Salamis, may have made up his mind that there was nothing left for it but to engage the Greeks at sea; at the same time (an indication of an indecision hitherto unknown) it was as if he wished to be reassured. It may be that his naval advisers sensed this or, equally, it may be they thought that even with their whittled-down fleet (approximately 400 against some 300 Greek triremes) they had sufficient superiority. Furthermore, one may hazard a guess that in those days, as so often subsequently, there was a rivalry between navy and army commanders. Here was the mighty army of the Great King sitting impotent ashore and unable to move without a decisive action by the fleet. It was true that the soldiers (at great cost) had won at Thermopylae and had burned an abandoned Athens - but the fleet commanders could hardly feel that Artemisium had been a victory. All, with one exceptional dissentient, were unanimous in giving battle to the Greeks.

The lone voice opposing a naval action was that of an exceptional woman, Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus in Caria. Her mother had been a Cretan, her father a Greek Carian. She was a widow and on her husband’s death had become the sovereign of her city. Although she had a grown-up son, she had still decided that she herself would sail in command of her fleet, which consisted of five triremes from Halicarnassus together with contingents from the off-lying Aegean islands of Cos, Nisyros and Calymnos. ‘Her own spirit of adventure and manly courage’, comments Herodotus, ‘were her only incentives.’ She had distinguished herself at Artemisium and her naval contingent, though small, was considered the most efficient in the Persian fleet after that of the Sidonians. The words of this remarkable Amazon, coupled with the fact that she alone stood out against a naval engagement, made Mardonius listen to her with close attention. The speech which Herodotus puts into her mouth is vivid and bears the ring of authenticity. (Since Herodotus was himself a native of Halicarnassus, it may well be that he heard as a young man some more or less authentic account of what this great queen had said at the conference - words handed down from her own report after she had returned to her city on the conclusion of the war.)

She began by pointing out that their recent experience at sea had shown that the Greeks were superior in naval tactics. It would be foolish to rush into a naval action at this moment, especially in a place that was of the Greeks’ own contriving. Her grasp of the whole situation was so extensive that the kernel of her speech deserves quoting:

Have you not taken Athens, the main objective of the war? Is not the rest of Greece in your power? There is no one now to resist you… . Let me tell you how I think things will now go with the enemy; if only you are not in too great a hurry to fight at sea - if you keep the fleet on the coast where it is now - then, whether you stay here or advance into the Peloponnese, you will easily accomplish your purpose. The Greeks will not be able to hold out against you for long; you will soon cause their forces to disperse - they will soon break up and go home. I hear they have no supplies in the island where they now are; and the Peloponnesian contingents, at least, are not likely to be very easy in their minds if you march with the army towards their country - they will hardly like the idea of fighting in defence of Athens.

She then launched into a diatribe against the quality of some of Xerxes’ other naval contingents, including in her venom the Egyptian fleet (which had in fact distinguished itself), but she was clearly one of those passionate women who, although the bulk of their advice is sound, cannot resist dragging in personal jealousies and animosities. When Mardonius reported her words to Xerxes there can be no doubt that the king considered them very carefully. Artemisia was clearly a woman who commanded admiration (though obviously envy and hatred among those for whom she expressed contempt). However, she was in a minority of one, and the king was unlikely to reject the advice of all his other senior naval commanders. He gave orders for the fleet, or at any rate some advance squadrons, to move up from Phaleron and begin to close in on the Salamis Channel.

Despite Herodotus, who implies that Xerxes, while admiring Artemisia’s plain speaking, paid no attention to it but followed the advice of the majority, the evidence lies all against this. For instance, he did not give orders for the whole fleet to go to battle stations and come out en masse for a major action against the Greeks at Salamis. On the contrary, he tried to lure the latter out by dangling this bait which, if the Greeks had proved unwise, might have led to a major engagement in the Saronic Gulf where (as Artemisia had foreseen) the superior numbers and the greater mobility of the Persians would have given them the advantage. The Greek fleet was like an octopus in its rocky lair, which needed the flicker of a white cloth, with its concealed barb, to induce it to strike… .

At the same time it seems that Xerxes ordered an army corps of about 30,000 men to march by the coast road past Eleusis towards Megara as if they were on their way to the Isthmus - something which would clearly cause panic and dissension among the Greeks at Salamis. The Peloponnesians would fear for the security of the Isthmian line and would provoke once again the old argument (still perhaps tacitly accepted by Eurybiades) that the Salamis strategy was wrong. Xerxes, in fact, does not seem to have rejected the sage advice of Artemisia but to have decided, rather than to accept it whole-heartedly, to adopt a compromise. He would make a feint of threatening the Peloponnese while at the same time trying to provoke a sea-battle in open waters. (A
Supremo
may inwardly accept that the advice of one of his admirals or generals is correct, but he is also constrained by his dominant authority and by the fact that he cannot entirely ignore the opinions of all the others.) Compromise rarely succeeds in warfare. Caesar knew this when he said at the crossing of the Rubicon: ‘The die is cast.’ Xerxes would have done better to accept the advice of the Halicarnassian queen, and not try to hedge his bets.

The movement of a large body of Persian troops towards Megara on the route to the Isthmus of Corinth led to consternation, and the usual division of opinion, among the Greeks assembled at Salamis. It is clear that the Persians made every effort to ensure that the whole operation should be as noisy and ostentatious as possible - something that would hardly be likely if they had intended a serious attack on the Isthmian line. This was an exercise to set the Greeks at odds with one another, and to divert them from their concordance to stand together at Salamis.

An unusual story in Herodotus seems unwittingly to confirm this. An Athenian exile named Dicaeus was out in the plain to the north of Eleusis along with the exiled Spartan king Demaratus at the time when the Persian troops had been ordered on the road that leads past Eleusis. The two men were most probably alone together so that they could talk freely and discuss their situation in the light of current circumstances. Herodotus specifically states that Dicaeus used to retell the story in later years and would tell any sceptics to consult Demaratus if they wanted confirmation of it. ‘They saw a cloud of dust, such as might have been raised by an army of thirty thousand men on the march, coming from the direction of Eleusis, and were wondering what troops they could be, when they suddenly heard the sound of voices. Dicaeus thought he recognised the
Iacchus
song, which is sung at the Dionysiac mysteries… .’ This is the first indication that we get in Herodotus of any date after the occupation of Athens; for the sacred rites at Eleusis were held at the time of the full moon of what is now the month of September. This puts the date on which Dicaeus fancied for the moment that he witnessed something to do with the Eleusinian mysteries taking place (he was possibly an initiate himself) at about the time of the full moon of 17 September. Demaratus, who, as a Spartan, knew little or nothing about the rites of Eleusis, is said to have asked his companion the reason for the noise. Dicaeus - realising that, in view of the devastated state of Attica, it could not be the normal annual procession - told him that the sound and the dust cloud could only have some mystic significance. Coming as it did from the direction of Eleusis, he concluded that it must necessarily betoken something of ill-omen towards these foreign invaders of the sacred soil. He came to the conclusion that the singing was of some divine nature (not the voices of distant troops, who were out of sight, singing in a foreign mode and tongue) and that it could only mean that some unearthly power was about to save the Athenians and their allies. Pointing to the dust cloud, which seemed to provide a strange omen on that autumn day, he said to Demaratus that the direction in which it moved would show where the Great King would be worsted - whether by land or by sea. The Spartan told him that when they got back among the Persians he had better keep his mouth shut or he would certainly lose his head. While Demaratus was speaking the dust cloud rose high in the air and drifted towards Salamis… .

The folly of Eurybiades, as the Peloponnesians saw it, in agreeing to the plan of this stateless Athenian Themistocles, immediately provoked another violent debate.

The smothered feeling broke out into open resentment, and another meeting was held. All the old ground was gone over again, one side urging that it was useless to stay and fight for a country which was already in enemy hands, and that the fleet should sail and risk an action in defence of the Peloponnese [just what Xerxes hoped], while the Athenians, Aeginetans, and Megarians still maintained that they should stay and fight at Salamis.

Themistocles acted promptly. He left the meeting and sent for an Asiatic Greek slave, Sicinnus, who had been the guardian of his children. It is interesting that Herodotus says ‘he slipped away’, but this seems somewhat dubious since the absence of the principal figure in the discussion could hardly have gone unremarked. It is more probable that, having made his position clear, he left the others to shout and wrangle (in a manner not uncommon among modern Greeks). His choice of Sicinnus is interesting for it reveals that trust in the devoted family slave to be found also in Greek tragedy, and going back as far as Eumaeus, the swineherd of Odysseus. As Herodotus tells the story, it would seem that this action of Themistocles was unpremeditated and done on the spur of the moment, but from the use that he made of Sicinnus one feels it was something which he had long conceived in the event of a breakdown in the Greek resolve to stay at Salamis. Furthermore, the fact that Sicinnus was ordered to take a small boat and cross over to the Persian lines under cover of darkness suggests that Themistocles must have had some supporters who agreed with him on this last desperate ploy. A man in a boat could hardly have got away unnoticed at that crisis in Greek affairs without some considerable authority being exercised over those on guard at the various landing-stages.

The message that Sicinnus was told to relay was, on the surface, simple enough. In fact, a number of modern scholars, thinking in terms of the complex twentieth century, have been unable to credit that the Great King could ever have believed it. (This is the mistake of hindsight and over-sophistication.) Since the versions given both by Herodotus and by Aeschylus, who fought in the battle, are so similar they seem more than worthy of credence. Herodotus writes:

… Sicinnus made his way to the Persian commanders and said: T am the bearer of a secret communication from the Athenian commander, who is a well-wisher to your king and hopes for a Persian victory. He has told me to report to you that the Greeks are afraid and are planning to slip away. Only prevent them from slipping through your fingers, and you have at this moment an opportunity of unparalleled success. They are at daggers drawn with each other, and will offer no opposition - on the contrary, you will see the pro-Persians amongst them fighting the rest.’