Travels with Herodotus (25 page)

Xerxes lost all of his subsequent battles.
When Xerxes realized the extent of the disaster that had taken place, he became afraid. What if the Greeks got the
idea … of sailing to the Hellespont and demolishing his bridges? In that case, he would be trapped in Europe, and would probably be wiped out. And so Xerxes’ thoughts turned to flight
.

And flee he does, abandoning the theater of war before the war’s end. He returns to Susa. He is thirty-something years old. He will be king of the Persians for another fifteen years, during which time he will occupy himself with expanding his palace in Persepolis. Perhaps he felt internally spent? Perhaps he suffered from depression? In any event, insofar as the world was concerned, he disappeared. The dreams of might, of ruling over everything and everyone, faded away. It is said that he was interested only in women; he constructed for them an immense, imposing harem, whose ruins I have seen.

He was fifty-six years old when, in 465
B.C.E.
, he was murdered by Artabanus, the commander of his security guard. This Artabanus put up Xerxes’ younger brother, Artaxerxes, to be king. Artaxerxes in turn later murdered Artabanus, during a fight that broke out in the palace. The son of Artaxerxes, Xerxes II, was murdered in 425 by his brother Sogdians, who was later murdered by Darius II, etc., etc.

B
efore the defeated Xerxes pulls out of Europe and returns to Susa with his emaciated, sick, and starving forces
(wherever they went and whatever people they encountered, they stole and ate their crops. If there were no crops to be had, they ate grass and herbs they found growing in the ground, and bark and leaves they peeled or pulled off both wild trees and cultivated ones. They were so hungry that they left nothing untried. Moreover, they were ravaged by disease, and men were dying of dysentery throughout the journey. Xerxes also left sick troops in the care and maintenance of whichever community they had reached at that particular point of the march
…, before all this happens, many other things will come to pass and much blood will be spilled.

There is a war going on, after all, one in which Persia is to conquer Greece—meaning, Asia is to seize Europe, despotism is to destroy democracy, and slavery is to prevail against freedom.

At first, everything suggests that this will in fact occur, that it will be thus. The Persian army marches hundreds of kilometers into Europe without meeting any resistance. What is more, several small Greek states, fearing that such a great army’s victory is inevitable, surrender without a fight and join the Persian side. So Xerxes’ army grows even larger and more powerful as it advances. Having seized the barrier that was Thermopylae, Xerxes reaches Athens. He occupies and burns down the city. Yet while Athens lies
in ruins, Greece still exists—and it will be saved by the genius of Themistocles.

Themistocles has just been chosen leader of Athens. This takes place at a difficult time, during a moment of great tension, because it is known that Xerxes is preparing an invasion. It so happens that just at that moment, Athens receives a large influx of funds generated by its silver mines in Laurium. The populists and the demagogues instantly feel the wind in their sails and come out with a slogan: Distribute it to all equally! Finally, everyone will have something, everyone will feel strong and secure.

But Themistocles acts sensibly and courageously: Athenians, he calls, come to your senses! The danger of annihilation hangs over our heads. Our only salvation, instead of spreading that money about, is to build with it a strong fleet capable of resisting the Persian force!

Herodotus paints the picture of this great war of antiquity by means of contrasts: On the one side, from the East, comes surging an immense, powerful steamroller, a blind force subject to the despotic will of a king-master, a king-god. On the other side sprawls the scattered, internally quarrelsome Greek world, rife with disputes and antagonisms, a world of tribes and independent cities without a common government to bind them. Two urban centers, Athens and Sparta, rise to the top of this incoherent amalgam, and taken together, their relations and arrangements will determine the principal axis of ancient Greek history.

Two individuals also face each other in this war. The young Xerxes, with a strong sense of boundless power, and Themistocles, older, convinced his cause is just, courageous in thought and in deed. Their situations are not comparable: Xerxes rules absolutely,
issuing orders at will; before Themistocles can issue an order, he must first secure the consent of military commanders who only nominally answer to him, and he must also win the approval of the populace. Their roles, too, are different: one rides at the head of an army advancing like an avalanche, in a hurry to attain a decisive victory; the other is merely a
primus inter pares
, and spends his time convincing, debating, and discussing with the continually convening disputatious Greeks.

The Persians face no dilemmas—their single goal is to please their king. They are like Russian soldiers from the poem “Ordon’s Redoubt” by Adam Mickiewicz.

The Greeks by contrast are by nature divided. On the one hand, they are attached to their small homelands, their city-states, each with its distinct interests and separate ambitions; on the other hand, they are united by a common language and common gods, as well as by a vague feeling—which nevertheless resonates forcefully at times—of a greater Greek patriotism.

The war is taking place on two fronts: on land and at sea. After seizing Thermopylae, the Persians encounter no resistance for a long time. Their fleet, however, keeps suffering dramatic setbacks. To begin, it sustains large losses as a result of storms and gales. Sudden violent winds propel Persian ships onto coastal rocks, where they shatter like matchboxes and their crews drown.

Initially, the Greek fleet is a lesser danger than the storms. The Persians have many times more ships and this numerical superiority
depresses Greek morale; time and again they fall into a panic, lose heart, think of escaping. They are far from being born killers. They do not have a taste for soldiering. If there is an opportunity to avoid a clash, they eagerly seize it. Sometimes they will go to great lengths just to avoid a skirmish. Unless the opponent is another Greek, of course—in which case they will wrestle with him ferociously.

Now too, under Persian pressure, the Greek fleet keeps retreating. Its commander, Themistocles, tries as far as he can to restrain it. Hold on, he exhorts the crews of the ships, try to maintain your positions! Sometimes they listen to him, but not always. The withdrawal continues, until at last the Greek ships find harbor in the bay of Salamis, near Athens. The Greek captains feel safe here. The entrance to the bay is so narrow that the Persian king will think twice before sailing in with his gigantic fleet.

Both Xerxes and Themistocles now ponder their situations. Xerxes: To go in or not to go in? Themistocles: If I can draw Xerxes into the little bay, its surface is so small that his numbers will prove a disadvantage. Xerxes: I will win, because I will sit on the throne at the edge of the sea, and the Persians, seeing that their king is watching, will fight like lions! Themistocles doesn’t yet know what Xerxes is thinking, and to make certain that the Persians enter the bay, he resorts to a trick:
He … briefed one of his men (a house-slave of his—his children’s attendant, to be precise—whose name was Sicinnus), and sent him over to the Persian camp in a boat …. Sicinnus sailed over and said to the Persian commanders, “I am on a secret mission for the Athenian commander, who is in fact sympathetic to Xerxes’ cause and would prefer you to gain the upper hand in the war rather than the Greeks. None of the other Greeks know that I am here. The message from my master is that the Greeks are in a state of panic and are planning to retreat. Unless you just stand by and let them escape, you have an opportunity here to achieve a glorious victory. They are disunited, in no
position to offer you resistance; in fact you’ll see them pitting their ships against one another, those who are on your side fighting those who are not.” After delivering this message, Sicinnus left
.

Themistocles turned out to be a good psychologist. He knew that Xerxes, like every ruler, was a vain man, and that vanity makes one blind, impairs one’s ability to think rationally. And so it was this time. Encouraged by the disinformation about Greek squabbling, instead of steering clear of the trap that a small bay always poses for a large fleet, he gives the order to sail into Salamis and block the Greeks’ escape route. The Persians execute this maneuver, under the cover of darkness.

That same evening, even as the Persians are secretively and quietly approaching the bay, another dispute flares up among the Greeks, who do not realize what is transpiring:
So the commanders at Salamis were furiously hurling arguments at one another. They were still unaware that they had been surrounded by the Persian fleet, and continued to assume that the enemy had remained where they had seen them stationed during the day
.

When they hear of the Persians’ approach, they initially give the news no credence, but finally accept the information and, spurred on by Themistocles, prepare themselves for combat.

The battle begins at dawn, so that Xerxes, sitting on a throne at the foot of the mountains which lie opposite Salamis and are called the Aegaleos, can observe it.
Whenever anything went well for his side, he asked who the captain of the ship in question was, and his scribes wrote down the name of the man, his father, and the town he came from
. Xerxes, confident of victory, wants to be able to reward his heroes later.

Faithful descriptions of battles which can be found in the literature of every epoch have one thing in common: they paint a picture of tremendous chaos, monstrous confusion, spectacular disorder. Even the most carefully orchestrated engagement in the
moment of frontal collision descends into a bloody, quivering vortex, in which it is difficult to get one’s bearings let alone to gain control. There are those hell-bent on killing others, and those looking for a means to slip away, or at the very least to duck the blows, and everything is overlaid with shouts, moans, and yelps, amidst turmoil and smoke.

So it was at Salamis. Whereas in the combat between two individuals one may discern agility, even grace, the collision in tight quarters of two fleets consisting of wooden ships and propelled by thousands of oars must have resembled a great bucket into which someone has thrown hundreds of sluggishly creeping, clumsily clambering, and chaotically entangled crabs. One ship rammed another, one listed on its side, another sank to the bottom with its entire crew, yet another attempted retreat, somewhere else several struggled against one another, permanently locked together it would have seemed, somewhere else a ship was trying to turn around, another was attempting to slip out of the bay, and in the general confusion Greeks fell upon Greeks, Persians upon Persians, until at last, after hours of this maritime hell, the Persians gave up and those of them who were left—those not drowned or otherwise killed—escaped.

Xerxes’ first reaction to the defeat is fear. The first thing he undertakes is to send
his children to Ephesus (some illegitimate children of his had come along on the expedition)
. He gives them as a guardian Hermotimus, a high-ranking court eunuch who was born in Pedasa.

Herodotus is very interested in this man’s fate and writes about it in detail:
No one we know of has ever exacted a more total retribution for a wrong done to him than Hermotimus. He was taken prisoner in a war, put up for sale, and bought by a man from Chios called Panionius. Now, Panionius made a living in the most atrocious way imaginable. What he used to do was acquire
good-looking boys, castrate them, and take them to Sardis and Ephesus, where he would offer them for sale at very high prices; in foreign countries eunuchs command higher prices than whole men on account of their complete reliability. One of Panionius’ victims—one among a great many, because this was the way he made a living—was Hermotimus. In fact, however, Hermotimus’ luck was not all bad: he was sent from Sardis to Xerxes’ court as one of a number of gifts, and eventually became the king’s most valued eunuch
.

Now, when Xerxes was in Sardis, in the course of setting out with his army against Athens, Hermotimus went down on some business or other to the part of Mysia called Atarneus, where people from Chios live, and he met Panionius there. He entered into a long, friendly conversation with him, first listing all the benefits that had come his way thanks to Panionius, and then offering to do as much good to him in return; all he had to do, he said, was move his family to Atarneus and live there. Panionius gladly accepted Hermotimus’ offer and moved his wife and children there. So when Hermotimus had Panionius and his whole family where he wanted, he said, “Panionius, there is no one in the world who makes a living in as foul a way as you do. What harm did I or any of my family do to you or any of yours? Why did you make me a nothing instead of a man? You expected the gods not to notice what you used to do in those days, but the law they follow is one of justice, and for your crimes they have delivered you into my hands. As a result, then, you should have no grounds for complaint about the payment I am going to extract from you.” When he had finished this rebuke, he had Panionius’ sons brought into the room and proceeded to force him to castrate all four of them. The deed was done, under compulsion, and afterwards Hermotimus forced the sons to castrate their father. And that is how vengeance and Hermotimus caught up with Panionius
.

Crime and punishment, injustice and revenge—one always follows the other, sooner or later. As it is in relations between individuals, so it is between nations. Whoever first starts a war, and therefore, in Herodotus’s opinion, commits a crime, will be revenged upon and punished, be it immediately or after the passage of time. This
relation, this inexorable pairing, is the very essence of fate, the meaning of irreversible destiny.