A flurry of exclamations erupted behind him, and Demophilus grabbed his arm and pointed. A figure in a tall headdress wearing glittering gold cloth covered with jewels had just emerged over the curve of the mountainside. He was accompanied by several men almost equally well dressed, and took a seat on the waiting throne. The attendants bowed low and backed away. Xerxes’ companions appeared as relaxed as he. They took their seats, but then started signaling irritably for something. A moment later a gigantic parasol with a hanging fringe was rushed up the slope and adjusted several times until it shielded the Great King from the morning sun that glistened off the Malian Gulf, without blocking his view of the battlefield.
Meanwhile, his troops (identified by Sperchias as Medes) continued to pour through the West Gate until they numbered about four thousand. Those weren’t bad odds, Leonidas thought, especially given the Medes’ wicker shields and lack of body armor. The men deployed were archers. Some of them went down on one knee, their shields before them; others remained upright, the ranks staggered. After some last-minute orders and redeployments, an eerie stillness fell on the sunny field.
“I could use a little shade,” Dienekes remarked to Leonidas, who laughed appreciatively. They glanced at one another, sharing the joke.
Xerxes raised and then dramatically dropped his arm. The Mede officers, who had been watching for this signal, shouted. The first volley whistled into the air.
The arrows did not darken the sun―there were too few Persians inside the West Gate for that―but the volleys were impressive nevertheless. For a start, they came at intervals of every two seconds, which meant they were reloading in eight seconds, Leonidas calculated. Men were bobbing up and down in perfect timing to ensure that the rear ranks got off their arrows in good order. All in all, very good shooting―except that it didn’t have any impact on the Greek armor. Either the range was too great or the bows too weak; the arrows bounced off the hoplons rather than sticking in them, much less piercing them.
The Mede archers kept up the barrage for about ten minutes, and then, with the Greeks responding as if they’d gone to sleep, the Medes realized they would have to move forward. As they reduced the range, the arrows started to thump into the hoplons, and the first cries of wounded came up from the phalanx of perioikoi. Leonidas leaned forward and shouted, “Clear them out, Isanor!”
“Yes, sir!” Isanor answered, and then with a single command the perioikoi phalanx started advancing, just like a Spartan phalanx, at a slow but steady pace. The closer they got to the archers, however, the more deadly the barrage became. Remembering Marathon, Leonidas shouted, “Jog!”
Either Isanor heard him or he came to the decision on his own. In any case, the perioikoi doubled the pace, and a few seconds later they crashed into the Persian archers. They rolled right over them. The Medes had never before encountered anything like this wall of moving bronze. They didn’t stand a chance. The perioikoi front ranks knocked them down without even stopping to stab with their upraised spears, and the rear ranks stabbed and gutted, kicked and trampled.
Leonidas didn’t bother watching the perioikoi. He focused on Xerxes. The Great King had leaped up from his throne, knocking over the refreshment table. He clearly hadn’t expected this, Leonidas registered with a slight smile of inner satisfaction.
Of course, the satisfaction did not last long. The perioikoi hadn’t even reached the last rows of archers before reinforcements were pouring through the West Gate. Now it was Leonidas’ turn to catch his breath and worry. Isanor’s phalanx, unhinged as it was in the forward position, could be outflanked on either side, surrounded, cut off, and slaughtered.
But just when Leonidas was getting truly alarmed, Isanor signaled withdrawal. The perioikoi, with admirable discipline, disengaged neatly, stepping back sharply but in unbroken formation for a good ten paces before turning and sprinting toward the wall so rapidly that the Medes barely got off a dozen arrows before they were in position again, shields in front of them. “Well done,” Leonidas remarked under his breath, and Oliantus nodded.
The Medes pouring into the field now were not archers but spearmen, and they came in greater numbers. Archers need space; spearmen don’t. Leonidas could hear Isanor shouting, “Steady! Steady!”
“They really are endless,” Alkander murmured.
“This is a drop in the ocean,” Leonidas answered.
Isanor was holding his men in position, making the Medes come to him, but that meant that with each second the odds were worsening. Leonidas found it hard to watch, but then, this was the best way to learn. He glanced up at Xerxes. The “Great King” had reseated himself and was sipping something from a vessel that glinted and gleamed in the early morning light.
The Medes collided with the perioikoi, and the battle was truly joined. Leonidas glanced along the front ranks beside him and could read its progress from the faces of his men―and from the sounds. He closed his eyes for a moment, experiencing the battle as if he were a middle ranker again, unable to see anything but the back of the man ahead of him, who had to guess at progress from the sounds, smells, and pressure of bodies packed together.
The Medes were howling, shouting, and screaming. Not knowing their tongue, Leonidas could not know if they were cursing, praying, or shouting insults. It didn’t much matter. The screams of the wounded had their own unique note. Just listening, he thought he could distinguish between mortal wounds and merely disfiguring, mutilating, and debilitating ones. The perioikoi were killing.
Then something changed. It was like a collective grunt. And then another. Grunt. Pause. Grunt. Pause. The perioikoi were advancing again. Leonidas looked at the faces of the men in the front rank. The Spartans looked pleased, the Thespians amazed and elated. Yes, the perioikoi were clearing the field again.
“Time?” Leonidas asked.
“A quarter-hour still,” Oliantus answered.
Leonidas came to life now. He walked over to Demophilus, warning him that it was almost time to relieve the perioikoi. The rankers, seeing their commander in motion, got to their feet, stretched and wriggled their muscles, then took up their shields.
Ten minutes later, taking advantage of a temporary lull in the fighting, Leonidas gave the order to deploy. The Spartiates went down the right ramp and took up their position on the right-hand side of the formation, while the Thespians went into position to their left. At a signal, they moved forward fifty paces and paused. Leonidas nodded for the trumpet signal that ordered the perioikoi to open gaps between their files for the relieving units to file through.
Several of the perioikoi rear rankers looked over their shoulders in apparent amazement; others had been looking over their shoulders every few seconds for a long time already. Both kinds of rear ranker passed the word forward, and a moment later the perioikoi compressed their files into columns of four men, providing gaps that the Spartans and Thespians could file through to the front. Leonidas was too close behind the perioikoi to see the enemy, but he could hear increased shouting, and guessed that the Persians thought the Greek line was breaking.
As he led the way through the central gap, Leonidas noted that the perioikoi were panting, sweating, and bloody―although Leonidas gathered that most of the blood was from their enemies.
He had reached the front, and guardsmen were going rapidly into position on either side of him, their shields clacking on one another, while behind him he felt the reassuring pressure of the second ranker already at his back.
Ahead of him a ragged mass of men was struggling to clamber over the bodies of their dead and dying comrades in order to engage the Spartans―a mass of men that quailed visibly when they realized the enemy was not fleeing in panic, but had been replaced by a new line of bronze. The moment of confusion lasted only a couple of seconds, however. Then the Mede officers shouted, the spears were raised, and the Medes rushed forward more furiously than before.
The crash of the Medes with the Spartan/Thespian line was sickeningly soft. Instead of the heart-sto
pping crash of bronze on bronze and the deep-throated echo of wood on wood that the Greeks knew from their own battles, there was only a whisper of breaking wicker and a mushy sound of flesh colliding with wood and bronze.
The eight-footers of the Greeks could kill three, even four ranks deep, but the Medes’ spears were much shorter and connected only with the front rank of the Greeks. As far as Leonidas could see, the Greeks were killing without taking any casualties at all. The problem, he rapidly recognized, was that the bodies of the enemy were piling up dangerously high in front of them. The more the Medes climbed up onto their dead and dying comrades, the more they could stab downward. This forced the Greeks to raise their shields higher and higher.
That was not good. Hoplons were far too heavy, and a man’s shoulder could not hold his hoplon high for long. The Greeks had to push the Medes back onto the level field.
Leonidas gave the order and set off, stepping forward onto the pile of human beings. His footing gave slightly and his foot slipped on something slimy, causing a queasy feeling. He felt warm liquid on his calves; something warm and slimy covered his toes. “Clear the bodies!” he shouted back over his shoulder, hoping the message would get relayed to the helots, one man at a time.
The Medes were fighting with a mindless, desperate courage. They howled in outrage as much as in pain. Leonidas could make out their faces, wrapped in their cloth turbans, and saw the bright colors of their sleeves and trousers turn a dull, dark tone as they soaked with sweat, urine, and blood. They fought as if deranged with their spears and, when these broke, with their curved swords. Leonidas noted in a detached part of his brain that the butts of the Medes’ spears had round balls on them, apparently for balance but useless in battle.
Since he was fighting men without body armor or effective shields, Leonidas took a man out with each thrust of his spear. With a horrible, methodical rhythm he brought his spear down again and again, severing a man’s neck, smashing through another’s teeth, breaking clear through the chest of the next.
At last they were back on the level, but the field was also wider. Leonidas checked anxiously to see whether the Medes were swarming around the ends of his phalanx. He was alarmed by movement on his right, before he realized it was only the bodies of the dead falling to the sea as they were pushed, shoved, and flung over the cliff. The helots were feverishly at work.
A second later a spear tip connected with the side of his helmet, knocking his head back and blinding him briefly as his helmet shifted. He turned back sharply to eliminate the threat, but already Maron had thrust his spear so deeply into the Mede’s armpit that he could not pull it out again. The man fell at Leonidas’ feet, vomiting blood and defecating, while Maron called for a new spear. Leonidas killed the next Mede when the man slipped and fell on the liquids of his comrade before he could even get in a good thrust.
Leonidas felt nothing for the men he was slaughtering. There were too many of them. He was too preoccupied with wondering how much time had passed and how long they had to continue this before they would be relieved. He found himself wondering if they could keep this up two to three hours a day for six or seven days until the full army arrived. Then his thoughts drifted to the fact that so many dead would attract vultures, dogs, flies, and disease. If this slaughter went on for days, he calculated―without stopping his trained, methodical killing―the putrefying bodies of the dead would make the air impossible to breathe. They would poison the ground water. He was starting to realize that his own brain was incapable of imagining what this Pass would look like even tonight, much less tomorrow or ten days from now.
This thought, the sense that this couldn’t go on forever, made him give the order to advance. Like the perioikoi before them, they moved forward just one step at a time, in the same slow push, pause, push, pause. The rear rankers carried the burden of the advance, their heads down and their shoulders against their shields. Each led with his left foot, bringing the right up and bracing on it before reaching out again with his left foot.
Leonidas found the advance easier than just holding ground. The Medes had no phalanx with which to counter the advancing Greek line. They crowded together but had not learned to fight together, in unison as a block. The pressure of a thousand trained and disciplined heavy infantry against a disorganized mass of men is immense. Within moments the pace was picking up and the killing was being done by the rear ranks. Leonidas sensed, more than saw, the wall of the mountain closing in on them again, and felt the men to his right pressing in to avoid falling into the sea. The West Gate was only fifty feet away. The Medes were screaming so loudly that his head ached. If he hadn’t known that there were hundreds of thousands of the enemy beyond that Gate, it would have felt like victory.
They continued to the Gate itself; then with a shout, they turned on their heels and marched on the double back toward the wall. Here they reversed again and stood, gasping for breath and dripping sweat, while the Medes mustered enough men for a new assault.
Leonidas had a moment to survey the field. The helots had done a remarkably good job of clearing away the corpses―and at the moment, the Persians were helping them. They were flinging their own men, the ones nearest the West Gate that the helots had not yet reached, over the cliff. To judge by the screams of terror, some of the men were still alive.
Leonidas spared a glance for Xerxes. He was still sitting on his throne, surrounded by his courtiers. It was impossible to tell whether he was distressed by the slaughter and the summary execution of the wounded. After his initial surprise, he appeared rather to have become accustomed to it.
Leonidas also looked back toward the wall, and saw with relief that the Tegeans and Mantineans were preparing to descend on to the field. The Spartan/Thespian hour wasn’t quite over, but it made sense to swap out the tired troops with fresh ones before the Medes could attack again.
Once the Spartans were back on the wall again, Leonidas sent two companies back to camp to refresh themselves, but waited with his guard to see how the Tegeans and Mantineans fought. Oliantus, serving as usual as his quartermaster, was tasked with reporting on casualties. Meander was beside him almost at once with a skin of water, which Leonidas half drank and then poured over his face. As he handed it back to Meander he remarked, “Good work clearing the corpses.”
“Thank you, sir. We had some help from the slaves of the others, too. We couldn’t have done it on our own.”
“You’re going to have to do it again―and again,” Leonidas warned.
“I know, sir.” Meander looked significantly toward the sun. It had not yet reached the zenith.
Leonidas looked out onto the battlefield. The Tegeans and Mantineans were doing just as well as the perioikoi, Thespians, and Spartans had done before them.
“You can’t fault the Medes’ courage,” Dienekes observed.
“No,” Leonidas agreed. The Medes, despite the obvious disadvantages of their armor and arms, were still fighting furiously.
“They must be mad to keep fighting like this,” Dienekes thought out loud.
“Earlier this morning, they thought we were mad to defy them,” Leonidas reminded him.
“War is madness,” Alkander remarked softly.
Oliantus was back. “No serious casualties, sir. Sprained ankles and wrists for the most part, wrenched shoulders, a dislocated elbow, one bad puncture wound in the biceps. What is odd is that both Aristodemos and Eurytus have come down with some eye illness. Their eyes are streaming and so red and swollen they can hardly see.”
“What caused that?” Leonidas asked, astonished.
“Apparently their eyes started itching after visiting the hot springs yesterday. They went together and bathed in the springs, then stretched out on some towels they found there to dry off.”
“Idiots,” Leonidas exclaimed angrily. People came to these hot springs to cure all sorts of illnesses. Spartiates should have known better than to use discarded towels.
“They were ashamed to say anything an
d thought it would go away, but during the fighting today they both found it increasingly difficult to see.”
“Have the surgeon look at them and, just in case it’s infectious, send them back to Alpeni, away from the others.”
Oliantus nodded approval, his eyes wandering to the field, where the Tegeans and Mantineans were killing efficiently. Meanwhile, the Arkadians were forming up on the wall. Leonidas didn’t like the nervous looks on many of their faces and the way they were jostling one another. They kept changing their positions as if they didn’t have fixed positions in the phalanx. He glanced back at his guardsmen, and then asked Oliantus, “Are the others rested enough for one company to relieve the guard here and let the guard refresh themselves?”
Oliantus nodded and went back down from the wall. Ten minutes later the Kastor Company, commanded by the experienced lochagos Diodoros, relieved the guard. The Arkadians were still dressing their lines and were dragging their feet about going into position, even when one of the inevitable lulls in the fighting occurred, caused by the Medes waiting for more troops to deploy through the bottleneck of the West Gate. Leonidas felt compelled to give the order himself.
“We’re going! We’re going!” came the irritated answer.
Leonidas glanced at Diodoros, who just shook his head.
The trouble started almost at once. The Tegeans and Mantineans failed to open wide, straight gaps; as a result, the Arkadians were getting bunched up and deploying very slowly. When a shout went up from the west indicating that the Medes were advancing, some of the Mantineans panicked and started pushing and shoving their way to the back. The Arkadians responded by huddling together in city units, leaving large gaps into which the Medes poured wildly. In just minutes the Medes had turned the flanks of the most exposed units, and almost before Leonidas could grasp what was happening, these panicked. Men were trying to run back to the wall, exposing their backs to the Medes. They collided with men still standing fast. Men lost their footing. Men started fighting with other contingents or even their own comrades. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he would never have believed it. Leonidas was not prepared for so much incompetence.
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