Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

  Men, women, children, horses, waterfowl: none could elude the meticulous prescriptions of Darius' bureaucrats. It was not only within the satrapal courts that the Great King had his 'eyes', forever watching, scanning, tracking. Every transaction carried out within a posting station required a form to be stamped by both manager and recipient, and then forwarded to a central archive in Persepolis. So tightly controlled were the itineraries of travellers on the royal roads that those who dawdled on the way and failed to arrive at a given destination on an allotted date could expect to forfeit their rations for the night. Those who travelled on the roads without a viyataka at all would not merely go hungry but very quickly be hunted down and killed. Even mail, if it were sent without royal or satrapal approval, would be destroyed. Only the most cunning could hope to evade the vigilance of the highway patrols. Histiaeus, for instance, back in 499 bc, desperate to communicate with his nephew in far-off Miletus about his plans for revolt, had shaved the head of his most trustworthy slave, tattooed a message on the gleaming scalp, and patiently waited for the hair to grow back. 'Then, once the slave had a full head again, Histiaeus sent him to Miletus with orders to do nothing except tell Aristagoras to shave him, and inspect what stood revealed.'28 Such was the inventiveness required of those without a viyataka.

  How, then, were enemies of the Great King ever to compete with all Darius' prodigious resources of intelligence? Not very well, was the answer. The Ionian rebels, for instance, pinned on the outermost rim of Asia, had only ever had the haziest notions of Persian troop movements and intentions — a failure set into stark relief by the startling ability of Darius, 1500 miles from the theatre of war, to track events almost as though he were on the spot. It was he, for instance, in the early weeks of494 BC, who had personally drawn up plans for the final offensive that a few months later would result in the great Persian victory at Lade and the sacking of Miletus. Darius' information on that occasion had been particularly precise and detailed, for his leading military specialist on Greek affairs, a general by the name of Datis, had travelled directly by express service from Ionia to keep him abreast of the latest news from the front. Nothing could better have indicated the supreme importance attached to intelligence by the Great King than that a man of Datis' stature should have made the long journey to Persepolis in person. Datis — like Harpagus, the original conqueror of Ionia — was a Mede; but he was also, in the competitive world of ration chits and security passes, quite as weighty a player as any Persian grandee. His daily wine ration was seventy quarts: a drinking allowance at which a sister of the King would not have turned up her nose. Due reward for an exceptional military ability and record.

  True, the Persian intelligence services did not always have things their own way; nor was Darius' eye for talent necessarily infallible. One of the worst debacles had occurred a couple of years before Datis' arrival in Persepolis, when the Great King, in a startling display of misjudgement, had sent Histiaeus back to Sardis as his personal agent. Appalled at having to welcome the slippery Milesian to his headquarters but reluctant to offend his brother, Artaphernes had pointedly-revealed to Histiaeus the full scale of his suspicions, hoping thereby to intimidate his unwelcome guest into openly going over to the enemy. '"Let's not beat about the bush,'" the Satrap had menaced. '"Aristagoras may have worn the shoe, but you were the one who made it.'' Histiaeus, turning pale, had got the message, but flight from Sardis that very night had hardly ended his capacity for mischief. Fishing in the murky waters of espionage circles with consummate skill, revealing himself first to one side then to the other as a double-agent, he had sought to turn Artaphernes' more underhand methods back against their perpetrator, daring even to foment rebellion within the satrapal court itself. Greeks, it appeared, were not the only people who could be set against one another: the crisis briefly appeared so threatening that Artaphernes, struggling frantically to maintain his authority, had been forced into a wholesale purge of his countrymen. Such ruthlessness, fortunately for the satrap, had been just sufficient to prevent a disintegration of the Persian provincial command — and, of course, from that moment on, Histiaeus had been a marked man. No episode in the entire quashing of the Ionians' revolt can have given Artaphernes greater pleasure than the capture, a year after the victory at Lade, of his brother's treacherous former favourite. Hauled to Sardis in chains, the irrepressible Histiaeus had coolly insisted that he be returned to the Great King - a demand which Artaphernes had duly met by impaling him, and then sending his severed head, pickled and packed in salt, by express post to Susa.

  The execution of Histiaeus, and the parallel escape of Miltiades to Athens, had marked the effective end ot Ionian resistance. Not of Artaphernes' labours, however. Having won the war, it was now his equally arduous task to win the peace. Ionia had been trampled underfoot by six summers of savage warfare. Fields lay uncultivated, ships rotted idly in stagnant harbours, roads had vanished beneath grass, villages and whole cities stood abandoned in blackened ruin. As the Ionians starved, so, inevitably, they began to scrap desperately over the few fields not lost to nettles and brambles; and, bled of nearly all their energy and manpower though they were, they reached for their weapons again. Artaphernes, having none of it, stepped in at once. Representatives of the various Ionian states were summoned to Sardis and briskly ordered to swear an oath of perpetual amity. Henceforward, all border disputes were to be settled not by the armed squabbling that was traditional among the Greeks but by arbitration, backed up directly by the sanction of Persian force. As even the Ionians themselves acknowledged, this was a development 'not entirely to their disadvantage'.30 To protect his subjects from their own worst instincts, to promote stability, to facilitate a regular flow of tribute: this, as it had always been, remained the satrap's default policy. Terror having served its purpose, Artaphernes could now return with a sigh of relief to the winning of his subjects' hearts and minds. Having been made all too aware of the Ionians' distaste for tyranny, he was even prepared to indulge in certain circumstances their preference for democracies. After all, just as long as the king's peace was kept, it scarcely mattered how the Greeks chose to rule themselves.

  This indulgence was not extended, of course, to those who remained in arms. Even as Artaphernes applied to bleeding Ionia the balm of a settlement long remembered afterwards as a model of fairness and justice, so the continued defiance of the Athenians remained an open wound. A standing menace too. The longer that the punishment of Athens was delayed, the greater was the risk that terrorist states might proliferate throughout the mountainous and inaccessible wilds of Greece: a nightmare prospect for any Persian strategist. Geopolitics, however, was far from the only prompting at the back of the Great King's mind. Not for nothing had Ahura Mazda delivered the world into his hands. No more sacred duty had been laid upon him than the obligation to storm, wherever they might fester, the strongholds of the Lie. Athens was a nest of rebels, to be sure — but the city also stood revealed, far more sinisterly, as the home of demons, 'daiva', false gods who had chosen the path of rebellion against the Lord Mazda, 'following the course of Wrath, sickening the lives of men'.31 Only fire, of the kind that had already cleansed and purged the shrines of the Ionians, could possibly redeem Athens and her temples from the Lie. For the spiritual good of the universe, as well as the future stability of Ionia, the entire Aegean would have to be transformed into a Persian lake - and without delay. Staging post in a thrilling new phase of imperial expansion and holy war: the burning of Athens promised to be both.

  But how best to achieve it? Two policies suggested themselves: to complete the conquest of the land approaches along the coast of the north Aegean; and simultaneously to menace the cities of Greece into surrender. In pursuance of the first goal, a fleet and a fresh army were dispatched to Thrace in the spring of 492 bc, with orders to extend Persian dominance ever further westwards, into Macedonia and perhaps beyond. Their commander, a dashing young nobleman by the name of Mardonius, arrived on the western front alread
y bathed in the golden glow of natural charisma. The son of Gobryas, Darius' closest friend among the Seven, his intimacy with the royal household had been confirmed by his marriage to the Great King's daughter. But Mardonius was not merely prodigiously well connected; he was also a general of authentic elan and flair. Alexander, the King of Macedon, quickly bowed to the inevitable: Macedonia was formally absorbed into the dominions of the Great King, whose remit now extended to the foothills of Mount Olympus. True, the victory was slightly tarnished when Mardonius' entire fleet was shipwrecked in a storm off Mount Athos, and Mardonius himself, launching an over exuberant assault on a troublesome mountain tribe, was badly wounded — but these setbacks were hardly severe enough to undermine Persian prestige. Macedonia, certainly, remained solid for the Great King; Alexander, practised weather-vane that he was, could still tell precisely which way the wind was blowing.

  But the key question for Persian strategists was whether the Greeks to the south would show themselves similarly sensitive to the political weather. In 491 bc, a year after the conquest of Macedonia, ambassadors were sent on a exploratory tour of Greece, with demands for earth and water. Most cities, gratifyingly, scurried to oblige. Some, however, did not. Two, in particular, could not have made their adherence to the darkness of the Lie, and to the daiva, those 'spawn of evil purpose',32 any clearer. In Athens, not only were the Great King's demands dismissed out of hand, but his ambassadors, in blatant defiance of international law, were put on trial by the Assembly, convicted and put to death. Perhaps — given that Athens was a proven terrorist state, and that the man who had initiated the diplomats' execution was Miltiades, a notorious fugitive from the Great King's justice — this outrage was no surprise. More shocking, and more disturbing in its implications, was that the Spartans chose to blacken themselves with an even worse act of sacrilege. There was no trial for the Great King's ambassadors in Sparta: instead, flung down a well, they were told before they drowned that 'if they wanted earth and water, they could find it there'."

  This, in its naked defiance, its savage wit and its cavalier disregard for religious convention, was a spectacular that had Cleomenes' fingerprints all over it. The Athenian democracy, it appeared, had indeed arrived at an accommodation with the Spartan king who had twice tried to destroy it. When the Athenians, discovering that Aegina had handed over earth and water to the Great King, reported the news to Sparta, Cleomenes travelled in person to berate the medisers. The merchant-princes of Aegina, however, with their dependence on international trade, were reluctant to offend the great superpower to the east — even on the say-so of a Spartan king. Searching for a way to outflank Cleomenes, they appealed to Demaratus, his fellow king. Demaratus, grateful for any opportunity to stab his hated rival in the back again, eagerly pledged his support. The Aeginetans were encouraged to stand firm. Cleomenes was rebuffed.

  Covert though Demaratus' role in this business had been, however, it was not so covert that his colleague failed to sniff it out. Cleomenes' counter-thrust, delivered immediately on his return to Sparta, was brutal and cunningly aimed. Resolved now to finish oft his insufferable colleague once and for all, Cleomenes approached Demaratus' cousin, a spiteful nonentity by the name of Leotychides, and promised him the throne if he would help bring down his kinsman. Leotychides, unsurprisingly, jumped at the chance. As his enemies were well aware, Demaratus had an old skeleton just waiting to be dragged out of the closet. Tangled though the circumstances of Cleomenes' own birth were, those of his fellow king were hardly less so. Demaratus' mother, the once plain girl granted the gift of loveliness by the apparition ot Helen, had become such a beauty that the King of Sparta, overwhelmed by her charms, had used his royal muscle to abduct her from her husband. Seven months later, the new-queen had given birth to a son. But was the father the king or the commoner? A question long settled, it might have been thought, by the fact that the queen's son — Demaratus himself — had by 491 bc been on the throne for twenty-four years. A mere detail to Cleomenes, though; and when Leotychides, raking up the issue of Demaratus' legitimacy, proposed taking the case to Delphi for arbitration, judicious bribes to the priesthood had already guaranteed Apollo's complicity.

  The oracle duly pronounced against Demaratus. Back in Sparta he was formally deposed by the ephors, and Leotychides, pliable and venal, took his place. Accompanied by his new colleague, Cleomenes promptly returned to confront the Aeginetans, who this time, rather than dare defy two Spartan kings, capitulated on the spot. They even agreed, when Cleomenes demanded it, to hand over hostages as a token of their good behaviour to their bitterest foes, the Athenians. No longer would a Persian task force arriving off Attica be able to use Aegina as a base. Cleomenes, long reviled by his neighbours, suddenly found himself widely lauded for his selfless labours 'in the common cause of Greece'.'1'1 Persian agents were confirmed in their judgement of the Spartan king as their most dangerous and able foe, and the major obstruction to the Great King's plans for the West.

  Yet all was far from lost. As the Persians had often had good cause to appreciate, there was no Greek front so united that it might not at any moment disintegrate. Just when Cleomenes appeared to have shored up his position for good, news of the bribes that he had given Delphi suddenly leaked out. The scandal burst over Sparta. Outrage was universal. Cleomenes, caught red-handed for once, was forced to flee the city in disgrace. Not, of course, that exile was a fate he was remotely prepared to take lying down. Disdaining to beg his fellow citizens for permission to return, he sought to intimidate them instead. Cleomenes had always had a talent for setting the cat among the pigeons, but now it led him into blatant treachery. Reversing the policy of divide and rule that he had promoted to such effect throughout his reign, he sought to rally the northern Peloponnese to his personal cause — and to such effect that his jittery countrymen lost their nerve and hurriedly invited him back. But hardly in a forgiving mood; and Cleomenes, by returning to Sparta, was effectively sealing his doom. It began to be whispered that he was mad. The Spartans themselves blamed alcohol. The Argives preferred to see in Cleomenes' decline sure proof of the anger of the gods. Whatever the cause, though, virtually everyone agreed that the king who only a year previously had been hailed as the bulwark of Greece was now a lunatic. There were few complaints when his two surviving half-brothers, Leonidas and Cleombrotus, late in 491 BC, had him certified and locked up in the stocks. Nor were many eyebrows raised when his corpse was found the following morning, slices of flesh carved off his legs, hips and belly, a bloodstained knife dropped in the dirt by his side. The verdict, one that pushed plausibility to its outer limits but was nevertheless universally accepted: suicide.

  So perished the Great King's most formidable enemy in Greece. With him also passed a style of leadership — unscrupulous, to be sure, but decisive and proactive — that the naturally cautious Spartans had never ceased to find alarming. Indeed, the squalid circumstances of Cleomenes' end did much to confirm them in their suspicion of strong leaders altogether. True, Leonidas, the new king, was his brother's successor in more ways than one, for he had married, with her father's blessing, Gorgo, Cleomenes' only child — as wealthy as an heiress as she had been precocious as a little girl. All the same, Leonidas remained, as a man new upon the throne and possibly tainted by fratricide, an unknown quantity: he was bound to take some time to find his feet. Who else was there, then, with the Persian hammer-blow threatening, to take a lead? Leotychides? He was too busy crowing over the wretched Demaratus. The Gerousia? Or the Ephorate? Both were instinctively conservative bodies, far less likely to sanction a policy of forward defence than Cleomenes had been. Persian spies, feeding intelligence back to Sardis that winter, had much good news to report of Sparta. The turmoil in the city, the faction-fighting that would have struck Darius' strategists as so inveterately Greek, appeared to offer them their perfect opening: the opportunity to strike at Athens and take her out while she stood alone.

  A chance not to be missed. In the early weeks of 490 B
C, the long-awaited invasion order was finally given. A large army, 'powerful and well equipped', totalling perhaps some 25,000 men in all, marched out from Susa.35 With Mardonius still recovering from his injuries, command of the expedition was entrusted to two other generals with detailed knowledge of the western front: Artaphernes, son and namesake of the satrap in Sardis; and, as effective supremo, Datis the Mede, the seventy-quarts-a-day veteran of the Ionian revolt, and a man who, unusually for a member of the imperial elite, had such a specialised understanding of the enemy that he could actually speak some faltering Greek. The strategy these two commanders were to follow had been mapped out for them directly by the Great King: cross the Aegean with an immense armada, bring the benefits of Persian rule and peace to all the islands, and then, that objective completed, 'reduce Athens and Eretria to slavery, and bring the slaves before the king'.36 The conquest of the rest of Greece, including Sparta and the Peloponnese, was to wait; and yet, even as Darius' instructions stood, the planned expedition was an ambitious one. Certainly, as an amphibious operation, it promised to be on a scale not witnessed since the invasion of Egypt thirty-five years before. On top of that, the plan not to hug the coast but to island-hop directly to Greece was as bold and innovatory a strategy as any that even Darius had conceived.