by Tom Holland
But this, perhaps, was to mistake the city's destiny. High on the Acropolis, right next to Athena's primal olive tree, could be found a cistern filled with salt-water. Kneel down beside it and a citizen might hear from its depths 'a sighing like that of waves when a south wind blows'; look at the rock, and he might see 'a mark in the form of a trident',-" branded there in the distant past by Poseidon, the god of the sea. Once, it was said, he and Athena had competed to be pre-eminent in the city; Poseidon, although bested by the goddess, had left behind the well as a mark of his continuing patronage, driven into the rock of the holiest shrine in Athens.32 Nor was the Acropolis the only site where the Athenians might ask the god for favours. At 'holy Sunium, Athens' headland',33 which every ship had to round when leaving Attica for the open sea, a temple had recently been raised to Poseidon on the edge of the teetering cliff. Datis, commanding his horse-transports on their desperate dash for Phalerum, would have seen its columns rising above him as he sailed his ponderous flotilla past the headland. Perhaps Poseidon, stirring the currents with the tip of his trident that fateful day, had slowed down the progress of the Persian ships as they strained for Athens? Certainly, there was no god likelier to favour Themistocles' plans for saving his city from a second barbarian onslaught than the lord of the sea. Themistocles himself, since Sunium lay only eight miles south of his deme, would have found it an easy matter to travel to the headland, and maybe he often did. With the shadow of the sea god's shrine on his back and the murmuring of the swell below him, there would certainly have been no better place to pray for a miracle.
And were one to materialise, the likeliest spot for it, as Themistocles would have known, lay within easy walking distance of Poseidon's temple. The cliffs which formed the tip of the promontory did not extend far. North of Sunium stretched the bleak and blasted flatlands of Laurium, unrelieved by any of the breezes that kept the cape fresh. The air along this stretch of coast was baking and acrid, and filthy with poisonous fumes, yet thousands of people, women and children as well as men, lived here, their shacks clustered meanly around factory complexes. These were not citizens but slaves, unfortunates condemned to labour amid the dust and the pollution so that the democracy might be rich. As the pock-marked slopes which rose beyond the sea and the ceaseless din of picks bore witness, Laurium was an area so rich in silver that there were still fresh seams to be found in the rock, even though it had been mined since before the Trojan War. Over the previous couple of decades, the quarries had benefited from a substantial upgrade: stone tanks had been hollowed out of the rock-face, for the washing of extracted ore, so that all extraneous elements, of which there were invariably plenty, might be sluiced away before smelting. This simple innovation had enabled the silver to be refined to an unprecedented degree of purity. It had also opened up a tantalising prospect: a productive lode, if a new one could be found, would be more exploitable than any in Laurium's history. It just needed a single, lucky strike. And that, in 483 bc: was exactly what was made.
'A fountain of silver, a storehouse of treasure buried within the earth.' So the seam appeared to the dazzled Athenians. What to do with this windfall? No sooner had Themistocles received news of it than he was up on his feet in the Assembly, demanding a fleet. His proposal was greeted with cries of outrage. Aristeides, his blend of conservatism and demagoguery as inimitable as ever, rose in immediate opposition. It was the custom, he pointed out smoothly, for bonanzas from the mines to be divided equally among the Athenian people: an appeal to the voters' self-interest that managed to be both blatant and hedged about edifyingly by tradition. Themistocles, meeting it head on, chose not to scaremonger, nor even to mention the Persian threat at all. Rather, harping on an enemy far more immediate than the Great King, squatting as she did directly on the Athenians' doorstep, he began 'whipping up the voters' dislike and jealousy of Aegina'.The Assembly, pulled in opposite ways by the rival temptations of avarice and jingoism, settled eventually on compromise. The profits from Laurium would be spent on warships, but only one hundred of them. Themistocles, who had been campaigning lor double that number, refused to back down. So too did Aristeides. Neither man was able to force an advantage. Autumn turned to winter, and the democracy, riven by the dispute, found itself paralysed. By Januarv, when the Assembly met to vote on whether an ostracism should be held that year, the result was a foregone conclusion. The logjam had to be broken: either Themistocles or Aristeides would be going. The pottery shards, it was settled, would be brought out when winter turned to spring.
It may not have been framed as such, then, but the ostracism of 482 bc: was, in effect, the first referendum in history. Perhaps the most fateful, too: for on its result would hang the future not only of Athens but of an independent Greece, and of much more besides. As the date appointed for the ostracism neared, the Athenians themselves appear dimly to have woken up to this. Rumours of the massive construction project on the Athos peninsula were by now hardening into menacing fact; and talk of the Great King's preparations for war, whispered in horror-stricken tones, must surely have begun swirling through the anxious streets. That Themistocles' enemies, even as they opposed giving the city a fleet, should still have hyped Aristeides as 'the Just' appears increasingly to have grated on people's nerves - as Aristeides himself would soon discover. Standing by the voting pens on the day of the ostracism, he was approached by an illiterate peasant who, failing to recognise the great man, handed him a pottery shard and asked him to write, 'Aristeides' on it. Nonplussed, Aristeides asked the peasant why. '"Because,"' came the answer, "I am fed up with hearing him called the 'Just' all the time." And Aristeides, when he heard this, did not reply, but merely took the shard, wrote his name on it, and then handed it back.'36 An inspiring story - and one that could have derived only from the Just One himself, of course. As such, it had the palpable whiff of damage limitation. Even as he watched the ostraka stacking up against him, Aristeides was looking to salvage something from the ruin. Perhaps he had even seen what was written on some of the shards: 'Datis' brother'. Certainly, once the result had been confirmed and it was announced that he would be heading into exile, Aristeides knew that, whatever else he was obliged to leave behind, he had to keep his reputation for honesty. The time might come when he would need it again. Ostracised Aristeides may have been; but even before he had left, he was preparing the ground for his return.
Meanwhile, however, the vote had served its purpose. The air was cleared and Themistocles had triumphed. Athens would have her two hundred ships. More than two hundred, in fact — for the Athenians, after all their prevarications, appeared suddenly possessed by a quite contrary spirit of nervous energy, as though, having finally grasped the nettle, they dreaded that they were doing too little, too late. Agents armed with Laurium silver fanned out urgently across the Aegean, buying timber wherever they could obtain it. Day and night, the shipyards of Piraeus rang to the din of saws and hammers. Warships had been gliding down the slipways since the vote the previous summer, but now they began to do so at the astounding rate of two a week. Nothing but the best would do, and the deadliest and most up-to-date model, the trireme, a slim, ram-headed killing machine equipped with three separate banks of oars, required workmanship of the highest precision.
Themistocles, indeed, hands on as ever, had personally insisted on experimenting with a new design, aimed at enhancing 'speed and ease of turning':'7 for while high productivity was essential, so too was quality. 'A terror to her enemy, a cause of joy to her friends': such had to be the benchmark for every trireme launched by the democracy.'18
Yet soberingly, all the challenges of constructing a fleet were as nothing compared to those of learning how to power and manoeuvre it. The effective pulling of an oar on a trireme was a notoriously difficult skill to master. 'Seamanship, after all, like so much else, is an art. It cannot merely be dabbled with in one's spare time. Indeed, it allows for no spare time at all.'39 Particularly when time itself, as seemed increasingly likely, might be in short supply.
The whole population of Attica needed to be broken urgently to the rowing bench — and even then, Themistocles fretted, there might not be enough citizens to man the swelling fleet. Day after day, as the summer of 482 bc slipped by and darkened into winter, farmers from the remotest olive groves, potters who might never before have left the Ceramicus, 'steadfast men of the hoplite class',40 their armour left behind to gather cobwebs in stable-lofts, all practised, practised, practised, enduring the blisters, the perpetual weariness and the aches in strange muscles they had never known they had, only to take out their rowing cushions, lay them on their benches, and set to practising once again. A brutal crash-course — but so it had to be. There were few who still believed, as spring came to Athens in 481 bc, that the enemy they were training to meet was the fleet of Aegina. Rumours of what was being planned for their city by the Great King were by now flooding in from all directions. It was even said, alarmingly, that Xerxes and his army were preparing to leave from Susa that very spring. Foreboding gripped the Athenians — and a longing, amid all the uncertainty and confusion, to know the worst. Then at last, from a most unexpected quarter, there came some definite news.
It was the Spartans who had received them: a pair of blank writing tablets. Much perplexity had greeted this cryptic delivery until the ever bright-eyed Gorgo, wife of King Leonidas, had suggested scraping away the wax — and a message had been found inscribed on the wood that lay beneath. It had been written by Demaratus: a warning of the plans of the King of Kings. The Spartans confessed that they did not know if this tip-off revealed 'a benignant care for his people or a malicious sense of joy';41 and yet how strange it was, and how alarming, that there was any doubt at all as to the defector's motivation. A message that had mysteriously made it past every checkpoint on the Royal Roads, that was calculated to chill the blood of its recipients, that had boosted the image of the puppet-king in waiting: this had the fingerprints of the Persian dirty-tricks department all over it. The Spartans, although they lacked the Athenians' enthusiasm for broadcasting their differences in public, were not lacking their own internal divisions. Demaratus' message could only have been written with the intention of widening these, between the hawks, confident of victory against any opponent who might dare to challenge them, even the King of Kings himself, and the more pessimistic, those who quietly-dreaded that the gods had sentenced them to ruin, and that the hour of their doom was drawing near.
Both Demaratus and his controllers in Persian intelligence would certainly have been well aware that the latter group was no small minority in Sparta. The ghosts of Darius' heralds, murdered a decade previously by Cleomenes, were widely feared to be haunting Lacedaemon, calling to the heavens for vengeance — as, of course, was their right. So conscience-racked were some Spartans, indeed, that two prominent Heraclids, frantic to expiate their city's sacrilege, had adopted the desperate expedient of travelling to Susa and offering themselves up to the King of Kings as a sacrifice. Xerxes, far too shrewd to take up this startling offer, had graciously spared them — for why should he deign to relieve the Spartans from the debilitating burden of their guilt? Demaratus' news, as it was designed to do, served only to compound their dread. Most cursed the traitor: dredging up old scandal, they smeared him as the bastard of a helot, the fruit of his mother's rolling with a stinking stable-hand, fit to be an Asiatic's slave. Others, however, realising that Demaratus might be the only man who stood between them and total ruin, and acknowledging that he had opposed Cleomenes and his impious excesses at every turn, began whispering differently. They too repeated rumours of Demaratus' paternity; but they called him the son, not of a slave, but of the phantom of a legendary hero, halfway to a god.42
Naturally, it still went without saying that the Spartans, if the Great King did invade the Peloponnese, would stand and block his way. But if even they, the bravest warriors in the world, were racked by self-doubt, how were the men of lesser states supposed to steel their nerves? As spring turned to summer the choice for every city in Greece became unavoidable: resistance or appeasement. No longer could the prospect of a Persian invasion be dismissed as an alarmist fantasy of ambitious politicians such as Themistocles. It was now evident even to the most obdurate sceptic that all the rumours of Xerxes' departure from Susa had been true: he was indeed heading west. By early autumn, so it was reported from Ionia, he had arrived at Sardis — and still, flocking to his banner, his vast dominions continued to empty themselves upon his command. The Great King and all his hordes were coming. By the spring of the following year, it would have begun: the advance of the largest army ever assembled, over the Hellespont, into Europe, and then down, like a wolf upon the fold, on to Greece. Those who lived there, in what might easily prove to be their last winter of freedom, could now shudder with a dreadful certitude as to whom the Great King's target was going to be.
And the Persian high command, as adept as ever at pyschological warfare, neglected no opportunity to turn the screws. Envoys, just as they had done a decade previously, before the Marathon campaign, began criss-crossing Greece, demanding earth and water. Every city was visited, with two exceptions: Athens and Sparta. The message of intimidation to the rest of Greece could hardly have been clearer. Frantic not to be earmarked in a similar manner for destruction, many cities scurried to oblige the imperial emissaries. Even those who openlv refused the demand for earth and water had their pro-Persian factions, or were patently equivocating. It did not seem beyond the bounds of possibility, during that bleak and dread-shadowed autumn, that the whole of Greece might simply drop like overripe fruit into Xerxes' lap.
Which was, of course, for the Spartans and the Athenians, who had no choice but to fight, the ultimate nightmare. Hoping to stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood, they too hurriedly sent out ambassadors, calling their fellow Greeks to arms and to a conference of war to be held at Sparta. This was a logical location, perhaps, since it was the Peloponnesian League that would provide any allied army with its muscle; and yet the Spartans, nervous of alienating cities that did not belong to the League, and displaying an unwonted care for their sensitivities, were careful to title the conference centre the 'Hellenion' — 'the united nations building of Greece'.''3 Nor was this merely an empty flourish. Many of the cities who had chosen to send delegates to Sparta were still at war with one another; yet, startlingly, when it was proposed that all such feuding should be resolved, everyone agreed then and there. Aegina, for instance, having decided this time round to throw in her lot against the invaders from the very start, found herself burying the hatchet with Athens; and with the very real prospect, furthermore, of her ships being combined in a single fleet with those of her erstwhile bitter foe.
Not that this new spirit of harmony was entirely without limits. When Themistocles, pointing to the disproportionate contribution that his city would be making to any allied navy, laid claim to its command, the Aeginetans joined delegates of other cities with ancient maritime traditions, such as Corinth and those of Euboea, in howling down the upstart. Heroically, and ever the pragmatist, the Athenian admiral managed to swallow his pride. His vanity may have been immense, but his determination to be the saviour of Athens was even greater. Themistocles was never the man to let his ego cloud either his intelligence or his uncanny ability to enter other people's minds. He could see, with the penetration that came naturally to a born in-fighter, that the Greeks had only one hope of survival: 'to put an end to their feuding, to reconcile the various cities with one another, and to persuade them to join together in the cause of defeating Persia'.44 Recognising the danger that no city's fleet would ever tolerate accepting orders from the admiral of another, he made the masterly suggestion that leadership of the allied fleet be given to a people without a drop of sea-blood in their veins. So it was that the Spartans, who had already laid claim to the land command by right, won command of the sea as well. A bitter expedient for Athens — but, as Themistocles well knew, there were far worse blows that could befall a city than a bruising of
her amour propre.
With a command structure, however vague, now successfully established, the allies could start to lay their plans. Two major challenges faced them. One, self-evident to all the delegates at the Hellenion, was the need to boost their numbers. Of the seven-hundred-odd cities in mainland Greece, barely thirty had sent delegates to Sparta. Notable absentees, such as the Argives, would somehow have to be persuaded to join the common cause; pro-allied factions in fence-sitting cities, such as Thebes, would have to be bolstered. The solution finally adopted was a carrot and stick approach. On the one hand, it was settled, ambassadors should be sent to Argos, and to all the other cities that had so far remained aloof from the alliance; on the other, a proclamation warned any would-be medisers that they could look forward to having a tenth of their income tithed as punishment for their treachery. Furthermore, since the allies would undoubtedly require divine as well as merely mortal assistance in order to achieve this, all the proceeds of the tithing, it was piously agreed, would be given 'to the god at Delphi'.
In this desperate hope that Apollo might be bribed, and his oracle with him, there was nothing remotely naive. Rather, it betrayed one of the allies' best-founded fears. They were all hard-nosed men. They knew that Persian spies were everywhere, secreting gifts of gold here, whispering promises of the Great King's favour there, working stealthily to rot the Greeks' resolve from within. Somehow, in the face of this espionage campaign, the allies had to find away to strike back. Here, then, was the second challenge facing the allies: to infiltrate the camp of the King of Kings.
For the Greeks, as yet, despite all the wild talk, had little idea as to the true scale of what they were facing. Only with hard intelligence could they start to formulate their strategy - and for that, undercover agents would be needed. Three spies were duly chosen and given their mission: to travel to Sardis and make notes on all they saw. Do this without being captured, and they would enable the allies to have an infinitely better sense of the odds facing them, and to plan accordingly come the spring, when they had agreed to meet once more.