by Tom Holland
And Truth, after all, was what Xerxes sat on his throne to defend. Strongly though considerations of geopolitics had weighed with him, and a sense of duty to his father, and personal ambition, yet Athens was to be burned, and Greece conquered, for a reason profounder than any of these. 'All I do, I do by the favour of Ahura Mazda.' So it pleased Xerxes, as it had pleased Darius before him, to proclaim. 'When there is a task to be done, it is Ahura Mazda who gives me aid, until that task is completed.'55 To the imperial army, then, as it embarked upon the supreme challenge of its master's reign, there clung a nimbus of the divine. The Lord of Light was to be regarded as a constant presence on the campaign. Not, of course, that Ahura Mazda could be represented as other people chose to portray their gods, in the form of some vulgar idol or painted image; yet vacancy, mystery-hedged and awful, might serve instead. So it was that an exquisitely decorated war chariot, guided by a charioteer following it on foot, was to accompany the army into Greece, wholly empty — 'for the mortal does not exist who may take his place upon that chariot's throne'. To pull it, eight white horses, of marvellous size and beauty, had been brought specially to Sardis. Others, when the army left for Greece, were to lead the way; still others were to pull the chariot of Xerxes himself. These creatures, as was only fitting, were touched by the sacred themselves — for they came from the plain of Nisaea. There, on that fateful first day of Darius' reign, when the assassin of the false Magus had emerged from the fort of Sikyavautish holding aloft his bleeding dagger to pronounce Persia and all her dominions purged of the Lie, the white horses had whinnied in salutation. Now, far from Nisaea, horses of the same breed, pulling the chariot of Darius' son, were to witness the dedication of demon-racked Athens, and all of Greece with her, to the Truth.
For if, as Xerxes had been raised to believe, the world was his to conquer, it was also his to mend. Keen horticulturalist that he was, he knew that a paradise, before it could be considered completed, first had to be cleared of weeds, set in order, beautified. Significantly, even embarking on a brutal campaign of destruction, Xerxes' love of the natural world and his eye for its glories never left him. Nearing Sardis, for instance, he had come across a plane tree of such surpassing loveliness that he had halted the entire march of his army in admiration. One of the Immortals had even been detached from the company and ordered to serve as its guard. Golden jewellery brought out from the expedition's mobile treasure trove had been festooned from its sweeping branches. To be sure, the Great King took — but he also gave away.
And not just to trees. Xerxes, tending the garden that was the world of his enormous empire, delighted in servants who served him loyally, and loaded them down just as he had loaded down the plane tree, with lavish rewards. 'For what robes are there that can compare in beauty to those the King hands out to his friends? Whose gifts — whether bracelets, or necklaces, or horses in harnesses studded with gold — are so distinctive?'57 Xerxes' Europe-bound expedition, while it was certainly intended to demonstrate the folly of scorning the Great King's favour, also had a more pacific intent. Remote satrapies, hitherto cruelly denied the royal presence, might now enjoy the supreme privilege of paying homage to the King of Kings in person. His subjects, as he rode through their towns, would line the roads, tossing flowers before the clattering hooves of the Nisaean horses, and prostrating themselves in the dust; attendants, following in their master's wake, would gather up gifts and petitions; guards, lashing the moaning, sobbing crowds with whips, would ensure that they retained, even in their ecstasy, a sense of their proper place. Naturally, there was nothing that any of the Great King's subjects, whether peasants or plutocrats, could offer their master that was not already his; but Xerxes, turning the light of his royal favour upon those who humbled themselves, might be munificent as well as gracious. 'Generously', he boasted, 'do I repay all those who do well by me.'58 Even the Greeks, if they would only submit to the majesty of the Great King, might hope to win, as Demaratus already had, extravagant honours and gifts. This, at its heart, was the symbiosis of global monarchy. Even Xerxes had to plant as well as reap.
Which was not to deny that blooms, for the good of the garden, might sometimes need to be pruned. Servants, unlike plants, could on occasion grow presumptuous. Xerxes, shortly before passing the plane tree that had so astounded him with its beauty, had been entertained by Pythius, the Lydian reputed to be the richest commoner in the world. Some thirty years previously, this same plutocrat, sensitive to the tastes of his Persian masters, had presented Darius with a plane tree made of gold. Now, greeting Xerxes, he had not only fed the Great King's entire army, but vowed to bankroll it. Xerxes, breezily dismissing this offer, had nevertheless been charmed. All that winter, Pythius and his five sons stood high in the royal favour. Pythius himself had been lavished with gifts; his sons all confirmed in prominent military posts. Then, with the coming of spring to Sardis, and the time at last for Xerxes and his task force to depart upon their great enterprise, there was sudden consternation. An eclipse, blotting out the sun, had cast the world into shadow. Although the Magi were quick to reassure their anxious master that this portended the ruin not of his expedition but of the rebel Greeks, Sardis remained racked by a sense of foreboding. The aged Pythius, as 'alarmed by the sign from the heavens'59 as anyone, even went so far as to beg the Great King for his eldest son to be spared from going to Greece. A terrible, a fatal mistake. At a time when Xerxes himself was preparing to ride into danger with all his 'sons, and brothers, and relatives, and friends',60 no more scandalous a request could possibly have been imagined. While the Great King, mingling mercy with the stern dictates of justice, did somehow bring himself to spare his former favourite's life, it was clearly out of the question to pardon the Lydian's impertinence altogether.
Pythius' precious eldest son was duly apprehended, killed and sawn in two. Then, with the army massing to march northwards for the Hellespont, the two halves of the corpse were exhibited on either side of the Sardis highway. 'And the army, everyone in it channelled between the two halves of the young man's body, embarked on its advance.'61
A less than cheery send-off, it might have been thought. In fact, grisly though this blood-offering certainly was, and an increasingly flyblown one at that, yet it broadcast to the jumpy levies passing between it a potent message of reassurance. The demands of ritual as well as justice had doomed the son of Pythius. The sacrifice of a human life was an act pregnant with fearful magic, a magic that Xerxes, hoping to purify his army, had now dared to harness. The Great King himself, trusting in the judgement of the Magi that the eclipse had been a favourable portent, had his private doubts whether there was in fact any evil that needed keeping at bay; but he also knew, with Sardis so shadow-haunted, that it was better to play things safe. Certainly, as his troops prepared to venture into the wilds of a new continent, they could do so confident that there was nothing their royal master would not countenance in his drive for victory.
Nor, as the Great King neared Europe, did he neglect to toy with the superstitions of his foes. Devout in the worship of Ahura Mazda he may have been — yet Xerxes had the traditional Persian genius for turning the religious sensibilities of alien peoples to his advantage. This was why, having closed in on the Hellespont, he took the opportunity to break his journey and explore a site that to him would have appeared merely a grass-covered series of bumps, but to the Greeks meant infinitely more: Troy. By ordering the Magi to pour libations upon the site, Xerxes was self-consciously laying claim to the role that the Greeks, in their terror, had already given him: that of nemesis for the carnage wrought by Agamemnon. Vengeance, on behalf of all the men of Asia slaughtered in the Trojan dust, was to be the King of King's. Just as Troy had once done, Athens and Sparta were shortly to burn.
Then, with the Pisistratids no doubt whispering helpful encouragements from the side, a thousand oxen were driven up the hill, and the whole lot immolated on the summit as an offering to Athena. This, since the goddess had always been notorious for her loathin
g of the Trojans, might have been thought a maladroit gesture - except that Xerxes, by displaying his respect for the protectress of Athens so extravagantly, was sending the Athenians a very public message. The Athena worshipped in their city was no Olympian, but rather a demon who had taken on her form, one of the daivas, a servant of the Lie. The King of Kings, pledged though he was to burn the Acropolis, was no enemy of the true goddess, whose worship, in the company of the Pisistratids, he would shortly be restoring. Only with Athens under Persian rule could Athena return to her ancient home — and that moment, in the spring of 480 bc, was drawing ever nearer.
For the Great King, from the summit of Troy, could see at last, beyond the plain on which so many Greeks and Trojans had once fought and died, the fateful glittering of the Hellespont. Further along the straits, where Asia and Europe stood separated by barely a couple of miles of sea, twin pontoon bridges were awaiting him, their immense cables chaining together the two continents, proof against the currents and the raging of the winds. That winter, it was true, a particularly ferocious gale had swept away two prototypes of the pontoon, but the Persian high command, having decapitated a few engineers pour encourager les autres, and with plenty of ships and manpower to spare, had quickly made good the repairs. Even the Hellespont appeared to have been taught to behave itself: a few symbolic touches of the whip, a set of fetters dropped into its waters, and the sea had been peaceable ever since. Now, as Xerxes descended from the grass-covered hill of Troy, all was ready for him: his army massed along the beaches and plains of Abydos, the city nearest to the bridgehead; his fleet, gliding into the straits, cramping the fish with beating oars. The locals, having correctly gauged the kind of welcoming gift that might prove acceptable to a world monarch, had erected a throne of white marble on a promontory overlooking the awe-inspiring scene. When he arrived, the Great King duly took his seat to admire the view.
'And from where he sat, gazing out across the bay, he could take in the spectacle of his army and his navy in a single sweep . . . And when he saw the whole of the Hellespont covered with ships, and all the beaches and plains of Abydos filled with men, Xerxes counted himself truly blessed.'62 The world was all before him: a spectacle of outright global dominion such as no king had ever staged before. Of intimidation, too. The extravaganza may have been flamboyant, and self-consciously theatrical in its mustering of levies from around the world, but the parade, beneath its flummery, bared fearsome teeth. The Great King, concerned even amid the ecstasy of the moment to demonstrate his enthusiasm for quality as well as quantity, sent messengers to the various naval contingents, instructing them to demonstrate their proficiency in a rowing match. Only once the regatta had been staged — and won, inevitably, by the Sidonians — did he decree that preparations for the crossing should commence.
All afternoon they took, all evening, all night. Finally, with the horizon lightening to their right, the Immortals, wearing wreaths in their hair and holding their spears upside down, assembled in serried formation beside the eastern bridge, while distantly, from the other, there drifted the sound of pack-animals, the braying of donkeys, the complaining of camels; and over them all, from glowing braziers, perfumes of incense billowed upwards to meet the dawn. The King of Kings himself, emerging past the Immortals and treading over boughs of myrtle, walked to the edge of the bridge. By now, beyond the straits, the silhouette of Europe was growing clearer by the minute — until, from the east, the first ray of sunlight touched the Hellespont, and Xerxes, pouring wine from a golden cup into the sea, raised a prayer of supplication to the heavens for the success of his great enterprise. When he was done, he dropped the cup into the black currents, then a golden bowl, and finally a sword. The ceremony was over. The crossing could begin. And the sun, touching the ranks of the Immortals asthey advanced onto the creaking bridge, caught the gold and silver apples on their spears, so that they seemed, as they advanced, to be moving points of light.
[1]
Seven days in all it took the task force to pass from Asia into Europe. The army crossed the eastern pontoon; the baggage-trains the western. No one knows for sure when Xerxes himself rode onto the bridge: some said that it was on the second day; others that he was the very last man to make the crossing. What is certain, however, is that the expedition made it over the Hellespont without mishap - and that the achievement, to those who witnessed it, appeared to be the work less of a man than of a god. 'Why, O Zeus,' one local is said to have exclaimed, watching the King of Kings ride by, 'have you gone to the bother of disguising yourself as a mortal from Persia, and giving yourself the name of Xerxes, and summoning the world to follow you, all for the purpose of annihilating Greece? Surely that was something that you could have done more simply on your own!'63
Drawing a Line
At around the same time as Xerxes was leaving Sardis, a delegation from Sparta was heading north to attend a congress of the allies at the Isthmus. Its mood would have been a good deal less cheery than the Great King's. Spartans tended to be bad travellers at the best of times, and the spring of 480 bc was decidedly not the best of times. The news that almost two million barbarians were making for their city might have been thought sobering enough. Yet not even the ultimate in invasion scares could entirely eclipse for the Spartans a more traditional source of paranoia. Crabbed and provincial in their anxieties as in so much else, their supreme dread remained, as it had always been, revolt in their own backyard. The helots, kept ignorant of anything beyond the brute facts of their serfdom, could be counted upon to have heard little, even by that spring, of the Great King's approach; but few others would have been similarly oblivious. In cities long subordinate to Sparta, and resentful of it, the prospect of swapping a local superpower for a global one was prompting gimlet-eyed calculations. Even en route to Corinth, the Spartan delegation to the congress at the Isthmus would have passed cities darkly rumoured to be rife with medisers. One of these, just inside the border with Tegea, was Caryae — a town so intimately linked to the rest of Lacedaemon that girls from Sparta would regularly travel there to go dancing. Tegea herself, in recent years, had also shown a worrying tendency towards insubordination — even going so far as to indulge on occasion 'in open spats with Sparta'.64 These, however, were mere pinpricks of concern compared to the city that remained Sparta's bitterest and most poisonous foe, crippled, maybe, since the slaughter at Sepeia, but hungry still for revenge and for what she saw as her ancient birthright: dominance of the Peloponnese. The Spartan delegates, as they headed north for Corinth, could hardly have failed to cast an uneasy sideways glance in the direction of Argos.
Admittedly, the Argives, playing hard to get, had not yet openly committed themselves to the cause of the Great King. Nor, however, as the Spartans were all too painfully aware, had they pledged themselves to the allies. When representatives from Sparta, arriving in Argos that winter, had invited them to do so, the Argives had responded with what they knew were impossible demands: a thirty-year truce and a share of the command. The negotiations had collapsed on the spot. The Spartan ambassadors, frogmarched to the border, had been warned that any repeat of their mission would be interpreted as a hostile act. 'For rather than concede so much as an inch to them, the Argives would actively prefer barbarian rule.'65
A statement of neutrality that appeared, to the Spartans, quite as menacing as a threat. Even before the allies' first conference at the Hellenion, they had suspected the worst of Argos - and with good cause. While the Argives, in justification of their inglorious fence-sitting, could brandish a warning from Delphi advising them to 'look after yourselves and keep your spears locked away',66 the Spartans, 'at the first stirrings of the war', had also applied for a long-range forecast from Apollo. The Pythians, returning from the oracle, had brought their royal masters, Leonidas and Leotychides, a most alarming message.
Your fate, O inhabitants of the broad fields of Sparta,
Is to see your great and famous city destroyed by the sons of Perseus.
Ei
ther that, or everyone within the borders of Lacedaemon,
Must mourn the death of a king, sprung from the line of Heracles67
Food for thought indeed. It was not merely that either Leonidas or Leotychides appeared to have been given a death sentence; there was also, in the description of the apocalypse that would otherwise overwhelm Sparta, a sinister, and typically Delphic, ambiguity. Who precisely were the 'sons of Perseus'? The Persians? The Argives? Both? That the allies' spring conference was being held at the Isthmus, midway between the Peleponnese and northern Greece, would only have served to make the question more alarming and pressing yet. Ahead of the ambassadors, far distant on the frontiers of Asia but drawing ever closer by the day, the Persians; behind them, eyes presumably fixed brightly on their backs, the Argives: sons of Perseus both. It was scarcely surprising that the Spartan delegates were jumpy.
Whether Leonidas and Leotychides were among them, we do not know. It was not normally the practice of Spartan kings to act as their own ambassadors, but Leonidas, in particular, as representative of the senior royal line and therefore the allied supreme commander, would surely have wished to keep track of new intelligence in person. If he did attend briefings at the Isthmus, however, he would have found it a singularly discouraging experience. Despite the high hopes of the previous autumn, no new allies had committed themselves. Just as Argos had done, many of the states that had been approached had explained that Apollo was advising them to keep their heads down. The biggest disappointment of all was the man who had attracted the giddiest hopes: the tyrant of Syracuse. Gelon, who desperately needed every last ship and soldier for his own looming showdown with Carthage, but did not wish to lose face by admitting as much, had extricated himself from his commitments to the old world by trumping even the Argives for impudence. First, he had demanded exclusive command over all the Greek forces; then, making a great show of compromise, over either the army or the fleet. When the allied ambassadors, just as they were meant to, had refused these terms indignantly, Gelon had snorted in contempt: 'You seem to have no lack of leaders, my friends — all you need now is to find some men for them to lead.'68