by Tom Holland
So it was that their weight of numbers, although it might have appeared overwhelming, failed to tell. Never before having tested themselves against the barbarian, the Spartans would have known within seconds of the first impact that they had the measure of their assailants. There could be no doubting the bravery of the Medes, men prepared to throw themselves against a line of bristling spears and shields, but they provided, even in their fish-scales, easy prey for a wall of bronze-clad professional killers. Within minutes, the front had taken on the character of a charnel-house. The Spartans employed their spear-heads and swords to eviscerate, and their skill in 'fighting close to their enemies'18 was a thing of horror to their fellow Greeks. Now, in the hellish closeness of the Hot Gates, the Medes learned to share in that dread. Those who fell did so with gaping wounds; those still on their feet found themselves soused with blood, slithering over entrails, stumbling over the growing piles of the dead.
For the Greeks too, though, straining to hold their positions against the seething crush of the enemy, the fight was desperate. Butting back their assailants with their heavy shields, jabbing, slashing, hacking all they could, feeling the sun steadily heating up the bronze of their armour, soaked in sweat and blood, those in the line of battle could hardly be expected to hold their position all the day. Nor were they: for Leonidas, with cool efficiency, ensured a regular transfusion of fresh troops to the front. Those withdrawn could remove their armour, have a drink, and bandage their wounds. Even a Spartan might sometimes need to catch his breath.
And particularly so because Leonidas, uncertain what further tactics the King of Kings might employ, needed his elite corps primed to cope with any sudden emergency. All day the battle continued to rage, until the Greeks, having seen off the Medes, and then reinforcements from Susa, found themselves, as the shadows lengthened, facing precisely such a moment of crisis. A glittering of jewelled weaponry, a shimmering of exquisite colours, and the Immortals, the most proficient and dreaded of all the Great King's regiments, as supreme among the Persians as the Spartans were among the Greeks, advanced into the pass. To meet them, Leonidas ordered all his bodyguard back to the front line — 'and there the Lacedaemonians fought in a manner never to be forgotten'.19 Courage, strength and resolution they displayed, as was only to be expected; but also a murderous talent for the tactical manoeuvre. At a signal, they would turn, stumble, appear to flee in panic; and then, as the enemy surged forwards in triumph, their discipline momentarily forgotten, the Spartans would wheel round, reform their line with a fearsome clattering of shields, and hack down their pursuers. This tactic was doubly demoralising to their assailants: for, apart from the casualties that it inflicted, it served to rub their noses in the brute fact of the Spartans' continued battle worthiness, even after a whole day's fighting, even amid the heat, and the blood, and the stench and the flies. Reluctant to squander his best troops fruitlessly, the Great King at length ordered their withdrawal, and the Immortals retreated back through the West Gate. The pass was left to the evening shadows, the carnage and the Greeks.
That night, amid the distant rumbling of thunder over Magnesia, rain started lashing down over the battlefield, slowly turning it into a mulch of gore and mud. In the piles of tangled corpses, the jewellery around the necks of Xerxes' slaughtered guardsmen, sparkling in the light of the sentries' guttering torches, would have appeared to mock the filth of slaughter. And the pretensions of the King of Kings as well? So Leonidas would have wanted desperately to believe. But he would have known better than to surrender to complacency. Though his position had demonstrated itself impregnable to a frontal assault, it still remained only as strong — or as weak — as its flanks. Messengers from the Phocian camp high on the slopes of Callidromus, having slithered and stumbled their way down to Thermopylae, reassured Leonidas that the mountain approaches were empty; but communication with the fleet at Artemisium that night, so violent had the weather turned again, was out of the question. Just as during the previous storm, Leonidas could only listen to the screaming of the winds, hug his red cloak about himself, and hope for the best.
And perhaps, for his peace of mind, this was just as well - because a day that could be viewed by the defenders of Thermopylae as a triumph of obduracy had been passed by the admirals at Artemisium in a very different spirit.20 Unpleasant surprise had followed fast on unpleasant surprise. The Persian fleet, far from being almost utterly destroyed, as optimists among the Greeks had hoped, had proved very far from finished. It may have been storm-battered — but throughout the early afternoon, as squadron after squadron, having limped past Sciathos and rounded the headland of Magnesia, began massing on the shore opposite Artemisium, the Greeks had watched with a mounting sense of despair. Never before had any of them seen the sea quite so black with shipping. Even after the havoc wreaked by the storms, the Persians could still muster perhaps eight hundred triremes, sufficient to outnumber the allied fleet by almost three to one. Not even the accidental blundering into their base of fifteen enemy ships and the capture of their crews had done much to cheer the Greeks. Now that they could see the Persian fleet before them, a bare ten miles away across the open sea, there were many who began to argue for a second withdrawal, and urgently, before the barbarians could complete their repairs. This talk had grown louder and louder — to the consternation of the locals, who were already twitchy at the prospect of being abandoned to the Mede. Soon they had sent a frantic delegation, first to Eurybiades, and then, when he turned down their request, to Themistocles, begging the allies to stay. Themistocles, who was as appalled as the Euboeans at the prospect of evacuating Artemisium, had nevertheless cheerfully demanded a backhander for his services. Having salted most of it away for himself, he then used the surplus to grease the palm of Eurybiades. This was hardly the style of backbone-stiffening favoured by Leonidas, but it was just as effective. Eurybiades and the other admirals duly agreed that the allied fleet would stay at Artemisium and hold the line.
No sooner had the high command resolved this, however, than it was thrown into renewed panic. In the late afternoon, at around the same time as the Immortals were advancing against the Hot Gates, and while the Persian squadrons, with all the ostentation they could muster, were staging an intimidatory review off the opposing coast, the allies hauled a Greek deserter from the enemy fleet, one Scyllias, out of the sea. A professional diver, who claimed to have swum the ten miles to Artemisium entirely underwater, the news he brought with him had a credibility that his boasting maybe lacked; certainly, it was sufficient to chill the blood of the listening admirals. The enemy, Scyllias reported, while the main body of their fleet was being repaired, had detached two hundred sea-worthy vessels to make their way unseen down the eastern coast of Euboea, round its southern tip, and then back up its western side. Here, raising its head again, was the Greeks' worst-case scenario: that they might find themselves bottled up, with the barbarian both ahead of them and blocking off their escape. A moment of mortal peril, to be sure — and yet, as Themistocles was quick to point out, Scyllias' intelligence spelled opportunity as well as danger. Detach a sizeable squadron from the fleet at Artemisium, send it down the straits between Euboea and the mainland, trust to the gods that the patrols off Attica would pursue the two hundred Persian ships when they caught sight of them, and it might be the barbarians who found themselves trapped in a vice.
All a massive gamble, of course — but the Greeks, if they were to have any hope of halting the Persian advance, had little choice but to trust occasionally to audacity and luck. A resolution was duly passed: 'to put to sea and meet the enemy ships that were sailing round Euboea'.21 Naturally, since it was essential not to alert the barbarians on the opposite shore to any thinning of the main fleet at Artemisium, the detachment would be able to leave only after nightfall — and after the Greeks, if they possibly could, had demonstrated to the enemy that they had no intention of cutting and running. This they did by boldly venturing out from their positions into the open sea, challenging
the Persians to attack them — which the Persians, confident in the crushing weight of their numbers, and the greater skill of their crews, duly did. Even as the sun began to set behind the western peaks of the mainland, their fleet was sweeping down hungrily across the open channel, swamping the much shorter line of the Greeks, looking to envelop it, crush it and end the war there and then. The Greeks, however, anticipating this tactic, had prepared a manoeuvre specifically designed to counter it: forming themselves into a circle, their rams pointed outwards, like the spines of a hedgehog rolled up tightly into a ball, they then moved out suddenly to the attack. The Persians, in the close fighting that followed, found their superior speed and agility negated. Some thirty of their ships were captured, and when twilight, deepening over the Aegean, at length brought the fighting to the end, it was the Greeks, to their astonishment and delight, who could claim the honours of the engagement. Barbarian seamanship, it appeared, might be countered, even defeated, after all. No better fillip could have been imagined for those crews facing a perilous night-time voyage.
Then, of course, came the gale. As rain drummed down on the ships of the Greek fleet, so the winds, screaming in from the southeast over the bleak strand of Artemisium, quickly shredded any prospect of a midnight get-away. Fortunately for the allies, however, that was not the limit of the storm damage: for wreckage from the evening's battle soon began to be swept up-channel towards the enemy positions, where it fouled the oars of the rolling patrol ships and filled the harbours with bobbing spars and corpses. Buffeted by yet another storm, and still licking their wounds from the unexpected mauling they had received at the hands of the Greeks, it was now the turn of the Persians to be thrown into a panic — 'for they imagined that the hour of their doom had come'.22 As it proved, they imagined wrong: the harbours in which the fleet had taken sanctuary the previous day served to shelter it from the worst depredations of the gale. No such refuge, however, for the two hundred ships sent south around Euboea, for the savage eastern coast of the island, with its jagged rocks and cliffs, was a miserable place to be caught off during a storm. The armada, it is said, 'running blind before the wind and rain', was shattered upon a notorious black spot known as the 'Hollows'; and certainly, irrespective of whether all the ships were lost, as the Greeks would later crow, the gale had spelled their mission's end.2j
By the following afternoon, reports of the shipwreck were reaching Artemisium, and the Greek admirals, confident that their lines of retreat were no longer threatened, could afford to breathe a huge sigh of relief. Not that they had any intention now of abandoning their forward position. Prospects for holding the front suddenly appeared as rosy as they had looked bleak the day before. Good news was coming in from everywhere: reinforcements, fifty-three ships fresh from Athens; the destruction, in an evening hit-and-run raid, of a squadron of Cilician ships; the briefing, brought by Abronichus, the liaison officer, that Leonidas and his men had withstood a second day of hard pounding at the Hot Gates. If the Great King could not make a breakthrough soon, his army would start to starve. It was already late in the campaigning season, and the barbarians were far from home. If they could merely avoid defeat, and keep the Mede at bay, that, for the Greeks, would surely prove victory enough.
But the true test, for the allied fleet and its ability to hold off the enemy, was still to come. The Persians, labouring desperately to make their remaining ships fully sea-worthy again, had not yet attempted to smash the linchpin of the whole Greek line that, if forced, would open the way to Thermopylae: the straits between Euboea and the mainland. The third day of battle dawned and the Greeks, watching from Artemisium, could have had little doubt that the moment of truth was coming at last. Squadron after squadron of the barbarian fleet — Phoenician, Egyptian, Ionian — began massing in the open channel. Now, after all the skirmishing, all the shadow-boxing, it was to come: the first full frontal assault by the Great King's navy on the Greek positions. Rowing out to block its passage, men who had first pulled on an oar just months — or, in the case of the Plataeans, weeks —before braced themselves for the fight.
Less mobile than its enemy, the Greek fleet, having plugged the straits, then opted to wait for the Persians to force the attack. Rowers, their knuckles whitening as they gripped their oars, their noses wrinkling against an overpowering stench of sweat and loosening bowels, sat crouched on their wooden benches, straining to hear above the creaking of timbers, the lapping of the water, and the nervous talk of their comrades the approaching tide of battle. Soon enough, from the marines on deck, the cry went up: the barbarians were closing in. 'Overwhelming numbers; gaudily painted figure-heads; arrogant yelling; savage war-chants':24 such were the sights and sounds of the Persian advance as it fanned out across the channel. The impact, when it duly came, was pulverising. All day the Greeks fought desperately to keep the enemy at bay, "yelling out to one another that the barbarians should not break through, even as the Persians, looking to sweep the passage clear, sought to annihilate them'.25 Somehow, despite the fearful battering they received, the Greeks managed to hold the straits — but only just. Numerous ships were sunk or captured, losses which the smaller allied fleet could ill afford; many others were disabled. The Athenians, who had borne the brunt of the enemy assault throughout the battle, had a full half of their fleet put out of action.
Prospects of holding the straits the following day looked bleak. Disconsolately, the Greeks began gathering wreckage from the battle, piling it up on the sand to serve as pyres for their dead, while their admirals, anxious faces lit by the funeral fires, debated what to do next. By now, the locals, who had seen the shattered state of the Greek fleet and already drawn their own conclusions as to its prospects, were driving their livestock down to the sea-front, in the hope that they might be included in any evacuation. Themistocles, recognising that the abandonment of Artemisium might indeed be a necessity, and not wishing his already battle-weary men to have to row through the night on empty stomachs, ordered the cattle barbecued.
Yet the mood along the fire-dotted beach that night, even amid all the weariness and disappointment, was not entirely one of despair. The Greeks had faced the Great King's armada in open battle and lived to tell the tale. Great things had been achieved at Artemisium — and not all of them owing to the winds. The allied fleet remained intact as a fighting force; and withdrawal, if it did come, would be strategic and orderly. Not that any final decision could be made either way until news had arrived from the Hot Gates — for synchronisation with Leonidas and his army remained the key to the whole campaign. And none of the navy knew what had happened at Thermopylae. As dusk turned to night, the admirals had to play a waiting game. Up and down the shore they crunched, breathing in the mingled scents of beef and burning human flesh, casting their gaze across the channel to the distant lights of the Persian positions, and waiting for Abronichus to deliver his daily briefing from the Spartan king.
His small galley arrived that night off Artemisium in good time. The sailors, gathered around their camp-fires, were still at their supper. The ships had not yet been readied for departure; no sense of crisis gripped the camp. One glimpse of Abronichus' face, however, as he came stumbling through the shallows, and all that changed. Everyone who saw him knew, even before he spoke, that something calamitous had occurred at Thermopylae.
PERSIAN FIRE
King's Dinners and Spartan Breakfasts
Even road-blocked on a dusty plain, beside the shore of the Bitter Sea, in a remote and savage land, the Great King remained the hub around which the spokes of his world empire turned. Unable to direct the invasion of Greece from Persepolis, Xerxes had simply ordered Persepolis to be brought with him to Greece. Night after night, no matter where the Great King halted, servants would scurry to unload mountains of luggage from trains of mules and camels, to level out a huge expanse of ground, and then to raise on it a tent so splendid as to put most palaces in the shade. Since Persian royalty was inveterately restless, migrating from capital to capita
l depending on the season, the Great King's engineers, with their long experience of providing for royal road-trips, knew precisely how best to prefabricate luxury. As a result, even in the bleak surroundings of the approach to Thermopylae, the imperial dignity, cocooned in rugs and cushions, leather awnings and coloured hangings, was never under any threat: chamber after chamber led away from the royal presence, while the Immortals, stationed by every doorway, stood as surety against any assassination attempt by veterans of the Crypteia.* The contrast with conditions inside the Hot Gates could hardly have been more
brutal: while Leonidas was obliged to camp out amid stench and putrescence, the Great King could direct the battle from within the perfumed cool of his audience hall; or, at night, looking to conserve his energy, retire to a silver-footed couch, where the coverings would have been prepared for him by a specialist bed-maker, a slave trained to 'make linens beautiful and soft, for the Persians were the very first people to have regarded this as an art'.26
*It is possible that such an attempt was made. Several sources claim that Leonidas, on the eve of the Spartans' last stand, launched a raid on the royal tent and was killed. It is hard to know what to make of this story — since Leonidas himself certainly died in battle - unless it hints at a garbled memory of a foiled mission to assassinate Xerxes.