Persian Fire (34 page)

Sure enough, by late July, Datis had reached the easternmost tip of Euboea.
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He was now within sight of Attica. Athens, however, would have to wait; for, rather than crossing directly to the mainland, Datis had decided that he would aim first for the smaller and less formidable of the two targets on Darius' hit-list. Forty-five miles up the ever-narrowing straits that separated Attica from Euboea the Persian fleet sailed, until at last, well inland and framed against a backdrop of mountain peaks, the rebel city of Eretria could be made out, its acropolis a rugged hump set amid a narrow plain of fields and olive groves. Scanning the shore nervously, Datis was soon breathing a sigh of relief; for the Eretrians, rather than fighting his task force on the landing beaches, where it would have been most vulnerable, had opted instead to retreat behind their walls. The Persians duly started their assault. For five long days, the fighting was bloody and desperate; on the sixth, treachery handed the city to the besiegers. Two fifth-columnists opened the gates. They both came, as Datis had surely known they would, from the aristocracy — indeed, were 'the most respected men in all of Eretria'. Intimidate the masses, flatter the elite: once again, the Persians' favoured policy had triumphantly proved its worth. As in Ionia, so now in Euboea, gutted ruins bore witness to the aptitude of the Greeks for treachery and class hatred.

And one man, turning from the spectacle of blazing Eretria and the coffles of slaves being readied for deportation, would surely have seen in it a foreshadowing of the fate of his own city and his own people, unless they could only be persuaded to see reason, to open their gates, to welcome him back. Hippias, the exiled tyrant of Athens, was more than eighty years old now. He had not seen his native land for two decades. Yet he devoutly believed himself the Athenians' last, best hope. Only he could divert the justified fury of the Great King from them; only he could hope to restore his wretched city to the sunlit uplands of Darius' favour.

It was with no sense of guilt, then, but rather through patriotism and a belief in his own destiny, that the aged Pisistratid boarded a Persian ship and guided Datis' fleet back the way it had sailed. Across the straits, on the far side of the Euboean Gulf, the coast of Attica rose rugged and steep from the water. There could be no landing there on its northern coast. But only round the headland, and the perfect spot was waiting: a scimitar-shaped bay wide and sheltered from the winds, with beaches where a whole fleet ot ships might be drawn up, a plain beyond it, ideal for Datis' cavalry, and a choice of two roads leading onwards round Mount Pentelikon to Athens. Hippias would have had good cause to remember the place. More than fifty years previously, he and his brother had landed there with their father, Pisistratus, when the would-be tyrant, at the third attempt, had finally succeeded in establishing his rule over Athens for good. Now, with the Persian fleet driving towards the same disembarkation point, Hippias knew that history, surely, was on the verge of repeating itself. Just as his brother's visions had once done, so now his own had offered a tantalising glimpse of what was to come. The previous night he had dreamed that he was sleeping with his mother; and so, as the prow of his ship met slushy sand, the old man readied himself to disembark, to embrace his native land, to prove the omen true. He was home at last.

Meanwhile, all around him, the bay was black with ships, and men were clambering into the waters, and wading onto the seaweed-matted beach, thousands upon thousands of them, an armed multitude of an order never before seen in Greece; and already, far and wide, Persian outriders were raising dust across the plain of Marathon.

The deadliest enemy that a hoplite had to face in battle was panic. All it took was for one man to despair of victory, to abandon his place in the line, to drop his shield and start shoving his comrades aside in a desperate scrabble to the rear, and a shudder of dread might pass through the whole phalanx, and that single soldier's flight become within seconds a general rout. An unsettling phenomenon — and one that the Greeks preferred to blame not on mortal fallibility but rather on some freakish supernatural event, the breath of a god, perhaps, sending a chill across the ranks, or the sudden apparition of an angered hero woken from his grave and striding across the battlefield. Yet even this theory, though it might provide balm to the injured pride of a routed army, still carried with it a disturbing implication: that to fight in a phalanx was always to be vulnerable to the faintheartedness of a few. 'Men wear helmets and breastplates for their own protection — but shields they carry for the good of everyone who forms the line.'
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" March to war without perfect confidence in the stomach of one's fellows for the coming fight, and a hoplite might well reflect that he was marching to his doom.

So that when men in Athens, looking from their walls to Mount Pentelikon and seeing the blaze of a great beacon there, warning of the Persians' landing, knew that the moment dreaded for so many years had finally arrived, opinion on how best to meet the peril was by no means unanimous. Fabulous reports of the size of the Asiatic hordes were already swirling through the city, and it was evident even to the soberest Athenian strategist that any army the democracy could put into the field was bound to be horrendously outnumbered. Add to that the invaders' overwhelming superiority in cavalry and the numbing fact that no Greek army had ever, in fifty years, succeeded in defeating the Persians in open combat, and the arguments for staying put, manning the city's walls and hunkering down for a siege might have appeared irresistible.

Yet the decision to march from the city and confront the invaders had in fact already been taken. No sooner was it confirmed that the Persians had landed at Marathon than the hoplites of the democracy, all those citizens who could afford to arm themselves, perhaps some ten thousand in total, prepared 'to take food with them and march'.
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" They left under the command of the war archon, Callimachus — but the strategy was Miltiades', and it was one that had been adopted, after days of bitter debate in the Assembly, as an official resolution of the Athenian people. The judgement of the city's greatest Mede-fighter was not one to be lightly set aside; and Miltiades, against the claims of everyone who had pushed for a defensive policy, had presented a compelling case of his own. Yes, the invaders had landed in overwhelming force; and yes, they had brought with them their fearsome cavalry; but that was precisely why they had to be met. Two roads led from Marathon round Mount Pentelikon to Athens: only let the Persians take command of one ot these, and their horsemen would be granted the whole sweep of Attica. If the Athenians marched quickly, however, and secured the two exits from the plain, they might yet contain the Persian beach-head. True, they would almost certainly then be committing themselves to battle - but it was not only within a phalanx that fraying nerves might breed disaster. It had needed only two traitors to open the gates of Eretria, after all. Could a city such as Athens, one that had been rife for a decade with rumours of treachery, fifth-columnists and profiteers from the Great King's gold, really hope to hold out during a siege? It beggared belief. Better, surely, if the worst came to the worst, to die in harness than to be stabbed ignominiously in the back.

Yet the Athenian people, despite having voted in favour of Miltiades' forward policy, still shrank from believing that they might have to stand and face the terrifying invaders on their own. Even as the army of the democracy, heading for Marathon, vanished from the sight of those left behind in Athens, one citizen was leaving in the opposite direction, south, into the Peloponnese. His name was Philippides, an athlete celebrated as his city's greatest runner, and a man of prodigious stamina and speed. By covering the staggering distance of 140 miles in under two days, he found himself, on the second evening of his epic run, descending the rugged northern hills of Lacedaemon into the Eurotas valley. As the sun sank behind the peaks of Mount Taygetos, Philippides reached the unwalled cluster of barracks and temples that constituted Sparta.

The scenes he found there could not have been in sharper contrast to those he had left behind in Athens. The whole of Lacedaemon was
en fête.
Philippides had arrived while one of the Spartans' holiest festivals, the Carneia, was in full swing, and all across the city young men were resting after a day spent playing brutal games of tag, while their elders feasted in field tents set up in deliberate imitation of a battlefield encampment. Far from signalling the Spartans' readiness to leap up and march off to war, this parody of their conventional campaigning style in fact displayed the precise opposite: the Carneia was a time of peace. There could be no question, the Spartans informed Philippides regretfully, of breaking such a sacrosanct period of truce. Only once the moon climbed full in the silver-lit August sky would they be able to march to Marathon. On the evening of Philippides' arrival in Sparta, that was still a week away. Add the marching time, and the Athenians could not expect to see a Spartan army for at least another ten days.

Surely, had he still been alive, Cleomenes, that scoffer at taboos and inveterate enemy of Persia, would have insisted upon an immediate departure - but he was dead, and Sparta, in the wake of his violent end, was still in a state of shock. Of faction-fighting too. The bitterness between Leotychides and Demaratus, in particular, was continuing to poison public life, with the new king jeering at his predecessor as a commoner at every turn. With the Spartans embroiled in such turmoil, it would hardly do to anger the gods further — even though, as Philippides put it, 'the Athenians beg you for your assistance, they beg you not to stand by idly while the most venerable city in the whole of Greece is crushed, they beg you not to let it be enslaved by gibberish-speaking invaders'.
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Yet even if ten days must have struck the disconsolate runner as a perilously long time for the Athenians to have to hold out, he was not destined to return from his mission entirely empty-handed.
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As he headed back to Athens, he was greeted by name on the heights beyond Tegea by a figure with the legs of a goat, two jutting horns and an enormous phallus. Perhaps it was a hallucination brought on by despair, exhaustion, or heat-stroke — but Philippides himself had no doubt that he was being spoken to by a god. A potentially mischievous one as well — for Pan had a warped sense of humour, and was perfectly capable, if he bore a grudge against a city, of giving every citizen within its walls a raging erection. But on this occasion, appearing to Philippides, the god had only words of encouragement, reassuring the runner of his affection for the Athenians and promising to be of use to them very soon. Pan did not go into specifics; but since he was, as his name implied, the god of panic, whose very appearance on a battlefield could send a chill through one army and fire another with potent courage, his words must have struck Philippides as rich with hope and promise.

And all the more so when he finally arrived home and found not the smouldering pile of rubble that he might have feared but rather a city that was just about keeping its nerve. In fact, the news from the front appeared almost promising: the Athenian hoplites had marched with such speed to Marathon that they had been able to secure the two roads to Athens, then had promptly dug themselves in before the invaders could break out from the plain. On top of that, they had been joined in their camp by some eight hundred men from Plataea: every hoplite the tiny city had been able to dispatch. This was hardly a substantial reinforcement, but it was so bold a gesture of gratitude and so touching a demonstration of friendship that the Athenians had found themselves powerfully fortified by it. Perhaps, they now began to hope, as they listened to Philippides' news, the stand-off at Marathon might continue until the Spartan relief force arrived. Perhaps their city might be preserved from the Persian firestorm, after all.

Not that the mood of optimism, among a people stripped of their fighting men, could be reckoned wholly unclouded, of course. Fearful imaginings, fearful questions still swept through the nervous streets. What if the Persian fleet, making its way round the coast of Attica while the Athenian hoplites were being held at Marathon, suddenly landed at Phalerum? What if traitors were in touch with Hippias? What if they had plans to open the gates? The darkest whisperings of all inevitably had as their focus the Alcmaeonids. But nothing could be proved against them; nor, despite all the rumours, was there evidence of overt treachery or defeatism from anyone else. The city gates remained barred. Philippides, heading on to Marathon, could report to the generals there not only the news from Sparta and his encounter with Pan, but that morale back in Athens was holding firm.

Yet the runner, when he arrived at the Athenian camp and had his first view of what his fellow citizens there were facing, must surely have felt his own resolve begin to waver. The spectacle of the plain of Marathon was fit to chill the blood; as terrifying, perhaps, as the sight that had greeted defenders on the walls of Troy, for when since those ancient times had there been any invasion force to compare with that of Datis? At the far end of the bay, sheltered by a long promontory known to locals as the 'Dog's Tail', the Persian ships had been hauled onto the sand, and they now extended along the curve of the beach for miles. The Asiatics themselves, monstrous numbers of them, dressed in their outlandish, brightly coloured costumes and swarming over the plain, trampled beneath their alien feet crops sprung from the sweat of Athenian farmers and the holy Attic soil. Their horsemen, galloping up to the Athenian lines, wheeled and turned, wheeled and turned, mocking their adversaries' lack of archers with fast-dispersing plumes of dust.