Persian Fire (36 page)

So it was that Athens escaped the terrible fate of Miletus and Eretria, and proved herself, in the ringing words of Miltiades, 'a city fit to become the greatest of all in Greece'.
⁵³
At Marathon, her citizens had stared their worst nightmare directly in the face: not merely that the Athenian people might be transplanted far from the primordially ancient soil that had given them birth, from their homes, their fields, their demes, but, even worse, that their bloodlines, amid hideous scenes of mutilation, might be extirpated. Every hoplite fighting on that day must have known that the Great King, incensed by the Athenians' oath-breaking, had ordained for them that 'most terrible of all known acts of vengeance': the castration of their sons. Had the Athenians, perhaps, in their darkest imaginings, dreaded that the gods themselves might uphold this ghastly sentence": Athens had indeed betrayed her promises of loyalty to Darius; and it was the habit among the Greeks when they swore an oath to stamp upon the severed testicles of a sacrificial beast, and pray that their progeny be similarly crushed if they went back on their word. By charging the enemy at Marathon, the Athenians had, in effect, steeled themselves to put this most terrible of all their fears to the test — and had resolved it spectacularly.

And much more besides. Whoever had sent the signal to the Persians from Mount Pentelikon kept his silence now. When the news was brought that Hippias, dashed of all his hopes, had expired of disappointment en route back into exile, it merely confirmed what everyone already knew: that no one after Marathon should stake his future on there being a tyranny in Athens again. Everyone was in favour of rule by the people now. Or at least in favour of rule by the people who had won the famous victory: the farmers, the landed gentry, the armour-owning stock. 192 of them, it was discovered, had died in the battle - and to these heroes of Athenian liberty a unique honour was accorded. No tombs in the Ceramicus for them; instead, for the first and only time in their city's history, the dead were buried, 'as a tribute to their courage', on the very field where they had fallen. A great tomb was raised over their corpses to a height of more than fifty feet, and marble slabs listing the names of the fallen were placed along its sides. Not even the haughtiest of noble dynasties could boast of anything to compare. Mingled with the dust they had fought so courageously to defend, the dead were to lie buried together, without class or family distinctions of any kind. They were citizens - nothing less and nothing more. What prouder title than that of Athenian could possibly be claimed? Athens herself was all.

Even the Spartans, when they arrived there after their gruelling three-day march, regarded the men who had conquered the Mede unaided with a new and ungrudging respect. Marching onwards to inspect the battlefield, they found at Marathon, rotting amid the dust of the plain or half sunk into marsh-slime, evidence enough of the scale of the menace that had been turned back so heroically. Six thousand and four hundred invaders lay there, fattening the flies — and that was only a fraction of the task force that Datis had led. How many teeming millions more the Great King might have at his command, breeding and swarming within the fathomless hinterlands of Asia, neither the Athenians nor the Spartans much cared to contemplate. Every Greek, looking upon the Persian dead and revelling in the great victory, must nevertheless have felt just a tremor of apprehension. Yet the Spartans, methodically inspecting the battlefield, turning over the corpses, making notes, would have found much to reassure them as well. It was the first opportunity they had ever been given to study the armour and the weapons of the fabled masters of the East; and what they saw did not greatly impress them. Datis may have led a huge army to Marathon - but nothing that the Spartans would have recognised as their equal.

Meanwhile, even as they continued their tour of inspection, a great trench was being dug on the southern margins of the marshes. Into this makeshift refuse tip the invaders' corpses were flung unceremoniously. No memorial for the slaughtered Persian hordes. Mute and inglorious as their grave was, what better was deserved by men who in life had known nothing of the comradeship of a city, or of liberty from royal diktats, or of the discipline of a phalanx, but had instead milled like the merest herd of beasts, their voices animal screechings, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing: The Ionians had labelled the Persians 'barbarians'; now, in the aftermath of their great victory the Athenians began to do the same. It was a word that perfectly evoked their fear of what they had seen that early morning on the plain of Marathon: an army numberless and alien, jabbering for their destruction, 'gibberish-speakers' indeed. Yet 'barbarian', especially on the tongue of a veteran of the famous battle, could also suggest something more: a sneer, a tone of superiority, or even of contempt — one, certainly, that few Greeks would have dared to adopt prior to that fateful August dawn.

Marathon had taught not only Athens but the whole of Greece a portentous lesson: humiliation at the hands of the superpower was not inevitable. The Athenians, as they would never tire of reminding everyone, had shown that the hordes of the Great King could be defeated. The colossus had feet of clay.

Liberty might be defended, after all.

Marathon, trumpeted by the Athenians as the greatest victory of all time, was regarded by the King of Kings in an understandably different light. True, Persian propagandists were hardly in the habit of drawing attention to their master's setbacks — yet neither was it entirely stretching a point for them to dismiss the battle as a minor border skirmish. While it was certainly to be regretted that the pestilential Athenians had managed to wriggle free of their punishment, the failure to take their city detracted only mildly from an expedition that had otherwise been a great success. Anyone doubting this had only to watch the Eretrians as they were led cringeing through the streets of Susa. Darius, exceedingly gracious, responded to the spectacle of his captives' misery and submission by ordering their chains struck off and settling them just to the north of modern-day Basra. This region was already widely celebrated for the mysterious black liquid that bubbled up from beneath its sands, and the smell of what the Persians called '
rhadinake
^,
hung heavy in the air — a far cry from the salt tang of the Aegean, just as the Judaeans had once wept beside the rivers of Babylon, so now the Eretrians mourned their homeland amid the oil wells of southern Iraq. 'Farewell, famous Eretria, our country no more. Farewell, Athens, once our neighbour across the straits. Farewell, beloved sea.'
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Their exile, as Darius had recognised, was punishment enough.

Such magnanimity, of course, could only ever be the sunshine after the storm of the Great King's righteous anger. On Athens, that obdurate stronghold of
daivas
and the Lie, the death sentence still stood as immutably as before. But not on Athens alone. The sin committed by the Spartans in murdering the Great King's ambassadors had been neither forgotten nor forgiven, and Darius, reformulating his western strategy in the aftermath of Marathon, was now resolved that Sparta as well as Athens should be destroyed. By good fortune, his intelligence chiefs, always at the forefront of the Great King's military planning, had recently pulled off a particularly spectacular coup: the recruitment as an agent of none other than a former king from that closed and mysterious city. Demaratus, publicly insulted by Leotychides in the full view of the Spartan people, had finally snapped: making his way first by stealth and then in open flight to the court at Susa, he had been greeted there with lavish marks of favour — and pumped greedily for information.
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The defector, already homesick for his city, had duly answered his interrogators with an unstinting and embittered relish.

Yet, for all that Demaratus found himself pushing at an open door when encouraging his patrons to consider an invasion of the Peloponnese, Darius' plans for conquest could not easily be hurried. Whereas Datis' expedition had been little more than a glorified razzia, the full-scale pacification of a land as remote and mountainous as Greece was a challenge of a wholly different order of complexity. The wheels of Persian bureaucracy ground both slowly and exceeding small. In June 486
bc
, three years after Darius had first given orders for the mobilisation of his empire, the Egyptians, oppressed by their master's ceaseless demands for grain and levies, rose in sudden revolt. From Athens, the gaze of the Great King swung abruptly southwards. Egypt, so rich, so fertile, so golden, was far too precious a prize :o be risked for the barren wilds of Greece. A task force that had imagined Athens its target was duly ordered to prepare itself instead for an assault on the land of the Nile. As summer shaded into the blessed cool ot autumn, preparations were made for its departure from Persia. The King of Kings readied himself to ride in person at
\ts
head.

At court, everyone could recognise this as a potentially fateful moment. Darius had embarked on many expeditions before, but he was no longer, at the age of sixty-five, a young man, and rumours of his frailty were rife. Courtiers with painful memories of what had happened the previous time that a Persian king had set off for Egypt dared to contemplate the end of an era — and they dreaded it. Cambyses, after all, campaigning beside the Nile, had left behind him in Persia only a single brother; Darius, a serial wife-taker and proudly prolific, had bred any number of ambitious sons. War in the provinces, a looming succession: here, if the past offered any guide, was a recipe for disaster. Fratricide, its malignant effects threatening the foundations of Persian rule, had already brought one line of kings to extinction - who was to say it might not do so again!

The aged Darius himself, however, having laboured all his reign to give to the world the fruits of truth and order, was hardly the man to regard the prospect of their ruin after his death with equanimity. An immense reservoir of able sons, far from threatening his empire, might, he preferred to believe, serve to buttress it. The Persian people could be reassured, rather than alarmed, by his fecundity. Not for nothing had it always been a fundamental principle of theirs that 'the surest gauge of manliness after courage in battle, is to be the father of a great brood of children’ Darius, scrupulous in all things, had certainly not neglected the education of his sons. Molly-coddling was the hardly the Persian way. Even the Greeks, who liked to reassure themselves that a people who wore
trousers as their national dress could only ever be hilariously effeminate, were obliged to acknowledge that. Sheathed in brightly coloured patterns his legs might be, but a Persian prince was still raised to be very tough indeed.

Granted, he might well pass the first years of his life amid the silken comforts of the women's quarters — but only so that the eunuchs there could better mould him, 'forming his infant beauty, shaping his toddler's limbs, straightening out his backbone'.
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From the age of five, he would find himself subject to a curriculum quite as exacting as the Spartan: woken before dawn by the blaring of a brass trumpet, a young prince would start his day with a brisk five-mile run, before embarking on a gruelling round of lessons, voice-training, weapons practice, and immersions in icy rapids. To teach him the arts of leadership, he would be given the command of a company of fifty other boys. To teach him a properly regal facility with the lance and the bow, he would go hunting with his father. To teach him the principles of justice, of the glories of Persian history, and of devotion to Ahura Mazda, he would receive instruction from the Magi. Born into the lap of luxury he might have been — but luxury existed to dazzle the gaze of inferiors, not to soften the steel of the elite. Even a princess, although she might own whole towns with no function save to keep her shod in exquisite slippers, was expected not to loll around in vapid idleness but rather to study hard under her governesses, to practise her riding, and perhaps, like her brothers, to prove herself 'skilled with bow and lance'.
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Much was expected of the children of the King of Kings. Awesome and splendid beyond compare as were the privileges of royalty, so too, and just as terrible, were the responsibilities that it brought. The inheritance of Darius' progeny, after all, was nothing less than the mastery of the world. No children in history had ever been born with quite such golden spoons in their mouths. Empire had become, under the artful and calculating management of Darius, a family concern — and it was in the interests of none of his children to scrap over the dazzling spoils. Prove themselves worthy of their father's favour, and they might all look forward to the rule of ancient kingdoms, of mighty satrapies, of splendid armies. The more deserving they were, of course, the more extravagantly they could hope to profit — with the supreme prize of Darius' own universal monarchy going, as was only fitting, to the most deserving prince of all.