Persian Fire (39 page)

For to this seeming paragon of virtue belonged a potent and momentous discovery: that image, in a democracy, might take a statesman just as far as substance. Irrespective of his nickname, Aristeides was, in truth, no less proficient at political machination than Themistocles. Far from 'avoiding the entanglements of faction, and cleaving to his own path','
⁰
as he pretended, he was in truth a net-worker of consummate ability. While Themistocles had been obliged to rely on obscure parvenus for his political education, for instance, Aristeides had aimed right for the very top, and made himself an intimate of Cleisthenes. Nor was his pose of rugged poverty any less a work of spin: he may not have been as keen on having his palm greased as Themistocles was, but then again, as the owner of a large estate at Phalerum and a close relation of some of the richest men in Athens, he hardly needed to be.

How, then, to explain Aristeides' peculiar hold on the electorate? His opponents, pointing out that he was a demesman of Alopeke, a village just to the south of Athens, made much play of how it echoed
'alopex'
- the Greek word for a fox. But this was, perhaps, to push the charge of deceit against Aristeides too far. Hypocrisy, it might even be argued, was the very lifeblood of the democracy. To be sure, the city's increasingly radical egalitarianism had done little to dim its traditions of snobbery. Aristeides, who mixed wealth with thrift, ambition with public service, the privileges of breeding with a resolve to trust the will of the people, offered to the Athenians a supremely comforting reassurance: that the ideals of their past might be squared with their new regime. Old certainties, he appeared to promise, sprung from the soil of Attica, as deeply rooted as the sacred olive tree that rose from the Acropolis, might still serve to guide the Athenian people through all the perils and insecurities that lay ahead. Set against the Just One's reassuring hoplite virtues, it was hardly surprising that the flash and dazzle of Themistocles' call to build a navy should have seemed to many as un-Athenian as the surge of the sea itself.

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.