Persian Fire (40 page)

Both Demaratus and his controllers in Persian intelligence would certainly have been well aware that the latter group was no small minority in Sparta. The ghosts of Darius' heralds, murdered a decade previously by Cleomenes, were widely feared to be haunting Lacedaemon, calling to the heavens for vengeance — as, of course, was their right. So conscience-racked were some Spartans, indeed, that two prominent Heraclids, frantic to expiate their city's sacrilege, had adopted the desperate expedient of travelling to Susa and offering themselves up to the King of Kings as a sacrifice. Xerxes, far too shrewd to take up this startling offer, had graciously spared them — for why should he deign to relieve the Spartans from the debilitating burden of their guilt? Demaratus' news, as it was designed to do, served only to compound their dread. Most cursed the traitor: dredging up old scandal, they smeared him as the bastard of a helot, the fruit of his mother's rolling with a stinking stable-hand, fit to be an Asiatic's slave. Others, however, realising that Demaratus might be the only man who stood between them and total ruin, and acknowledging that he had opposed Cleomenes and his impious excesses at every turn, began whispering differently. They too repeated rumours of Demaratus' paternity; but they called him the son, not of a slave, but of the phantom of a legendary hero, halfway to a god.
⁴²

Naturally, it still went without saying that the Spartans, if the Great King did invade the Peloponnese, would stand and block his way. But if even they, the bravest warriors in the world, were racked by self-doubt, how were the men of lesser states supposed to steel their nerves? As spring turned to summer the choice for every city in Greece became unavoidable: resistance or appeasement. No longer could the prospect of a Persian invasion be dismissed as an alarmist fantasy of ambitious politicians such as Themistocles. It was now evident even to the most obdurate sceptic that all the rumours of Xerxes' departure from Susa had been true: he was indeed heading west. By early autumn, so it was reported from Ionia, he had arrived at Sardis — and still, flocking to his banner, his vast dominions continued to empty themselves upon his command. The Great King and all his hordes were coming. By the spring of the following year, it would have begun: the advance of the largest army ever assembled, over the Hellespont, into Europe, and then down, like a wolf upon the fold, on to Greece. Those who lived there, in what might easily prove to be their last winter of freedom, could now shudder with a dreadful certitude as to whom the Great King's target was going to be.

And the Persian high command, as adept as ever at pyschological warfare, neglected no opportunity to turn the screws. Envoys, just as they had done a decade previously, before the Marathon campaign, began criss-crossing Greece, demanding earth and water. Every city was visited, with two exceptions: Athens and Sparta. The message of intimidation to the rest of Greece could hardly have been clearer. Frantic not to be earmarked in a similar manner for destruction, many cities scurried to oblige the imperial emissaries. Even those who openlv refused the demand for earth and water had their pro-Persian factions, or were patently equivocating. It did not seem beyond the bounds of possibility, during that bleak and dread-shadowed autumn, that the whole of Greece might simply drop like overripe fruit into Xerxes' lap.

Which was, of course, for the Spartans and the Athenians, who had no choice but to fight, the ultimate nightmare. Hoping to stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood, they too hurriedly sent out ambassadors, calling their fellow Greeks to arms and to a conference of war to be held at Sparta. This was a logical location, perhaps, since it was the Peloponnesian League that would provide any allied army with its muscle; and yet the Spartans, nervous of alienating cities that did not belong to the League, and displaying an unwonted care for their sensitivities, were careful to title the conference centre the 'Hellenion' — 'the united nations building of Greece'.''
³
Nor was this merely an empty flourish. Many of the cities who had chosen to send delegates to Sparta were still at war with one another; yet, startlingly, when it was proposed that all such feuding should be resolved, everyone agreed then and there. Aegina, for instance, having decided this time round to throw in her lot against the invaders from the very start, found herself burying the hatchet with Athens; and with the very real prospect, furthermore, of her ships being combined in a single fleet with those of her erstwhile bitter foe.

Not that this new spirit of harmony was entirely without limits. When Themistocles, pointing to the disproportionate contribution that his city would be making to any allied navy, laid claim to its command, the Aeginetans joined delegates of other cities with ancient maritime traditions, such as Corinth and those of Euboea, in howling down the upstart. Heroically, and ever the pragmatist, the Athenian admiral managed to swallow his pride. His vanity may have been immense, but his determination to be the saviour of Athens was even greater. Themistocles was never the man to let his ego cloud either his intelligence or his uncanny ability to enter other people's minds. He could see, with the penetration that came naturally to a born in-fighter, that the Greeks had only one hope of survival: 'to put an end to their feuding, to reconcile the various cities with one another, and to persuade them to join together in the cause of defeating Persia'.
⁴⁴
Recognising the danger that no city's fleet would ever tolerate accepting orders from the admiral of another, he made the masterly suggestion that leadership of the allied fleet be given to a people without a drop of sea-blood in their veins. So it was that the Spartans, who had already laid claim to the land command by right, won command of the sea as well. A bitter expedient for Athens — but, as Themistocles well knew, there were far worse blows that could befall a city than a bruising of her
amour propre.

With a command structure, however vague, now successfully established, the allies could start to lay their plans. Two major challenges faced them. One, self-evident to all the delegates at the Hellenion, was the need to boost their numbers. Of the seven-hundred-odd cities in mainland Greece, barely thirty had sent delegates to Sparta. Notable absentees, such as the Argives, would somehow have to be persuaded to join the common cause; pro-allied factions in fence-sitting cities, such as Thebes, would have to be bolstered. The solution finally adopted was a carrot and stick approach. On the one hand, it was settled, ambassadors should be sent to Argos, and to all the other cities that had so far remained aloof from the alliance; on the other, a proclamation warned any would-be medisers that they could look forward to having a tenth of their income tithed as punishment for their treachery. Furthermore, since the allies would undoubtedly require divine as well as merely mortal assistance in order to achieve this, all the proceeds of the tithing, it was piously agreed, would be given 'to the god at Delphi'.

In this desperate hope that Apollo might be bribed, and his oracle with him, there was nothing remotely naive. Rather, it betrayed one of the allies' best-founded fears. They were all hard-nosed men. They knew that Persian spies were everywhere, secreting gifts of gold here, whispering promises of the Great King's favour there, working stealthily to rot the Greeks' resolve from within. Somehow, in the face of this espionage campaign, the allies had to find away to strike back. Here, then, was the second challenge facing the allies: to infiltrate the camp of the King of Kings.

For the Greeks, as yet, despite all the wild talk, had little idea as to the true scale of what they were facing. Only with hard intelligence could they start to formulate their strategy - and for that, undercover agents would be needed. Three spies were duly chosen and given their mission: to travel to Sardis and make notes on all they saw. Do this without being captured, and they would enable the allies to have an infinitely better sense of the odds facing them, and to plan accordingly come the spring, when they had agreed to meet once more.

Their conference now concluded, the delegates began exchanging their farewells and leaving for home. The three agents were meanwhile heading for the nearest port, and a ship to Ionia. Spring, and the campaigning season it would herald, was still months away; but at least the Greek allies could now feel that the first blow against the King of Kings and his invasion was being struck.

Once, before the coming of the Persians, the Aegean had been a Greek lake. That winter of 481
bc
, however, with a crippled Ionia still counting the ruinous cost of rebellion, with Miletus a blackened shell of her former greatness, and Naxos and the other islands having submitted a decade previously to Datis' armada, the journey of the three Greek spies from the Peloponnese was very much a voyage into enemy waters. The nearer they drew to Asia, the more unsettling it became. Evidence of the terrifying scale of Xerxes' preparations was everywhere. Winter was drawing in, but the Aegean sea-lanes were still unseasonably busy. Along the Ionian coast, vessels that had swarmed there from every corner of the eastern Mediterranean crowded the harbours. The Greeks, even in their own backyard, were being swamped. Thirteen years previously, at Lade, the last fleet of a free Ionia had been swept off the sea. Now, with the invasion of Greece itself only months away, the contingents that had contributed most notably to that crushing victory for the King of Kings were back in

Ionian waters. Any Greek would have recognised them with a sinking heart. Slim, shield-hung and sublimely manoeuvrable, the triremes that would constitute the shock force of Xerxes' fleet had a deadly reputation. The sailors who manned them were universally acknowledged as the most proficient in the world. 'Your borders', as the Judaean prophet Ezekiel put it, 'are in the heart of the sea.'
⁴⁶
He was addressing the city of Tyre, but he might just as well have been speaking to her even wealthier neighbour Sidon, or to Byblos, or to any of the great merchant strongholds that stood on islands or abreast of double harbours along the seaboard of what is now Lebanon. Proudly independent of one another each city may have been, but this, to many outsiders, was a wasted subtlety. The Greeks, certainly, lumped all their citizens together as one single, perfidious crew:
Phoinikes
— Phoenicians.

This name, deriving as it almost certainly did from
'phoinix',
the Greek word for 'purple', reflected that same blend of admiration and contempt with which they tended to regard any people whom they found threatening. Admiration — because the violet dye which the Phoenicians manufactured from shellfish was definitively the colour of refinement and privilege, an internationally desired luxury product that had helped to fill the coffers of Tyre and Sidon to overflowing. Contempt — because how vulgar it was, after all, how crashingly and irredeemably vulgar, to be defined by an item of merchandise! 'The love of lucre, one might say, is a peculiarly Phoenician characteristic.'
⁴⁷
So Athenian aristocrats liked to sniff. Yet this characterisation of Phoenicians as oily money-grubbers, universal Greek prejudice though it was, might just as easily inspire resentment as disdain. The merchants of Tyre and Sidon were not the only people who had a taste for turning a profit. There were many Greeks who shared it, and who profoundly resented the competition that the Phoenicians gave them. No matter how far they travelled, no matter where they sought new markets, or raw materials, or land for a trading post, 'those celebrated sea-rovers, those sharp dealers, the holds of their black ship filled up with a hoard of flashy trinkets',
⁴⁸
seemed always to have got there first.

This rivalry, stretching back centuries, extended to the outer limits of the known world. The Phoenicians, their cities quite as hemmed in by mountains as were those of the Greeks, had always set their sights upon the open horizons of the sea. As far back as 814
bc
, it was said, the Tyrian princess Elissa, leaving her homeland, had led a great party of colonists along the coast of North Africa until, arriving opposite Sicily, she had founded there a 'new city' —
'qart hadasht',
or Carthage — destined to become the greatest metropolis of the West. By the time that Euboean colonists, a few decades later, began nosing their own way westwards, the tentacles of Phoenician trade had already reached to Spain. Soon they were extending even further, into the Atlantic and towards the Equator, to beaches fringed by jungle, where the Carthaginians would trade with impassive natives: gewgaws and baubles for gold.