Persian Fire (50 page)

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 capital 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'.
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*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.

The Greeks, clutching at straws, presumed to attribute the extravagances of such a campaigning style to effeminacy: a woeful betrayal of their own lack of sophistication. Having given ample demonstrations of his courage while still a young man, Xerxes had no intention of risking his life in battle now, not with a great army and fleet both looking to him for leadership, and a campaign of unprecedented complexity to direct. The royal tent may have been monumental, but it had to be if it were to provide an adequate nerve-centre for a global superpower. As at Persepolis, so on the wayside of the road to Thermopylae, the Great King did not disdain advice but rather demanded it, having recognised that the wisest master is the one who makes best use of his slaves. Xerxes, whose subordinates were rarely short of obedience and courage, evidently had a talent for inspiring devotion in them: not for nothing did his name mean 'He Who Rules Over Heroes'.

No less than the Spartans, then, the Great King's followers were steeled by a rigorous discipline. Protocol, even on campaign, even for heroes, was rigid and sacrosanct. No matter how violently the gales outside the tent might rage, or how alarming the news from the front might prove to be, the Great King, seated in due magnificence upon a throne of solid gold, conducted his councils of war precisely as though presiding at Persepolis. Only in the degree to which the royal ear might bend itself to foreigners did the very different circumstances of Thermopylae intrude upon proceedings. Filled by the Great King's relatives and intimates though the top ranks in the military were, not everyone honoured with a summons to the royal presence was necessarily a Persian. There were two sons of Datis, for instance, in command of the cavalry; and then, of course, the key adviser on everything Greek, there was Demaratus. Even as Xerxes, periodically dispatching his troops into the Hot Gates, continued to probe the defenders of the pass for any suggestion of weakening, he pumped the exiled king for insights into Spartan psychology. Overwhelming force and a mastery of data: the twin characteristics, as they had ever been, of the Persian way of making war. To synthesise these adequately, in order to neutralise a problem such as the one presented by defenders of Thermopylae, was a challenge that could only really be met in the tent of the King of Kings, where princes of the royal blood, and intelligence agents, and logistics chiefs, and Greek renegades, all might equally be summoned and have their reports and judgements pooled:

And Xerxes, though enraged by the defence of the Hot Gates, did not surrender to his frustration, but rather consulted his briefings, made calculations, gave orders and kept his patience. The king of a mountain people, it hardly came as any great revelation to him that a narrow pass might be rendered impregnable to a frontal attack. The Syrian Gates, for instance, through which Datis and his army had snaked on their way to Marathon, bristled with fortifications far more imposing than those of Thermopylae: a tourniquet ever ready to be applied, in case of emergency, to the flow of the Royal Road. Yet even when 'a natural gateway exactly imitates the defences raised by human ingenuity',
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it will invariably, as the Persian military well knew, betray a fatal weakness — for there are few gorges that cannot somehow be bypassed by a path across their heights. The Syrian Gates, and the Cilician Gates, and the Persian Gates: all were vulnerable to being outflanked by mountain roads. Why not the Hot Gates, too?

With the Greeks holding out against all that could be thrown directly at them, this became, hour by hour, an ever more pressing question. There can be little doubt that Persian agents, even before the arrival of the Great King, would have been fanning out over the foothills of Oeta and Callidromus, scanning the lie of the land, waving gold before peasants, appealing for native guides. None had been forthcoming: Trachis, perched above the fissure of the nearby, boulder-strewn Asopus gorge, was openly hostile to the Great King, and most of the locals had fled either into the mountains or to Leonidas. Some were left, however, and all it would take was for one Greek, just one, intimidated by the spectacle of the Great King's magnificence, to crack; and magnificence, of course, was something that the Great King did surpassingly, superlatively well.

In particular, colossal in the middle of the sprawling camp, the imperial war banners decorated with eagles flapping imperiously above it, there was Xerxes' own tent. This was not merely a campaign headquarters, but, thanks to its careful reproduction of the layout of Persepolis, right down to the very last detail, a mobile master-class in the dynamics of royal power. Oblivious to these as only savages on the outer rim of the world could be, the Greeks were to be dazzled, overawed and terrified out of their lamentable ignorance. Attempting to explain to Xerxes the significance of the Lycurgan code, Demaratus had boldly asserted that the Spartans feared it 'more than your subjects fear you —at which the King of Kings, 'showing no anger', had merely laughed, 'and then with great gentleness dismissed him'.
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Perhaps the bristling provincialism of a homesick exile was altogether too pathetic a joke to anger the master of a superpower. And perhaps — for the Spartans were a people who had dared to kill his father's ambassadors, and had sent their king with only three hundred men to oppose the whole might of his army — their arrogance was something that Xerxes could hardly doubt. 'The typical Greek: a man who envies the good fortune of others, and resents the power of those stronger than himself.'
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This, delivered with crushing but not inaccurate condescension, was the considered judgement of the Persian high command on the psychology of their enemy. Precisely the same profile, however, could once have been applied to the Medes, the Babylonians, or the Egyptians — and all those ancient peoples had been sternly shown the error of their ways.

That the Great King felt a solemn obligation to open the eyes of Europe to its future in the new world order could be gauged from the leisurely pace of his advance from the Hellespont. This had left him arriving at Thermopylae perilously late in the campaigning season; but it had been important to Xerxes to instruct his new subjects very precisely in the character of the submission that they owed to him. While a succession of parades, regattas and horse-races had continued to flaunt the global scale of the Great King's resources, so the contribution that the natives themselves were to make to this magnificence, and the abasement that they would graciously be permitted to display to their master, had been similarly driven home. Over the winter, every city on the expedition's path had been instructed to prepare a feast fit for a king. For months, the natives had done little except panic over menus. To be charged with preparing a dinner-party to the opulent standards of Persepolis would have been headache enough for any hosts, but that was almost the least of their obligations. There were also the Great King's soldiers to be fed, and his horses, mules and camels. Wood had to be provided for the fires of the royal cooks. The cups on the Great King's table had to be fashioned of silver and gold, the fittings of finest linen, the rugs and carpets of the softest and most luxurious materials that the wretched citizenry could afford. Nor, once these had been used, was there any prospect of then selling them off to help recoup expenses, since the Persians, like the worst kind of house-guest, were in the habit of crating up all the furnishings 'and marching off, leaving not a single thing behind'.
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No wonder that one wag, bled white by the 'honour' of hosting the imperial army, had called on his fellow citizens to offer up thanks to the gods 'that King Xerxes was not in the habit of demanding breakfast as well'.
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No wonder either that Alexander of Macedon, back in May, when confronted by the prospect of a Greek holding force bedding down at Tempe on the southern borders of his kingdom, had sent it a frantic message, warning its commanders that their position was untenable. Perfectly true, of course — and a conclusion that the Greeks had already begun drawing for themselves — but the security of the task force had been, from Alexander's point of view, merely incidental. Rather, his principal concern had been to ensure as short a stay for the Persian army in Macedonia as possible. Vassal of the King of Kings that he was, Alexander had been painfully aware that his master regarded the whole empire as his larder — that 'the various delicacies of the countries over which he ruled, the choicest first-fruits of each',
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were all his due, a tribute to be skimmed for the exclusive benefit of the royal table. The feasts scraped together with such expense and agony by those on Xerxes' path had been portrayed as the gifts, not of those who had provided them, but of the Great King himself, magnanimously bestowed upon his followers: the 'King's Dinner'. It was also said, conversely, that Xerxes had refused any Greek specialities, and ordered them taken away if they were ever served — for only the fat of his own subjects' lands could be permitted to pass the Great King's lips. Time enough for Attic figs once Xerxes sat in conquered Athens.

The prospect, then, that his army might starve, or even — perish the thought - that the royal table itself might stand empty, was a crisis of far more than mere logistics: for at risk were the very foundations of imperial prestige. Deprive the Great King of his pudding, and morale might start to plummet. Not that it was an easy matter to catch out a bureaucracy so attentive to detail that it was in the habit of issuing travel chits to ducks. Extensive preparations had been made for just such a moment of crisis as was brewing at Thermopylae. Waterfowl would certainly have been brought in the imperial baggage train, but so also would any number of the other delicacies to which the royal palate had grown accustomed: acanthus oil from Carmania, dates from Babylon, cumin from Ethiopia. Even the Great King's drinking water had been transported in great jars from a river near Susa.

All the same, the supply of ingredients — and particularly fresh ingredients — had its limits, even for the peerless logistics chiefs of Persia. By the sixth day of the enforced halt at Thermopylae, the situation beyond the gilded confines of the royal tent, out among the teeming multitudes of the rank and file, was turning serious. The appetites of Iranians, in particular, did not readily lend themselves to belt-tightening. The Greeks, who tended to eat only the meat of animals that had first been sacrificed to the gods, told wide-eyed stories of their enemy's carnivorous tastes. A Persian, it was said, would think nothing of baking a whole donkey by way of a birthday celebration; or even, if he were particularly well off, a camel. Soldiers on campaign took a regular supply of 'oxen, asses, deer, smaller animals, ostriches, geese and cocks'
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as their daily right. The approaches to Thermopylae, never abundant in ostriches at the best of times, were proving an alarming culinary let-down to the men of the Great King's army. Persian cooks, celebrated though they were for the inventiveness of their recipes, could hardly magic meals out of fields stripped wholly bare.