Persian Fire (52 page)

Yet surely now it would not be long before they would have their necks wrung like chickens. The Great King, sifting intelligence reports in the aftermath of Thermopylae, could not help but smile at the desperate attempts of his enemies to rival him in psychological warfare. It was reported, for instance, that a Greek admiral, pausing in his flight down the coast of Euboea, had carved messages along the seashore, appealing to the Ionians to desert — or at least to fight badly. A laughable stratagem! Why, when two great victories had just been won by Persian arms, when the cities of Boeotia were scurrying to open their gates to the conqueror, when the mastery of Europe lay within the Great King's grasp, would any of his subjects contemplate mutiny? His squadrons may have been storm-battered, possibly even disconsolate because the Greeks had slipped from their grasp — but a way to boost their spirits was conveniently close at hand. A formal invitation was issued to the fleet: 'leave to go and see how King Xerxes deals with lunatics who think that they can beat him'.
⁴¹
So many men took up this offer, it is said, that there were not enough boats to ferry them all to the Hot Gates.

More than the corpses of the Greeks, more than the piles of helmets with their horsehair crests, hacked and dented, more even than those badges of the Spartans' pride, their blood-red cloaks and tunics, now nothing but tattered rags, one trophy, shocking and hideous, would certainly have brought home to Ionian sailors the full awful scale of their master's power. Driven into the side of the road was a stake, and driven on to the top of the stake was a human head. Although it was normally the custom of the Persians, 'more than any other people in the world, to honour men who distinguish themselves in war',
⁴²
no honour had been shown Leonidas. King of a city accursed, what better fate had he deserved? So did his conqueror, the King of Kings, deal with all servants of the Lie.

And the sightless eyeballs of the allied commander-in-chief, shrunken already and crawled across by flies, were fixed upon the road that led to Athens — now open and defenceless.

One day every year, just as winter was thawing into spring, the Athenians became strangers in their own city. Their temples were roped off and placed strictly out of bounds. Their doors were smeared with pitch. Their relatives, their children, even their slaves were kept off the streets. In the privacy of their own homes, seated at separate tables, racing to drain separate jugs, forbidden to talk until their draughts had been drunk, the Athenians celebrated the Anthesteria: the festival of new wine. No occasion gave better opportunities for a joyous family riot. Children as young as three, crowned with wreaths of flowers and brandishing their own tiny jugs, would be allowed to join in the drinking contest and then to totter round unsteadily, gawping at the scenes of celebration. 'Couches, tables, pillows, covers, garlands, perfume, whores, appetisers, they're all there, sponges, pancakes, sesame buns, pastries, dancers, good ones too, and all the favourite songs.'
⁴³
Whores aside, perhaps, no other festival in the Athenian calendar came quite as close to the spirit of modern-day Christmas.

Yet as the muffled sounds of merriment drifted out from behind glistening, black-painted doors, the streets were not wholly abandoned. Demons were believed to be abroad: spirits of evil, harbingers of disaster. People called them
'Kens',
spectres from beyond the city walls. Only at sundown did the Athenians feel able to cry out in relief, 'Away with you,
Keres
— for the Anthesteria is over!'
⁴⁴
The pitch-coated doors were flung open, men spilled out onto the streets, and the ropes were taken down from around the temples. The rhythms of daily life returned to Athens.

But what if these rhythms were to vanish and never return? This was the question that had been haunting the city ever since

Themistocles, earlier in the summer, had persuaded the Athenian people to evacuate their homeland. Perhaps there were aliens more menacing even than ghouls. An unsettling ambiguity cast its shadow over the Anthesteria.
'Keres',
thanks to a peculiarity of the Attic accent, might easily be pronounced
'Kares'
— 'Carians', or 'the people of Caria'. These, neighbours of the Ionians in the south-west corner of what is now Turkey, had been among the very first barbarians to intrude upon the consciousness of the Greeks. For centuries they were emblematic of foreignness, and of Asia. They had fought, it was said, in the first great war between East and West, on the side of the Trojans; and unlike their cousins in Ionia, they had never submitted to the rule of Greek settlers. Even though Halicarnassus, the great metropolis of Caria, had owed its original foundation to colonists from the Peloponnese, Greeks were only one ingredient in what had become, over the centuries, a complex melting-pot. The city was, to Athenian eyes, at any rate, disturbingly mestizo. Peculiar customs, florid and exotic, flourished there. Why, it was even ruled by a woman: Queen Artemisia. So 'masculine' was this alarming female's 'spirit of adventure'
⁴⁵
that it had prompted her to sign up with the imperial battle fleet. Decked out in golden jewellery, draped in purple robes and perfumed with expensive scents she may have been, but her proficiency as an admiral could hardly be doubted. So well captained were her triremes, indeed, that they had a reputation second only to the squadrons of Sidon. If the barbarians could not be halted before they reached Attica, then Artemisia and her warships might soon be gliding into Piraeus.
'Keres'
or
'Kares',
it would hardly make much difference which word was used: aliens would be walking the streets of Athens — and they would not be vanishing at sunset.

Perhaps it was only to be expected, then, that many Athenians, even as their countrymen fought and died at Artemisium to win time for the evacuation of Attica, dragged their feet. This was certainly no reflection on the quality of provision that had been made for them in exile. The gates of Troezen, a city safely in the Peloponnese, some thirty miles across the Saronic Gulf from Piraeus, had been open to refugees from Athens since the onset of the crisis. Miserable though it was to be homeless — and perhaps peculiarly so for an earth-born Athenian — the Troezenians had already proved to be remarkably generous hosts: every nervous mother arriving in their city was given public welfare, every child free education, and even carte blanche to pick fresh fruit from groves and orchards. Nevertheless, back in Athens, the very success of the evacuation provoked a renewed bout of anguish. The more that families could be seen boarding up their homes, trudging through the streets with their luggage, pushing overloaded hand-carts down to the beaches and the docks, the more it struck those too upset or angry to join them that the world had been turned upside down.

And how ominous a sign of the times it was that wives and mothers — respectable Athenian matrons! — were on the streets at all. The opportunities for misbehaviour that an international crisis might offer women had been preying on the minds of Greek husbands since at least the days of the Trojan War. In Athens, however, such anxieties had a particular resonance. 'Brought up under the most cramping restrictions, raised from childhood to see and hear as little as possible, and to ask only a minimum of questions,
^H6
Athenian women lived a life of seclusion without parallel elsewhere in Greece. The peculiar character of the democracy demanded nothing less. The capacity of women to stir up mischief in public life had been a cause of alarm to thoughtful reformers well before the revolution of 507
bc
. Concerned to instruct the elite in the virtues of self-restraint, Solon had found any hint of female showiness particularly insufferable, and had made stringent efforts to rein it in. Rather than permit daughters of the aristocracy to flaunt their wealth and taste in public, he had taken the simple, if drastic, step of decreeing that any woman seen 'walking the streets, out and about','
¹⁷
should be regarded as a prostitute. Athenian husbands — or at least those with sufficient floor space to immure their wives in separate quarters — had seized the opportunities presented by this legislation with relish. Increasingly, over the decades, the law had ensured that only women whom no one ever saw could be regarded as respectable. Simultaneously, of course, it did wonders for the sex trade.

So much so that Solon, a century after his death, would be remembered gratefully by the Athenian citizenry as a man who had used state funding to subsidise brothels, on the impeccably egalitarian principle that whores should be available to all. This tradition - since the great reformer's attitude towards women was almost certainly one of stern indifference — was probably a distortion; but it does suggest how the right to cruise for prostitutes had come to be seen by many citizens as a foundation-stone of democracy. Like the statue of the tyrannicides in the Agora, or the rows of seats carved out of the Pnyx, the Athenian red-light district, vibrant with riot, suffering and pleasure, served as one of the supreme monuments to the new order. Whores were to be seen everywhere in the Ceramicus, whether sunning themselves topless outside brothels, brawling in squalid back-alleys or haunting tombs beyond the city limits. Menaced by this flamboyant visibility, their respectable sisters shrank and grew ever less visible before it, so that it had soon become the convention, under the democracy, not even to mention the name of a married woman in public. Indeed, the carnivorous nature of Athenian politics being what it was, the only real impact that even the most virtuous of wives could have upon the career of her husband was as a liability. For a politician, there was only one thing worse than not being talked about, and that was having his family talked about. Many citizens, watching matrons and whores jostling each other on their way down to the beaches, were so appalled that they flatly forbade their own wives to join the exodus.

As a result, when Themistocles, having led his battered fleet safely back from Artemisium, finally limped into Piraeus, he found to his horror that Athens was very far from evacuated. It was he, of course — ever 'the man of twists and turns' — who had posted the appeals to the Ionian squadrons to mutiny; but he knew better than to bank on any implosion of the imperial battle fleet. Or on the Peloponnesians, for that matter. There were many in the upper reaches of Athenian society, trusting in private assurances from the Spartans, who clung to the desperate hope that an allied army might soon be marching to their rescue. Not Themistocles. In a pass far distant from the Peloponnese, a king of Sparta and all his bodyguard lay dead, and there was nothing the Athenians could say or do now that would persuade the Spartans to commit more of their troops to a foreign field. The response of the allied delegates at Corinth to the news from Thermopylae could hardly have made that clearer. Unanimously, the Peloponnesians had voted to look to their own backyard. Even as the Great King's outriders were closing in on Attica, an army of workmen, under the direction of Leonidas' younger brother Cleombrotus, was busy at work erecting a wall along the five-mile width of the Isthmus, 'hauling blocks of stone, and bricks, and wood, and sandbags, not resting a minute, labouring night and day'.'
¹⁸
Others had already set to demolishing the road to Megara, a narrow and precipitous corniche hacked out of the flanks of coastal cliffs, and effectively the only land route that an army could follow to — or from — the Isthmus. With each landslide that crashed from the road into the shallow coves below, the Peloponnesians were abandoning Attica ever more surely to its fate.

Even the gods, it appeared, were despairing of Athens now. No sooner had Themistocles returned to the Assembly and frantically renewed the evacuation order than there came eerie news from the Acropolis. The sacred serpent, whose presence beside the tomb of Erechtheus had served generations of Athenians as an assurance that their city would never fall, was reported by its attendants to have left its honey cake uneaten, and disappeared. Word swept across the panicking crowds 'that Athena herself had abandoned the city, and was pointing them the way to the sea'.
⁴⁹
All highly opportune for Themistocles, of course; as was, just as suspiciously, a second discovery, made even as refugees were surging to the coast with their luggage. The sacred serpent, it seemed, was not alone in having vanished from the Acropolis; so too, filched from around the neck of that holiest of statues, the self-portrait of Athena Polias, had a golden gorgon's head. Themistocles, loudly protesting his outrage at this sacrilege, immediately set to ransacking the bags of particularly wealthy citizens. When, as invariably he did, he found sacks of gold squirrelled away among the luggage, he would impound them on the spot. These confiscations, combined with a whip-round among former archons, served to raise a substantial sum of money: a financial reserve that the Athenian people, now that they were passing into exile, might soon have little choice but to depend upon for their welfare.