Persian Fire (63 page)

The Peloponnesians, led by Sparta, responded with scorn. Who exactly, they sneered, was to lead the cities of Greece into this promised golden age? The answer envisaged by the Athenians had been implicit in their invitation: cities that sent delegates to the Acropolis would effectively be ceding the primacy to Athens. Sparta, inevitably, refused point-blank to do so. Her allies in the Peloponnese dutifully did the same. The conference was aborted. Shrugging off this setback, Athens responded by tightening the screws on those that she could force to do her will. The war with Persia might have been brought to a close, but the Athenians were in no mood to see the league dissolved just because peace had come to the Aegean. Any hint of recalcitrance from a member-state, still more open rebellion, and their crack-down would be merciless. The subscriptions sent to the Acropolis, now nakedly revealed as tribute, continued to be extorted every year. The very word 'allies', having become hopelessly outdated, was replaced by the phrase 'cities subject to the Athenian people' — a description that at least had the merit of accuracy. Far from being united, the Greek world found itself divided instead into rival power blocs, each one led by a city that put her dependants humiliatingly in the shade, and justified her hegemony by boasting loudly of her record in the defence of liberty.

For Athens was not the only city which laid claim to the title of saviour of Greece. In the balance, Sparta, her former ally, and now increasingly bitter rival, could set Plataea and — above all — Thermopylae. To the rest of Greece, the Spartans remained peerless as models of heroism and virtue; and nothing, not even their most splendid victories, had done more to cement this reputation than the memory of the three hundred and their exemplary defeat.

'Go tell them in Sparta, O passer-by,

That here, in obedience to their orders, we lie.'
⁸⁰

These lines, carved on a simple stone memorial, could be read on the site of the famous last stand; an epitaph as laconic and stern as Leonidas himself. As immortal as well — for Thermopylae, of all the battles fought against the armies of the Great King, was the one most gloriously transfigured into legend. Yet the Athenians — as brilliant, as eloquent, as quick-witted as their Spartan opposites were sober — would nevertheless trump its memory. Late in 449
bc
, a portentous motion was brought before the Assembly. Only a few months previously Sparta had refused to send her delegates to Athens and agree that the burned temples could be reconstructed; now the Athenians voted on the issue without reference to the opinion of the rest of Greece. The proposal to rebuild the monuments on the Acropolis was thunderously passed. Plans for a spectacular makeover of the sacred rock were put into immediate effect.

Such a scheme had been long in the preparation. The mover behind it was a Eupatrid grandee by the name of Pericles, a seasoned political-operator who had first demonstrated his passion for eye-catching cultural projects by sponsoring, back in 472
bc,
Aeschylus' celebrated tragedy on the Persians. Pericles certainly brought an unrivalled pedigree to his taste for
grands projets:
the son of Xanthippus, he was also, on his mother's side, an Alcmaeonid. This meant, of course, that he was the heir to a long family tradition of sponsoring monuments on the Acropolis; but no Alcmaeonid had ever been presented with an opportunity such as Pericles was grasping now. The barbarian holocaust had ravaged the entire summit of the rock, so that it was not a single temple but the whole Acropolis that Pericles was planning to rebuild. By employing the cream of Athenian talent, including the great sculptor Phidias, he aimed to raise, as he put it, 'marks and monuments of our city's empire' so perfect that 'future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now'.
⁸¹
In 447
bc
, work began on a temple designed to be the most sumptuous and beautiful ever built. Subsequent generations would know it as the Parthenon.

However, bold and original though all the new monuments on the Acropolis were destined to be, they still had their foundations deep in the bedrock of what had gone before. The Parthenon, for instance, that daring monument to the new age of Athenian greatness, was being raised on the scorched base of an older, unfinished building: the great temple that had been begun in the 480s
bc
as a celebration of the victory at Marathon. Now, with his plans for the Acropolis, Pericles was looking to enshrine the memory of Marathon for all eternity. Remembrances of the battle were to be everywhere on the sacred rock. Whether in the ground-plan of the Parthenon itself, or in trophies raised to the victory, or in friezes illustrating the fighting, the greatest moment in Athenian history was to be celebrated with a brilliance that would proclaim Athens not merely the saviour of Greece, but her school and mistress, too.

For those who had fallen at Marathon were not altogether dead. Leave behind the dust and din of the building-site on the Acropolis in the morning, and an Athenian might reach the battlefield by nightfall. There, silhouetted against the stars, he would see the great tumulus which had been raised over the honoured ashes of the slain, and beside it a more recent monument, lovingly crafted out of white marble, barely a decade old. The most potent, and the eeriest, memorial, however, could not be seen — only heard. Every night, it was said, ghostly across the plain, strange sounds of fighting would disturb the midnight calm: the ringing of metal, the hiss of arrows, war-cries, trampling, screams. No other field of battle that had been contested with the barbarians could boast of such a visitation; and an Athenian, although he would have dreaded to approach the phantoms, would perhaps have found in their presence a certain source of civic pride. They had been actors, after all, in the greatest drama in history — when Athens had stood alone and preserved the liberty of all Greece. 'For they were the fathers not merely of children, of mortal flesh and blood, but of their children's freedom, and of the freedom of every person who dwells in the continent of the West.'
⁸²
Everything stemmed from Marathon; everything was justified by it, too.

Beyond the plain, with its monuments, tumuli and ghosts, the road wound on northwards, leading over empty hills to a single temple on a slope above the sea. This was Rhamnus, where it was said that Zeus, having pursued Nemesis across the whole world, had finally brought her to earth. From that one rape had been hatched Helen, the Trojan War and all the long, violent story of hatred between East and West. It had brought Datis the Mede and his great armada to Marathon, barely five miles to the south; 'and so sure was he that nothing could stop him from taking Athens that he had brought with him a block of marble, from which he intended to carve a trophy in celebration of his victory'.
⁸³
After the defeat of his expedition, the block of marble had been found abandoned on the battlefield; and so the locals had hauled it off to Rhamnus. No better place for it could have been imagined — for the temple that stood there above the slope that led down to the sea was sacred to Nemesis herself. It was clearly her anger that had doomed the barbarians' expedition; and so plans had been made to build a second temple to her, and as a memorial to Marathon. It was intended to fashion the marble into a likeness of the goddess. The great Phidias had been asked to carve it. As on the Acropolis, so at Rhamnus, an Athenian might aim to glimpse the future. If he arrived where the marble block stood, waiting to be carved, he might easily imagine that he could see within the spectral purity of its whiteness a foreshadowing of the sculpture that was to be; that he was catching a glimpse of the face of Nemesis herself.

In 431
bc
, the growing tensions between Athens and Sparta finally erupted into open hostilities. The ensuing struggle, which the Athenians called 'the Peloponnesian War', lasted on and off for twenty-seven years. It ended in 404
bc
with the total defeat of Athens. Her empire was dismantled, her fleet destroyed and her democracy suspended. Although in the following century she would stage a spectacular recovery, Athens would never again be the predominant power in Greece.

Nor, after 371
bc
, would Sparta. One hundred and eight years after Pausanias had won his great victory over Mardonius, the Spartan army was brought to sensational defeat by the Thebans at the village of Leuctra, barely five miles from Plataea. The Thebans, pressing home their advantage, then invaded Lacedaemon. The Peloponnesian League was abolished. Messenia was freed. Sparta, deprived of her helots, was reduced overnight from being the hegemon of Greece to a middle-ranking power.

Over the following decades, the Greek cities would continue to tear themselves apart. Meanwhile, to the north, a new predator was readying itself for the murderous struggle to be the greatest power in Greece. In 338
bc
, King Philip II of Macedon, following in the footsteps of Xerxes, swept southwards into Boeotia. An army of Athenians and Thebans, attempting to bar his way, was cut to pieces. 'We lie here because we strove to give freedom to Greece.' So it was written on the tomb of the fallen. 'The glory we enjoy will never age.'
¹
Proud words — but not even the most stirring epitaph could obscure the grim reality that Greek independence had effectively been brought to an end. Four years later, and Philip's son, Alexander, crossed the Hellespont to assault the Persian Empire. Now it was the turn of the Great King to have his power humbled into the dust. Three great battles in succession were lost to the invader. Babylon fell. Persepolis was burned. The last King of Kings suffered a squalid and thirst-racked death. Alexander laid claim to the
Kidaris
of Cyrus, and to an empire that stretched from the Adriatic to the Indus.

For the first time, Greece and Persia acknowledged the rule of a single master.

Even Nemesis, perhaps, might have permitted herself a smile.

All dates are
bc.

c.
1250: The Trojan War.

c. 1200: The destruction of the royal palaces at Mycenae and Sparta.

c. 1200—1000: The migration of the Dorians into the Peloponnese.

c. 1000—800: The migration of the Medes and Persians into western Iran.

814: The foundation of Carthage.

750—700: The Assyrian kings establish their control over the Medes of the Zagros.

c. 750—650: Sparta invades and conquers Messenia.

c. 670: The loss of Assyrian control over Media.