Thermopylae (18 page)

‘It’s an ill wind… .’ The southerly that had wreaked havoc on their enemies boosted the Athenians up the Euripus Channel to give Themistocles fifty-three new vessels at the very moment that the most needed them. Emboldened by this great good news the reinforced Athenian fleet (and this time, one imagines, there were no protests from Eurybiades) proceeded to adopt the same hit-and-run tactics they had found fruitful before. Once again in the late afternoon or early evening they swept up from Artemisium. They found an enemy almost totally demoralised by this second gale.

They had huddled in Aphetae, thinking they were doomed, as the wind and the rain had swept up from the south. Themistocles and his commanders fell upon them like a lightning bolt that evening, attacked and destroyed the Cilician squadron, and moved back to Artemisium before a major action could possibly take place. Once more their withdrawal was covered by the swift fall of darkness. It was another brilliant small victory, boosting the pride of the Greeks at the same time as their confidence was reassured by the news of the destruction of the Persians off Euboea.

On the morning of this day, 19 August, Xerxes threw in fresh crack troops, encouraging them with lavish promises of the rewards that would be theirs if they succeeded, but dire warnings of what would happen to them if they failed. He had calculated also that since the Greeks ‘were so few in number, they would be too exhausted and too worn down by wounds to put up much of a resistance’. The Great King was to be bitterly disappointed. The Greeks, as we have seen - with the exception of the Phocians guarding the pass - were organised in divisions according to their states and, in the intervals between the attacks, were able to replace the narrow front line with men who had come up fresh (or as much so as possible) from behind. To judge from a later observation of Herodotus, it seems likely that even by this second day the Persian morale was so low that they had to be driven forward by the whips of overseers (military police have never been over-popular!). In the confusion of those in front trying to turn back from the bronze wall bristling with spears and those at the back running forward to escape the blows across their shoulders the chaos was complete. Yard upon yard in front of the Greek line was piled with slain and wounded while the sickly sweet smell of death was everywhere on the air. ‘So, finding that they were doing no better than on the previous day, the Persians once again withdrew.’

Xerxes was in despair and had no idea how to deal with the situation. As has been said, the Persians would no doubt within a matter of days have found the way over the mountain and down to take the Greeks in the rear, but what was the pressing cause for concern was the provisioning of the army. By this time, one imagines, except for a straggling ‘tail’, the whole host must have been up and encamped around. No store-ships had come up from the south and, although one can only guess at the amount of communication there may have been by sea between the fleet and the army, such news as did come through from the south will all have been bad. Indeed, at about this time when Xerxes and his staff were debating their next move, Themistocles was making the second of his lightning raids on the demoralised Persian fleet.

It was at this moment of gloom in the Great King’s camp that Ephialtes so opportunely put in his appearance. Like many others he had no doubt expected the pass to have fallen on the first day, and certainly on the second. The sight of the bedraggled troops returning yet again defeated across the plain must have prompted him to come to the Great King in person (possibly before someone else did?). It will have been clear by now that such information had acquired a real value, so ‘in hope of a rich reward’ he made his way to the king. Burn comments: ‘What the guide Ephialtes had to show his masters was not the existence of a route leading east on top of the mountains, which was locally common knowledge (Hdt. 7, 175), but exactly where to turn east
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(My italics.) Ephialtes was not only prepared to tell them where to cross the Asopus, so as to begin their climb to the easy ground between the two ridges of Kallidromos, but he was prepared to act in person as their guide. It was this that made all the difference. It was one night before the full moon - that Carneian moon which had held back the full Spartan army - so that the Persians and their guide would have the benefit of it all night long, as they made their way by the track about which this man from Malis was now telling the Great King.

Xerxes wasted no more time. He sent for Hydarnes, commander of the Immortals. The Persian Guards may have suffered fairly heavy losses and a blow to their morale the day before, but the losses will have been made up and their morale could now be restored. In the pass of the Hot Gates they had been fighting under conditions that were thoroughly unfavourable to them. But these were men familiar with another kind of warfare, and their training and their weaponry were ideal for hard, fast marching under mountain conditions. *

Xerxes was sending them where they could prove to all the army that they were indeed the Great King’s chosen Ten Thousand, and he was sending them where they could take their revenge.

At ‘about the time that the lamps are lit’ Hydarnes and the Immortals moved out with their guide from the camp. They had an all-night march ahead of them and the reason they delayed until nearly dark was most probably to ensure that their movements were unseen by any of the watchful enemy. There are almost more theories as to their approach route to the saddle of Kallidromos than there are possible approaches. The simplest, and therefore as so often in ancient history perhaps the best, was that they crossed the River Asopus early in their march and took the shorter but harder way up the mountain than that offered by a longer but easier route. While the men were fresh it would have seemed wise to take a more taxing route for, once up in the narrow plain along the mountain’s top, the going would have been relatively easy to hardened soldiers who were, it must be remembered, inhabitants of a mountainous country. (The words of Cyrus come to mind.) The steepness of the track that leads up by this route will almost certainly have been less so over two thousand years ago. As all over Greece, the soil erosion during the centuries has changed many a contour, and the oak-forests which once lay up this way will themselves have contributed to hold earth that is now long since gone.

‘By this path, then,’ Herodotus continues, ‘having crossed the Asopus, the Persians marched all night. They had on their right the mountains of the Oeitians and on their left those of the Trachinians. By the time they reached the top of the mountain dawn was just breaking.’ All this, of course, is just reconstruction - and certainly, by the evidence of his words, Herodotus never came this way himself. He did, as others have pointed out, clearly come to Thermopylae and examine the site of the battlefield and he certainly - as always - went to the best possible source of information that he could find. There can be little doubt that it would have been round about dawn that the Persians, moving at a good disciplined pace, will have put the hard climb behind them and have entered on the relatively easy part of their passage over the mountain along its spine. At some point along here (and speculation is endless) the Phocians were encamped, detailed off by Leonidas for this very purpose, to guard the approach route and to make sure that no one got through without a struggle. Unfortunately, the Phocians, like many citizen armies of that time, seem to have been ill-disciplined soldiers - compared, that is, to professionals like the Spartans or the Immortals.

Despite the fact that the battle had raged in the pass for two days, the Phocians seem to have set no sentries and to have been taken completely by surprise. They had volunteered for this duty ‘to watch the track and protect their country’, and Leonidas must be forgiven for not anticipating that such volunteers would not have shown the slightest traces of professionalism. The first thing apparently that the Phocians knew of the approach of the Persian force was the sound of ‘the marching feet which made a loud rustling and swishing sound in the fallen leaves’. The oak-trees will have become somewhat dry by this time in August, and the recent gales will undoubtedly have sent down thousands of leaves to join the detritus that already covered the mountain track. It was a windless night, we are told, and this vivid description contains all the elements of truth. The Phocians were asleep with no outposts to their position, no guards set, and, of course, without their armour on. (The expression ‘caught with their trousers down’ might serve as their monument.)

‘When the Persians caught sight of men in front of them seizing their arms they were amazed, for they had not expected any opposition. Now they seemed to have run into an armed body of men. Hydarnes, afraid that they might be Spartans, asked Ephialtes who they were; and on hearing the truth, prepared to engage them.’ There is something a little curious in this part of the story about ‘the dog that did not bark in the night-time’. If it was only dawn or early light how could Ephialtes have been so sure that they were not Spartans - except by their sheer incompetence? Hoplite armour throughout Greece was very similar, no distinguishing signs would have been readily visible, and even if the alarmed men were shouting out to one another in a dialect of Greek other than Doric one does not imagine that Ephialtes was an expert in linguistics. Again, the phrase ‘on hearing the truth’ suggests that Ephialtes or others had been scouting up this way before, seen the Phocian camp, recognised them for whom they were and had kept to himself the confident knowledge that the Persians would be more than a match for them. But, if this had been the case, surely he would have told Xerxes, and Hydarnes would have been forewarned and forearmed? There is an element of mystery here.

The Phocians, in any case, seem to have behaved in a most incompetent and even cowardly manner. True, there were only one thousand of them and this body of men who were now advancing were clearly far greater in number, but an organised and determined resistance in a comparatively narrow area was what had been expected of them if the worst should happen and the enemy find their way through by the ‘secret’ of Kallidromos. As the Persians drew up in battle order, knelt and began to open fire on this surprised enemy, the Phocians fled under the hail of arrows and made for the safety of a nearby peak. ‘They thought themselves’, writes Herodotus, ‘the main object of attack.’ How could they ? They had been placed to keep watch and ward over this mountain passage so that the main body of the Greeks below should not be surprised and taken in the rear. Perhaps, with over two millennia intervening, one tends to think in too sophisticated a manner. It is somewhat like the modern astonishment that a full-moon festival could have delayed the movement of the body of the Spartan army at this time when their country was threatened. (Over sixty years later, a sophisticated Athenian general was to lose his army in Sicily through failing to move at the right time because there was an eclipse of the moon.) In any case, the Phocians find, and have found, no credit. They clung to the safety of their hillside while the Immortals, having driven off this undisciplined party of Greeks, passed almost contemptuously on their way through the mountainside.

Hydarnes could afford the luxury of a smile. This Greek Ephialtes had shown them the correct way over the mountain (none of that Greek duplicity), or it would not have been guarded at all - however inefficiently. If all the Greeks were like the Spartans, even the Great King would have had to consider the wisdom of his advance.

But this body of men who had been caught unprepared, and had then been unwilling to stand and fight, must have given him considerable confidence. Possibly the majority of the Greeks were as undisciplined and as incompetent as these? The Persians passed on, ‘going fast’. They knew that it could not be long before the news that they were up on the mountain would reach the defenders of the pass. But in any case, whatever happened now, the Immortals could feel in the morning air the dawn of triumph. They were through.

The news, it would seem, had already reached Leonidas. ‘The Greeks at Thermopylae heard from their seer Megistias that death was coming with the dawn.’ He had been taking the omens and saw their fate written in the sacrifice. Deserters also came in during the night with the news of the Persians outflanking them over the mountain. One of these Ionian Greeks, who had developed a conscience about being in the Great King’s ranks, is named by Ephorus as Tyrrhastiadas of Cyme and, since this was also the birthplace of Ephorus, the story may well represent the genuine and proud tradition of a local family that their ancestor had been the man who brought the news to Leonidas. By then the Spartan king had become a hero for all time, and such associations will have been treasured. Diodorus and others also tell a tale, which most authorities have considered suspect, that Leonidas, knowing all was lost, personally led a suicidal attempt on the Persian lines to try to kill Xerxes. We can be sure that this is untrue, for we know that Leonidas stayed to the last at Thermopylae, as was his duty and as befitted a Spartan king. It is most probably no more than one of the many accretions of legend which came to surround that last day. On the other hand, it is just possible that a small group of Spartans were sent forward by their king to try to locate the tent of Xerxes and assassinate him. Green makes the good comment: ‘To dismiss the tradition out of hand is perhaps a little rash. How credible are historians a thousand years hence likely to find the Long Range Desert Group’s attempt on Rommel’s life in 1942?’

A last council of war was held and it seems clear that opinions were divided. There are two versions of what took place at this meeting and Herodotus gives them both.

Some urged that they must not abandon the post, others the opposite. The result was that the army split, with some contingents returning to their various states while others prepared to stand by Leonidas. It is said that Leonidas himself dismissed them in order to spare their lives. As for the Spartans it would be not in their code for them to desert the post which they had been entrusted to guard.