Thermopylae (3 page)

Nothing was left to chance. Dumps of provisions, both for men and for their animals, were sited at regular intervals along the route that the Grand Army was to take. The Persians, unlike the Greeks, were not principally bread- or grain-eaters (as most Mediterranean peoples are to this day). Meat was a staple part of their diet, and ‘meat on the hoof’ was brought into the principal supply depots long before the army moved. At the same time great quantities of salted-down meat were stockpiled. The army, of course, as it moved across Asia Minor, and later into Greece, was expected to live off the land to a large extent, but Xerxes and his commissariat organisers did not make the great mistake of many later armies in assuming that so large a force could necessarily supply itself in this hand-to-mouth fashion. In
Persia and the Greeks
A. R. Burn quotes the description of Persian preparations for war by Theopompos of Chios. It is true that Theopompos was writing much later about an expedition against Egypt, but there is little reason to believe that Persian thoroughness had changed since the time of Xerxes. He records the 

tens of thousands of stand of arms, both Greek and oriental; vast herds of baggage animals and beasts for slaughter; bushels of condiments, and boxes and sacks, and bales of paper and all the other accessories. And there was so much salt meat of every kind, that it made heaps, so large that people approaching from a distance thought they were coming to a range of hills.

The reference to the bales of paper can only bring a wry smile to the face of anyone who has served in modern wars. Persia was nothing if not a bureaucratic state, and they had learned largely from the Egyptians, with their tradition of meticulous public records, that the organisation of a great country, and more especially an empire, required scribes and civil servants and departmental organisers. They were among the forerunners-in the large-scale use of paperwork - under which so much of the world groans today. (Byblos, one of the principal Phoenician cities, which came under the sway of Persia, was credited with having been the inventor of paper - made from papyrus. The word Bible (‘Book’) derives from Byblos.)

Especial provision was made in the way of stores for the army when it should have crossed into Greece. While in Asia Minor they might be expected to feed off the land to a great extent, since all of the area came under Persian rule. Such could not be expected in Greece itself once the army was south of the pro-Persian north. The River Strymon, which empties into the sea to the north of Mount Athos, was bridged for the passage of the army, and in several parts of this region of Thrace great provision dumps were established. The largest of these was at the White Cape on the Thracian coast and another was at the mouth of the Strymon near the new bridge. Yet others were sited to the south, in parts of Macedonia.

So much that Herodotus and later Greek historians considered as evidence of the megalomania of Xerxes and the hubris of a typical Oriental tyrant was no more than evidence of forethought, excellent logistics, and planning superiority over the Greeks of the period. The small Greek city-states could not understand what the organisation of a great empire and the movement of many thousands of men entailed: they themselves thought in terms of hundreds or at the most a few thousands. It would be well over a century until a Greece, unified under Alexander the Great, would have to tackle the problems of Empire. The principal source of amazement, not untinged with some reluctant admiration, was the great bridge of boats which Xerxes ordered to be constructed across the Hellespont at the narrows between Abydos on the Asian side to a point near Sestos on the European side: a distance of about seven furlongs or 1400 yards.

There were two bridges supported on 674 biremes and triremes which were used to form the floating platforms upon which the carriageway itself was laid. There were 360 vessels on the side towards the Black Sea and 314 on the southern section. One of these was allocated to the Egyptian workmen and the other to the Phoenicians. One may suspect that the Phoenicians built a better bridge (admirable though the Egyptians were as architects, they were not so distinguished a seafaring people as the masters of Tyre and Sidon). Nevertheless a storm of ‘great violence’ smashed both bridges shortly after they had been completed. Xerxes’ reaction was, in accordance with the Greek view of Herodotus, that of a maddened tyrant who expects that even the winds and the waves will respect his wishes. He gave orders that the Hellespont should be given three hundred lashes, that a pair of fetters be thrown into the sea, and even that it should be branded like a common criminal. Herodotus, like all Greeks (who made their living so largely from the sea and to whom the sea-god Poseidon was a deity always to be placated), regarded this not only as a barbarous, but indeed a maniacal act. ‘You salt and bitter current,’ Xerxes is said to have ordered the men who wielded the whips to say,
^c
your master inflicts this punishment upon you for doing harm to him, who never harmed you. Nevertheless Xerxes the King will cross you with or without your permission. No man makes sacrifice to you, and for this neglect you deserve your neglect because of your salty and dirty water.’

Curiously enough, although much of this might be taken as the ravings of a paranoiac oriental monarch (as the Greeks thought), Xerxes’ behaviour was not so irrational. To the Zoroastrian, for whom the dream of the pastoral life was - like the Garden of Eden to the Jews - the ultimate aim to which the Good must aspire, their heaven was essentially one conceived by landsmen. Flowing streams of clear water were naturally part of this concept. As a land-bound people, moreover, they had a dislike of the sea and an inability to cope with it (hence their employment of the Egyptians and the Phoenicians to man their fleets). ‘The bitter water’, the undrinkable water of the sea, was symbolic of Ahriman, the evil power against which the true follower of Ahuramazda was pledged to fight. Xerxes’ cursing and lashings of the sea, therefore, was possibly no more than a symbolic act done, as Xerxes might have put it, ‘according to Truth and with the proper rite’.

His rage against the designers of the two bridges was, however, entirely in accordance with what the Greeks expected of an Eastern tyrant. They were executed. A Greek engineer, Harpalus, is on record as having been the designer of the final two successful bridges; aided probably by Ionian and Phoenician technicians. They were moored slantwise to the Black Sea and at right angles to the Hellespont. Upstream and downstream specially constructed anchors were laid. Those to the east were to hold the bridging vessels against winds from the Black Sea, as well as against the strong current that flows down permanently as the cold river-fed water of the Black Sea pours in to replenish the Mediterranean. Those laid to the south were to hold the bridges, and especially the southerly bridge, against any gales that might strike from the less expected but still not uncommon quarter of the south-west. Despite their lack of modern scientific instruments the technicians of 2400 years ago were more familiar from centuries of experience with prevailing winds and tides than many a modern mariner who glides through the Hellespont with thousands of horsepower under his feet, assisted by efficient lighthouses, radar, and radio beacons. In three places between the bridges gaps were left so that boats might pass up or down the Hellespont. Since the freeboard, or height of deck above waterline, was little more than eight feet in the average bireme, there would have been little difficulty for such a vessel to pass under the three open sections of the bridges -especially when it is remembered that the sailors were constantly used to lowering masts and yards whenever the weather was foul. (The squaresails on vessels of that period were of little use except with a following wind, or one from slightly abaft of the beam.)

One of the astonishing mechanical triumphs of Xerxes’ bridges of boats was the strength and the weight of the cables that held them together. The Phoenicians, we learn, used cables of flax, while the Egyptians had theirs made out of papyrus. These large and heavy lengths of cable were almost certainly brought up the Aegean on barges. ‘Each bridge’, writes Herodotus, ‘had two flax cables and four of papyrus. The flax was the heavier - half a fathom of it weighing 114 lbs.’ This may be an exaggeration or a misunderstanding of Eastern weights and measures, for this would have meant that over a distance of 1400 yards the total weight of the flax cables alone would have been nearly 100 tons. In any case, the whole project was of such size and scale that it is doubtful whether anything equivalent could have been achieved to equal it in Europe for many centuries to come. (It is only recently, since the aqualung and many other improvements in diving techniques, that enough has been recovered of the remains of ancient ships to reveal how far from primitive were the seafaring vessels of ancient mariners.)

Manpower had built the Pyramids, and manpower and animal power were to remain the gauge of human mechanical achievement until the Industrial Revolution. ‘As soon as the vessels were on station’, Herodotus writes, ‘the cables were hauled taut by wooden winches on the shore.’ The next thing was to cut planks equal to the breadth of the floats. These were then laid edge to edge over the cables and were bound together. Finally, brushwood was laid on top, followed by soil, which the workmen spread evenly and trod down flat. Only one last thing remained to do (evidence again of considerable forethought) and that was to erect palisades on either side of the bridges so that the animals which were to pass over would not take fright at the sight of ‘the bitter water’. Nothing in the Crusades centuries later, almost nothing until amphibious operations of the twentieth century, was to equal the skill and technical ability of these engineers and craftsmen of the Persian Empire - working in the fifth century B.C.

By the spring of 480 Xerxes had received the news that not only was the canal bypassing Mount Athos completed, but that both the bridges across the Hellespont were restored and ready for the army to cross. The time was ripe. The spring months, after the gales of winter, and long before the prevailing northerlies of summer set in, were ideal. True, there can sometimes be storms in this season, but they are rare. Most of the Aegean, from the Hellespont southward to the Sporades, Cape Sunium, and beyond that again to the Cyclades, is usually ruffled by no more than the winds known as
prodroms
- the variable forerunners of early summer.

Long in advance of his move out of Sardis Xerxes had sent messengers to all the Greek states asking for those formal tokens of surrender - the gifts of earth and water from their land. It is hardly surprising that many of them, and especially the vulnerable islands, sent back these necessary tributes. According to Herodotus, it was only to the two major states of Athens and Sparta that no heralds were despatched. On the previous occasion, ten years before, when Darius had sent similar heralds, the Athenians were said to have cast them into ‘The Pit’ - the place for condemned criminals -and the Spartans to have thrown them down a well. Part of this story is suspect, for Herodotus had a pro-Athenian bias and was inclined to enlarge upon their heroic legend. At the time of Darius it seems somewhat unlikely that the Athenians would have acted in a manner so contrary to the international law accepted by all civilised peoples. (Heralds were regarded as sacred and inviolable.) On the other hand, there is real evidence that the Spartans had indeed thrown the Persian ambassadors down a well, telling them to ‘get earth and water for their king from down there’. The drastic nature of the action is Spartan, the quoted remark suitably laconic, and it was a known fact that Sparta regarded herself as superior to the law of other States and nations, especially ‘Barbarians’: those who were not Greeks.

Xerxes and his advisers knew that, if it was intolerable to send heralds to Sparta, it was equally pointless to send them to Athens. The essential core of Greece which had to be destroyed was composed of these two small, even if so dissimilar, city-states. The one was the military muscle of Greece and the other provided by far the greater part of its naval arm. Many of the other Greeks had already ‘medised’, as the term was: they had, that is to say, shown their willingness to co-operate with the Persians. This was hardly surprising, since to many an intelligent citizen, whether of an Aegean island, or of a city on the mainland, it must have seemed more than clear that, even if all the Greeks were united (which was far from true), they would stand no chance against the massive army and navy that was coming against them out of the East.

Xerxes had made good use of the propaganda effect of his preparations. He had even deliberately allowed Greek spies to infiltrate and witness the gathering together of the army and the building of the navy. His own men, for their part, in the guise either of sailors or of merchants had long kept the king and his inner circle acquainted with the political groups and motivations within the cities and island-states of the Greeks. In nearly all of these there were power struggles between various rich families, or between ruling families and the
demos
or common people. It was easy to see that in many cases, in return for the plentiful Persian gold, one rich family would be prepared to ‘sell out’ to the Persians in return for becoming the local rulers in due course. Alternatively, an oligarchy, or aristocratic allied group of families, would do the same in return for the monetary and military help that would enable them to keep the demos in their proper place - down. (In so many subsequent wars similar arrangements have always been made between the potentially occupied and the apparently all-powerful invaders.) If the Greeks were - as they were indeed - a brilliant people, they were individualistic to a fault, and concerned with the fate and fortune of themselves first of all and, secondly, of their state. Athens and Sparta, although by the nature of their societies basically hostile to one another, were large and important enough to realise that co-operation between the two of them was the only possible way in which the Greeks as a people could survive the Juggernaut that had some years ago crushed the freedom of their fellow-Greeks in Asia Minor (Ionia).