Salamis (4 page)

No gods laughed. The week after Thermopylae was the worst of the Long War – the worst week many of us had ever known.

Calliades was archon in Athens, and the Eleians celebrated the Seventy-fifth Olympiad, that in which Astylus of Syracuse won the stadion. It was in this year that King Xerxes made his campaign against Greece. It was the year of the climax of the Long War.

I was there.

Part I

The Wooden Wall

When the foe shall have taken whatever the limit of Cecrops

Holds within it, and all which divine Cithaeron, shelters,

Then far-seeing Jove grants this to the prayers of Athene;

Safe shall the wooden wall continue for thee and thy children.

Wait not the tramp of the horse, nor the footmen mightily moving

Over the land, but turn your hack to the foe, and retire ye.

Yet shall a day arrive when ye shall meet him in battle.

Holy Salamis, thou shalt destroy the offspring of women,

When men scatter the seed, or when they gather the harvest.

Prophecy of the Oracle of Delphi, 480 BC

When morning broke, we prepared our ships to put to sea. Unbeaten, we prepared to disperse and run.

It didn’t matter particularly just how the Spartans had come to lose such an impregnable position. It’s a well-known story now and I won’t shame us all by telling it. And at the time I did not yet know that my brilliant brother-in-law, Antigonus, had died at the head of his Thespians, taking forty Marathon veterans to die beside the Spartans. They stripped and desecrated his body too, the cowards.

I didn’t know, yet. But I knew that Themistocles was grey with fatigue and shattered hopes, and I knew that Adeimantus scarcely troubled to hide his delight. The great fleet was breaking up. Nothing had been decided except that all the Boeotians – Plataeans like me – were to run for their homes and clear the plains of Boeotia before the Great King came with fire and sword. We knew, even then, what was coming. With the Hot Gates lost there wasn’t another place to stop the Medes. Eurybiades said that there would be another army to fight for Boeotia, but none of us believed him.

Aristides told me in that awful dawn that the Thebans had already offered earth and water to the Great King. I spat, somewhat automatically.

‘We were
winning,’
I said. It was said in the sort of voice that young men comment on the ultimate unfairness of the world.

Aristides looked at Brasidas, who happened to be there, cleaning the blood from his greaves in seawater. They exchanged a look.

‘It is the will of the gods,’ Aristides said.

‘Fuck the gods,’ I spat.

Brasidas stepped back and met my eye. ‘You sound like a child,’ he said – a long speech, for him.

But to a Spartan, the essence of nobility is in not showing weakness – and almost
any
show of emotion, even anger, rage or love – all of these are signs of weakness. A true Spartan hides his thoughts from men.

It’s not an ideal I’ve ever striven for, but I understand it.

Aristides was an aristocratic Athenian and he clearly shared Brasidas’s views. ‘Blasphemy,’ he said.

Together, they made me feel like a small boy who had fled rather than face a beating.

I remember all this because of what Aristides said.

First, he put a hand on my shoulder – an unaccustomed familiarity.

Then he said, ‘Most men praise the gods when they are happy and curse them when they are sad. But piety lies in obeying the will of the gods all the time. It is easy to be a just man when all of your decisions go well and all the world loves you. It is when all is lost that the gods see what you really are.’

I spat again. ‘Let the gods note that I’m tired and wounded, then,’ I said. I had lost fingers on my left hand, and they ached – the ends hurt all the time, making sleeping difficult, and I had trouble closing my hand.

Briseis was lost. For ever, as far as I could tell. Again.

Let me tell you a thing, thugater. I had determined that if the Greeks lost I would not return alive. I had seen too many defeats. My house was too empty, despite my daughter. Yes – despite her.

But we had
not
lost. Beyond all fears, it was the
Spartans
who lost. And now I was alive and all my hopes in ruins. In a way, it was worse then Lade.

At Lade, I felt Apollo betrayed us. At Artemisium, I felt as if the whole pantheon deserted us.

Aristides left his hand on my shoulder. ‘Now we show the gods who we are,’ he said.

Brave words, in a moment of despair.

Eurybiades summoned us as the sun rose. Some of the ships had already left – two Athenian dispatch boats, and a whole squadron of Athenians under Xanthippus, one of their navarchs.

We were a grim and silent lot – three hundred captains. Many of us had wounds from the day before, and there were gaps. We had lost almost fifty ships in four days.

Themistocles had his himation wrapped around him and the end pulled over his head, and seemed unwilling to speak. His bluff, man-of-the-people face looked bloated, and he himself seemed crippled.

In that dark hour it was Eurybiades who declined to crack.

‘We will need a fleet rendezvous,’ he said clearly. ‘First, let us make sacrifice to the immortal gods and then let us have some clear counsel.’ He led us up on the headlands to the little temple of Artemis and there he sacrificed a pair of rams. Themistocles played no part, and Aristides hung back.

Adeimantus of Corinth held the sacrifices and walked with the Spartan navarch back down the hill to the small rise where we gathered to talk.

After prayers and some exhortations, Eurybiades raised his arms. ‘Let me hear you,’ he said. ‘What is our next move?’

He looked at Themistocles. The Athenian democrat shook his head.

‘Corinth!’ said Adeimantus. ‘We can hold the isthmus for ever, and if we should lose it, we have the Acrocorinth, which can host a mighty army and hold until the gods come to aid us.’

Themistocles twitched, like a wounded man who is wounded again.

No one was going to listen to me, so I walked around the circle of men slowly, hobbling a little on my second-best spear, until I reached the Athenian orator.

I poked him.

He ignored me.

‘Themistocles!’ I hissed. ‘If you don’t enter into this thing, they’re going to sail away and leave Athens to its fate.’

Themistocles met my eye. ‘Athens is already doomed,’ he said. ‘Don’t you understand? Attica is open. The Persians will come at us now, as they have always desired. It is over.’

I frowned. I wanted to say what Aristides had said to me, but Themistocles was not the man to accept arguments about excellence and the gods.

‘How great would men think you if you stopped the Persians now?’ I asked him. ‘The fleet is
not
beaten
.
’ I pointed. ‘Yesterday they flinched, not we Greeks.’

I’m not sure what I believed, thugater. What I meant. I hated that Themistocles would not even make a fight of it, even while I recognised the totality of our defeat.

Aristides had followed me. He and Themistocles hated each other, of course, but in that hour they were both Athenians.

‘We must at least have the fleet to cover the movement of all the demos – the people – to Salamis,’ Aristides said.

That shook me. Of course, they would empty Attica.

My daughter was at Brauron, dancing with the maidens. She was in Attica.

Aristides crossed his arms.

Themistocles slowly straightened, like a man waking from sleep. His voice was carefully pitched. He sounded as if he did not care.

‘None of you can sail to Corinth in a single leg,’ he said. ‘You’ll want to take water on the beaches of mighty Ajax, where Salamis brushes the sea.’

Adeimantus grinned. ‘We can take on water while we watch Athens destroyed!’ he said, and laughed like a boy, so that men turned their heads away in shame, and shuffled away from him. ‘But then, we sail for Corinth.’

Themistocles shrugged as if it was a matter of little moment.

Eurybiades nodded sharply. ‘Salamis it is. Day after tomorrow.’ To the Corinthian, he said, ‘It is not fitting to speak of the destruction of Athens. It is close to blasphemy.’

From the Spartan, these were strong words.

Adeimantus laughed, more of a bark than a laugh, a sound made to gain attention as a child, I’d warrant. ‘Mighty Lacedaemon sent one king and a handful of men to protect Greece. Why pretend? Sparta wants Athens destroyed as much as Corinth does.’

Eurybiades’ face grew red and his reserve showed the first sign of cracking that I had seen.

Adeimantus realised his error and held up a hand, like a man signalling defeat in a pankration bout. ‘No – I spoke only in jest.’

‘An ill jest,’ I said.

Adeimantus turned on me. ‘I do not speak to you.’

I let it go. I wanted to get to my daughter, not to have a fight on the beach.

The gloom engendered by the death of Leonidas stayed on us even as we got our hulls into the water and indeed, my thugater, it was on us for many days thereafter. But I reminded young Pericles, when he was going to return to Cimon, that Heraclitus said, ‘Souls slain in war are purer than those that perish in disease.’

‘What does that mean?’ Pericles asked me. He had a way, comic in a man so young, and yet also a little terrifying, of asking the most direct questions with his big eyes boring into you.

I shrugged. ‘Who am I to tell you what Heraclitus meant by anything?’ I said. ‘But if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say he meant that as the basis of soul is fire, so, in combat, a man’s soul is hottest, and if he dies then, he dies with his soul closest to its natural state. Whereas my master thought that moisture was the antithesis of the soul and that in sickness we become weak and our souls moist.’

Pericles shook his head. ‘I would like to believe that the king of Sparta went straight to Elysium, to walk there with Achilles and Hector. But …’ He met my eye, this adolescent boy. ‘Yet I do not think it is so simple. I think this is the sort of thing men tell each other to console themselves for the loss of a comrade.’

Then he bowed. ‘I am sorry, Lord Arimnestos. I speak as if I was your peer.’

I had to laugh. Even through the pain of losing the king, even in the knowledge that my world was about to be destroyed, there was something antic in the serious, steady-burning arrogance of the boy.

‘Go prate at Cimon,’ I told him. ‘I’ll see you in Attica.’

I said the last because I had determined to go first to Brauron, which is close by the sea, to pick up my daughter. But my oarsmen were Plataeans almost to a man, and they made it clear that they had other priorities.

I couldn’t be angry. First, I knew from Cimon that the great sanctuaries, like Brauron and Sounion, would be evacuated anyway. My daughter had many friends and I had guest friends in Attica. She was not going to be abandoned in the rush to the ships. Athens and Themistocles had been planning their resistance to the Great King for three years and every aspect of defence – and every option – had been examined. One of the few real advantages to democracy in the face of crisis is that the involvement of every free man means that many different points of view are brought to bear on a problem; admittedly, half of them are foolish or even fantastical, but many men bring new ideas and ready wit. Most of the rural population of Attica was already evacuated to Salamis and to the east coast of the Peloponnese. Troezen especially welcomed Athenian refugees, and little Hermione took many Attic farm families (and, as it proved, many Plataeans), but most of the people went across the narrow straits to the island of Salamis.

At any rate, my daughter was safe enough. Or so I had to hope, because unless I wanted mutiny and blood, my oarsmen wanted to go home. At Artemisium we were an easy day’s rowing from the narrows where Euboea nearly connects to the mainland, just another day’s walk or two from Plataea over to the west near Mount Cithaeron. As we had nearly the whole phalanx of Green Plataea and nearly every man of substance either rowing or serving as marines – and as the Persians would be at our gates in three days or less – Plataea represented the more immediate crisis.

We rowed with a will. But as we rowed, I marshalled my arguments for the rowers. When we camped on the beaches of Boeotia that night, I convinced Myron and both Peneleos and Empedocles, sons of Empedocles, and old Draco himself and Myron’s rich friend Timaeus – and Hermogenes and Styges and Idomeneus and the rest – to give me one more day of rowing. I suggested that some men be sent ahead, walking, or riding. I sent Ka and his archers and they found mules and a pair of horses to carry our messengers. I didn’t ask Ka too many questions about where the horses had come from.

‘Let’s take the ships around to Athens,’ I said to the men on the beach. ‘They need them for their evacuation. And we can go as swiftly over the mountains from Eleusis as across Boeotia from here.’

Myron nodded. ‘There might already be Persian troops loose in Boeotia,’ he said. ‘Their cavalry—’

Hermogenes nodded. ‘And the Thebans have already Medised,’ he said, as everyone spat. ‘They’re between us and home, here.’

Styges glared. ‘Traitors,’ he said.

We chose a dozen steady men – well, Idomeneus was one, and no one ever called him steady, but they needed a killer to get them through if the going got rough. Ka stole more horses – let’s call it what it was – and the messengers rode off with careful instructions and Timaeus to see they were obeyed.

The rest of us woke before dawn and rowed. We were in advance of most of the rest of the fleet, because we were rowing to save our goods and families. We passed the headland at Brauron south of Marathon under sail and I could see the temple and the old bridge and I was delighted to see that there was no one moving – no girls dancing in the courtyard, no children playing at goats on the old hill above the cave of the goddess. We had a beautiful wind and we ran towards Sounion on an empty coast, but towards afternoon, as we prepared to weather Poseidon’s promontory, we saw the flash of oars behind us. We knew Cimon’s squadron had stayed to watch the Persians and we guessed the Athenian’s public ships were moving in a body under Xanthippus, rowing as hard for home as they could.

I feel I should explain that, in the years before Artemisium, the Athenians had invested the whole output of their silver mines in building a fleet of more than a hundred well-built triremes. Five of them were being crewed by Plataeans, and had Plataean officers and marines. It seemed to me awkward – at best – to leave these five ships on the beaches of Boeotia while we ran home to save our furniture and I said so.

We were not, as it proved, the first ships of the Allied Fleet to reach the beaches at Phaleron. But we rowed past, despite the late hour, and swept into the narrow channel between the Island of Salamis and the mainland as the sun dropped into the sea beyond Megara to the west.

The Bay of Salamis was covered in ships. Fishing boats, merchant ships of every size, rowing boats, military pentekonters and even older triakonters of thirty-oared ships were going back and forth, turning the sea to froth by the beating of their oars, or so the poets liked to say.