Persian Fire (53 page)

And all the while, as sobbing children were shepherded through the shallows by their fathers, and mothers with wild, white faces clutched their head-scarves tight about them and stumbled in their wake, and vessels of every description crowded the waters off Phalerum and Piraeus, time was running out. Six days had passed since the forcing of the Hot Gates. With Athens increasingly a ghost town, those thronging the beaches began to glance ever more anxiously over their shoulders, scanning the horizon for smudges of dust, a glint of metal, a dot of fire. Still nothing. By the evening, when Athens stood empty at last, the only movement in all the great expanse of the abandoned city was that of dogs, bewildered by the sudden quiet. Many, faithful to their owners, had followed them down to the beaches, running along the sands, howling at the boats as they disappeared. Xanthippus, it is said, having been summoned back to Athens along with all the other victims of ostracism, but now heading off into exile again, had looked behind him as he sailed away from the mainland, only to see his own dog paddling desperately in pursuit. Reaching dry land at last, the exhausted creature had scrabbled up onto the rocks, whined and then expired.
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Xanthippus' destination, and that of all his fellow citizens, was Salamis. Here, across the narrow straits from Mount Aigaleos, the Athenian people had resurrected a semblance, however ghostly and impoverished, of the city they had just abandoned. A few women and children — those laggards for whom the journey to Troezen had grown too perilous — were now camped out there. So too, symbols and guardians alike of the constitution, were the magistrates of the democracy. The elderly, whose wisdom in a time of crisis was rated an invaluable resource, had been settled on the island since the very start of the evacuation, along with the city's treasures and grain reserves. And now, most stirring of all, weather-beaten and battle-scarred though they were, their timbers bearing the marks of frantic labours in the shipyards, there lay in readiness off the bays of Salamis some 180 Athenian triremes: a wooden wall indeed. Well might Themistocles, pointing to the fleet, insist that his countrymen, even in exile, still remained citizens of 'the greatest city in all of Greece'.
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A claim which he would be obliged to cling to as though it were a life-raft in the hours that followed his arrival on Salamis. Athenian ships were not the only ones visible from the island. For the past two days, as Themistocles and his men had ferried refugees from Attica, the other allied squadrons had been lurking in the straits. That the Peloponnesian admirals had agreed to wait there for the length of the evacuation said much of the bonds of fellowship forged at Artemisium. Both their orders and their personal inclinations would have urged them to head immediately for the Isthmus. From Salamis, distant across the blue of the gulf, it was just possible to make out a stub of rock framed against the sky: this tantalising way-marker was the acropolis of Corinth, the watchtower of the Peloponnese, and barely five miles south of the Isthmus wall. Perhaps predictably, then, it was a Corinthian, the young and fiery commander Adeimantus, who took the lead in the council of war that immediately followed the return of Themistocles to the allied fleet. Leave for the Isthmus at once, he demanded of Eurybiades and his fellow admirals. Concentrate naval and military resources together. Join with the army already massed along the Isthmus. There were bays and gulfs enough around Corinth to guard the flank of a battle-line. And if disaster did overtake the fleet — well, at least the Peloponnesians 'might then find a refuge among their own people'.
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Hardly, of course, an argument designed to thrill an admiral from Athens — nor those from Aegina and Megara — and it might have been thought, since these men were in command of around three-quarters of the Greek fleet's total of 310 triremes, that their objections would prove decisive.
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Not a bit of it. The risk facing Themistocles and his two colleagues was the same one that had haunted the war effort from the start: that the alliance might fragment and disintegrate. Outnumbered probably two to one as the Greek fleet still was, not even the Athenians could afford to go it alone. Any split among the allied squadrons would sink all hopes of victory.

And it was victory that Themistocles was aiming for — not merely a holding operation, as was envisaged by Adeimantus, but a decisive crippling of the Great King's whole naval capacity. To convince his colleagues that this ambition was more than just the fantasy of a desperate exile, he drew on the one thing that could unite them, and gloriously so: their joint memories of the Artemisium campaign. Themistocles knew that battle in open waters — which the Greeks would face if they made their stand off the Isthmus — favoured the enemy. 'But battle in close conditions', he urged, 'works to our advantage.' This was the lesson he had drawn from the day of the fiercest fighting, when the allied squadrons — although battered — had successfully held the passageway between Euboea and the mainland against the full weight of the barbarian fleet. The straits in that battle had been some two or three miles across; at Salamis, if the barbarians could only be lured into them, the waters were half a mile wide at most. 'If everything goes well — and the prospects for that are not unreasonable — then we can win.'
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And here, for all the soaring self-confidence with which it had been delivered, was a judgement quite as rooted in the experiences of everyone who had fought at Artemisium — the Peloponnesian admirals included — as in the fertility of the Athenian's ever-scheming brain. Themistocles himself well appreciated this, for he had, to a degree that none of his opposite numbers could remotely rival, made a career out of persuasion. Democracy, in its first decades, had proved an exacting school. No one in the world was now better practised at getting his own way than a successful Athenian politician. The effectiveness of Themistocles' pitch can be gauged from the fact that when, midway through the council of war, messengers arrived with the terrifying news that the barbarians had been seen entering Attica, 'setting fire to the whole country',
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the meeting did not break up in panic. Nor, despite the blood-curdling realisation that the Persian fleet might be gliding into Athenian waters at any moment, and perhaps blocking off the escape routes, did the Peloponnesians press their demands for an immediate withdrawal. Instead, all of the high command agreed that the fleet would stay where it was: off Salamis. Themistocles, for the moment at any rate, had convinced the doubters.

And this despite the fact that he was now, in the eyes of his fellow admirals, that most despised of all creatures — 'a man without a country'.
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Such a label was not entirely accurate, of course — not while Salamis remained in Athenian hands. Nor, even with the Persian cavalry clattering fast towards the city, had Athens herself been wholly surrendered: one stronghold, the sacred heart of Attica, still held out. Not even the iconoclastic Themistocles had ever proposed that the Acropolis should be abandoned. Instead, by a vote of the Assembly, it had been agreed 'that the treasurers and priestesses remain on it to guard the property of the gods'.
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Other Athenians as well, those too stubborn to go into exile, had taken refuge there. The defenders, having had weeks to provision themselves and to erect barricades — 'wooden walls' — across the ramp, could now plausibly regard themselves as well braced for a lengthy siege.

Yet their spirits, all the same, must have quailed at their first sight of the enemy. No better view could have been had of the arrival of the Great King into Athens than from the heights of the sacred rock. Fire, incinerating the blessed fields and groves of Attica, heralded Xerxes' coming. Gazing from the western battlements, the defenders watched impotently as the royal banners were raised triumphantly over their city. The hordes of the Great King's army were already swarming everywhere, taking possession of the familiar streets, laying waste the defenders' homes. In the Agora and on the slopes of the Areopagus, the hill which rose between the Pnyx and the Acropolis, engineers could be seen sinking bore-holes: evidently, the barbarians were too mistrustful of the Athenians even to drink their water. Other work-parties busied themselves with looting and stripping the city bare.

Most horrifying spectacle of all for the defenders on the Acropolis to have to endure was that of the bronze tyrannicides, those potent symbols of the democracy, being lowered from their plinth, crated up, and readied for transport. No doubt the Pisistratids, back in their homeland at last, had explained to their masters the precise significance of the statues. A perfect trophy to adorn the halls of Susa.

Meanwhile, above the Agora, the Great King had established his command post on the Areopagus. Archers were ordered onto the hill, and instructed to shoot fire-arrows at the barricades blocking the ramp of the Acropolis. The wooden wall — 'betraying the defenders'
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— was soon ablaze, but the defences beyond it held firm. The Great King, anxious to send the good news to Persia that the nest of
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had been smoked out, began to grow impatient. Summoned to the royal presence, the Pisistratids were duly dispatched up the ramp to negotiate with their obdurate countrymen. Their overtures were rejected. The assault on the ramp was renewed. Arrows fizzed, and boulders, levered over the side of the fortifications by the defenders, crashed and rolled. The chaos of battle was general.

But now, with the Athenians at full stretch, the Great King's officers began surveying the opposite end of the Acropolis. Here, where the drop was so sheer that not even a single guard had been stationed, elite forces finally succeeded in scaling the face of the cliff. As at Thermopylae, so now, talents honed in the Zagros enabled the Great King to stab a Greek garrison in the back. The Acropolis was stormed. Many of the defenders hurled themselves off the battlements in preference to waiting to be slaughtered. Others sought sanctuary in the temple of Athena. The Persians, naturally, massacred the lot. Then, as their master had ordered, they put everything on the summit of the rock to the torch. What would not burn they demolished, toppled or smashed. The great storehouse of Athenian memories, accumulated over centuries — the city's very past — was wiped out in a couple of hours.

Plumes of thick smoke, billowing up from the inferno, began to blacken the Attic sky. To the Athenians, standing frozen upon their ships, or on the slopes of Salamis, the message they advertised was one of purest horror. To their allies too, watching as evening turned to night, and still the silhouette of Mount Aigaleos was lit an angry red, the spectacle was barely less demoralising. In others, however, also on the sea that night, it would have prompted very different emotions. The Great King's admirals, who had not wished to arrive off Athens until they could be certain that the city's harbours were secured, had taken their time to rendezvous with the army. Now, however, with the whole of the Attic coastline, from Sunium to the Acropolis, a blaze of burning temples, the Persian victory was being broadcast far out to sea. There was no need for any of the Great King's squadrons, if they were still making their way to port that night, to rely on the stars: their oars, beating the waters, would have churned up waves illuminated by fire.

Dawn showed the Acropolis a blackened, smoking ruin. Once a nest of demons, now purged by flames, it stood cleansed at last of the Lie. The principles of Arta had prevailed, and Xerxes, the Lord Mazda's servant, had performed his bounden duty to the Truth. In witness of this, the Great King, having summoned the Pisistratids to his presence again, gave them orders to ascend the Acropolis, 'and there offer sacrifices according to their native custom'
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— for they alone, of all the Athenians, had stood firm against the blandishments of the Lie. Gratefully, the returned exiles duly climbed onto the cinderscape. Over broken statues and toppled columns and the charred corpses of their slaughtered countrymen they picked their way, to that most sacred spot on the otherwise barren summit, where the primal olive tree, the city's gift from Athena, had always stood. The shrine built around it had been systematically flattened, but a blackened stump was soon unearthed beneath the rubble. Tenaciously, as they had always done, the living roots still clung to the rock.

And sprouting from the stump — a certain miracle — a long green shoot was rising up to meet the sun.