The Great King (44 page)

Themistocles had bought a Corinthian ally – Diotus, who had had business dealings with me and was the proxenos for little Plataea, and he and Myron had done the best they could – they’d wrapped the accusations in wool, as we like to say in Plataea. So when I arrived, I had to put up almost a third of my profits from the voyage east as a bond, and then I was allowed to go about my business – which was to attend the conference.

One more detail to explain my frame of mind. I went to the great temple of Zeus to swear an oath to answer the charges against me, and there I saw Calisthenes – one of the mighty Alcmaeonidae of Athens. That was like a splash of icy water.

He smiled at me. I know that smile – I’ve smiled it at other men. He
wanted
me to know that he was involved in the charges against me.

I was concerned, to say the least.

With all that hanging over my head, I was a poor delegate – a week late, and I hadn’t made a sacrifice. The conference was actually held in the precinct of the temple complex where they held the games – the Isthmian games, I mean. And even though I’d missed eight days of talk, they were still talking.

The issue was not resistance. Greece had already chosen to resist. Thanks to the gods, men had used their heads and seen that we had to fight.

The issue was command. All were agreed that Sparta should lead the allied army. Why not? The Spartiates were the closest things to professional soldiers that we had. Spartan kings had more experience of planning major campaigns than anyone else. There really wasn’t much argument – the only man I could possibly have considered to put up against Leonidas was Aristides, and
he
wanted the Spartans to command.

So Leonidas would lead the field army.

But the naval component was another story. And we all knew that the navy was going to be important. The largest navy belonged to Athens, which, in fifteen years, had gone from a fairly small navy to the largest in the Aegean and perhaps in the whole of the eastern Mediterranean – except Persia, of course. That summer, Athens could put more than a hundred hulls in the water, and Aegina could scarcely muster seventy, and Corinth about fifty. Only Syracusa on Sicily had more.

And no one wanted Athens to have the command.

In vain did Themistocles politic. And let me add – Gorgo and Leonidas were unshakeable in supporting him. Leonidas wanted Themistocles to be the navarchos.

There were other candidates.

Gelon of Syracusa was one. He offered one hundred and twenty ships to the cause if he could be the commander on land and sea.

Adamanteis of Corinth was another, and he scarcely bothered to conceal his loathing of Athens –
That upstart city
, he said in a speech. It was an impious exaggeration – even in myth, Athens pre-dates Corinth, and in fact the evidence of your eyes will show you how long Athens has been a mighty citadel, but other men – our foes – agreed with him. Only a few decades before, Athens had been a minor city-state with a tyrant who could be bought and a small fleet and a small army. The new democracy had flooded her phalanx with new muscle and had made her rowers into citizens, and many of the oligarchs who ruled the cities of mainland Greece felt deeply threatened, no little bit by the growth of the very fleet that Athens swore to use for the common good.

After a day of it, all I could think of was the captains’ conferences before Lades. We had supposedly all been on the same side, for the same purposes, and the Samians had betrayed us. Here, we weren’t done with the conference and some men – the Corinthians and the men of Argos – were open in saying that they would prefer to see Athens destroyed than to see an Athenian command the allied fleet.

The problem – and it was a problem – was that there were not many compromise candidates. No one was going to accept an Aeginian in command. They had tried to Medise – that is, to support the Great King – at the time of Marathon, and they made no secret of their hatred for Athens. But they were the only other state with a navy large enough to train officers who could direct major sea operations.

Except Corinth. And Adamanteis wanted that command very badly. He fought tooth and nail in the discussions to arrange that a stinging message was sent to Gelon.

For myself, I could have served under Gelon. But the rumour was that the Great King was flinging Carthage at Syracusa to pin the great Syracusan fleet in place, and men worried that Gelon would sacrifice Greece to save Sicily, and of course they were right. I agreed with them – I knew that Artapherenes had gone to Carthage. But I thought that with one mighty fleet, we could probably control the whole of the sea.

At any rate, no one listened to me. Gelon was sent an icy message of refusal, and went back to fighting Carthage.

But Themistocles was no more willing to send the Athenian fleet to sea under a Corinthian than under an Aeginian. So the bickering continued, while the Persians built their second bridge and while their ships and lead elements of their armies moved into Thrace.

I could see it falling apart before my very eyes. The whole alliance – so promising a month before – was going to break up over the issue of the fleet. Half the cities present had
no
fleets and couldn’t imagine what it was all about.

About two weeks into the conference, I was sitting on the steps of the shrine of Herakles with two dozen men – really, the whole of the ‘Athenian’ faction. We were tired, and we sat drinking watered wine, our slaves and hypaspists gathered around us.

We’d come out of the temple still debating the command. Two of the representatives from Megara had come out – we were trying to dissuade them from their pro-Corinthian stance.

‘Why does it
matter
?’ the elder asked.

And Themistocles stood, and pointed out over the crisp blue water of the great bay before us. ‘The war with Persia is all about the sea,’ he said. ‘Xerxes may come by land, but he cannot maintain his army – or his conquest – without the sea. This war will be won and lost with triremes, not with swords.’

The Megaran sneered. ‘You only say that because your political power base is little men who row,’ he said. ‘Only gentlemen can win battles.’

Themistocles shook his head. ‘Persian archers care nothing for the quality of the man in the armour,’ he said. ‘Arrows are all democrats.’

The Megaran shrugged. ‘Only rich men can own the armour to stop the arrows.’

Themistocles shook his head. ‘With a fleet, I can prevent the Persians from having arrows,’ he said. ‘I can prevent them from having bread, or beans, or garlic, or bowstrings.’

The Megarans muttered, and turned to walk away, unswayed.

Stung, the orator shouted after them, ‘After the war, there will be an empire! Don’t you see it? With a fleet, we can crush the Great King. We can take all Ionia back—’

I put a hand on his arm.

Themistocles sat down and glowered.

That night, I went and drank wine with Leonidas. I was invited. He and his retinue were in a fine country house near the precinct – far finer than his house in Sparta, in fact. The floor mosaics were magnificent. Aristides was there – he didn’t attend the meetings of the conference, because of his feeling about Themistocles, but he was in Corinth and attended many private functions. Everyone knew he had been to see the Great King, and since no one could imagine the great Aristides becoming pro-Persian, they trusted him to tell them what the Great King intended, and he told them – right down to the facts of our escape from Mardonius.

At any rate, I lay with him on a kline and listened to Leonidas plan his campaign. He had a straightforward idea – that the Greeks should send their allied army to a forward position so that the Persians would not be in a position to threaten anyone – except perhaps the Thessalians. We needed the Thessalian cavalry to match the brilliant Persian cavalry.

And Leonidas – almost alone, let me add – looked clear eyed at the odds and the campaign. He was the first to propose a series of narrow points – where land and sea were both constrained – as the places where the allied army could face the Great King while the allied fleet contained his fleet. Our spies and our scouts – even my own work – suggested that the Persians would have almost six hundred fighting ships. Even if Xerxes gave us another year, all Greece couldn’t match six hundred ships. So the best we could hope for was a series of holding actions, and Leonidas invited me to drink his wine so that I could help Aristides to advise him on naval tactics.

Leonidas was a fine commander and a deep thinker, but he thought sea battles were land battles with water.

But he was very good about the narrow places and he had a much firmer grasp of geography than most men. He
listened
when other men spoke. He was already choosing his battlefields. Perhaps most important, he was almost alone in understanding that we would not be challenging Xerxes to a fair fight on an open field, like Plataea facing Thisbe or Athens facing Thebes.

Oh, no.

Leonidas, the great general, the King of Sparta, the first among equals, the best warrior of Greece, lay on his couch at Corinth and laid out our strategy.

‘I’ll take the allied army to a narrow place,’ he said. ‘And we’ll fight the Medes the way a cat fights a dog.’ He looked around.

Some men flinched.

‘With everything we have,’ he said. ‘And with our flanks defended.’

He chose a dozen sites based on what other men could tell him, and his own travels and his brother’s. Some of them were rendered untenable by distance from the centres at Athens and the Peloponesus. Some were so far ‘forward’ that they fell immediately to the Persians or even surrendered. But he chose the Vale of Tempe immediately, because it offered almost everything we needed for a forward strategy. He named three places to which he could retreat.

The best of them all was the Hot Gates, and the headland of Artemis, where the north end of Euboea almost meets the coast of southern Thessaly. There, the sea is as constrained as the land.

But Euxenis, the Thessalian, shook his head. ‘If you fight there, you will lose Thessaly,’ he said. ‘And all of our cavalry will be serving the Great King.’

Leonidas smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But if I lose Thessaly, I’ll have to fight somewhere.’

Sparthius raised a hand. ‘Why not just meet them here, at the isthmus?’ he asked.

Leonidas shrugged. ‘If we fight here, then Athens and Thebes are lost, and Megara and probably Corinth.’

Sparthius looked at me and winked. ‘So? None of them has a single Spartan citizen.’

Now, my friends, you may think this is dull – but this is what we faced, in building the alliance. Every state could see how to protect its own interests. And the men of the Peloponnesus were in the most secure position of all.

‘If Xerxes’ fleet defeats our fleet, he can land an army anywhere,’ I said. ‘He could take Olympia.’

‘Avert!’ said a dozen Spartiates. Men glared at me.

‘Or Sparta itself,’ I said, ignoring them.

Every head turned.

‘Not while there was a single Spartiate left alive,’ Bulis said.

But Queen Gorgo nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. She was only passing through the room – collecting her small weaving bag, or so she claimed, although like many women I’ve known, she knew how to linger at an all-male party for an hour.

At her one word, all the Spartans fell silent. And she smiled – a carefully dramatised hesitation. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You would all die, and then an army of his slaves would take Sparta.’

An hour later, with far too much wine in me, I staggered to my feet and clasped hands with Aristides before nodding to the king. Spartans use very little ceremony in private.

I had made it through the doors of the andron when Hector took my arm without a word and led me across the marble-paved courtyard, past a magnificent and ancient olive tree in a basin of marble, and up a set of carved wooden steps to the porch – the exedra – of the women’s wing.

Gorgo sat quite decorously with a pair of maidens, enjoying the moonlit air and the scent of olives.

‘A Spartan,’ she said, as soon as I was at the top of the steps.

I was not at my best. ‘What?’ I mumbled, or words to that effect.

She waved dismissively. ‘Why do men drink so much? Listen, Arimnestos, I need your wits. Let’s have a Spartan navarch. A Spartan of unimpeachable nobility and some ability, who can give clear orders – and take them, if necessary. From Themistocles. No – listen! No one in Corinth or Megara or Thebes can imagine that Themistocles the Democrat is really going to ally with Leonidas the great noble. Let us put in a Spartan admiral, and all our troubles are at an end. And we are rid of Adamenteis.’

I leaned against the rail. ‘I think Adamenteis is in the pay of the Great King,’ I said.

Gorgo shrugged. ‘Half the conference have been sent money by Xerxes.’ She lowered her peplos from over her head to show her eyes and a bit of her mouth. ‘I have myself.’

I was charmed. ‘What did you do with the money?’ I asked.

‘I sent half to the temple of Artemis at Brauron and the other half to Themistocles to build a ship,’ she said. ‘Do you think we can defeat Xerxes?’

‘Yes,’ I insisted. ‘If you are navarch.’

We laughed together.

The next day, I proposed that Eurybiades of Lacedaemon be chosen as navarchos. I had wandered about – half drunk – and informed Themistocles and Aristides and a dozen of the important men, so that, as soon as I made the proposal in council, a dozen orators rose and supported it.

Adamenteis never had a chance to rally his supporters. We put it to the vote and the thing was done.

Athens chose to trust Sparta with its fleet. Friends – in many ways, it was Athens’ finest hour. Someone had to trust a stranger.

And with that trust came the scent of victory. Until Athens conceded that it would give the command to Sparta, we were some sixty odd cities with a common language and a lot of shared hatred. But after the question of the arch-navarchos was settled, the smaller cities began to show signs of fight. And as the last week of the conference rolled along, Themistocles framed a resolution calling for an even division of spoils – as in the Iliad – and the wording suggested strongly that if we won, we would punish those who stood with the Medes.