Travels with Herodotus (28 page)

The two men differed even in their appearance. Ben Bella was always well-groomed, elegant, refined, courteous, smiling amiably. When Boumedienne appeared for the first time in public after the coup, he looked like a tank commander who had just stepped out of his conveyance covered in the sands of the Sahara. He did try to smile, but without much success—it was simply not his style.

In Algiers I saw the Mediterranean Sea for the first time. I saw it up close—I could dip my hand into it, feel its touch. I didn’t have to ask for directions; I knew that just by walking downward, then down some more, I would eventually reach it. It was everywhere, visible from afar, glimmering from behind various buildings, appearing at the bottoms of steep streets.

At the very bottom was the port district, with simple wooden bars all in a row, smelling of fish, wine, and coffee. But it was the
tart scent of the sea that was most noticeable, a gentle, calming refreshment carried on each gust of the wind.

I had never been in a city where nature is so kind to man. For it offered everything all at once—the sun, a cooling breeze, the brightness of the air, the silver of the sea. The sea seemed familiar to me, perhaps because I had read so much about it. Its smooth waves signified fine weather, peace, something like an invitation to travel and experience. One had the urge to join those two fishermen over there, who were just setting sail.

I returned to Dar es-Salaam, but Judi had left. I was told that he had been recalled to Algiers and assumed, because he was a participant in the victorious conspiracy, that the move meant a promotion. In any event, he did not return here. I never met him again, in fact, and so was unable to thank him for having incited me to take the trip. The military coup in Algeria was the start of an entire series, a whole chain of similar revolts, which for the next quarter century would decimate the continent’s young postcolonial states. Those states turned out to be weak from the start, and many of them have remained so to this day.

Not least, thanks to this journey, I stood for the first time on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It seems to me that from that moment on I understood Herodotus even better than before. His thoughts, his curiosity, how he saw the world.

W
e are still by the Mediterranean, Herodotus’s sea, only now on its eastern end, where Europe adjoins Asia and where the two continents meet across a chain of gently contoured, sunny isles, whose quiet, calm bays encourage sailors to visit and to stay awhile.

The commander of the Persians, Mardonius, leaves his winter lair in Thessaly and heads south
at the head of his army to attack Athens
. When he reaches the city, however, he finds it uninhabited. Athens is destroyed and deserted. The population has moved away, taking shelter in Salamis. He sends an envoy there, a certain Murichides, whose mission is to once again propose to the Athenians that they surrender without a fight and recognize King Xerxes as their ruler.

Murichides presents this proposal to the highest Athenian authority, the Council of Five Hundred, and a crowd of Athenians listens in on the assembly’s deliberations. One member of the council, Lycides, argues that it would be best to accept Mardonius’s conciliatory offer and come to some kind of an agreement with the Persians. Hearing this, the Athenian audience erupts in anger, surrounds the speaker, and stones him to death on the spot.

Let us pause a moment at this scene.

We are in democratic Greece, proud of its freedom of speech
and of thought. One of its citizens publicly expresses his views—and what happens? There is an instant outcry. Lycides simply forgot that there was a war going on, and that in wartime all democratic freedoms, including the freedom of speech, are typically put on the shelf. War engenders its own, distinct laws, and the normally complex code of governing principles is reduced to a single fundamental imperative: victory at any cost!

Lycides has barely finished his speech when he is put to death. One can imagine how rattled, agitated, and near hysteria the crowd listening to him must have been. The Persian army is hot on their heels, they have already lost half their country, they have lost their city. It is not difficult to find stones in the spot where the council deliberated and the onlookers gathered. Greece is a country of stones; they are everywhere. Everyone walks on them. You need only bend down. And that is exactly what happens. People reach for the nearest stone, the one closest at hand, and hurl it at Lycides. At first, he probably shouts in terror; later, already dripping with blood, he moans from pain, cowers, wheezes, begs for mercy. In vain. The throng, furious, in a state of mad frenzy, no longer hears, no longer thinks, and is incapable of stopping itself. It will come to its senses only after the last stone has extinguished the life of Lycides, turned him to pulp, silenced him forever.

But that is not the end of it!

Herodotus writes that
the uproar in Salamis over Lycides alerted the Athenian women to what was happening. With every woman arousing and enlisting the support of her neighbor, they spontaneously flocked to Lycides’ house, where they stoned his wife and his children to death
.

His wife and children! How were the Athenian tots guilty of their daddy’s advocacy of a compromise with the Persians? Did they even know anything about these Persians, much less that the mere suggestion of talking to them was punishable by death?

Were the youngest among them even able to imagine what death looks like? How terrible it is? At what point did they realize that the grandmothers and aunts whom they suddenly saw in front of their house were not bringing them sweets and grapes, but rather stones, with which they would now start to crack open their heads?

Lycides’ fate demonstrates the Greeks’ deeply felt pain of even contemplating collaboration with the invader, what great angst it aroused. What should one do? How should one behave? What choice should one make? Cooperate or resist? Enter into talks or boycott? Come to an arrangement and try to survive, or opt for heroism and go out in a blaze of glory? Difficult, rankling questions, tormenting dilemmas.

The Greeks are divided over these alternatives, and their disagreements are not confined to discussions and verbal sparring. They fight one another with weapons, on battlefields—the Athenians with the Thebans, the Phocians with the Thessalians; they go for one another’s throats, gouge out one another’s eyes, cut off one another’s heads. No Persian provokes so much hatred in a Greek as another Greek does—just so long as he is from an opposing camp or from a tribe that is at odds with his. Perhaps various complexes contribute to this, feelings of guilt, disloyalties, treacheries? Hidden fears, terror at the thought of a divine curse?

A fresh confrontation is about to take place, in the last two battles of this war, which will be fought at Plataea and Mycale.

First, Plataea. After Mardonius determined that the Athenians and the Spartans would not bend to come to terms with him, he leveled Athens and withdrew to the north, to the territories of the Thebans, who were collaborating with the Persians and whose flat, even lands were well suited to heavy cavalry, the signature Persian
military formation. The pursuing Athenians and Spartans now also arrived at this plain in the vicinity of Plataea. Both armies took up positions facing each other, formed into lines—and waited. All sensed that a great moment was approaching, a decisive and deadly one. Days passed, and both sides remained in a disconcerting and enervating motionlessness, asking the gods—each side its own—if the time was right to begin the battle. But the answers were no and no.

During one of those days, a Theban, the Greek collaborator Attaginus, organizes a banquet for Mardonius to which he invites fifty of the most eminent Persians and as many of the most distinguished Thebans, seating each Persian-Theban pair on a separate couch. One of the couches is occupied by Thersander, a Greek, and a Persian whose name Herodotus does not provide. They eat and drink together, and at a certain moment the Persian, clearly in a reflective mood, says to Thersander,
“Look at these Persians here at the banquet, and consider also the army which we have left encamped on the river.”
He has been tormented by premonitions, as is clear from what he says next:
“Before much time has passed you’ll see few of them left alive.” The Persian was weeping as he spoke
. Thersander, still sober, tries to end the sobbing of his dejected and drunk couchmate by saying, quite sensibly:
“Shouldn’t you be telling this to Mardonius and the next highest-ranking Persians?
” To which the Persian replies with a tragic-sounding wisdom:
“My friend, an event which has been decreed by the god cannot be averted by man, for no one is willing to believe even those who tell the truth. A great many Persians are well aware of what I’ve just said, but we follow our leaders because we have no choice. There’s no more terrible pain a man can endure than to see clearly and be able to do nothing.”

The great battle of Plataea, which will end with the defeat of the Persians and will establish Europe’s long-lasting hegemony over
Asia, is preceded by minor skirmishes in which the Persian cavalry attacks the defending Greeks. In one of them, the de facto commanding officer of the Persian army, Masistius, perishes.
Masistius’ horse, which was out in front of the rest, was hit in the side by an arrow, and the pain of the wound made it rear up and unseat him. As soon as Masistius landed on the ground, the Athenians sprang forward, seized the horse and killed Masistius, although he fought back. At first, in fact, they failed to kill him: next to his skin he was wearing a breastplate made of gold scales, with a red tunic on top, so the Athenians’ blows kept hitting the breastplate and achieving nothing. Eventually, however, one of them realized what was happening and struck Masistius in the eye. Only then did he fall to the ground and die
.

A fierce struggle then erupted over the body. The corpse of a leader is a sacred thing. The fleeing Persians fought for its possession as they retreated. But they fought in vain, returning in empty-handed defeat to their camp.
When the cavalry got back to the Persian encampment, Mardonius and the whole of his army were deeply upset to hear of Masistius’ death. They shaved off not only their own hair, but also that of their horses and their yoke-animals, and gave themselves over to unending lamentation. The whole of Boeotia echoed with the sound of mourning, since, after Mardonius, there was no one in Persia who was more highly respected by the Persians in general and the king in particular
.

Whereas the first thing the Greeks did, having managed to hold on to Masistius’s body, was to
load the corpse on to a cart and parade it past their lines. Masistius had been remarkably tall and good-looking (which is in fact why they did this with the body), and the men broke ranks to go and see him
.

All this takes place several days before the great and conclusive battle, which neither side dares initiate because the omens continue to be unfavorable. On the Persian side, the fortune-teller is a certain Hegesistratus, a Greek from the Peloponnese but an enemy of the Spartans and the Athenians.
Hegesistratus had once been arrested and imprisoned by the Spartiates to await execution for the terrible and
horrific treatment they had suffered at his hands. In this desperate situation, because his life was in danger and he was prepared to suffer gruesome agonies rather than die, he did something that defies description. He was being kept in stocks made of wood bound with iron, and somehow got hold of a blade which had been smuggled into the prison. What he then immediately set about doing must have taken more courage than anything else we have ever heard of. He worked out that the rest of his foot would get free of the stocks if he cut off the bulk of his foot, so he proceeded to do so. Then since he was under guard, he dug a hole through the wall and ran away to Tegea, travelling by night and resting by day under the cover of woodland. Although the Lacedaemonians were out looking for him in full force, he managed to reach Tegea two nights after escaping. The Lacedaemonians were amazed by his courage when they found half of his foot lying there, but they could not find him
.

How did he do that?

Cutting off one’s own foot is hard work indeed.

It is not enough to sever the muscles. One also has to saw through the tendons and bones. Self-mutilations have occurred in our times as well: witnesses claim that in the gulags people occasionally cut off their own hands or pierced their stomachs with knives. An incident is even described in which a prisoner nailed his member to a wooden board. The goal was always to free oneself at any cost from the backbreaking labor, to go to the hospital, and there to be able to lie down awhile, to rest. But to cut off one’s foot and then run off immediately?

To escape?

To hurry?

How was this even possible? Most likely by crawling on one’s hands and the other leg. But that mutilated leg must have hurt fiendishly and bled profusely. How did he stanch the blood? Did he not faint from exhaustion during the flight? From thirst? From pain? Did he not feel himself on the verge of madness? Would he
not have seen ghosts? Was he not plagued by hallucinations? Apparitions? Vampires? And did the wound not get infected? After all, he had to scrape that stump over the ground, through dust and dirt—for how else could he drag it along? Did that leg therefore not start to swell? Fill with pus? Turn blue?

And yet despite all this he escapes the Spartans, recovers, whittles himself a wooden prosthesis, and even becomes the soothsayer of Mardonius, commander of the Persians.

Tensions mount near Plataea. After a dozen days of fruitless offerings to the gods, the signs become slightly more favorable and Mardonius decides to commence hostilities. It is an ordinary human weakness: he is in a hurry to rout the enemy, wants to become the satrap of Athens and of all of Greece as quickly as possible. Now
every unit of the Greek army took casualties from the javelins and arrows of the Persian cavalry as they bore down on them
. And when the quivers are emptied, the two armies resort to terrifying hand-to-hand combat. Several hundred thousand men wrestle with one another, grip one another in murderous holds, choke one another in deadly embraces. Whoever has something at hand pounds his opponent over the head with it, or sticks a knife between his ribs, or kicks him in the shins. One can almost hear the collective panting and groaning, the moans and wheezes, the curses and cries!