Even as he celebrated his victory, though, his fellow citizens would not have been left entirely purged of a residual fear. It was all very well for Aeschylus to claim that Salamis had left the Great King “denuded of men capable of defending him,”70 but why, in that case, were Persian garrisons still in Thrace and beside the Hellespont? What were they doing in Sardis? How could they be in every capital of every satrapy, to the limits of the rising of the sun? Far from tottering, the empire of the Great King in truth remained on foundations as solid and formidable as ever. That the mighty edifice had received the odd chip to its western facade was indisputable, but few within the vast extent of the empire would have realized even that. The Great King, after all, was hardly in the habit of broadcasting his failures. If his subjects had ever heard of Athens, then it was only as a city that their master had put to the torch. If they had ever heard of the Spartans, then it was only as a people whose king their master had killed in battle. “May Ahura Mazda, and all the gods, protect me. And may he protect my kingdom. And may he protect all that I have laboured to build.”71 So Xerxes was in the habit of praying. And who was to say that Ahura Mazda did not listen to him still?
But Aeschylus, imagining “the people of Asia” restless beneath the Persian yoke, had not been indulging entirely in wishful thinking. Why, after all, had the Great King hurried away from Sardis—and why exactly had he failed to return? The solution to the mystery lay far distant from Greece, in that cockpit of the Near East, Babylon. There, late in the campaigning season of 479 BC, even as Xerxes was being brought the disastrous news of Plataea and Mycale, a fresh revolt had broken out.72 The Great King, to his horror, had found himself caught between two fronts. Abandoning his campaign on the fractious periphery of his empire, Xerxes had sped back to its heartland—where the insurrection, sure enough, had been easily suppressed. Babylon, taught its lesson once and for all, had remained quiescent from that moment onward. But Xerxes himself, it appears, despite the successful pacification of the rebellion, had also absorbed a painful lesson. Cyrus, Cambyses and Darius had all taken it for granted that the frontiers of Persian dominion would prove infinite. Darius, in particular, that devout and cynical autocrat, had proclaimed that he was entrusted not merely with the right but with a sacred duty to subdue the Lie wherever he found it, to the very limits of the world. At least as pious in the worship of Ahura Mazda as his father, Xerxes had inherited this sense of global mission along with the imperial tiara. This, after all, was why he had led the invasion of the West. But that invasion had failed; and the chariot of the Lord Mazda, ridden with such awful ceremony along the pontoon over the Hellespont, had ended up stolen by a gang of Thracian brigands and dumped in a field. To the Greeks, the bridging of Asia and Europe, and the desire to rule both continents, had always seemed the most fatal of the Great King’s follies; and perhaps, in his heart of hearts, Xerxes had come to agree. Certainly, there would be no more attempts to conquer Europe following his return from Sardis. It was Xerxes, of all Persia’s kings, who had been obliged to accept an uncomfortable truth, and one that for once was not synonymous with his own country’s order: that even the mightiest empires can suffer from overstretch.
Imperial forces had not given up the fight in the Aegean—but they were no longer in the vanguard of a scheme of global conquest. The Great King’s defeat in the West had dealt a fatal blow to that vaunting dream. Persian ambitions were now infinitely more modest: merely to stabilize control of Ionia. Even when basking in the afterglow of the victory at Mycale, Leotychides had recognized that this would be the Great King’s policy, and he dreaded the inability of the Greeks to stand in its way. But when he had proposed the transplanting of the Ionians from their cities and their resettlement on the mainland, Xanthippus had exploded with indignation. He had protested that it was not for the Spartans to propose the dissolution of what were, originally, Athenian colonies; and he had pledged his city eternally to the defense of Ionian freedom. “And after he and his fellow citizens had expressed themselves with great vigour, the Peloponnesians at length gave way.”73
So it was that the ethnic cleansing of the Greeks from Asia was postponed for 2400 years, until the era of Atatürk; and the claim of Athens to the command of the continued war against Persia was made explicit. One year later and it was formalized as well. An alliance was legally constituted, with its treasury on Apollo’s sacred island of Delos, and subscription fees measured in either ships or cash. The Ionians, the islanders, the Greeks of the Hellespont: almost all signed up. With the added muscle that this new Delian League provided them, the Athenians could now take the attack directly to the barbarian. Throughout the 470s BC, Persian garrisons in Thrace and around the Hellespont were systematically reduced. The following decade witnessed even more spectacular successes. Led by Cimon, the dashing son of Miltiades, the Athenians swept the enemy from the Aegean, and fostered rebellion throughout Ionia and Caria. The climax of these triumphs came in 466 BC, when Cimon, confronted by the largest concentration of Persian forces to have been marshaled since the year of Salamis, won a sensational double victory. First, gliding into the mouth of the Eurymedon, a river in the south of what is now Turkey, he wiped out an entire Phoenician fleet. Next, landing his weary marines on shore, he inflicted the same treatment upon the imperial army. It was this battle, once and for all, that destroyed any lingering prospect of a third Persian invasion. Security had been won for Greece at last. The great war, in effect, was over.
But Athens, the city that had secured the victory at the Eurymedon, appeared to shrink from a sense of her own achievement: as though she could not bear to abandon a struggle that had served for thirty long years to define her. So that Persia, in the prayers offered up by the Assembly, continued to be named as the national enemy. So too that the Athenians, having run the Persians out of the Aegean but still addicted to making war on them, voted to hunt them down in foreign fields. In 460, a huge armada was dispatched to Cyprus and Egypt. Six years of fighting later, it had been comprehensively wiped out. The Athenians, in a panic that the barbarians might now come sweeping back into the Aegean, hurriedly removed the headquarters of the league from Delos to their own city. Even when the Persians failed to materialize in Greek waters, the treasury remained on the Acropolis. Naturally, just as they had always done, the Athenians required that subscriptions to the league be paid in full. Liberty, as they pointed out, did not come cheap. But many of the increasingly disgruntled allies began to mutter that Athenian-sponsored freedom was proving a good deal more expensive than slavery to the King of Kings had ever been.
That a Greek pledged to the overthrow of Persian despotism might himself start to ape the manners of a Persian was not, in the decades that followed the great invasion, a wholly novel paradox. Pausanias, for instance, giddy with conceit, had become a notorious enthusiast for barbarian chic. His countrymen, appalled to see a general of the Spartan people swanning around on campaign sporting the trousers of a satrap, had grown increasingly suspicious of their erstwhile hero. A mere decade after Plataea, the ephors accused him of plotting to overthrow the state. Pausanias, taking sanctuary inside the bronze-walled temple on the Spartan acropolis, was walled up there to starve; only at the very last moment was his emaciated body hauled out, so that his death would not pollute the shrine. The man who had laughed at the wealth of the Great King’s table only himself to develop a gluttonous taste for Persian haute cuisine duly expired of hunger.