Such a scheme had been long in the preparation. The mover behind it was a Eupatrid grandee by the name of Pericles, a seasoned political operator who had first demonstrated his passion for eye-catching cultural projects by sponsoring, back in 472 BC, Aeschylus’ celebrated tragedy on the Persians. Pericles certainly brought an unrivaled pedigree to his taste for grands projets: the son of Xanthippus, he was also, on his mother’s side, an Alcmaeonid. This meant, of course, that he was the heir to a long family tradition of sponsoring monuments on the Acropolis; but no Alcmaeonid had ever been presented with an opportunity such as Pericles was grasping now. The barbarian holocaust had ravaged the entire summit of the rock, so that it was not a single temple but the whole Acropolis that Pericles was planning to rebuild. By employing the cream of Athenian talent, including the great sculptor Phidias, he aimed to raise, as he put it, “marks and monuments of our city’s empire” so perfect that “future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now.”81 In 447 BC, work began on a temple designed to be the most sumptuous and beautiful ever built. Subsequent generations would know it as the Parthenon.*20
However, bold and original though all the new monuments on the Acropolis were destined to be, they still had their foundations deep in the bedrock of what had gone before. The Parthenon, for instance, that daring monument to the new age of Athenian greatness, was being raised on the scorched base of an older, unfinished building: the great temple that had been begun in the 480s BC as a celebration of the victory at Marathon. Now, with his plans for the Acropolis, Pericles was looking to enshrine the memory of Marathon for all eternity. Remembrances of the battle were to be everywhere on the sacred rock. Whether in the ground plan of the Parthenon itself, or in trophies raised to the victory, or in friezes illustrating the fighting, the greatest moment in Athenian history was to be celebrated with a brilliance that would proclaim Athens not merely the savior of Greece, but her school and mistress, too.
For those who had fallen at Marathon were not altogether dead. Leave behind the dust and din of the building site on the Acropolis in the morning, and an Athenian might reach the battlefield by nightfall. There, silhouetted against the stars, he would see the great tumulus which had been raised over the honored ashes of the slain, and beside it a more recent monument, lovingly crafted out of white marble, barely a decade old. The most potent, and the eeriest, memorial, however, could not be seen—only heard. Every night, it was said, ghostly across the plain, strange sounds of fighting would disturb the midnight calm: the ringing of metal, the hiss of arrows, war cries, trampling, screams. No other field of battle that had been contested with the barbarians could boast of such a visitation; and an Athenian, although he would have dreaded to approach the phantoms, would perhaps have found in their presence a certain source of civic pride. They had been actors, after all, in the greatest drama in history—when Athens had stood alone and preserved the liberty of all Greece. “For they were the fathers not merely of children, of mortal flesh and blood, but of their children’s freedom, and of the freedom of every person who dwells in the continent of the West.”82 Everything stemmed from Marathon; everything was justified by it, too.
Beyond the plain, with its monuments, graves and ghosts, the road wound on northward, leading over empty hills to a single temple on a slope above the sea. This was Rhamnus, where it was said that Zeus, having pursued Nemesis across the whole world, had finally brought her to earth. From that one rape had been hatched Helen, the Trojan War and all the long, violent story of hatred between East and West. It had brought Datis the Mede and his great armada to Marathon, barely five miles to the south; “and so sure was he that nothing could stop him from taking Athens that he had brought with him a block of marble, from which he intended to carve a trophy in celebration of his victory.”83 After the defeat of his expedition, the block of marble had been found abandoned on the battlefield; and so the locals had hauled it off to Rhamnus. No better place for it could have been imagined—for the temple that stood there above the slope that led down to the sea was sacred to Nemesis herself. It was clearly her anger that had doomed the barbarians’ expedition; and so plans had been made to build a second temple to her, and as a memorial to Marathon. It was intended to fashion the marble into a likeness of the goddess. The great Phidias had been asked to carve it. As on the Acropolis, so at Rhamnus, an Athenian might aim to glimpse the future. If he arrived where the marble block stood, waiting to be carved, he might easily imagine that he could see within the spectral purity of its whiteness a foreshadowing of the sculpture that was to be; that he was catching a glimpse of the face of Nemesis herself.
Envoi
In 431 BC, the growing tensions between Athens and Sparta finally erupted into open hostilities. The ensuing struggle, which the Athenians called “the Peloponnesian War,” lasted on and off for twenty-seven years. It ended in 404 BC with the total defeat of Athens. Her empire was dismantled, her fleet destroyed and her democracy suspended. Although in the following century she would stage a spectacular recovery, Athens would never again be the predominant power in Greece.
Nor, after 371 BC, would Sparta. One hundred and eight years after Pausanias had won his great victory over Mardonius, the Spartan army was brought to sensational defeat by the Thebans at the village of Leuctra, barely five miles from Plataea. The Thebans, pressing home their advantage, then invaded Lacedaemon. The Peloponnesian League was abolished. Messenia was freed. Sparta, deprived of her helots, was reduced overnight from being the hegemon of Greece to a middle-ranking power.
Over the following decades, the Greek cities would continue to tear themselves apart. Meanwhile, to the north, a new predator was readying itself for the murderous struggle to be the greatest power in Greece. In 338 BC, King Philip II of Macedon, following in the footsteps of Xerxes, swept southward into Boeotia. An army of Athenians and Thebans, attempting to bar his way, was cut to pieces. “We lie here because we strove to give freedom to Greece.” So it was written on the tomb of the fallen. “The glory we enjoy will never age.”1 Proud words—but not even the most stirring epitaph could obscure the grim reality that Greek independence had effectively been brought to an end. Four years later, and Philip’s son, Alexander, crossed the Hellespont to assault the Persian Empire. Now it was the turn of the Great King to have his power humbled into the dust. Three great battles in succession were lost to the invader. Babylon fell. Persepolis was burned. The last King of Kings suffered a squalid and thirst-racked death. Alexander laid claim to the kidaris of Cyrus, and to an empire that stretched from the Adriatic to the Indus.
For the first time, Greece and Persia acknowledged the rule of a single master.
Even Nemesis, perhaps, might have permitted herself a smile.
Timeline
All dates are BC.
c. 1250: The Trojan War.
c. 1200: The destruction of the royal palaces at Mycenae and Sparta.