19. The King of Kings seated on his throne. This is probably a representation of Darius—in which case the Crown Prince standing behind the throne is Xerxes. Alternatively, the King may be Xerxes himself. Artists at the Persian court were employed to portray idealized representations of royal power, not to draw from real life. (National Museum of Iran, Tehran/Bridgeman Art Library)
20. A frieze of palm leaves and sunflowers from Xerxes’ private quarters at Persepolis. Gardens and the beauties of the natural world were a universal passion among the Persian elite.
21. The Great King, symbolically borne on the shoulders of his soldiers. The invasion of Greece was not merely a military expedition—it was also designed to demonstrate the full scale and reach of royal power. (Sadie Holland)
22. An ostracon cast in the 480s BC, when dread of Persia was starting to infect political life in Athens. This particular shard was cast against “Callias the son of Cratius”; the rough sketch on its reverse side, showing Callias as a Persian archer, makes clear the crime of which he was suspected. (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Athens)
23. Themistocles: “the subtle serpent of Greece.” (Werner Forman/CORBIS)
24. A fragment of a relief from Persepolis, showing a chariot pulled by Nisaean horses. This was the form of transport that Xerxes used to cross the Hellespont. (British Museum)
25. Persian infantrymen, from a frieze discovered at Susa. The richness and beauty of their robes suggest that they belong to the Immortals, the elite squad of 10,000 who served the Great King as his shock troops. (Gianni Dagli Orti/CORBIS)
26. A view of the beach at Artemisium as it looks today. Back in 480 BC, the ships of the Greek fleet could easily be hauled up onto the shingle or launched back into the sea as the movements of the enemy demanded. (Tom Holland)
27. A coin from the fourth century BC, showing a Sidonian warship. Slim, shield-hung and sublimely maneuverable, Phoenician triremes moved faster than anything the Greek fleet could pitch against them. (British Museum)
28. This bust of a Spartan warrior has traditionally been taken to represent Leonidas, the king who lead the 300 men of his bodyguard to their heroic deaths at Thermopylae. Whether it is truly a portrait of Leonidas or not—and the overwhelming probability must be that it is not—it powerfully expresses the resolution and defiance that Spartans were trained all their life to attain. (The Art Archive/Archaeological Museum Sparta/Dagli Orti)
29. Thermopylae, seen from the heights above the East Gate. Back in 480 BC, the flatlands stretching away from the pass to the east would have been submerged beneath the waters of the Malian Gulf. Otherwise, this is essentially the view that Hydarnes and the Immortals would have had as they descended from the mountain pass to attack the Greek holding force in its rear. (Tom Holland)
30. This relief, sculpted some eighty years after the battle of Salamis, shows the midsection of a Greek warship. Banks of straining rowers pull on oars. (Bridgeman/Alinari Archives)
31. Modern-day Salamis. The straits in which the Persian fleet were defeated are now crowded with tankers, warships and speedboats. The topography, however, has stayed essentially the same. This is the view from the entrance to the straits. A full view of them is only possible once a ship has advanced further into the channel. (Tom Holland)
32. Down, and almost out. The Persian defeat at Plataea finished off the Great King’s hopes of conquering Greece for good. (National Museums of Scotland)
33. A view from the Pnyx, where Themistocles rallied his fellow citizens to defiance of the Persian juggernaut, looking eastward toward the Acropolis. On the summit of the sacred rock stand the ruins of the Parthenon: the most beautiful war memorial ever built. (Bridgeman/Alinari Archives)
6
THE GATHERING STORM
Weeds in Paradise
Marathon, trumpeted by the Athenians as the greatest victory of all time, was regarded by the King of Kings in an understandably different light. True, Persian propagandists were hardly in the habit of drawing attention to their master’s setbacks—yet neither was it entirely stretching a point for them to dismiss the battle as a minor border skirmish. While it was certainly to be regretted that the pestilential Athenians had managed to wriggle free of their punishment, the failure to take their city detracted only mildly from an expedition that had otherwise been a great success. Anyone doubting this had only to watch the Eretrians as they were led cringeing through the streets of Susa. Darius, exceedingly gracious, responded to the spectacle of his captives’ misery and submission by ordering their chains struck off and settling them just to the north of modern-day Basra. This region was already widely celebrated for the mysterious black liquid that bubbled up from beneath its sands, and the smell of what the Persians called “rhadinake” hung heavy in the air—a far cry from the salt tang of the Aegean. Just as the Judaeans had once wept beside the rivers of Babylon, so now the Eretrians mourned their homeland amid the oil wells of southern Iraq. “Farewell, famous Eretria, our country no more. Farewell, Athens, once our neighbour across the straits. Farewell, beloved sea.”1 Their exile, as Darius had recognized, was punishment enough.
Such magnanimity, of course, could only ever be the sunshine after the storm of the Great King’s righteous anger. On Athens, that obdurate stronghold of daivas and the Lie, the death sentence still stood as immutably as before. But not on Athens alone. The sin committed by the Spartans in murdering the Great King’s ambassadors had been neither forgotten nor forgiven, and Darius, reformulating his western strategy in the aftermath of Marathon, was now resolved that Sparta as well as Athens should be destroyed. By good fortune, his intelligence chiefs, always at the forefront of the Great King’s military planning, had recently pulled off a particularly spectacular coup: the recruitment as an agent of none other than a former king from that closed and mysterious city. Demaratus, publicly insulted by Leotychides in the full view of the Spartan people, had finally snapped: making his way first by stealth and then in open flight to the court at Susa, he had been greeted there with lavish marks of favor—and pumped greedily for information.2 The defector, already homesick for his city, had duly answered his interrogators with an unstinting and embittered relish.
Yet, for all that Demaratus found himself pushing at an open door when encouraging his patrons to consider an invasion of the Peloponnese, Darius’ plans for conquest could not easily be hurried. Whereas Datis’ expedition had been little more than a glorified razzia, the full-scale pacification of a land as remote and mountainous as Greece was a challenge of a wholly different order of complexity. The wheels of Persian bureaucracy ground both slowly and exceeding small. In June 486 BC, three years after Darius had first given orders for the mobilization of his empire, the Egyptians, oppressed by their master’s ceaseless demands for grain and levies, rose in sudden revolt. From Athens, the gaze of the Great King swung abruptly southward. Egypt, so rich, so fertile, so golden, was far too precious a prize to be risked for the barren wilds of Greece. A task force that had imagined Athens its target was duly ordered to prepare itself instead for an assault on the land of the Nile. As summer shaded into the blessed cool of autumn, preparations were made for its departure from Persia. The King of Kings readied himself to ride in person at its head.