Meanwhile, however, the vote had served its purpose. The air was cleared and Themistocles had triumphed. Athens would have her two hundred ships. More than two hundred, in fact—for the Athenians, after all their prevarications, appeared suddenly possessed by a quite contrary spirit of nervous energy, as though, having finally grasped the situation, they dreaded that they were doing too little, too late. Agents armed with Laurium silver fanned out urgently across the Aegean, buying timber wherever they could obtain it. Day and night, the shipyards of Piraeus rang to the din of saws and hammers. Warships had been gliding down the slipways since the vote the previous summer, but now they began to do so at the astounding rate of two a week. Nothing but the best would do, and the deadliest and most up-to-date model, the trireme, a slim, ram-headed killing machine equipped with three separate banks of oars, required workmanship of the highest precision. Themistocles, indeed, hands on as ever, had personally insisted on experimenting with a new design, aimed at enhancing “speed and ease of turning”:37 for while high productivity was essential, so too was quality. “A terror to her enemy, a cause of joy to her friends”: such had to be the benchmark for every trireme launched by the democracy.38
Yet soberingly, all the challenges of constructing a fleet were as nothing compared to those of learning how to power and maneuver it. The effective pulling of an oar on a trireme was a notoriously difficult skill to master. “Seamanship, after all, like so much else, is an art. It cannot merely be dabbled with in one’s spare time. Indeed, it allows for no spare time at all.”39 Particularly when time itself, as seemed increasingly likely, might be in short supply. The whole population of Attica needed to be broken urgently to the rowing bench—and even then, Themistocles fretted, there might not be enough citizens to man the swelling fleet. Day after day, as the summer of 482 BC slipped by and darkened into winter, farmers from the remotest olive groves, potters who might never before have left the Ceramicus, “steadfast men of the hoplite class,”40 their armor left behind to gather cobwebs in stable lofts, all practiced, practiced, practiced, enduring the blisters, the perpetual weariness and the aches in strange muscles they had never known they had, only to take out their rowing cushions, lay them on their benches, and set to practicing once again. A brutal crash course—but so it had to be. There were few who still believed, as spring came to Athens in 481 BC, that the enemy they were training to meet was the fleet of Aegina. Rumors of what was being planned for their city by the Great King were by now flooding in from all directions. It was even said, alarmingly, that Xerxes and his army were preparing to leave from Susa that very spring. Foreboding gripped the Athenians—and a longing, amid all the uncertainty and confusion, to know the worst. Then at last, from a most unexpected quarter, there came some definite news.
It was the Spartans who had received them: a pair of blank writing tablets. Much perplexity had greeted this cryptic delivery until the ever bright-eyed Gorgo, wife of King Leonidas, had suggested scraping away the wax—and a message had been found inscribed on the wood that lay beneath. It had been written by Demaratus: a warning of the plans of the King of Kings. The Spartans confessed that they did not know if this tip-off revealed “a benignant care for his people or a malicious sense of joy”;41 and yet how strange it was, and how alarming, that there was any doubt at all as to the defector’s motivation. A message that had mysteriously made it past every checkpoint on the Royal Roads, that was calculated to chill the blood of its recipients, that had boosted the image of the puppet king in waiting: this had the fingerprints of the Persian dirty-tricks department all over it. The Spartans, although they lacked the Athenians’ enthusiasm for broadcasting their differences in public, were not lacking their own internal divisions. Demaratus’ message could only have been written with the intention of widening these, between the hawks, confident of victory against any opponent who might dare to challenge them, even the King of Kings himself, and the more pessimistic, those who quietly dreaded that the gods had sentenced them to ruin, and that the hour of their doom was drawing near.
Both Demaratus and his controllers in Persian intelligence would certainly have been well aware that the latter group was no small minority in Sparta. The ghosts of Darius’ heralds, murdered a decade previously by Cleomenes, were widely feared to be haunting Lacedaemon, calling to the heavens for vengeance—as, of course, was their right. So conscience-racked were some Spartans, indeed, that two prominent Heraclids, frantic to expiate their city’s sacrilege, had adopted the desperate expedient of traveling to Susa and offering themselves up to the King of Kings as a sacrifice. Xerxes, far too shrewd to take up this startling offer, had graciously spared them—for why should he deign to relieve the Spartans from the debilitating burden of their guilt? Demaratus’ news, as it was designed to do, served only to compound their dread. Most cursed the traitor: dredging up old scandal, they smeared him as the bastard of a helot, the fruit of his mother’s rolling with a stinking stable hand, fit to be an Asiatic’s slave. Others, however, realizing that Demaratus might be the only man who stood between them and total ruin, and acknowledging that he had opposed Cleomenes and his impious excesses at every turn, began whispering differently. They too repeated rumors of Demaratus’ paternity; but they called him the son, not of a slave, but of the phantom of a legendary hero, halfway to a god.42
Naturally, it still went without saying that the Spartans, if the Great King did invade the Peloponnese, would stand and block his way. But if even they, the bravest warriors in the world, were racked by self-doubt, how were the men of lesser states supposed to steel their nerves? As spring turned to summer the choice for every city in Greece became unavoidable: resistance or appeasement. No longer could the prospect of a Persian invasion be dismissed as an alarmist fantasy of ambitious politicians such as Themistocles. It was now evident even to the most obdurate skeptic that all the rumors of Xerxes’ departure from Susa had been true: he was indeed heading west. By early autumn, so it was reported from Ionia, he had arrived at Sardis—and still, flocking to his banner, his vast dominions continued to empty themselves upon his command. The Great King and all his hordes were coming. By the spring of the following year, it would have begun: the advance of the largest army ever assembled, over the Hellespont, into Europe, and then down, like a wolf upon the fold, on to Greece. Those who lived there, in what might easily prove to be their last winter of freedom, could now shudder with a dreadful certitude as to whom the Great King’s target was going to be.