A less than cheery send-off, it might have been thought. In fact, grisly though this blood offering certainly was, and an increasingly fly-blown one at that, yet it broadcast to the jumpy levies passing between it a potent message of reassurance. The demands of ritual as well as justice had doomed the son of Pythius. The sacrifice of a human life was an act pregnant with fearful magic, a magic that Xerxes, hoping to purify his army, had now dared to harness. The Great King himself, trusting in the judgment of the Magi that the eclipse had been a favorable portent, had his private doubts whether there was in fact any evil that needed keeping at bay; but he also knew, with Sardis so shadow-haunted, that it was better to play things safe. Certainly, as his troops prepared to venture into the wilds of a new continent, they could do so confident that there was nothing their royal master would not countenance in his drive for victory.
Nor, as the Great King neared Europe, did he neglect to toy with the superstitions of his foes. Devout in the worship of Ahura Mazda he may have been—yet Xerxes had the traditional Persian genius for turning the religious sensibilities of alien peoples to his advantage. This was why, having closed in on the Hellespont, he took the opportunity to break his journey and explore a site that to him would have appeared merely a grass-covered series of bumps, but to the Greeks meant infinitely more: Troy. By ordering the Magi to pour libations upon the site, Xerxes was self-consciously laying claim to the role that the Greeks, in their terror, had already given him: that of nemesis for the carnage wrought by Agamemnon. Vengeance, on behalf of all the men of Asia slaughtered in the Trojan dust, was to be the King of King’s. Just as Troy had once done, Athens and Sparta were shortly to burn.
Then, with the Pisistratids no doubt whispering helpful encouragements from the side, a thousand oxen were driven up the hill, and the whole lot immolated on the summit as an offering to Athena. This, since the goddess had always been notorious for her loathing of the Trojans, might have been thought a maladroit gesture—except that Xerxes, by displaying his respect for the protectress of Athens so extravagantly, was sending the Athenians a very public message. The Athena worshipped in their city was no Olympian, but rather a demon who had taken on her form, one of the daivas, a servant of the Lie. The King of Kings, pledged though he was to burn the Acropolis, was no enemy of the true goddess, whose worship, in the company of the Pisistratids, he would shortly be restoring. Only with Athens under Persian rule could Athena return to her ancient home—and that moment, in the spring of 480 BC, was drawing ever nearer.
For the Great King, from the summit of Troy, could see at last, beyond the plain on which so many Greeks and Trojans had once fought and died, the fateful glittering of the Hellespont. Further along the straits, where Asia and Europe stood separated by barely a couple of miles of sea, twin pontoon bridges were awaiting him, their immense cables chaining together the two continents, proof against the currents and the raging of the winds. That winter, it was true, a particularly ferocious gale had swept away two prototypes of the pontoon, but the Persian high command, having decapitated a few engineers pour encourager les autres, and with plenty of ships and manpower to spare, had quickly made good the repairs. Even the Hellespont appeared to have been taught to behave itself: a few symbolic touches of the whip, a set of fetters dropped into its waters, and the sea had been peaceable ever since. Now, as Xerxes descended from the grass-covered hill of Troy, all was ready for him: his army massed along the beaches and plains of Abydos, the city nearest to the bridgehead; his fleet, gliding into the straits, cramping the fish with beating oars. The locals, having correctly gauged the kind of welcoming gift that might prove acceptable to a world monarch, had erected a throne of white marble on a promontory overlooking the awe-inspiring scene. When he arrived, the Great King duly took his seat to admire the view.
“And from where he sat, gazing out across the bay, he could take in the spectacle of his army and his navy in a single sweep . . . And when he saw the whole of the Hellespont covered with ships, and all the beaches and plains of Abydos filled with men, Xerxes counted himself truly blessed.”62 The world was all before him: a spectacle of outright global dominion such as no king had ever staged before. Of intimidation, too. The extravaganza may have been flamboyant, and self-consciously theatrical in its mustering of levies from around the world, but the parade, beneath its flummery, bared fearsome teeth. The Great King, concerned even amid the ecstasy of the moment to demonstrate his enthusiasm for quality as well as quantity, sent messengers to the various naval contingents, instructing them to demonstrate their proficiency in a rowing match. Only once the regatta had been staged—and won, inevitably, by the Sidonians—did he decree that preparations for the crossing should commence.
All afternoon they took, all evening, all night. Finally, with the horizon lightening to their right, the Immortals, wearing wreaths in their hair and holding their spears upside down, assembled in serried formation beside the eastern bridge, while distantly, from the other, there drifted the sound of pack animals, the braying of donkeys, the complaining of camels; and over them all, from glowing braziers, perfumes of incense billowed upward to meet the dawn. The King of Kings himself, emerging past the Immortals and treading over boughs of myrtle, walked to the edge of the bridge. By now, beyond the straits, the silhouette of Europe was growing clearer by the minute—until, from the east, the first ray of sunlight touched the Hellespont, and Xerxes, pouring wine from a golden cup into the sea, raised a prayer of supplication to the heavens for the success of his great enterprise. When he was done, he dropped the cup into the black currents, then a golden bowl, and finally a sword. The ceremony was over. The crossing could begin. And the sun, touching the ranks of the Immortals as they advanced onto the creaking bridge, caught the gold and silver apples on their spears, so that they seemed, as they advanced, to be moving points of light.*16
Seven days in all it took the task force to pass from Asia into Europe. The army crossed the eastern pontoon; the baggage trains the western. No one knows for sure when Xerxes himself rode onto the bridge: some said that it was on the second day; others that he was the very last man to make the crossing. What is certain, however, is that the expedition made it over the Hellespont without mishap—and that the achievement, to those who witnessed it, appeared to be the work less of a man than of a god. “Why, O Zeus,” one local is said to have exclaimed, watching the King of Kings ride by, “have you gone to the bother of disguising yourself as a mortal from Persia, and giving yourself the name of Xerxes, and summoning the world to follow you, all for the purpose of annihilating Greece? Surely that was something that you could have done more simply on your own!”63
Drawing a Line
At around the same time as Xerxes was leaving Sardis, a delegation from Sparta was heading north to attend a congress of the allies at the Isthmus. Its mood would have been a good deal less cheery than the Great King’s. Spartans tended to be bad travelers at the best of times, and the spring of 480 BC was decidedly not the best of times. The news that almost two million barbarians were making for their city might have been thought sobering enough. Yet not even the ultimate in invasion scares could entirely eclipse for the Spartans a more traditional source of paranoia. Crabbed and provincial in their anxieties as in so much else, their supreme dread remained, as it had always been, revolt in their own backyard. The helots, kept ignorant of anything beyond the brute facts of their serfdom, could be counted upon to have heard little, even by that spring, of the Great King’s approach; but few others would have been similarly oblivious. In cities long subordinate to Sparta, and resentful of it, the prospect of swapping a local superpower for a global one was prompting gimlet-eyed calculations. Even en route to Corinth, the Spartan delegation to the congress at the Isthmus would have passed cities darkly rumored to be rife with medizers. One of these, just inside the border with Tegea, was Caryae—a town so intimately linked to the rest of Lacedaemon that girls from Sparta would regularly travel there to go dancing. Tegea herself, in recent years, had also shown a worrying tendency toward insubordination—even going so far as to indulge on occasion “in open spats with Sparta.”64 These, however, were mere pinpricks of concern compared to the city that remained Sparta’s bitterest and most poisonous foe, crippled, maybe, since the slaughter at Sepeia, but hungry still for revenge and for what she saw as her ancient birthright: dominance of the Peloponnese. The Spartan delegates, as they headed north for Corinth, could hardly have failed to cast an uneasy sideways glance in the direction of Argos.