A few weeks later and the whole expedition had been humiliatingly aborted. The smooth-talking Thessalians who had persuaded the allies to embark upon it had, it proved, skated over a number of inconvenient details. First: a rival faction in Thessaly had already signed up to the Persians. Second: Tempe was not in fact the only pass through the northern mountains. Third: the whole area was already swarming with enemy agents, and had been for years, ever since the dominant faction in Thessaly, looking to finish off their rivals for good, had first made contact with Xerxes’ spy chiefs and suggested their master launch an invasion. The allied task force, far from securing an impregnable position for itself, had walked into a trap. With a civil war brewing in their rear, and no chance of securing all the mountain passes into Thessaly, Euainetus and Themistocles had no sooner dug themselves in at Tempe than they were deciding to cut their losses and make a dash for it back home. It was undoubtedly the correct decision, and one that saved the lives of ten thousand men—but the ignominy of the withdrawal could hardly help but send a shudder through the rest of Greece. All the rival factions in Thessaly, now that they had been abandoned to the barbarians, began to medize frantically; collaborators in cities further south felt confirmed in their own view of themselves as realists; those still committed to the fight sank into a paralyzed despair. Before the rising tide of menace, growing darker by the day, it appeared that the allies had only one policy: retreat. Whisperings that the Persians were invincible grew louder. Such was the talk even in those cities committed to resistance when, in late May, news that the Great King and his army had safely crossed the Hellespont broke like a thunderclap over Greece.69
It was in Athens that the shock was felt most keenly—and there that the impasse over strategy appeared most ominous and fateful. Facing the prospect not merely of defeat, like the citizens of other cities, but of obliteration, the Athenian people, in their extremity, turned for guidance to Apollo.70 Leaving Attica, skirting warily past Thebes, climbing the foothills of Mount Parnassus, the Athenian emissaries were soon on the winding and increasingly lonely road that led between jagged peaks and past walls of fissured rock to Delphi. Once they had arrived there, they were led first through the cluttered gaudiness of the shrine to the Castalian spring, and then, having purified themselves in its freezing waters and offered up a sacrifice before the flames of the eternal fire, back to the temple itself. At the far end of the inner sanctuary, obscured by a jumble of ancient treasures, the Pythia waited for them, sunk within deepest shadow. Compared to the net-covered stone of the Omphalos, or the sacred laurel tree, or the lyre of the god, all of them crammed into the tiny chamber alongside her, the Pythia, an old woman in a young girl’s dress, appeared almost a thing of grotesquerie, ill suited, certainly, to be the vessel of golden Apollo. Already, however, as vapors from the cauldron she was perched upon caressed her parted thighs and curled beneath the skirt of her virgin’s tunic, she was shuddering with mantic ecstasy: the trance had come upon her. The Athenians, guided by the priests, took their seats beside the doorway; and at once the Pythia, without even waiting to hear their question, began to spasm with the urgency of her possession by the god. “Why sit down, you wretches?” she cried, her accent distorted and terror-stricken. “Get out of here, flee, flee, flee to the ends of the world!” Words spewed out in horror soared and stumbled in a savage rhythm, conjuring up images of carnage, and fire, and annihilation. The god of war was coming, the wheels of his Syrian chariot rattling, towers crumbling in his wake. The temples of Athens would burn. Black blood would drown the city. “Go, go, leave the sanctuary, surrender to your grief!”71
Tottering out weakly into the sunlight, the Athenian emissaries found themselves with little option but to do as the Pythia had instructed, and slump down in despair. So all was settled, then: the hour of their city’s doom was at hand. Or was it? A priest, seemingly as shocked by the Pythia’s vision as the Athenians themselves had been, hurried after the emissaries, and urged them to approach the oracle a second time. To a skeptic, this might have seemed suspiciously like bet-hedging. And so indeed, perhaps, it was; the priesthood, after all, had to consider its own future. While understandably anxious not to antagonize the Great King, it could not afford to stake all its chips on a Persian walkover. Every eventuality—even one as improbable as a Greek victory—had to be covered. It would have been only politic, then, for the priests to have allowed their Athenian guests at least a glimmering of hope.
Yet cynicism, as the fatal example of Cleomenes had demonstrated, might well be pushed too far. Not every ambiguity uttered by the oracle could be dismissed as mere calculation. To sneer at Delphi was to sneer at the divine. The assumption behind the priest’s advice to the Athenians—that Apollo, having delivered them a forecast of unmitigated pessimism, might somehow be persuaded to temper it with a rosier one—was not necessarily far fetched. A god’s wisdom, by its very nature, was something mysterious and infinite. Matters were rarely, with Apollo, altogether as they seemed. If Delphi, as most Greeks took for granted, did indeed open a portal to the supernatural, then the glimpses of the future that this afforded might well appear to flicker and change like fire.
The Athenians, then, following the priest’s advice, were not wholly nonplussed when the Pythia, seeing them a second time, did indeed fall into a renewed frenzy and start chanting fresh prophecies. “Athena cannot mollify the power of Olympian Zeus,” she warned, “although she begs him with all her eloquence and subtlety.” So far, so depressing—but then, abruptly, a flash of hope: “And yet,” the Pythia moaned:
And yet—this word I give you, adamant, a promise:
Everything within the borders of Attica shall fall,
Yes, and the sacred vales of nearby mountain ranges,
But the wooden wall alone, the wooden wall shall stand,
That much Zeus grants to Athena, as an aid to you and all your children.
Men on horses, men on foot, sweeping they come from Asia:
Retreat, for soon enough you will meet with them face to face.
Divine Salamis—you will be the ruin of many a mother’s son,
When the seed is scattered, or the harvest is gathered in.72
And with these final, cryptic phrases, the Pythia woke abruptly from her trance; and all fell silent in Apollo’s shrine once again.
What on earth had she been talking about? The Athenian emissaries, without really having the faintest idea, were just relieved that her second batch of verses sounded cheerier than the first, and gratefully took the transcript back to Athens. There it was exhaustively dissected. Debate and perplexity were general. One phrase, in particular, served to polarize opinion: “the wooden wall.” Themistocles’ opponents, displaying a prodigious capacity for lateral thinking, proposed that this was a reference to the wattle fence that in the time of Erechtheus had ringed the summit of the Acropolis. Themistocles himself, with more plausibility, argued that it referred to ships. Why else, he argued, would the Pythia have mentioned the island of Salamis? Yes, retorted his opponents, but she had failed to mention which mothers—Greek or barbarian—would mourn their sons. True enough, Themistocles hit back: but had not Salamis been hailed by her as “divine”? And so the arguments raged on.