Only the votes of the Assembly could ultimately serve to settle them. Such was the wisdom of Apollo: to have given Athens an oracle that did not merely hold up a mirror to her innermost doubts but obliged her to resolve them on her own. It was as the citizens of a democracy that the Athenian people were facing their supreme test; and it was as the citizens of a democracy that they would decide how best to meet it. A date was set in early June for the formal debate on the oracle, which would also, of course, serve to determine once and for all how they were to fight the looming war. With the Great King now only weeks away from their city, the Athenian people could no longer afford to prevaricate. At long last, they would be obliged either to back Themistocles and his strategy, or to reject them both for good.
Venue for the momentous debate was that first and most imposing of monuments raised by the democracy to itself: the great meeting-place hollowed out two and a half decades previously from the hill of the Pnyx. As they took their seats there amid the dust and scent of thyme, the voters could see before them an unrivaled panorama of their city, and of that blessed landscape from which, in the beginning, the first Athenians had sprung. In the distance, almost bleached of color by the purity of the Attic light, the outline of Mount Pentelikon and the roads that led to Marathon. In the foreground, the Agora, with its great twin nudes of the tyrannicides and its gleaming new civic monuments. Rising just to its right, and most imposing of all, the holy rock of the Acropolis. Cluttered as its summit still was with the detritus of aristocracy—family shrines, statues, votive shields and bronzes—there were, even on this most sacrosanct of sites, imposing marks of the new order. The venerable but shabby temple of Athena Polias, for instance, once a showcase for Boutad exclusivity, was long gone, replaced, during the first decade of the democracy, by an imposing structure infinitely better suited to the dignity of the goddess, and of the Athenian people themselves. The flamboyantly decorated sanctuary raised by the Alcmaeonids midway through the previous century had also been demolished, torn down even as ostracism was destroying the family’s political base. In its place, work had begun on a magnificent new temple, conceived as a celebration of Marathon and an expression of gratitude to Athena for her protection. Looking across from the Pnyx, the voters could see the scaffolding that covered its half-finished shell. Such a labor of love, on such a site, in such a city: this could not be abandoned, surely? Not to the barbarians. Not to their impious fire.
Yet abandonment of the city, on that fateful day of the most decisive debate in Greek—and perhaps all European—history, was precisely what Themistocles was indeed proposing. No longer, if they ever had been, could the implications of his naval policy be whitewashed. Even if every able-bodied citizen were to take his place upon a rowing bench, the Athenian fleet would still be seriously undermanned. No man of fighting age could be spared to garrison a “wooden wall” on the Acropolis, or anywhere else in Athens come to that. Women, children, old men, all would need to be evacuated, and the city itself entrusted “to Athena, the mistress of Athens, and to the other gods.”73 It was possible, of course—as Themistocles would no doubt have argued—that the barbarians might be fought to a standstill north of Attica. That, however, with every Athenian committed to the fleet, would require the Spartans and their allies to hold the line by land. Whether the Peloponnesians could be persuaded to venture beyond the Isthmus a second time, far from their own cities, only time would tell. Yet the Athenians, if they were to have any hope of convincing the Spartans not to abandon Attica, had little choice but to show themselves prepared to do so. Themistocles could certainly offer blood, toil, tears and sweat to his fellow citizens. What he would not give them was any promise to fight the invaders on the beaches. Surrender Athens but pledge themselves never to surrender: such was the policy, bold and paradoxical, that Themistocles urged on the Athenians.
What precise heights of oratory he attained, what memorable and stirring phrases he pronounced, we have no way of knowing: not a single account of his speech has been preserved. Only by the effect that it had on the Assembly can we gauge what must surely have been its electric and vivifying quality—for Themistocles’ audacious proposals, when put to the vote, were ratified. The Athenian people, facing the gravest moment of peril in their history, committed themselves once and for all to the alien element of the sea, and put their faith in a man whose ambitions many had long profoundly dreaded. Few Athenians seemed any longer to doubt that Themistocles had “a supreme talent for arriving at the correct solution to a crisis at precisely the correct moment”;74 yet, perhaps it was only on the very brink of catastrophe that they could bring themselves to acknowledge the exceptional quality of his foresight. Under normal circumstances, the democracy had little tolerance of genius. The circumstances of that summer, however, were decidedly not normal; and so the Athenians, rather than punish Themistocles for having been right all along about the Persian threat, decided instead to give him his head. Suspicion of talent, at a moment of crisis such as Athens faced, was no longer an indulgence that she could afford. So it was, on Themistocles’ own insistence, that the various victims of ostracism were summoned urgently back to Attica, “in order that all Athenians might be of one mind in the defence against the barbarian.”75 And Cimon, the son of Miltiades, who was, perhaps more than anyone, the heir to the tradition of Marathon, led a procession of the Athenian jeunesse dorée through the Ceramicus to the Acropolis, and there, with great ostentation, dedicated the bridle of his horse to Athena, before picking up a shield and heading with his companions down to Piraeus. “And this he did to broadcast to the whole city a simple message: that what was needed now was not prowess on horseback, but rather men to fight at sea.”76
With Athens united at last, all that remained was to persuade her allies to play their parts. Themistocles, returning to the Isthmus, did so with his hand immeasurably strengthened; nor did he find the Peloponnesians necessarily hostile, despite the debacle at Tempe, to the drawing of a second forward line. After all, the Athenian fleet was pledged to the defense of their coastline as well as that of Attica; and Themistocles, for whom the expedition to Thessaly had clearly not been a complete waste of time, had already identified the perfect spot for an attempt to keep the Persian fleet at bay. Between the northern tip of Euboea and the mainland there was a narrow strait barely six miles across, ideally suited to being plugged; furthermore, it was only some forty miles east of the even narrower pass of Thermopylae. A fleet and army, operating in tandem, might well hope to hold both the straits and the pass—even in the face of monstrous odds. The Athenians, prompted by Themistocles, had already voted to send a hundred ships to Euboea; and now the allied delegates at the Isthmus—again, no doubt, at Themistocles’ urging—voted to back this strategy. Corinth, Aegina, Megara and other, lesser, naval powers all agreed to dispatch squadrons in support of the Athenian fleet; Sparta to lead a task force to Thermopylae. At last, it seemed, in spite of everything, a resolution had been reached. Now, in the lull before the storm, there was nothing to do but wait for the barbarian.