They also serve who only stand and wait. If Leonidas, on his lonely sentry duty at Thermopylae, was primed for death, then Themistocles, just as surely, had his heart set on survival. Glorious as it was, having left home and family behind, having journeyed to war in a distant land, having staked one’s life in a supreme contest of valor and endurance, then to fall in battle, yet so also, in Greek tradition, might a hero display an instinct for self-preservation and be no less a hero. Achilles, offered by his mother the alternatives of a happy but obscure old age or an early death and undying glory, had not hesitated; but Homer, in his second great epic, had sung the exploits of a man who made a very different choice. Odysseus, as barrel-chested as Themistocles and quite as much a “man of twists and turns,” had wanted nothing more, having sacked Troy, than to return home to his wife. In the cause of achieving that, he had held no ploy, no deception, no ruse beneath him. This was why Athena had admired him and honored him above all her favorites: for “here among mortal men,” as she told Odysseus, “you’re the best at tactics, spinning yarns, and I am famous among the gods for wisdom, cunning wiles, too.”9 So it was that she loved the Athenians, who were held to be the most intelligent of the Greeks; and so it was, too, whenever the impossible appeared suddenly possible, and the solution to a seemingly insuperable problem began to glimmer into view, that a mortal could know Athena stood by his side. Themistocles, weighing up the odds of battle, turning fresh stratagems over in his mind, would surely not have confined himself to raising prayers to the north wind alone.
“In league with Athena set your own hand to work”: so the proverb went.10 For the moment, however, the initiative had slipped from Themistocles’ grasp. His next move would depend on what others did first: the Persians—and the gods of the winds. Still there were no new developments—and still the temperature rose. Then, at last, some ten days, perhaps, after the Greek fleet had abandoned its station at Artemisium, there was a sudden wake-up call. A thirty-oared cutter, captained by an Athenian, a crony of Themistocles named Abronichus, came speeding down the straits to Chalcis. Appointed at the start of the campaign to serve as the liaison officer between Leonidas and the Greek fleet, Abronichus brought his friend alarming news. The phony war, it appeared, was over. The Great King’s army was approaching Thermopylae. The Mede was at the Hot Gates.
The Storm Breaks
Lookouts were hardly needed to warn of the approach of the King of Kings. Well before the first Persian reconnaissance units began spilling out over the flatlands along the shore of the Malian Gulf, Leonidas would have known that a force beyond computation was closing in on him. Cloudless the August sky may have been, but the horizon to the north was lost behind a haze of dust. Ever filthier, thicker, more swirling it grew; and then the earth itself, trampled beneath thousands upon thousands of kicking feet, began to tremble. Such, rendered literal, was the power of the Great King: that he could shake the world. For years, his agents had inflicted on the Greeks a strategy of creeping terror; and now, at last, the terror was at their gates.
For the defenders of Thermopylae, gazing in horror across the bay, the spectacle of the Great King’s hordes was of an order beyond their darkest imaginings. On and on, the din of their progress now thunderous, shimmering in and out of view, borne upon rolling breakers of choking dust, the barbarians advanced. To the Greeks, wiping grit from their watering eyes, feeling the earth beneath them shiver for hour after ceaseless hour, the reports of the three spies sent to Sardis, who had spoken of Asia being emptied, and of millions being mustered against them, must have seemed horrifically confirmed. Panic began to grip the tiny army. All except the Spartans, that is, who maintained their customary composure; and Leonidas, even as he sought to steady nerves among the allies, ordered his bodyguard to hold a position beyond the wall. Soon enough, clattering up through the West Gate, there came a Persian outrider. None of the three hundred looked up. Some combed their long hair, as was the Spartan habit when preparing to face death. Others, their naked bodies slippery with oil, ran or grappled with one another; not strenuously, however, for “on campaign, the exercising required of the Spartans was always less demanding than normal . . . so that for them, uniquely, war represented a relaxation of military training.”11 The Persian scout, having surveyed this scene in astonishment, then wheeled round and galloped away. No attempt was made by the Spartans to stop him.
Later in the day, a formal embassy from Xerxes approached the Hot Gates. Leonidas, who would surely have met it beyond the wall so that the ambassadors could not see how few men he had under his command, was informed of the Great King’s terms. The defenders, if they laid down their arms, might have a free passage back to their homes; the title “Friends of the Persian People” would be granted them; “and on all the Greeks who accepted his friendship, King Xerxes would settle more lands, and of better quality, than any they currently possessed.”12 To many of the Peloponnesians, already itching to scuttle back to the Isthmus, these proposals only confirmed them in their sudden enthusiasm for a retreat from the pass; but the Phocians, for whom the Isthmus might as well have been in Egypt for all the protection it afforded them, responded with fury to the prospect of abandoning Thermopylae. So too, unsurprisingly, did Leonidas; and since he was the commander in chief, and a Spartan king to boot, his resolution was sufficient to sway the waverers. The allies would stay where they were. The pass would be held. When the Great King’s embassy, returning to the Hot Gates, demanded that the Greeks hand over their arms, Leonidas’ defiance was aptly laconic: “Molon labe”; “Come and get them.”13
His countrymen had always prized such gems of cool. The bleaker the circumstances, the more imperturbable a Spartan was trained to be: and Leonidas, perfectly aware that sangfroid was the best morale booster that he could offer his wavering allies, naturally looked to his bodyguard to back him up with some steely nonchalance of their own. They did not disappoint. When the barbarians fired their arrows, one of the locals pointed out tremulously, so many would hiss through the air as to blot out the sun. The Spartans, who were in the habit of dismissing arrows as mere spindles, womanish and cowardly, affected to be colossally unfazed. “What excellent news,” one of them drawled. “If the Mede hides the sun, then so much the better for us—we can fight our battle in the shade.”14
Yet, inspiring though such witticisms surely were, they must have struck Leonidas as perilously close to gallows humor. He knew that in truth the situation facing his men was even graver than most of them appreciated. Themistocles and the Greek fleet, still praying for storms, remained at Chalcis. With Artemisium abandoned, there was nothing now to stop the Persian fleet, once it arrived off Euboea, from heading directly for the shallows off Thermopylae. Such a moment, with the Great King already installed beyond the Hot Gates, could hardly be far off. As Leonidas scanned the eastern horizon, searching for distant masts, he would have watched the deepening of twilight over the Malian Gulf and the blazing of campfires in the pass with profound relief. Night had come—and the Persian fleet had not. The allies still held Thermopylae. But for how much longer? Nervously, men glanced above them. The moon, almost full, gleamed in a cloudless, windless sky. So it would also be gleaming over distant Olympia, and Lacedaemon too. Even though Leonidas had sent messengers to the Isthmus earlier that afternoon with a desperate appeal for reinforcements, he knew that there was little chance of it being answered—not for another week or so, at least, until the games at Olympia and the Carneia were over. And time was running out.