By the following afternoon, reports of the shipwreck were reaching Artemisium, and the Greek admirals, confident that their lines of retreat were no longer threatened, could afford to breathe a huge sigh of relief. Not that they had any intention now of abandoning their forward position. Prospects for holding the front suddenly appeared as rosy as they had looked bleak the day before. Good news was coming in from everywhere: reinforcements, fifty-three ships fresh from Athens; the destruction, in an evening hit-and-run raid, of a squadron of Cilician ships; the briefing, brought by Abronichus, the liaison officer, that Leonidas and his men had withstood a second day of hard pounding at the Hot Gates. If the Great King could not make a breakthrough soon, his army would start to starve. It was already late in the campaigning season, and the barbarians were far from home. If they could merely avoid defeat, and keep the Mede at bay, that, for the Greeks, would surely prove victory enough.
But the true test, for the allied fleet and its ability to hold off the enemy, was still to come. The Persians, laboring desperately to make their remaining ships fully seaworthy again, had not yet attempted to smash the linchpin of the whole Greek line that, if forced, would open the way to Thermopylae: the straits between Euboea and the mainland. The third day of battle dawned and the Greeks, watching from Artemisium, could have had little doubt that the moment of truth was coming at last. Squadron after squadron of the barbarian fleet—Phoenician, Egyptian, Ionian—began massing in the open channel. Now, after all the skirmishing, all the shadowboxing, it was to come: the first full frontal assault by the Great King’s navy on the Greek positions. Rowing out to block its passage, men who had first pulled on an oar just months—or, in the case of the Plataeans, weeks—before braced themselves for the fight.
Less mobile than its enemy, the Greek fleet, having plugged the straits, then opted to wait for the Persians to force the attack. Rowers, their knuckles whitening as they gripped their oars, their noses wrinkling against an overpowering stench of sweat and loosening bowels, sat crouched on their wooden benches, straining to hear above the creaking of timbers, the lapping of the water, and the nervous talk of their comrades the approaching tide of battle. Soon enough, from the marines on deck, the cry went up: the barbarians were closing in. “Overwhelming numbers; gaudily painted figure-heads; arrogant yelling; savage war-chants”:24 such were the sights and sounds of the Persian advance as it fanned out across the channel. The impact, when it duly came, was pulverizing. All day the Greeks fought desperately to keep the enemy at bay, “yelling out to one another that the barbarians should not break through, even as the Persians, looking to sweep the passage clear, sought to annihilate them.”25 Somehow, despite the fearful battering they received, the Greeks managed to hold the straits—but only just. Numerous ships were sunk or captured, losses which the smaller allied fleet could ill afford; many others were disabled. The Athenians, who had borne the brunt of the enemy assault throughout the battle, had a full half of their fleet put out of action. Prospects of holding the straits the following day looked bleak. Disconsolately, the Greeks began gathering wreckage from the battle, piling it up on the sand to serve as pyres for their dead, while their admirals, anxious faces lit by the funeral fires, debated what to do next. By now, the locals, who had seen the shattered state of the Greek fleet and already drawn their own conclusions as to its prospects, were driving their livestock down to the seafront, in the hope that they might be included in any evacuation. Themistocles, recognizing that the abandonment of Artemisium might indeed be a necessity, and not wishing his already battle-weary men to have to row through the night on empty stomachs, ordered the cattle barbecued.
Yet the mood along the fire-dotted beach that night, even amid all the weariness and disappointment, was not entirely one of despair. The Greeks had faced the Great King’s armada in open battle and lived to tell the tale. Great things had been achieved at Artemisium—and not all of them owing to the winds. The allied fleet remained intact as a fighting force; and withdrawal, if it did come, would be strategic and orderly. Not that any final decision could be made either way until news had arrived from the Hot Gates—for synchronization with Leonidas and his army remained the key to the whole campaign. And none of the navy knew what had happened at Thermopylae. As dusk turned to night, the admirals had to play a waiting game. Up and down the shore they crunched, breathing in the mingled scents of beef and burning human flesh, casting their gaze across the channel to the distant lights of the Persian positions, and waiting for Abronichus to deliver his daily briefing from the Spartan king.
His small galley arrived that night off Artemisium in good time. The sailors, gathered around their campfires, were still at their supper. The ships had not yet been readied for departure; no sense of crisis gripped the camp. One glimpse of Abronichus’ face, however, as he came stumbling through the shallows, and all that changed. Everyone who saw him knew, even before he spoke, that something calamitous had occurred at Thermopylae.
King’s Dinners and Spartan Breakfasts
Even road-blocked on a dusty plain, beside the shore of the Bitter Sea, in a remote and savage land, the Great King remained the hub around which the spokes of his world empire turned. Unable to direct the invasion of Greece from Persepolis, Xerxes had simply ordered Persepolis to be brought with him to Greece. Night after night, no matter where the Great King halted, servants would scurry to unload mountains of luggage from trains of mules and camels, to level out a huge expanse of ground, and then to raise on it a tent so splendid as to put most palaces in the shade. Since Persian royalty was inveterately restless, migrating from capital to capital depending on the season, the Great King’s engineers, with their long experience of providing for royal road trips, knew precisely how best to prefabricate luxury. As a result, even in the bleak surroundings of the approach to Thermopylae, the imperial dignity, cocooned in rugs and cushions, leather awnings and colored hangings, was never under any threat: chamber after chamber led away from the royal presence, while the Immortals, stationed by every doorway, stood as surety against any assassination attempt by veterans of the Crypteia.*17 The contrast with conditions inside the Hot Gates could hardly have been more brutaclass="underline" while Leonidas was obliged to camp out amid stench and putrescence, the Great King could direct the battle from within the perfumed cool of his audience hall; or, at night, looking to conserve his energy, retire to a silver-footed couch, where the coverings would have been prepared for him by a specialist bed-maker, a slave trained to “make linens beautiful and soft, for the Persians were the very first people to have regarded this as an art.”26
The Greeks, clutching at straws, presumed to attribute the extravagances of such a campaigning style to effeminacy: a woeful betrayal of their own lack of sophistication. Having given ample demonstrations of his courage while still a young man, Xerxes had no intention of risking his life in battle now, not with a great army and fleet both looking to him for leadership, and a campaign of unprecedented complexity to direct. The royal tent may have been monumental, but it had to be if it were to provide an adequate nerve center for a global superpower. As at Persepolis, so on the wayside of the road to Thermopylae, the Great King did not disdain advice but rather demanded it, having recognized that the wisest master is the one who makes best use of his slaves. Xerxes, whose subordinates were rarely short of obedience and courage, evidently had a talent for inspiring devotion in them: not for nothing did his name mean “He Who Rules Over Heroes.”