Yet surely now it would not be long before they would have their necks wrung like chickens. The Great King, sifting intelligence reports in the aftermath of Thermopylae, could not help but smile at the desperate attempts of his enemies to rival him in psychological warfare. It was reported, for instance, that a Greek admiral, pausing in his flight down the coast of Euboea, had carved messages along the seashore, appealing to the Ionians to desert—or at least to fight badly. A laughable stratagem! Why, when two great victories had just been won by Persian arms, when the cities of Boeotia were scurrying to open their gates to the conqueror, when the mastery of Europe lay within the Great King’s grasp, would any of his subjects contemplate mutiny? His squadrons may have been storm-battered, possibly even disconsolate because the Greeks had slipped from their grasp—but a way to boost their spirits was conveniently close at hand. A formal invitation was issued to the fleet: “leave to go and see how King Xerxes deals with lunatics who think that they can beat him.”41 So many men took up this offer, it is said, that there were not enough boats to ferry them all to the Hot Gates.
More than the corpses of the Greeks, more than the piles of helmets with their horsehair crests, hacked and dented, more even than those badges of the Spartans’ pride, their blood-red cloaks and tunics, now nothing but tattered rags, one trophy, shocking and hideous, would certainly have brought home to Ionian sailors the full awful scale of their master’s power. Driven into the side of the road was a stake, and driven onto the top of the stake was a human head. Although it was normally the custom of the Persians, “more than any other people in the world, to honor men who distinguish themselves in war,”42 no honor had been shown Leonidas. King of a city accursed, what better fate had he deserved? So did his conqueror, the King of Kings, deal with all servants of the Lie.
And the sightless eyeballs of the allied commander in chief, shrunken already and crawled across by flies, were fixed upon the road that led to Athens—now open and defenseless.
Ghost Town
One day every year, just as winter was thawing into spring, the Athenians became strangers in their own city. Their temples were roped off and placed strictly out of bounds. Their doors were smeared with pitch. Their relatives, their children, even their slaves were kept off the streets. In the privacy of their own homes, seated at separate tables, racing to drain separate jugs, forbidden to talk until their drafts had been drunk, the Athenians celebrated the Anthesteria: the festival of new wine. No occasion gave better opportunities for a joyous family riot. Children as young as three, crowned with wreaths of flowers and brandishing their own tiny jugs, would be allowed to join in the drinking contest and then to totter round unsteadily, gawking at the scenes of celebration. “Couches, tables, pillows, covers, garlands, perfume, whores, appetisers, they’re all there, sponges, pancakes, sesame buns, pastries, dancers, good ones too, and all the favorite songs.”43 Whores aside, perhaps, no other festival in the Athenian calendar came quite as close to the spirit of modern-day Christmas.
Yet as the muffled sounds of merriment drifted out from behind glistening, black-painted doors, the streets were not wholly abandoned. Demons were believed to be abroad: spirits of evil, harbingers of disaster. People called them “Keres,” specters from beyond the city walls. Only at sundown did the Athenians feel able to cry out in relief, “Away with you, Keres—for the Anthesteria is over!”44 The pitch-coated doors were flung open, men spilled out onto the streets, and the ropes were taken down from around the temples. The rhythms of daily life returned to Athens.
But what if these rhythms were to vanish and never return? This was the question that had been haunting the city ever since Themistocles, earlier in the summer, had persuaded the Athenian people to evacuate their homeland. Perhaps there were aliens more menacing even than ghouls. An unsettling ambiguity cast its shadow over the Anthesteria. “Keres,” thanks to a peculiarity of the Attic accent, might easily be pronounced “Kares”—“Carians,” or “the people of Caria.” These, neighbors of the Ionians in the southwest corner of what is now Turkey, had been among the very first barbarians to intrude upon the consciousness of the Greeks. For centuries they were emblematic of foreignness, and of Asia. They had fought, it was said, in the first great war between East and West, on the side of the Trojans; and unlike their cousins in Ionia, they had never submitted to the rule of Greek settlers. Even though Halicarnassus, the great metropolis of Caria, had owed its original foundation to colonists from the Peloponnese, Greeks were only one ingredient in what had become, over the centuries, a complex melting pot. The city was, to Athenian eyes, at any rate, disturbingly mestizo. Peculiar customs, florid and exotic, flourished there. Why, it was even ruled by a woman: Queen Artemisia. So “masculine” was this alarming female’s “spirit of adventure”45 that it had prompted her to sign up with the imperial battle fleet. Decked out in golden jewelry, draped in purple robes and perfumed with expensive scents she may have been, but her proficiency as an admiral could hardly be doubted. So well captained were her triremes, indeed, that they had a reputation second only to the squadrons of Sidon. If the barbarians could not be halted before they reached Attica, then Artemisia and her warships might soon be gliding into Piraeus. “Keres” or “Kares,” it would hardly make much difference which word was used: aliens would be walking the streets of Athens—and they would not be vanishing at sunset.
Perhaps it was only to be expected, then, that many Athenians, even as their countrymen fought and died at Artemisium to win time for the evacuation of Attica, dragged their feet. This was certainly no reflection on the quality of provision that had been made for them in exile. The gates of Troezen, a city safely in the Peloponnese, some thirty miles across the Saronic Gulf from Piraeus, had been open to refugees from Athens since the onset of the crisis. Miserable though it was to be homeless—and perhaps peculiarly so for an earth-born Athenian—the Troezenians had already proved to be remarkably generous hosts: every nervous mother arriving in their city was given public welfare, every child free education, and even carte blanche to pick fresh fruit from groves and orchards. Nevertheless, back in Athens, the very success of the evacuation provoked a renewed bout of anguish. The more that families could be seen boarding up their homes, trudging through the streets with their luggage, pushing overloaded handcarts down to the beaches and the docks, the more it struck those too upset or angry to join them that the world had been turned upside down.
And how ominous a sign of the times it was that wives and mothers—respectable Athenian matrons!—were on the streets at all. The opportunities for misbehavior that an international crisis might offer women had been preying on the minds of Greek husbands since at least the days of the Trojan War. In Athens, however, such anxieties had a particular resonance. “Brought up under the most cramping restrictions, raised from childhood to see and hear as little as possible, and to ask only a minimum of questions,”46 Athenian women lived a life of seclusion without parallel elsewhere in Greece. The peculiar character of the democracy demanded nothing less. The capacity of women to stir up mischief in public life had been a cause of alarm to thoughtful reformers well before the revolution of 507 BC. Concerned to instruct the elite in the virtues of self-restraint, Solon had found any hint of female showiness particularly insufferable, and had made stringent efforts to rein it in. Rather than permit daughters of the aristocracy to flaunt their wealth and taste in public, he had taken the simple, if drastic, step of decreeing that any woman seen “walking the streets, out and about,”47 should be regarded as a prostitute. Athenian husbands—or at least those with sufficient floor space to immure their wives in separate quarters—had seized the opportunities presented by this legislation with relish. Increasingly, over the decades, the law had ensured that only women whom no one ever saw could be regarded as respectable. Simultaneously, of course, it did wonders for the sex trade.