So much so that Solon, a century after his death, would be remembered gratefully by the Athenian citizenry as a man who had used state funding to subsidize brothels, on the impeccably egalitarian principle that whores should be available to all. This tradition—since the great reformer’s attitude toward women was almost certainly one of stern indifference—was probably a distortion; but it does suggest how the right to cruise for prostitutes had come to be seen by many citizens as a foundation stone of democracy. Like the statue of the tyrannicides in the Agora, or the rows of seats carved out of the Pnyx, the Athenian red-light district, vibrant with riot, suffering and pleasure, served as one of the supreme monuments to the new order. Whores were to be seen everywhere in the Ceramicus, whether sunning themselves topless outside brothels, brawling in squalid back alleys or haunting tombs beyond the city limits. Menaced by this flamboyant visibility, their respectable sisters shrank and grew ever less visible before it, so that it had soon become the convention, under the democracy, not even to mention the name of a married woman in public. Indeed, the carnivorous nature of Athenian politics being what it was, the only real impact that even the most virtuous of wives could have upon the career of her husband was as a liability. For a politician, there was only one thing worse than not being talked about, and that was having his family talked about. Many citizens, watching matrons and whores jostling each other on their way down to the beaches, were so appalled that they flatly forbade their own wives to join the exodus.
As a result, when Themistocles, having led his battered fleet safely back from Artemisium, finally limped into Piraeus, he found to his horror that Athens was very far from evacuated. It was he, of course—ever “the man of twists and turns”—who had posted the appeals to the Ionian squadrons to mutiny; but he knew better than to bank on any implosion of the imperial battle fleet. Or on the Peloponnesians, for that matter. There were many in the upper reaches of Athenian society, trusting in private assurances from the Spartans, who clung to the desperate hope that an allied army might soon be marching to their rescue. Not Themistocles. In a pass far distant from the Peloponnese, a king of Sparta and all his bodyguard lay dead, and there was nothing the Athenians could say or do now that would persuade the Spartans to commit more of their troops to a foreign field. The response of the allied delegates at Corinth to the news from Thermopylae could hardly have made that clearer. Unanimously, the Peloponnesians had voted to look to their own backyard. Even as the Great King’s outriders were closing in on Attica, an army of workmen, under the direction of Leonidas’ younger brother Cleombrotus, was busy at work erecting a wall along the five-mile width of the Isthmus, “hauling blocks of stone, and bricks, and wood, and sandbags, not resting a minute, labouring night and day.”48 Others had already set to demolishing the road to Megara, a narrow and precipitous corniche hacked out of the flanks of coastal cliffs, and effectively the only land route that an army could follow to—or from—the Isthmus. With each landslide that crashed from the road into the shallow coves below, the Peloponnesians were abandoning Attica ever more surely to its fate.
Even the gods, it appeared, were despairing of Athens now. No sooner had Themistocles returned to the Assembly and frantically renewed the evacuation order than there came eerie news from the Acropolis. The sacred serpent, whose presence beside the tomb of Erechtheus had served generations of Athenians as an assurance that their city would never fall, was reported by its attendants to have left its honey cake uneaten, and disappeared. Word swept across the panicking crowds “that Athena herself had abandoned the city, and was pointing them the way to the sea.”49 All highly opportune for Themistocles, of course; as was, just as suspiciously, a second discovery, made even as refugees were surging to the coast with their luggage. The sacred serpent, it seemed, was not alone in having vanished from the Acropolis; so too, filched from around the neck of that holiest of statues, the self-portrait of Athena Polias, had a golden gorgon’s head. Themistocles, loudly protesting his outrage at this sacrilege, immediately set to ransacking the bags of particularly wealthy citizens. When, as invariably he did, he found sacks of gold squirreled away among the luggage, he would impound them on the spot. These confiscations, combined with a whip-round among former archons, served to raise a substantial sum of money: a financial reserve that the Athenian people, now that they were passing into exile, might soon have little choice but to depend upon for their welfare.
And all the while, as sobbing children were shepherded through the shallows by their fathers, and mothers with wild, white faces clutched their head scarves tight about them and stumbled in their wake, and vessels of every description crowded the waters off Phalerum and Piraeus, time was running out. Six days had passed since the forcing of the Hot Gates. With Athens increasingly a ghost town, those thronging the beaches began to glance ever more anxiously over their shoulders, scanning the horizon for smudges of dust, a glint of metal, a dot of fire. Still nothing. By the evening, when Athens stood empty at last, the only movement in all the great expanse of the abandoned city was that of dogs, bewildered by the sudden quiet. Many, faithful to their owners, had followed them down to the beaches, running along the sands, howling at the boats as they disappeared. Xanthippus, it is said, having been summoned back to Athens along with all the other victims of ostracism, but now heading off into exile again, had looked behind him as he sailed away from the mainland, only to see his own dog paddling desperately in pursuit. Reaching dry land at last, the exhausted creature had scrabbled up onto the rocks, whined and then expired.50
Xanthippus’ destination, and that of all his fellow citizens, was Salamis. Here, across the narrow straits from Mount Aigaleos, the Athenian people had resurrected a semblance, however ghostly and impoverished, of the city they had just abandoned. A few women and children—those laggards for whom the journey to Troezen had grown too perilous—were now camped out there. So too, symbols and guardians alike of the constitution, were the magistrates of the democracy. The elderly, whose wisdom in a time of crisis was rated an invaluable resource, had been settled on the island since the very start of the evacuation, along with the city’s treasures and grain reserves. And now, most stirring of all, weather-beaten and battle-scarred though they were, their timbers bearing the marks of frantic labors in the shipyards, there lay in readiness off the bays of Salamis some 180 Athenian triremes: a wooden wall indeed. Well might Themistocles, pointing to the fleet, insist that his countrymen, even in exile, still remained citizens of “the greatest city in all of Greece.”51