A claim which he would be obliged to cling to as though it were a life raft in the hours that followed his arrival on Salamis. Athenian ships were not the only ones visible from the island. For the past two days, as Themistocles and his men had ferried refugees from Attica, the other allied squadrons had been lurking in the straits. That the Peloponnesian admirals had agreed to wait there for the length of the evacuation said much of the bonds of fellowship forged at Artemisium. Both their orders and their personal inclinations would have urged them to head immediately for the Isthmus. From Salamis, distant across the blue of the gulf, it was just possible to make out a stub of rock framed against the sky: this tantalizing landmark was the acropolis of Corinth, the watchtower of the Peloponnese, and barely five miles south of the Isthmus wall. Perhaps predictably, then, it was a Corinthian, the young and fiery commander Adeimantus, who took the lead in the council of war that immediately followed the return of Themistocles to the allied fleet. Leave for the Isthmus at once, he demanded of Eurybiades and his fellow admirals. Concentrate naval and military resources together. Join with the army already massed along the Isthmus. There were bays and gulfs enough around Corinth to guard the flank of a battle line. And if disaster did overtake the fleet—well, at least the Peloponnesians “might then find a refuge among their own people.”52
Hardly, of course, an argument designed to thrill an admiral from Athens—nor those from Aegina and Megara—and it might have been thought, since these men were in command of around three-quarters of the Greek fleet’s total of 310 triremes, that their objections would prove decisive.53 Not a bit of it. The risk facing Themistocles and his two colleagues was the same one that had haunted the war effort from the start: that the alliance might fragment and disintegrate. Outnumbered probably two to one as the Greek fleet still was, not even the Athenians could afford to go it alone. Any split among the allied squadrons would sink all hopes of victory.
And it was victory that Themistocles was aiming for—not merely a holding operation, as was envisaged by Adeimantus, but a decisive crippling of the Great King’s whole naval capacity. To convince his colleagues that this ambition was more than just the fantasy of a desperate exile, he drew on the one thing that could unite them, and gloriously so: their joint memories of the Artemisium campaign. Themistocles knew that battle in open waters—which the Greeks would face if they made their stand off the Isthmus—favored the enemy. “But battle in close conditions,” he urged, “works to our advantage.”54 This was the lesson he had drawn from the day of the fiercest fighting, when the allied squadrons—although battered—had successfully held the passageway between Euboea and the mainland against the full weight of the barbarian fleet. The straits in that battle had been some two or three miles across; at Salamis, if the barbarians could only be lured into them, the waters were half a mile wide at most. “If everything goes well—and the prospects for that are not unreasonable—then we can win.”55
And here, for all the soaring self-confidence with which it had been delivered, was a judgment quite as rooted in the experiences of everyone who had fought at Artemisium—the Peloponnesian admirals included—as in the fertility of the Athenian’s ever-scheming brain. Themistocles himself well appreciated this, for he had, to a degree that none of his opposite numbers could remotely rival, made a career out of persuasion. Democracy, in its first decades, had proved an exacting school. No one in the world was now better practiced at getting his own way than a successful Athenian politician. The effectiveness of Themistocles’ pitch can be gauged from the fact that when, midway through the council of war, messengers arrived with the terrifying news that the barbarians had been seen entering Attica, “setting fire to the whole country,”56 the meeting did not break up in panic. Nor, despite the blood-curdling realization that the Persian fleet might be gliding into Athenian waters at any moment, and perhaps blocking off the escape routes, did the Peloponnesians press their demands for an immediate withdrawal. Instead, all of the high command agreed that the fleet would stay where it was: off Salamis. Themistocles, for the moment at any rate, had convinced the doubters.
And this despite the fact that he was now, in the eyes of his fellow admirals, that most despised of all creatures—“a man without a country.”57 Such a label was not entirely accurate, of course—not while Salamis remained in Athenian hands. Nor, even with the Persian cavalry clattering fast toward the city, had Athens herself been wholly surrendered: one stronghold, the sacred heart of Attica, still held out. Not even the iconoclastic Themistocles had ever proposed that the Acropolis should be abandoned. Instead, by a vote of the Assembly, it had been agreed “that the treasurers and priestesses remain on it to guard the property of the gods.”58 Other Athenians as well, those too stubborn to go into exile, had taken refuge there. The defenders, having had weeks to provision themselves and to erect barricades—“wooden walls”—across the ramp, could now plausibly regard themselves as well braced for a lengthy siege.
Yet their spirits, all the same, must have quailed at their first sight of the enemy. No better view could have been had of the arrival of the Great King into Athens than from the heights of the sacred rock. Fire, incinerating the blessed fields and groves of Attica, heralded Xerxes’ coming. Gazing from the western battlements, the defenders watched impotently as the royal banners were raised triumphantly over their city. The hordes of the Great King’s army were already swarming everywhere, taking possession of the familiar streets, laying waste the defenders’ homes. In the Agora and on the slopes of the Areopagus, the hill which rose between the Pnyx and the Acropolis, engineers could be seen sinking boreholes: evidently, the barbarians were too mistrustful of the Athenians even to drink their water. Other work parties busied themselves with looting and stripping the city bare. Most horrifying spectacle of all for the defenders on the Acropolis to have to endure was that of the bronze tyrannicides, those potent symbols of the democracy, being lowered from their plinth, crated up, and readied for transport. No doubt the Pisistratids, back in their homeland at last, had explained to their masters the precise significance of the statues. A perfect trophy to adorn the halls of Susa.
Meanwhile, above the Agora, the Great King had established his command post on the Areopagus. Archers were ordered onto the hill, and instructed to shoot fire arrows at the barricades blocking the ramp of the Acropolis. The wooden wall—“betraying the defenders”59—was soon ablaze, but the defenses beyond it held firm. The Great King, anxious to send the good news to Persia that the nest of daivas had been smoked out, began to grow impatient. Summoned to the royal presence, the Pisistratids were duly dispatched up the ramp to negotiate with their obdurate countrymen. Their overtures were rejected. The assault on the ramp was renewed. Arrows fizzed, and boulders, levered over the side of the fortifications by the defenders, crashed and rolled. The chaos of battle was general.
But now, with the Athenians at full stretch, the Great King’s officers began surveying the opposite end of the Acropolis. Here, where the drop was so sheer that not even a single guard had been stationed, elite forces finally succeeded in scaling the face of the cliff. As at Thermopylae, so now, talents honed in the Zagros enabled the Great King to stab a Greek garrison in the back. The Acropolis was stormed. Many of the defenders hurled themselves off the battlements in preference to waiting to be slaughtered. Others sought sanctuary in the temple of Athena. The Persians, naturally, massacred the lot. Then, as their master had ordered, they put everything on the summit of the rock to the torch. What would not burn they demolished, toppled or smashed. The great storehouse of Athenian memories, accumulated over centuries—the city’s very past—was wiped out in a couple of hours.