And so ended the attempt of the Great King to force the straits of Salamis.
So Near, So Far
In 484 BC, while Xerxes, back from suppressing the revolt in Egypt, was drawing up his first plans for the conquest of the West, the Mesopotamians had unexpectedly launched an insurrection of their own. Decades had passed since Darius, impaling the man he had contemptuously arraigned as “Nidintu-Bel,” had disposed of the last native “King of Babylon, King of Lands.” These titles, imbued with all the ancient glamour of the city between the two rivers, had been among the more splendid honorifics that the usurper had bequeathed his son. Not, of course—as Darius himself had well appreciated—that titles alone a King of Babylon could make. The Persian grip on Mesopotamia, during the long years of his reign, had become increasingly a matter of securing real estate. Vast swaths of it, confiscated from the hapless natives, had ended up as the personal property of the King of Kings. Other holdings, parceled out to favored servants, had been granted on the understanding that they be settled with colonies of reservists from the distant reaches of the empire. As a result, the mudflats of Mesopotamia, like the huge metropolis that they fed, had begun to fill with immigrants. Walking along the course of a palm-tree-fringed canal, one might pass through whole villages of aliens: Egyptian archers, Lydian cavalrymen, axe-wielding Saka. This, under the rule of the King of Kings, was to be the future of the world: a universal melting pot.
When rebellion erupted on the banks of the Euphrates, Xerxes had therefore moved speedily to crush it. An expedition to the West could hardly have been risked while Babylon, the largest and richest city in the Great King’s dominions, was in ferment. The great capital still held a crucial significance in the Persian order of things. It was not only bureaucrats in the imperial treasury who could testify to that. Just as both Cyrus and Darius had discovered in the ancient city a mirror held up to all their proudest pretensions, so too Xerxes, with his invasion of Europe, was making manifest a vision of global monarchy that had first been dreamed of long previously in Babylon—the original cosmopolis. The camp of the Great King’s forces, thronged with soldiers from every corner of the world, brought to Attica more than a touch of far-distant Mesopotamia. The Athenians too, and the Peloponnesians, and all the Greeks, reaching even to the islands of the far West, were expected soon to add their own numbers to the mix. Once they had been conquered. Once they had only been conquered.
But how to secure that submission was now, after Salamis, a sudden and unanticipated headache. Mardonius, in the council of war that followed the battle, cheerfully dismissed the whole debacle as being of sublime unimportance. “What are a few planks of wood?” he sniffed dismissively. “So what if a shamble of Phoenicians, of Egyptians, of Cypriots, of Cilicians have messed things up? It is not as though the Persians had any hand in it. No, my Lord, it was hardly a defeat for us.”29 Ringingly stated—and an expression of the chauvinism that came naturally to every Persian aristocrat. To the Great King, too, of course—for Xerxes was hardly the man to dispute his countrymen’s bravery and prowess. All the same, he had marched on Greece as more than just the King of Persia: he was, literally, “King of Lands.” The rout of the various squadrons he had summoned to his banner had stung his pride. It was all very well for Mardonius to sneer at the ragbag character of the imperial navy—but that was precisely what had made it, in the opinion of the Great King, such an effective embodiment of his global power.
Nor, despite the mauling that it had received, could Xerxes initially bring himself to accept that his reach might have been reduced as a consequence of the defeat. No sooner had his fleet been swept out of the straits than he was attempting to impose his mastery in a fresh and suitably imperious manner: by erecting a causeway across to Salamis. Rocks were dropped into the shallows, merchant ships lashed together in a desperate attempt to bridge the central depths of the channel. But it was the Greek archers, not the straits themselves, that ultimately posed the insuperable obstacle to the attempt. The imperial engineers, harassed by predatory warships, provided easy pickings for enemy fire, until the Great King, bowing to the inevitable, was forced reluctantly to abandon the project. For a man who had bridged the Hellespont and split the peninsula of Mount Athos, this was an agonizing frustration. Having dreamed only days previously of conquering an entire continent, the Great King now found himself defied by a mile-wide stretch of water.
And by further grim tidings, too. Reports were starting to come in from Sicily, a theater crucial to the Great King’s hopes of extending his power ever further westward, of a second Greek victory.*18 Gelon, the precocious tyrant of Syracuse, was said to have inflicted a sensational defeat on the Carthaginians. The destruction of their army had been bloody beyond compare. Below the walls of Himera, a city in north Sicily, 150,000 Carthaginians lay butchered; the survivors had all been enslaved; their general, surprised while making a sacrifice, had immolated himself in the flames. For the Great King, as he pondered his next move in an increasingly autumnal Athens, the implications of this news were sobering in the extreme. His ambitions, once so grandiose, seemed suddenly diminished and circumscribed. Dreams of extending the limits of Persian greatness to the setting of the sun counted for little against the reality of a blockaded Isthmus, an unpacified Peloponnese. What had previously been represented as a campaign of universal conquest appeared to have shrunk to the status of an awkward border war.
And as such, of course, to have become hardly worthy of the Great King’s personal attention. Mardonius, recognizing this, was quick to seize his chance. “Head back to your regional headquarters in Sardis,” he urged his cousin, “and take the greater part of the army with you, and leave me to complete the enslavement of Greece with men whom I will personally choose to finish off the job.”30 Such a commission was precisely what Mardonius had been angling after for years; and the Great King, reluctant to pass a second summer on campaign in Greece, no longer had any reason to oppose his cousin’s strategy. The scale and flamboyance that had characterized the expedition under his own leadership would be scandalously inappropriate once he was no longer at its head. As the task force’s new commander, Mardonius would be judged by only one measure: whether he succeeded in bringing the new satrapy to heel. Against the Spartans and their allies it was quality, not quantity, that would count. The lessons of Thermopylae, bruising though they were, had been well learned. As the Great King, having left a still-smoking Attica behind him, began leading his troops northward, through Boeotia and then into Thessaly, so Mardonius, given a free hand by his cousin, began to cherry-pick the elite.