Top of his wish list was cavalry: mobile, heavily armored, and, in the case of the Saka, able to fire a rain of arrows at any ponderous lines of infantry they might happen to be galloping past. The virtual helplessness of Greek hoplites against such opponents had been demonstrated repeatedly over previous decades and there seemed little reason to doubt that it soon would be again. Nor was Mardonius alone in this opinion. What neutrals made of his prospects can be gauged from the fact that the Great King, despite his failure to subdue Greece, completed a leisurely and unscathed retreat.31 To be sure, the allies spun any number of far-fetched anecdotes—claiming that his army had been reduced to eating grass, that it had been virtually wiped out after crashing through an ice-covered river, that Xerxes himself had crossed the Hellespont huddled alone in a fishing boat—but these were all lies. Any tribe or city that dared to betray its oath of submission could expect to meet with an immediate and blistering response. Most opted to play things safe. Thrace, Macedonia and Thessaly all stayed loyal to the King of Kings. So, too, did Thebes and central Greece. Even the imperial fleet, although certainly down, was far from out. The carnage of Salamis notwithstanding, it still outnumbered the allied navy. There appeared every prospect, come the summer, that Mardonius would indeed “finish off the job.”
Or perhaps he would be spared the need. Embarrassing though the intelligence failure at Salamis had been, and devastating in its consequences, the Persian high command still looked to divide and rule. Remarkably, channels were even kept open to Themistocles. After all, it had not been on the Athenian’s recommendation that the Great King had chosen to fight in the straits—a detail with which Themistocles appears to have made considerable hay. Only days after Salamis, in a startling display of cheek, he had sent Sicinnus back over the straits with a second message for the Persians: a reassurance that he remained “eager to be of service to the royal cause” and was acting as a restraining influence on the rest of the allied fleet.32 Mind-boggling claims, it might have been thought—but the spy chiefs had not, as they must have been itching to do, put Sicinnus to a long and agonizing death. Instead, just as on the eve of Salamis, they had opted to send the slave back to his master. We do not know what message they gave him to carry, but there must surely have been one: an amplification of the Great King’s peace terms, no doubt. The Athenian people, still buoyed by their victory at Salamis, could hardly have been expected to accept them—but that was not the point. Just as Themistocles was obviously shadowboxing, so too was the Persian high command. Each side was indicating to the other their appreciation of a guilty secret: that the moment might yet come when it would be in their mutual interests for Athens to be granted a privileged surrender.
But why would Themistocles, at the moment of his greatest triumph, be prepared to send such a treasonous message? The answer, for those skilled in the dark art of interpreting Greek diplomatic maneuvers, had not been long in coming. Several weeks after Sicinnus’ second mission, the Spartans had sent an embassy of their own to the Persian camp. Arriving in Thessaly, where the Great King was preparing to depart for the Hellespont, they had bluntly demanded reparations for the death of Leonidas. The Great King, bursting into laughter, had suddenly fallen silent, as though making private calculations. “You will get all the reparations you deserve,” he had said at last, gesturing to his cousin, “from Mardonius here.”33 Witty enough—but Xerxes had surely been mulling over more than a menacing bon mot. He would have recognized that behind the Spartans’ seemingly brutish demand there was an intriguing hint: that they just might, if offered a hefty enough bribe, be prepared to tolerate the status quo. A comical notion, of course: the Great King did not negotiate with anyone. Nevertheless, it was, in its implications, full of interest. It would, after all, oblige the Spartans to wash their hands of the whole of central Greece—including Attica. Well might the Great King have paused and furrowed his brow.
And well might the Spartans, their embassy rebuffed, have loudly insisted that they had only sent it in the first place because they had been instructed to do so by Apollo. The Athenians, and everyone else, were happy to take their word for it. None of the Greeks who had triumphed at Salamis had any interest in destabilizing the alliance if they could possibly help it. Even as the campaigning season drew to a close amid autumnal storms, the afterglow of the famous victory still lit the lengthening evenings. To celebrate their achievement, the various Greek squadrons, returned from a profitable few weeks spent touring the Aegean, and extorting money from the islanders, all assembled off the Isthmus. Here, at the temple of Poseidon which had served the alliance as its headquarters throughout the summer, a great jamboree of mutual backslapping was held. Sacrifices were offered to the gods, and prizes given. The sense of relief was immense. “A black cloud,” as Themistocles put it, “has been swept away from off the sea.”34
But not, unfortunately from off the land—with implications for the alliance that might prove ominous, as the shrewder Athenians and Spartans had already begun to appreciate. The Isthmus, even as it hosted the great festival of unity, served as a fracture line. If a delegate tired of the celebrations, he could have this brought home to him while paying a call on the neighborhood’s most obvious alternative source of entertainment. There stood, two thousand feet above Corinth, on the summit of the city’s steepling acropolis, a temple dedicated to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Here, complementing the marble statuary, could be found an altogether less chilly brand of votive offering: prostitutes. Donated to the goddess by grateful Olympic champions and other such luminaries, these had a reputation so superlative that in Greek “korinthiazein”—“to do a Corinthian”—meant to fuck. Patriotic as well as proficient, Aphrodite’s temple whores had spent the weeks before Salamis raising urgent prayers to their divine mistress, imploring her to inspire the allies with a love of battle. Any war hero who did take time off from the celebrations at the Isthmus to visit them could look forward to a particularly enthusiastic reception. Then, shattered by the climb as well as by all of his subsequent exertions, he could slump down, admire the matchless view, and see for himself why the alliance that had won at Salamis might be in imminent danger of fissuring.
For from nowhere else could the opportunities and the dilemmas presented by the Isthmus be more readily appreciated. To the south stretched the Peloponnese—now, thanks in large part to the Athenian fleet, secure from invasion. To the north curved the coast that led to Attica—still wide open to Mardonius. Hardly surprising, then, that the Athenians, even as they began returning across the straits from Salamis to their ruined homeland, should have kept a nervous eye on the road to Thessaly. Resentful of the monstrous unfairness of geography, and hardly able to restrain themselves from blaming it on the Peloponnesians, they pressed loudly for a commitment from their allies to send an army north against Mardonius come the spring. The Peloponnesians stonewalled; and the more that the Athenians, attempting to shame them into action, harped upon their role as the victors of Salamis, the more their partners, snug and smug behind their wall, dug in their heels.