It is hard otherwise to explain a haunting coincidence. Well over a hundred miles away from Plataea, on the far side of the Aegean, on the same day as the great victory, “a rumour suddenly flew through the ranks of the Greek fleet that their countrymen had beaten Mardonius in Boeotia.”64 The resulting surge of confidence among the crewmen could hardly have been better timed: for they too, that afternoon, faced an army of barbarians. Leotychides, after months of inactivity, had finally, a few days previously, ventured eastward out of his headquarters and was now anchored in the great harbor of Samos, directly opposite the ridge of Mount Mycale. It was there, on the mountain’s slope, that the Panionium stood, the ancient communal shrine of the Ionians; south, along the coast, lay devastated Miletus; and just offshore from her harbors, in the bay, rose the island of Lade. Fateful scenes all, and clear evidence of Nemesis’ hand: for in the war’s beginning was its end.
Nor was it hard to discern the goddess’s hand in the fact that the odds which had so favored the Persians fifteen years previously had now been dramatically reversed. The imperial war fleet, once the terror of the seas, had been sadly reduced from its wonted pomp. Its ships were battle scarred, its crews demoralized, its squadrons near mutinous. The Phoenicians, once its mainstay, had been dismissed from its ranks altogether. Leotychides, by contrast, had recently received a huge reinforcement in the form of the Athenian battle squadron: for Xanthippus, having kicked his heels on Salamis throughout the first half of the summer, had cheerfully set out for Delos the moment that Pausanias was confirmed to have left the Isthmus. As a result, the Allies—in a startling turnaround from the previous summer—now possessed the advantage of numbers. Scanning the horizon nervously, the Persian admirals had only had to glimpse the Greek fleet bearing down on them to jump ship. Landing directly in the shadow of Mount Mycale, they had hauled their triremes onto a beach, frantically improvised a stockade out of boulders and apple trees, and barricaded themselves inside it.
And it was this same stockade that Leotychides, on the day of the Battle of Plataea, decided to attack. Noon, and a wisp of smoke began to rise on the western horizon, soon to be answered by a beacon blazing into life on the heights of Samos. Meanwhile, marines—Athenian, Corinthian and Troezenian—were landing on the beach near the Persians’ makeshift fort. The defenders, cheered by the small size of the allied assault force, emerged from behind their palisade; and the Greeks immediately charged them. A desperate fight ensued, with the Persians fighting bravely from behind a makeshift wall of shields; but in the end, as at Marathon and Plataea, the hoplites rolled them over. Meanwhile, Leotychides, having disembarked with the Peloponnesians in the rear of the palisade, gained sweet revenge for Thermopylae by emerging suddenly from a foothill of Mount Mycale and completing the rout. Only a fraction of the Persian garrison escaped to Sardis. The fort and all the ships lined up inside it were abandoned. Leotychides, having been sure first to pillage everything he could, torched the Persian fleet that same evening. No longer fighting in defense of their own soil, the Greeks had now gone successfully on the attack. Dusk settled over Ionia, and fires lit on the edge of Asia flickered throughout the night.
“Many are the marks of evidence which prove the hand of the goddess in the affairs of mortal men.”65 To the Greeks, it seemed a miracle that they should have prevailed twice on the same day over what was still, after all, the world’s superpower. Leotychides himself could barely credit it. Even back on Samos, having left the Persian fleet to burn across the straits, he and his fellow admirals continued to dread the wrath of the King of Kings. Surely, they imagined, his vengeance was bound to strike at any moment. But it did not. Instead, some weeks after Mycale, it was reported that Xerxes, “in a state of bewilderment,”66 had left Sardis altogether, and was taking the long road back to Susa. With him was going most of his army. A raiding party, dispatched from Sardis, did manage to land a blow on that favorite Persian punching bag, the holy shrine at Didyma, and once again cart off a statue of Apollo; but otherwise there was little action from the barbarians. A year passed, and then another; and still the Great King did not return.
This inactivity led to much conjecture among the Greeks. Cowardice, effeminacy and softness were all adduced as plausible explanations. The notion of the barbarians’ decadence, which would have struck everyone as preposterous before Marathon, now began to be regarded by most Greeks as a simple fact. Nor was it merely the failure of the Persians to launch a third invasion which increasingly nourished this comforting prejudice. Everything about Xerxes’ invasion which had struck the Greeks as so terrifying at the time—the teeming numbers of the Great King’s hordes, the limitless resources at his fingertips, the wealth, the show, the spectacle, the extravagance of his train—all, in hindsight, appeared merely to have marked him out as effete. Conquerors of Asia the Persians may have been; but they might as well have been women when measured against the free-born, bronze-clad men of Greece.
Some even began to wonder if the bloody repulse that the Great King had suffered had doomed his regime altogether. One of these optimists was an Athenian by the name of Aeschylus—a man who had every reason to nurture such a hope. A veteran of both Marathon and Salamis, he had also suffered a bitter personal loss at the hands of the barbarians: for it was his brother who had clung to one of the ships moored off Marathon, and had his wrist hacked off by an ax. Well might Aeschylus have dreamed of the implosion of Persian power. In 472 BC, eight years after Salamis, he gave his optimism a truly visionary rendering at the City Dionysia, the Athenians’ annual drama contest. As the audience, assembling in the shadow of the Acropolis, milled into the theater, they would have seen, wherever they gazed, scars and reminders of their city’s recent ordeal. Behind them, on the sacred rock, the silhouette remained one of devastation stilclass="underline" for the allies—Athenians included—had vowed before taking the field against Mardonius that any temple burned by the barbarians was to be left forever as a ruin, “to serve as witness for generations yet to come.”67 The bleachers on which the audience took their seats had been fashioned, almost certainly, out of timbers salvaged from the shattered barbarian fleet; while on the stage itself, it has been plausibly suggested, there may have stood that most spectacular of all battle trophies: the captured royal tent.68 If so, then the leather that had once sheltered the King of Kings now provided an awning over the stage of the Dionysia—and the perfect backdrop for the tragedy that Aeschylus had titled The Persians.
Set in Susa, it offered, for the delectation of the Athenian people, a dramatic reconstruction of Xerxes’ return home from Salamis. The king who had left Persia in the full pomp of his majesty was portrayed limping back in rags; the courtiers who had thought to hail a conquering hero were heard wailing in misery. All most enjoyable—and comforting—for the audience, of course. The Great King was indeed cowed, Aeschylus reassured his fellow citizens; and Athens, the city which had defeated him, was now a beacon of liberty to nations everywhere. “For the people of Asia will not endure to remain the slaves of Persia for long; to be strong-armed into paying tribute to their master; to prostrate themselves before him on the ground. Kingship itself and all its power are dead.”69 The world, in other words, had been made safe for Athens—and for democracy. No wonder that Aeschylus should have scooped first prize.