The Persian fleet was much smaller than at Salamis. Morale among the crews, which included a large number of doubtfully loyal Ionians, was very low. The survivors of the Phoenician contingent were so dispirited that they had been sent home. When the Persian commanders at the island of Samos learned the Hellenes were on the move, they decided they were no match for them and withdrew to the shelter of the nearby Mycale headland. There they joined forces with an infantry division that Xerxes had ordered to watch over Ionia during the army’s absence in Greece. They beached their ships and erected around them a stockade of rocks and timber.
The Greeks sailed close inshore to the Persian encampment and had a herald shout to the Ionians to “remember freedom first and foremost” and mutiny. They then disembarked not far off. Marines from Athens and other poleis marched along the beach towards the stockade. Meanwhile, out of sight of the enemy, the Spartans led about half their men up a gully into the hills and along a ridge to come down on the Persians from inland. The idea was not simply to stage a surprise attack, but, by giving the impression that the Greeks were fewer than they actually were, to tempt the Persians into taking the offensive.
The Persian commander nervously confiscated the Samians’ weapons and sent an equally untrustworthy contingent from Miletus to guard the passes that led from the Persian position out of the mountainous promontory. But he could not dismiss all his Ionians.
Just about now a rumor spread through the Greek fleet that Mardonius had been defeated in a great battle. This may have been a pious fiction invented by Leotychidas or possibly genuine news of the defeat of Masistius some days earlier. But it is equally plausible that the information could have been conveyed by a chain of beacons across the Aegean, for it appears that the battle of Plataea and this engagement at Mycale took place on the same day.
The Persians ate the bait and came out from their camp to fight, expecting a quick and easy victory. They planted a wicker shield-wall, as at Plataea, and shot arrows at the oncoming attackers. There was hard fighting with heavy casualties, but as the Athenians and others began to gain the upper hand, the unarmed Samians and other Ionians switched sides. By the time the Spartans turned up at the top of the ridge, there was little for them to do but mop up.
The victory was total. The camp was stormed and all the warships burned. For now, the Great King no longer had a fleet; when he heard what had happened he went into a state of shock. Elite Persian troops had more or less been wiped out and the Ionians went back to their cities with no intention of being conscripted again.
Leotychidas sailed north to the Hellespont to destroy Xerxes’ bridges, in case they had been rebuilt. Even if they had not, he could usefully confiscate the bridging material and capture the massive papyrus and flax cables.
—
The defeat of Xerxes was now complete. This was Greece’s finest hour. For all their squabbling and moral squalor, the allies had stuck together. Over time an idea grew of a historic fight for liberty, waged by a few, the happy few, against the barbarian many. It became a myth that shone ever more brightly with the passage of time. But it was closer than most myths are to the reality of what actually took place. The Persian Empire was an expansionist despotism (if a relatively civilized one) and the Greeks did seek to realize a certain idea of freedom. For Athens victory was proof that its democracy worked.
The Greeks had shown that a hoplite army, even one without cavalry, was more than a match for the best that the Achaemenids could throw at them. This was not a lesson quickly forgotten. The brilliant opportunism of Themistocles and his decision to make Athens into a sea power transformed the geopolitics of the region. The Greeks now ruled the waves. While the failure of Darius’s raid in 490 could properly be discounted as no more than an offense to the Great King’s bella figura, Xerxes had lost the Aegean Sea and most of its islands and could anticipate a new and more successful Ionian revolt along the seaboard of Asia Minor.
—
At last the Athenians could thank their hosts at Troezen and Salamis and, after long months as hard-up refugees, go home. Thucydides wrote:
The Athenian people, after the departure of the barbarian from their country, at once proceeded to bring over their children and wives, and such possessions as they had saved, from the places where they had deposited them. They prepared to rebuild their city and their walls. Only isolated portions of the circumference had been left standing, and most of the houses were in ruins, though a few remained, in which the Persian grandees had lodged.
In fact, the Spartans feared that Athens would get above itself and they had relished any opportunity to interfere militarily in its domestic affairs. Their own city was famous for being without walls and they asked the Athenian ecclesia not to build any themselves, and to join them in knocking down the fortifications of other city-states. Their stated motive was to make sure that if the Persians invaded for a third time there would be no strong places that they could capture and use as bases.
A likely tale, thought Themistocles; they simply wanted to keep the Athenians weak. Before he could be stopped, he put to work the entire male population on urgent wall construction and on improving the defenses of Piraeus. The perimeter of the city was enlarged, to accommodate a growing population. Gravestones, column drums from an unbuilt temple, and other miscellaneous material were cannibalized. Only when the work reached the lowest defensible height, at least so far as Athens itself was concerned, did he inform the Spartans what had been done. Privately, they were annoyed, but said nothing.
Twenty years later, very much in the spirit of Themistocles, who (in Plutarch’s metaphor) “attached the city to the Piraeus and made the land dependant on the sea,” two massive new walls were constructed to lead from Athens to the new port five miles away, and to the bay at Phaleron and so literally link the city to the sea. Later a third wall, parallel to the first, was added, creating a corridor two hundred yards wide. So long as its mercantile profits and the silver of Laurium allowed it to maintain its fleet, the polis would in effect become an unconquerable island. It would no longer have to worry about land powers, such as Sparta or Argos or disgraced Thebes. The Long Walls, as they came to be called, were very probably the wily statesman’s original idea—even if a generation had to pass before it was realized.
There was one exception to the general renewal of the sacked city. When the allies swore their oath before the battle of Plataea every Athenian was reported to have vowed: “I will not rebuild a single one of the temples which the barbarians have burned and razed to the ground, but will let them remain for future generations as a memorial of their impiety.”
So the Acropolis stayed a charred ruin. “Lest we forget” was the visible message that loomed above the city. There was little chance of that, as the Great King was to find out.
The Athenians had not finished with him yet.
13
League of Nations
Nobody underplayed the resonance of victory. It echoed and re-echoed. Monuments, shrines, odes, and elegies proliferated.
Simonides of Ceos specialized in public poetry and was so much in demand that, despite his murky track record as celebrator of the Pisistratid tyranny at Athens, he became the unofficial poet laureate of the Persian Wars. He (probably) wrote that most celebrated of epitaphs in honor of the Spartan king and the famous Three Hundred. Leonidas and his comrades were buried in 480 where they fell on the mound behind the ancient wall at Thermopylae. A stone lion commemorated the king. The poem’s terseness can, paradoxically, move the reader, even today.