The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [44]
The Persians could never be beaten with Greek brawn; Greek nous, however, might have a chance. And so early in autumn – the month of September for us, Pyanepsion in the Athenian calendar – the Persian forces, by now camped dangerously close on the fringes of Attica, were tempted into what would turn out to be the beginning of their military endgame.
The entire population of Athens – all, that is, except the priestesses, treasurers and trembling lingerers who had holed themselves up on the Acropolis (and were then slaughtered or burned alive as the Temple of Athena was torched) – had been evacuated to the Peloponnese or to the nearby island of Salamis. Well over 100,000 had been moved. Children were whimpering, women sweated with effort and fear. In this refugee crowd were many of the men who might have the chance to make Athens great: a teenage Pericles (almost certainly) was here, so too the dramatist Sophocles.
They were lines of snails in an electric storm. Families had with them some treasures, some grain. Their homes had been incinerated, everything was broken or looted. This was a sad, a debased moment. With the city of Athens still smouldering, all Athenians could do was watch and wait. The odds were heavily weighted against them. Enslavement, slaughter, rape seemed almost certain. Only if by some miracle – or, many must have thought, by the intervention of Athena herself – if the Greek plan worked, would they be able to take themselves and their families back to their cindered city.12
But that day Olympian deities, and particularly, it seemed, the gods of the wind, were listing towards the Athenian side. The straits of Salamis are a scant mile wide. If one climbs up the rocky white cliffs – where Xerxes himself sat to watch the battle – and stares down, the waters look little more than an inlet, a lake better suited to pleasure-boats. Salamis sits obstructively in between. However vast your head-count, at any one time, only a limited number of soldiers can fight here. The few Persian ships that entered were blown sideways. Fat, broadside bellies of the boats were presented to the Greeks. The warships started to cluster like leaves in a puddle. A frenzy of ramming followed. With the bottle-nosed metal bolt attached to the front of every ship, the Greeks splintered the guts of their enemies. Those men that didn’t drown were skewered in the shallows. Screams echoed across the seas, the rocks slipped and shone with still-pulsing half-humans. Waters flushed with Greek and with Persian blood.
And then a sharp, sweet call cut through the air. The Greeks were celebrating their victory with a flute paean. A monumental statue would be set up in Delphi, 17½ feet high, holding the stern-post of a captured Persian warship. Blocks of stone would be inscribed and erected throughout the city, declaring that Western liberty could, and should, triumph over Eastern tyranny.
The defeat of such a gargantuan enemy ignited Athens. For seven long decades the Persians had been flexing their muscles, stealing Greek allies, marching through Greek lands, tempting Greeks to their side with the promise of riches beyond their wildest dreams.13 And now overnight this attitudinal, radical little territory of Athens had become (by recalling exiles, empowering hoplite soldiers, training in new skills and – hands butchered with blisters and splinters – knocking out two triremes a week) the city of the invincible. The Athenians set about rebuilding their homes, and building up their reputation and their wondrous city-state.
Now Athens’ name was spoken of in village squares across the diaspora. Spirits were flying high. In simple rooms throughout the city officials wrapped themselves in their best cloaks to travel to Asia Minor, Thrace and Egypt to bear the good news that Athens had taken on the job of uniting the eastern Mediterranean against its enemies. Because Athens was now a maritime power, she