Travels with Herodotus Read online

  First, Xerxes spends four years creating his army—a worldwide military coalition into whose ranks will be recruited all the peoples, tribes, and clans of the empire. Just naming them all takes Herodotus several pages. He calculates that this army—infantry, cavalry, and naval crews—numbered some five million men. He exaggerates, of course. Even so, it was a gigantic fighting force. How to feed it? How to supply it with sufficient drinking water? These men and animals would imbibe entire rivers along the way, leaving empty beds behind them. Someone observes that, luckily, Xerxes ate only once a day. If the king, and with him the entire army, ate twice daily, they would have turned all of Thrace, Macedonia, and Greece into a desert, and the local populations would have died of hunger.

  Herodotus is fascinated by this army’s advance, by the vertiginous mighty river of men, beasts, and equipment, of uniforms and armor. Because each ethnic group has its own attire, the colorful diversity of this throng is difficult to describe. Two chariots form the center of the procession: the sacred chariot of Zeus, which was drawn by eight white horses. Following them on foot (because no human being is allowed to mount the seat of this chariot) came the charioteer, with the reins in his hands.

  Behind him came Xerxes himself, seated on a chariot drawn by Nesaean horses….

  He was followed by the 1,000 bravest and noblest Persian spearmen,… and then another 1,000 élite Persian horsemen, and after them came the 10,000 best remaining Persian soldiers on foot …. And finally the rest of the army brought up the rear, all massed together indiscriminately.

  But let us not be misled by the ornamentalism of this army marching off to war. This is no carnival, no holiday party. On the contrary. Herodotus notes that the troops, walking with difficulty and in silence, had to be driven on now and then by whips.

  He describes in detail the behavior of the Persian king. Xerxes is unbalanced, unpredictable, an astonishing bundle of contradictions (in this he resembles Stavrogin).

  Here he is, making his way to Sardis with his army. He spots a plane-tree along the road which was so beautiful that he presented it with golden decorations and appointed one of the Immortals as guardian to look after it.

  He is still under the spell of the tree’s charms when news reaches him that a great storm in the straits of the Hellespont has destroyed the bridges which he had ordered built so that his army could cross from Asia into Europe in its advance on Greece. Upon hearing this, Xerxes flew into a rage. He ordered his men to give the Hellespont three hundred lashes and to sink a pair of shackles into the sea. I once heard that he also dispatched men to brand the Hellespont as well. Be that as it may, he did tell the men he had thrashing the sea to revile it in terms you would never hear from a Greek. “Bitter water,” they said, “this is your punishment for wronging your master when he did no wrong to you. King Xerxes will cross you, with or without your consent. People are right not to sacrifice to a muddy, brackish stream like you!” So the sea was punished at his orders, and he had the supervisors of the bridging of the Hellespont beheaded.

  We do not know how many of these heads were cut off. We do not know if the condemned builders meekly offered up their necks, or if they fell on their knees and begged for mercy. The carnage must have been horrific, because such bridges were built by thousands upon thousands of people. In any event, the punishments satisfy Xerxes, help him regain his mental equilibrium. His people build new bridges across the Hellespont, and the Magi announce that all omens are auspicious.

  The king, overjoyed at this news, decides to press on when a Lydian he knew, Pythius, comes to him and begs for a favor: “Master, I have five sons, all of whom have to march with you against Greece. Please, my lord, take pity on me in my old age and release one of my sons, the eldest one, from military service, so that he can look after me and manage my property as well. But take the other four with you—and may you return home with all your objectives attained!”

  At these words Xerxes once again falls into a fury: “Damn you!” Xerxes shouts at the old man. “… How dare you mention a son of yours, when you are no more than my slave, and should follow in my train with your whole household, wife and all?…” As soon as Xerxes had given Pythius this answer, he ordered those of his men who were responsible for such matters to find the eldest of Pythius’ sons and to cut him in half. Then they were to place one half on the right of the road and the other half on the left, so that the army would pass between them.

  And that is what happened.

  The unending river of troops filed down the road, urged along by the crack of the whips, and all the soldiers saw lying on either side of them the bloody remains of Pythius’s eldest son. Where was Pythius at that moment? Did he stand by the corpse? By which part of it? How did he behave when Xerxes approached in his chariot? With what expression on his face? This is unknowable, because, being a slave, he had to kneel with his face to the ground.

  An uncertainty afflicts Xerxes. It gnaws at him. He hides it with a show of haughtiness and pride. In order to feel stronger, internally shored up, assured of his power, he organizes a review of his army and fleet. The immensity of this mass cannot but impress, cannot but take one’s breath away. So great is the number of arrows released simultaneously from all the bows that it obscures the sun. The ships are so many that one cannot see the waters of the bay: While they were in Abydus, Xerxes decided that he would like to survey his whole army. A dais of white stone had already been made especially for him … and set up on a hill there. From this vantage-point he could look down on to the seashore and see both the land army and the fleet. As he watched them he conceived the desire to see the ships race … Xerxes took great pleasure in the race, and indeed in the whole army.

  The sight of the Hellespont completely covered by his ships and the coast and plains of Abydus totally overrun by men first gave Xerxes a feeling of deep selfsatisfaction, but later he began to weep.

  The king crying?

  His uncle, Artabanus, seeing Xerxes’ tears, spoke to him thus: “My lord, a short while ago you were feeling happy with your situation and now you are weeping. What a total change of mood!”

  “Yes,” Xerxes answered. “I was reflecting on things and it occurred to me how short the sum total of human life is, which made me feel compassion. Look at all these people—but not one of them will still be alive in a hundred years’ time.”

  They converse thus about life and death for a long while still, after which the king sends his old uncle back to Susa and, having waited for the dawn, orders the crossing of the straits of the Hellespont to the other side—to Europe: At sunrise, Xerxes poured a libation from a golden cup into the sea and, facing the sun, asked the sun-god to avert any accidents which might stop him from reaching the outer limits of Europe and conquering the whole continent.

  Xerxes’ army, drinking the rivers dry, consuming whatever food it comes across, and keeping to the northern shores of the Aegean Sea, crosses Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly, and reaches Thermopylae.

  • • •

  Every school curriculum includes Thermopylae; it is not usual to devote an entire class to it.

  Thermopylae is a narrow isthmus, a passage between the sea and a high mountain lying to the northwest of today’s Greek capital. To seize this passage is to have an open road to Athens. The Persians understand this, as do the Greeks, of course. Which is why both will wage a fierce battle here. The Greek combatants will all perish, but Persian losses will also be immense.

  Initially, Xerxes counted on the handful of Greeks defending Thermopylae simply to flee at the sight of the gigantic Persian army, and so calmly waited for that to occur. But the Greeks, under the command of Leonidas, do not retreat. Impatient, Xerxes sends out a scout on horseback on a mission of reconnaissance. The scout approached the Greeks’ camp and kept them under close surveillance … He watched them in a variety of occupations, such as exercising naked and combing their hair; this surprised him, but he took careful note of their numbers and then made his way back t
o Xerxes, without meeting any opposition. No one set out after him, and in fact he met with total indifference. When he got back he gave Xerxes a thorough report on what he had seen.

  Xerxes listened to what the scout had to say, but he could not understand that in actual fact the Greeks were getting themselves ready to kill or be killed to the best of their ability.

  The battle lasts several days, and the balance is tipped only by a traitor who shows the Persians the path through the mountains. They surround the Greeks, all of whom are killed. After the battle, Xerxes walks over the battlefield strewn with corpses, looking for the body of Leonidas. When he came to Leonidas’ corpse, … he told his men to cut off his head and stick it on a pole.

  Xerxes lost all of his subsequent battles. When Xerxes realized the extent of the disaster that had taken place, he became afraid. What if the Greeks got the idea … of sailing to the Hellespont and demolishing his bridges? In that case, he would be trapped in Europe, and would probably be wiped out. And so Xerxes’ thoughts turned to flight.

  And flee he does, abandoning the theater of war before the war’s end. He returns to Susa. He is thirty-something years old. He will be king of the Persians for another fifteen years, during which time he will occupy himself with expanding his palace in Persepolis. Perhaps he felt internally spent? Perhaps he suffered from depression? In any event, insofar as the world was concerned, he disappeared. The dreams of might, of ruling over everything and everyone, faded away. It is said that he was interested only in women; he constructed for them an immense, imposing harem, whose ruins I have seen.

  He was fifty-six years old when, in 465 B.C.E., he was murdered by Artabanus, the commander of his security guard. This Artabanus put up Xerxes’ younger brother, Artaxerxes, to be king. Artaxerxes in turn later murdered Artabanus, during a fight that broke out in the palace. The son of Artaxerxes, Xerxes II, was murdered in 425 by his brother Sogdians, who was later murdered by Darius II, etc., etc.

  THE OATH OF ATHENS

  Before the defeated Xerxes pulls out of Europe and returns to Susa with his emaciated, sick, and starving forces (wherever they went and whatever people they encountered, they stole and ate their crops. If there were no crops to be had, they ate grass and herbs they found growing in the ground, and bark and leaves they peeled or pulled off both wild trees and cultivated ones. They were so hungry that they left nothing untried. Moreover, they were ravaged by disease, and men were dying of dysentery throughout the journey. Xerxes also left sick troops in the care and maintenance of whichever community they had reached at that particular point of the march …, before all this happens, many other things will come to pass and much blood will be spilled.

  There is a war going on, after all, one in which Persia is to conquer Greece—meaning, Asia is to seize Europe, despotism is to destroy democracy, and slavery is to prevail against freedom.

  At first, everything suggests that this will in fact occur, that it will be thus. The Persian army marches hundreds of kilometers into Europe without meeting any resistance. What is more, several small Greek states, fearing that such a great army’s victory is inevitable, surrender without a fight and join the Persian side. So Xerxes’ army grows even larger and more powerful as it advances. Having seized the barrier that was Thermopylae, Xerxes reaches Athens. He occupies and burns down the city. Yet while Athens lies in ruins, Greece still exists—and it will be saved by the genius of Themistocles.

  Themistocles has just been chosen leader of Athens. This takes place at a difficult time, during a moment of great tension, because it is known that Xerxes is preparing an invasion. It so happens that just at that moment, Athens receives a large influx of funds generated by its silver mines in Laurium. The populists and the demagogues instantly feel the wind in their sails and come out with a slogan: Distribute it to all equally! Finally, everyone will have something, everyone will feel strong and secure.

  But Themistocles acts sensibly and courageously: Athenians, he calls, come to your senses! The danger of annihilation hangs over our heads. Our only salvation, instead of spreading that money about, is to build with it a strong fleet capable of resisting the Persian force!

  Herodotus paints the picture of this great war of antiquity by means of contrasts: On the one side, from the East, comes surging an immense, powerful steamroller, a blind force subject to the despotic will of a king-master, a king-god. On the other side sprawls the scattered, internally quarrelsome Greek world, rife with disputes and antagonisms, a world of tribes and independent cities without a common government to bind them. Two urban centers, Athens and Sparta, rise to the top of this incoherent amalgam, and taken together, their relations and arrangements will determine the principal axis of ancient Greek history.

  Two individuals also face each other in this war. The young Xerxes, with a strong sense of boundless power, and Themistocles, older, convinced his cause is just, courageous in thought and in deed. Their situations are not comparable: Xerxes rules absolutely, issuing orders at will; before Themistocles can issue an order, he must first secure the consent of military commanders who only nominally answer to him, and he must also win the approval of the populace. Their roles, too, are different: one rides at the head of an army advancing like an avalanche, in a hurry to attain a decisive victory; the other is merely a primus inter pares, and spends his time convincing, debating, and discussing with the continually convening disputatious Greeks.

  The Persians face no dilemmas—their single goal is to please their king. They are like Russian soldiers from the poem “Ordon’s Redoubt” by Adam Mickiewicz.

  How the soldiers fall, whose God and faith is the Czar.

  The Czar is angry: let us die, and make the Czar happy.

  The Greeks by contrast are by nature divided. On the one hand, they are attached to their small homelands, their city-states, each with its distinct interests and separate ambitions; on the other hand, they are united by a common language and common gods, as well as by a vague feeling—which nevertheless resonates forcefully at times—of a greater Greek patriotism.

  The war is taking place on two fronts: on land and at sea. After seizing Thermopylae, the Persians encounter no resistance for a long time. Their fleet, however, keeps suffering dramatic setbacks. To begin, it sustains large losses as a result of storms and gales. Sudden violent winds propel Persian ships onto coastal rocks, where they shatter like matchboxes and their crews drown.

  Initially, the Greek fleet is a lesser danger than the storms. The Persians have many times more ships and this numerical superiority depresses Greek morale; time and again they fall into a panic, lose heart, think of escaping. They are far from being born killers. They do not have a taste for soldiering. If there is an opportunity to avoid a clash, they eagerly seize it. Sometimes they will go to great lengths just to avoid a skirmish. Unless the opponent is another Greek, of course—in which case they will wrestle with him ferociously.

  Now too, under Persian pressure, the Greek fleet keeps retreating. Its commander, Themistocles, tries as far as he can to restrain it. Hold on, he exhorts the crews of the ships, try to maintain your positions! Sometimes they listen to him, but not always. The withdrawal continues, until at last the Greek ships find harbor in the bay of Salamis, near Athens. The Greek captains feel safe here. The entrance to the bay is so narrow that the Persian king will think twice before sailing in with his gigantic fleet.

  Both Xerxes and Themistocles now ponder their situations. Xerxes: To go in or not to go in? Themistocles: If I can draw Xerxes into the little bay, its surface is so small that his numbers will prove a disadvantage. Xerxes: I will win, because I will sit on the throne at the edge of the sea, and the Persians, seeing that their king is watching, will fight like lions! Themistocles doesn’t yet know what Xerxes is thinking, and to make certain that the Persians enter the bay, he resorts to a trick: He … briefed one of his men (a house-slave of his—his children’s attendant, to be precise—whose name was Sicinnus), and sent him over to the Per
sian camp in a boat …. Sicinnus sailed over and said to the Persian commanders, “I am on a secret mission for the Athenian commander, who is in fact sympathetic to Xerxes’ cause and would prefer you to gain the upper hand in the war rather than the Greeks. None of the other Greeks know that I am here. The message from my master is that the Greeks are in a state of panic and are planning to retreat. Unless you just stand by and let them escape, you have an opportunity here to achieve a glorious victory. They are disunited, in no position to offer you resistance; in fact you’ll see them pitting their ships against one another, those who are on your side fighting those who are not.” After delivering this message, Sicinnus left.

  Themistocles turned out to be a good psychologist. He knew that Xerxes, like every ruler, was a vain man, and that vanity makes one blind, impairs one’s ability to think rationally. And so it was this time. Encouraged by the disinformation about Greek squabbling, instead of steering clear of the trap that a small bay always poses for a large fleet, he gives the order to sail into Salamis and block the Greeks’ escape route. The Persians execute this maneuver, under the cover of darkness.

  That same evening, even as the Persians are secretively and quietly approaching the bay, another dispute flares up among the Greeks, who do not realize what is transpiring: So the commanders at Salamis were furiously hurling arguments at one another. They were still unaware that they had been surrounded by the Persian fleet, and continued to assume that the enemy had remained where they had seen them stationed during the day.