Herodotus (Swayne)/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X.
THERMOPYLÆ.
Ready in heart and ready in hand,
March with banner, and bugle, and fife,
To the death, for their native land."
—Tennyson, "Maud."
After the terrible defeat of his best generals at Marathon, Darius thought the Athenians worth his personal attention. That battle took place in the autumn of B.C. 490; and the king occupied the next three years in preparations for a new expedition, which he intended to lead in person. But a revolt in Egypt divided his attention; and he was considering in which direction he was most wanted, when he was summoned from the scene by a mightier monarch than himself, after a reign of six-and-thirty years. His fourth son, Xerxes, succeeded him—not his first-born, Artabazanes; because Xerxes had been born in the purple, and of a daughter of Cyrus; whereas the elder sons had been born when Darius was a subject, and of the daughter of a subject. Xerxes soon disposed of the Egyptian revolt, and left his brother Achæmenes satrap of the country. Then he took up the great quarrel bequeathed him by his father, but after many hesitations and vacillations, signified in the narrative of Herodotus by dreams and their interpretations, and opposite opinions said to have been given by Artabanus, who dissuaded, and Mardonius, who was in favour of an invasion. The young king was evidently afraid of compromising his newly-inherited prosperity. He was of a luxurious character, not craving, like Darius, for barren honour; and if he left the Greeks alone, it would be a long time before they found their way to Susa. When the bolder counsels at last prevailed, he resolved to make matters as safe as possible. Grecian liberty was not to be stabbed, but stifled, to death. He would pour out all Asia upon it. So he took four good years in preparation, gathering a host of armed, half-armed, and almost unarmed men, such as has hardly been seen before or since. The soldiers, with the exception of the select few, carried the rudest national weapons—bows and arrows, pole-axes, "morning-stars," even staves and lassoes. Some rate the host as high as five millions; others give less than half that number. The men were measured, like dry goods—not counted; that is, a pen was made which could hold ten thousand, through which the whole army passed in successive batches. It is time, perhaps, that a common error should be exploded, into which, however, it would be impossible for any attentive reader of Herodotus to fall. No schoolboy believes now, as elderly men did when they were boys, that the French are a nation of cowards. But it is possible for careless readers of Greek history to believe that the Persians were cowards; else, they might say, how should they have been beaten by so small a number of Greeks? And were they not obliged to flog their soldiers into action? Perhaps this was only a Greek version of the fact that corporal punishment was an institution in their army. Amongst the Greeks it was confined to slaves. The lash has not prevented Russians and Austrians—not to mention others—from fighting well. Perhaps the native Persians, especially those of noble birth, were personally braver than the Greeks. But the Greeks had the immense advantage of discipline. In a disciplined army every man has the eyes of his comrades on him, and if fear is felt, it cannot act for very shame, and because it is counteracted by mechanical obedience. Aristotle assigns a special kind of courage to national militias, which all Greek armies were, which he calls the political courage, springing from the feeling of what is due from the individual to the community. This may not be courage of the most romantic kind, but it appears to answer its end perfectly; and Nelson thought it good enough to appeal to in his famous watchword, still written round the wheel of our war-ships—"England expects every man to do his duty." This kind of courage culminated in Leonidas. The Persian officers were even desperately brave, and always led the charges in person, which accounts for their great relative loss in battles. The Greek officers took their chance with the rest, being indistinguishable from the privates in the phalanx. Again, the numbers of their armies were a positive disadvantage to the Persians; for most of their auxiliary troops, when brought into contact with real soldiers, were as sheep brought to the shambles. The Greeks were also more efficiently armed. The Persian infantry were archers, carrying also pikes and daggers, who (like the English crossbow-man with his pavoise-hearer in the fifteenth century) made a "bulwark of their great oblong wicker shields, as may he seen now in the Nimrud sculptures, and shot from behind them. But when this bulwark was once forced, the Persians had no protection but their light armour against the strong, pikes of the Greeks. Our archers turned the scale of battle against superior forces at Cressy and Poitiers, because they were the only body which had at all the character of regular troops.
The Persian officers had in some respects become luxurious and effeminate even in the time of Darius, riding in palanquins, keeping sumpter-camels, and so forth; but they do not appear to have been worse than our Anglo-Indians, who have never been reckoned deficient in valour. The French mousquetaires, who fought under Marshal Saxe, were as celebrated for their foppery as their gallantry in the field. "Hold hard—the dandies are coming!" was the word passed from one British soldier to another, when their laced coats and three-cornered hats came in sight.
There is no need to follow in detail all the pomp and circumstance of the slow march of Xerxes into Greece. The vast army crossed from Abydos to Sestos by a double pontoon bridge; and Xerxes, like the spoiled child of the harem, is said to have ordered the Hellespont to be scourged, and chains to be thrown into it, and branding-irons to be plunged into the hissing water, because a storm had destroyed the work when first attempted. He is also said to have cut in halves the eldest son of a wealthy Lydian, who had made him an offer of all his property, but requested that one of his sons might be left behind; making his troops defile between the severed portions, by way of raising their enthusiasm. A similar story is told of Darius, which appears, in his case, incredible. The great interest of the expedition begins when it arrived where resistance might be expected from the Greeks. The land-force which marched round the coast was accompanied by more than twelve hundred war-galleys, besides a multitude of other craft. The navy passed through a new-made ship-canal, by which the voyage round the formidable headland of Athos was avoided. Our author says the work was done in mere bravado, since the ships might have been drawn across the narrow neck of land with less labour and cost. It is remarkable, in the cutting of this canal (a work of three years, the traces of which are still distinctly visible), that all the other nations were senseless enough to make its sides perpendicular, which, from the continual landslips, gave them double trouble; while the Phœnicians alone proved themselves as good "navvies" as navigators, by making their cutting twice as broad at top as at bottom.
The news of the approach of this overwhelming host struck the Greeks with consternation, and all the northern tribes, including the Thebans, submitted to the invader. The Athenians were alarmed by dark oracles pointing apparently to their extermination, but containing one saving clause, that they might find safety in their "wooden walls." They wisely interpreted this to mean their ships. Their troublesome war with the Æginetans proved now an advantage, as it had forced them to make large additions to their navy, the former poverty of which has been mentioned. Envoys were sent for aid to Argos, Sicily, Corcyra, and Crete. The Argives might be well excused for declining, as Cleomenes had just massacred six thousand out of their not probably more than ten thousand citizens. Gelon, the king of Syracuse, would have assisted, had not Sicily been just then invaded by a miscellaneous army of three hundred thousand men under the command of the Carthaginian Hamilcar, possibly induced, through the Phœnicians, to make this diversion in favour of Xerxes. Gelon had the good fortune to destroy this host in the decisive battle of Himera, on the same day as the Greek victory at Salamis. The Corcyræans temporised, with their historical selfishness; the Cretans excused themselves on the faith of an oracle; so the Greeks proper were left to face their terrible enemy alone, and even among them there were many craven spirits who took the side of the Persian.
Thessaly, through which the course of the invaders lay, is a basin of mountains, like Bohemia, cracked by the gorge of the Peneus, as Bohemia is by that of the Elbe. This basin was doubtless, as Herodotus says, once a lake, until it was tapped by some convulsion of nature. Xerxes thought flooding the country quite feasible, by damming up the outlet of the river: no such measure, however, was necessary. At first the Greeks had intended to make their stand there, in the Vale of Tempe, celebrated for its beauty. Overhung by plane-woods, the high cliffs are festooned with creepers, and diversified with underwood, approaching here and there so closely as to leave barely room for the road and river. But they gave up this position when they found that Thessaly could easily be entered by another road over the mountains. They drew back towards the isthmus: and Thessaly at once made terms with the Persian king.
It was now decided to make the first stand at the narrow pass of Thermopylæ (Hotwells-Gate), the key of Greece itself. The river Spercheius has since established a tract of alluvial deposit between the mountain and the sea, but the hot springs are still there, in pools of clear water, and the other features of the scene remain much as they were in the time of Herodotus. The pass leads along the shore from Thessaly to Locris. The Grecian fleet were to support the army in the narrow strait by Artemisium, on the head of Eubœa (Negropont). As the Persian host rolled on, it had increased like a snowball, imbibing the contingents of all the districts that submitted. But the elements were still against the invaders. A storm arose when their fleet was off Magnesia, attributed by the Athenians to the intervention of Boreas (the North Wind), who had married a daughter of their mythical king Erechtheus. At least four hundred galleys perished, and so much wealth was cast ashore that the wreckers on the coast became rich men; and the Persians soon after lost fifteen ships more, which mistook the enemy's fleet for their own. Xerxes was himself with the land-force, which had now occupied the territory of Trachis, north of the pass of Thermopylæ. The little Greek army had posted itself behind an ancient wall, which barred the pass, and which they had repaired, at a spot where there was only room for a single chariot-road. The nucleus of the force (in all under 8000 of all arms) was three hundred thorough-bred Spartans, each attended by his seven Helots. They were all fathers of families, who had left sons at home to succeed them. At their head was Leonidas, now senior king of Sparta. This small force was expected to be able to hold the pass until the rest were disengaged; for the Spartans were keeping a local feast, and the other Greeks were engaged at the great Olympian festival. Perhaps the very extremity of the danger made the Greeks put their religious duties in the foreground; and, indeed, Leonidas and his men went out as to an expected sacrifice. A Persian scout reported to Xerxes that he found the Spartans busy dressing their hair. In surprise the king appealed for explanation to his refugee guest Demaratus, the banished king of Sparta, whom he had brought to Greece in his train. The Spartan warned him that it betokened, on the part of his countrymen, a resistance to the death. Usually careless of their dress, there was one occasion when they polished their arms, combed their long hair and wreathed it with flowers, and put on scarlet vests; it was when they expected a battle which they might not survive. Xerxes waited four days to see if they would retire, and then ordered his Medes and Cissians to bring them to him in chains. For a whole day these made repeated attacks, and were as often repulsed with heavy loss. The Persian "Immortals" were then launched at them, and fared no better. These troops were so called because they were always kept up to the exact number of ten thousand,[1] and represented the Imperial Guard. Often pretending flight, so as to draw them on in loose pursuit, the Greeks turned on their enemies and butchered them. One would have thought that this affair in the front would have made little impression on that dense host; but Xerxes is said to have leapt thrice from his throne as the wave of disturbance reached him, fearing for his whole army. On the third day a native guide came and told the king of a pass over the mountains, by which the Greeks might be taken in rear, and he selected Hydarnes, the commander of the Immortals, for this important service. The crest of this pass (the existence of which the Greeks had learned too late) was watched on their behalf by a thousand Phocians, who were warned by hearing the rustling of the dry leaves of the oak-wood, but thinking an attack on their own post was intended, retired to a more defensible position, and let Hydarnes pass on. The way in which the little band of heroes received the announcement that their position had been turned should be told in Herodotus's own words:—
"First, the soothsayer Megistias, as he inspected the sacrifices, warned them of the death which awaited them with the morrow's dawn. Then came some deserters, who told them of the march of the Persians round the hill. All this was while it was still night. Then, when the day had broken, their scouts came running down from the heights with the same news. Thereupon the Greeks took counsel, and their opinions were divided: for some would not hear of quitting their post, while others advised to do so. Then they parted asunder, and some went off and dispersed each to their own cities, and some prepared to remain there with Leonidas. It is even said that Leonidas himself sent them away, anxious that they should not be slain; but for himself and the Spartans who were there, it was not seemly, he said, for them to leave a post which they had once undertaken to keep."
Those who chose the nobler alternative, besides the Spartans and their Laconian subjects and Helot slaves, who could not help themselves, were seven hundred Thespians and four hundred Thebans the latter, our author says, detained as hostages, but probably proscribed at home for refusing to submit, like the rest, to Xerxes. The struggle now could have but one issue. Xerxes ordered a general attack at daybreak, and Leonidas, in order to sell the lives of his men as dearly as possible, ordered them to advance from the defile itself, and attack in the open. The Persians perished in crowds some driven into the sea, some trampled to death by their comrades, others urged forward by stripes only to fall on the deadly lances of the Greeks.
Dead weight, however, began to tell against the latter, when they had broken their spears in barbarian bodies, and had used their swords till they were weary. At last Leonidas fell, and over his body the struggle was renewed more furiously than ever.
In a semicircle lay."
In that swathe of corpses were found two brothers of Xerxes. Four times the Greeks repulsed the enemy, and at last bore off the body of their king. They had but short breathing-space. Their hour was come, when the fatal troops of Hydarnes came down the hills in their rear. The survivors drew back into the narrowest part of the pass, within the wall, and posted themselves on a hillock, where a stone lion afterwards marked the resting-place of Leonidas. So did the survivors of the Khyber Pass massacre in 1841 draw together for a last stand on the hillock at Gundamuck, whence a single officer escaped to Peshawur to tell that the British army was exterminated.
The four hundred Thebans saved themselves by a timely surrender; the remaining four thousand Greeks were buried in a hail-shower of missiles. Herodotus awards the palm of valour to a Spartan wit, who, when he was told that the Persian arrows would darken the air, said, "Then we shall have but a shadow-fight" (or sham-fight). Such a man would have appreciated the ghastly witticisms of the guillotine in the French Revolution. Xerxes, with an indecency towards the dead quite opposed to all Persian usage, had the head of Leonidas cut off, and fixed upon a pole.
The Greek combined fleet was commanded by the Spartan Eurybiades. The Spartans would only co-operate on condition that the command should be theirs, though they only furnished ten ships, while the Athenians mustered one hundred and twenty-seven. Spartan provincialism forms a strong contrast to the national patriotism of the little state of Platæa, which threw itself heart and soul into the cause of Greek independence. Though landsmen, the Platæans helped to man the Athenian fleet. They were afterwards rewarded by vile ingratitude from Sparta, and lukewarm friendship from Athens.
The whole naval strength counted two hundred and seventy-one three-banked galleys. The Persian disaster in the storm had now been balanced by a Greek disaster in the field; and the barometer of Hellenic confidence fell again. There was even talk of leaving Eubœa to its fate, and retreating southwards. Themistocles, the Athenian commander, was a man who had raised himself to a foremost position from small beginnings, which may account for his understanding so well the use and power of money. If Mammon was one of his gods, he could make him his servant for good as well as for evil. The Eubœans, alarmed for their families and goods, besought the Spartan admiral not to desert them; and finding him impracticable, applied to Themistocles—this time backing their prayers with a present of thirty talents. Themistocles knew Eurybiades better than they, and gave him five talents out of the thirty, as if they had come from himself, or from the treasury of the Athenians, and three more to Adeimantus the Corinthian, whose valour, among all the national commanders, seemed most strongly tempered with discretion. The rest of this secret-service money he kept for himself.
The Persians, in great fear lest the Greek fleet should escape them under cover of night, detached two hundred ships, with orders to sail round outside Euboea, and back up the strait between the island and the mainland, and so block in the enemy.
The battle—or rather battles, for there were three—of Artemisium began by desultory and provocative attacks on the part of the Greeks, who, when they had brought the whole Persian fleet upon them, rolled theirs up like a hedgehog or porcupine, with the spines outside. They drew their sterns all together, and formed a circle with their sharp beaks turned every way. In the first mêlée thirty ships were taken from the Persians. The battle lasted through the mid-summer evening, and then each fleet withdrew to its moorings. The sea was like oil, and that ominous calm reigned from which better sailors than the Greeks would have foretold storm. At midnight it thundered and lightened on Mount Pelion, the wind rose, and the wrecks and bodies were drifted to the station of the Persian fleet, and struck the crews with dismay. But it fared worse with their detached division, which was utterly destroyed on the rocks on the outer coast of Eubœa. Thus did the good wind Boreas still seem to help his friends. A reinforcement of fifty-three fresh Athenian galleys came up at daybreak, having escaped the storm inside the island. The ancient warships, even the great "five-bankers" of the Romans and Carthaginians, could stand no more weather than a river-steamer; while their great rounded Dutch-built merchant-ships would ride out a moderate gale fairly. On the afternoon of the second day the Greeks attacked again, and sank some Cilician vessels. On the third day about noon the Persians began the attack, while the Greeks kept their station at Artemisium. There was much fouling among the Persians from their closely-packed vessels, but they fought well, and neither side could claim much advantage. The Athenians gained most distinction among the allies; and of the Athenians Cleinias, son of Alcibiades, and father of him of that name who afterwards was the representative Athenian of the new school. He had manned and equipped his trireme at his own expense. The Greeks remained masters of the field—that is, of the scene of action, with the bodies and wrecks; but as half the Athenian fleet had been more or less damaged, they decided on withdrawing southward, especially as they now heard of the loss of Thermopylæ. Before he went, Themistocles had inscriptions graven on the rocks by all the watering-places, exhorting the Ionian Greeks now in the service of Persia to desert. If this had no effect on those to whom they were addressed, it would at any rate make them objects of suspicion to the Persians. Then the Greeks sailed away—the Corinthians first, the Athenians, as became them, last.
While the Persian sailors and marines were wasting the north of Eubœa, a herald came from Xerxes ordering a day's leave ashore to be given, that the crews might view the field of Thermopylæ. On the Greek side were four thousand bodies in a heap, which the king pretended were all Spartans or Thespians; on his side lay about a thousand, scattered all over the field. The rest of the Persians had been carefully buried beforehand; but the trick deceived nobody.
The Persian army now advanced and ravaged Phocis, and on the farther frontier parted into two divisions, the larger entering the friendly territory of Bœotia, and making for Athens—the smaller proceeding towards Delphi. Xerxes was well instructed as to the wealth of Apollo's temple, and must have known by heart all the costly offerings that Crœsus had made. The Delphians in dismay consulted their oracle: the god replied that "he could protect his own." Just when the enemy reached the ascent to the temple, a thunderstorm burst forth, and great rocks came rolling down the steep of Parnassus. The Persians fled, and the Delphians, assisted apparently by two supernatural warriors, emerged from their hiding-places and slew the hindermost. The priests of Apollo were doubtless adepts in the machinery of the stage.
- ↑ The forty members of the French Academy are so nicknamed for the same reason.