Christian Cameron: Salamis

With only a little jiggling of the wheel of fate, we made sure Sparta won the chariot race and we left the Olympics richer by some drachmas and wiser by as much, as we’d had nights and nights to thrash out plans for the defence of Greece.

So it was all the more daunting when King Leonidas and Queen Gorgo of Sparta asked me to take their ambassadors to the Great King, the king of Persia. That’s another complex tale; the old Spartan king had killed the Persian heralds, an act of gross impiety, and Leonidas sought to rid Sparta of that impiety. So he sent two messengers to far-off Persepolis, two hereditary heralds.

And me.

Well, and Aristides the Just of Athens, who was ostracised — exiled — for being too fair, too rigid, too much of a prig …

I laugh. He was probably my closest friend — my mentor. A brilliant soldier — his finest hour will come soon — and a brilliant speaker, a man who was so incorruptible that ordinary men sometimes found him easy to hate. An aristocrat of the kind that makes men like me think there might be something to the notion of birth; a true hero.

We went to the Great King by way of Tarsus, where I was mauled by a lion, and Babylon, where I was mauled by a woman. Of the two, Babylon was vastly to be preferred. In Babylon we found the seed of the revolt that later saved Greece. When we arrived at Persepolis, I knew immediately that our embassy was doomed — the arrogance of the Persians and Medes was boundless, and nothing we could do would placate or even annoy them. I told you last night how the Spartan envoys — and Brasidas, my friend — and I danced in armour for the Immortals, and were mocked.

Our audience with the Great King was more like staged theatre, intended by his cousin Mardonius to humiliate us before the King had us executed.

But, luckily, my friend Artaphernes had a long arm and his own allies. In other places I have discussed him — another great man, another hero, another mentor. The greatest of my foes, and one I never defeated. But in this we were allies; he did not want Mardonius to triumph, nor did he seek to destroy Athens or Sparta. Because of Artaphernes, we had a few friends in Persepolis, and we were rescued from death by the Queen Mother, who smuggled us out of the city and let us free on the plains; not because she loved Greece, but only because she feared Mardonius and his extreme, militaristic policies.

We ran. But in running, with our Persian escort of Artaphernes’ picked men (and my boyhood friend Cyrus!), we left Brasidas to fan the flames of revolt in Babylon, and we slipped home.

In Sardis, after weeks of playing cat and mouse with all the soldiers in Asia, I saw Artaphernes. He was sick and old, but strong enough to ask me for a last favour — that when I heard he was dead, I should come and take Briseis. Yes, the love of my life was his wife, the Queen of Ionia as she had always meant to be. Artaphernes’ son, also called Artaphernes, hated her, and hated me.

At any rate, we made it to my ships, and sailed across the wintry sea to Athens. In the spring, the Revolt of Babylon saved Greece from invasion, and the leaders of the Greek world gathered at Corinth and bickered. Endlessly. My ships made me rich, bringing cargoes from Illyria and Egypt and Colchis and all points in between, and I sailed that summer, going to the Nile delta and back, and ignoring the cause of Greek independence as much as ever I could.

But in the end, the Persians came. Last night I told you all of the truth: the internal divisions of the Greeks, and their foolish early efforts — the march to the Vale of Tempe and its utter failure, and the eventual arrangement for a small land army to hold the Hot Springs of Thermopylae while the great allied fleet held Cape Artemisium.

Leonidas, best of the Spartans, held the pass at Thermopylae. And we, as ragtag a fleet as ever put oar to water, held the waters off Artemisium — day after day. Storms pounded the Persians. We pounded the Persians. Once we fought them to a standstill, and on the last day we beat them.

But at our backs, a traitor led the Medes around the Spartan wall, and King Leonidas died.

The so-called Great King desecrated his body and took his head. The Great King’s soldiers did the same to all three hundred Spartans and to others besides. Dogs ripped the body of my noble brother-in-law, Antigonus. My sister would weep for his shade, and I would weep too.

No gods laughed. The week after Thermopylae was the worst of the Long War — the worst week many of us had ever known.

Calliades was archon in Athens, and the Eleians celebrated the Seventy-fifth Olympiad, that in which Astylus of Syracuse won the stadion. It was in this year that King Xerxes made his campaign against Greece. It was the year of the climax of the Long War.

I was there.

When morning broke, we prepared our ships to put to sea. Unbeaten, we prepared to disperse and run.

It didn’t matter particularly just how the Spartans had come to lose such an impregnable position. It’s a well-known story now and I won’t shame us all by telling it. And at the time I did not yet know that my brilliant brother-in-law, Antigonus, had died at the head of his Thespians, taking forty Marathon veterans to die beside the Spartans. They stripped and desecrated his body too, the cowards.

I didn’t know, yet. But I knew that Themistocles was grey with fatigue and shattered hopes, and I knew that Adeimantus scarcely troubled to hide his delight. The great fleet was breaking up. Nothing had been decided except that all the Boeotians — Plataeans like me — were to run for their homes and clear the plains of Boeotia before the Great King came with fire and sword. We knew, even then, what was coming. With the Hot Gates lost there wasn’t another place to stop the Medes. Eurybiades said that there would be another army to fight for Boeotia, but none of us believed him.

Aristides told me in that awful dawn that the Thebans had already offered earth and water to the Great King. I spat, somewhat automatically.

‘We were winning,’ I said. It was said in the sort of voice that young men comment on the ultimate unfairness of the world.

Aristides looked at Brasidas, who happened to be there, cleaning the blood from his greaves in seawater. They exchanged a look.

‘It is the will of the gods,’ Aristides said.

‘Fuck the gods,’ I spat.

Brasidas stepped back and met my eye. ‘You sound like a child,’ he said — a long speech, for him.

But to a Spartan, the essence of nobility is in not showing weakness — and almost any show of emotion, even anger, rage or love — all of these are signs of weakness. A true Spartan hides his thoughts from men.

It’s not an ideal I’ve ever striven for, but I understand it.

Aristides was an aristocratic Athenian and he clearly shared Brasidas’s views. ‘Blasphemy,’ he said.

Together, they made me feel like a small boy who had fled rather than face a beating.

I remember all this because of what Aristides said.

First, he put a hand on my shoulder — an unaccustomed familiarity.