Salamis Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.

Part I
    The Wooden Wall
    When the foe shall have taken whatever the limit of Cecrops
    Holds within it, and all which divine Cithaeron, shelters,
    Then far-seeing Jove grants this to the prayers of Athene;
    Safe shall the wooden wall continue for thee and thy children.
    Wait not the tramp of the horse, nor the