Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome by Victor Davis Hanson Read Free Book Online Page B

took precedence over purely military considerations. So it was that,
    rather than leading a strike force such as Cyrus would have recognized,
    capable of descending on the lumbering infantrymen of the enemy
    with the same murderous speed that had always proved so lethal to the
    Greeks of Ionia, he opted instead to summon a tribute of contingents
    from all the manifold subject peoples of his empire, a coalition if not
    of the willing then of the submissively dutiful, at any rate. Naturally,
    this swelling of his army with a vast babel of poorly armed levies repre-
    sented a fearsome headache for his harassed commissariat, but Xerxes
    judged that it was necessary to the proper maintenance of his dignity.
    After all, to what did the presence in his train of the full astounding
    diversity of his tributaries give glorious expression if not his rank as
    the lieutenant on earth of Ahura Mazda? Nor was that all. The rumor
    of his approach, assiduously fanned by Persian agents, promised fair
    to overwhelm the Greeks with sheer terror—or else, at the thought
    of all the potential pickings on offer, with greed. It must have seemed
    to Xerxes, as he embarked on his great expedition, that the whole of
    Greece would end up dropping like overripe fruit into his lap.
    But it did not. Indeed, for al the wel -honed bril iance of the invad-
    ers’ propaganda chiefs, they found themselves, over the course of the
    invasion, being repeatedly outsmarted by the Greeks. What made this
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    al the more striking an upset was that the Persians, in the opening
    rounds of the campaign, did indeed have genuine triumphs to trumpet.
    At the mountain pass of Thermopylae, for instance, their achievement
    in dislodging a force of five thousand heavy infantry from a nearly im-
    pregnable position, in wiping out hundreds of the supposedly invincible
    Spartans, and in kil ing one of their kings was a thumping one. No won-
    der that Xerxes invited sailors from his fleet to tour the Hot Gates, “so
    that they might see how the Great King deals with those lunatics who
    presume to oppose him.”17 No wonder either that the Peloponnesian
    land forces, brought the news of Thermopylae, immediately scuttled
    back behind the line of the Isthmus of Corinth and refused to reemerge
    from their bolt-hole for almost a year. Clearly, then, for any Greek re-
    solved to continue the fight, it was essential to transmute the disaster at
    the Hot Gates into a display of heroism sufficiently glorious to inspire
    the whole of Greece to continued defiance. Indeed, in the immediate
    wake of Thermopylae, with their city defenseless before the Persian
    juggernaut, the Athenians had, if anything, an even greater stake than
    the Spartans in casting the dead king and his bodyguards as martyrs for
    liberty. Perhaps, then, it is an index of their success that the Pelopon-
    nesians, in the wake of the capture of Athens and the burning of the
    temples on the Acropolis, did not withdraw their fleets as they had pre-
    viously withdrawn their land forces but were prepared instead to join
    with the Athenian ships and make a stand in the straits of Salamis. By
    doing so they demonstrated that the spin of the Greek propagandists
    had indeed been something more than spin: that the bloody defeat at
    Thermopylae had been, precisely as they had claimed, a kind of victory.
    It was to prove a decisive one as well. At Salamis and at Plataea, on
    sea and then on land, the Greek allies crushingly repulsed the amphibi-
    ous task force that had been ranged against them and ensured that the
    Pax Persica would not be extended to Greece. The failure of the at-
    tempt had certainly not been due to Persian effeminacy, or softness, or
    any lack of courage, “for in bravery and strength,” as the Greeks them-
    selves freely acknowledged, “the two sides were evenly matched.”18
    Indisputably, however, in man-to-man combat, Greek equipment and
    training had proven far superior, for Plataea had confirmed