Part 3
On the fourth day the Persian fleet succeeded in entering the Pagasaean Gulf. Then Xerxes ordered the attack. His Persian bodyguard, the ten thousand “Immortals” who were his best troops, were held in reserve. Meanwhile the Medes and Kissians, admirable infantry to whom victory had long become a habit, were sent forward to wear down the Spartan resistance. They were dressed in close-fitting leathern garments, in trousers (which surprised the Greeks) and curious fez-like caps, of soft felt or cotton, projecting in a kind of drooping horn at the front. (But the Kissians wore turbans.) They had sleeved tunics of many colours and cuirasses of bronzen scales like the skin of some great fish. They had wicker shields from behind which they cast their long spears (but the Greek spears were longer) and shot the reed arrows from their little bows (but the Greek bows were smaller). At their right sides swung from their girdles their foot-long stabbing swords. Their emperor, throned on a golden chair with silver feet, watched them advance to the assault. On his head was a stiff upright fez, on his feet saffron-tinted slippers. His mantle was purple, purple his trousers and flowing robe embroidered in white with the sacred hawks of his god Ahuramazda. He was girt with a golden zone, from which was hung his Persian sword thickly set with precious stones.
The Medes and Kissians attacked with fury. Against these lighter-armed troops the Spartans with their metal panoply and great heavy spears would have been at a terrible disadvantage. It was vital for them to keep the enemy engaged at close quarters. The tactics of Leonidas therefore were designed to effect this. His men made short rushes into the thick of the foe; feigned flights; reformed again and renewed the charge. They did this again and again. What discipline! In that narrow space, fifty feet wide, the ponderous Lacedaemonian spears of the Greek vanguard went through the wicker shields and the scale armour of the Barbarians like papyrus, while the points of the Median lances bent or broke against the solid buckler and breastplate of the Spartan hoplite. Leonidas hardly lost a man. Still the enemy came on, yelling; their dead choked the mouth of the Pass. Hour after hour in that late-summer weather the fight raged on. Loaded with their armour, trusting much to mere superiority of physical strength as they thrust back the assailants with their shields, all that time the Spartans kept up these violent rushing tactics. And then Xerxes sent the “Immortals” at them.
These men were perfectly fresh. They greatly outnumbered, not merely the Spartans, but all the defenders of the Pass together. They were the flower of one of the great conquering armies of history. The Spartans lifted their shields again and renewed the furious fighting. They made a dreadful slaughter of the Immortals, till at the long day’s end the Persians fell back, beaten and baffled. The Spartans dropped on the ground and slept like dead men.
Next day was a repetition of the day before.
Xerxes, or his generals, grew anxious. The closest co-operation with the fleet was necessary for the victualling of so numerous a host; and the fleet had failed to penetrate into the Malian Gulf. And the Pass was not yet forced.
At this critical hour a man craved audience of the King. He was a Malian Greek, a native of the region, and he knew all Oeta like one of its foxes. (Long years after, when a price was on his head, something drew him back to the scene of his immortal crime, to be slain there by no public avenger.) This fellow offered, for gold, to lead the Persians by a path he knew, which would take them by a long, steep, circuitous climb and descent to a position in the rear of the men in the Pass. The offer was accepted eagerly.
Hydarnes, commanding the Immortals, set out under the guidance of the traitor. As they left the Persian encampment darkness was falling and lamps began here and there to glimmer. The guide led the way into the wild ravine of the Asôpos. If outside the light was failing, here it was already night. Far above their heads the men could see a star or two shining between the narrow slit where the sheer walls of the gorge seemed almost to meet, so high they were. The path, by which a laden mule could with difficulty pass, followed the course of the rushing stream over gravel and between great boulders. It was part of the old hill-road to Delphi and well known to pilgrims and bandits. It had an evil reputation. “It hath ever been put to an ill use by the Malians.” (We can imagine to what sort of use our Malian had been wont to put it.) Moreover the Asôpos would sometimes rise suddenly and come roaring in spate down the gulley, flooding over the road. A sinister path.
For about three miles the Persians in Indian file threaded the ravine, which then opened out into a valley, up the slope of which they toiled, aided by their spears, along a track getting ever rougher and steeper. Sometimes the way would conduct them through a pitchy wood of firs. Now and again a man would stumble in the thick scrub or over a projecting edge of rock. Superstitious terror, begotten of the darkness upon such hills in the minds of those worshippers of Ahriman, troubled and silenced them. They emerged at last on a kind of rocky pavement. Then they descended a ravine and climbed the opposing slope. As they climbed the darkness lifted a little; a faint glimmer came from their golden bangles and the pomegranates of gold and silver on the butt of their spears. When they reached the summit of the path called Anopaia which they had so long been following, the dawn was clear behind the acute peak of Mount Saromata.
Anopaia was not unknown to the defenders of the Pass, and Leonidas had detached his Phocian contingent to guard it. In the silence of that windless night, in the hour before the break of day, the Phocian outposts heard a mysterious sound—a sort of light, dry, continuous roar, gradually growing nearer and louder. It was the Persians passing through an oak wood and dispersing with their feet the fallen leaves of many autumns. Suddenly the men appeared in the open. The Phocians were taken by surprise. Under a shower of arrows they retreated upon a little fort crowning a height about half a mile away. There they awaited the attack of Hydarnes. But he, neglecting these Phocians, pressed on along the path, which now began to descend, very steep and narrow. In no long time he would be on the road behind Leonidas. The Pass was turned.
While it was yet night, deserters had come to the Greeks with news of the march across the mountain. Soon after scouts came running down from the heights confirming the tale. Tradition says that Leonidas in so desperate a case bade his allies depart and save themselves; as for himself and his men, their orders were to defend the Pass to the utmost. It has, however, been recently suggested that the contingents which withdrew went to meet Hydarnes. If such was their purpose, either they came too late, or missed the enemy, or like the Phocians shrank from the conflict with the odds so heavy against them. At any rate they now pass out of the story. They were all the Greek forces save the Lacedaemonians, the thousand who must have composed nearly the whole fighting power of Thespiai, and four hundred Thebans. Of these the Thebans, it is said, were retained by Leonidas as hostages, their city being tainted already with suspicion of disloyalty. Yet they may have been true men. But the Thespians stayed willingly. Even when it was known that Hydarnes could not be stopped, they chose to stay. They had no traditional code of military honour like the Spartans; their proportionate stake was twenty times greater. “Their leader was Demophilos the son of Diadromês, their bravest man was Dithyrambos the son of Harmatidas.”
It was full daylight when Xerxes according to arrangement attacked. The Greeks, who hitherto had lined up behind the old wall which the Persian scout had seen drawn along the ridge of a mound within the narrowest part of the Pass, now, knowing the end was come, issued forth into the broader space beyond. Then followed a fight which men who only read of it never forget. The Barbarians came on in wave upon wave; the Greeks slew and slew. They could see the Persian officers lashing on their men with whips to the assault. Now and again one of themselves would fall with a rattle of bronze. But the enemy fell in heaps. Many were thrust into the sea and drowned; still more were trampled to death beneath the feet of their fellows. Two brothers of Xerxes were slain.
Then Leonidas fell.
The Spartans gathered about their king and fought to rescue the body. By this time their spears were broken, and they were fighting with their swords. One of the two men who had been left behind at the base in the last stages of ophthalmia appeared, led by his servant. The helot turned the face of his master towards the enemy and fled. The blind man stumbled forward, striking wildly, until he was killed. Four times the Barbarians were driven back, and the body of Leonidas was saved.
Word came that the Immortals were on the road behind them. Therefore the Greeks changed their plan of battle and retreated to the narrower portion of the Pass; all but the Thebans, who surrendered to the foe. The men of Sparta and Thespiai fought their way back to the mound and behind the stone wall across the mound, and there made their final stand. With cries the Barbarians swarmed about them on front and flank and rear. In a moment the wall was down. Such of the Greeks as still had swords kept using them. When their swords were gone, they fought with their bare hands; and died at last rending their enemies’ flesh like wolves with their teeth.
Thus, and not more easily, did Xerxes win through the Pass.
III
THE ADVENTURERS
The Greek world, like the English, was largely the creation of adventurous men. To follow in their track would be in itself a literary adventure of the most fascinating and entirely relevant to our subject, the conflict of the Greek and the Barbarian. Unfortunately for our delight the adventurers did not often write down their experiences; or if they did, their accounts have for the most part disappeared. There was a certain Pytheas of Massalia, that is Marseille, who about the time of Alexander the Great sailed up the eastern coast of England and discovered Scotland, and wrote a book about it afterwards. We should like to read that book; if only to see what he said about Scotland. But his account is lost, and we should hardly know about him at all, if it were not for a brief reference in the geographer Strabo. Pytheas seems to have got as far as the Orkney or even the Shetland Islands—one German sends him on a Polar expedition—and had something to say about a mysterious “Thule.” He remarked on the extraordinary length of the summer days in these northern latitudes, thereby provoking his fellow-countrymen to regard him as “extremely mendacious” (Ψευδίστατος).
Long before the time of Pytheas one Skylax of Karyanda in Asia Minor—a Greek or half-Greek—was sent by King Darius to explore the mouths of the Indus, that “second of all the rivers which produced crocodiles.” He sailed down a river “towards the dawn and the risings of the sun into the sea and through the sea westward,” circumnavigating India. What river was that? Whatever river it was, he accomplished a wonderful thing. Skylax also wrote a book, apparently, on this voyage. There exist fragments of his _Voyage Round the Parts Without the Pillars of Heracles_. His Indian narrative might be the worst written volume in the world, but it could not fail to excite the imagination in every sentence. Sailing along a river of crocodiles in a Greek galley in the reign of Darius the King!
Skylax was an Ionian or an Ionized Carian; and this reminds us that Ionia produced the first adventurers. There went to the making of that colony a great commingling of races. The first settlers may actually have come from Crete bringing with them what they could of the dazzling Cretan civilization. Many certainly came from Greece, which had enjoyed a civilization derived from Crete. No doubt the colonists had to accept help from any quarter and adopt dubious fugitives from Dorianized Hellas and “natives”—Carians, Lydians, Leleges and the like, who had learned to speak a kind of Greek—and marry native wives, who had not even learned to do that, and who would not eat with their husbands, and persisted in a number of other irrational and unsympathetic customs. But it is possible to believe that some memory of the ancient lore was long preserved, and in particular a knowledge of the sea-routes the Cretan ships had followed. I have argued elsewhere in this sense, venturing the suggestion that the Greek colonial empire (which started from Ionia) began in an effort to re-establish the great trading system which had its centre in early Crete. Excavators keep on discovering signs of Cretan—“Minoan” or “Mycenaean”—influences in the very places to which the Greek colonists came; and it looks as if they came because they knew the way.
The Ionian cities were nearly all maritime, and this in the fullest sense that the word suggests. The relation of Miletus, for example, to the Aegean did not less effectually mould the character of that state than the Adriatic moulded Venice. Therefore to understand Ionia we must approach her from the sea. She early discovered that this was her element. From Miletus harbour, from the shell-reddened beach of Erythrae, from Samos, from Chios, from Phokaia her ships ventured yearly farther, seeking (if we are right) to recover the old trade-connexions so long severed by the Invasions; to recover the old and, if possible, to pick up new. Ionian seamen became famous for their skill and hardihood. Not merely in the Aegean, but also in remoter waters, it soon became a common thing to see a little wooden many-oared vessel, a great eye painted on either bow (to let her see her way, of course), a touch of rouge on her cheeks; her sail set or her rowers rowing to the music of one that played on a flute. Her burden would be (for a guess) wine and olive oil and black-figured pottery, with a quantity of the glittering rubbish with which traders have always cheated natives—for the chief an embroidered belt or a woollen garment dyed as red as possible, for his wife a bronze mirror or a necklace of glorious beads. Having reached her destination and done good business, the ship would leave behind one or two of the crew with instructions to collect and store the products of the country against her return next spring. If all went well and the natives did not suddenly attack and exterminate the foreign devils in their midst, the storehouses would increase and the settlers with them, until at last the factory seemed important enough to undergo the solemn ceremony of “foundation” (_Oikismos_) and to be called a “colony” (_Apoikia_). Normally the “foundation” meant a great influx of new settlers, and from it the colony dated its official existence. But it might have had a struggling unofficial existence quite a long time before. More likely than not it had. These settlements at the sea-ends of trade-routes are immemorially old.
Let me quote an anecdote from Herodotus. He is engaged in relating the saga of the founding of Cyrene by certain men of the Aegean island Thera, and at a point in his narrative he says of these Theraeans:
_In their wanderings they came to Crete and namely to the city of Itanos. There they meet a man that was a seller of purple, whose name was Korôbios; who said that he had been caught in a tempest and carried to Libya, even to the island of Platea, which is part of Libya. This man they persuaded to go with them to Thera, giving him money; and from Thera men sailed to view the land, being few in number as for the first time. But when Korôbios had guided them to this Isle Platea, they leave him there with provision for certain months, and themselves set sail with all speed to report concerning the island to the Theraeans. Now when they did not return in the time agreed upon, Korôbios was left with nothing. But then a ship of Samos that was voyaging to Egypt put in at this Platea; and when the master of the ship, whose name was Kolaios, and the other Samians had heard the whole tale from Korôbios, they left him a year’s food, and themselves put off from the isle, being eager to make Egypt. However, they were driven from their course by a wind out of the east. And passing out through the Pillars of Heracles they arrived at Tartessos, the wind never ceasing to blow. Thus were they marvellously led to this market, which at that time was untouched, so that these men won the greatest profit in merchandise of all Greeks of whom we surely know._
It would be easy to write a long commentary on that story. I might invite the reader to share my admiration of an art which makes you see so much in so little. You see the lonely man on his desert island of sand and scrub, with no companions but the wild goats (if goats there were) and the sea-birds fishing among the breakers. You picture his despair as he watches his store of victuals coming to an end, with no sign of his returning shipmates; his extravagant joy when he descries a Greek vessel; the astonishment of the strangers at the sight of this Crusoe; his bursting eagerness to tell them “the whole tale”; the departure of the Samians and the belated reappearance of the Theraeans; the face of Korôbios as he goes down to meet them, thinking of the things he will say. But the point I wish more particularly to make is the significance for history of the story. Desiring to learn what they can of the commercial possibilities of the Cyrenaica, the Theraeans come to Crete, and not only to Crete, but to that part of it where there still dwelt in the eastern corner of the long island a remnant of Eteocretans, that is “Cretans of Pure Blood,” descendants of the “Minoan” Cretans, who had been such famous traders and mariners. Itanos, where Korôbios lived, was an Eteocretan town. It has been excavated and has revealed material evidence of “Minoan” culture. That the ships of Minos visited Cyrenaica any one would conjecture who looked at a map. Ethnographers and archæologists adduce arguments of their own pointing to the same conclusion. Where the Greek town of Cyrene later grew up was the end of a caravan-route of unknown age from the Oasis of Siwah to the Mediterranean. Was not trade done there by the Minoans long before it was reconstituted as a “colony” of the Theraeans? Might not some knowledge of this African market and the sea-road thither linger on among the ruined and hunted Eteocretans?
In Herodotus’ account Korôbios appears to know only Platea, and it only by accident. That Eteocretan then must have felt no end of a surprise when the Samians came so opportunely to his help in the island he had “discovered.” Platea is supposed to be the little island of Bomba, which gives its name to the Gulf of Bomba. The Theraeans stayed in Platea a matter of two years. Then, urged by want and the Delphian Oracle, they landed in a body on the mainland opposite the island. It was a beautiful spot called Aziris, shut in by wooded hills and nourished by a river. Here they lived six years. Then at last, guided by friendly Libyans—are not those “friendlies” somewhat significant?—they pushed on to the site of what came to be known as the city of Cyrene. Korôbios has dropped out of the story, and the whole business looks like a bit of “peaceful penetration” into unknown country. That is the impression Herodotus wishes to convey. But it is a wrong impression, for somebody did know a remarkable amount about the Cyrenaica. The god of Delphi knew. It is he who is always urging the reluctant Theraeans from stage to stage of their advance. Herodotus, less perhaps from pious than artistic motives, emphasizes the contrast of the divine foreknowledge with the timid ignorance of men; it makes everything more dramatic. But we need not suffer ourselves to be imposed upon. For the god we substitute his ministers. The priests at Delphi had in their possession some previous information about the Libyan coast. They made a point of collecting such information. Where they got this particular piece of knowledge we do not know; but the old Homeric hymn tells how in ancient days a ship sailed from Crete to establish the oracle at Delphi.
But we have not yet exhausted the interest of that brief excerpt from Herodotus. Our thoughts travel with those Samians who, making for Egypt, were driven by contrary winds farther and farther west, until at last they passed the Straits of Gibraltar and found a superb new market at Tartessos just outside. It has been generally believed by scholars that Tartessos is the Tarshish with which, as we read in the Old Testament, King Hiram of Tyre exchanged merchandise; but of this there is now some doubt. Tartessos stood on an island at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, and was doubtless known to the Phoenicians before the Samians got there. It is surely of it that Arnold is thinking at the end of that long simile which concludes _The Scholar Gipsy_, when he tells how the Phoenician trader after passing the Atlantic straits reaches a place where _through sheets of foam, shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come_. The discovery of the Atlantic made a profound impression on the Greek mind. Pious and conservative spirits, like Pindar, thought it wicked to venture beyond the Straits; and indeed, it was long before any one did venture far, because, for one thing, the sort of craft which was suited to the tideless Mediterranean could not face so well the different conditions of the ocean. For another thing, the Phoenicians had got a monopoly of the British trade.
We do not know how the Samians lost the market of Tartessos, but in later times we find their fellow-countrymen the Phokaians in possession. This privilege was the result of the friendliness of Arganthonios, King of the Tartessians, who reigned eighty years and lived to be “quite a hundred and twenty.” The Phokaians perhaps deserved their luck, for they were the most daring of all the Ionian navigators. Some of their adventures would doubtless make good reading. The Phokaians also attract us because of all the Ionians they loved their freedom most. When Harpagos, the general of Cyrus, besieged them, rather than live even in a nominal subjection to the Persian, they launched their famous fifty-oared ships, and embarking their wives and children and furniture sailed to Chios. However, the Chians could not help them, so they decided to go and settle in distant Corsica. But first they made a sudden descent on their city and slew the Persian garrison which had occupied it. _Then, when this had been done by them, they made strong curses against any who should remain behind of their company. And beside the curses they sank also a lump of iron and sware an oath that they would not return to Phokaia until this lump came up to light again. But as they were setting out for Corsica, more than half the people of the town were seized with longing and pity for their city and the familiar places of the land, and broke their oath and sailed back to Phokaia_. The remnant reached Corsica, where they dwelt five years. Then they fought a disastrous drawn battle with a fleet of Etruscans and Carthaginians. Once more they took on board their wives and children and property and sailed away, this time to Reggio, from which they set out again and “founded that city in the Oenotrian land which is now called Hyele,” better known as Elea, a little south of Paestum.