Sunset of the Gods

CHAPTER FOUR





Orientation often involved an actual jaunt to the target area, for purposes of familiarization. In this case, Rutherford deemed it unnecessary and possibly counterproductive, given almost twenty-nine hundred years’ worth of changes. And in Landry’s case—and, to a lesser extent, in Jason’s—modern Greece was old hat anyway. Instead, he took them on virtual tours, enhanced by modern scholarship’s best guesses as to what the landscape in question had looked like. Jason knew from experience that those guesses were sometimes surprisingly good . . . and sometimes not. He dared hope that the former was the case for the city of Athens, which had been the subject of centuries of dedicated and painstaking archaeological work.

They were also drilled in the historical background of the period—or at least Jason, Chantal, and Mondrago were. Given his academic credentials, Landry was an integral part of the instructional staff, and quickly came to dominate it. For this, Jason eventually came to be grateful. Landry, a product of the same sort of social background as Rutherford, could be something of an irritating know-it-all at times. But he was a true teacher, not to be confused with an educational bureaucrat who held that title. In his introduction, he managed to clarify the labyrinthine complexities of fifth century b.c. geopolitics.

“To put it in the simplest possible terms—”

(“Please do,” Mondrago was heard to mutter.)

“—the Greek, and specifically Ionian, colonies on the Asiatic shore of the Aegean were loosely dominated by the kingdom of Lydia in the mid-sixth century b.c.” Landry manipulated a remote, and a cursor ran over the area in question—the western fringe of what would much later become Turkey—on the map-display that covered the rear wall of the briefing room. “Then the Persians, under their first Great King Cyrus, conquered Lydia, including the Ionians. In order to keep the Ionian city-states under control, the Persians established tyrannies in them.”

“They must have loved that,” Modrago grimaced.

“Actually, that word doesn’t have the blood-stained connotations it later acquired in English. A Classical Greek ‘tyrant’ was simply a man who ruled a city from outside the normal constitutional framework, with the support of one of the popular factions. The closest later-day parallel would be a North American big-city ‘boss’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although the position of Greek tyrant had more formal recognition than that.”

“So he was well advised to take good care of his constituency,” Jason opined.

“Precisely. But the tame tyrants of Ionia tended to lose sight of that because their other constituency—the one they had to keep happy—was the Great King of Persia.”

“Why?” asked Chantal. “If their own people were behind them, couldn’t they defy him?”

Landry gave her a look of rather supercilious annoyance, as though he considered the question naïve. Instead of answering it directly, he held up the remote and expanded the map to the east and south. And expanded it. And expanded it, until the peninsula of Greece and the entire Aegean basin had shrunk to kind of an afterthought at the upper left corner.

“The Persian Empire,” he explained with almost patronizing care, “was the world’s sole superpower. It had conquered the entire Near East and Egypt, as well as parts of Central Asia and the Indus Valley over here to the right of the map, in western India. It is believed to have had a population of at least sixteen million people, while Greece and the Aegean islands had, at most, two and a half million. Furthermore, it was not the result of gradual expansion over a span of centuries. Cyrus didn’t begin his career of conquest until around 550 b.c. This unprecedented empire had burst on the world in a mere sixty years.”

Mondrago studied the map intently. “How could the Persians possibly hold an empire that size together, at that technological level? I mean, infantry marching on foot. . . .”

“Yes. The Greeks were incredulous when they learned that the Persian capital of Susa was three months’ march eastward from the Aegean shore. They would have been even more incredulous if they had known that the empire extended another three months’ march beyond that.”

“Then how—?”

“The Persians were the first empire-builders in history to recognize that communication was the key to control. They used a combination of fire beacons, mounted couriers using a system of highways with posting stations, and other techniques, including aural relay in mountainous regions.”

“‘Aural relay’?” queried Mondrago.

“Yes. They had men trained in breath control who could literally shout to each other across valleys and ravines where the acoustics were good, with lots of echoes, thus transmitting messages almost instantaneously across the right kind of terrain. By using all these various means the Great King was able to get information from the frontiers and send orders back in mere days, which seemed supernatural to the Greeks.”

“I’m beginning to understand why the Ionian tyrants had to kowtow to him,” Mondrago said seriously. “The capo di tutti capi.”

“Yes. But by so kowtowing they were swimming against the tide of the Greeks’ inveterate xenophobia, and thereby running the risk of alienating their own people. So their rule was always teetering on a knife-edge, and they were ready to jump either way: gain still greater favor with their master; or, failing that, go into rebellion out of sheer desperation.

“In 500 b.c. Histaeus, the tyrant of Miletus, the largest and richest of the Ionian cities, tried the first option. He himself was living at the Persian court in a kind of gilded hostage situation—they gave him the title ‘Royal Table-Companion’—but through his nephew Aristagoras, who was standing in for him at Miletus, he offered to expedite a conquest of the Aegean island of Naxos, where he had contacts among the disgruntled aristocracy. As it turned out, Aristagoras made a total botch of the expedition. Rather than sit with folded hands and await the usual fate of Persian puppets who failed, Aristagoras reversed himself: he declared himself a convert to democracy of the kind Athens had had for the past eight years. He also called on the other Ionian cities to establish democracies and join Miletus in rebellion.”

“The expression ‘big brass ones’ comes to mind,” commented Jason.

“Indeed. The rebellion spread like wildfire through Ionia and beyond, and Aristagoras persuaded the Athenians to come to the aid of the new democracies. In 498 b.c. they sent an expeditionary force which marched inland and burned Sardis, the seat of Artaphernes, the local Persian satrap, or governor.” Landry caused the cursor to flash on Sardis.

“Mission accomplished,” Mondrago remarked drily.

“Not quite. The town was burned but the citadel held out and the Greeks were forced to retreat to the coast. On the way, they were cut to pieces by the Persian cavalry.”

Mondrago looked perplexed. “I’ve studied the ancient Greek style of warfare, and I’ve always gotten the impression that the Persians had no answer to the hoplite, or heavy infantryman. That seems to be the pattern all the way up to Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire.”

“One gets that impression because, as you’ve pointed out, the Greeks won in the end,” Landry explained with a chuckle. “It’s always the ultimate winner’s successes that are remembered. It comes as a shocking surprise to most people that George Washington was soundly trounced whenever he came up against professional British troops in the kind of open-field set-piece battle they were organized and trained to fight. However, your point is well taken as applied to the phalanx of hoplites. When it could be brought to bear under the right conditions—head-to-head combat on a narrow front—it was indeed unstoppable by anything except another phalanx. But it was a rigid, inflexible formation, and the hoplites who comprised it, loaded down with fifty to seventy pounds of armor and weapons, were incapable of rapid maneuvering.”

Landry manipulated his controls again. An image appeared on the screen, superimposed on the map. It showed a man who seemed to have stepped out of a Grecian vase-painting. He were greaves on his lower legs, a cuirass with curving metal shoulder-plates, and a face-enclosing helmet with an impressive-looking but (to Jason’s eye) impractical-seeming horsehair crest. He carried a large round shield and a spear a couple of feet longer than he was. At his side hung a leaf-shaped sword. The image represented modern scholarship’s best reconstruction, which had turned out to be very much like those vase paintings after all.

“When hoplites armed and equipped like this couldn’t form up, as in the retreat from Sardis, the Persian cavalry could ride circles around them and shoot them to pieces with arrows. In 479 b.c., that Persian cavalry nearly won the Battle of Plataea, before the Spartan phalanx could be effectively brought to bear. But the Persian style of warfare was, at bottom, a raiding style. The Greeks finally won by forcing decisive battles. Alexander became ‘the Great’ because he could catch his enemies between a phalanx and the heavy shock cavalry his father Phillip had invented—the most effective heavy shock cavalry the world would see before the advent of the stirrup. But the point is, we’re going to be seeing the first of those decisive hoplite battles.” Landry’s eyes glowed with anticipation, then he shook himself and returned to his subject.

“At any rate, after the debacle of the retreat from Sardis, Athens withdrew into isolationism, leaving its Ionian allies to be brutally subjugated, a process that was completed by 494 b.c. with the destruction of Miletus. After which the Great King Darius decided it was time to punish those Greeks across the Aegean who had aided the rebels. In 491 b.c. his emissaries toured Greece demanding ‘earth and water’—the tokens of submission. Athens and Sparta violated the diplomatic niceties by killing the emissaries, in the case of the Spartans by throwing them down a well, at whose bottom they were told they could find what they sought.” Mondrago smothered a guffaw. Landry shot him a primly disapproving look before resuming.

“This was very bold, you see; the Persians had already established a satrapy in Thrace, to the north of the Aegean, and had an army there. But their accompanying fleet was wrecked by a storm, which made invasion from the north impractical. Instead, a new fleet was prepared—six hundred ships, including some specialized for transporting cavalry horses. It carried an army we believe numbered as many as 35,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry—the Greeks later claimed it was hundreds of thousands, but they always believed in making a good story even better. It also carried Hippias, the last tyrant of Athens, who had been working for the Persians since being deposed in 510 b.c. He was now over eighty years old, but still hoped to be restored to power. Instead of working its way north, the fleet island-hopped directly across the Aegean and took the city of Eretria on the island of Euboea, an Ionian ally, with the help of fifth columnists. They then burned it and enslaved the population . . . which was also meant to be the fate of Athens.”

“Which brings us to your mission,” said Rutherford, who had entered the room unnoticed. “You omitted one thing, Bryan: in 492 B.C King Alexander I of Macedon, who was reliable only as a weathervane, made his kingdom a Persian client-state. This is convenient for us, for your cover story is that you are Macedonians who opposed submission to Persia and are in exile as a consequence. This should assure you of a friendly reception in Athens—particularly from the man we intend for you to contact. But for now, I believe it is too late in the day to begin your detailed briefing on the Marathon campaign itself—which, at any rate, should be left to the end, so as to be as fresh as possible in your minds. Also, we have other matters to take up tomorrow.”