The morale of the fleet was not good when I joined it. News that the Corcyrans — whose numbers would have been a wonderful addition — were prevaricating off Ithaca came as a blow.
Adamenteis of Corinth said openly that the Peloponnesian League should fall back to the isthmus and leave Athens to its fate. Themistocles made all his usual arguments.
But then, the Plataeans arrived.
They came down the mountain from the direction of Athens, singing the paean, and all the work on the beach of Marathon stopped, even though they were ten stades away.
Did I mention that time doesn’t run straight?
The Plataeans’ paean rang against the mountainsides, but it also rang through time, and every one of us who had stood in the stubble on that day, ten years before, raised his head like an old dog smelling a much-loved master.
And the Plataean phalanx came down the mountain singing, song after song, as if a march of three hundred stades was nothing to them, as perhaps it was not.
Men went back to work on the beach, but some men smiled. Oh, my friends, no one called us bumpkins and sheep lovers that day, and when the bronze dog caps were close, the Athenians gathered on the edge of the beach and cheered and cheered — ring after ring until my throat ached and my heart was full.
Idomeneaus brought them to the very edge of the beach, where the Persians had had their ships. He halted, and despite being a small army of Boeotian bumpkins, they halted like Spartiates and grounded their spears, all together.
Of course, it was a piece of theatre. If you’ve been paying attention, you know that Greek armies seldom march in their armour, much less with their aspides on their shoulders. But Idomeneaus, for all that he is mad with violence, is no one’s fool.
He halted, as I say, and the men grounded their spears. The cheering Athenians fell silent, and the Corinthians were silent from curiosity, and the Megarans too. Aeginians came and stood.
Idomeneaus saluted me. ‘Well!’ he said, loud enough to carry to Athens. ‘Here we are again. Are the Persians here?’ he asked.
Men laughed.
‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re over by Thrace.’
His whole face lit up. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Let’s go!’
That story was retold ten times an hour over the next days.
It is easy for any Greek to make great claims for his city. We are all hopelessly partial. Biased. I admit it. I would put Plataea before Athens or Corinth or Syracusa in everything; even while I suspect our temple of Hera is really small and provincial, I will never admit it. So I’m biased.
But I think we transformed the fleet.
Our men came singing. A thousand men who had faced the Persians — and beaten them. Not one Plataean complained about having to row. Men of fifty winters climbed down into the sweltering benches, took up the oars with the same practical interest as they used the spear, the plough or the potter’s wheel, and learned.
The second night, when the aches were pounding away — when some of the older hoplites had discovered that I was only putting my youngest, fittest Plataeans in armour, and that meant many older men were going to row — we were gorging on Athenian mutton on the beach of Marathonas, and a young Athenian from Cimon’s flagship was complaining about the work — and the dishonour.
Myron — who had come in person — stood up and put a hand on his back like the old man he was. ‘Dishonour, is it?’ he asked. ‘The only dishonour would be to be left behind. In a hundred years, men will no longer claim descent from the gods. They will only say — my grandsire was there when we warred down the Great King.’
All conversation stopped.
‘But!’ a young man wailed — half in self-mockery, I think — ‘But it’s hot and it stinks of piss down in the benches! My shoulders hurt and I’ve no skin on my hands!’
Empedocles, son of Empedocles the Old, laughed. ‘I don’t disagree, young man,’ he said. ‘Let’s all take an oath, then. After we beat the Medes, we’ll never row again!’
The laughter went on for a long time.
Every commander knows that laughter is precious.
Mostly, we rowed up and down.
I confess that I found some irony in the time I’d spent training my phalanx to Spartan-like perfection so that we could use them as oarsmen instead. At least every oarsman understood the basic tactics.
And because they were my phalanx, and not slaves, I got all my people together on the beach every morning, and told them what we’d do — every signal, every manoeuvre. Most of them didn’t understand a bit of it, at first, but by the end of the first week, when we had our first rumours of contact with the Persian fleet, most men knew when to reverse their benches and when to rest on their oars before the orders were passed. Citizens can be much better oarsmen than ‘professionals’, who are too often broken ex-slaves.
And farmers are strong.
Every night, Themistocles hammered home that our tactics must be simple and pure. All the Athenian helmsmen understood the complexity of the diekplous, where you pass through the enemy formation breaking oars and then turn back to envelop their second line. But Themistocles knew better than most men how few of our oarsmen could handle a complex ramming attack.
It will also help explain things if I say that I took eighty veteran oarsmen from each of my other ships — including Demetrios’s magnificent long killer, the Athena Nike, and I put those, almost one hundred each, into the Athenian public ships and replaced them with Plataeans. In this way, ten of my eleven ships had lower-deck oarsmen who were raw beginners, but upper-deck men and full deck crews of veterans. It also eliminated any possibility of rivalry, and I told them all the first night we were together that we’d share the loot equally — no extra for the officers — a very popular move on my part, let me add. Men love freedom, but loot is. . more immediate. I put ten Plataean Epilektoi on every deck as marines, saving only Athena Nike and Lydia, which got their own marines back.
Gelon got a ship. As she was a public ship and had only a number, he called her Nemesis.
Idomeneaus got a ship. After all, he’d had one before. He called her Hera.
Leukas got a ship. After much thought, he called her Parthenos, which he claimed was the Greek for a goddess in faraway Alba.
I gave the fastest of my public ships to Giannis. He called her Sea Horse. He had, after all, sailed and led and fought his way into the Outer Sea and back. He knew almost everything. And I let him have Alexandros to command his marines.
And of course, I gave the best of the public ships to Sekla. He consulted with a priest of Poseidon and called her Machaira.
So as soon as we felt that our oarsmen could manoeuvre from column to line and back, Themistocles had us practise forming close together for defence. He assumed we’d always be on the defensive. The strategy that he and Leonidas had evolved was brutally simple — we’d hold out all summer and force Xerxes to retreat before winter came. None of us could imagine that Xerxes was rich enough to keep his army fed and in the field all winter.
After a few days of practising the most essential single skill of fleet combat — that’s rowing backwards all together, if you don’t know — Themistocles ordered us to try the ‘wheel’.
It was almost the end of the fleet.
The wheel is a complex manoeuvre that depends on perfect timing and brilliant control.
When complete, every ship comes to rest with the stern posts touching and their oars in — you can form as few as fifteen ships like this. It forces your opponents to run in against your bow and to concede the initiative of any boarding action. It allows the force that has formed the wheel to move marines from ship to ship in perfect freedom while every attacking ship has to fight individually. The advantage of the wheel is so great that when a defender forms one, the attacker usually just sails around the outside. There’s not much he can do, unless he can somehow attack from every direction all at once — and even then, remember that the wheel’s defenders have the advantage of interior lines.