That’s the good part.
Here’s the bad part. To form the wheel from line ahead, you have to row backwards, get up enough speed to make it to your final resting spot and no more, pull your oars in and steer. If you are going too fast astern, you foul another ship and you may even damage each other. If you don’t pull hard enough, you come to a complete stop on the water in the face of the enemy and, for a bonus, you may be between two other ships with no room to deploy your oars.
Now throw in untrained oarsmen and hundreds of ships trying to do this all at once.
The first time we tried, we had formed a grand crescent off the point of Marathon, and my squadron was on the left of the line — that’s where we’d been at Marathon. Greeks can be creatures of habit.
First we all backed water together — as I said, this is the single most essential tactic of sea warfare, and we did it well enough.
Themistocles blew a trumpet — a Persian trumpet, no less — and we all began to form the wheel.
We were in the most difficult position, because we had to retreat, folding the crescent in the other way and ending on the back side of the wheel — a long pull rowing the wrong way. But on that day, it was entirely to our advantage, as the ships in the centre — and how vociferously they’d demanded that position, the Corinthians, of course — were ruthlessly crushed by the amateur crews of the Athenians and the Aeginians. We backed and backed and heard the screams and oars were splintered. Men died.
A Corinthian trireme rolled and sank, her back broken.
And the nearest Persian was a thousand stades away.
It was like Lades.
The Corinthians and the Megarans were the worst sailors — no, that’s not fair. They had the worst officers. But they had not suddenly raised a hundred new warships as Athens and Aegina, the real sea powers, had done, and consequently they affected to despise all the other ships. Like the Lesbians before Lade, they said they needed no further practice — that their crews were fully trained.
The Corinthians threatened to go home.
Our Spartan navarch arrived. Eurybiades brought ten ships from the Peloponnesus, and he came almost straight from the Olympics. I have heard him denigrated, and I have heard his leadership derided.
Men are odd animals. Eurybiades, like Leonidas, and like Arisitides and like Themistocles, wanted nothing but the victory of the allies. Because he was willing to listen to Themistocles — because he was ready to learn from all of us who had more experience of the sea — men deride him. In fact, I believe that he was the best navarch we could have had. He was cautious. He was mature. He would not hurry a judgement.
He was a Spartan, and would not hear of a contingent refusing to drill, and most importantly, he was a senior officer of the Peloponnesian League. I was present the morning he landed. Themistocles met him on the beach, and Adamenteis hurried across the beach to complain to the Spartans about what he perceived as poor treatment at the hands of Athens.
He came off his ship into the surf and waded ashore. A pair of helots came and stripped his wet armour and began to dry it. He embraced Themistocles and took my hand.
‘You appear to have done well,’ he said, in his dry way.
Themistocles nodded.
Just then, Adamenteis came up. ‘He has not done well, and he and his Athenian cabal will wreck everything. Listen — they’ve sent the dregs of their oarsmen and kept all their best men home. Look at the Plataeans! Let them drill. We’ll sit and laugh.’
The navarch looked at him — a look that I hope no Spartan ever gives me. ‘Are you refusing to drill?’ he asked.
Adamenteis paused. ‘Refusing? No, but-’
Eurybiades nodded. ‘Good. We will drill. The king has marched. He depends on this fleet to hold his flank.’
‘We’re ready now!’ Adamenteis insisted.
Spartans do not sneer. I’ve never seen one do so, because to sneer is to mock, and to mock is to be weak — the Spartans know this. They are too proud to mock anyone.
Eurybiades didn’t smile or frown or change facial expression at all. He merely said, ‘We will sail when I say. You are ready when I decide.’ He paused. ‘Yes? Any questions?’
Spartans have many failings, but they are good, reliable commanders. We had been unlucky at the Vale of Tempe, but now we had a simple, plain-spoken man who’d served overseas — in Aegypt and Ionia. He was not a master sailor, but he knew the sea and he’d fought ten battles, and he spoke with absolute assurance.
We spent a third week at drills. Every day. He came aboard each of the squadron flagships and watched our squadrons manoeuvre — usually with Themistocles at his shoulder. Far from ignoring the Athenian democrat, he turned the man into his. . it’s hard to name the office. His right hand. Many of the innovations that Themistocles lays claim to — even now, the filthy traitor — came from the Spartan navarch, who did not himself care a whit who got credit for anything, so long as the battles were won and the fleet stayed together.
We had games. After all, we had ten times the men that Leonidas had with the vanguard of the army. The fleet had at least forty thousand men. So, as we did before Lades and before every major military effort, we gave games.
For the first time, I did not participate.
I was thirty-five years old. Men of fully mature age sit in the shade and watch the beautiful youths. We don’t compete, and we tell ourselves it is because that would be unfair. I would like to suggest that it is because older men fear to learn that skill and age cannot defeat youth and strength.
Peisander of the Philaedae won our games, a young Athenian of Cimon’s family. He ran like a deer, jumped as if he had wings and his javelin flew like a bolt from the hand of Zeus. Or so Phrynicus said.
An Athenian youth — Pericles, an ugly boy with a big head who talked all the time — nonetheless won the two-stade sprint. He was serving as Cimon’s hypaspitos, and poor Niceas had to do all the work and was jealous.
And off to the west, other men were at the Olympics as if nothing had happened. As if there was no invasion. No Great King.
At any rate, we all lay in tents on the beach the night after the games — a dinner for all the navarchs commanding the ships and all the victors, crowned in olive. And Eurybiades laid out his strategy.
‘We are smaller, and worse trained,’ he said. ‘But all we have to do is to continue to exist — to retreat after every loss, never allow ourselves to be routed or encircled — and we will not lose.’
It was a long speech for a Spartan.
And Themistocles followed him. ‘No matter what the disparity in numbers, Xerxes cannot afford to let us separate one piece of his fleet. As long as we always have a clear retreat and sea room, we can win a string of little victories while we train up our rowers. And never risk a big fight. This is why we must master the wheel.’
No one liked the wheel.
We didn’t sink any more ships, but we had some very ugly times — somewhere in the third week, I lost almost a quarter of my oars and Nicolas had his collarbone broken when a ship from the Sicyon contingent popped out of the wheel like a pomegranate seed from between a boy’s hands and struck us in the stern — which led to a long series of foulings and a great many curses. Luckily our deck crews were better than our oarsmen, and poled us off before men died — but had the Persians been close, we’d all have died or been made slaves.
At the end of the third week, Eurybiades admitted he was waiting for other contingents. We had two hundred and sixty-nine triremes and a dozen pentekonters as messengers and scouts, as well as a hundred small merchantmen to keep us supplied.