They were all, Xerxes reported, “in the earth entomb’d.” The chorus then lamented how the god of war had beaten down the Persian force:
Again the voice of wild despair
With thrilling shrieks shall pierce the air;
For high the god of war his flaming crest
Raised, with the fleet of Greece surrounded,
The haughty arms of Greece with conquest bless’d,
And Persia’s wither’d force confounded,
Dash’d on the dreary beach her heroes slain,
Or whelm’d them in the darken’d main.88
Aeschylus, The Persians, trans. Robert Potter, available at http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/persians.html.
After the play concluded with Xerxes and the chorus expressing their grief, the audience was silent for a while and then broke into thunderous applause. The decisive Battle of Salamis was only eight years in the past, and many of the audience members were veterans of the Persian Wars, including Aeschylus himself.
What Aeschylus left out of his drama is that the Persians might never have bothered to invade in the first place if the Greeks had not provoked them. Some Greek colonies in Ionia, on the Aegean coast of modern Turkey, had rebelled against the empire around 500 BC. Greeks from Athens and Eretria went to assist them, eventually sacking the city of Sardis.99 In response, the emperor Darius I organized a force of twenty thousand men, which advanced all the way to Marathon, just a little north of Athens. It was so close that an Athenian courier sent back to announce the Greek victory was able to run the 26.1 miles to Athens without stopping.1010
Herodotus, The Histories 5.97–105.
In his account of the Battle of Marathon, Herodotus mentions a courier going to Sparta and Athens, but not this fabled run, which first appears in Plutarch. Herodotus, The Histories 6.105; and Plutarch, De gloria Atheniensium 3 (available at the Perseus Digital Library).
The pioneering Greek historian Herodotus reports that the Persians lost 6,400 men at Marathon – more than a quarter of the force – while the Greeks lost only 192.1111 The defeat was so lopsided that Darius’s son Xerxes vowed to return and destroy the Greeks as a sacred duty:
Herodotus, The Histories 6.102–18.
I intend to bridge the Hellespont and lead an army through Europe to Greece, so that we can punish the Athenians for all that they did to the Persians and to my father. Now you saw how even Darius had his mind set on marching against these men, but that he died and did not have the opportunity to exact vengeance upon them. I, however, on his behalf and that of the rest of the Persians, shall not give up until I conquer Athens and set it on fire . . . .1212
Herodotus, The Histories 7.8.
Things did not turn out as Xerxes planned. While the bridging of the Hellespont was a great achievement and the Persians did finally annihilate the Greeks at Thermopylæ in 480 BC, this was only after three hundred Spartans kept Xerxes’ tens of thousands of “Immortals” at bay for seven humiliating days. The delay allowed the rest of Greece valuable time to prepare. The Athenians, in particular, were able to effect an orderly evacuation of their city, so when Xerxes arrived to put it to the sword he found only a small rearguard on the Acropolis. Meanwhile, the Athenian fleet had gone to the island of Salamis armed with a plan. The Greeks lured the Persian navy into a constricted strait near the island where their large, elaborate ships were unable to maneuver, and the swifter, more agile Greek vessels crushed them. Xerxes returned to Persia, and the war concluded the following year as an unqualified triumph for Athens and her allies.
Pericles was only a boy when these events took place, but he had witnessed enough of them to understand how remarkable the Greek victory had been – and by extension, how remarkable the Greeks must be. The Persians commemorated this proud achievement, and Aeschylus won first prize for tragedy at the Festival of Dionysus in 472 BC.
Athens: 461 BC*
There were a number of suspects in the murder of Ephialtes, the leading politician of Athens. One of them was Pericles, who as his deputy was likely to succeed him. But the more likely culprits were members of the traditionally conservative Areopagus, the council of aristocrats. Many of them believed that Cleisthenes’ democratic reforms had resulted in mob rule, but Ephialtes thought the reforms had not gone far enough. In close consultation with Pericles, he stripped away most of the council’s jurisdiction, a radical act that finally broke the power of the aristocracy and launched the most expansive phase of Athenian democracy.
If members of the Areopagus had indeed plotted to assassinate Ephialtes on the assumption that the reform movement would founder in his absence, they were quickly disappointed. Pericles became, in effect, the “first citizen of Athens” in 461 BC and aggressively continued the effort to transfer political power to the Ecclesia as he consolidated his own position. His main rival was ostracized, or banished, on the grounds that he was a Spartan sympathizer. Over the next decade, Pericles led Athens in an almost endless series of military adventures against the Spartans, against the Persians in Egypt, and even against the sacred city of Delphi. These expeditions had mixed results, but they nevertheless enhanced Pericles’ power and burnished his prestige. For the moment, Athens was the acknowledged leader of Greece as head of the Delian League.
When a formal peace was finally settled with the Persians in 449 BC that permanently excluded them from Greece, Pericles declared it was high time for Athens to emerge from the long, self-imposed state of mourning that followed the sack of the city. A tiny olive seedling had appeared amidst the rubble left by the Persians on the Acropolis, and the citizens decided it must have sprung from Athena’s legendary tree. Pericles interpreted the seedling as a sign that the sanctuary should be rebuilt (though he may well have planted it himself).
The first challenge for Pericles was financial. He was not an elected official with executive authority to dispense funds at will, but merely the most influential member of the Ecclesia. He could wield power only by calling on the support of allies and persuading his fellow citizens that his ambitious building plans were a worthy expenditure of the city’s limited financial resources. But Pericles was nothing if not persuasive. When the various projects around the city were running low on funds, he convinced the Ecclesia to dip into the treasury of the Delian League – the money set aside by Athens and her allies for their common defense. The first stone for Athena’s new temple was laid in 447 BC.
* * *
The Acropolis: c. 445 BC
When Pericles walked into the workshop, a scantily clad girl raced for a curtained enclosure at the back of the room. Phidias turned around with a scowl. “Impeccable timing as always,” he snapped. “You’ve frightened my model.”
“And whore?”
“Of course.”
Pericles grinned. “Don’t let her distract you too much – I need you to keep working.”
“What else have I done these many years?” the sculptor sighed dramatically.
“Tell me about it! I’ve been to a banquet only
