The Rest Is History - 98. Thermopylae & Salamis Episode 1

Episode Date: September 20, 2021

In 480 BC, 300 Spartans made a famous stand at Thermopylae, as hordes of Persian soldiers, led by Xerxes, seemed set to succeed in their aim of conquering Greece. However, although Leonidas and his men were defeated, only a short while later the Greek navy, against superior Persian forces, routed them in the Straits of Salamis, a turning point in the war as the Persians were steadily swept out of Greece. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook discuss the epic battle and its outcome. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. There is an inscription written over these men who were buried where they fell, and over those who died before the others went away, dismissed by Leonidas. It reads as follows. Here four thousand men from the Peloponnese once fought three million. That inscription is for them all, but the Spartans have their own. Go tell the

Spartans, thou who passest by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie. So wrote Herodotus, the father of history, looking back on the Spartans who died at the Battle of Thermopylae. Tom, Tom Holland, Thermopylae is one of the two great engagements in the greco-persian wars the the wars that in some ways are at the very foundation of history itself so um tell us why are we doing this subject apart from the fact that it's a brilliant subject it is a brilliant subject uh i have to say i mean basically it's it's the subject that got me into history as a child so maybe come to that in a minute but but the reason we're doing um specifically thermopylae and salamis which are the two great battles for in 480 bc is that this is the 2500th anniversary so this episode will be going out at approximately

the day on which 2500 years ago, the Persian battle fleet was defeated in the Straits of Salamis, thereby perhaps radically changing the course of history. I mean, we might come onto a discussion about that later. I thought we would. But as you said, also, it is in a way kind of the foundation of history because this story about how the greeks confronted the persians and defeated them became the theme for

the first great work of history herodotus and i'm very grateful that you um you cited him but you didn't use my translation i didn't use your translation do you know why i i just couldn't find it in time to be be honest. Oh, well. Even as I was reading it, I felt a little bit... You knew I'd be cross. I thought you'd be cross, but I thought that would add a piquancy to the episode. Yes, it does. It does. It's driven me into an absolute fury. Now, of course, you have only recently been associating with the Persian, because you are coming to this. I mean, one reason I wanted to puncture your sort of bubble of immense pride,

not that you have a bubble of immense pride, but if you did, I would want to puncture it, is that you've been basking in the adulation of fans of The Rest Is History, haven't you? Because you've just, only a couple of days ago, you did the live show about top 10 mistresses with top Persian, Ali Ansari. We did. And I think, I'm not entirely sure of the logistics of it.

And this is all very complicated, isn't it? We record these episodes before they then go out, obviously. But I think that the top 10 mistresses, which was the subject of our live show at the London Podcast Festival, will have gone out before this episode goes out. So perhaps people may have heard it. But Dominic, you were much missed.

Well, I don't believe that at all. No, really know really I mean it was lovely to do it with Ali who was absolutely brilliant um as he was in in the Persia episode I mean he got in I mean if people have heard the episode but he got in an absolutely terrible Persian mistress I mean yeah she was called the nightingale but then he went on to say she was actually called the parrot and i waited to hear what this amazing iranian mistress had done and she'd done absolutely nothing oh no i mean if i was gonna have a persian mistress my expectations would be very high i was very disappointed in that but having said that everything else about persia obviously is brilliant yes um you know my thesis and one that ali shares that basically everything comes from persia um and that is i think what makes the story of the persian invasion of greece so brilliant and it's something that i didn't realize really when i got obsessed by it as a child where i was all over the greeks it was

completely greece it was it was Athens it was Sparta absolutely on their side but I now with the wisdom of many my many decades my wisdom of the years I now appreciate that that we owe just as much to Persia as we do okay and that's what makes this such a seismic so let's put this into context for listeners who who who don't share your childhood childlike childhood enthusiasm so we're in the fifth century bc is that right and that's right isn't it tom you're just looking yes yes and persia is top nation i mean persia is by far the most important rich sophisticated civilization in the eurasian world i guess well i mean putting china on one side and greece is nothing am i right i mean greece is just a

collection of of kind of so pretty obscure little city states so persia is um i mean it's not just the greatest power on the face of the planet. It's the greatest power that has ever existed. The scale of its empire is unprecedented. And it goes from the shores of the Aegean right the way up. Well, you know, we talked about this in our Afghanistan episode. It goes all the way up beyond Afghanistan into kind of Central Asia to the Indus. It's rich. It's teeming with manpower.

It commands the most sophisticated, the most ancient civilizations in the world, Egypt, Babylon, absolutely a stupefying power. And compared to that, absolutely, the Greeks are nothing. And when i wrote potion fire which um i'm shamelessly going to plug no you should my book on this it is the popular history on this but it but it's kind of i hate you know you have to write a blurb and i wrote person fire in the backdrop to the invasion of afghanistan and the iraq war and And during the Iraq war, there was a lot of talk from American

neocons about how America was the heir of Athens. It was a democracy. And that the war in Iraq was a war for democracy. And so therefore, in a sense, they were the Athenians. But it struck me then, and it struck me very strongly over the past month with the kind of withdrawal from from Afghanistan that actually, in a sense, America is, you know, in a sense of kind of global mission. It's its superpower status, its desire to bring order to a kind of rugged terrorist ridden backwater is actually America, is actually Persia. And so the blurb that I wrote for Persian Fire, in the fifth century BC, a global superpower was determined to bring truth and order to what it regarded as two terrorist states. The superpower was Persia, incomparably rich in ambition, golden men. The terrorist states were Athens and Sparta, eccentric cities in a poor and mountainous backwater Greece and so I think that that does kind of brilliantly scramble I should say brilliantly I'm being modest but the the idea of of um that that we in the west can trace our origins to

Persia as well as to Greece I think is a great way to kind of scramble the default assumption that we in the west are just they are kind of you know things well some there are two there are two aspects to that aren't there to that sort of very helena centric um portrait that we have one is if you ever look at a map of the persian wars greece is kind of central and most of the persian empire is off stage so it's just this sort of shadowy eastern power and greece is the center of the world but obviously that's not how people are how most people in the kind of eurasian landmass thought of greece they thought of greece as very peripheral and persia is central of these great cities well i guess so but i mean your mental g so. But I mean, your mental Greece. Well, I mean, but your mental world is defined by Persia rather than by Greece. Right. For most people at the time, for most, let's say, educated people. the first work of history ever written so so this is you know he's blazing the path here

and he is writing about a Persian king called Cambyses who's the son of Cyrus the great who is the the kind of the the founder of the Persian empire eulogized by the Persians but also by the Greeks by the Jews I mean he's kind of you know he's hailed as the messiah in um in the book of isaiah and cambyses has invaded egypt and there supposedly he goes mad and herodotus draws this information from the egyptian piece it's it's it's probably propaganda but this is what he reports and he says one of the markers for why cambyses is mad is that he laughs at the egyptian gods for kind of having animal heads and the Egyptians for worshipping bulls and things like that. And Rodgers says this is insane because everybody thinks that their customs and their habits are the best and everybody thinks that their, you know,

their lands are the best. And as evidence for this, he tells a story about Darius the Great, who succeeds Cambyses and who is the king who sends the expedition to attack athens that gets defeated at marathon so in a sense the great enemy of the greeks but in this story he he is put center position and herodotus tells a story that deriah summons a greek and an indian and the greeks when their parents die burn them and the indians when their parents die her burn them. And the Indians, when their parents die, Herodotus reports, eat them. That's really not true. It's not true. But for the purposes of the story, let's say it is.

And Darius says to the Greek, how much would I have to pay you to eat your parent? And the Greek goes, oh, I'd never do that. And to the Indian, he says, how much would I have to pay you to burn your parent? And the Indian is equally disgusted and revolted by the very idea. And Herodotus says, this proves what Pindar, the great poet, said, that custom is king, that everybody thinks his land is the best.

But the thing that's fascinating about that is that Herodotus is actually situating Darius at the centre. Herodotus, a Greek, is looking at the world through Persian eyes yeah and I think that that is kind of reflective of the way that even a Greek could recognise that the Persians were kind of central in a way they wouldn't they wouldn't have done it the other way around a Persian writer wouldn't have looked through Greek eyes that person would never have done that the Persians were convinced that Persia was best and that um you know it stood at the center of the world of course the greeks said the same the greeks had this story that that zeus set two eight two two eagles flying from different corners of

the world and that they met over delphi so delphi is the center of the world for the greeks but i think it's possible for someone like herodotus who is who is born on the the the what's now the turkish side of the aegean from halicarnassicarnassus, is he? That's right, yes, which is now Bodrum, the great yachting capital, the great yachting centre. You could go and wear your yachting shoes there, Tom, like the Kaiser. Yes, I could. Yes, make sure I got the right ones. So he's born, I mean, he's a subject of the Persian king.

So he kind of has, you know, foots in both worlds. Foots? Yeah, feet. He has a foot in both worlds. Well, Herodotus, okay, so Herodotus, that raises the other thing

I was going to talk about, which is that everything we are going to talk about, about Thermopylae and Salamis and the Persian Wars, everything comes from Greek sources, doesn't it?

I mean, we don't, am I right in thinking there are no real Persian, certainly no narrative Persian accounts of these events? Not a single mention of them

from the Persians they do not mention them at all now maybe we'll come back to this but worth raising now this is obviously seismic for the Greeks but do the Persians even notice it's happened it's a moot point I mean it's indisputably a defeat, but obviously, unlike us, there aren't journalists, there aren't kind of cameramen, there aren't people on Twitter recording the humiliation. So the Persian king is able to kind of present it, I does seem to record how the Persians presented what had happened. So the two great battles in 480 when Xerxes, the Persian king, leads this invasion. There's the Battle of Thermopylae where the spartans hold the hot gates hold the passes but it gets turned and lenny does the the king gets killed and then the persians move down they occupy athens they burn it before being defeated at salamis and according to daio

this is i mean he he says during his expedition to greece xerxes achieved victory over the spartans at thermopylae and killed King Leonidas there. Then he took and laid waste Athens, of which he sold into slavery all the inhabitants who had not succeeded in escaping. And after these successes, he imposed tribute on the Greeks and returned to Asia. Well, that sounds very much like a Persian victory. Yes. So I'm sure that that is how it would have been presented. And probably that is a kind of refracted echo of the original Persian propaganda, which hasn't survived. It's kind of rippling down through the centuries to be recorded by this Greek historian who, you know, he's very open to kind of Persian knowledge and influences.

But no, there are no Persian reports, really. And the reason for that is that the Persians essentially see themselves as having brought about the end of history. Okay. Everything's perfect. The Persians have conquered the world. And the thing about the Persians and the reason why there are, in a sense, we in the West are its heirs as well as the heirs of Athens, is that the Persians are the first people to moralize the idea of empire i think we talked about this in our episode on empire that they they see the world as divided into into to truth and the lie into light and into darkness um and inevitably they cast their own rulers as light and truth and they cast all those who

oppose them as as darkness and falsehood and that And that means that essentially there is no need to describe what they're doing because everything is perfect. They have brought about the absolute essence of everything that human civilization could be. And so therefore, what is there to write about? Well, that's not a great place to be a historian. No, it's a terrible place. To the degree that when you look at the kind of incredible portrayals of the Persian kings, Darius or Xerxes or whatever, it's often impossible to tell them apart. Because essentially, the great king, the king of Persia, the king of kings, his role is divorced from the kind of humanity. He rules not as a kind of individual person who is inherited the throne

but as the essence of kingship that's why he is the king of kings that is his role and so therefore you don't get the kind of scandalous gossip that you get from greek historians or later roman historians which is why you know someone like darius or xerxes is a kind of much chillier, much more anonymous figure than, say, the Spartan or the Athenian leaders. Yeah. Themistocles. Okay, so let's talk about how it all, why does it happen? Greece is disunited, Greece is city-states, Persia is the great empire. Why on earth, if you're so rich and powerful, why do they even bother attacking the greeks what's the story well i think it's it's partly because empires have to expand particularly if you feel that you have a kind of moral mission yeah to pacify the world because inevitably on along your borders there

are going to be kind of fracture points and the greeks are a very fractious people they are very given to rebellion and in the 490s bc the greeks who've been conquered were conquered by cyrus's armies um in the mid-sixth century so these are all the cities on the coast they're called ionia yeah so they're called the ionians and the ionians rebel and the ionians look across the the sea to the great cities of Greece proper for support. And first of all, they come to Sparta and the Spartans are a very kind of insular crabbed people. And although Cleomenes, who we talked about in the Sparta episode, although he is a kind of expansive guy he you know he he's not he doesn't want to cross the sea he he doesn't want to go on kind of great alexander style adventures and so he says no and so then the ionian ambassador goes to athens and athens

is a revolutionary state it's it's chucked out this guy hippias who um it is a tyrant and a tyrant doesn't quite have the meaning that has in contemporary english it's more like a kind of uh a latin american dictator it's that kind of uh peron he's a kind of peronist figure he's been expelled and the athenians have embarked on this kind of radical political project that we know is democracy uh and and democracy today it doesn't quite have the connotations that it would have had for the athenians because for the athenians it's it's the demos the people that has the the kratos the power the demos is everyone who who's living who has lived and who will live who have sprung from the soil of Attica. So it's deeply, deeply rooted in a sense of place. The Athenians came to be autochthonous,

sprung from the soil. They're not immigrants. And the democracy, the power that is given to this people is kind of expressive of this deeply weird, deeply supernatural sense of community that the Athenian people have with themselves, with the soil and with the gods, and particularly with Athena, who is their patron. And it's a state that, because there is this kind of sense of commonality that hadn't been there under the rule of the Peronist hippias, it's a kind of ferment of experimentation. They're kind of flexing their muscles. They're trying to test what they can do with this new sense of power, this new political experiment

that they're running. And so they sign up to joining the Ionians. Just a quick question about the Ionians. When they rebel against the Persian Empire, I mean, they're not rebelling. Are they rebelling because they don't like paying tribute, basically? Is it a tax rebellion? I mean, presumably they're not rebelling because they have a sense of Greekness and the Persian overlord offends that, because the Persian king rules tons of different kinds of people. He rules Bactrians and Egyptians and Carmanians and all sorts. So there's nothing wrong with being ruled by the Persian king, right?

Yeah, there is a kind of resentment about it. There's a resentment about the tribute. I agree. I mean, you know, they'd been ruled before the Persians, they'd been ruled by the Lydians. So they're used to paying tribute. But I think there's a kind of constant snarl of, again, in Ionia, as in Athens,

there's a kind of tension between people who are tyrants, people who resent being ruled as tyrants, individual ambitions, kind of a hint of class warfare. These are very, very unstable places politically. And so the kind of the yearning for freedom, the yearning to cast off Persian tributary power is kind of gets mixed in with the personal ambitions of the leadership. It's that that generates the impulse to to rebel and it's what makes the athenians kind of such natural allies yeah and and the guy who persuades the athenians to join in says that you know it's it was easier to persuade 10 000 men in athens than it was to persuade one man cleomenes in

sparta and and there is this sense that you know know, that this is an uprising, not just against the Persians, but against the kind of the ruling classes that were the kind of the Petanists in these Ionian cities. So the Athenians, you know, they send some ships and Herodotus says that this was the beginning of the great process of chaos that was to convulse the world, these ships going. And the kind of echoes of the Trojan War there, which also herodotus is kind of drawing out so the athenians go then they join in uh an expedition to go and attack the persian governor in sardis which was the former capital of the lydian empire um croesus came from sardis yeah croesus who invented money came from there the founding father of this podcast yes exactly so so the athenians join in the attack they they capture um sardis but they don't capture the acropolis the kind of the high point the high city um which holds out and disastrously they accidentally set fire to

the city and this burns down various temples and the athenians are so kind of appalled at having done this that they all retreat the the pers Persian you know they get cavalry they attack the Ionians are defeated the Athenians skedaddle back to um back to Athens there's a kind of enormous sense of anxiety not just that they have kind of tweaked the the tale of the of the Persian um great beast but also that they've offended the gods and so basically they kind of there's a kind of agreement they're just going to forget about it you know let's just pretend this didn't happen and meanwhile on the other side the Persians are kind of moving in for the kill they raise a great fleet the the Ionians are cornered outside Miletus which is the center

of this rebellion by an island called Lade and the entire fleet just disintegrates because what the persians are brilliant at when they fight they're brilliant at bringing overwhelming force which they have they can muster fleets from across the empire yeah um they're very very good at kind of data resourcing so they know exactly you know who is in with who and they're very very good at espionage they're very good at kind of getting secret agents and so they use gold basically to foster dissension among the the ionians and the whole battle fleet just disintegrates and then the persian fleet moves in and mops it up they then sack miletus and they take away the inhabitants to Persia.

The boys are castrated. The girls are sold as slaves. It's hideous. And when a play is staged in Athens about the fall of Miletus, the playwright is fined. The play is banned. And the Athenians,

they just don't want to know about it. The whole thing is appalling. Because they feel guilty or because they... I think they feel a sense of shame that they let the Milesians and the Ionians down. They feel guilt that they burnt down the temples in Sardis and therefore the gods are against them. And they're frankly crapping themselves. I thought of what the Persians might do quite correctly. Yeah, so the Persians,

now at this stage, the Persians could let sleeping dogs lie as they were. They could just say, right, well, that's it. But they're presumably determined to teach the Athenians a lesson, aren't they? Exactly. And it's exactly like the Americans going to Afghanistan after the burning down of 9-11.

These guys are harbouring terrorists. They're a terrorist state. They're a terrorist state. You know, Athens is kind of the equivalent of Al-Qaeda yeah yeah you know we've got to root them out yes uh we've you know we for the good of the world you know it's not just kind of persian ammo proper it's it's but we have a duty so we need to bring truth we need to bring order and and athens is seen as a nest of davers of demons you know they need to purge athens with fire that's very kind of post 9-11 isn't it yeah and they so the george bush of this scenario is darius the great is that right

he's that is right yes and so does he go himself he goes himself he's far too important to bother with with you know it's basically they see it as border policing yeah it's a sort of punitive raid basically more than yeah yes yes i mean it has to be done, obviously, for kind of reasons of realpolitik. You can't allow people to just come along and burn a city and attack you and then not be punished for it. But there is also this kind of cosmic dimension.

So an amphibious expedition is sent across the Aegean. First of all, it attacks the city of Eretria, which is in Euboea, Euboea today kind of long thin narrow island yes that is north of attica that gets captured then they land on the plane of marathon the athenians rather than hunker down inside their city send all their soldiers hoplites named after the hoplon the the heavy shield that the heavy the armored infantry carry they actually march out to try and meet with the with the persians they also send a messenger running all the way to ath to sparta to try and get the spartans to come and join them the spartans are celebrating a festival so can't but say that they will come there you know when it's over in a week's time thanks for that yeah cheers guys

the only people who come to the athenian rescue is from the tiny town of platea which the athenians had backed in their war against thebes which is the kind of the big heavyweight city of boeotia the region just next to attica um so the platoons do come and join but there are hardly any so there's a any. So there's a kind of standoff above the plane of marathon. And then the Athenians see that the Persians are starting to load troops onto their ships. And a message comes that the cavalry is being loaded on. And this means both that maybe these ships are heading around the headland to go to Athens to attack it directly while there's no one to defend it but it also means that you know that the infantry can march down into the plain and they won't be attacked by cavalry and so this is what the Athenians do

no Greek army had ever defeated the Persians in pitch battle so it took you know they're massively outnumbered it takes incredible courage courage. They charge down the hill. Last kind of stretch, they start to run. They smash into the Persian line. The Athenians have weakened the centre of their line. So the centre of the Persian line goes forward, but the Athenians are then able to kind of turn and pincer it. Yes, to sort of envelop it, I guess.

Envelop it. And they kind of play on on persian overconfidence because the persians push forwards in this kind of way because they assume that they're going to defeat them because they've always defeated the greeks but instead it's the athenians who win the athenians then rush back to athens to make sure that that the persians can't kind of snip around and capture athens while they're away the persian fleet moves into the harbor of of Phaleron. They see the Athenian hoplites drawn up on the harbour front. They kind of pause and then the sun sets and the Persian fleet withdraws. And the Athenians have seen the Persians off.

And, of course, this is the greatest thing that the Athenians have ever done. They've lost 190. The persians have lost thousands and thousands they build a great kind of funeral memorial for it the spartans arrive late they go and inspect the persian dead you know pay the athenians great compliments there's there's basically the kind of the athenians relax they think we've seen the persians off we're brilliant you know we're heroic it's the hoplite class. It's the kind of the people who can afford armour who did it. Brilliant. However.

Yes. Yeah. Well, this is the perfect point to take a break. And when we return, I guess we'll be getting into the Battle of Thermopylae. Very exciting. See you after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. dot com Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We're talking about the Persian Wars and specifically the Battle of Thermopylae. So the Athenians have just wiped the floor with the Persians at Marathon, Tom, and are very overconfident. But they've got a shock coming, haven't they? Because the Persians are going to come back for more. It comes as a shock to most people in Athens. Most people in Athens assume that everything is fine,

that the Persians have gone. But there are those who, kind of Churchill-like, are looking to the future and recognising the full scale of the kind of storm that is gathering. And of these, the ablest is a man called Themistocles. Yeah. Who is a kind of a child of the democratic revolution. So he's grown up as a political figure, really only knowing the democracy.

So he's that first generation. And in a sense, he's the kind of the prototype of the democratic politician. So he's become a kind of a legal figure so he's the first person to become a lawyer and recognize that this is a good way to kind of prepare yourself for politics he also understands that the implications of the democracy the fact that everybody now has a vote and a say is that if you start appealing to to people who don't necessarily have large amounts of property who don't necessarily have enough money to to own armor they're a resource you can get their votes and so he starts to appeal to yeah he's a populist so he's stuck well or you could say he's um

well he's appealing to the people whether that makes you a populist or a socialist or i mean he's not a socialist but he's he's he's someone who who's who is a man of the people yeah like you yes just like me that's exactly the comparison i was thinking of and he therefore argues that the focus of athens should be on boosting its naval power. And the harbour of Phaleron that the Persian fleet had approached after Marathon is inadequate. It's not large enough. It's too exposed. There is another place, a place called, a bay called Piraeus, which is further from Athens itself, about two miles further, but is much better protected. And if developed, could make a kind of an amazing, amazing harbour.

And so Themistocles pushes this through. And it's a way of kind of, you know, it's calculated to appeal to those who are poorer, those who will get money to develop it, those who will then be able to make money from kind of, you know, profiting from the increased trade and everything. So this is very popular but Themistocles also has his eyes on on making Athens a great naval power as well as a great trading power and just in the nick of time so Battle of Marathons 490 this happens in 483 a massive seam of silver is discovered at a place of called Lauryon which is on the kind of attic coast east of Athens. You know, it's a prodigious amount of cash that is opened up.

And so there's a debate as to what should be done with this money. Traditionally, when kind of windfalls happen like this happen, it's shared out among the people and that obviously has appeal. And so there's a guy called Aristides who is nicknamed the just because he's a figure of such kind of moral probity. He argues that the silver should be shared out among everybody in Athens.

Themistocles argues, no, we should invest this money in a fleet. We should make ourselves the greatest power in Greece. And he doesn't argue this because the persians are coming because he knows that lots of people aren't worried about that and he doesn't want to seem like a kind of you know kind of whipping up phantoms but instead there is athens has a great rival the island of aegina which lies just off attica and so he says we could build a huge fleet and then we could beat the crap out of aegina and this and this is very popular you

know so he's not like this so he's not churchill then he is churchill because he is looking at he's looking at persia but he's disguising the fact that that's what he's doing he's basically saying you know let's build this fleet so we can we can attack aegina but all along he's he's he knows that the real challenge is is persia so this he and aristides have to basically argue the torso for this and the argument is is so bitter and so impossible to resolve that um this kind of novel political technique called ostracism has to be drawn on and ostraca are kind of shards of pottery and if there are two major kind of political figures in the democracy who are basically disrupting it and they can't be reconciled the athenians will have a vote to

decide which one should be sent into exile for 10 years and they write the name down on these ostraca on these fragments of pottery and themistocles and Aristides are put up for ostracism and effectively it's the first referendum in history because essentially they are voting on whether to spend the money on the fleet or not yeah so so much rides on this referendum yeah and it's Aristides who ends up being exiled Themistocles his policy is passed the investment goes into the fleet and it's in 482 481 that everyone starts to realize that actually the persians are coming well this is what i was going to ask what are the persians doing while all this is going on so darius is still king am i right darius dies shortly after the battle of marathon okay so he's gone so he is

he and he is succeeded by one of his many sons a man called xerxes great name great great name and a great guy i mean he's he's seen as the kind of the archetype of a tyrant uh you know a hubristic idiot who who fails because the the greeks write the history but he's a man of formidable capabilities um because he's a persian prince he's the he's the uh the grandson of cyrus um darius comes from a different family but darius has married um cyrus's daughter atossa brilliant atossa yeah whether she was atossa who knows but tom come on calm down that's a below me isn't it that's a terrible joke she so she's a kind of formidable queen mother figure but Xerxes himself is is imposed physically imposing he's been trained he's tough he's been trained in in all the attributes of war he's also a great gardener Persians are very very they love

their gardens they love their gardens and um there's a kind of war party in Persia that is saying um you know we should definitely invade greece and one of the ways that they that they get xerxes to agree to this is to say that that europe has kind of amazing trees you could get some beautiful trees for your garden it's kind of saying it's like yeah it's a gardening garden center well like napoleon napoleon was very into his gardening there's a whole book about napoleon and gardening yes the risk go one isn't it yes yes uh well xerxes is the same so xerxes absolutely loves his trees loves his plants um saplings and stuff and so he decides yes we you know i have a duty to the persian people to the empire but above all to uh to you know the cosmic balance of good and evil to to invade greece and to punish uh not just the

athenians but also the Spartans because before Marathon Darius had sent ambassadors around Greece asking for earth and water which is the symbol of submission everybody given it apart from the Athenians who put them on trial the ambassadors on trial and executed them and the Spartans who famously chucked them down a well right so you can sort of see that from Xerxes perspective he's punishing two terrorist states yes athens and sparta who are you know they they represent disorder anarchy violence they treat ambassadors with scorn they don't hand over the earth and water they're just bad people they are bad people and that's absolutely yes they are bad they they are evil

that's exactly yeah the you know it's an axis of evil Athens and Sparta and the Spartans feel the Spartans are kind of paranoid about actually about the the crime that they've committed in murdering the the assassins and they actually send two Spartans to Xerxes to try and kind of make up for it and you know Xerxes doesn't kill them because he knows it's much better to leave the Spartans stewing in a sense of guilt um so essentially Xerxes feels that he's on a moral mission yeah but he also feels that of course when he's invading Greece he's doing it as the king of kings as the as the king of the universe and therefore he can't as Persians under cyrus had done do this kind of the persians under cyrus have been very mobile essentially kind of based on horses um just persians just the medes

very very swift very effective um xerxes can't invade greece in that way because he's he's the king of of the empire so therefore he has to take a force that is appropriate to his status as the king of the world. And so therefore, as well as all his kind of hardened troops, the Persians, the Medes and so on, he also has to bring people from every corner of the empire.

Even if they're no good at fighting? Even if they're no good at fighting at all. So, you know, people who are armed with kind of stone tip spears and stone axes and things like that, they all have to come along. And this in turn makes it makes it very problematic to get them there because it he can't you know if he's

bringing this size force and there are arguments about how large it is so that thing you passage from her it says three million people which is obviously completely exaggerated well that's the poem that he's quoting herodotus actually says it's about 1,070,000 people. I mean, that's obviously also a ludicrous figure. I guess it's about 250,000, 300,000. I mean, it's enormous. I mean, that's a larger force than anything up to D-Day. I mean, it's on an enormous scale, but they can't take them across in ships because there aren't enough so that means that they've got to march across the hellespont on pontoon bridges or something how do they get across the hellespont and they've got to take a fleet okay so they have to kind of go in sync well how do they cross the hellespont i mean that's that's exactly that's exactly the problem

well they build two pontoon bridges. Right, okay. And the pontoon, there's a great storm in the winter and they get smashed up, so they have to be rebuilt. And the Greeks are absolutely shocked because the sea is punished symbolically by being branded and having fetters thrown into it. And this is seen as kind of massive, offensive to Poseidon, the god of the sea.

Where the sea was gutted. Yeah, well, we'll find out whether the sea was gutted. Yeah, well, we'll find out whether the sea was gutted, because in due course, this becomes a kind of important part of the story, the vengeance of Poseidon for this. But also what they do is, there'd been a fleet earlier that had sunk around Mount Athos. And according to Rodas, the shipwreck sailors had all been eaten by sea monsters. I mean, I don't know, who were they what were they we don't know and so xerxes has commissioned people to laborers to build canals you know the three prongs of the athos peninsula the canals are kind of dug through so that the fleet can just go straight through it and not risk being shipwrecked so enormous preparations are made and obviously

the greeks even even the kind of the the dumbest greek has to realize the monstrous scale of what is coming and so in due course when xerxes arrives in sardis he winters there um they send spies over to find out how large the you know the invasion force is these spies get captured they're about to be executed when Xerxes' guards come running and say, what are you doing? The spies then get taken around. They get given full lists of everybody who's coming, all the brigades, all the ships and everything. Then they're sent back to the Greeks, who were all absolutely terrified. And so in Greece, the prospect of this monstrous army coming is not met with a kind of oval, you know,

a unanimous decision to resist it. The Athenians have to, the Spartans have to, because they're clearly toast. But it's not obvious that the other Greeks do. And because the Athenians and the Spartans have enemies among the Greeks, the likelihood is that Argos, the great rival in the Peloponnese for the rule, Sparta's great rival, who the Spartans hate, the Argives hate them. The Argives claim descent from a guy called Perseus, famous for chopping off the head of the Gorgon. And the Argives say that the Persians are descended from Perseus as in a sense they're kind of yeah so they're kin so maybe they should side with the persians and so they refuse basically to join they say the only way that they'll join is if they can lead the army and the spartans refuse that and they got argives know that they're going to refuse

that so basically they're neutral and then the thebans because the the Athenians and the Thebans have been had this bust up over Plataea this kind of tiny town in in Boeotia that properly should be subordinate to Thebes but has become an Athenian ally the Thebans are gagging to side with the Persians as well and see Athens destroyed so the idea that this is a Persian a Greco-Persian war a clash between two civilizations Greece and Persia is is completely wrong, right? It's not completely wrong because the Greeks and the Persians have very, very different perspectives on things. But there are Greeks fighting on the Persian side, though, aren't there? Absolutely. And there are Greeks who will always regard a kind of outside force as a lesser threat than their immediate enemies.

And the Persians know this and the persians are absolute masters of dividing and ruling and that's why their agents are everywhere they have an incredibly sophisticated espionage network tom i'm very conscious this episode is all about thermopylae but we're coming to thermopylae we haven't got we haven't got thermopylae well listen i tell you what we should do for this episode we should get the persians to the gates of thermopylae okay then we'll do thermopylae so we should call the episode the gates of thermopylae the road to thermopylae the road to thermopylae the road to thermopylae so so that's what you're listening to in case there's any uncertainty we've been going on too long no no it's fine i mean it's

not quite rater morley on the top 10 churches level of um level of delay and jeopardy. I should talk faster. Yeah. So, okay, there are Greeks on the Persian side and there are also Greek mercenaries, aren't there? The Persians always relied on Greek mercenaries. And obviously there must be Greeks from the Ionian coast. Absolutely. So the Ionians, they have to supply contingents of ships. So the great king marches from Sardis.

He marches up to Troy where he offers sacrifice offers sacrifice to athena yeah to show that you know there's no hard feelings about the fact he's going to destroy her city try and get her on board right then he he sits on uh this throne he all his fleet is out before him his armies oh yes i remember this scene in kind of famous scene great set piece herodotus describes and he he gazes out and then suddenly he bursts into tears, and his uncle asks him, why are you weeping? And Xerxes says, I'm looking out at this, all these men who are under my command,

and then I suddenly thought that in a hundred years, not one of them will be left alive. Gosh. Well, Xerxes is such an impressive, profound thinker, isn't he? I admire him for that. I mean, he clearly didn't say that, because that's a very greek perspective it's kind of projecting it onto him right i i think that um herodotus does say that you know

xerxes is the most physically impressive the most um kind of authoritative figure in the army that he deserved to be king so there's a recognition that xerxes is a very kind of impressive but that said Tom so that scene is is Herodotus projecting but then you say Herodotus then says Xerxes is incredibly formidable and impressive and everything but I mean presumably that's Herodotus projecting as well isn't it that's him creating a suitable villain yeah for the Greeks to defeat so actually in a sense we know nothing about Xerxes that's not filtered through all this this sort of historicizing propaganda well I I think the fact that Herodotus obviously the fact you know Xerxes is the great invader uh he loses so it's inevitable that he's going to be cast as the villain I think the fact that Herodotus can say he's also a very impressive figure

yeah if he was King John he would not have done that no he would not so i think i think that um we can assume that xerxes is an impressive figure not only because um the you know herodotus says he is but also because he he does actually control this great army yeah he he does hold it all together um and that's no easy feat at all and so they cross the hellespont yeah takes seven days according to herodotus and they start marching along northern greece and then down and the fleet is slowly kind of matching it as it slips along the coastline and so there's this sense of this terrifying force coming towards athens towards Sparta. And this inevitably generates kind of immense panic among the Greeks who have decided that they're going to fight.

So they do what the Greeks always do in such situations, which is to consult Apollo at Delphi. And so the Spartans send a message. And the message from Apollo is that the only way that Sparta can hold out is if a king of Sparta dies. So that's that's something for the Spartans to think about. And then the Athenians, the Athenians go and the Athenian messengers walk in and the Pythia, this kind of old woman dressed in a young girl's dress, who Apollo speaks through her, goes, whoa, you're screwed. You're absolutely screwed. Is that what she says? Pretty much.

You're screwed. Run to the ends of the world. You know, you're going to be murdered. And the Athenians totter out and they're kind of pale and they can't believe it. Surely Apollo can give us something to be murdered. And the Athenians totter out and they're kind of pale and they can't believe it. Surely Apollo can give us something to cling to. And this priest comes out and says, guys, give it another go.

Let's see what he comes up with this time. And I'm going to read what Apollo says because it's very important for what then subsequently happened. So Apollo says, Athena has been begging Zeus to spare Athens and Zeus has determined that Athens is going to burn and yet this word I give you adamant a promise everything within the borders of Attica shall fall yes and the sacred veils of nearby mountain ranges but the wooden wall alone the wooden wall shall stand that much zeus grants to athena as an aid to you and all your children men on horses men on foot sweeping they come from asia retreat for soon enough you will meet with them face to

face divine salamis you will be the ruin of many a mother's son when the seed is scattered or the harvest is gathered in and so typically delphic message full of kind of riddles and uncertainties messengers go back themistically caesars on it what is the wooden wall there are some who say the wooden wall is the fortifications that surround the acropolis and so so therefore, what Delphi is saying is, you know, hold on to the Acropolis and try and sit the siege out. Themistocles says, no, the wooden wall is our fleet. We should trust to our fleet. That is going to be the wall of Athens.

We should abandon Attica. We should evacuate it, even though we are sprung from its soil. But we should trust to the wooden wall that is our, this incredible fleet that we've built just in the nick of time and divine salamis what does that mean well salamis is this island just off attica with a very kind of narrow straits between it and what that offers is the possibility of negating the overwhelming force that the persian fleet has because if you can trap them in the straits then their numbers will actually count against them and so Themistocles says this is what we should do we should evacuate Athens we should send our women and children across the sea to Troasin which is a city in the Peloponnese we should evacuate the old men and the gods

statues of the gods to Salamis and we should trust to the fleet we should also before we abandon athens try and hold a forward line and thermistocles has been on kind of reconnoitering mission north they've recognized that they can't hold the kind of um the the line around mount olympus which you know is is uh near thessaly but south of thessaly there is um there's a very very narrow road that has the sea on one side and a mountain pass mount high mountain cliffs on the other uh there are hot boiling springs of sulfur there and so it's called the hot gates thermopylae in greek and the sea that you can't just hold the land, you've also got to hold the sea. There's the island of Euboea, which its head kind of reaches up just next to where Thermopylae is.

And there are kind of narrow straits there as well. So if the fleet goes there to a beach called Artemisian, named after a temple to Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, maybe the troops can hold the pass and our fleet can hold this you know naval equipment this maritime equivalent of a pass and maybe we can we can keep the persians at bay there and this is the plan and they wait and they wait but still the persians don't come and august comes and we remember talking about the um the olympic episode that we did. We opened with this, how the Olympic Games start and the Spartans are very kind of aware of their obligations to the gods. They can't fight during the Olympics, the Olympic festival.

But then the news comes, the Persians are almost at the gates. So the Spartans decide to send Leonidas with 300 men all of whom have already had children so the implication is they know that you know there's a massive risk that they're going to die and there is of course also that prophecy from from Apollo that only the death of a Spartan king will enable Sparta to survive the Spartansans advance northwards. They accumulate about 5,000 men on the way. Among them, men from Thebes, which is divided between people who want to oppose the Persians and to side with the Persians. So those who want to oppose the Persians go with lenidas and his and the other men they arrive at the gates meanwhile the the greek fleet sails northwards to artemisian um it's not under the command of themistocles because

everybody else hates the athenians they're all jealous of them for having this new fleet the corinthians and the megarans and the people from aegina people like that so they're actually serving under a spartan admiral but effectively themistocles is in command so you've got Laenidas on land you've got Themistocles ready at sea oh the tension Tom the tension and then and then haze a distant dust haze is seen rising in the distance and a flash of light comes from the island of Skiathos, which is just north of Artemisian, at dawn, signalling that the first Persian ships have been seen.

Brilliant. Well, that sets things up very nicely for the next episode. So I thought this episode was going to be about Thermopylae. But no, it's about the road to Thermopylae. The atmosphere could not be more heavy. There's electricity in the air, even as I'm sitting here. There literally is electricity in the air.

And I will explain why at the beginning of the next episode. God, what a tantalising prospect. So tune in next time to the next episode of The Rest Is History when finally the Battle of Thermopylae will get underway and we will see you then. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.