His Majesty witnessed at close range, with His own eyes, I the magnificent valor demonstrated by the Spartans, Thespians and their emancipated squires and servants upon this, the final morning of defense of the pass. He has no need of my recounting the events of this battle. I will report only those instances and moments which may have escaped the notice of His Majesty's vantage, again, as he has requested, to shed light upon the character of the Hellenes he there called his enemy.
Foremost among all, and indisputable in claim to preeminence, may be only one man, the Spartan king, Leonidas. As His Majesty knows, the main force of the Persian army, advancing as it had on the previous two days along the track from Trachis, did not commence its assault until long after the sun was fully up. The hour of attack in fact was closer to midday than morning and came while the Ten Thousand Immortals had not yet made their appearance in the allied rear.
Such was Leonidas' disdain for death that he actually slept for most of this interval. Snoozed might be a more apt description, so free from care was the posture the king assumed upon the earth, cushioned upon his cloak as a ground cloth, legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded across his breast, his eyes shaded fay a straw sun hat and his head pillowed insouciantly upon the bowl of his shield. He might have been a boy, herding goats in some sleepy summer dale.
Of what does the nature of kingship consist? What are its qualities in itself; what the qualities it inspires in those who attend it? These, if one may presume to divine the meditations of His Majesty's heart, are the questions which most preoccupy his own reason and reflection.
Does His Majesty recall that moment, upon the slope beyond the Narrows, after Leonidas had fallen, struck through with half a dozen lances, blinded beneath his helmet staved in from the blow of a battle-axe, his left arm useless with its splintered shield lashed to his shoulder, when he fell at last under the crush of the enemy? Can His Majesty recall that surge within the melee of slaughter when a corps of Spartans hurled themselves into the teeth of the vaunting foe and flung them back, to retrieve the corpse of their king? I refer neither to the first time nor the second or third, but the fourth, when there stood fewer than a hundred of them, Peers and Knights and freedmen, dueling an enemy massed in their thousands.
I will tell His Majesty what a king is. A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field. A king does not dine while his men go hungry, nor sleep when they stand at watch upon the wall. A king does not command his men's loyalty through fear nor purchase it with gold; he earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake. That which comprises the harshest burden, a king lifts first and sets down last. A king does not require service of those he leads but provides it to them. He serves them, not they him.
In the final moments before the actual commencement of battle, when the lines of the Persians and Medes and Sacae, the Bactrians and Illyrians, Egyptians and Macedonians, lay so close across from the defenders that their individual faces could be seen, Leonidas moved along the Spartan and Thespian foreranks, speaking with each platoon commander individually. When he stopped beside Dienekes, I was close enough to hear his words.
Do you hate them, Dienekes? the king asked in the tone of a comrade, unhurried, conversational, gesturing to those captains and officers of the Persians proximately visible across the oudenos chorion, the no-man's-land.
Dienekes answered at once that he did not. I see faces of gentle and noble bearing. More than a few, I think, whom one would welcome with a clap and a laugh to any table of friends.
Leonidas clearly approved my master's answer. His eyes seemed, however, darkened with sorrow.
I am sorry for them, he avowed, indicating the valiant foemen who stood so proximately across. What wouldn't they give, the noblest among them, to stand here with us now?
That is a king, Your Majesty. A king does not expend his substance to enslave men, but by his conduct and example makes them free. His Majesty may ask, as Rooster did, and the lady Arete, why one such as I whose station could most grandly be called service and most meanly slavery, why one of such condition would die for those not of his kin and country. The answer is, they were my kin and country. I set down my life with gladness, and would do it again a hundred times, for Leonidas, for Dienekes and Alexandros and Polynikes, for Rooster and Suicide, for Arete and Diomache, Bruxieus and my own mother and father, my wife and children. I and every man there were never more free than when we gave freely obedience to those harsh laws which take life and give it back again.
Those events of the actual battle I count as nothing, for the fight was over in its profoundest sense before it began. I had slept, sitting upright against the Wall, following Leonidas' example, while we waited that hour and the hour after and the hour after that for His Majesty's army to make its move.
In my doze I discovered myself again among the hills above the city of my childhood. I was no longer a boy but myself of grown years. My cousin was there, in years still a girl, and our dogs, Lucky and Happy, exactly as they had been in the days following the sack of Astakos. Diomache had given chase to a hare and was climbing, bare-legged with extraordinary swiftness, a slope which seemed to ascend to the heavens, Bruxieus waited atop, as did my mother and father: I knew, though I could not see them. I gave chase too, seeking to overtake Diomache with all my grown strength. I could not. However swiftly I mounted, she remained ever elusive, always an interval ahead, calling to me gaily, teas-ingly, that I would never run fast enough to catch her.
I came awake with a start. There awaited the massed Persians, less than a bowshot away.
Leonidas stood upon his feet, out front. Dienekes as always took his stance before his platoon, which was drawn up at seven-and-three, wider and shallower than on either previous day. My place was third in the second file, for the first time in my life without my bow but clutching instead in my right hand the heavy haft of the eight-footer which had last been Doreion's. Around my left forearm, braced tight against the elbow, stood wrapped the linen-cushioned bronze sleeve bolted through the oak and the bronze facing of the aspis which had been Alexandras'. The helmet I wore had belonged to Lachides and the cap beneath had been that of Ariston's squire, Demades.
Eyes on me! Dienekes barked, and the men as always tore their glance from the enemy, who marshaled now so near across the interval that we could see the irises beneath their lashes and the gaps between their teeth. There were ungodly numbers of them. My lungs howled for air; I could feel the blood pounding within my temples and read its pulse upon the vessels of the eyes.
My limbs were stone; I could feel neither hands nor feet. I prayed with every fiber, simply for the courage not to faint. Suicide stood upon my left. Dienekes stood before.
At last came the fight, which was like a tide, and within which one felt as a wave beneath the storming whims of the gods, waiting for their fancy to prescribe the hour of his extinction. Time collapsed. Elements blurred and merged. I remember one surge carrying the Spartans forward, driving the enemy by the score into the sea, and another which propelled the phalanx rearward like boats lashed gunwale-to-gunwale driven before the irresistible storm. I recall my feet, planted solid with all my strength upon the earth slick with blood and urine, as they were driven rearward, in place before the push of the foe, like the fleece-wrapped soles of a boy playing upon the mountain ice.
I saw Alpheus take on a Persian chariot single-handedly, slaying general, henchman and both flank guardsmen. When he fell, shot through the throat by a Persian arrow, Dienekes dragged him out. He got up, still fighting. I saw Polynikes and Derkylides hauling Leonidas' corpse, each with a weaponless hand upon the shoulders of the king's shattered corselet, striking at the foe with their shields as they drew back. The Spartans re-formed and rushed, fell back and broke, then reformed again. I killed a man of the Egyptians with the butt-spike of my shivered spear as he drove his own into the wall of my guts, then an instant later, falling under the blow of an axe, clawed free over a Spartan corpse, only to recognize, beneath its hacked-open helmet, the shattered face of Alpheus.
Suicide hauled me from the fray. At last the Ten Thousand Immortals could be seen, advancing in line of battle to complete their envelopment. What remained of the Spartans and Thespians fell rearward from the plain, to the Narrows, pouring through the sallyports of the Wall toward the final hillock.
The allies were so few now, and their weapons so spent and broken, that the Persians made bold to attack with cavalry, as they would in a rout. Suicide fell. His right foot had been chopped off.
Put me on your back! he commanded. I knew without more words what he meant. I could hear arrows and even javelins thrumming into his yet-living flesh, shielding me as I bore him.
I saw Dienekes yet alive, slinging away one shattered xiphos and clawing through the dirt for another. Polynikes churned past me, carrying Telamonias hobbled beside him. Half the runner's face had been sheared off; blood gushed in sheets from the opened bone of his cheek. The dump! he was calling, meaning that magazine of weapons which Leoni-das had ordered placed in reserve behind the Wall. I felt the tissue of my belly tear and the intestines begin to spill.
Suicide hung life-spent upon my back. I turned rearward toward the Narrows. Persian and Median archers in their thousands hailed bronzeheads down upon the retreating Spartans and Thespians. Those who reached the dump were shredded like pennants in a gale.
The defenders staggered toward the knoll upon which the last stack of weapons had been cached.
Mo more than sixty remained; Derkylides, astonishingly unwounded, rallied the survivors into a circular front. I found a strap and cinched my guts in. I was struck, for just a moment, with the impossible beauty of the day. For once no haze obscured the chan-nel; one could make out individual stones upon the hills across the strait and track the game trails up the slopes, turn by turn.
I saw Dienekes reel beneath the blow of an axe, but had not myself the strength to rally to him.
Medes and Persians, Bactrians and Sacae, were not merely pouring over the Wall but dismantling it with a frenzy. I could see horses beyond. The officers of the foe no longer required whips to drive their men forward. Over the broken stones of the Wall thundered the horsemen of His Majesty's cavalry, followed by the bucking chariots of his generals.
The Immortals marshaled round about the hillock now, pouring bowfire point-blank into the Spartans and Thespians crouched beneath the slender shelter of their shattered and staved-in shields. Derkylides led the rush upon them. I saw him fall, and Dienekes, fighting beside him.
Neither had shields, nor for all that could be seen, weapons of any kind. They went down not like heroes of Homer crashing clamorously within the carapaces of their armor, but like commanders completing their last and dirtiest job.
The enemy stood, invincible in the might of their missile fire, but somehow the Spartans reached them. They fought without shields, with only swords and then bare hands and teeth. Polynikes went after an officer. The runner still had his legs. So swiftly did he cross the space at the base of the hillock that his hands found the foe's throat even as a storm of Persian steel tore his back apart.
The last few dozen upon the hillock, rallied now by Dithyrambos, both of whose arms had been shredded by enemy fire and hung now useless at his sides, pincushioned with bolts, sought to form a front for a final rush. Chariots and Persian horsemen stampeded pell-mell into the Spartans. A battle waggon, afire, rolled over both my legs. Before the defenders, completely encircling the hillock, the Immortals had formed now in bowmen's ranks. Their bolts thundered upon the last unarmed and shattered warriors. From their rear, more archers hurled volleys over the heads of their comrades to rain upon the last survivors among the Hellenes. Backs and bellies bristled with the fletched spines of arrow butts; shot-to-pieces men sprawled in rag piles of bronze and scarlet.
The ear could hear His Majesty bawling orders, so near at hand ranged he upon his chariot. Was he calling in his foreign tongue for his men to cease fire, to capture the final defenders alive?
Were those to whom he cried the marines of Egypt, under their captain, Ptammitechus, who spurned their monarch's order and rushed in to gift what Spartans and Thespians they could reach with the final boon of death? It was impossible to see or hear within the tumult. The marines parted toward the flanks. The fury of the Persian archers redoubled as they sought with the numberless shafts of their fusillades to extinguish at last the stubborn foe who had made them pay so dearly for this mean measure of dirt, As when a hailstorm descends unseasonably from the mountains and hurls from the sky its icy pellets upon the husbandman's newly sprouted crop, so did the bolts of the Persians in their myriads thunder down upon the Spartans and Thespians.
Now the farmer assumes his anxious station in the doorway, hearing the deluge upon the tiles of the roof, watching its bullets of ice clatter and rebound upon the stones of the walk. How fare the sprouts of spring barley? One here and there survives, as if by miracle, and holds yet its head aloft. But the planter knows this state of clemency cannot endure. He turns his face away, in obedience to the laws of God, while without, beneath the storm, the final shaft breaks and falls, overwhelmed by the insuperable onslaught of heaven.
Such was the end of Leonidas and the defenders of the pass at Thermopylae, as related by the Greek Xeones and compiled in transcription by His Majesty's historian Gobartes the son of Artabazos and completed the fourth day of Arahsamnu, Year Five of His Majesty's Accession.
This date, in the bitter iron} of God Ahura Mazda, was the same upon which the naval forces of the Persian Empire suffered the calamitous defeat at the hands of the Hellenic fleet, in the Straits of Solamis, off Athens, that catastrophe which sent to their deaths so many valiant sons of the East and, by its consequences for the supply and support of the army, doomed the entire campaign to disaster.
That oracle of Apollo delivered earlier to the Athenians, which declared, The wooden wall alone shall not fail you, had revealed its fateful truth, the timbered stronghold manifesting itself not as that ancient palisade of the Athenian Acropolis so speedily overrun by His Majesty's forces, but as a wail of ships' hulls and the sailors and marines of Hellas who manned them so superbly, dealing the death blow to His Majesty's ambitions of conquest.
The magnitude of the calamity effaced all consideration of thecaptive Xeones and his tale. Care of the man himself was forsaken amid the chaos of defeat, as every physician and tender of the Royal Surgeon's staff made haste to the shore opposite Salamis, there to minister to the myriad wounded of the imperial armada, washed up amid the charred and splintered wreckage of their vessels of war.
When darkness at last brought surcease from the slaughter, a greater terror seized the Empire's camp. This was of the wrath of His Majesty. So many officers of the court were being put to the sword, or so my notes recall, that the Historian's staff cried quits to the task of recording their names.
Terror overran the pavilions of His Majesty, heightened not only by the great quake which shook the city precisely at the hour of sunset but also by the apocalyptic aspect of the siting of the army's bivouac, there within the razed and still-smoldering city of the Athenians. Midway through the second watch the general Mardonius sealed His Majesty's chamber and debarred entry to any further officers. His Majesty's Historian was able to procure only the scantiest of instructions as to the disposition of the day's records. Upon dismissal, I inquired purely as an afterthought for orders concerning the Greek Xeones and his papers.
Kill him, the general Mardonius replied without hesitation, and bum every page of that compilation of falsehoods, whose recording has been folly from the first and the merest mention of which at this hour will serve only to drive His Majesty into further paroxysms of rage.
Other duties held me several hours. These at length completed, I proceeded in search of Orontes, captain of the Immortals, whose responsibility it must be to carry out these orders of Mardonius.
I located the officer upon the shore. He was clearly in a state of exhaustion, overwrought both with the grief of the day's defeat and with his own frustration as a soldier at being unable, other than by pulling dying sailors out of the water, to aid the valiant mariners of the fleet. Orontes composed himself at once, however, and turned his attention to the matter at hand.
If you'd like to find your head still upon your shoulders tomorrow, the captain declared when he had been informed of the general's order, you will pretend you never heard or saw Mardonius.
I protested that the order had been issued in the name of His Majesty. It could not be ignored.
It can't, can't it? And what will be the general's story tomorrow or a month hence, after his order has been carried out, when His Majesty sends for you and asks to see the Greek and his notes.
I will tell you what will happen, the captain continued. Even now in His Majesty's chambers, His chancellors and ministers press upon Him the necessity to withdraw the Royal Person, to take ship for Asia, as Mardonius has urged before. This time I think His Majesty will take heed.
Orontes declared his conviction that His Majesty would order the bulk of the army to remain in Hellas, under command of the general Mardonius and charged to complete the conquest of Greece in His name. That task accomplished, His Majesty will possess His victory. Today's calamity will be forgotten in that bright glow of triumph.
Then in the delectation of conquest, Orontes continued, His Majesty will call for these notes of the Greek Xeones, as a sweetcake to cap the banquet of victory. If you and I stand before Him empty-handed, which of us will point the finger at Mardonius, and who will believe our declarations of innocence?
I asked then what we must do.
Orontes ' heart was clearly torn. Memory recalled that he, as chief field commander of the Immortals beneath Hydarnes, their general, had tramped in the van during the Ten Thousand's night envelopment of the Spartans and Thespians at Thermopylae and had served with extraordinary valor in the final morning's assault, facing the Spartans hand-to-hand and securing for His Majesty the conquest of the foe. Orontes ' own arrows had been among those fatal shafts flung at close range into the final defenders, perhaps into the flesh of the very men whose histories had been recounted within the captive Xeones' tale.
This knowledge, one could not help but read upon the captain's countenance, increased further his reluctance to deal harm to this man with whom he so clearly identified as a fellow soldier and even, one must at this point state, a friend.
All this notwithstanding, Orontes summoned himself to duty. He dispatched two officers of the Immortals with orders to remove the Greek from the Surgeon's tent and deliver him at once to the staff pavilion of the Immortals. After several hours attending to other more urgent business, he and I proceeded to that site. We walked in together. The man Xeones sat up conscious upon his litter, though drawn and gravely enfeebled.
Clearly he divined our purpose. His aspect was one of good cheer. Come, gentlemen, he spoke before I or Orontes could give voice to our mission. How may I assist you in your task? His dispatch would not require the blade, he adjudged. For the stroke of a feather, I feel, will be blow enough to finish the job. Orontes inquired of the Greek Xeones if he grasped fully the magnitude of the victory his countrymen's navy had achieved this day. The man affirmed that he did. He expressed the opinion, however, that the war was far from over. The issue remained very much in doubt.
Orontes imparted his extreme reluctance to carry out the sentence of execution. In light of the present disorder within the Empire's camp, he declared it a matter of slender difficulty to spirit the fellow out unobserved. Did the man Xeones, Orontes inquired, possess friends or compatriots yet within Attika to whom we could deliver him? The captive smiled. Your army has done an admirable job of driving any such off, he observed. And besides, His Majesty will need all His men to bear more important baggage.
Yet did Orontes seek any excuse to postpone the moment of execution. Since you ask no favor of us, sir, the captain addressed the prisoner, may I request one of you?
The man replied that he would gladly grant all that remained within his power.
You have cheated us, my friend, Orontes declared with wry expression. Deprived us of a tale of which your master, the Spartan Dienekes, so you said, promised to speak. This was around the fire during that last hunt of which you spoke, when he and Alexandras and Ariston addressed the subject of fear. Do you remember? Your master cut off the youths' discourse with a pledge that, when they reached the Hot Gates, he would tell them a tale of Leonidas and the lady Paraleia, on the subject of courage and of what criteria the Spartan Icing employed to select the Three Hundred. Or did Dienekes in fact fail to speak of this?
No, the captive Xeones confirmed, his master had found occasion and did in truth impart this tale. But, the prisoner asked, absent His Majesty's imperative to continue documenting the events of this narrative, did the captain indeed wish to keep on?
We whom you call foe are flesh and blood, Orontes replied, with hearts no less capable of attachment than your own. Does it strike you as implausible that we in this tent, His Majesty's historian and myself, have come to care for you, sir, not alone as a captive relaying an account of battle but as a man and even a friend?
Orontes requested, as a kindness to himself who had followed with keen interest and empathy the antecedent chapters of the Greek's tale, if the man would, as a comrade and so far as his strength permitted, relate to us now this final portion.
What had the Spartan king to say of women's courage, and how did your master, Dienekes, in fact relate it to his young friends and proteges?
The man Xeones propped himself with effort, and assistance from myself and the officers, upright upon his settle. Summoning his strength, he drew a breath and resumed;
I will impart this tale to you, my friends, as my master related it to me and to Alexandros and Ariston at the Hot Gates-not in his own voice, but in that of the lady Paraleia, Alexandros' mother, who recounted it in her own words to Dienekes and the lady Arete, only hours after its occurrence. The time of the conveying of the lady Paraleia's tale was an evening three or four days before the march-out from Lakedaemon to the Hot Gates. The lady Paraleia had betaken herself for this purpose to the home of Dienekes and Arete, bringing with her several other women, all mothers and wives of warriors selected for the Three Hundred. None of the women knew what the lady wished to say. My master stood on the moment of excusing himself, that the ladies may have their privacy. Paraleia, however, requested that he remain. He must hear this too, she said. The ladies seated themselves about Paraleia. She began:
What I tell you now, Dienekes, you must not repeat to my son. Not until you reach the Hot Gates, and not then, until the proper moment. That hour may be, if the gods so ordain, that of your own death or his. You will know it when it comes. Now attend closely, Dienekes, and you, ladies.
This forenoon I received a summons from the king. I went at once, presenting myself within the courtyard of his home. I was early; Leonidas had not arrived from his business of organizing the march-out. His queen, Gorgo, however, awaited upon a bench in the shade of a plane tree, apparently intentionally. She welcomed me and bade me sit. We were alone, absent all servants and attendants.
'You are wondering, Paraleia,' she began, 'why my husband has sent for you. I will tell you. He wishes to address your heart, and what he imagines must be your feelings of injustice at being singled out, so to speak, to bear a double grief. He is keenly aware that in selecting for the Three Hundred both Olympieus and Alexandros he has robbed you twice, of son as well as husband, leaving only the babe Olympieus to carry on your line. He will speak to this when he comes. But first, I must confide in you from my own heart, woman-to-woman.'
She is quite young, our queen, and looked tall and lovely, though in that shadowed light exceedingly grave.
'I have been daughter of one king and now wife to another,I Gorgo said. 'Women envy my station but few grasp its stern obligations. A queen may not be a woman as others. She may not possess her husband or children as other wives and mothers, but may hold them only in stewardship to her nation. She serves them, the hearts of her countrymen, not her own or her family's. Now you too, Paraleia, are summoned to this stern sisterhood. You must take your place at my shoulder in sorrow. This is women's trial and triumph, ordained by God: to abide with pain, to endure grief, to bear up beneath sorrow's yoke and thus to endow others with courage.'
Hearing these words of the queen, I confess to you, Dienekes, and you, ladies, that my hands trembled so that I feared I may not command them-not alone with the foreknowledge of grief but of rage as well, blind bitter fury at Leonidas and the heartlessness with which he decanted the double measure of sorrow into my cup. Why me? my heart cried in anger. I stood upon the moment of giving voice to this outrage when the sound of the gate opening came from the outer court, and in a moment Leonidas himself entered. He had just come from the marshaling ground and bore his dusty footgear in his hand. Perceiving his lady and myself in intimate converse, he divined at once the subject of our intercourse.
With apology for his tardiness he sat, thanking me for presenting myself so punctually and inquiring after my ailing father and others of our family. Though it was plain he bore a thousand burdens of the army and the state, not excepting the prescience of his own imminent death and the bereavement of his beloved wife and children, yet as he took his bench he dismissed all from his mind and addressed himself to me alone with undiverted attention.
'Do you hate me, lady?' These were his initial words. 'Were I you, I would. My hands would now be trembling with fury hard-suppressed.' He cleared a space upon his bench. 'Come, daughter. Sit here beside me,'
I obeyed. The lady Gorgo moved subtly closer upon her settle. I could smell the king's sweat of his exercise and feel the warmth of his flesh beside me as, when a girl, I had known my own father's when he had called me to his counsel. Again the heart's surfeit of grief and anger threatened to take me out of hand. I fought this back with all my force.
' 'The city speculates and guesses,' Leonidas resumed, 'as to why I elected those I did to the Three Hundred. Was it for their prowess as individual men-at-arms? How could this be, when among champions such as Polynikes, Dienekes, Al-pheus and Maron I nominated as well unblooded youths such as Ariston and your own Alexandros? Perhaps, the city sup' poses, I divined some subtle alchemy of this unique aggregation. Maybe I was bribed, or paying back favors. I will never tell the city why I appointed these three hundred. I will never tell the Three Hundred themselves. But I now tell you. 'I chose them not for their own valor, lady, but for that of their women.'
At these words of the king a cry of anguish escaped my breast, as I understood before he spoke what further he would now say. I felt his hand about my shoulder, comforting me. 'Greece stands now upon her most perilous hour. If she saves herself, it will not be at the Gates (death alone awaits us and our allies there) but later, in battles yet to come, by land and sea. Then Greece, if the gods will it, will preserve herself. Do you understand this, lady? Well. Now listen.
'When the battle is over, when the Three Hundred have gone down to death, then will all Greece look to the Spartans, to see how they bear it.
'But who, lady, who will the Spartans look to? To you. To you and the other wives and mothers, sisters and daughters of the fallen.
'If they behold your hearts riven and broken with grief, they, too, will break. And Greece will break with them. But if you bear up, dry-eyed, not alone enduring your loss but seizing it with contempt for its agony and embracing it as the honor that it is in truth, then Sparta will stand.
And all Hellas will stand behind her.
'Why have I nominated you, lady, to bear up beneath this most terrible of trials, you and your sisters of the Three Hundred? Because you can.'
From my lips sprang these words, reproving the king: 'And is this the reward of women's virtue, Leonidas? To be afflicted twice over, and bear a double grief?
On this instant the queen Gorgo reached for me, to offer succor. Leonidas held her back.
Instead, yet securing my shoulder within the grasp of his warm arm, he addressed my outburst of anguish.
'My wife reaches for you, Paraleia, to impart by her touch intelligence of the burden she has borne without plaint all her life. This has ever been denied her, to be simply bride to Leonidas, but always she must be wife to Lakedaemon. This now is your role as well, lady. No longer may you be wife to Olympieus or mother to Alexandros, but must serve as wife and mother of our nation. You and your sisters of the Three Hundred are the mothers now of all Greece, and of freedom itself. This is stern duty, Paraleia, to which I have called my own beloved wife, the mother of my children, and have now as well summoned you. Tell me, lady. Was I wrong?
Upon these words of the king, all self-command fled my heart. I broke down, weeping. Leonidas pulled me to him in kindness; I buried my face in his lap, as a girl does with her father, and sobbed, unable to constrain myself. The king held me firmly, his embrace neither stern nor unkind, but bearing me up with gentleness and solace.
As when a wildfire upon a hillside at last consumes itself and flares no more, so my fit of grief burned itself out. A peace settled clemently upon me, as if gift not alone of that strong arm which clasped me yet in its embrace, but of some more profound source, ineffable and divine. Strength returned to my knees and courage to my heart. I rose before the king and wiped my eyes. These words I addressed to him, not of my own will it seemed, but prompted by some unseen goddess whose source and origin I could not name.
'Those were the last tears of mine, my lord, that the sun will ever see.'
These were the final words spoken by the captive Xeones. The man's voice trailed off; his vital signs ebbed swiftly. Within moments he lay still and cold. His god had used him up and restored him at last to that station to which he yearned most to return, reunited with the corps of his comrades beneath the earth.
Immediately outside the captain Orontes' tent, armored elements of His Majesty's forces were clamorously withdrawing from the city. Orontes ordered the man Xeones' body borne without upon his litter. Chaos reigned. The captain was past due at his post; each succeeding moment heightened the urgency of his departure.
His Majesty will recall the state of anarchy which prevailed upon that morning, Numerous street youths and blackguards, the scum of the Athenian polity, that element of such mean station as not even to merit evacuation but who instead had been marooned by their betters and left to prowl the streets as predators, now made bold to penetrate the margins of His Majesty's camp.
These villains were looting everything they could lay hands upon. As our party emerged onto that now-rubbled boulevard called by the Athenians the Sacred Way, a clutch of these felons chanced to be herded past by subalterns of His Majesty's military police.
To my astonishment the captain Orontes hailed these officers. He ordered them to release the miscreants to his charge and themselves begone. The malefactors were three in number and of the scurviest disposition imaginable. They drew themselves up before Orontes and the officers of the Immortals, clearly expecting to be executed upon the spot. I was commanded by the captain to translate.
Orontes demanded of these rogues if they were Athenians. Not citizens, they replied, but men of the city. Orontes indicated the coarsecloth wrap which draped the form of the man Xeones.
Do you know what this garment is?
The villains' leader, a youth not yet twenty, responded that it was the scarlet cloak of Lakedaemon, that mantle worn only by a warrior of Sparta. Clearly none of the criminals could summon explanation for the presence of the body of this man, a Hellene, here now in the charge of his Persian enemy.
Orontes interrogated the wretches further. Did they know the location, in the seaport precinct of Phaleron, of that sanctuary known as Persephone of the Veil?
The thugs replied in the affirmative.
To my further astonishment, and that of the officers as well, the captain produced from his purse three gold darics, each a month's pay for an armored infantryman, and held this treasure out to the reprobates.
Take this man's body to that temple and remain with it until the priestesses return from their evacuation. They will know what to do with it.
Here one of the officers of the Immortals broke in to protest. Look at these criminals, sir. They are swine! Place gold in their hands and they'll dump man and litter in the first ditch they come to.
No time remained for debate. Orontes, myself and the officers all must make haste to our stations. The captain held up, for the briefest of intervals, examining the faces of the three scoundrels before him.
Do you love your country? he demanded.
The villains' expressions of defiance answered for them.
Orontes indicated the form upon the litter.
This man, with his life, has preserved it. Bear him with honor. There we left him, the corpse of the Spartan Xeones, and in a moment were swept ourselves into the irresistible current of decampment and retreat.
There remain to be appended wo final postscripts regarding the man and the manuscript which will at last round this tale into completion.
As the captain Orontes had predicted, His Majesty took ship for Asia, leading in Greece under command of Mardonius the elite corps of the army, some 300,000 including Orontes himself and the Ten Thousand Immortals, with orders to winter in Thessaly and resume the conflict when campaigning weather returned in the spring. Come that season, so vowed the general Mardonius, the irresistible might of His Majesty's army would once and for ail deliver into subjection the whole of Hellas. I myself remained, in the capacity of historian, upon station with this corps.
At last in the spring His Majesty's land forces faced the Hellenes in battle upon that plain adjacent to the Greek city of Pla-taea, a day's march northwest of Athens.
Across from the 300,000 of Persia, Media, Bactria, India, the Sacae and the Hellenes conscripted under His Majesty's banner stood 100,000 free Greeks, the main force comprised of the full Spartan army-5000 Peers, plus the Lakedaemonian per-ioikoi, armed squires and helots to a total of 75,000-flanked by the hoplite militia of their Peloponnesian allies, the Tegeates. The army's strength was completed by lesser-numbered contingents from a dozen other Greek states, foremost among whom stood the Athenians, to the number of 8000, upon the left.
One need not recount the particulars of that calamitous defeat, so grimly familiar are they to His Majesty, nor the details of the appalling losses to famine and disease of the flower of the Empire upon the long retreat to Asia. It ma? suffice to note, from the perspective of an eyewitness, that everything the man Xeones had forecast proved true. Our warriors beheld again that line of lambdas upon the interleaved shields of Lakedaemon, not this time in breadth of fifty or sixty as in the confines of the Hot Gates, but ten thousand across and eight deep, as Xeones had described them, an invincible tide of bronze and scarlet. The courage of the men of Persia once again proved no match for the valor and magnificent discipline of these warriors of Lakedaemon fighting to preserve their nation's freedom. It is my belief that no force under heaven, however numerous, could have withstood their onslaught upon that day.
In the hot-blood aftermath of the slaughter, the historian's station within the Persian palisade was overrun by two battalions of armed helots. These, under orders of the Spartan commander in chief, Pausanias, to take no prisoners, began butchering without quarter every man of Asia they could la? steel upon. In this exigency I thrust myself forward and began crying out in Greek, imploring the conquerors for mere? for our men.
Such, however, stood the Greeks' fear of the multitudes of the East, even in disarm? and defeat, that none heeded or gave pause. Hands were laid upon my own person and my throat drawn back beneath the blade. Inspired perhaps by God Ahura Mazda, or in the instance by terror alone, I found my voice crying out from memory the names of those Spartans of whom the man Xeones had spoken. Leonidas. Dienekes. Alexandras. Polynikes. Rooster. At once the helot warriors drew up their swords. All slaughter ceased.
Spartiate officers appeared and restored order to the mob of their armored serfs. I was hauled forward, hands bound, and dumped upon the earth before one of the Spartans, a magnificentlookmg warrior, his flesh yet steaming with the gore and tissue of conquest. The helots had informed him of the names I had cried out. The warrior stood over my kneeling form, regarding me gravely.
Do you know who I am? he demanded. I replied that I did not.
I am Dekton, son of Idotychides. It was my name you called when you cried 'Rooster.' '
Scruple compels me here to state that what spare physical description the captive Xeones had supplied of this man failed in all ways to do him justice. The warrior who stood above me was a splendid specimen in the prime of youth and vigor, six feet and more in stature, possessed of a comeliness of person and nobility of bearing that belied utterly the mean birth and station from which, it was clear, he had in the interval arisen.
I now knelt within this man's power, pleading for mercy. I told him of his comrade Xeones' survival following the battle at Thermopylae, his resuscitation by the Royal Surgeon's staff and his dictation of the document by which I, its transcriber, had acquired knowledge of those names of the Spartans which I had, seeking pity, cried out.
By now a dozen other Spartiate warriors had clustered, encircling my kneeling form. As one, the} scorned the document un-seen and denounced me for a liar.
What fiction of Persian heroism is this you have concocted of your own fancy, scribe? one among them demanded. Some carpet of lies woven to flatter your King?
Others declared that they knew well the man Xeones, squire of Dienekes. How dare I cite his name, and that of his noble master, in craven endeavor to save my own skin?
Throughout this, the man Dekton called Rooster held silent. When the others' fury had at last spent itself, he put to me one question only, with Spartan brevity: where had the man Xeones last been seen?
His body dispatched with honor by the Persian captain Orontes to that temple of Athens called by the Hellenes Persephone of the Veil.
At this the Spartan Dekton elevated his hand in clemency This stranger speaks true. His comrade Xeones' ashes, he confirmed, had been restored to Sparta, delivered months prior to this dart's battle by a priestess of that very temple, Hearing this, all strength fled my knees. I sank upon the earth, overcome by the apprehension of my own and our army's annihilation and by the irony of discovering myself now before the Spartans in that selfsame posture which the man Xeones had been compelled to assume before the warriors of Asia, that of the vanquished and the enslaved.
The general Mardonius had perished in the battle at Plataea, and the captain Orontes as well.
Yet now the Spartans believed me, my life was spared.
I was held at Plataea in the custody of the Hellenic allies, treated with consideration and courtesy, for most of the following month, then assigned as a captive interpreter to the staff of the Allied Congress.
This document, in the end, preserved my life.
An aside, as to the battle. His Majesty may recall the name Aristodemos, the Spartan officer mentioned on several occasions by the man Xeones as an envoy and, later, as among the Three Hundred at the Hot Gates. This man alone among the Peers survived, having been evacuated due to field blindness prior to the final morning.
Upon this Aristodemos' return alive to Sparta, he was forced to endure at the hands of the citizenry such scorn as a coward or tresante, trembler, that, now at Plataea, discovering the opportunity to redeem himself, he displayed such spectacular heroism, excelling all upon the field, as to eradicate forever his former disgrace.
The Spartans, however, spurned Aristodemos for their prize of valor, awarding this to three other warriors, Posidonius, Philokyon and Amompharetus. The commanders adjudged Aristodemos' heroics reckless and unsound, striving in blood madness alone in front of the line, clearly seeking death before his comrades' eyes to expiate the infamy of his survived at Thermopylae. The valor of Posidonius, Philokyon and Amompharetus they reckoned superior, being that of men who wish to live yet still fight magnificently.
To return to my own lot. I was detained at Athens for two summers, serving in such capacities as translator and scribe as permitted me to witness firsthand the extraordinary and unprece-dented transformation there taking place.
The ruined city rose again. With astonishing celerity the wails and port were rebuilt, the buildings of assembly and commerce, the courts and magistracies, the houses and shops and markets and factories. A second conflagration now consumed all Hellas, in particular the city of Athena, and this was the blaze of boldness and self-assurance. The hand of heaven, it seemed, had set itself in benediction upon each man's shoulder, banishing all timorous-ness and irresolution. Overnight the Greeks had seized the stage of destiny. They had defeated the mightiest army and navy in History. What lesser undertaking could now daunt them? What enterprise could they not dare.
The Athenian fleet drove His Majesty's warships back to Asia, clearing the Aegean. Trade boomed. The treasure and commerce of the world flooded into Athens.
Yet massive as was this economic recrudescence, it paled alongside the effects of victory upon the individuals, the commons of the populace themselves. A dynamism of optimism and enterprise fired each man with belief in himself and his gods. Each citizen-warrior who had endured trial of arms in the phalanx, or pulled an oar under fire on the sea now deemed himself deserving of full inclusion in all affairs and discourse of the city.
That peculiar Hellenic form of government called democra-tia, rule of the people, hod plunged its roots deep, nurtured by the blood of war; now with victory the shoot burst forth into full flower. In the Assembly and the courts, the marketplace and the magistracies, the commons thrust themselves forward with vigor and confidence.
To the Greeks, victory was proof of the might and majesty of their gods. These deities, which to our more civilised understanding appear vain and passion-possessed, riddled with folly and so prey to humanlike faults and foibles as to be unworthy of being called divine, to the Greeks embodied and personified their belief in that which was, if grander tnan human in scale, yet human in spirit and essence. The Greeks' sculpture and athletics celebrated the human form, their literature and music human passion, their discourse and philosophy human reason.
In the flush of triumph the arts exploded. No man's home, however humble, reascended from the ashes without some crowning mural, statue or memorial in thanksgiving to the gods and to the valor of their own arms. Theater and the chorus throve. The tragedies of Aeschylus and Phrynichus drew hordes to the precincts of the theatron, where noble and common, citizen and foreigner, took their stations, attending in rapt and often transported awe to works whose stature, the Greeks professed, would endure forever.
In the fall of my second year of captivity I was repatriated upon receipt of His Majesty's ransom, along with a number of other officers of the Empire, and returned to Asia.
Restored to His Majesty's service, I reassumed my responsibilities recording the affairs of the Empire. Chance, or perhaps the hand of God Ahura Mazda, found me toward the close of the following summer in the port city of Sidon, there assigned to assist in the interrogation of a ship's master of Aegina, a Greek whose galley had been driven by storm to Egypt and there been captured by Phoenician warships of His Majesty's fleet. Examining this officer's logs, I came upon an entry indicating a sea passage, the summer previous, from EpidaurusLimera, a port of Lakedaemon, to Thermopylae.
At my urging, His Majesty's officers pressed their interrogation upon this point. The Aeginetan captain declared that his vessel had been among those employed to convey a parry of Spartan officers and envoys to the dedication of a monument to the memory of the Three Hundred.
Also on board, the captain stated, was a party of Spartan women, the wives and relations of a number of the fallen.
No commerce was permitted, the captain reported, between himself and his officers and these gentlewomen. I questioned the man strenuously, but could determine neither by evidence nor by surmise if among these were included the ladies Arete and Paraleia, or the wives of any of the warriors mentioned in the papers of the man Xeones.
His vessel beached at the mouth of the Spercheios, the captain stated, at the eastern terminus of the very plain where His Majesty's army had encamped during the assault upon the Hot Gates.
The memorial party there disembarked and proceeded the final distance on foot.
Three corpses of Greek warriors, the ship's master reported, had been recovered by the natives months earlier at the upper margins of the Trachinian plain, the very pastureland upon which His Majesty's pavilion had been sited. These remains had been preserved piously by the citizens of Trachis and were restored now with honor to the Lakedaemonians.
Though certainty remains ever elusive in such matters, the bodies, common sense testifies, can have been none other than those of the Spartan Knight Doreion, the Skirite Hound and the outlaw known as Ball Player, who participated in the night raid upon His Majesty's pavilion.
The ashes of one other body, that of a warrior of Lakedaemon returned from Athens,.were borne by the Aeginetan vessel. The captain could provide no intelligence as to the identity of these remains. My heart, however, leapt at the possibility that they might be those of our narrator. I pressed the sea captain for further intelligence.
At the Rot Gates themselves, this officer declared, these final bodies and the urn of ashes were interred in the burial mound of the Lakedaemonian precinct, sited upon a knoll directly above the sea. Scrupulous interrogation of the captain as to the topography of the site permits me to conclude with near certainty that this hillock is the same whereupon the final defenders perished.
No athletic games were celebrated in memoriam, but only a simple solemn service sung in thanksgiving to Zeus Savior, Apollo, Eros and the Muses. It was ail over, the ship's master stated, in less than an hour.
The captain's preoccupations upon the site were understandably more for the tide and the security of his vessel than with the memorial events transpiring. One instance, however, struck him, he said, as singular to the point of recollection. A woman among the Spartan party had held herself discrete from the others and chose to linger, solitary, upon the site after her sisters had reassembled in preparation to depart. In fact this lady tarried so late that the captain was compelled to dispatch one of his seamen to summon her away.
I inquired earnestly after the name of this woman. The captain, not surprisingly, had neither inquired nor been informed. I pressed the question, seeking any peculiarities of dress or person which might assist in mounting a supposition as to her identity. The captain insisted that there was nothing.
What about her face? I persisted. Was she young or old? Of what age or appearance?
I cannot say, the man replied.
Why not?
Her face was hidden, the ship's master declared. AH but her eyes obscured by a veil.
I inquired further as to the monuments themselves, the stones and their inscriptions. The captain reported what he recalled, which was little. The stone over the Spartans' grave, he recollected, bore verses composed by the poet Simonides, who himself stood present that day to assist in the dedication.
Can you recall the epitaph upon the stone? I inquired. Or were the verses too lengthy for memory to retain?
Not at all, the captain replied. The lines were composed Spartan-style. Short. Nothing wasted.
So spare were they, he testified, that even one of as poor a memory as himself encountered no difficulty in their recollection, O xein angellein Lakedaimoniois hoti tede keimetha tois keinon rhemasi peithomenoi These verses have I rendered thus, as best I can:
Tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie.