WaybackWire

ARTEMISIUM.—The allied fleet, 271 warships besides the fifty-oared boats, has taken station at Artemisium, in the country of Histiaea on the north of Euboea.

Athens sends 127 ships, with the Plataeans rowing beside her own men, and has found the ships for Chalcis besides. Corinth sends 40 and Aegina 18; Sparta sends 10.

The chief command goes to a Spartan, Eurybiades son of Euryclides. The allies said they would sooner break up the fleet than follow Athenians, and the Athenians have waived their claim, holding the safety of Hellas to come first.

Themistocles of Athens has given up his own command to Eurybiades, and has soothed his countrymen with a promise: if they prove brave in this war, he will bring the Greeks to follow them willingly afterwards.

From the first Themistocles wanted to embark the citizens and meet the king at sea, as far from Greece as might be, and many opposed him. Since the march to Tempe came to nothing, Athens has warmed to his naval plan, and he has been sent with the fleet to watch the narrows.

THERMOPYLAE.—The army in the pass has grown. The Opuntian Locrians have come in full force and the Phocians with 1,000 men, answering a summons from the allies.

The allied messengers told them this was only the advance guard, with the rest expected any day, and that the Athenians, the Aeginetans and the fleet were watching the sea. “The invader of Hellas was not a god but a human being,” they said, and a man is certain to fall from pride.

For the Locrians who live by the pass, it is a change of side. They had given earth and water to the king, and had promised to seize the passes for him before he came.

Only on reaching the pass did the Greeks learn, from the men of Trachis, of a path over the mountain. The Phocians, defending their own country, have promised Leonidas of their own accord to guard it.

The main armies follow later. Sparta sent Leonidas ahead so that the other allies would see the Spartans march and not go over to the Persians. Once the Carneia festival is over, the Spartans mean to leave a garrison at home and march out in full force; the other allies mean to do the same once the Olympic festival is past.

THE ISTHMUS OF CORINTH.—The Persian king, Xerxes, has left Therma with his army and is coming down into Thessaly by the upper road through the Macedonian highlands, the way he was told was safest.

The road runs by the Perrhaebi and Gonnus. For many days a third of his army had been cutting it over the mountains while he waited in Pieria, where his heralds came back to him, some empty-handed, some bearing earth and water.

His fleet, reckoned at 1,207 triremes, lies at Therma awaiting orders.

Thessaly is already his. The Thessalian envoys had pleaded with the council at the Isthmus: “Men of Hellas, the pass of Olympus must be guarded so that Thessaly and all Hellas may be sheltered from the war.”

The allies answered by sending about 10,000 men-at-arms, with horsemen, to hold the vale of Tempe between Olympus and Ossa, under Euaenetus son of Carenus of Sparta and Themistocles of Athens.

They stayed only a few days. Messengers from Alexander son of Amyntas, the Macedonian, warned of the king’s numbers and advised them to go, and the Greeks learned of another way into Thessaly by Gonnus. They sailed back to the Isthmus, and the Thessalians, left alone, went over to the king.

ATHENS.—Athens has put its whole strength into its ships, and the reason lies at Delphi. The priestess Aristonice first told the city’s envoys to flee, for fire and the god of war in a Syrian chariot would bring them low.

Dismayed, the envoys went back as suppliants on the advice of Timon son of Androbulus, vowing to stay until they died. The second answer said all within the border of Cecrops would be lost, “Yet a wood-built wall will by Zeus all-seeing be granted”, and called Salamis divine.

The city argued over it. Some elders held the wall to be the old thorn hedge round the acropolis; others said the ships, though the readers of oracles feared the last verses spelt defeat at sea near Salamis.

Themistocles son of Neocles answered that, had the verse meant ill for Athenians, it would have called Salamis cruel, not divine, and that the ships are the wooden wall. The city judged him the better counsellor. He had already persuaded Athens to build 200 ships with the Laurium silver rather than share it out at ten drachmae a head.

The vote was to trust in the god and meet the invader with the whole power of the fleet.