
Xerxes and his advisers knew that, if it was intolerable to send heralds to Sparta, it was equally pointless to send them to Athens. The essential core of Greece which had to be destroyed was composed of these two small, even if so dissimilar, city-states. The one was the military muscle of Greece and the other provided by far the greater part of its naval arm. Many of the other Greeks had already ‘medised’, as the term was: they had, that is to say, shown their willingness to co-operate with the Persians. This was hardly surprising, since to many an intelligent citizen, whether of an Aegean island, or of a city on the mainland, it must have seemed more than clear that, even if all the Greeks were united (which was far from true), they would stand no chance against the massive army and navy that was coming against them out of the East.
Xerxes had made good use of the propaganda effect of his preparations. He had even deliberately allowed Greek spies to infiltrate and witness the gathering together of the army and the building of the navy. His own men, for their part, in the guise either of sailors or of merchants had long kept the king and his inner circle acquainted with the political groups and motivations within the cities and island-states of the Greeks. In nearly all of these there were power struggles between various rich families, or between ruling families and the demos or common people. It was easy to see that in many cases, in return for the plentiful Persian gold, one rich family would be prepared to ‘sell out’ to the Persians in return for becoming the local rulers in due course. Alternatively, an oligarchy, or aristocratic allied group of families, would do the same in return for the monetary and military help that would enable them to keep the demos in their proper place - down. (In so many subsequent wars similar arrangements have always been made between the potentially occupied and the apparently all-powerful invaders.) If the Greeks were - as they were indeed - a brilliant people, they were individualistic to a fault, and concerned with the fate and fortune of themselves first of all and, secondly, of their state. Athens and Sparta, although by the nature of their societies basically hostile to one another, were large and important enough to realise that co-operation between the two of them was the only possible way in which the Greeks as a people could survive the Juggernaut that had some years ago crushed the freedom of their fellow-Greeks in Asia Minor (Ionia).
Although it is true that Herodotus, who was born some four years after the invasion of Xerxes, had access to all the records available, it is impossible to accept the figures that he gives for the size of the Persian army and of the fleet. If one first of all bears in mind that Herodotus was trying to make his figures square with a famous war memorial that had been set up in the pass of Thermopylae, it is not so difficult to see where his added noughts come from in his computation of the Persian numbers. The memorial in traditional Spartan or laconic style reads :
Against three million men fought in this place Four thousand Peloponnesians, face to face.
The fact is that the Greeks, when it came to numbers beyond their normal usage, tended to use the term ‘myriads’ (tens of thousands) as we, centuries later, loosely use millions or billions - meaning no more than an almost uncountable amount.
The figures as given by Herodotus show an army totalling :
1,700,000 infantrymen, 80,000 horsemen, a camel corps and chariot contingent numbering 20,000, and a mixture of Greeks from Ionia, the islands, and Thrace, to the total of 300,000. Burn adds the dry but apt comment
… finding himself still short of the war-memorial’s three million, he cheerfully doubles the whole total to allow for noncombatants (cooks, drivers, women - the Guards are reported to have brought their women along in wagons) and reaches a grand total of 5,283,220. The most remarkable thing, he adds, with a decent descent into realism, is how such a multitude was fed.
Other scholars and