By the spring of 480 Xerxes had received the news that not only was the canal bypassing Mount Athos completed, but that both the bridges across the Hellespont were restored and ready for the army to cross. The time was ripe. The spring months, after the gales of winter, and long before the prevailing northerlies of summer set in, were ideal. True, there can sometimes be storms in this season, but they are rare. Most of the Aegean, from the Hellespont southward to the Sporades, Cape Sunium, and beyond that again to the Cyclades, is usually ruffled by no more than the winds known as prodroms - the variable forerunners of early summer.
Long in advance of his move out of Sardis Xerxes had sent messengers to all the Greek states asking for those formal tokens of surrender - the gifts of earth and water from their land. It is hardly surprising that many of them, and especially the vulnerable islands, sent back these necessary tributes. According to Herodotus, it was only to the two major states of Athens and Sparta that no heralds were despatched. On the previous occasion, ten years before, when Darius had sent similar heralds, the Athenians were said to have cast them into ‘The Pit’ - the place for condemned criminals -and the Spartans to have thrown them down a well. Part of this story is suspect, for Herodotus had a pro-Athenian bias and was inclined to enlarge upon their heroic legend. At the time of Darius it seems somewhat unlikely that the Athenians would have acted in a manner so contrary to the international law accepted by all civilised peoples. (Heralds were regarded as sacred and inviolable.) On the other hand, there is real evidence that the Spartans had indeed thrown the Persian ambassadors down a well, telling them to ‘get earth and water for their king from down there’. The drastic nature of the action is Spartan, the quoted remark suitably laconic, and it was a known fact that Sparta regarded herself as superior to the law of other States and nations, especially ‘Barbarians’: those who were not Greeks.
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 ind