[pg 209]CHAPTER XIXTHE COMMANDMENT OF XERXESIt is easy to praise the blessings of peace. Still easier to paint the horrors of war,—and yet war will remain for all time the greatest game at which human wits can play. For in it every form of courage, physical and moral, and every talent are called into being. If war at once develops the bestial, it also develops as promptly the heroic. Alone of human activities it demands a brute’s strength, an iron will, a serpent’s intellect, a lion’s courage—all in one. And of him who has these things in justest measure, history writes,“He conquered.”It was because Mardonius seemed to possess all these, to foresee everything, to surmount everything, that Glaucon despaired for the fate of Hellas, even more than when he beheld the crushing armaments of the Persian.Yet for long it seemed as if the host would march even to Athens without battle, without invoking Mardonius’s skill. The king crossed Thrace and Macedonia, meeting only trembling hospitality from the cities along his route. At Doriscus he had held a review of his army, and smiled when the fawning scribes told how one million seven hundred thousand foot and eighty thousand horse followed his banners.8Every fugitive and spy from southern Hellas told how the hearts of the stanchest patriots were sinking, how everywhere save in Athens and Sparta loud voices urged the[pg 210]sending of“earth and water,”—tokens of submission to the irresistible king. At the pass of Tempē covering Thessaly, Glaucon, who knew the hopes of Themistocles, had been certain the Hellenes would make a stand. Rumour had it that ten thousand Greek infantry were indeed there, and ready for battle. But the outlaw’s expectations were utterly shattered. To the disgust of the Persian lords, who dearly loved brisk fighting, it was soon told how the cowardly Hellenes had fled by ship, leaving the rich plains of Thessaly bare to the invader.Thus was blasted Glaucon’s last hope. Hellas was doomed. He almost looked to see Themistocles coming as ambassador to bring the homage of Athens. Since his old life seemed closed to the outlaw, he allowed Mardonius to have his will with him,—to teach him to act, speak, think, as an Oriental. He even bowed himself low before the king, an act rewarded by being commanded one evening to play at dice with majesty itself. Xerxes was actually gracious enough to let his new subject win from him three handsome Syrian slave-boys.“You Hellenes are becoming wise,”announced the monarch one day, when the Locrian envoys came with their earth and water.“If you can learn to speak the truth, you will equal even the virtues of the Aryans.”“Your Majesty has not found me a liar,”rejoined the Athenian, warmly.“You gather our virtues apace. I must consider how I can reward you by promotion.”“The king is overwhelmingly generous. Already I fear many of his servants mutter that I am promoted beyond all desert.”“Mutter? mutter against you?”The king’s eyes flashed ominously.“By Mazda, it is against me, then, who advanced[pg 211]you! Hearken, Otanes,”—he addressed the general of the Persian footmen, who stood near by,—“who are the disobedient slaves who question my advancement of Prexaspes?”The general—he had been the loudest grumbler—bowed and kissed the carpet.“None, your Eternity; on the contrary, there is not one Aryan in the host who does not rejoice the king has found so noble an object for his godlike bounty.”“You hear, Prexaspes,”said Xerxes, mollified.“I am glad, for the man who questions my wisdom touching your advancement must be impaled. To-morrow is my birthday, you will not fail to sit with the other great lords at the banquet.”“The king overpowers me with his goodness.”“Do not fail to deserve it. Mardonius is always praising you. Consider also how much better it is to depend on a gracious king than on the clamour of the fickle mob that rules in your helpless cities!”* * * * * * *The next morning was the royal birthday. The army, pitched in the fertile plain by Thessalian Larissa, feasted on the abundance at hand. The king distributed huge largesses of money. All day long he sat in his palace-like tent, receiving congratulations from even the lowest of his followers, and bound in turn not to reject any reasonable petition. The Magi sacrificed blooded stallions and rare spices to Mithra the“Lord of Wide Pastures,”to Vohu-Manu the“Holy Councillor,”and all their other angels, desiring them to bless the arms of the king.The“Perfect Banquet”of the birthday came in the evening. It hardly differed from the feast at Sardis. The royal pavilion had its poles plated with silver, the tapestries[pg 212]were green and purple, the couches were spread with gorgeous coverlets. Only the drinking was more moderate, the ceremonial less rigid. The fortunate guests devoured dainties reserved for the special use of royalty: the flour of the bread was from Assos, the wine from Helbon, the water to dilute the wine had come in silver flasks from the Choaspes by Susa. The king even distributed the special unguent of lion’s fat and palm wine which no subject, unpermitted, could use and shun the death penalty.Then at the end certain of the fairest of the women came and danced unveiled before the king—this one night when they might show forth their beauty. And last of all danced Roxana. She danced alone; a diaphanous drapery of pink Egyptian cotton blew around her as an evening cloud. From her black hair shone the diamond coronet. To the sensuous swing of the music she wound in and out before the king and his admiring lords, advancing, retreating, rising, swaying, a paragon of agility and grace, feet, body, hands, weaving their charm together. When at the end she fell on her knees before the king, demanding whether she had done well, the applause shook the pavilion. The king looked down on her, smiling.“Rise, sister of Mardonius. All Eran rejoices in you to-night. And on this evening whose request can I fail to grant? Whose can I grant more gladly than yours? Speak; you shall have it, though it be for half my kingdoms.”The dancer arose, but hung down her flashing coronal. Her blush was enchanting. She stood silent, while the good-humoured king smiled down on her, till Artazostra came from her seat by Mardonius and whispered in her ear. Every neck in the crowded pavilion was craned as Artazostra spoke to Xerxes.“May it please my royal brother, this is the word of Rox[pg 213]ana.‘I love my brother Mardonius; nevertheless, contrary to the Persian custom, he keeps me now to my nineteenth year unwedded. If now I have found favour in the sight of the king, let him command Mardonius to give me to some noble youth who shall do me honour by the valiant deeds and the true service he shall render unto my Lord.’”“A fair petition! Let the king grant it!”shouted twenty; while others more wise whispered,“This was not done without foreknowledge by Mardonius.”Xerxes smiled benignantly and rubbed his nose with the lion’s fat while deliberating.“An evil precedent, lady, an evil precedent when women demand husbands and do not wait for their fathers’ or brothers’ good pleasure. But I have promised. The word of the king is not to be broken. Daughter of Gobryas, your petition is granted. Come hither, Mardonius,”—the bow-bearer approached the throne,—“you have heard the bold desire of your sister, and my answer. I must command you to bestow on her a husband.”The bow-bearer bowed obediently.“I hear the word of the king, and all his mandates are good. This is no meet time for marriage festivities, when the Lord of the World and all the Aryan power goes forth to war. Yet as soon as the impious rebels amongst the Hellenes shall be subdued, I will rejoice to bestow my sister upon whatsoever fortunate servant the king may deign to honour.”“You hear him, lady,”—the royal features assumed a grin, which was reflected throughout the pavilion.“A husband you shall have, but Mardonius shall be revenged. Your fate is in my hands. And shall not I,—guardian of the households of my empire,—give a warning to all bold maidens against lifting their wills too proudly, or presuming upon an overindulgent king? What then shall be just[pg 214]punishment?”The king bent his head, still rubbing his nose, and trying to persuade all about that he was meditating.“Bardas, satrap of Sogandia, is old; he has but one eye; they say he beats his eleven wives daily with a whip of rhinoceros hide. It would be just if I gave him this woman also in marriage. What think you, Hydarnes?”“If your Eternity bestows this woman on Bardas, every husband and father in all your kingdoms will applaud your act,”smiled the commander.The threatened lady fell again on her knees, outstretching her hands and beseeching mercy,—never a more charming picture of misery and contrition.“You tremble, lady,”went on the sovran,“and justly. It were better for my empire if my heart were less hard. After all, you danced so elegantly that I must be mollified. There is the young Prince Zophyrus, son of Datis the general,—he has only five wives already. True, he is usually the worse for wine, is not handsome, and killed one of his women not long since because she did not sing to please him. Yes—you shall have Zophyrus—he will surely rule you—”“Mercy, not Zophyrus, gracious Lord,”pleaded the abject Egyptian.The king looked down on her, with a broader grin than ever.“You are very hard to please. I ought to punish your wilfulness by some dreadful doom. Do not cry out again. I will not hear you. My decision is fixed. Mardonius shall bestow you in marriage to a man who is not even a Persian by birth, who one year since was a disobedient rebel against my power, who even now contemns and despises many of the good customs of the Aryans. Hark, then, to his name. When Hellas is conquered, I command that Mardonius wed you to the Lord Prexaspes.”[pg 215]The king broke into an uproarious laugh, a signal for the thousand loyal subjects within the great pavilion to roar with laughter also. In the confusion following Artazostra and Roxana disappeared. Fifty hands dragged the appointed bridegroom to the king, showering on him all manner of congratulations. Xerxes’s act was a plain proof that he was adopting the beautiful Hellene as one of his personal favourites,—a post of influence and honour not to be despised by a vizier. What“Prexaspes”said when he thanked the king was drowned in the tumult of laughing and cheering. The monarch, delighted to play the gracious god, roared his injunctions to the Athenian so loud that above the din they heard him.“You will bridle her well, Prexaspes. I know them—those Egyptian fillies! They need a hard curb and the lash at times. Beware the tyranny of your own harem. I would not have the satrapies know how certain bright eyes in the seraglio can make the son of Darius play the fool. There is nothing more dangerous than women. It will take all your courage to master them. A hard task lies before you. I have given you one wife, but you know our good Persian custom—five, ten, or twenty. Take the score, I order you. Then in twelve years you’ll be receiving the prize a Persian king bestows every summer on the father of the most children!”And following this broad hint, the king held his sides with laughter again, a mirth which it is needless to say was echoed and reëchoed till it seemed it could not cease. Only a few ventured to mutter under breath:“The Hellene will have a subsatrapy in the East before the season is over and a treasure of five thousand talents! Mithra wither the upstart!”* * * * * * *The summer was waning when the host moved southward[pg 216]from Larissa, for mere numbers had made progress slow, and despite Mardonius’s providence the question of commissariat sometimes became difficult. Now at last, leaving behind Thrace and Macedonia, the army began to enter Greece itself. As it fared across the teeming plains of Thessaly, it met only welcome from the inhabitants and submissions from fresh embassies. Report came from the fleet—keeping pace with the land army along the coasts—that nowhere had the weak squadrons of the Greeks adventured a stand. Daily the smile of the Lord of the World grew more complacent, as his“table-companions”told him:“The rumour of your Eternity’s advent stupefies the miserable Hellenes. Like Atar, the Angel of Fire, your splendour glitters afar. You will enter Athens and Sparta, and no sword leave its sheath, no bow its wrapper.”Every day Mardonius asked of Glaucon,“Will your Hellenes fight?”and the answer was ever more doubting,“I do not know.”Long since Glaucon had given up hope of the defeat of the Persian. Now he prayed devoutly there might be no useless shedding of blood. If only he could turn back and not behold the humiliation of Athens! Of the fate of the old-time friends—Democrates, Cimon, Hermione—he tried not to think. No doubt Hermione was the wife of Democrates. More than a year had sped since the flight from Colonus. Hermione had put off her mourning for the yellow veil of a bride. Glaucon prayed the war might bring her no new sorrow, though Democrates, of course, would resist Persia to the end. As for himself he would never darken their eyes again. He was betrothed to Roxana. With her he would seek one of those valleys in Bactria which she had praised, the remoter the better, and there perhaps was peace.[pg 217]Thus the host wound through Thessaly, till before them rose, peak on peak, the jagged mountain wall of Othrys and Œta, fading away in violet distance, the bulwark of central Hellas. Then the king’s smile became a frown, for the Hellenes, undismayed despite his might, were assembling their fleet at northern Eubœa, and at the same time a tempest had shattered a large part of the royal navy. The Magi offered sacrifice to appease Tishtrya, the Prince of the Wind-ruling Stars, but the king’s frown grew blacker at each message. Glaucon was near him when at last the monarch’s thunders broke forth.A hot, sultry day. The king’s chariot had just crossed the mountain stream of the Sphercus, when a captain of a hundred came galloping, dismounted, and prostrated himself in the dust.“Your tidings?”demanded Xerxes, sharply.“Be gracious, Fountain of Mercy,”—the captain evidently disliked his mission,—“I am sent from the van. We came to a place where the mountains thrust down upon the sea and leave but a narrow road by the ocean. Your slaves found certain Hellenes, rebels against your benignant government, holding a wall and barring all passage to your army.”“And did you not forthwith seize these impudent wretches and drag them hither to be judged by me?”“Compassion, Omnipotence,”—the messenger trembled,—“they seemed sturdy, well-armed rogues, and the way was narrow and steep where a score can face a thousand. Therefore, your slave came straight with his tidings to the ever gracious king.”“Dog! Coward!”Xerxes plucked the whip from the charioteer’s hand and lashed it over the wretch’s shoulders.“By thefravashi, the soul of Darius my father, no man shall bring so foul a word to me and live!”[pg 218]“Compassion, Omnipotence, compassion!”groaned the man, writhing like a worm. Already the master-of-punishments was approaching to cover his face with a towel, preparatory to the bow-string, but the royal anger spent itself just enough to avert a tragedy.“Your life is forfeit, but I am all too merciful! Take then three hundred stripes on the soles of your feet and live to be braver in the future.”“A thousand blessings on your benignity,”cried the captain, as they led him away,“I congratulate myself that insignificant as I am the king yet deigns to notice my existence even to recompense my shortcomings.”“Off,”ordered the bristling monarch,“or you die the death yet. And do you, Mardonius, take Prexaspes, who somewhat knows this country, spur forward, and discover who are the madmen thus earning their destruction.”The command was obeyed. Glaucon galloped beside the Prince, overtaking the marching army, until as they cantered into the little mud-walled city of Heraclea a second messenger from the van met them with further details.“The pass is held by seven thousand Grecian men-at-arms. There are no Athenians. There are three hundred come from Sparta.”“And their chief?”asked Glaucon, leaning eagerly.“Is Leonidas of Lacedæmon.”“Then, O Mardonius,”spoke the Athenian, with a throb in his voice not there an hour ago.“There will be battle.”So, whether wise men or mad, the Hellenes were not to lay down their arms without one struggle, and Glaucon knew not whether to be sorry or to be proud.[pg 219]CHAPTER XXTHERMOPYLÆA rugged mountain, an inaccessible morass, and beyond that morass the sea: the mountain thrusting so close upon the morass as barely to leave space for a narrow wagon road. This was the western gate of Thermopylæ. Behind the narrow defile the mountain and swamp-land drew asunder; in the still scanty opening hot springs gushed forth, sacred to Heracles, then again on the eastern side Mt. Œta and the impenetrable swamp drew together, forming the second of the“Hot Gates,”—the gates which Xerxes must unlock if he would continue his march to Athens.The Great King’s couriers reported that the stubborn Hellenes had cast a wall across the entrance, and that so far from showing terror at the advent of majesty, were carelessly diverting themselves by athletic games, and by combing and adorning their hair, a fact which the“Lord Prexaspes”at least comprehended to mean that Leonidas and his Spartans were preparing for desperate battle. Nevertheless, it was hard to persuade the king that at last he confronted men who would resist him to his face. Glaucon said it. Demaratus, the outlawed Spartan, said it. Xerxes, however, remained angry and incredulous. Four long days he and his army sat before the pass,“because,”announced his couriers,“he wishes in his benignity to give these madmen a chance to flee away and shun destruction;”[pg 220]“because,”spoke those nearest to Mardonius, the brain of the army,“there is hot fighting ahead, and the general is resolved to bring up the picked troops in the rear before risking a battle.”Then on the fifth day either Xerxes’s patience was exhausted or Mardonius felt ready. Strong regiments of Median infantry were ordered to charge Leonidas’s position, Xerxes not failing to command that they slay as few of the wretches as possible, but drag them prisoners before his outraged presence.A noble charge. A terrible repulse. For the first time those Asiatics who had forgotten Marathon discovered the overwhelming superiority that the sheathing of heavy armour gave the Greek hoplites over the lighter armed Median spearmen. The short lances and wooden targets of the attackers were pitifully futile against the long spears and brazen shields of the Hellenes. In the narrow pass the vast numbers of Barbarians went for nothing. They could not use their archers, they could not charge with their magnificent cavalry. The dead lay in heaps. The Medes attacked again and again. At last an end came to their courage. The captains laid the lash over their mutinous troops. The men bore the whips in sullen silence. They would not charge again upon those devouring spears.White with anger, Xerxes turned to Hydarnes and his“Immortals,”the infantry of the Life Guard. The general needed no second bidding. The charge was driven home with magnificent spirit. But what the vassal Medes could not accomplish, neither could the lordly Persians. The repulse was bloody. If once Leonidas’s line broke and the Persians rushed on with howls of triumph, it was only to see the Hellenes’ files close in a twinkling and return to the onset with their foes in confusion. Hydarnes led back his men[pg 221]at last. The king sat on the ivory throne just out of arrow shot, watching the ebb and flow of the battle. Hydarnes approached and prostrated himself.“Omnipotence, I the least of your slaves put my life at your bidding. Command that I forfeit my head, but my men can do no more. I have lost hundreds. The pass is not to be stormed.”Only the murmur of assent from all the well-tried generals about the throne saved Hydarnes from paying the last penalty. The king’s rage was fearful; men trembled to look on him. His words came so thick, the rest could never follow all his curses and commands. Only Mardonius was bold enough to stand up before his face.“Your Eternity, this is an unlucky day. Is it not sacred to Angra-Mainyu the Evil? The arch-Magian says the holy fire gives forth sparks of ill-omen. Wait, then, till to-morrow. Verethraghna, the Angel of Victory, will then return to your servants.”The bow-bearer led his trembling master to the royal tent, and naught more of Xerxes was seen till the morning. All that night Mardonius never slept, but went unceasingly the round of the host preparing for battle. Glaucon saw little of him. The Athenian himself had been posted among the guard of nobles directly about the person of the king, and he was glad he was set nowhere else, otherwise he might have been ordered to join in the attack. Like every other in the host, he slept under arms, and never returned to Mardonius’s pavilion. His heart had been in his eyes all that day. He had believed Leonidas would be swept from the pass at the first onset. Even he had underrated the Spartan prowess. The repulse of the Medes had astonished him. When Hydarnes reeled back, he could hardly conceal his joy. The Hellenes were fighting! The Hellenes were conquering![pg 222]He forgot he stood almost at Xerxes’s side when the last charge failed; and barely in time did he save himself from joining in the shout of triumph raised by the defenders when the decimated Immortals slunk away. He had grown intensely proud of his countrymen, and when he heard the startled Persian lords muttering dark forbodings of the morrow, he all but laughed his gladness in their faces.So the night passed for him: the hard earth for a bed, a water cruse wrapped in a cloak for a pillow. And just as the first red blush stole over the green Malian bay and the mist-hung hills of Eubœa beyond, he woke with all the army. Mardonius had used the night well. Chosen contingents from every corps were ready. Cavalrymen had been dismounted. Heavy masses of Assyrian archers and Arabian slingers were advanced to prepare for the attack by overwhelming volleys. The Persian noblemen, stung to madness by their king’s reproaches and their own sense of shame, bound themselves by fearful oaths never to draw from the onset until victorious or dead. The attack itself was led by princes of the blood, royal half-brothers of the king. Xerxes sat again on the ivory throne, assured by every obsequious tongue that the sacred fire gave fair omens, that to-day was the day of victory.The attack was magnificent. For an instant its fury seemed to carry the Hellenes back. Where a Persian fell two stepped over him. The defenders were swept against their wall. The Barbarians appeared to be storming it. Then like the tide the battle turned. The hoplites, locking shields, presented an impenetrable spear hedge. The charge spent itself in empty promise. Mardonius, who had been in the thickest, nevertheless drew off his men skilfully and prepared to renew the combat.In the interval Glaucon, standing by the king, could see a short, firm figure in black armour going in and out among the[pg 223]Hellenes, ordering their array—Leonidas—he needed no bird to tell him. And as the Athenian stood and watched, saw the Persians mass their files for another battering charge, saw the Great King twist his beard whilst his gleaming eyes followed the fate of his army, an impulse nigh irresistible came over him to run one short bow-shot to that opposite array, and cry in his own Greek tongue:—“I am a Hellene, too! Look on me come to join you, to live and die with you, with my face against the Barbarian!”Cruel the fate that set him here, impotent, when on that band of countrymen Queen Nikē was shedding bright glory!But he was“Glaucon the Traitor”still, to be awarded the traitor’s doom by Leonidas. Therefore the“Lord Prexaspes”must stand at his post, guarding the king of the Aryans.The second charge was as the first, the third was as the second. Mardonius was full of recourses. By repeated attacks he strove to wear the stubborn Hellenes down. The Persians proved their courage seven times. Ten of them died gladly, if their deaths bought that of a single foe. But few as were Leonidas’s numbers, they were not so few as to fail to relieve one another at the front of the press,—which front was fearfully narrow. And three times, as his men drifted back in defeat, Xerxes the king“leaped from the throne whereon he sat, in anguish for his army.”At noon new contingents from the rear took the place of the exhausted attackers. The sun beat down with unpitying heat. The wounded lay sweltering in their agony whilst the battle roared over them. Mardonius never stopped to count his dead. Then at last came nightfall. Man could do no more. As the shadows from Œta grew long over the close scene of combat, even the proudest Persians turned away. They had lost thousands. Their defeat was absolute.[pg 224]Before them and to westward and far away ranged the jagged mountains, report had it, unthreaded by a single pass. To the eastward was only the sea,—the sea closed to them by the Greek fleet at the unseen haven of Artemisium. Was the triumph march of the Lord of the World to end in this?Xerxes spoke no word when they took him to his tent that night, a sign of indescribable anger. Fear, humiliation, rage—all these seemed driving him mad. His chamberlains and eunuchs feared to approach to take off his golden armour. Mardonius came to the royal tent; the king, with curses he had never hurled against the bow-bearer before, refused to see him. The battle was ended. No one was hardy enough to talk of a fresh attack on the morrow. Every captain had to report the loss of scores of his best. As Glaucon rode back to Mardonius’s tents, he overheard two infantry officers:—“A fearful day—the bow-bearer is likely to pay for it. I hope his Majesty confines his anger only to him.”“Yes—Mardonius will walk the Chinvat bridge to-morrow. The king is turning against him. Megabyzus is the bow-bearer’s enemy, and already is gone to his Majesty to say that it is Mardonius’s blunders that have brought the army to such a plight. The king will catch at that readily.”At the tents Glaucon found Artazostra and Roxana. They were both pale. The news of the great defeat had been brought by a dozen messengers. Mardonius had not arrived. He was not slain, that was certain, but Artazostra feared the worst. The proud daughter of Darius found it hard to bear up.“My husband has many enemies. Hitherto the king’s favour has allowed him to mock them. But if my brother deserts him, his ruin is speedy. Ah! Ahura-Mazda, why hast Thou suffered us to see this day?”Glaucon said what he could of comfort, which was little.[pg 225]Roxana wept piteously; he was fain to soothe her by his caress,—something he had never ventured before. Artazostra was on the point of calling her eunuchs and setting forth for Xerxes’s tent to plead for the life of her husband, when suddenly Pharnuches, Mardonius’s body-servant, came with news that dispelled at least the fears of the women.“I am bidden to tell your Ladyships that my master has silenced the tongues of his enemies and is restored to the king’s good favor. And I am bidden also to command the Lord Prexaspes to come to the royal tent. His Majesty has need of him.”Glaucon went, questioning much as to the service to be required. He did not soon forget the scene that followed. The great pavilion was lit by a score of resinous flambeaux. The red light shook over the green and purple hangings, the silver plating of the tent-poles. At one end rose the golden throne of the king; before it in a semicircle the stools of a dozen or more princes and commanders. In the centre stood Mardonius questioning a coarse-featured, ill-favoured fellow, who by his sheepskin dress and leggings Glaucon instantly recognized as a peasant of this Malian country. The king beckoned the Athenian into the midst and was clearly too eager to stand on ceremony.“Your Greek is better than Mardonius’s, good Prexaspes. In a matter like this we dare not trust too many interpreters. This man speaks the rough dialect of his country, and few can understand him. Can you interpret?”“I am passing familiar with the Locrian and Malian dialect, your Majesty.”“Question this man further as to what he will do for us. We have understood him but lamely.”Glaucon proceeded to comply. The man, who was exceeding awkward and ill at ease in such august company,[pg 226]spoke an outrageous shepherd’s jargon which even the Athenian understood with effort. But his business came out speedily. He was Ephialtes, the son of one Eurydemus, a Malian, a dull-witted grazier of the country, brought to Mardonius by hope of reward. The general, partly understanding his purpose, had brought him to the king. In brief, he was prepared, for due compensation, to lead the Persians by an almost unknown mountain path over the ridge of Œta and to the rear of Leonidas’s position at Thermopylæ, where the Hellenes, assailed front and rear, would inevitably be destroyed.As Glaucon interpreted, the shout of relieved gladness from the Persian grandees made the tent-cloths shake. Xerxes’s eyes kindled. He clapped his hands.“Reward? He shall have ten talents! But where? How?”The man asserted that the path was easy and practicable for a large body of troops. He had often been over it with his sheep and goats. If the Persians would start a force at once—it was already quite dark—they could fall upon Leonidas at dawn. The Spartan would be completely trapped, or forced to open the defile without another spear thrust.“A care, fellow,”warned Mardonius, regarding the man sharply;“you speak glibly, but if this is a trick to lead a band of the king’s servants to destruction, understand you play with deadly dice. If the troops march, you shall have your hands knotted together and a soldier walking behind to cut your throat at the first sign of treachery.”Glaucon interpreted the threat. The man did not wince.“There is no trap. I will guide you.”That was all they could get him to say.[pg 227]“And do not the Hellenes know of this mountain path and guard it?”persisted the bow-bearer.Ephialtes thought not; at least if they had, they had not told off any efficient detachment to guard it. Hydarnes cut the matter short by rising from his stool and casting himself before the king.“A boon, your Eternity, a boon!”“What is it?”asked the monarch.“The Immortals have been disgraced. Twice they have been repulsed with ignominy. The shame burns hot in their breasts. Suffer them to redeem their honour. Suffer me to take this man and all the infantry of the Life Guard, and at dawn the Lord of the World shall see his desire over his miserable enemies.”“The words of Hydarnes are good,”added Mardonius, incisively, and Xerxes beamed and nodded assent.“Go, scale the mountain with the Immortals and tell this Ephialtes there await him ten talents and a girdle of honour if the thing goes well; if ill, let him be flayed alive and his skin be made the head of a kettledrum.”The stolid peasant did not blench even at this. Glaucon remained in the tent, translating and hearing all the details: how Hydarnes was to press the attack from the rear at early dawn, how Mardonius was to conduct another onset from the front. At last the general of the guard knelt before the king for the last time.“Thus I go forth, Omnipotence, and to-morrow, behold your will upon your enemies, or behold me never more.”“I have faithful slaves,”said Xerxes, rising and smiling benignantly upon the general and the bow-bearer.“Let us disperse, but first let command be given the Magians to cry all night to Mithra and Tishtrya, and to sacrifice to them a white horse.”[pg 228]“Your Majesty always enlists the blessings of heaven for your servants,”bowed Mardonius, as the company broke up and the king went away to his inner tent and his concubines. Glaucon lingered until most of the grandees had gone forth, then the bow-bearer went to him.“Go back to my tents,”ordered Mardonius;“tell Artazostra and Roxana that all is well, that Ahura has delivered me from a great strait and restored me to the king’s favour, and that to-morrow the gate of Hellas will be opened.”“You are still bloody and dusty. You have watched all last night and been in the thick all day,”expostulated the Athenian;“come to the tents with me and rest.”The bow-bearer shook his head.“No rest until to-morrow, and then the rest of victory or a longer one. Now go; the women are consuming with their care.”Glaucon wandered back through the long avenues of pavilions. The lights of innumerable camp-fires, the hum of thousands of voices, the snorting of horses, the grumbling of camels, the groans of men wounded—all these and all other sights and sounds from the countless host were lost to him. He walked on by a kind of animal instinct that took him to Mardonius’s encampment through the mazes of the canvas city. It was dawning on him with a terrible clearness that he was become a traitor to Hellas in very deed. It was one thing to be a passive onlooker of a battle, another to be a participant in a plot for the ruin of Leonidas. Unless warned betimes the Spartan king and all who followed him infallibly would be captured or slaughtered to a man. And he had heard all—the traitor, the discussion, the design—had even, if without his choice, been partner and helper in the same. The blood of Leonidas and his men would be on his head. Every curse the Athenians had heaped on him[pg 229]once unjustly, he would deserve. Now truly he would be, even in his own mind’s eyes,“Glaucon the Traitor, partner to the betrayal of Thermopylæ.”The doltish peasant, lured by the great reward, he might forgive,—himself, the high-born Alcmæonid, never.From this revery he was shaken by finding himself at the entrance to the tents of Mardonius. Artazostra and Roxana came to meet him. When he told of the deliverance of the bow-bearer, he had joy by the light in their eyes. Roxana had never shone in greater beauty. He spoke of the heat of the sun, of his throbbing head. The women bathed his forehead with lavender-water, touching him with their own soft hands. Roxana sang again to him, a low, crooning song of the fragrant Nile, the lotus bells, the nodding palms, the perfumed breeze from the desert. Whilst he watched her through half-closed eyes, the visions of that day of battles left him. He sat wrapped in a dream world, far from stern realities of men and arms. So for a while, as he lounged on the divans, following the play of thetorch-lighton the face of Roxana as her long fingers plied the strings. What was it to him if Leonidas fought a losing battle? Was not his happiness secure—be it in Hellas, or Egypt, or Bactria? He tried to persuade himself thus. At the end, when he and Roxana stood face to face for the parting, he violated all Oriental custom, yet he knew her brother would not be angry. He took her in his arms and gave her kiss for kiss.Then he went to his own tent to seek rest. But Hypnos did not come for a long time with his poppies. Once out of the Egyptian’s presence the haunting terror had returned,“Glaucon the Traitor!”Those three words were always uppermost. At last, indeed, sleep came and as he slept he dreamed.
[pg 209]CHAPTER XIXTHE COMMANDMENT OF XERXESIt is easy to praise the blessings of peace. Still easier to paint the horrors of war,—and yet war will remain for all time the greatest game at which human wits can play. For in it every form of courage, physical and moral, and every talent are called into being. If war at once develops the bestial, it also develops as promptly the heroic. Alone of human activities it demands a brute’s strength, an iron will, a serpent’s intellect, a lion’s courage—all in one. And of him who has these things in justest measure, history writes,“He conquered.”It was because Mardonius seemed to possess all these, to foresee everything, to surmount everything, that Glaucon despaired for the fate of Hellas, even more than when he beheld the crushing armaments of the Persian.Yet for long it seemed as if the host would march even to Athens without battle, without invoking Mardonius’s skill. The king crossed Thrace and Macedonia, meeting only trembling hospitality from the cities along his route. At Doriscus he had held a review of his army, and smiled when the fawning scribes told how one million seven hundred thousand foot and eighty thousand horse followed his banners.8Every fugitive and spy from southern Hellas told how the hearts of the stanchest patriots were sinking, how everywhere save in Athens and Sparta loud voices urged the[pg 210]sending of“earth and water,”—tokens of submission to the irresistible king. At the pass of Tempē covering Thessaly, Glaucon, who knew the hopes of Themistocles, had been certain the Hellenes would make a stand. Rumour had it that ten thousand Greek infantry were indeed there, and ready for battle. But the outlaw’s expectations were utterly shattered. To the disgust of the Persian lords, who dearly loved brisk fighting, it was soon told how the cowardly Hellenes had fled by ship, leaving the rich plains of Thessaly bare to the invader.Thus was blasted Glaucon’s last hope. Hellas was doomed. He almost looked to see Themistocles coming as ambassador to bring the homage of Athens. Since his old life seemed closed to the outlaw, he allowed Mardonius to have his will with him,—to teach him to act, speak, think, as an Oriental. He even bowed himself low before the king, an act rewarded by being commanded one evening to play at dice with majesty itself. Xerxes was actually gracious enough to let his new subject win from him three handsome Syrian slave-boys.“You Hellenes are becoming wise,”announced the monarch one day, when the Locrian envoys came with their earth and water.“If you can learn to speak the truth, you will equal even the virtues of the Aryans.”“Your Majesty has not found me a liar,”rejoined the Athenian, warmly.“You gather our virtues apace. I must consider how I can reward you by promotion.”“The king is overwhelmingly generous. Already I fear many of his servants mutter that I am promoted beyond all desert.”“Mutter? mutter against you?”The king’s eyes flashed ominously.“By Mazda, it is against me, then, who advanced[pg 211]you! Hearken, Otanes,”—he addressed the general of the Persian footmen, who stood near by,—“who are the disobedient slaves who question my advancement of Prexaspes?”The general—he had been the loudest grumbler—bowed and kissed the carpet.“None, your Eternity; on the contrary, there is not one Aryan in the host who does not rejoice the king has found so noble an object for his godlike bounty.”“You hear, Prexaspes,”said Xerxes, mollified.“I am glad, for the man who questions my wisdom touching your advancement must be impaled. To-morrow is my birthday, you will not fail to sit with the other great lords at the banquet.”“The king overpowers me with his goodness.”“Do not fail to deserve it. Mardonius is always praising you. Consider also how much better it is to depend on a gracious king than on the clamour of the fickle mob that rules in your helpless cities!”* * * * * * *The next morning was the royal birthday. The army, pitched in the fertile plain by Thessalian Larissa, feasted on the abundance at hand. The king distributed huge largesses of money. All day long he sat in his palace-like tent, receiving congratulations from even the lowest of his followers, and bound in turn not to reject any reasonable petition. The Magi sacrificed blooded stallions and rare spices to Mithra the“Lord of Wide Pastures,”to Vohu-Manu the“Holy Councillor,”and all their other angels, desiring them to bless the arms of the king.The“Perfect Banquet”of the birthday came in the evening. It hardly differed from the feast at Sardis. The royal pavilion had its poles plated with silver, the tapestries[pg 212]were green and purple, the couches were spread with gorgeous coverlets. Only the drinking was more moderate, the ceremonial less rigid. The fortunate guests devoured dainties reserved for the special use of royalty: the flour of the bread was from Assos, the wine from Helbon, the water to dilute the wine had come in silver flasks from the Choaspes by Susa. The king even distributed the special unguent of lion’s fat and palm wine which no subject, unpermitted, could use and shun the death penalty.Then at the end certain of the fairest of the women came and danced unveiled before the king—this one night when they might show forth their beauty. And last of all danced Roxana. She danced alone; a diaphanous drapery of pink Egyptian cotton blew around her as an evening cloud. From her black hair shone the diamond coronet. To the sensuous swing of the music she wound in and out before the king and his admiring lords, advancing, retreating, rising, swaying, a paragon of agility and grace, feet, body, hands, weaving their charm together. When at the end she fell on her knees before the king, demanding whether she had done well, the applause shook the pavilion. The king looked down on her, smiling.“Rise, sister of Mardonius. All Eran rejoices in you to-night. And on this evening whose request can I fail to grant? Whose can I grant more gladly than yours? Speak; you shall have it, though it be for half my kingdoms.”The dancer arose, but hung down her flashing coronal. Her blush was enchanting. She stood silent, while the good-humoured king smiled down on her, till Artazostra came from her seat by Mardonius and whispered in her ear. Every neck in the crowded pavilion was craned as Artazostra spoke to Xerxes.“May it please my royal brother, this is the word of Rox[pg 213]ana.‘I love my brother Mardonius; nevertheless, contrary to the Persian custom, he keeps me now to my nineteenth year unwedded. If now I have found favour in the sight of the king, let him command Mardonius to give me to some noble youth who shall do me honour by the valiant deeds and the true service he shall render unto my Lord.’”“A fair petition! Let the king grant it!”shouted twenty; while others more wise whispered,“This was not done without foreknowledge by Mardonius.”Xerxes smiled benignantly and rubbed his nose with the lion’s fat while deliberating.“An evil precedent, lady, an evil precedent when women demand husbands and do not wait for their fathers’ or brothers’ good pleasure. But I have promised. The word of the king is not to be broken. Daughter of Gobryas, your petition is granted. Come hither, Mardonius,”—the bow-bearer approached the throne,—“you have heard the bold desire of your sister, and my answer. I must command you to bestow on her a husband.”The bow-bearer bowed obediently.“I hear the word of the king, and all his mandates are good. This is no meet time for marriage festivities, when the Lord of the World and all the Aryan power goes forth to war. Yet as soon as the impious rebels amongst the Hellenes shall be subdued, I will rejoice to bestow my sister upon whatsoever fortunate servant the king may deign to honour.”“You hear him, lady,”—the royal features assumed a grin, which was reflected throughout the pavilion.“A husband you shall have, but Mardonius shall be revenged. Your fate is in my hands. And shall not I,—guardian of the households of my empire,—give a warning to all bold maidens against lifting their wills too proudly, or presuming upon an overindulgent king? What then shall be just[pg 214]punishment?”The king bent his head, still rubbing his nose, and trying to persuade all about that he was meditating.“Bardas, satrap of Sogandia, is old; he has but one eye; they say he beats his eleven wives daily with a whip of rhinoceros hide. It would be just if I gave him this woman also in marriage. What think you, Hydarnes?”“If your Eternity bestows this woman on Bardas, every husband and father in all your kingdoms will applaud your act,”smiled the commander.The threatened lady fell again on her knees, outstretching her hands and beseeching mercy,—never a more charming picture of misery and contrition.“You tremble, lady,”went on the sovran,“and justly. It were better for my empire if my heart were less hard. After all, you danced so elegantly that I must be mollified. There is the young Prince Zophyrus, son of Datis the general,—he has only five wives already. True, he is usually the worse for wine, is not handsome, and killed one of his women not long since because she did not sing to please him. Yes—you shall have Zophyrus—he will surely rule you—”“Mercy, not Zophyrus, gracious Lord,”pleaded the abject Egyptian.The king looked down on her, with a broader grin than ever.“You are very hard to please. I ought to punish your wilfulness by some dreadful doom. Do not cry out again. I will not hear you. My decision is fixed. Mardonius shall bestow you in marriage to a man who is not even a Persian by birth, who one year since was a disobedient rebel against my power, who even now contemns and despises many of the good customs of the Aryans. Hark, then, to his name. When Hellas is conquered, I command that Mardonius wed you to the Lord Prexaspes.”[pg 215]The king broke into an uproarious laugh, a signal for the thousand loyal subjects within the great pavilion to roar with laughter also. In the confusion following Artazostra and Roxana disappeared. Fifty hands dragged the appointed bridegroom to the king, showering on him all manner of congratulations. Xerxes’s act was a plain proof that he was adopting the beautiful Hellene as one of his personal favourites,—a post of influence and honour not to be despised by a vizier. What“Prexaspes”said when he thanked the king was drowned in the tumult of laughing and cheering. The monarch, delighted to play the gracious god, roared his injunctions to the Athenian so loud that above the din they heard him.“You will bridle her well, Prexaspes. I know them—those Egyptian fillies! They need a hard curb and the lash at times. Beware the tyranny of your own harem. I would not have the satrapies know how certain bright eyes in the seraglio can make the son of Darius play the fool. There is nothing more dangerous than women. It will take all your courage to master them. A hard task lies before you. I have given you one wife, but you know our good Persian custom—five, ten, or twenty. Take the score, I order you. Then in twelve years you’ll be receiving the prize a Persian king bestows every summer on the father of the most children!”And following this broad hint, the king held his sides with laughter again, a mirth which it is needless to say was echoed and reëchoed till it seemed it could not cease. Only a few ventured to mutter under breath:“The Hellene will have a subsatrapy in the East before the season is over and a treasure of five thousand talents! Mithra wither the upstart!”* * * * * * *The summer was waning when the host moved southward[pg 216]from Larissa, for mere numbers had made progress slow, and despite Mardonius’s providence the question of commissariat sometimes became difficult. Now at last, leaving behind Thrace and Macedonia, the army began to enter Greece itself. As it fared across the teeming plains of Thessaly, it met only welcome from the inhabitants and submissions from fresh embassies. Report came from the fleet—keeping pace with the land army along the coasts—that nowhere had the weak squadrons of the Greeks adventured a stand. Daily the smile of the Lord of the World grew more complacent, as his“table-companions”told him:“The rumour of your Eternity’s advent stupefies the miserable Hellenes. Like Atar, the Angel of Fire, your splendour glitters afar. You will enter Athens and Sparta, and no sword leave its sheath, no bow its wrapper.”Every day Mardonius asked of Glaucon,“Will your Hellenes fight?”and the answer was ever more doubting,“I do not know.”Long since Glaucon had given up hope of the defeat of the Persian. Now he prayed devoutly there might be no useless shedding of blood. If only he could turn back and not behold the humiliation of Athens! Of the fate of the old-time friends—Democrates, Cimon, Hermione—he tried not to think. No doubt Hermione was the wife of Democrates. More than a year had sped since the flight from Colonus. Hermione had put off her mourning for the yellow veil of a bride. Glaucon prayed the war might bring her no new sorrow, though Democrates, of course, would resist Persia to the end. As for himself he would never darken their eyes again. He was betrothed to Roxana. With her he would seek one of those valleys in Bactria which she had praised, the remoter the better, and there perhaps was peace.[pg 217]Thus the host wound through Thessaly, till before them rose, peak on peak, the jagged mountain wall of Othrys and Œta, fading away in violet distance, the bulwark of central Hellas. Then the king’s smile became a frown, for the Hellenes, undismayed despite his might, were assembling their fleet at northern Eubœa, and at the same time a tempest had shattered a large part of the royal navy. The Magi offered sacrifice to appease Tishtrya, the Prince of the Wind-ruling Stars, but the king’s frown grew blacker at each message. Glaucon was near him when at last the monarch’s thunders broke forth.A hot, sultry day. The king’s chariot had just crossed the mountain stream of the Sphercus, when a captain of a hundred came galloping, dismounted, and prostrated himself in the dust.“Your tidings?”demanded Xerxes, sharply.“Be gracious, Fountain of Mercy,”—the captain evidently disliked his mission,—“I am sent from the van. We came to a place where the mountains thrust down upon the sea and leave but a narrow road by the ocean. Your slaves found certain Hellenes, rebels against your benignant government, holding a wall and barring all passage to your army.”“And did you not forthwith seize these impudent wretches and drag them hither to be judged by me?”“Compassion, Omnipotence,”—the messenger trembled,—“they seemed sturdy, well-armed rogues, and the way was narrow and steep where a score can face a thousand. Therefore, your slave came straight with his tidings to the ever gracious king.”“Dog! Coward!”Xerxes plucked the whip from the charioteer’s hand and lashed it over the wretch’s shoulders.“By thefravashi, the soul of Darius my father, no man shall bring so foul a word to me and live!”[pg 218]“Compassion, Omnipotence, compassion!”groaned the man, writhing like a worm. Already the master-of-punishments was approaching to cover his face with a towel, preparatory to the bow-string, but the royal anger spent itself just enough to avert a tragedy.“Your life is forfeit, but I am all too merciful! Take then three hundred stripes on the soles of your feet and live to be braver in the future.”“A thousand blessings on your benignity,”cried the captain, as they led him away,“I congratulate myself that insignificant as I am the king yet deigns to notice my existence even to recompense my shortcomings.”“Off,”ordered the bristling monarch,“or you die the death yet. And do you, Mardonius, take Prexaspes, who somewhat knows this country, spur forward, and discover who are the madmen thus earning their destruction.”The command was obeyed. Glaucon galloped beside the Prince, overtaking the marching army, until as they cantered into the little mud-walled city of Heraclea a second messenger from the van met them with further details.“The pass is held by seven thousand Grecian men-at-arms. There are no Athenians. There are three hundred come from Sparta.”“And their chief?”asked Glaucon, leaning eagerly.“Is Leonidas of Lacedæmon.”“Then, O Mardonius,”spoke the Athenian, with a throb in his voice not there an hour ago.“There will be battle.”So, whether wise men or mad, the Hellenes were not to lay down their arms without one struggle, and Glaucon knew not whether to be sorry or to be proud.[pg 219]CHAPTER XXTHERMOPYLÆA rugged mountain, an inaccessible morass, and beyond that morass the sea: the mountain thrusting so close upon the morass as barely to leave space for a narrow wagon road. This was the western gate of Thermopylæ. Behind the narrow defile the mountain and swamp-land drew asunder; in the still scanty opening hot springs gushed forth, sacred to Heracles, then again on the eastern side Mt. Œta and the impenetrable swamp drew together, forming the second of the“Hot Gates,”—the gates which Xerxes must unlock if he would continue his march to Athens.The Great King’s couriers reported that the stubborn Hellenes had cast a wall across the entrance, and that so far from showing terror at the advent of majesty, were carelessly diverting themselves by athletic games, and by combing and adorning their hair, a fact which the“Lord Prexaspes”at least comprehended to mean that Leonidas and his Spartans were preparing for desperate battle. Nevertheless, it was hard to persuade the king that at last he confronted men who would resist him to his face. Glaucon said it. Demaratus, the outlawed Spartan, said it. Xerxes, however, remained angry and incredulous. Four long days he and his army sat before the pass,“because,”announced his couriers,“he wishes in his benignity to give these madmen a chance to flee away and shun destruction;”[pg 220]“because,”spoke those nearest to Mardonius, the brain of the army,“there is hot fighting ahead, and the general is resolved to bring up the picked troops in the rear before risking a battle.”Then on the fifth day either Xerxes’s patience was exhausted or Mardonius felt ready. Strong regiments of Median infantry were ordered to charge Leonidas’s position, Xerxes not failing to command that they slay as few of the wretches as possible, but drag them prisoners before his outraged presence.A noble charge. A terrible repulse. For the first time those Asiatics who had forgotten Marathon discovered the overwhelming superiority that the sheathing of heavy armour gave the Greek hoplites over the lighter armed Median spearmen. The short lances and wooden targets of the attackers were pitifully futile against the long spears and brazen shields of the Hellenes. In the narrow pass the vast numbers of Barbarians went for nothing. They could not use their archers, they could not charge with their magnificent cavalry. The dead lay in heaps. The Medes attacked again and again. At last an end came to their courage. The captains laid the lash over their mutinous troops. The men bore the whips in sullen silence. They would not charge again upon those devouring spears.White with anger, Xerxes turned to Hydarnes and his“Immortals,”the infantry of the Life Guard. The general needed no second bidding. The charge was driven home with magnificent spirit. But what the vassal Medes could not accomplish, neither could the lordly Persians. The repulse was bloody. If once Leonidas’s line broke and the Persians rushed on with howls of triumph, it was only to see the Hellenes’ files close in a twinkling and return to the onset with their foes in confusion. Hydarnes led back his men[pg 221]at last. The king sat on the ivory throne just out of arrow shot, watching the ebb and flow of the battle. Hydarnes approached and prostrated himself.“Omnipotence, I the least of your slaves put my life at your bidding. Command that I forfeit my head, but my men can do no more. I have lost hundreds. The pass is not to be stormed.”Only the murmur of assent from all the well-tried generals about the throne saved Hydarnes from paying the last penalty. The king’s rage was fearful; men trembled to look on him. His words came so thick, the rest could never follow all his curses and commands. Only Mardonius was bold enough to stand up before his face.“Your Eternity, this is an unlucky day. Is it not sacred to Angra-Mainyu the Evil? The arch-Magian says the holy fire gives forth sparks of ill-omen. Wait, then, till to-morrow. Verethraghna, the Angel of Victory, will then return to your servants.”The bow-bearer led his trembling master to the royal tent, and naught more of Xerxes was seen till the morning. All that night Mardonius never slept, but went unceasingly the round of the host preparing for battle. Glaucon saw little of him. The Athenian himself had been posted among the guard of nobles directly about the person of the king, and he was glad he was set nowhere else, otherwise he might have been ordered to join in the attack. Like every other in the host, he slept under arms, and never returned to Mardonius’s pavilion. His heart had been in his eyes all that day. He had believed Leonidas would be swept from the pass at the first onset. Even he had underrated the Spartan prowess. The repulse of the Medes had astonished him. When Hydarnes reeled back, he could hardly conceal his joy. The Hellenes were fighting! The Hellenes were conquering![pg 222]He forgot he stood almost at Xerxes’s side when the last charge failed; and barely in time did he save himself from joining in the shout of triumph raised by the defenders when the decimated Immortals slunk away. He had grown intensely proud of his countrymen, and when he heard the startled Persian lords muttering dark forbodings of the morrow, he all but laughed his gladness in their faces.So the night passed for him: the hard earth for a bed, a water cruse wrapped in a cloak for a pillow. And just as the first red blush stole over the green Malian bay and the mist-hung hills of Eubœa beyond, he woke with all the army. Mardonius had used the night well. Chosen contingents from every corps were ready. Cavalrymen had been dismounted. Heavy masses of Assyrian archers and Arabian slingers were advanced to prepare for the attack by overwhelming volleys. The Persian noblemen, stung to madness by their king’s reproaches and their own sense of shame, bound themselves by fearful oaths never to draw from the onset until victorious or dead. The attack itself was led by princes of the blood, royal half-brothers of the king. Xerxes sat again on the ivory throne, assured by every obsequious tongue that the sacred fire gave fair omens, that to-day was the day of victory.The attack was magnificent. For an instant its fury seemed to carry the Hellenes back. Where a Persian fell two stepped over him. The defenders were swept against their wall. The Barbarians appeared to be storming it. Then like the tide the battle turned. The hoplites, locking shields, presented an impenetrable spear hedge. The charge spent itself in empty promise. Mardonius, who had been in the thickest, nevertheless drew off his men skilfully and prepared to renew the combat.In the interval Glaucon, standing by the king, could see a short, firm figure in black armour going in and out among the[pg 223]Hellenes, ordering their array—Leonidas—he needed no bird to tell him. And as the Athenian stood and watched, saw the Persians mass their files for another battering charge, saw the Great King twist his beard whilst his gleaming eyes followed the fate of his army, an impulse nigh irresistible came over him to run one short bow-shot to that opposite array, and cry in his own Greek tongue:—“I am a Hellene, too! Look on me come to join you, to live and die with you, with my face against the Barbarian!”Cruel the fate that set him here, impotent, when on that band of countrymen Queen Nikē was shedding bright glory!But he was“Glaucon the Traitor”still, to be awarded the traitor’s doom by Leonidas. Therefore the“Lord Prexaspes”must stand at his post, guarding the king of the Aryans.The second charge was as the first, the third was as the second. Mardonius was full of recourses. By repeated attacks he strove to wear the stubborn Hellenes down. The Persians proved their courage seven times. Ten of them died gladly, if their deaths bought that of a single foe. But few as were Leonidas’s numbers, they were not so few as to fail to relieve one another at the front of the press,—which front was fearfully narrow. And three times, as his men drifted back in defeat, Xerxes the king“leaped from the throne whereon he sat, in anguish for his army.”At noon new contingents from the rear took the place of the exhausted attackers. The sun beat down with unpitying heat. The wounded lay sweltering in their agony whilst the battle roared over them. Mardonius never stopped to count his dead. Then at last came nightfall. Man could do no more. As the shadows from Œta grew long over the close scene of combat, even the proudest Persians turned away. They had lost thousands. Their defeat was absolute.[pg 224]Before them and to westward and far away ranged the jagged mountains, report had it, unthreaded by a single pass. To the eastward was only the sea,—the sea closed to them by the Greek fleet at the unseen haven of Artemisium. Was the triumph march of the Lord of the World to end in this?Xerxes spoke no word when they took him to his tent that night, a sign of indescribable anger. Fear, humiliation, rage—all these seemed driving him mad. His chamberlains and eunuchs feared to approach to take off his golden armour. Mardonius came to the royal tent; the king, with curses he had never hurled against the bow-bearer before, refused to see him. The battle was ended. No one was hardy enough to talk of a fresh attack on the morrow. Every captain had to report the loss of scores of his best. As Glaucon rode back to Mardonius’s tents, he overheard two infantry officers:—“A fearful day—the bow-bearer is likely to pay for it. I hope his Majesty confines his anger only to him.”“Yes—Mardonius will walk the Chinvat bridge to-morrow. The king is turning against him. Megabyzus is the bow-bearer’s enemy, and already is gone to his Majesty to say that it is Mardonius’s blunders that have brought the army to such a plight. The king will catch at that readily.”At the tents Glaucon found Artazostra and Roxana. They were both pale. The news of the great defeat had been brought by a dozen messengers. Mardonius had not arrived. He was not slain, that was certain, but Artazostra feared the worst. The proud daughter of Darius found it hard to bear up.“My husband has many enemies. Hitherto the king’s favour has allowed him to mock them. But if my brother deserts him, his ruin is speedy. Ah! Ahura-Mazda, why hast Thou suffered us to see this day?”Glaucon said what he could of comfort, which was little.[pg 225]Roxana wept piteously; he was fain to soothe her by his caress,—something he had never ventured before. Artazostra was on the point of calling her eunuchs and setting forth for Xerxes’s tent to plead for the life of her husband, when suddenly Pharnuches, Mardonius’s body-servant, came with news that dispelled at least the fears of the women.“I am bidden to tell your Ladyships that my master has silenced the tongues of his enemies and is restored to the king’s good favor. And I am bidden also to command the Lord Prexaspes to come to the royal tent. His Majesty has need of him.”Glaucon went, questioning much as to the service to be required. He did not soon forget the scene that followed. The great pavilion was lit by a score of resinous flambeaux. The red light shook over the green and purple hangings, the silver plating of the tent-poles. At one end rose the golden throne of the king; before it in a semicircle the stools of a dozen or more princes and commanders. In the centre stood Mardonius questioning a coarse-featured, ill-favoured fellow, who by his sheepskin dress and leggings Glaucon instantly recognized as a peasant of this Malian country. The king beckoned the Athenian into the midst and was clearly too eager to stand on ceremony.“Your Greek is better than Mardonius’s, good Prexaspes. In a matter like this we dare not trust too many interpreters. This man speaks the rough dialect of his country, and few can understand him. Can you interpret?”“I am passing familiar with the Locrian and Malian dialect, your Majesty.”“Question this man further as to what he will do for us. We have understood him but lamely.”Glaucon proceeded to comply. The man, who was exceeding awkward and ill at ease in such august company,[pg 226]spoke an outrageous shepherd’s jargon which even the Athenian understood with effort. But his business came out speedily. He was Ephialtes, the son of one Eurydemus, a Malian, a dull-witted grazier of the country, brought to Mardonius by hope of reward. The general, partly understanding his purpose, had brought him to the king. In brief, he was prepared, for due compensation, to lead the Persians by an almost unknown mountain path over the ridge of Œta and to the rear of Leonidas’s position at Thermopylæ, where the Hellenes, assailed front and rear, would inevitably be destroyed.As Glaucon interpreted, the shout of relieved gladness from the Persian grandees made the tent-cloths shake. Xerxes’s eyes kindled. He clapped his hands.“Reward? He shall have ten talents! But where? How?”The man asserted that the path was easy and practicable for a large body of troops. He had often been over it with his sheep and goats. If the Persians would start a force at once—it was already quite dark—they could fall upon Leonidas at dawn. The Spartan would be completely trapped, or forced to open the defile without another spear thrust.“A care, fellow,”warned Mardonius, regarding the man sharply;“you speak glibly, but if this is a trick to lead a band of the king’s servants to destruction, understand you play with deadly dice. If the troops march, you shall have your hands knotted together and a soldier walking behind to cut your throat at the first sign of treachery.”Glaucon interpreted the threat. The man did not wince.“There is no trap. I will guide you.”That was all they could get him to say.[pg 227]“And do not the Hellenes know of this mountain path and guard it?”persisted the bow-bearer.Ephialtes thought not; at least if they had, they had not told off any efficient detachment to guard it. Hydarnes cut the matter short by rising from his stool and casting himself before the king.“A boon, your Eternity, a boon!”“What is it?”asked the monarch.“The Immortals have been disgraced. Twice they have been repulsed with ignominy. The shame burns hot in their breasts. Suffer them to redeem their honour. Suffer me to take this man and all the infantry of the Life Guard, and at dawn the Lord of the World shall see his desire over his miserable enemies.”“The words of Hydarnes are good,”added Mardonius, incisively, and Xerxes beamed and nodded assent.“Go, scale the mountain with the Immortals and tell this Ephialtes there await him ten talents and a girdle of honour if the thing goes well; if ill, let him be flayed alive and his skin be made the head of a kettledrum.”The stolid peasant did not blench even at this. Glaucon remained in the tent, translating and hearing all the details: how Hydarnes was to press the attack from the rear at early dawn, how Mardonius was to conduct another onset from the front. At last the general of the guard knelt before the king for the last time.“Thus I go forth, Omnipotence, and to-morrow, behold your will upon your enemies, or behold me never more.”“I have faithful slaves,”said Xerxes, rising and smiling benignantly upon the general and the bow-bearer.“Let us disperse, but first let command be given the Magians to cry all night to Mithra and Tishtrya, and to sacrifice to them a white horse.”[pg 228]“Your Majesty always enlists the blessings of heaven for your servants,”bowed Mardonius, as the company broke up and the king went away to his inner tent and his concubines. Glaucon lingered until most of the grandees had gone forth, then the bow-bearer went to him.“Go back to my tents,”ordered Mardonius;“tell Artazostra and Roxana that all is well, that Ahura has delivered me from a great strait and restored me to the king’s favour, and that to-morrow the gate of Hellas will be opened.”“You are still bloody and dusty. You have watched all last night and been in the thick all day,”expostulated the Athenian;“come to the tents with me and rest.”The bow-bearer shook his head.“No rest until to-morrow, and then the rest of victory or a longer one. Now go; the women are consuming with their care.”Glaucon wandered back through the long avenues of pavilions. The lights of innumerable camp-fires, the hum of thousands of voices, the snorting of horses, the grumbling of camels, the groans of men wounded—all these and all other sights and sounds from the countless host were lost to him. He walked on by a kind of animal instinct that took him to Mardonius’s encampment through the mazes of the canvas city. It was dawning on him with a terrible clearness that he was become a traitor to Hellas in very deed. It was one thing to be a passive onlooker of a battle, another to be a participant in a plot for the ruin of Leonidas. Unless warned betimes the Spartan king and all who followed him infallibly would be captured or slaughtered to a man. And he had heard all—the traitor, the discussion, the design—had even, if without his choice, been partner and helper in the same. The blood of Leonidas and his men would be on his head. Every curse the Athenians had heaped on him[pg 229]once unjustly, he would deserve. Now truly he would be, even in his own mind’s eyes,“Glaucon the Traitor, partner to the betrayal of Thermopylæ.”The doltish peasant, lured by the great reward, he might forgive,—himself, the high-born Alcmæonid, never.From this revery he was shaken by finding himself at the entrance to the tents of Mardonius. Artazostra and Roxana came to meet him. When he told of the deliverance of the bow-bearer, he had joy by the light in their eyes. Roxana had never shone in greater beauty. He spoke of the heat of the sun, of his throbbing head. The women bathed his forehead with lavender-water, touching him with their own soft hands. Roxana sang again to him, a low, crooning song of the fragrant Nile, the lotus bells, the nodding palms, the perfumed breeze from the desert. Whilst he watched her through half-closed eyes, the visions of that day of battles left him. He sat wrapped in a dream world, far from stern realities of men and arms. So for a while, as he lounged on the divans, following the play of thetorch-lighton the face of Roxana as her long fingers plied the strings. What was it to him if Leonidas fought a losing battle? Was not his happiness secure—be it in Hellas, or Egypt, or Bactria? He tried to persuade himself thus. At the end, when he and Roxana stood face to face for the parting, he violated all Oriental custom, yet he knew her brother would not be angry. He took her in his arms and gave her kiss for kiss.Then he went to his own tent to seek rest. But Hypnos did not come for a long time with his poppies. Once out of the Egyptian’s presence the haunting terror had returned,“Glaucon the Traitor!”Those three words were always uppermost. At last, indeed, sleep came and as he slept he dreamed.
[pg 209]CHAPTER XIXTHE COMMANDMENT OF XERXESIt is easy to praise the blessings of peace. Still easier to paint the horrors of war,—and yet war will remain for all time the greatest game at which human wits can play. For in it every form of courage, physical and moral, and every talent are called into being. If war at once develops the bestial, it also develops as promptly the heroic. Alone of human activities it demands a brute’s strength, an iron will, a serpent’s intellect, a lion’s courage—all in one. And of him who has these things in justest measure, history writes,“He conquered.”It was because Mardonius seemed to possess all these, to foresee everything, to surmount everything, that Glaucon despaired for the fate of Hellas, even more than when he beheld the crushing armaments of the Persian.Yet for long it seemed as if the host would march even to Athens without battle, without invoking Mardonius’s skill. The king crossed Thrace and Macedonia, meeting only trembling hospitality from the cities along his route. At Doriscus he had held a review of his army, and smiled when the fawning scribes told how one million seven hundred thousand foot and eighty thousand horse followed his banners.8Every fugitive and spy from southern Hellas told how the hearts of the stanchest patriots were sinking, how everywhere save in Athens and Sparta loud voices urged the[pg 210]sending of“earth and water,”—tokens of submission to the irresistible king. At the pass of Tempē covering Thessaly, Glaucon, who knew the hopes of Themistocles, had been certain the Hellenes would make a stand. Rumour had it that ten thousand Greek infantry were indeed there, and ready for battle. But the outlaw’s expectations were utterly shattered. To the disgust of the Persian lords, who dearly loved brisk fighting, it was soon told how the cowardly Hellenes had fled by ship, leaving the rich plains of Thessaly bare to the invader.Thus was blasted Glaucon’s last hope. Hellas was doomed. He almost looked to see Themistocles coming as ambassador to bring the homage of Athens. Since his old life seemed closed to the outlaw, he allowed Mardonius to have his will with him,—to teach him to act, speak, think, as an Oriental. He even bowed himself low before the king, an act rewarded by being commanded one evening to play at dice with majesty itself. Xerxes was actually gracious enough to let his new subject win from him three handsome Syrian slave-boys.“You Hellenes are becoming wise,”announced the monarch one day, when the Locrian envoys came with their earth and water.“If you can learn to speak the truth, you will equal even the virtues of the Aryans.”“Your Majesty has not found me a liar,”rejoined the Athenian, warmly.“You gather our virtues apace. I must consider how I can reward you by promotion.”“The king is overwhelmingly generous. Already I fear many of his servants mutter that I am promoted beyond all desert.”“Mutter? mutter against you?”The king’s eyes flashed ominously.“By Mazda, it is against me, then, who advanced[pg 211]you! Hearken, Otanes,”—he addressed the general of the Persian footmen, who stood near by,—“who are the disobedient slaves who question my advancement of Prexaspes?”The general—he had been the loudest grumbler—bowed and kissed the carpet.“None, your Eternity; on the contrary, there is not one Aryan in the host who does not rejoice the king has found so noble an object for his godlike bounty.”“You hear, Prexaspes,”said Xerxes, mollified.“I am glad, for the man who questions my wisdom touching your advancement must be impaled. To-morrow is my birthday, you will not fail to sit with the other great lords at the banquet.”“The king overpowers me with his goodness.”“Do not fail to deserve it. Mardonius is always praising you. Consider also how much better it is to depend on a gracious king than on the clamour of the fickle mob that rules in your helpless cities!”* * * * * * *The next morning was the royal birthday. The army, pitched in the fertile plain by Thessalian Larissa, feasted on the abundance at hand. The king distributed huge largesses of money. All day long he sat in his palace-like tent, receiving congratulations from even the lowest of his followers, and bound in turn not to reject any reasonable petition. The Magi sacrificed blooded stallions and rare spices to Mithra the“Lord of Wide Pastures,”to Vohu-Manu the“Holy Councillor,”and all their other angels, desiring them to bless the arms of the king.The“Perfect Banquet”of the birthday came in the evening. It hardly differed from the feast at Sardis. The royal pavilion had its poles plated with silver, the tapestries[pg 212]were green and purple, the couches were spread with gorgeous coverlets. Only the drinking was more moderate, the ceremonial less rigid. The fortunate guests devoured dainties reserved for the special use of royalty: the flour of the bread was from Assos, the wine from Helbon, the water to dilute the wine had come in silver flasks from the Choaspes by Susa. The king even distributed the special unguent of lion’s fat and palm wine which no subject, unpermitted, could use and shun the death penalty.Then at the end certain of the fairest of the women came and danced unveiled before the king—this one night when they might show forth their beauty. And last of all danced Roxana. She danced alone; a diaphanous drapery of pink Egyptian cotton blew around her as an evening cloud. From her black hair shone the diamond coronet. To the sensuous swing of the music she wound in and out before the king and his admiring lords, advancing, retreating, rising, swaying, a paragon of agility and grace, feet, body, hands, weaving their charm together. When at the end she fell on her knees before the king, demanding whether she had done well, the applause shook the pavilion. The king looked down on her, smiling.“Rise, sister of Mardonius. All Eran rejoices in you to-night. And on this evening whose request can I fail to grant? Whose can I grant more gladly than yours? Speak; you shall have it, though it be for half my kingdoms.”The dancer arose, but hung down her flashing coronal. Her blush was enchanting. She stood silent, while the good-humoured king smiled down on her, till Artazostra came from her seat by Mardonius and whispered in her ear. Every neck in the crowded pavilion was craned as Artazostra spoke to Xerxes.“May it please my royal brother, this is the word of Rox[pg 213]ana.‘I love my brother Mardonius; nevertheless, contrary to the Persian custom, he keeps me now to my nineteenth year unwedded. If now I have found favour in the sight of the king, let him command Mardonius to give me to some noble youth who shall do me honour by the valiant deeds and the true service he shall render unto my Lord.’”“A fair petition! Let the king grant it!”shouted twenty; while others more wise whispered,“This was not done without foreknowledge by Mardonius.”Xerxes smiled benignantly and rubbed his nose with the lion’s fat while deliberating.“An evil precedent, lady, an evil precedent when women demand husbands and do not wait for their fathers’ or brothers’ good pleasure. But I have promised. The word of the king is not to be broken. Daughter of Gobryas, your petition is granted. Come hither, Mardonius,”—the bow-bearer approached the throne,—“you have heard the bold desire of your sister, and my answer. I must command you to bestow on her a husband.”The bow-bearer bowed obediently.“I hear the word of the king, and all his mandates are good. This is no meet time for marriage festivities, when the Lord of the World and all the Aryan power goes forth to war. Yet as soon as the impious rebels amongst the Hellenes shall be subdued, I will rejoice to bestow my sister upon whatsoever fortunate servant the king may deign to honour.”“You hear him, lady,”—the royal features assumed a grin, which was reflected throughout the pavilion.“A husband you shall have, but Mardonius shall be revenged. Your fate is in my hands. And shall not I,—guardian of the households of my empire,—give a warning to all bold maidens against lifting their wills too proudly, or presuming upon an overindulgent king? What then shall be just[pg 214]punishment?”The king bent his head, still rubbing his nose, and trying to persuade all about that he was meditating.“Bardas, satrap of Sogandia, is old; he has but one eye; they say he beats his eleven wives daily with a whip of rhinoceros hide. It would be just if I gave him this woman also in marriage. What think you, Hydarnes?”“If your Eternity bestows this woman on Bardas, every husband and father in all your kingdoms will applaud your act,”smiled the commander.The threatened lady fell again on her knees, outstretching her hands and beseeching mercy,—never a more charming picture of misery and contrition.“You tremble, lady,”went on the sovran,“and justly. It were better for my empire if my heart were less hard. After all, you danced so elegantly that I must be mollified. There is the young Prince Zophyrus, son of Datis the general,—he has only five wives already. True, he is usually the worse for wine, is not handsome, and killed one of his women not long since because she did not sing to please him. Yes—you shall have Zophyrus—he will surely rule you—”“Mercy, not Zophyrus, gracious Lord,”pleaded the abject Egyptian.The king looked down on her, with a broader grin than ever.“You are very hard to please. I ought to punish your wilfulness by some dreadful doom. Do not cry out again. I will not hear you. My decision is fixed. Mardonius shall bestow you in marriage to a man who is not even a Persian by birth, who one year since was a disobedient rebel against my power, who even now contemns and despises many of the good customs of the Aryans. Hark, then, to his name. When Hellas is conquered, I command that Mardonius wed you to the Lord Prexaspes.”[pg 215]The king broke into an uproarious laugh, a signal for the thousand loyal subjects within the great pavilion to roar with laughter also. In the confusion following Artazostra and Roxana disappeared. Fifty hands dragged the appointed bridegroom to the king, showering on him all manner of congratulations. Xerxes’s act was a plain proof that he was adopting the beautiful Hellene as one of his personal favourites,—a post of influence and honour not to be despised by a vizier. What“Prexaspes”said when he thanked the king was drowned in the tumult of laughing and cheering. The monarch, delighted to play the gracious god, roared his injunctions to the Athenian so loud that above the din they heard him.“You will bridle her well, Prexaspes. I know them—those Egyptian fillies! They need a hard curb and the lash at times. Beware the tyranny of your own harem. I would not have the satrapies know how certain bright eyes in the seraglio can make the son of Darius play the fool. There is nothing more dangerous than women. It will take all your courage to master them. A hard task lies before you. I have given you one wife, but you know our good Persian custom—five, ten, or twenty. Take the score, I order you. Then in twelve years you’ll be receiving the prize a Persian king bestows every summer on the father of the most children!”And following this broad hint, the king held his sides with laughter again, a mirth which it is needless to say was echoed and reëchoed till it seemed it could not cease. Only a few ventured to mutter under breath:“The Hellene will have a subsatrapy in the East before the season is over and a treasure of five thousand talents! Mithra wither the upstart!”* * * * * * *The summer was waning when the host moved southward[pg 216]from Larissa, for mere numbers had made progress slow, and despite Mardonius’s providence the question of commissariat sometimes became difficult. Now at last, leaving behind Thrace and Macedonia, the army began to enter Greece itself. As it fared across the teeming plains of Thessaly, it met only welcome from the inhabitants and submissions from fresh embassies. Report came from the fleet—keeping pace with the land army along the coasts—that nowhere had the weak squadrons of the Greeks adventured a stand. Daily the smile of the Lord of the World grew more complacent, as his“table-companions”told him:“The rumour of your Eternity’s advent stupefies the miserable Hellenes. Like Atar, the Angel of Fire, your splendour glitters afar. You will enter Athens and Sparta, and no sword leave its sheath, no bow its wrapper.”Every day Mardonius asked of Glaucon,“Will your Hellenes fight?”and the answer was ever more doubting,“I do not know.”Long since Glaucon had given up hope of the defeat of the Persian. Now he prayed devoutly there might be no useless shedding of blood. If only he could turn back and not behold the humiliation of Athens! Of the fate of the old-time friends—Democrates, Cimon, Hermione—he tried not to think. No doubt Hermione was the wife of Democrates. More than a year had sped since the flight from Colonus. Hermione had put off her mourning for the yellow veil of a bride. Glaucon prayed the war might bring her no new sorrow, though Democrates, of course, would resist Persia to the end. As for himself he would never darken their eyes again. He was betrothed to Roxana. With her he would seek one of those valleys in Bactria which she had praised, the remoter the better, and there perhaps was peace.[pg 217]Thus the host wound through Thessaly, till before them rose, peak on peak, the jagged mountain wall of Othrys and Œta, fading away in violet distance, the bulwark of central Hellas. Then the king’s smile became a frown, for the Hellenes, undismayed despite his might, were assembling their fleet at northern Eubœa, and at the same time a tempest had shattered a large part of the royal navy. The Magi offered sacrifice to appease Tishtrya, the Prince of the Wind-ruling Stars, but the king’s frown grew blacker at each message. Glaucon was near him when at last the monarch’s thunders broke forth.A hot, sultry day. The king’s chariot had just crossed the mountain stream of the Sphercus, when a captain of a hundred came galloping, dismounted, and prostrated himself in the dust.“Your tidings?”demanded Xerxes, sharply.“Be gracious, Fountain of Mercy,”—the captain evidently disliked his mission,—“I am sent from the van. We came to a place where the mountains thrust down upon the sea and leave but a narrow road by the ocean. Your slaves found certain Hellenes, rebels against your benignant government, holding a wall and barring all passage to your army.”“And did you not forthwith seize these impudent wretches and drag them hither to be judged by me?”“Compassion, Omnipotence,”—the messenger trembled,—“they seemed sturdy, well-armed rogues, and the way was narrow and steep where a score can face a thousand. Therefore, your slave came straight with his tidings to the ever gracious king.”“Dog! Coward!”Xerxes plucked the whip from the charioteer’s hand and lashed it over the wretch’s shoulders.“By thefravashi, the soul of Darius my father, no man shall bring so foul a word to me and live!”[pg 218]“Compassion, Omnipotence, compassion!”groaned the man, writhing like a worm. Already the master-of-punishments was approaching to cover his face with a towel, preparatory to the bow-string, but the royal anger spent itself just enough to avert a tragedy.“Your life is forfeit, but I am all too merciful! Take then three hundred stripes on the soles of your feet and live to be braver in the future.”“A thousand blessings on your benignity,”cried the captain, as they led him away,“I congratulate myself that insignificant as I am the king yet deigns to notice my existence even to recompense my shortcomings.”“Off,”ordered the bristling monarch,“or you die the death yet. And do you, Mardonius, take Prexaspes, who somewhat knows this country, spur forward, and discover who are the madmen thus earning their destruction.”The command was obeyed. Glaucon galloped beside the Prince, overtaking the marching army, until as they cantered into the little mud-walled city of Heraclea a second messenger from the van met them with further details.“The pass is held by seven thousand Grecian men-at-arms. There are no Athenians. There are three hundred come from Sparta.”“And their chief?”asked Glaucon, leaning eagerly.“Is Leonidas of Lacedæmon.”“Then, O Mardonius,”spoke the Athenian, with a throb in his voice not there an hour ago.“There will be battle.”So, whether wise men or mad, the Hellenes were not to lay down their arms without one struggle, and Glaucon knew not whether to be sorry or to be proud.[pg 219]CHAPTER XXTHERMOPYLÆA rugged mountain, an inaccessible morass, and beyond that morass the sea: the mountain thrusting so close upon the morass as barely to leave space for a narrow wagon road. This was the western gate of Thermopylæ. Behind the narrow defile the mountain and swamp-land drew asunder; in the still scanty opening hot springs gushed forth, sacred to Heracles, then again on the eastern side Mt. Œta and the impenetrable swamp drew together, forming the second of the“Hot Gates,”—the gates which Xerxes must unlock if he would continue his march to Athens.The Great King’s couriers reported that the stubborn Hellenes had cast a wall across the entrance, and that so far from showing terror at the advent of majesty, were carelessly diverting themselves by athletic games, and by combing and adorning their hair, a fact which the“Lord Prexaspes”at least comprehended to mean that Leonidas and his Spartans were preparing for desperate battle. Nevertheless, it was hard to persuade the king that at last he confronted men who would resist him to his face. Glaucon said it. Demaratus, the outlawed Spartan, said it. Xerxes, however, remained angry and incredulous. Four long days he and his army sat before the pass,“because,”announced his couriers,“he wishes in his benignity to give these madmen a chance to flee away and shun destruction;”[pg 220]“because,”spoke those nearest to Mardonius, the brain of the army,“there is hot fighting ahead, and the general is resolved to bring up the picked troops in the rear before risking a battle.”Then on the fifth day either Xerxes’s patience was exhausted or Mardonius felt ready. Strong regiments of Median infantry were ordered to charge Leonidas’s position, Xerxes not failing to command that they slay as few of the wretches as possible, but drag them prisoners before his outraged presence.A noble charge. A terrible repulse. For the first time those Asiatics who had forgotten Marathon discovered the overwhelming superiority that the sheathing of heavy armour gave the Greek hoplites over the lighter armed Median spearmen. The short lances and wooden targets of the attackers were pitifully futile against the long spears and brazen shields of the Hellenes. In the narrow pass the vast numbers of Barbarians went for nothing. They could not use their archers, they could not charge with their magnificent cavalry. The dead lay in heaps. The Medes attacked again and again. At last an end came to their courage. The captains laid the lash over their mutinous troops. The men bore the whips in sullen silence. They would not charge again upon those devouring spears.White with anger, Xerxes turned to Hydarnes and his“Immortals,”the infantry of the Life Guard. The general needed no second bidding. The charge was driven home with magnificent spirit. But what the vassal Medes could not accomplish, neither could the lordly Persians. The repulse was bloody. If once Leonidas’s line broke and the Persians rushed on with howls of triumph, it was only to see the Hellenes’ files close in a twinkling and return to the onset with their foes in confusion. Hydarnes led back his men[pg 221]at last. The king sat on the ivory throne just out of arrow shot, watching the ebb and flow of the battle. Hydarnes approached and prostrated himself.“Omnipotence, I the least of your slaves put my life at your bidding. Command that I forfeit my head, but my men can do no more. I have lost hundreds. The pass is not to be stormed.”Only the murmur of assent from all the well-tried generals about the throne saved Hydarnes from paying the last penalty. The king’s rage was fearful; men trembled to look on him. His words came so thick, the rest could never follow all his curses and commands. Only Mardonius was bold enough to stand up before his face.“Your Eternity, this is an unlucky day. Is it not sacred to Angra-Mainyu the Evil? The arch-Magian says the holy fire gives forth sparks of ill-omen. Wait, then, till to-morrow. Verethraghna, the Angel of Victory, will then return to your servants.”The bow-bearer led his trembling master to the royal tent, and naught more of Xerxes was seen till the morning. All that night Mardonius never slept, but went unceasingly the round of the host preparing for battle. Glaucon saw little of him. The Athenian himself had been posted among the guard of nobles directly about the person of the king, and he was glad he was set nowhere else, otherwise he might have been ordered to join in the attack. Like every other in the host, he slept under arms, and never returned to Mardonius’s pavilion. His heart had been in his eyes all that day. He had believed Leonidas would be swept from the pass at the first onset. Even he had underrated the Spartan prowess. The repulse of the Medes had astonished him. When Hydarnes reeled back, he could hardly conceal his joy. The Hellenes were fighting! The Hellenes were conquering![pg 222]He forgot he stood almost at Xerxes’s side when the last charge failed; and barely in time did he save himself from joining in the shout of triumph raised by the defenders when the decimated Immortals slunk away. He had grown intensely proud of his countrymen, and when he heard the startled Persian lords muttering dark forbodings of the morrow, he all but laughed his gladness in their faces.So the night passed for him: the hard earth for a bed, a water cruse wrapped in a cloak for a pillow. And just as the first red blush stole over the green Malian bay and the mist-hung hills of Eubœa beyond, he woke with all the army. Mardonius had used the night well. Chosen contingents from every corps were ready. Cavalrymen had been dismounted. Heavy masses of Assyrian archers and Arabian slingers were advanced to prepare for the attack by overwhelming volleys. The Persian noblemen, stung to madness by their king’s reproaches and their own sense of shame, bound themselves by fearful oaths never to draw from the onset until victorious or dead. The attack itself was led by princes of the blood, royal half-brothers of the king. Xerxes sat again on the ivory throne, assured by every obsequious tongue that the sacred fire gave fair omens, that to-day was the day of victory.The attack was magnificent. For an instant its fury seemed to carry the Hellenes back. Where a Persian fell two stepped over him. The defenders were swept against their wall. The Barbarians appeared to be storming it. Then like the tide the battle turned. The hoplites, locking shields, presented an impenetrable spear hedge. The charge spent itself in empty promise. Mardonius, who had been in the thickest, nevertheless drew off his men skilfully and prepared to renew the combat.In the interval Glaucon, standing by the king, could see a short, firm figure in black armour going in and out among the[pg 223]Hellenes, ordering their array—Leonidas—he needed no bird to tell him. And as the Athenian stood and watched, saw the Persians mass their files for another battering charge, saw the Great King twist his beard whilst his gleaming eyes followed the fate of his army, an impulse nigh irresistible came over him to run one short bow-shot to that opposite array, and cry in his own Greek tongue:—“I am a Hellene, too! Look on me come to join you, to live and die with you, with my face against the Barbarian!”Cruel the fate that set him here, impotent, when on that band of countrymen Queen Nikē was shedding bright glory!But he was“Glaucon the Traitor”still, to be awarded the traitor’s doom by Leonidas. Therefore the“Lord Prexaspes”must stand at his post, guarding the king of the Aryans.The second charge was as the first, the third was as the second. Mardonius was full of recourses. By repeated attacks he strove to wear the stubborn Hellenes down. The Persians proved their courage seven times. Ten of them died gladly, if their deaths bought that of a single foe. But few as were Leonidas’s numbers, they were not so few as to fail to relieve one another at the front of the press,—which front was fearfully narrow. And three times, as his men drifted back in defeat, Xerxes the king“leaped from the throne whereon he sat, in anguish for his army.”At noon new contingents from the rear took the place of the exhausted attackers. The sun beat down with unpitying heat. The wounded lay sweltering in their agony whilst the battle roared over them. Mardonius never stopped to count his dead. Then at last came nightfall. Man could do no more. As the shadows from Œta grew long over the close scene of combat, even the proudest Persians turned away. They had lost thousands. Their defeat was absolute.[pg 224]Before them and to westward and far away ranged the jagged mountains, report had it, unthreaded by a single pass. To the eastward was only the sea,—the sea closed to them by the Greek fleet at the unseen haven of Artemisium. Was the triumph march of the Lord of the World to end in this?Xerxes spoke no word when they took him to his tent that night, a sign of indescribable anger. Fear, humiliation, rage—all these seemed driving him mad. His chamberlains and eunuchs feared to approach to take off his golden armour. Mardonius came to the royal tent; the king, with curses he had never hurled against the bow-bearer before, refused to see him. The battle was ended. No one was hardy enough to talk of a fresh attack on the morrow. Every captain had to report the loss of scores of his best. As Glaucon rode back to Mardonius’s tents, he overheard two infantry officers:—“A fearful day—the bow-bearer is likely to pay for it. I hope his Majesty confines his anger only to him.”“Yes—Mardonius will walk the Chinvat bridge to-morrow. The king is turning against him. Megabyzus is the bow-bearer’s enemy, and already is gone to his Majesty to say that it is Mardonius’s blunders that have brought the army to such a plight. The king will catch at that readily.”At the tents Glaucon found Artazostra and Roxana. They were both pale. The news of the great defeat had been brought by a dozen messengers. Mardonius had not arrived. He was not slain, that was certain, but Artazostra feared the worst. The proud daughter of Darius found it hard to bear up.“My husband has many enemies. Hitherto the king’s favour has allowed him to mock them. But if my brother deserts him, his ruin is speedy. Ah! Ahura-Mazda, why hast Thou suffered us to see this day?”Glaucon said what he could of comfort, which was little.[pg 225]Roxana wept piteously; he was fain to soothe her by his caress,—something he had never ventured before. Artazostra was on the point of calling her eunuchs and setting forth for Xerxes’s tent to plead for the life of her husband, when suddenly Pharnuches, Mardonius’s body-servant, came with news that dispelled at least the fears of the women.“I am bidden to tell your Ladyships that my master has silenced the tongues of his enemies and is restored to the king’s good favor. And I am bidden also to command the Lord Prexaspes to come to the royal tent. His Majesty has need of him.”Glaucon went, questioning much as to the service to be required. He did not soon forget the scene that followed. The great pavilion was lit by a score of resinous flambeaux. The red light shook over the green and purple hangings, the silver plating of the tent-poles. At one end rose the golden throne of the king; before it in a semicircle the stools of a dozen or more princes and commanders. In the centre stood Mardonius questioning a coarse-featured, ill-favoured fellow, who by his sheepskin dress and leggings Glaucon instantly recognized as a peasant of this Malian country. The king beckoned the Athenian into the midst and was clearly too eager to stand on ceremony.“Your Greek is better than Mardonius’s, good Prexaspes. In a matter like this we dare not trust too many interpreters. This man speaks the rough dialect of his country, and few can understand him. Can you interpret?”“I am passing familiar with the Locrian and Malian dialect, your Majesty.”“Question this man further as to what he will do for us. We have understood him but lamely.”Glaucon proceeded to comply. The man, who was exceeding awkward and ill at ease in such august company,[pg 226]spoke an outrageous shepherd’s jargon which even the Athenian understood with effort. But his business came out speedily. He was Ephialtes, the son of one Eurydemus, a Malian, a dull-witted grazier of the country, brought to Mardonius by hope of reward. The general, partly understanding his purpose, had brought him to the king. In brief, he was prepared, for due compensation, to lead the Persians by an almost unknown mountain path over the ridge of Œta and to the rear of Leonidas’s position at Thermopylæ, where the Hellenes, assailed front and rear, would inevitably be destroyed.As Glaucon interpreted, the shout of relieved gladness from the Persian grandees made the tent-cloths shake. Xerxes’s eyes kindled. He clapped his hands.“Reward? He shall have ten talents! But where? How?”The man asserted that the path was easy and practicable for a large body of troops. He had often been over it with his sheep and goats. If the Persians would start a force at once—it was already quite dark—they could fall upon Leonidas at dawn. The Spartan would be completely trapped, or forced to open the defile without another spear thrust.“A care, fellow,”warned Mardonius, regarding the man sharply;“you speak glibly, but if this is a trick to lead a band of the king’s servants to destruction, understand you play with deadly dice. If the troops march, you shall have your hands knotted together and a soldier walking behind to cut your throat at the first sign of treachery.”Glaucon interpreted the threat. The man did not wince.“There is no trap. I will guide you.”That was all they could get him to say.[pg 227]“And do not the Hellenes know of this mountain path and guard it?”persisted the bow-bearer.Ephialtes thought not; at least if they had, they had not told off any efficient detachment to guard it. Hydarnes cut the matter short by rising from his stool and casting himself before the king.“A boon, your Eternity, a boon!”“What is it?”asked the monarch.“The Immortals have been disgraced. Twice they have been repulsed with ignominy. The shame burns hot in their breasts. Suffer them to redeem their honour. Suffer me to take this man and all the infantry of the Life Guard, and at dawn the Lord of the World shall see his desire over his miserable enemies.”“The words of Hydarnes are good,”added Mardonius, incisively, and Xerxes beamed and nodded assent.“Go, scale the mountain with the Immortals and tell this Ephialtes there await him ten talents and a girdle of honour if the thing goes well; if ill, let him be flayed alive and his skin be made the head of a kettledrum.”The stolid peasant did not blench even at this. Glaucon remained in the tent, translating and hearing all the details: how Hydarnes was to press the attack from the rear at early dawn, how Mardonius was to conduct another onset from the front. At last the general of the guard knelt before the king for the last time.“Thus I go forth, Omnipotence, and to-morrow, behold your will upon your enemies, or behold me never more.”“I have faithful slaves,”said Xerxes, rising and smiling benignantly upon the general and the bow-bearer.“Let us disperse, but first let command be given the Magians to cry all night to Mithra and Tishtrya, and to sacrifice to them a white horse.”[pg 228]“Your Majesty always enlists the blessings of heaven for your servants,”bowed Mardonius, as the company broke up and the king went away to his inner tent and his concubines. Glaucon lingered until most of the grandees had gone forth, then the bow-bearer went to him.“Go back to my tents,”ordered Mardonius;“tell Artazostra and Roxana that all is well, that Ahura has delivered me from a great strait and restored me to the king’s favour, and that to-morrow the gate of Hellas will be opened.”“You are still bloody and dusty. You have watched all last night and been in the thick all day,”expostulated the Athenian;“come to the tents with me and rest.”The bow-bearer shook his head.“No rest until to-morrow, and then the rest of victory or a longer one. Now go; the women are consuming with their care.”Glaucon wandered back through the long avenues of pavilions. The lights of innumerable camp-fires, the hum of thousands of voices, the snorting of horses, the grumbling of camels, the groans of men wounded—all these and all other sights and sounds from the countless host were lost to him. He walked on by a kind of animal instinct that took him to Mardonius’s encampment through the mazes of the canvas city. It was dawning on him with a terrible clearness that he was become a traitor to Hellas in very deed. It was one thing to be a passive onlooker of a battle, another to be a participant in a plot for the ruin of Leonidas. Unless warned betimes the Spartan king and all who followed him infallibly would be captured or slaughtered to a man. And he had heard all—the traitor, the discussion, the design—had even, if without his choice, been partner and helper in the same. The blood of Leonidas and his men would be on his head. Every curse the Athenians had heaped on him[pg 229]once unjustly, he would deserve. Now truly he would be, even in his own mind’s eyes,“Glaucon the Traitor, partner to the betrayal of Thermopylæ.”The doltish peasant, lured by the great reward, he might forgive,—himself, the high-born Alcmæonid, never.From this revery he was shaken by finding himself at the entrance to the tents of Mardonius. Artazostra and Roxana came to meet him. When he told of the deliverance of the bow-bearer, he had joy by the light in their eyes. Roxana had never shone in greater beauty. He spoke of the heat of the sun, of his throbbing head. The women bathed his forehead with lavender-water, touching him with their own soft hands. Roxana sang again to him, a low, crooning song of the fragrant Nile, the lotus bells, the nodding palms, the perfumed breeze from the desert. Whilst he watched her through half-closed eyes, the visions of that day of battles left him. He sat wrapped in a dream world, far from stern realities of men and arms. So for a while, as he lounged on the divans, following the play of thetorch-lighton the face of Roxana as her long fingers plied the strings. What was it to him if Leonidas fought a losing battle? Was not his happiness secure—be it in Hellas, or Egypt, or Bactria? He tried to persuade himself thus. At the end, when he and Roxana stood face to face for the parting, he violated all Oriental custom, yet he knew her brother would not be angry. He took her in his arms and gave her kiss for kiss.Then he went to his own tent to seek rest. But Hypnos did not come for a long time with his poppies. Once out of the Egyptian’s presence the haunting terror had returned,“Glaucon the Traitor!”Those three words were always uppermost. At last, indeed, sleep came and as he slept he dreamed.
[pg 209]CHAPTER XIXTHE COMMANDMENT OF XERXESIt is easy to praise the blessings of peace. Still easier to paint the horrors of war,—and yet war will remain for all time the greatest game at which human wits can play. For in it every form of courage, physical and moral, and every talent are called into being. If war at once develops the bestial, it also develops as promptly the heroic. Alone of human activities it demands a brute’s strength, an iron will, a serpent’s intellect, a lion’s courage—all in one. And of him who has these things in justest measure, history writes,“He conquered.”It was because Mardonius seemed to possess all these, to foresee everything, to surmount everything, that Glaucon despaired for the fate of Hellas, even more than when he beheld the crushing armaments of the Persian.Yet for long it seemed as if the host would march even to Athens without battle, without invoking Mardonius’s skill. The king crossed Thrace and Macedonia, meeting only trembling hospitality from the cities along his route. At Doriscus he had held a review of his army, and smiled when the fawning scribes told how one million seven hundred thousand foot and eighty thousand horse followed his banners.8Every fugitive and spy from southern Hellas told how the hearts of the stanchest patriots were sinking, how everywhere save in Athens and Sparta loud voices urged the[pg 210]sending of“earth and water,”—tokens of submission to the irresistible king. At the pass of Tempē covering Thessaly, Glaucon, who knew the hopes of Themistocles, had been certain the Hellenes would make a stand. Rumour had it that ten thousand Greek infantry were indeed there, and ready for battle. But the outlaw’s expectations were utterly shattered. To the disgust of the Persian lords, who dearly loved brisk fighting, it was soon told how the cowardly Hellenes had fled by ship, leaving the rich plains of Thessaly bare to the invader.Thus was blasted Glaucon’s last hope. Hellas was doomed. He almost looked to see Themistocles coming as ambassador to bring the homage of Athens. Since his old life seemed closed to the outlaw, he allowed Mardonius to have his will with him,—to teach him to act, speak, think, as an Oriental. He even bowed himself low before the king, an act rewarded by being commanded one evening to play at dice with majesty itself. Xerxes was actually gracious enough to let his new subject win from him three handsome Syrian slave-boys.“You Hellenes are becoming wise,”announced the monarch one day, when the Locrian envoys came with their earth and water.“If you can learn to speak the truth, you will equal even the virtues of the Aryans.”“Your Majesty has not found me a liar,”rejoined the Athenian, warmly.“You gather our virtues apace. I must consider how I can reward you by promotion.”“The king is overwhelmingly generous. Already I fear many of his servants mutter that I am promoted beyond all desert.”“Mutter? mutter against you?”The king’s eyes flashed ominously.“By Mazda, it is against me, then, who advanced[pg 211]you! Hearken, Otanes,”—he addressed the general of the Persian footmen, who stood near by,—“who are the disobedient slaves who question my advancement of Prexaspes?”The general—he had been the loudest grumbler—bowed and kissed the carpet.“None, your Eternity; on the contrary, there is not one Aryan in the host who does not rejoice the king has found so noble an object for his godlike bounty.”“You hear, Prexaspes,”said Xerxes, mollified.“I am glad, for the man who questions my wisdom touching your advancement must be impaled. To-morrow is my birthday, you will not fail to sit with the other great lords at the banquet.”“The king overpowers me with his goodness.”“Do not fail to deserve it. Mardonius is always praising you. Consider also how much better it is to depend on a gracious king than on the clamour of the fickle mob that rules in your helpless cities!”* * * * * * *The next morning was the royal birthday. The army, pitched in the fertile plain by Thessalian Larissa, feasted on the abundance at hand. The king distributed huge largesses of money. All day long he sat in his palace-like tent, receiving congratulations from even the lowest of his followers, and bound in turn not to reject any reasonable petition. The Magi sacrificed blooded stallions and rare spices to Mithra the“Lord of Wide Pastures,”to Vohu-Manu the“Holy Councillor,”and all their other angels, desiring them to bless the arms of the king.The“Perfect Banquet”of the birthday came in the evening. It hardly differed from the feast at Sardis. The royal pavilion had its poles plated with silver, the tapestries[pg 212]were green and purple, the couches were spread with gorgeous coverlets. Only the drinking was more moderate, the ceremonial less rigid. The fortunate guests devoured dainties reserved for the special use of royalty: the flour of the bread was from Assos, the wine from Helbon, the water to dilute the wine had come in silver flasks from the Choaspes by Susa. The king even distributed the special unguent of lion’s fat and palm wine which no subject, unpermitted, could use and shun the death penalty.Then at the end certain of the fairest of the women came and danced unveiled before the king—this one night when they might show forth their beauty. And last of all danced Roxana. She danced alone; a diaphanous drapery of pink Egyptian cotton blew around her as an evening cloud. From her black hair shone the diamond coronet. To the sensuous swing of the music she wound in and out before the king and his admiring lords, advancing, retreating, rising, swaying, a paragon of agility and grace, feet, body, hands, weaving their charm together. When at the end she fell on her knees before the king, demanding whether she had done well, the applause shook the pavilion. The king looked down on her, smiling.“Rise, sister of Mardonius. All Eran rejoices in you to-night. And on this evening whose request can I fail to grant? Whose can I grant more gladly than yours? Speak; you shall have it, though it be for half my kingdoms.”The dancer arose, but hung down her flashing coronal. Her blush was enchanting. She stood silent, while the good-humoured king smiled down on her, till Artazostra came from her seat by Mardonius and whispered in her ear. Every neck in the crowded pavilion was craned as Artazostra spoke to Xerxes.“May it please my royal brother, this is the word of Rox[pg 213]ana.‘I love my brother Mardonius; nevertheless, contrary to the Persian custom, he keeps me now to my nineteenth year unwedded. If now I have found favour in the sight of the king, let him command Mardonius to give me to some noble youth who shall do me honour by the valiant deeds and the true service he shall render unto my Lord.’”“A fair petition! Let the king grant it!”shouted twenty; while others more wise whispered,“This was not done without foreknowledge by Mardonius.”Xerxes smiled benignantly and rubbed his nose with the lion’s fat while deliberating.“An evil precedent, lady, an evil precedent when women demand husbands and do not wait for their fathers’ or brothers’ good pleasure. But I have promised. The word of the king is not to be broken. Daughter of Gobryas, your petition is granted. Come hither, Mardonius,”—the bow-bearer approached the throne,—“you have heard the bold desire of your sister, and my answer. I must command you to bestow on her a husband.”The bow-bearer bowed obediently.“I hear the word of the king, and all his mandates are good. This is no meet time for marriage festivities, when the Lord of the World and all the Aryan power goes forth to war. Yet as soon as the impious rebels amongst the Hellenes shall be subdued, I will rejoice to bestow my sister upon whatsoever fortunate servant the king may deign to honour.”“You hear him, lady,”—the royal features assumed a grin, which was reflected throughout the pavilion.“A husband you shall have, but Mardonius shall be revenged. Your fate is in my hands. And shall not I,—guardian of the households of my empire,—give a warning to all bold maidens against lifting their wills too proudly, or presuming upon an overindulgent king? What then shall be just[pg 214]punishment?”The king bent his head, still rubbing his nose, and trying to persuade all about that he was meditating.“Bardas, satrap of Sogandia, is old; he has but one eye; they say he beats his eleven wives daily with a whip of rhinoceros hide. It would be just if I gave him this woman also in marriage. What think you, Hydarnes?”“If your Eternity bestows this woman on Bardas, every husband and father in all your kingdoms will applaud your act,”smiled the commander.The threatened lady fell again on her knees, outstretching her hands and beseeching mercy,—never a more charming picture of misery and contrition.“You tremble, lady,”went on the sovran,“and justly. It were better for my empire if my heart were less hard. After all, you danced so elegantly that I must be mollified. There is the young Prince Zophyrus, son of Datis the general,—he has only five wives already. True, he is usually the worse for wine, is not handsome, and killed one of his women not long since because she did not sing to please him. Yes—you shall have Zophyrus—he will surely rule you—”“Mercy, not Zophyrus, gracious Lord,”pleaded the abject Egyptian.The king looked down on her, with a broader grin than ever.“You are very hard to please. I ought to punish your wilfulness by some dreadful doom. Do not cry out again. I will not hear you. My decision is fixed. Mardonius shall bestow you in marriage to a man who is not even a Persian by birth, who one year since was a disobedient rebel against my power, who even now contemns and despises many of the good customs of the Aryans. Hark, then, to his name. When Hellas is conquered, I command that Mardonius wed you to the Lord Prexaspes.”[pg 215]The king broke into an uproarious laugh, a signal for the thousand loyal subjects within the great pavilion to roar with laughter also. In the confusion following Artazostra and Roxana disappeared. Fifty hands dragged the appointed bridegroom to the king, showering on him all manner of congratulations. Xerxes’s act was a plain proof that he was adopting the beautiful Hellene as one of his personal favourites,—a post of influence and honour not to be despised by a vizier. What“Prexaspes”said when he thanked the king was drowned in the tumult of laughing and cheering. The monarch, delighted to play the gracious god, roared his injunctions to the Athenian so loud that above the din they heard him.“You will bridle her well, Prexaspes. I know them—those Egyptian fillies! They need a hard curb and the lash at times. Beware the tyranny of your own harem. I would not have the satrapies know how certain bright eyes in the seraglio can make the son of Darius play the fool. There is nothing more dangerous than women. It will take all your courage to master them. A hard task lies before you. I have given you one wife, but you know our good Persian custom—five, ten, or twenty. Take the score, I order you. Then in twelve years you’ll be receiving the prize a Persian king bestows every summer on the father of the most children!”And following this broad hint, the king held his sides with laughter again, a mirth which it is needless to say was echoed and reëchoed till it seemed it could not cease. Only a few ventured to mutter under breath:“The Hellene will have a subsatrapy in the East before the season is over and a treasure of five thousand talents! Mithra wither the upstart!”* * * * * * *The summer was waning when the host moved southward[pg 216]from Larissa, for mere numbers had made progress slow, and despite Mardonius’s providence the question of commissariat sometimes became difficult. Now at last, leaving behind Thrace and Macedonia, the army began to enter Greece itself. As it fared across the teeming plains of Thessaly, it met only welcome from the inhabitants and submissions from fresh embassies. Report came from the fleet—keeping pace with the land army along the coasts—that nowhere had the weak squadrons of the Greeks adventured a stand. Daily the smile of the Lord of the World grew more complacent, as his“table-companions”told him:“The rumour of your Eternity’s advent stupefies the miserable Hellenes. Like Atar, the Angel of Fire, your splendour glitters afar. You will enter Athens and Sparta, and no sword leave its sheath, no bow its wrapper.”Every day Mardonius asked of Glaucon,“Will your Hellenes fight?”and the answer was ever more doubting,“I do not know.”Long since Glaucon had given up hope of the defeat of the Persian. Now he prayed devoutly there might be no useless shedding of blood. If only he could turn back and not behold the humiliation of Athens! Of the fate of the old-time friends—Democrates, Cimon, Hermione—he tried not to think. No doubt Hermione was the wife of Democrates. More than a year had sped since the flight from Colonus. Hermione had put off her mourning for the yellow veil of a bride. Glaucon prayed the war might bring her no new sorrow, though Democrates, of course, would resist Persia to the end. As for himself he would never darken their eyes again. He was betrothed to Roxana. With her he would seek one of those valleys in Bactria which she had praised, the remoter the better, and there perhaps was peace.[pg 217]Thus the host wound through Thessaly, till before them rose, peak on peak, the jagged mountain wall of Othrys and Œta, fading away in violet distance, the bulwark of central Hellas. Then the king’s smile became a frown, for the Hellenes, undismayed despite his might, were assembling their fleet at northern Eubœa, and at the same time a tempest had shattered a large part of the royal navy. The Magi offered sacrifice to appease Tishtrya, the Prince of the Wind-ruling Stars, but the king’s frown grew blacker at each message. Glaucon was near him when at last the monarch’s thunders broke forth.A hot, sultry day. The king’s chariot had just crossed the mountain stream of the Sphercus, when a captain of a hundred came galloping, dismounted, and prostrated himself in the dust.“Your tidings?”demanded Xerxes, sharply.“Be gracious, Fountain of Mercy,”—the captain evidently disliked his mission,—“I am sent from the van. We came to a place where the mountains thrust down upon the sea and leave but a narrow road by the ocean. Your slaves found certain Hellenes, rebels against your benignant government, holding a wall and barring all passage to your army.”“And did you not forthwith seize these impudent wretches and drag them hither to be judged by me?”“Compassion, Omnipotence,”—the messenger trembled,—“they seemed sturdy, well-armed rogues, and the way was narrow and steep where a score can face a thousand. Therefore, your slave came straight with his tidings to the ever gracious king.”“Dog! Coward!”Xerxes plucked the whip from the charioteer’s hand and lashed it over the wretch’s shoulders.“By thefravashi, the soul of Darius my father, no man shall bring so foul a word to me and live!”[pg 218]“Compassion, Omnipotence, compassion!”groaned the man, writhing like a worm. Already the master-of-punishments was approaching to cover his face with a towel, preparatory to the bow-string, but the royal anger spent itself just enough to avert a tragedy.“Your life is forfeit, but I am all too merciful! Take then three hundred stripes on the soles of your feet and live to be braver in the future.”“A thousand blessings on your benignity,”cried the captain, as they led him away,“I congratulate myself that insignificant as I am the king yet deigns to notice my existence even to recompense my shortcomings.”“Off,”ordered the bristling monarch,“or you die the death yet. And do you, Mardonius, take Prexaspes, who somewhat knows this country, spur forward, and discover who are the madmen thus earning their destruction.”The command was obeyed. Glaucon galloped beside the Prince, overtaking the marching army, until as they cantered into the little mud-walled city of Heraclea a second messenger from the van met them with further details.“The pass is held by seven thousand Grecian men-at-arms. There are no Athenians. There are three hundred come from Sparta.”“And their chief?”asked Glaucon, leaning eagerly.“Is Leonidas of Lacedæmon.”“Then, O Mardonius,”spoke the Athenian, with a throb in his voice not there an hour ago.“There will be battle.”So, whether wise men or mad, the Hellenes were not to lay down their arms without one struggle, and Glaucon knew not whether to be sorry or to be proud.
It is easy to praise the blessings of peace. Still easier to paint the horrors of war,—and yet war will remain for all time the greatest game at which human wits can play. For in it every form of courage, physical and moral, and every talent are called into being. If war at once develops the bestial, it also develops as promptly the heroic. Alone of human activities it demands a brute’s strength, an iron will, a serpent’s intellect, a lion’s courage—all in one. And of him who has these things in justest measure, history writes,“He conquered.”It was because Mardonius seemed to possess all these, to foresee everything, to surmount everything, that Glaucon despaired for the fate of Hellas, even more than when he beheld the crushing armaments of the Persian.
Yet for long it seemed as if the host would march even to Athens without battle, without invoking Mardonius’s skill. The king crossed Thrace and Macedonia, meeting only trembling hospitality from the cities along his route. At Doriscus he had held a review of his army, and smiled when the fawning scribes told how one million seven hundred thousand foot and eighty thousand horse followed his banners.8Every fugitive and spy from southern Hellas told how the hearts of the stanchest patriots were sinking, how everywhere save in Athens and Sparta loud voices urged the[pg 210]sending of“earth and water,”—tokens of submission to the irresistible king. At the pass of Tempē covering Thessaly, Glaucon, who knew the hopes of Themistocles, had been certain the Hellenes would make a stand. Rumour had it that ten thousand Greek infantry were indeed there, and ready for battle. But the outlaw’s expectations were utterly shattered. To the disgust of the Persian lords, who dearly loved brisk fighting, it was soon told how the cowardly Hellenes had fled by ship, leaving the rich plains of Thessaly bare to the invader.
Thus was blasted Glaucon’s last hope. Hellas was doomed. He almost looked to see Themistocles coming as ambassador to bring the homage of Athens. Since his old life seemed closed to the outlaw, he allowed Mardonius to have his will with him,—to teach him to act, speak, think, as an Oriental. He even bowed himself low before the king, an act rewarded by being commanded one evening to play at dice with majesty itself. Xerxes was actually gracious enough to let his new subject win from him three handsome Syrian slave-boys.
“You Hellenes are becoming wise,”announced the monarch one day, when the Locrian envoys came with their earth and water.“If you can learn to speak the truth, you will equal even the virtues of the Aryans.”
“Your Majesty has not found me a liar,”rejoined the Athenian, warmly.
“You gather our virtues apace. I must consider how I can reward you by promotion.”
“The king is overwhelmingly generous. Already I fear many of his servants mutter that I am promoted beyond all desert.”
“Mutter? mutter against you?”The king’s eyes flashed ominously.“By Mazda, it is against me, then, who advanced[pg 211]you! Hearken, Otanes,”—he addressed the general of the Persian footmen, who stood near by,—“who are the disobedient slaves who question my advancement of Prexaspes?”
The general—he had been the loudest grumbler—bowed and kissed the carpet.
“None, your Eternity; on the contrary, there is not one Aryan in the host who does not rejoice the king has found so noble an object for his godlike bounty.”
“You hear, Prexaspes,”said Xerxes, mollified.“I am glad, for the man who questions my wisdom touching your advancement must be impaled. To-morrow is my birthday, you will not fail to sit with the other great lords at the banquet.”
“The king overpowers me with his goodness.”
“Do not fail to deserve it. Mardonius is always praising you. Consider also how much better it is to depend on a gracious king than on the clamour of the fickle mob that rules in your helpless cities!”
* * * * * * *
The next morning was the royal birthday. The army, pitched in the fertile plain by Thessalian Larissa, feasted on the abundance at hand. The king distributed huge largesses of money. All day long he sat in his palace-like tent, receiving congratulations from even the lowest of his followers, and bound in turn not to reject any reasonable petition. The Magi sacrificed blooded stallions and rare spices to Mithra the“Lord of Wide Pastures,”to Vohu-Manu the“Holy Councillor,”and all their other angels, desiring them to bless the arms of the king.
The“Perfect Banquet”of the birthday came in the evening. It hardly differed from the feast at Sardis. The royal pavilion had its poles plated with silver, the tapestries[pg 212]were green and purple, the couches were spread with gorgeous coverlets. Only the drinking was more moderate, the ceremonial less rigid. The fortunate guests devoured dainties reserved for the special use of royalty: the flour of the bread was from Assos, the wine from Helbon, the water to dilute the wine had come in silver flasks from the Choaspes by Susa. The king even distributed the special unguent of lion’s fat and palm wine which no subject, unpermitted, could use and shun the death penalty.
Then at the end certain of the fairest of the women came and danced unveiled before the king—this one night when they might show forth their beauty. And last of all danced Roxana. She danced alone; a diaphanous drapery of pink Egyptian cotton blew around her as an evening cloud. From her black hair shone the diamond coronet. To the sensuous swing of the music she wound in and out before the king and his admiring lords, advancing, retreating, rising, swaying, a paragon of agility and grace, feet, body, hands, weaving their charm together. When at the end she fell on her knees before the king, demanding whether she had done well, the applause shook the pavilion. The king looked down on her, smiling.
“Rise, sister of Mardonius. All Eran rejoices in you to-night. And on this evening whose request can I fail to grant? Whose can I grant more gladly than yours? Speak; you shall have it, though it be for half my kingdoms.”
The dancer arose, but hung down her flashing coronal. Her blush was enchanting. She stood silent, while the good-humoured king smiled down on her, till Artazostra came from her seat by Mardonius and whispered in her ear. Every neck in the crowded pavilion was craned as Artazostra spoke to Xerxes.
“May it please my royal brother, this is the word of Rox[pg 213]ana.‘I love my brother Mardonius; nevertheless, contrary to the Persian custom, he keeps me now to my nineteenth year unwedded. If now I have found favour in the sight of the king, let him command Mardonius to give me to some noble youth who shall do me honour by the valiant deeds and the true service he shall render unto my Lord.’”
“A fair petition! Let the king grant it!”shouted twenty; while others more wise whispered,“This was not done without foreknowledge by Mardonius.”
Xerxes smiled benignantly and rubbed his nose with the lion’s fat while deliberating.
“An evil precedent, lady, an evil precedent when women demand husbands and do not wait for their fathers’ or brothers’ good pleasure. But I have promised. The word of the king is not to be broken. Daughter of Gobryas, your petition is granted. Come hither, Mardonius,”—the bow-bearer approached the throne,—“you have heard the bold desire of your sister, and my answer. I must command you to bestow on her a husband.”
The bow-bearer bowed obediently.
“I hear the word of the king, and all his mandates are good. This is no meet time for marriage festivities, when the Lord of the World and all the Aryan power goes forth to war. Yet as soon as the impious rebels amongst the Hellenes shall be subdued, I will rejoice to bestow my sister upon whatsoever fortunate servant the king may deign to honour.”
“You hear him, lady,”—the royal features assumed a grin, which was reflected throughout the pavilion.“A husband you shall have, but Mardonius shall be revenged. Your fate is in my hands. And shall not I,—guardian of the households of my empire,—give a warning to all bold maidens against lifting their wills too proudly, or presuming upon an overindulgent king? What then shall be just[pg 214]punishment?”The king bent his head, still rubbing his nose, and trying to persuade all about that he was meditating.
“Bardas, satrap of Sogandia, is old; he has but one eye; they say he beats his eleven wives daily with a whip of rhinoceros hide. It would be just if I gave him this woman also in marriage. What think you, Hydarnes?”
“If your Eternity bestows this woman on Bardas, every husband and father in all your kingdoms will applaud your act,”smiled the commander.
The threatened lady fell again on her knees, outstretching her hands and beseeching mercy,—never a more charming picture of misery and contrition.
“You tremble, lady,”went on the sovran,“and justly. It were better for my empire if my heart were less hard. After all, you danced so elegantly that I must be mollified. There is the young Prince Zophyrus, son of Datis the general,—he has only five wives already. True, he is usually the worse for wine, is not handsome, and killed one of his women not long since because she did not sing to please him. Yes—you shall have Zophyrus—he will surely rule you—”
“Mercy, not Zophyrus, gracious Lord,”pleaded the abject Egyptian.
The king looked down on her, with a broader grin than ever.
“You are very hard to please. I ought to punish your wilfulness by some dreadful doom. Do not cry out again. I will not hear you. My decision is fixed. Mardonius shall bestow you in marriage to a man who is not even a Persian by birth, who one year since was a disobedient rebel against my power, who even now contemns and despises many of the good customs of the Aryans. Hark, then, to his name. When Hellas is conquered, I command that Mardonius wed you to the Lord Prexaspes.”
The king broke into an uproarious laugh, a signal for the thousand loyal subjects within the great pavilion to roar with laughter also. In the confusion following Artazostra and Roxana disappeared. Fifty hands dragged the appointed bridegroom to the king, showering on him all manner of congratulations. Xerxes’s act was a plain proof that he was adopting the beautiful Hellene as one of his personal favourites,—a post of influence and honour not to be despised by a vizier. What“Prexaspes”said when he thanked the king was drowned in the tumult of laughing and cheering. The monarch, delighted to play the gracious god, roared his injunctions to the Athenian so loud that above the din they heard him.
“You will bridle her well, Prexaspes. I know them—those Egyptian fillies! They need a hard curb and the lash at times. Beware the tyranny of your own harem. I would not have the satrapies know how certain bright eyes in the seraglio can make the son of Darius play the fool. There is nothing more dangerous than women. It will take all your courage to master them. A hard task lies before you. I have given you one wife, but you know our good Persian custom—five, ten, or twenty. Take the score, I order you. Then in twelve years you’ll be receiving the prize a Persian king bestows every summer on the father of the most children!”
And following this broad hint, the king held his sides with laughter again, a mirth which it is needless to say was echoed and reëchoed till it seemed it could not cease. Only a few ventured to mutter under breath:“The Hellene will have a subsatrapy in the East before the season is over and a treasure of five thousand talents! Mithra wither the upstart!”
* * * * * * *
The summer was waning when the host moved southward[pg 216]from Larissa, for mere numbers had made progress slow, and despite Mardonius’s providence the question of commissariat sometimes became difficult. Now at last, leaving behind Thrace and Macedonia, the army began to enter Greece itself. As it fared across the teeming plains of Thessaly, it met only welcome from the inhabitants and submissions from fresh embassies. Report came from the fleet—keeping pace with the land army along the coasts—that nowhere had the weak squadrons of the Greeks adventured a stand. Daily the smile of the Lord of the World grew more complacent, as his“table-companions”told him:“The rumour of your Eternity’s advent stupefies the miserable Hellenes. Like Atar, the Angel of Fire, your splendour glitters afar. You will enter Athens and Sparta, and no sword leave its sheath, no bow its wrapper.”
Every day Mardonius asked of Glaucon,“Will your Hellenes fight?”and the answer was ever more doubting,“I do not know.”
Long since Glaucon had given up hope of the defeat of the Persian. Now he prayed devoutly there might be no useless shedding of blood. If only he could turn back and not behold the humiliation of Athens! Of the fate of the old-time friends—Democrates, Cimon, Hermione—he tried not to think. No doubt Hermione was the wife of Democrates. More than a year had sped since the flight from Colonus. Hermione had put off her mourning for the yellow veil of a bride. Glaucon prayed the war might bring her no new sorrow, though Democrates, of course, would resist Persia to the end. As for himself he would never darken their eyes again. He was betrothed to Roxana. With her he would seek one of those valleys in Bactria which she had praised, the remoter the better, and there perhaps was peace.
Thus the host wound through Thessaly, till before them rose, peak on peak, the jagged mountain wall of Othrys and Œta, fading away in violet distance, the bulwark of central Hellas. Then the king’s smile became a frown, for the Hellenes, undismayed despite his might, were assembling their fleet at northern Eubœa, and at the same time a tempest had shattered a large part of the royal navy. The Magi offered sacrifice to appease Tishtrya, the Prince of the Wind-ruling Stars, but the king’s frown grew blacker at each message. Glaucon was near him when at last the monarch’s thunders broke forth.
A hot, sultry day. The king’s chariot had just crossed the mountain stream of the Sphercus, when a captain of a hundred came galloping, dismounted, and prostrated himself in the dust.
“Your tidings?”demanded Xerxes, sharply.
“Be gracious, Fountain of Mercy,”—the captain evidently disliked his mission,—“I am sent from the van. We came to a place where the mountains thrust down upon the sea and leave but a narrow road by the ocean. Your slaves found certain Hellenes, rebels against your benignant government, holding a wall and barring all passage to your army.”
“And did you not forthwith seize these impudent wretches and drag them hither to be judged by me?”
“Compassion, Omnipotence,”—the messenger trembled,—“they seemed sturdy, well-armed rogues, and the way was narrow and steep where a score can face a thousand. Therefore, your slave came straight with his tidings to the ever gracious king.”
“Dog! Coward!”Xerxes plucked the whip from the charioteer’s hand and lashed it over the wretch’s shoulders.“By thefravashi, the soul of Darius my father, no man shall bring so foul a word to me and live!”
“Compassion, Omnipotence, compassion!”groaned the man, writhing like a worm. Already the master-of-punishments was approaching to cover his face with a towel, preparatory to the bow-string, but the royal anger spent itself just enough to avert a tragedy.
“Your life is forfeit, but I am all too merciful! Take then three hundred stripes on the soles of your feet and live to be braver in the future.”
“A thousand blessings on your benignity,”cried the captain, as they led him away,“I congratulate myself that insignificant as I am the king yet deigns to notice my existence even to recompense my shortcomings.”
“Off,”ordered the bristling monarch,“or you die the death yet. And do you, Mardonius, take Prexaspes, who somewhat knows this country, spur forward, and discover who are the madmen thus earning their destruction.”
The command was obeyed. Glaucon galloped beside the Prince, overtaking the marching army, until as they cantered into the little mud-walled city of Heraclea a second messenger from the van met them with further details.
“The pass is held by seven thousand Grecian men-at-arms. There are no Athenians. There are three hundred come from Sparta.”
“And their chief?”asked Glaucon, leaning eagerly.
“Is Leonidas of Lacedæmon.”
“Then, O Mardonius,”spoke the Athenian, with a throb in his voice not there an hour ago.“There will be battle.”
So, whether wise men or mad, the Hellenes were not to lay down their arms without one struggle, and Glaucon knew not whether to be sorry or to be proud.
[pg 219]CHAPTER XXTHERMOPYLÆA rugged mountain, an inaccessible morass, and beyond that morass the sea: the mountain thrusting so close upon the morass as barely to leave space for a narrow wagon road. This was the western gate of Thermopylæ. Behind the narrow defile the mountain and swamp-land drew asunder; in the still scanty opening hot springs gushed forth, sacred to Heracles, then again on the eastern side Mt. Œta and the impenetrable swamp drew together, forming the second of the“Hot Gates,”—the gates which Xerxes must unlock if he would continue his march to Athens.The Great King’s couriers reported that the stubborn Hellenes had cast a wall across the entrance, and that so far from showing terror at the advent of majesty, were carelessly diverting themselves by athletic games, and by combing and adorning their hair, a fact which the“Lord Prexaspes”at least comprehended to mean that Leonidas and his Spartans were preparing for desperate battle. Nevertheless, it was hard to persuade the king that at last he confronted men who would resist him to his face. Glaucon said it. Demaratus, the outlawed Spartan, said it. Xerxes, however, remained angry and incredulous. Four long days he and his army sat before the pass,“because,”announced his couriers,“he wishes in his benignity to give these madmen a chance to flee away and shun destruction;”[pg 220]“because,”spoke those nearest to Mardonius, the brain of the army,“there is hot fighting ahead, and the general is resolved to bring up the picked troops in the rear before risking a battle.”Then on the fifth day either Xerxes’s patience was exhausted or Mardonius felt ready. Strong regiments of Median infantry were ordered to charge Leonidas’s position, Xerxes not failing to command that they slay as few of the wretches as possible, but drag them prisoners before his outraged presence.A noble charge. A terrible repulse. For the first time those Asiatics who had forgotten Marathon discovered the overwhelming superiority that the sheathing of heavy armour gave the Greek hoplites over the lighter armed Median spearmen. The short lances and wooden targets of the attackers were pitifully futile against the long spears and brazen shields of the Hellenes. In the narrow pass the vast numbers of Barbarians went for nothing. They could not use their archers, they could not charge with their magnificent cavalry. The dead lay in heaps. The Medes attacked again and again. At last an end came to their courage. The captains laid the lash over their mutinous troops. The men bore the whips in sullen silence. They would not charge again upon those devouring spears.White with anger, Xerxes turned to Hydarnes and his“Immortals,”the infantry of the Life Guard. The general needed no second bidding. The charge was driven home with magnificent spirit. But what the vassal Medes could not accomplish, neither could the lordly Persians. The repulse was bloody. If once Leonidas’s line broke and the Persians rushed on with howls of triumph, it was only to see the Hellenes’ files close in a twinkling and return to the onset with their foes in confusion. Hydarnes led back his men[pg 221]at last. The king sat on the ivory throne just out of arrow shot, watching the ebb and flow of the battle. Hydarnes approached and prostrated himself.“Omnipotence, I the least of your slaves put my life at your bidding. Command that I forfeit my head, but my men can do no more. I have lost hundreds. The pass is not to be stormed.”Only the murmur of assent from all the well-tried generals about the throne saved Hydarnes from paying the last penalty. The king’s rage was fearful; men trembled to look on him. His words came so thick, the rest could never follow all his curses and commands. Only Mardonius was bold enough to stand up before his face.“Your Eternity, this is an unlucky day. Is it not sacred to Angra-Mainyu the Evil? The arch-Magian says the holy fire gives forth sparks of ill-omen. Wait, then, till to-morrow. Verethraghna, the Angel of Victory, will then return to your servants.”The bow-bearer led his trembling master to the royal tent, and naught more of Xerxes was seen till the morning. All that night Mardonius never slept, but went unceasingly the round of the host preparing for battle. Glaucon saw little of him. The Athenian himself had been posted among the guard of nobles directly about the person of the king, and he was glad he was set nowhere else, otherwise he might have been ordered to join in the attack. Like every other in the host, he slept under arms, and never returned to Mardonius’s pavilion. His heart had been in his eyes all that day. He had believed Leonidas would be swept from the pass at the first onset. Even he had underrated the Spartan prowess. The repulse of the Medes had astonished him. When Hydarnes reeled back, he could hardly conceal his joy. The Hellenes were fighting! The Hellenes were conquering![pg 222]He forgot he stood almost at Xerxes’s side when the last charge failed; and barely in time did he save himself from joining in the shout of triumph raised by the defenders when the decimated Immortals slunk away. He had grown intensely proud of his countrymen, and when he heard the startled Persian lords muttering dark forbodings of the morrow, he all but laughed his gladness in their faces.So the night passed for him: the hard earth for a bed, a water cruse wrapped in a cloak for a pillow. And just as the first red blush stole over the green Malian bay and the mist-hung hills of Eubœa beyond, he woke with all the army. Mardonius had used the night well. Chosen contingents from every corps were ready. Cavalrymen had been dismounted. Heavy masses of Assyrian archers and Arabian slingers were advanced to prepare for the attack by overwhelming volleys. The Persian noblemen, stung to madness by their king’s reproaches and their own sense of shame, bound themselves by fearful oaths never to draw from the onset until victorious or dead. The attack itself was led by princes of the blood, royal half-brothers of the king. Xerxes sat again on the ivory throne, assured by every obsequious tongue that the sacred fire gave fair omens, that to-day was the day of victory.The attack was magnificent. For an instant its fury seemed to carry the Hellenes back. Where a Persian fell two stepped over him. The defenders were swept against their wall. The Barbarians appeared to be storming it. Then like the tide the battle turned. The hoplites, locking shields, presented an impenetrable spear hedge. The charge spent itself in empty promise. Mardonius, who had been in the thickest, nevertheless drew off his men skilfully and prepared to renew the combat.In the interval Glaucon, standing by the king, could see a short, firm figure in black armour going in and out among the[pg 223]Hellenes, ordering their array—Leonidas—he needed no bird to tell him. And as the Athenian stood and watched, saw the Persians mass their files for another battering charge, saw the Great King twist his beard whilst his gleaming eyes followed the fate of his army, an impulse nigh irresistible came over him to run one short bow-shot to that opposite array, and cry in his own Greek tongue:—“I am a Hellene, too! Look on me come to join you, to live and die with you, with my face against the Barbarian!”Cruel the fate that set him here, impotent, when on that band of countrymen Queen Nikē was shedding bright glory!But he was“Glaucon the Traitor”still, to be awarded the traitor’s doom by Leonidas. Therefore the“Lord Prexaspes”must stand at his post, guarding the king of the Aryans.The second charge was as the first, the third was as the second. Mardonius was full of recourses. By repeated attacks he strove to wear the stubborn Hellenes down. The Persians proved their courage seven times. Ten of them died gladly, if their deaths bought that of a single foe. But few as were Leonidas’s numbers, they were not so few as to fail to relieve one another at the front of the press,—which front was fearfully narrow. And three times, as his men drifted back in defeat, Xerxes the king“leaped from the throne whereon he sat, in anguish for his army.”At noon new contingents from the rear took the place of the exhausted attackers. The sun beat down with unpitying heat. The wounded lay sweltering in their agony whilst the battle roared over them. Mardonius never stopped to count his dead. Then at last came nightfall. Man could do no more. As the shadows from Œta grew long over the close scene of combat, even the proudest Persians turned away. They had lost thousands. Their defeat was absolute.[pg 224]Before them and to westward and far away ranged the jagged mountains, report had it, unthreaded by a single pass. To the eastward was only the sea,—the sea closed to them by the Greek fleet at the unseen haven of Artemisium. Was the triumph march of the Lord of the World to end in this?Xerxes spoke no word when they took him to his tent that night, a sign of indescribable anger. Fear, humiliation, rage—all these seemed driving him mad. His chamberlains and eunuchs feared to approach to take off his golden armour. Mardonius came to the royal tent; the king, with curses he had never hurled against the bow-bearer before, refused to see him. The battle was ended. No one was hardy enough to talk of a fresh attack on the morrow. Every captain had to report the loss of scores of his best. As Glaucon rode back to Mardonius’s tents, he overheard two infantry officers:—“A fearful day—the bow-bearer is likely to pay for it. I hope his Majesty confines his anger only to him.”“Yes—Mardonius will walk the Chinvat bridge to-morrow. The king is turning against him. Megabyzus is the bow-bearer’s enemy, and already is gone to his Majesty to say that it is Mardonius’s blunders that have brought the army to such a plight. The king will catch at that readily.”At the tents Glaucon found Artazostra and Roxana. They were both pale. The news of the great defeat had been brought by a dozen messengers. Mardonius had not arrived. He was not slain, that was certain, but Artazostra feared the worst. The proud daughter of Darius found it hard to bear up.“My husband has many enemies. Hitherto the king’s favour has allowed him to mock them. But if my brother deserts him, his ruin is speedy. Ah! Ahura-Mazda, why hast Thou suffered us to see this day?”Glaucon said what he could of comfort, which was little.[pg 225]Roxana wept piteously; he was fain to soothe her by his caress,—something he had never ventured before. Artazostra was on the point of calling her eunuchs and setting forth for Xerxes’s tent to plead for the life of her husband, when suddenly Pharnuches, Mardonius’s body-servant, came with news that dispelled at least the fears of the women.“I am bidden to tell your Ladyships that my master has silenced the tongues of his enemies and is restored to the king’s good favor. And I am bidden also to command the Lord Prexaspes to come to the royal tent. His Majesty has need of him.”Glaucon went, questioning much as to the service to be required. He did not soon forget the scene that followed. The great pavilion was lit by a score of resinous flambeaux. The red light shook over the green and purple hangings, the silver plating of the tent-poles. At one end rose the golden throne of the king; before it in a semicircle the stools of a dozen or more princes and commanders. In the centre stood Mardonius questioning a coarse-featured, ill-favoured fellow, who by his sheepskin dress and leggings Glaucon instantly recognized as a peasant of this Malian country. The king beckoned the Athenian into the midst and was clearly too eager to stand on ceremony.“Your Greek is better than Mardonius’s, good Prexaspes. In a matter like this we dare not trust too many interpreters. This man speaks the rough dialect of his country, and few can understand him. Can you interpret?”“I am passing familiar with the Locrian and Malian dialect, your Majesty.”“Question this man further as to what he will do for us. We have understood him but lamely.”Glaucon proceeded to comply. The man, who was exceeding awkward and ill at ease in such august company,[pg 226]spoke an outrageous shepherd’s jargon which even the Athenian understood with effort. But his business came out speedily. He was Ephialtes, the son of one Eurydemus, a Malian, a dull-witted grazier of the country, brought to Mardonius by hope of reward. The general, partly understanding his purpose, had brought him to the king. In brief, he was prepared, for due compensation, to lead the Persians by an almost unknown mountain path over the ridge of Œta and to the rear of Leonidas’s position at Thermopylæ, where the Hellenes, assailed front and rear, would inevitably be destroyed.As Glaucon interpreted, the shout of relieved gladness from the Persian grandees made the tent-cloths shake. Xerxes’s eyes kindled. He clapped his hands.“Reward? He shall have ten talents! But where? How?”The man asserted that the path was easy and practicable for a large body of troops. He had often been over it with his sheep and goats. If the Persians would start a force at once—it was already quite dark—they could fall upon Leonidas at dawn. The Spartan would be completely trapped, or forced to open the defile without another spear thrust.“A care, fellow,”warned Mardonius, regarding the man sharply;“you speak glibly, but if this is a trick to lead a band of the king’s servants to destruction, understand you play with deadly dice. If the troops march, you shall have your hands knotted together and a soldier walking behind to cut your throat at the first sign of treachery.”Glaucon interpreted the threat. The man did not wince.“There is no trap. I will guide you.”That was all they could get him to say.[pg 227]“And do not the Hellenes know of this mountain path and guard it?”persisted the bow-bearer.Ephialtes thought not; at least if they had, they had not told off any efficient detachment to guard it. Hydarnes cut the matter short by rising from his stool and casting himself before the king.“A boon, your Eternity, a boon!”“What is it?”asked the monarch.“The Immortals have been disgraced. Twice they have been repulsed with ignominy. The shame burns hot in their breasts. Suffer them to redeem their honour. Suffer me to take this man and all the infantry of the Life Guard, and at dawn the Lord of the World shall see his desire over his miserable enemies.”“The words of Hydarnes are good,”added Mardonius, incisively, and Xerxes beamed and nodded assent.“Go, scale the mountain with the Immortals and tell this Ephialtes there await him ten talents and a girdle of honour if the thing goes well; if ill, let him be flayed alive and his skin be made the head of a kettledrum.”The stolid peasant did not blench even at this. Glaucon remained in the tent, translating and hearing all the details: how Hydarnes was to press the attack from the rear at early dawn, how Mardonius was to conduct another onset from the front. At last the general of the guard knelt before the king for the last time.“Thus I go forth, Omnipotence, and to-morrow, behold your will upon your enemies, or behold me never more.”“I have faithful slaves,”said Xerxes, rising and smiling benignantly upon the general and the bow-bearer.“Let us disperse, but first let command be given the Magians to cry all night to Mithra and Tishtrya, and to sacrifice to them a white horse.”[pg 228]“Your Majesty always enlists the blessings of heaven for your servants,”bowed Mardonius, as the company broke up and the king went away to his inner tent and his concubines. Glaucon lingered until most of the grandees had gone forth, then the bow-bearer went to him.“Go back to my tents,”ordered Mardonius;“tell Artazostra and Roxana that all is well, that Ahura has delivered me from a great strait and restored me to the king’s favour, and that to-morrow the gate of Hellas will be opened.”“You are still bloody and dusty. You have watched all last night and been in the thick all day,”expostulated the Athenian;“come to the tents with me and rest.”The bow-bearer shook his head.“No rest until to-morrow, and then the rest of victory or a longer one. Now go; the women are consuming with their care.”Glaucon wandered back through the long avenues of pavilions. The lights of innumerable camp-fires, the hum of thousands of voices, the snorting of horses, the grumbling of camels, the groans of men wounded—all these and all other sights and sounds from the countless host were lost to him. He walked on by a kind of animal instinct that took him to Mardonius’s encampment through the mazes of the canvas city. It was dawning on him with a terrible clearness that he was become a traitor to Hellas in very deed. It was one thing to be a passive onlooker of a battle, another to be a participant in a plot for the ruin of Leonidas. Unless warned betimes the Spartan king and all who followed him infallibly would be captured or slaughtered to a man. And he had heard all—the traitor, the discussion, the design—had even, if without his choice, been partner and helper in the same. The blood of Leonidas and his men would be on his head. Every curse the Athenians had heaped on him[pg 229]once unjustly, he would deserve. Now truly he would be, even in his own mind’s eyes,“Glaucon the Traitor, partner to the betrayal of Thermopylæ.”The doltish peasant, lured by the great reward, he might forgive,—himself, the high-born Alcmæonid, never.From this revery he was shaken by finding himself at the entrance to the tents of Mardonius. Artazostra and Roxana came to meet him. When he told of the deliverance of the bow-bearer, he had joy by the light in their eyes. Roxana had never shone in greater beauty. He spoke of the heat of the sun, of his throbbing head. The women bathed his forehead with lavender-water, touching him with their own soft hands. Roxana sang again to him, a low, crooning song of the fragrant Nile, the lotus bells, the nodding palms, the perfumed breeze from the desert. Whilst he watched her through half-closed eyes, the visions of that day of battles left him. He sat wrapped in a dream world, far from stern realities of men and arms. So for a while, as he lounged on the divans, following the play of thetorch-lighton the face of Roxana as her long fingers plied the strings. What was it to him if Leonidas fought a losing battle? Was not his happiness secure—be it in Hellas, or Egypt, or Bactria? He tried to persuade himself thus. At the end, when he and Roxana stood face to face for the parting, he violated all Oriental custom, yet he knew her brother would not be angry. He took her in his arms and gave her kiss for kiss.Then he went to his own tent to seek rest. But Hypnos did not come for a long time with his poppies. Once out of the Egyptian’s presence the haunting terror had returned,“Glaucon the Traitor!”Those three words were always uppermost. At last, indeed, sleep came and as he slept he dreamed.
A rugged mountain, an inaccessible morass, and beyond that morass the sea: the mountain thrusting so close upon the morass as barely to leave space for a narrow wagon road. This was the western gate of Thermopylæ. Behind the narrow defile the mountain and swamp-land drew asunder; in the still scanty opening hot springs gushed forth, sacred to Heracles, then again on the eastern side Mt. Œta and the impenetrable swamp drew together, forming the second of the“Hot Gates,”—the gates which Xerxes must unlock if he would continue his march to Athens.
The Great King’s couriers reported that the stubborn Hellenes had cast a wall across the entrance, and that so far from showing terror at the advent of majesty, were carelessly diverting themselves by athletic games, and by combing and adorning their hair, a fact which the“Lord Prexaspes”at least comprehended to mean that Leonidas and his Spartans were preparing for desperate battle. Nevertheless, it was hard to persuade the king that at last he confronted men who would resist him to his face. Glaucon said it. Demaratus, the outlawed Spartan, said it. Xerxes, however, remained angry and incredulous. Four long days he and his army sat before the pass,“because,”announced his couriers,“he wishes in his benignity to give these madmen a chance to flee away and shun destruction;”[pg 220]“because,”spoke those nearest to Mardonius, the brain of the army,“there is hot fighting ahead, and the general is resolved to bring up the picked troops in the rear before risking a battle.”
Then on the fifth day either Xerxes’s patience was exhausted or Mardonius felt ready. Strong regiments of Median infantry were ordered to charge Leonidas’s position, Xerxes not failing to command that they slay as few of the wretches as possible, but drag them prisoners before his outraged presence.
A noble charge. A terrible repulse. For the first time those Asiatics who had forgotten Marathon discovered the overwhelming superiority that the sheathing of heavy armour gave the Greek hoplites over the lighter armed Median spearmen. The short lances and wooden targets of the attackers were pitifully futile against the long spears and brazen shields of the Hellenes. In the narrow pass the vast numbers of Barbarians went for nothing. They could not use their archers, they could not charge with their magnificent cavalry. The dead lay in heaps. The Medes attacked again and again. At last an end came to their courage. The captains laid the lash over their mutinous troops. The men bore the whips in sullen silence. They would not charge again upon those devouring spears.
White with anger, Xerxes turned to Hydarnes and his“Immortals,”the infantry of the Life Guard. The general needed no second bidding. The charge was driven home with magnificent spirit. But what the vassal Medes could not accomplish, neither could the lordly Persians. The repulse was bloody. If once Leonidas’s line broke and the Persians rushed on with howls of triumph, it was only to see the Hellenes’ files close in a twinkling and return to the onset with their foes in confusion. Hydarnes led back his men[pg 221]at last. The king sat on the ivory throne just out of arrow shot, watching the ebb and flow of the battle. Hydarnes approached and prostrated himself.
“Omnipotence, I the least of your slaves put my life at your bidding. Command that I forfeit my head, but my men can do no more. I have lost hundreds. The pass is not to be stormed.”
Only the murmur of assent from all the well-tried generals about the throne saved Hydarnes from paying the last penalty. The king’s rage was fearful; men trembled to look on him. His words came so thick, the rest could never follow all his curses and commands. Only Mardonius was bold enough to stand up before his face.
“Your Eternity, this is an unlucky day. Is it not sacred to Angra-Mainyu the Evil? The arch-Magian says the holy fire gives forth sparks of ill-omen. Wait, then, till to-morrow. Verethraghna, the Angel of Victory, will then return to your servants.”
The bow-bearer led his trembling master to the royal tent, and naught more of Xerxes was seen till the morning. All that night Mardonius never slept, but went unceasingly the round of the host preparing for battle. Glaucon saw little of him. The Athenian himself had been posted among the guard of nobles directly about the person of the king, and he was glad he was set nowhere else, otherwise he might have been ordered to join in the attack. Like every other in the host, he slept under arms, and never returned to Mardonius’s pavilion. His heart had been in his eyes all that day. He had believed Leonidas would be swept from the pass at the first onset. Even he had underrated the Spartan prowess. The repulse of the Medes had astonished him. When Hydarnes reeled back, he could hardly conceal his joy. The Hellenes were fighting! The Hellenes were conquering![pg 222]He forgot he stood almost at Xerxes’s side when the last charge failed; and barely in time did he save himself from joining in the shout of triumph raised by the defenders when the decimated Immortals slunk away. He had grown intensely proud of his countrymen, and when he heard the startled Persian lords muttering dark forbodings of the morrow, he all but laughed his gladness in their faces.
So the night passed for him: the hard earth for a bed, a water cruse wrapped in a cloak for a pillow. And just as the first red blush stole over the green Malian bay and the mist-hung hills of Eubœa beyond, he woke with all the army. Mardonius had used the night well. Chosen contingents from every corps were ready. Cavalrymen had been dismounted. Heavy masses of Assyrian archers and Arabian slingers were advanced to prepare for the attack by overwhelming volleys. The Persian noblemen, stung to madness by their king’s reproaches and their own sense of shame, bound themselves by fearful oaths never to draw from the onset until victorious or dead. The attack itself was led by princes of the blood, royal half-brothers of the king. Xerxes sat again on the ivory throne, assured by every obsequious tongue that the sacred fire gave fair omens, that to-day was the day of victory.
The attack was magnificent. For an instant its fury seemed to carry the Hellenes back. Where a Persian fell two stepped over him. The defenders were swept against their wall. The Barbarians appeared to be storming it. Then like the tide the battle turned. The hoplites, locking shields, presented an impenetrable spear hedge. The charge spent itself in empty promise. Mardonius, who had been in the thickest, nevertheless drew off his men skilfully and prepared to renew the combat.
In the interval Glaucon, standing by the king, could see a short, firm figure in black armour going in and out among the[pg 223]Hellenes, ordering their array—Leonidas—he needed no bird to tell him. And as the Athenian stood and watched, saw the Persians mass their files for another battering charge, saw the Great King twist his beard whilst his gleaming eyes followed the fate of his army, an impulse nigh irresistible came over him to run one short bow-shot to that opposite array, and cry in his own Greek tongue:—
“I am a Hellene, too! Look on me come to join you, to live and die with you, with my face against the Barbarian!”
Cruel the fate that set him here, impotent, when on that band of countrymen Queen Nikē was shedding bright glory!
But he was“Glaucon the Traitor”still, to be awarded the traitor’s doom by Leonidas. Therefore the“Lord Prexaspes”must stand at his post, guarding the king of the Aryans.
The second charge was as the first, the third was as the second. Mardonius was full of recourses. By repeated attacks he strove to wear the stubborn Hellenes down. The Persians proved their courage seven times. Ten of them died gladly, if their deaths bought that of a single foe. But few as were Leonidas’s numbers, they were not so few as to fail to relieve one another at the front of the press,—which front was fearfully narrow. And three times, as his men drifted back in defeat, Xerxes the king“leaped from the throne whereon he sat, in anguish for his army.”
At noon new contingents from the rear took the place of the exhausted attackers. The sun beat down with unpitying heat. The wounded lay sweltering in their agony whilst the battle roared over them. Mardonius never stopped to count his dead. Then at last came nightfall. Man could do no more. As the shadows from Œta grew long over the close scene of combat, even the proudest Persians turned away. They had lost thousands. Their defeat was absolute.[pg 224]Before them and to westward and far away ranged the jagged mountains, report had it, unthreaded by a single pass. To the eastward was only the sea,—the sea closed to them by the Greek fleet at the unseen haven of Artemisium. Was the triumph march of the Lord of the World to end in this?
Xerxes spoke no word when they took him to his tent that night, a sign of indescribable anger. Fear, humiliation, rage—all these seemed driving him mad. His chamberlains and eunuchs feared to approach to take off his golden armour. Mardonius came to the royal tent; the king, with curses he had never hurled against the bow-bearer before, refused to see him. The battle was ended. No one was hardy enough to talk of a fresh attack on the morrow. Every captain had to report the loss of scores of his best. As Glaucon rode back to Mardonius’s tents, he overheard two infantry officers:—
“A fearful day—the bow-bearer is likely to pay for it. I hope his Majesty confines his anger only to him.”
“Yes—Mardonius will walk the Chinvat bridge to-morrow. The king is turning against him. Megabyzus is the bow-bearer’s enemy, and already is gone to his Majesty to say that it is Mardonius’s blunders that have brought the army to such a plight. The king will catch at that readily.”
At the tents Glaucon found Artazostra and Roxana. They were both pale. The news of the great defeat had been brought by a dozen messengers. Mardonius had not arrived. He was not slain, that was certain, but Artazostra feared the worst. The proud daughter of Darius found it hard to bear up.
“My husband has many enemies. Hitherto the king’s favour has allowed him to mock them. But if my brother deserts him, his ruin is speedy. Ah! Ahura-Mazda, why hast Thou suffered us to see this day?”
Glaucon said what he could of comfort, which was little.[pg 225]Roxana wept piteously; he was fain to soothe her by his caress,—something he had never ventured before. Artazostra was on the point of calling her eunuchs and setting forth for Xerxes’s tent to plead for the life of her husband, when suddenly Pharnuches, Mardonius’s body-servant, came with news that dispelled at least the fears of the women.
“I am bidden to tell your Ladyships that my master has silenced the tongues of his enemies and is restored to the king’s good favor. And I am bidden also to command the Lord Prexaspes to come to the royal tent. His Majesty has need of him.”
Glaucon went, questioning much as to the service to be required. He did not soon forget the scene that followed. The great pavilion was lit by a score of resinous flambeaux. The red light shook over the green and purple hangings, the silver plating of the tent-poles. At one end rose the golden throne of the king; before it in a semicircle the stools of a dozen or more princes and commanders. In the centre stood Mardonius questioning a coarse-featured, ill-favoured fellow, who by his sheepskin dress and leggings Glaucon instantly recognized as a peasant of this Malian country. The king beckoned the Athenian into the midst and was clearly too eager to stand on ceremony.
“Your Greek is better than Mardonius’s, good Prexaspes. In a matter like this we dare not trust too many interpreters. This man speaks the rough dialect of his country, and few can understand him. Can you interpret?”
“I am passing familiar with the Locrian and Malian dialect, your Majesty.”
“Question this man further as to what he will do for us. We have understood him but lamely.”
Glaucon proceeded to comply. The man, who was exceeding awkward and ill at ease in such august company,[pg 226]spoke an outrageous shepherd’s jargon which even the Athenian understood with effort. But his business came out speedily. He was Ephialtes, the son of one Eurydemus, a Malian, a dull-witted grazier of the country, brought to Mardonius by hope of reward. The general, partly understanding his purpose, had brought him to the king. In brief, he was prepared, for due compensation, to lead the Persians by an almost unknown mountain path over the ridge of Œta and to the rear of Leonidas’s position at Thermopylæ, where the Hellenes, assailed front and rear, would inevitably be destroyed.
As Glaucon interpreted, the shout of relieved gladness from the Persian grandees made the tent-cloths shake. Xerxes’s eyes kindled. He clapped his hands.
“Reward? He shall have ten talents! But where? How?”
The man asserted that the path was easy and practicable for a large body of troops. He had often been over it with his sheep and goats. If the Persians would start a force at once—it was already quite dark—they could fall upon Leonidas at dawn. The Spartan would be completely trapped, or forced to open the defile without another spear thrust.
“A care, fellow,”warned Mardonius, regarding the man sharply;“you speak glibly, but if this is a trick to lead a band of the king’s servants to destruction, understand you play with deadly dice. If the troops march, you shall have your hands knotted together and a soldier walking behind to cut your throat at the first sign of treachery.”
Glaucon interpreted the threat. The man did not wince.
“There is no trap. I will guide you.”
That was all they could get him to say.
“And do not the Hellenes know of this mountain path and guard it?”persisted the bow-bearer.
Ephialtes thought not; at least if they had, they had not told off any efficient detachment to guard it. Hydarnes cut the matter short by rising from his stool and casting himself before the king.
“A boon, your Eternity, a boon!”
“What is it?”asked the monarch.
“The Immortals have been disgraced. Twice they have been repulsed with ignominy. The shame burns hot in their breasts. Suffer them to redeem their honour. Suffer me to take this man and all the infantry of the Life Guard, and at dawn the Lord of the World shall see his desire over his miserable enemies.”
“The words of Hydarnes are good,”added Mardonius, incisively, and Xerxes beamed and nodded assent.
“Go, scale the mountain with the Immortals and tell this Ephialtes there await him ten talents and a girdle of honour if the thing goes well; if ill, let him be flayed alive and his skin be made the head of a kettledrum.”
The stolid peasant did not blench even at this. Glaucon remained in the tent, translating and hearing all the details: how Hydarnes was to press the attack from the rear at early dawn, how Mardonius was to conduct another onset from the front. At last the general of the guard knelt before the king for the last time.
“Thus I go forth, Omnipotence, and to-morrow, behold your will upon your enemies, or behold me never more.”
“I have faithful slaves,”said Xerxes, rising and smiling benignantly upon the general and the bow-bearer.“Let us disperse, but first let command be given the Magians to cry all night to Mithra and Tishtrya, and to sacrifice to them a white horse.”
“Your Majesty always enlists the blessings of heaven for your servants,”bowed Mardonius, as the company broke up and the king went away to his inner tent and his concubines. Glaucon lingered until most of the grandees had gone forth, then the bow-bearer went to him.
“Go back to my tents,”ordered Mardonius;“tell Artazostra and Roxana that all is well, that Ahura has delivered me from a great strait and restored me to the king’s favour, and that to-morrow the gate of Hellas will be opened.”
“You are still bloody and dusty. You have watched all last night and been in the thick all day,”expostulated the Athenian;“come to the tents with me and rest.”
The bow-bearer shook his head.
“No rest until to-morrow, and then the rest of victory or a longer one. Now go; the women are consuming with their care.”
Glaucon wandered back through the long avenues of pavilions. The lights of innumerable camp-fires, the hum of thousands of voices, the snorting of horses, the grumbling of camels, the groans of men wounded—all these and all other sights and sounds from the countless host were lost to him. He walked on by a kind of animal instinct that took him to Mardonius’s encampment through the mazes of the canvas city. It was dawning on him with a terrible clearness that he was become a traitor to Hellas in very deed. It was one thing to be a passive onlooker of a battle, another to be a participant in a plot for the ruin of Leonidas. Unless warned betimes the Spartan king and all who followed him infallibly would be captured or slaughtered to a man. And he had heard all—the traitor, the discussion, the design—had even, if without his choice, been partner and helper in the same. The blood of Leonidas and his men would be on his head. Every curse the Athenians had heaped on him[pg 229]once unjustly, he would deserve. Now truly he would be, even in his own mind’s eyes,“Glaucon the Traitor, partner to the betrayal of Thermopylæ.”The doltish peasant, lured by the great reward, he might forgive,—himself, the high-born Alcmæonid, never.
From this revery he was shaken by finding himself at the entrance to the tents of Mardonius. Artazostra and Roxana came to meet him. When he told of the deliverance of the bow-bearer, he had joy by the light in their eyes. Roxana had never shone in greater beauty. He spoke of the heat of the sun, of his throbbing head. The women bathed his forehead with lavender-water, touching him with their own soft hands. Roxana sang again to him, a low, crooning song of the fragrant Nile, the lotus bells, the nodding palms, the perfumed breeze from the desert. Whilst he watched her through half-closed eyes, the visions of that day of battles left him. He sat wrapped in a dream world, far from stern realities of men and arms. So for a while, as he lounged on the divans, following the play of thetorch-lighton the face of Roxana as her long fingers plied the strings. What was it to him if Leonidas fought a losing battle? Was not his happiness secure—be it in Hellas, or Egypt, or Bactria? He tried to persuade himself thus. At the end, when he and Roxana stood face to face for the parting, he violated all Oriental custom, yet he knew her brother would not be angry. He took her in his arms and gave her kiss for kiss.
Then he went to his own tent to seek rest. But Hypnos did not come for a long time with his poppies. Once out of the Egyptian’s presence the haunting terror had returned,“Glaucon the Traitor!”Those three words were always uppermost. At last, indeed, sleep came and as he slept he dreamed.