The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq Read Free

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September 480 B.C.
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    The “Violet-crowned” Athens of legend was in flames. It no longer existed as a Greek city. How, the Athenians lamented, could their vibrant democracy simply end like this—emptied of its citizens, occupied by the Persian king Xerxes, and now torched? How had the centuries-old polis of Theseus and Solon, with its majestic Acropolis, now in just a few September days been overwhelmed by tens of thousands of Persian marauders—enemies that the Athenians had slaughtered just ten years earlier at Marathon?
    News had come suddenly this late summer to the once hopeful Athenians that the last-ditch Hellenic defense, eighty-five miles away at the pass of Thermopylae—the final gateway from the north into Greece—had evaporated. A Spartan king was dead. There were no Greek land forces left to block the rapid advance of the more than a quarter million Persian sailors and infantry southward into central Greece. The Greek fleet at Artemisium was fleeing southward to Athens and the Peloponnese. Far more numerous Persian warships followed in hot pursuit. Nearly all of the northern Greek city-states, including the important nearby city of Thebes, had joined the enemy. Now the residents of a defenseless Athens—on a desperate motion in the assembly of their firebrand admiral Themistocles—faced only bad and worsechoices, and scrambled in panic to abandon their centuries-old city to King Xerxes.
    Desperate Athenians rowed in boats over to the nearby islands or the northern coast of the Peloponnese. Anyone who stayed behind in the lost city would meet the fate of the Spartans and Thespians at Thermopylae—killed to the last man. It was as if the great Athenian infantry victory at Marathon that turned back the first Persian invasion a decade earlier had never occurred—like the French who lost their country in May 1940 to the Germans despite the valor of Verdun a generation earlier. All of Greece was to be the westernmost satrapy of an angry Xerxes’ ascendant Persia that now for the first time incorporated European land into its empire. Athens—and everything north of it—was already Persian. The war seemed, for practical purposes, almost over, with only some mopping up of the crippled and squabbling Greek fleet at Salamis.
    The ensuing mass flight of Athenians was a landmark moment in the history of Greece. Centuries later, the Roman-era biographer Plutarch, who in his own times could not conceive of Asians in Europe rather than Europeans controlling Asia, summed up the Athenian panic and the decision to forgo a last glorious land battle with the brief obituary: “The whole city of Athens had gone out to sea.” But what exactly did that mean? Could a Greek polis—traditionally defined concretely by its locale, monuments, and landed patrimony—survive in name only without a home? Many Greeks could not conceive of handing over their shrines and tombs of their ancestors to the enemy without even a fight. That is, until the popular leader Themistocles had convinced them all that they had no choice but to leave. Only that way would the gods fight on the Athenian side and eventually give them victory and what was left of their charred city back. 1
    Soon almost all the fighting-age resident males—perhaps as many as thirty thousand to forty thousand Athenian citizens—had abandoned the city to man its fleet of triremes off Salamis. More than a quarter million elderly, women, and children had sought safety outside Attica, one of the largest transfers of population in the ancient world. In their haste, the despondent Athenians abandoned some of the ill and aged in the city or left them to their own devices out in the Attic countryside. Meanwhile, well over a hundred thousand Athenian civilians would crowd across the bay from the city to the rocky island of Salamis. They were gambling that their own seamen, along with still unconquered Greek allies from the Peloponnese, could wreck the Persian fleet before they