Sunset of the Gods - By Steve White Page 0,13

gotten the impression that the Persians had no answer to the hoplite, or heavy infantryman. That seems to be the pattern all the way up to Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire.”

“One gets that impression because, as you’ve pointed out, the Greeks won in the end,” Landry explained with a chuckle. “It’s always the ultimate winner’s successes that are remembered. It comes as a shocking surprise to most people that George Washington was soundly trounced whenever he came up against professional British troops in the kind of open-field set-piece battle they were organized and trained to fight. However, your point is well taken as applied to the phalanx of hoplites. When it could be brought to bear under the right conditions—head-to-head combat on a narrow front—it was indeed unstoppable by anything except another phalanx. But it was a rigid, inflexible formation, and the hoplites who comprised it, loaded down with fifty to seventy pounds of armor and weapons, were incapable of rapid maneuvering.”

Landry manipulated his controls again. An image appeared on the screen, superimposed on the map. It showed a man who seemed to have stepped out of a Grecian vase-painting. He were greaves on his lower legs, a cuirass with curving metal shoulder-plates, and a face-enclosing helmet with an impressive-looking but (to Jason’s eye) impractical-seeming horsehair crest. He carried a large round shield and a spear a couple of feet longer than he was. At his side hung a leaf-shaped sword. The image represented modern scholarship’s best reconstruction, which had turned out to be very much like those vase paintings after all.

“When hoplites armed and equipped like this couldn’t form up, as in the retreat from Sardis, the Persian cavalry could ride circles around them and shoot them to pieces with arrows. In 479 b.c., that Persian cavalry nearly won the Battle of Plataea, before the Spartan phalanx could be effectively brought to bear. But the Persian style of warfare was, at bottom, a raiding style. The Greeks finally won by forcing decisive battles. Alexander became ‘the Great’ because he could catch his enemies between a phalanx and the heavy shock cavalry his father Phillip had invented—the most effective heavy shock cavalry the world would see before the advent of the stirrup. But the point is, we’re going to be seeing the first of those decisive hoplite battles.” Landry’s eyes glowed with anticipation, then he shook himself and returned to his subject.

“At any rate, after the debacle of the retreat from Sardis, Athens withdrew into isolationism, leaving its Ionian allies to be brutally subjugated, a process that was completed by 494 b.c. with the destruction of Miletus. After which the Great King Darius decided it was time to punish those Greeks across the Aegean who had aided the rebels. In 491 b.c. his emissaries toured Greece demanding ‘earth and water’—the tokens of submission. Athens and Sparta violated the diplomatic niceties by killing the emissaries, in the case of the Spartans by throwing them down a well, at whose bottom they were told they could find what they sought.” Mondrago smothered a guffaw. Landry shot him a primly disapproving look before resuming.

“This was very bold, you see; the Persians had already established a satrapy in Thrace, to the north of the Aegean, and had an army there. But their accompanying fleet was wrecked by a storm, which made invasion from the north impractical. Instead, a new fleet was prepared—six hundred ships, including some specialized for transporting cavalry horses. It carried an army we believe numbered as many as 35,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry—the Greeks later claimed it was hundreds of thousands, but they always believed in making a good story even better. It also carried Hippias, the last tyrant of Athens, who had been working for the Persians since being deposed in 510 b.c. He was now over eighty years old, but still hoped to be restored to power. Instead of working its way north, the fleet island-hopped directly across the Aegean and took the city of Eretria on the island of Euboea, an Ionian ally, with the help of fifth columnists. They then burned it and enslaved the population . . . which was also meant to be the fate of Athens.”

“Which brings us to your mission,” said Rutherford, who had entered the room unnoticed. “You omitted one thing, Bryan: in 492 B.C King Alexander I of Macedon, who was reliable only as a weathervane, made his kingdom a Persian client-state. This is convenient for us, for