THE EVACUATION OF ATHENS
It had come at last,—the hour wise men had dreaded, fools had scoffed at,
cowards had dared not face. The Barbarian was within five days’ march of
Attica. The Athenians must bow the knee to the world monarch or go forth
exiles from their country.
In the morning after the night of terror came another courier, not this
time from Thermopylæ. He bore a letter from Themistocles, who was
returning from Eubœa with the whole allied Grecian fleet. The reading of
the letter in the Agora was the first rift in the cloud above the city.
“Be strong, prove yourselves sons of Athens. Do what a year ago you so
boldly voted. Prepare to evacuate Attica. All is not lost. In three days I
will be with you.”
There was no time for an assembly at the Pnyx, but the Five Hundred and
the Areopagus council acted for the people. It was ordered to remove the
entire population of Attica, with all their movable goods, across the bay
to Salamis or to the friendly Peloponnesus, and that same noon the heralds
went over the land to bear the direful summons.
To Hermione, who in the calm after-years looked back on all this year of
agony and stress as on an unreal thing, one time always was stamped on
memory as no dream, but vivid, unforgetable,—these days of the great
evacuation. Up and down the pleasant plain country of the Mesogia to
southward, to the rolling highlands beyond Pentelicus and Parnes, to the
slumbering villages by Marathon, to the fertile farm-land by Eleusis, went
the proclaimers of ill-tidings.
“Quit your homes, hasten to Athens, take with you what you can, but
hasten, or stay as Xerxes’s slaves.”
For the next two days a piteous multitude was passing through the city. A
country of four hundred thousand inhabitants was to be swept clean and
left naked and profitless to the invader. Under Hermione’s window, as she
gazed up and down the street, jostled the army of fugitives, women old and
young, shrinking from the bustle and uproar, grandsires on their staves,
boys driving the bleating goats or the patient donkeys piled high with
pots and panniers, little girls tearfully hugging a pet puppy or hen. But
few strong men were seen, for the fleet had not yet rounded Sunium to bear
the people away.
The well-loved villas and farmsteads were tenantless. They left the
standing grain, the ripening orchards, the groves of the sacred olives.
Men rushed for the last time to the shrines where their fathers had
prayed,—the temples of Theseus, Olympian Zeus, Dionysus, Aphrodite. The
tombs of the worthies of old, stretching out along the Sacred Way to
Eleusis, where Solon, Clisthenes, Miltiades, and many another bulwark of
Athens slept, had the last votive wreath hung lovingly upon them. And
especially men sought the great temple of the “Rock,” to lift their hands
to Athena Polias, and vow awful vows of how harm to the Virgin Goddess
should be wiped away in blood.
So the throng passed through the city and toward the shore, awaiting the
fleet.
It came after eager watching. The whole fighting force of Athens and her
Corinthian, Æginetan, and other allies. Before the rest raced a stately
ship, the _Nausicaä_, her triple-oar bank flying faster than the spray.
The people crowded to the water’s edge when the great trireme cast off her
pinnace and a well-known figure stepped therein.
“Themistocles is with us!”
He landed at Phaleron, the thousands greeted him as if he were a god. He
seemed their only hope—the Atlas upbearing all the fates of Athens. With
the glance of his eye, with a few quick words, he chased the terrors from
the strategi and archons that crowded up around him.
“Why distressed? Have we not held the Barbarians back nobly at Artemisium?
Will we not soon sweep his power from the seas in fair battle?”
With almost a conqueror’s train he swept up to the city. A last assembly
filled the Pnyx. Themistocles had never been more hopeful, more eloquent.
With one voice men voted never to bend the knee to the king. If the gods
forbade them to win back their own dear country, they would go together to
Italy, to found a new and better Athens far from the Persian’s power. And
at Themistocles’s motion they voted to recall all the political exiles,
especially Themistocles’s own great enemy Aristeides the Just, banished by
the son of Neocles only a few years before. The assembly dispersed—not
weeping but with cheers. Already it was time to be quitting the city.
Couriers told how the Tartar horsemen were burning the villages beyond
Parnes. The magistrates and admirals went to the house of Athena. The last
incense smoked before the image. The bucklers hanging on the temple wall
were taken down by Cimon and the other young patricians. The statue was
reverently lifted, wound in fine linen, and borne swiftly to the fleet.
“Come, _makaira_!” called Hermippus, entering his house to summon his
daughter. Hermione sent a last glance around the disordered aula; her
mother called to the bevy of pallid, whimpering maids. Cleopis was bearing
Phœnix, but Hermione took him from her. Only his own mother should bear
him now. They went through the thinning Agora and took one hard look at
each familiar building and temple. When they should return to them, the
inscrutable god kept hid. So to Peiræus,—and to the rapid pinnaces which
bore them across the narrow sea to Salamis, where for the moment at least
was peace.
All that day the boats were bearing the people, and late into the night,
until the task was accomplished, the like whereof is not found in history.
No Athenian who willed was left to the power of Xerxes. One brain and
voice planned and directed all. Leonidas, Ajax of the Hellenes, had been
taken. Themistocles, their Odysseus, valiant as Ajax and gifted with the
craft of the immortals, remained. Could that craft and that valour turn
back the might of even the god-king of the Aryans?