“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make proud.” (Ancient Greek proverb)
“Hubris, when it blooms, bears a grain-head of ruinous folly, from which it reaps an all-weeping harvest.” (Aeschylus)
Chaining the Sea
A sudden storm rose over the Hellespont strait and smashed to pieces the immense bridge that had just been thrown across its waters. The cables snapped, the planks splintered, and the long chain of ships broke apart under the force of wind and current. What had taken weeks of meticulous engineering vanished in a single day. For the man who had ordered the crossing, the destruction was not an accident of nature but a personal insult delivered by an inferior entity – the sea. Xerxes I, King of Kings, lord of the Persian Empire, master of fifty nations, responded accordingly. He commanded that the sea itself be punished by whipping it as if it were a rebellious slave who had dared to resist its master. As they lashed the sea, his men shouted: “You hateful water, your master lays this punishment upon you. King Xerxes will cross you whether you wish it or not!” Herodotus tells us that Xerxes also ordered his men to heat branding irons and plunge them into the water and throw a pair of fetters – shackles, iron chains – into the sea. Each punishment was precise and deliberate: The whipping was what you gave a disobedient slave; the branding was how you marked something as your property; the chains were how you declared a defeated people subjugated. In other words, Xerxes was enslaving the sea as if it were a rebellious subject who had defied his will and now needed to be put in irons! These preposterous acts were not merely theatrical. They were the actions of a man who genuinely could not conceive of a limit to his authority – who had confused his imperial power with cosmic power.
It is one of the most astonishing passages in all of Herodotus’s writings, shocking the reader even today, twenty-five centuries later. The great historian shows us everything we need to know about the arrogance of power: its rage at being resisted, its need to humiliate what it cannot control, and its irrational confusion between dominion over men and dominion over the order of the world itself.
In the end, the engineers rebuilt the bridge, and Xerxes crossed the Hellespont to march through Greece with the largest army the ancient world had ever seen – estimates range from two hundred thousand to over a million men, drawn from every corner of the empire, from Egypt to India. His aim was to punish Athens and avenge his father Darius’s defeat at the Battle of Marathon a decade earlier. Xerxes had inherited both the empire and the unfinished business. At the narrow pass of Thermopylae, a few thousand Greeks alongside three hundred Spartans under King Leonidas held his entire army at bay for three days until they died to the last man and became immortal. Marching on, Xerxes entered Athens and found it empty – the population had evacuated on the advice of their general Themistocles. He burned the temples on the Acropolis and the whole city. But he still had to face the Greek fleet at the straits of Salamis, the narrow channel between the island and the Athenian coast. Themistocles had lured the massive Persian fleet there, into waters too confined for its size to have an advantage. The Greek triremes, lighter and more maneuverable, rammed the Persian ships in the cramped strait where they could neither deploy nor retreat. Xerxes, expecting triumph, watched from a golden throne on the hillside above as his ships burned and his men drowned.
The sea, as it turned out, had the last word!
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