The plan to abandon Attica

There’s a passage in Herodotus that includes an astonishing line.

The Persians were coming for the Athenians. The Great King wanted all of Greece, but particularly Athens. The Persian army was too big to count. A lot of Greek poleis capitulated, sending earth and water to the Great King. The people, the land, the rivers were his, without a fight.

The oracle at Delphi — which was to the Greeks what the King James Version was to my folks — prophesied doom.

The official interpreters preferred that the Athenians not prepare for battle. Herodotus says their

advice was, in fact, that Athens should not resist at all, but should abandon Attica and find somewhere else to live. 

Can you imagine that? A whole community willing to abandon land, houses, temples and ancestral graves and start elsewhere because they preferred to live free rather than under a despot?

I grew up hearing preachers recount how the ancient Hebrews were uprooted and taken to Babylon. That loss of homeland was because of conquest and captivity. Can you imagine a mass migration by choice?

A second oracle left a glimmer of hope in a defense based on walls of wood.

Some traditionalists recalled that the old defensive walls around the acropolis, a stockade really, had been made of wood. They planned to man the traditional defenses and pray for divine help.

But a newcomer named Themistocles, an advocate of sea power, convinced a majority that “wooden walls” meant ships.

The Athenians, desperate, did abandon Attica. The citizens put the women, children and livestock on ships and sent them to safety.

The Persians massacred the few who believed that the stockade around the acropolis had some kind of divine protection. While the city burned, the Athenians took to their warships, resolved to fight at sea.

• Source: Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. The quotation is from Book VII, paragraph 143.