Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  Another week, while my body healed. Black was restless, eager to get to sea. Suddenly, there were Cilician pirates everywhere, and down the coast, a village burned.

  Finally, I set a sailing date. The evenings were brisk, and the sun was lower in the sky.

  We sat and drank wine until the sun set, wine that went straight to my head, and we ate a big tuna that Melaina’s father caught. He came and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Stephanos loved you,’ he said. ‘You’re a good man.’

  That made me cry. I cried easily in those days.

  It was harder to abandon Chios than it had been to leave Miletus, because unlike these cheerful fisherfolk, I knew what was coming to them. The light hand of Persia was about to be replaced by an iron fist. I watched the sun set, and I knew that it would be a long time before I saw it rise here, in the east.

  Melaina came into my bed that last night, while I lay looking at the rafters. I didn’t send her away, although our lovemaking had more grief to it than lust. But she left before dawn, and she was a proper daughter again on the beach when she poured a libation and washed Harpagos’s shield in wine.

  Then my keel was in the water, and I ceased to think of her, because we went to sail an ocean full of enemies.

  We ran north, evading everything we saw, until we entered the Bosporus.

  Kallipolis was still free. We beached, and I embraced Miltiades.

  I’ll make this brief. We wintered there. In the spring, Histiaeus — Istes’ brother, who left him to die — came to us, asking that we follow him to make a pre-emptive attack on the coast of Phoenicia — to show that the East Greeks weren’t beaten. It was a strategy that was a year too late.

  ‘I’ll stay and defend the Chersonese,’ Miltiades said. ‘It is mine. But I will lose no more men in Asia.’

  Histiaeus was captured in Phrygia a month later, trying to forage for food for his oarsmen. Datis executed him for treason. It was a cheap death for a man who had led the Ionian Revolt. He should have died on the walls with his brother.

  Less than a week later, Datis flooded the Chersonese with Scythian and Thracian mercenaries. He outspent Miltiades, ten to one, and in a week we lost four of our towns.

  We expected it, though. The east was lost. We loaded our ships, taking every Greek man and woman — the survivors of Miletus, and Methymna and Teos, and all of Miltiades’ men and their women. We filled ten triremes and as many Athenian grain ships, and we sailed away. The Scythians burned Kallipolis behind us, but we left it empty.

  Datis landed an army on Lesbos, and he swept the island with a chain of men all the way across, looking for rebels. He crucified those he caught, and he took the best of the boys and all of the unmarried girls, and sold them as slaves or took them for the harem. Then he went to Chios and did the same.

  There was no force in the world that could stop him. He harried the Aeolians, selling their children to brothels, and then he harried the Ionians, and humiliated them, island by island, until there was no longer the sigh of a girl or the worship of Aphrodite from Sardis to Delos. He broke the world of my youth. He destroyed it. I grew to manhood in the world of Alcaeus and Sappho. He destroyed Sappho’s school and sold the students to satisfy the lusts of his soldiers.

  You children know the world Athens made, and you think it good. I love Athens — but there was a fairer world once, a brighter place, with better poets and freer ways. Where Greeks and Persians could be friends with each other, with Aegyptians and Lydians.

  Datis killed it, to break the spirit of the Greeks and reduce them to servitude. Truly, it was the rape of the islands that taught us Greeks what the Persians were capable of, and showed us why we would have to fight, or see our culture die.

  Artaphernes resisted Datis, of course. But Datis was the Great King’s nephew and had won the great battle, and Artaphernes was considered soft on Greeks.

  Datis raped the islands, and we sailed away and left them. I sailed Black Raven into Corinth and unloaded the refugees, While Black took him back to sea as a paid ship, for Athens, I brought them north, to Plataea.

  Idomeneus was a bastard, for all I loved him, and when the treasure had gone over the side, none of it was mine or his — so I still had riches, and I spent them that summer. I settled forty families in the vale of Asopus, and when I was finished, the money of my piracy was gone, washed clean in rescuing them from poverty, or so I hoped.

  And then I was just another farmer with a forge, for my gold was gone.

  While I was spending money like a drunken sailor, I heard the rumours — that I was a murderer, that I was accursed of Apollo. All my father’s friends spoke up for me, as well as all my own friends — Hermogenes and Epictetus the Younger, and Myron and his sons — but my absences, my riches and the constant murmurs of the sons of Simon, from Thebes, had their effect. Men pushed me away, in the little ways that men use when they are afraid. And to my shame, I responded with arrogance and let the distance grow.

  It was a dark winter, with one beam of light. For when I was settling my Milesians, I met Antigonus of Thespiae, the young basileus of that town. He took ten of my families and made them citizens, and we became friends quickly — and as quickly, he courted my sister. He was a wealthy man, and he might have had any maiden in the valley of the Asopus, but he courted Pen, and in the spring he wed her, and men came to that wedding who had whispered about me, and my life was the better for it.

  My mother stayed sober until the priest was gone, and I kissed her, and she cried. Then I folded my finery away and went back to the forge, and she went back to drinking, and men went back to whispering that the Corvaxae were all accursed.

  There were other fights, that last year. But the Ionian Revolt died with Istes, as he fell, shouting ‘Miletus’.

  I suppose we thought that the Long War was over. And I had forgotten my slave girl. I tried to forget Briseis, and Melaina. I tried to forget all of it. I ignored my armour and my helmet and I worked on bronze kettles and drinking cups.

  Until the archon came and asked me to return to teaching the Pyrrhiche.

  My calf throbbed and burned, and my hips hurt when we danced, but they all admired my splendid Persian scale shirt and my rich red cloak, and Myron came and embraced me.

  ‘Your new citizens have made us richer by a thousand gold darics,’ he said.

  ‘And fifty shields in the phalanx,’ Hermogenes said.

  The men of Plataea came to me, and clasped my arm. Glad to have you back, they said, but now I sensed the hesitation in their grips and the tendency of their eyes to wander when they spoke. Plataeans didn’t just take off to fight in other people’s wars. Or show up with a passel of foreigners.

  But I was the devil they knew. And by then, thanks to the word-fame of my role at Lade, I was famous — so famous that it was hard for my neighbours to accept me as a man who danced and sweated and had trouble with his grape vines. Fame makes you different — ask any man who has won the laurel at Olympia or Nemea.

  May none of you ever experience defeat, and the death of all your friends. Idomeneus remained, back at the tomb of the hero, but he was as mad as a wild dog. Black was fighting against Aegina for Athens. Hermogenes was like another man — a good man, but a farmer and a husband. All the rest of them were dead. Even Archilogos was dead. And I didn’t dare allow my mind to think about Briseis. In some way, I let her be dead, as well.

  But one of the saddest truths of men is that no grief lasts for ever.

  My helmet was waiting, just where I had left it, on a leather bag on the great square bench that Pater had built. I had to hobble around the shop — my calf never healed, and as I said, I never ran well again — and I was angry all the time. Hermogenes forced me to work, and Tiraeus fired the forge, and after mending a few pots, my hands remembered their duty.

  I think it was a month after the Pyrrhiche, and perhaps three months after Pen’s wedding, before I looked at the helmet. I was surprised by what a good helmet it was, how far along I had left it. It s
eemed like ten years — like a lifetime. There was the ding where I’d mis-struck when the boy came to me with news from Idomeneus. I blinked away tears. Then I took out the ding with careful, methodical planishing, which seemed more restful than dull.

  When the bowl was as smooth as Briseis’s breasts, I turned the helmet over and looked at the patterns I’d incised.

  I had started the ravens on the cheekplates before I left. I did not love Lord Apollo any more. But the ravens seemed apt. If I ever stood in the phalanx again, I wanted to wear ravens.

  Instead of going to work on the helmet, I took a piece of scrap, pounded it out flat and tapped the ravens to life on a practice piece. I made a dozen errors, but I worked through patiently, reheating as I went. It was two days before I was satisfied, and then I went back and put the ravens on the cheekplates in an afternoon. I had time left to go and help my slaves prop the grape vines. Then I went back, looked my work over carefully and polished it as the sun set behind the hills of home. I filled the ravens with lead on the inside, planished a little more.

  Tiraeus kept an eye on me while he put a new bail on an old bronze bucket for the temple. And then he looked at my work.

  ‘You’ve grown up,’ he said. And then, his voice rough, he pointed at the back of the skullpiece. ‘Little rough there.’

  I picked up the hammer.

  Ting-ting.

  Ting-ting.

  Part II

  Marathon

  Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian,

  who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Gela;

  of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak,

  and the long-haired Persian knows it well.

  Epitaph on the Stele of Aeschylus the Playwright

  9

  It was late autumn, and the rains lashed the farm, and my slaves stayed in by the fire and made baskets for the next year’s crop. I was in the forge, hammering out the face of a new aspis — I needed a shield.

  The world was moving. I could feel it. The last cities of Lesbos were falling to the Persians, and in Athens, the stasis — the conflict — between the aristocrats and the demos was so bad that it had come to murder in the streets, or so men said, and Persian gold flowed like water to buy the best men. Closer to home, Thebes had begun agitating to take our city, or at least reduce our boundaries. And one voice carried clear from their agora to ours — Simon, son of Simon, loud in condemnation of our archon, Myron, and eager for my blood. Small traders bought us this news.

  Empedocles the priest came out from Thebes in the last golden light of autumn, while the hillside of Cithaeron was a glow of red oak leaves. When he had given the blessing of Hephaestus to my forge and relit our fires after we swept the shop, he raised Tiraeus to the rank of master, as the man deserved. Then he looked at my helmet, running his thumb over the eyebrows and using calipers to pick out the measurements of the ravens on the cheekpieces.

  ‘This is master work,’ he said. He handed it to Tiraeus, and Tiraeus handed it to Bion. ‘And you are the master in this shop, so it is right that you too should be raised.’

  I think that the fires in my heart relit that day. I had not expected it, although in retrospect there were a thousand little signs that my friends had made plans for me to be raised to the rank of master. Other pieces were brought out by Tiraeus — things I’d forgotten, like a set of bronze pins I’d made for my sister’s wedding guests — and Empedocles laughed with joy to see them, and that laughter went through me like lightning on a summer’s day. I was, you know, for a time, the master warrior of all Hellas — but it never gave me the joy that making gave me.

  Oh, there’s a lie. Killing can be a joy. Or merely a job, or worse.

  So, because two of us had been raised, we gave a special sacrifice at the Temple of Hera, where my sister, now a matron, had just been anointed as a priestess. She was two months pregnant, just starting to show, and she officiated with the dignity of her new status. And Antigonus of Thespiae saw nothing wrong with having a master smith as a brother-in-law, so he came with a train of aristocrats to my sacrifice, and Myron arrived with the best men of Plataea, and I saw the wine of a whole crop drained in a few hours — but I reckoned it wine well spent, because my heart was beating again.

  The next day, I took ten more amphorae of wine up the hill to the tomb of the hero, and I gave a smaller feast for Idomeneus and his men, and many of our Milesians as well. We drank and we danced. Idomeneus had built a great bonfire, five trees’ worth of wood, and we alternated between too hot and too cold, drank the wine and sang.

  It was late in the evening, and the fire burned high, and the younger men and women were piling my straw into a great bale — the better to share other warmths.

  I was twenty-seven, and I had never felt so old. But I was happy, pleasantly tired from dancing — the first good dancing since my leg was wounded. I was a master smith, and men came to my forge to talk about the affairs of the city. I might have been content.

  Idomeneus came and leaned against me in the warm-chill of the fire’s edge.

  ‘What ever happened to that slave girl you took away to Athens?’ he asked. ‘Did you sell her?’

  I had forgotten.

  The gods sometimes work all together, and the next day, when my head rang like my forge from the wine, Hermes sent me a messenger from Athens, with payment for a load of finished bronze. He brought news that Miltiades had been arrested for wishing to restore the tyranny. And he brought a letter from Phrynichus, and a copy of his play, the famous Fall of Miletus. When I read it, I wept.

  In the letter, Phrynichus explained that the play had been written to awaken the men of Athens to what the Persians were up to. He said that he had written it so that men might recognize Miltiades for his role in trying to save the East Greeks.

  And he asked me to come to the opening of the play.

  In Athens, they have a different form of theatre to what we have in Boeotia, and I think I should explain. Once, in my grandfather’s time, I suppose, drama was about the same everywhere — much like a rhapsode singing the Iliad, except that the poet or a professional musician performed works of praise to the gods, or sometimes the story of a hero. In Athens, there was always a set of plays — at least three — and the best of the three received a prize in honour of the god Dionysus. Athens was certainly not the only city to give praise to the god of wine, nor to offer a prize for the finest poems in his honour, but Athens has a tendency to take things to extremes.

  The tyrant Hippias was a great worshipper of Dionysus, and men say that he inaugurated the practice of using a chorus — a group of singers — to support the main line of the play. So the dramas became more like a team sport — the poet or singer and his team of chorus members competed. It was demanding, both physically and mentally, and that competition fired men to make it better, more complex, more vivid.

  While I was a slave in Ephesus, someone brought in the interaction between chorus and poet, so that men spoke and answered each other as if in a simple conversation in the agora. This may seem a small thing to you, children, but imagine a poor peasant from Attica, allowed to watch Heracles debate with the gods over his fate. Agamemnon begging his son to avenge him. Strong stuff. Sophists decry it as the end of men’s piety, but I’ve always loved it.

  Phrynichus had long led the way, winning prize after prize. But when he wrote The Fall of Miletus, he set drama on another course, because instead of writing about the gods and heroes, he wrote about an event that had just happened in the world of men. His play had many actors — not just a chorus, but a dozen more men each taking a separate role. There was Istes, fighting to the last on the wall — and Histiaeus, and Miltiades — and me.

  I was not a citizen of Athens then, so I was not permitted to appear in the play. Besides, that might have seemed to some like hubris. But Phrynichus asked me to come to the judging of the play, to stand with him as his guest, and to stand by Miltiades.

  The crops
were in, and my slaves were, for the most part, decent men who could work for a month without me. Besides, Hermogenes would be there, and Tiraeus. I didn’t stop to think. I took a horse, borrowed Idomeneus’s young man, Styges, as my servant and rode over the mountain to Attica.

  This time, I was much more careful in my approach to mighty Athens, and I rode clear around the city and arrived at Aristides’ gate as the autumn sun set and men pulled their chlamyses closer against the wind and dark cold.

  His wife came to the gate, summoned by servants. She surprised me by granting me the flash of her smile and a quick kiss on the cheek.

  ‘Arimnestos of Plataea, you are ever a friend of this house,’ she said. ‘My husband is late coming in from the Agora. Please come in!’

  I have always valued that woman. ‘Despoina, this is Styges, acting as my hypaspist. He is no slave.’

  She nodded to him. ‘I’ll see to his bed, then,’ she said. ‘You’ll want to bathe.’

  Not a question.

  I was just clear of my bath, towelling down and wishing I had not put quite so much warm water on her floor, when Aristides came in through the curtain and embraced me, his wool cloak still carrying the cold of the outside. ‘Arimnestos!’ he said.

  I had last seen him as his ship swept past mine, out of the pocket of death, at Lade. ‘You lived,’ I said with satisfaction.

  ‘And you as well, my Plataean hero. By the gods, you fought like Heracles himself.’ He embraced me again.

  Other men had said as much, but other men were not the soft-spoken prig of justice, Aristides, and I valued those words — well, up to this very hour.

  I followed him to a table set beside his wife’s loom, and the three of us ate together. Later, it became the fashion to exclude women from many things, but not then. There was meat from a sacrifice, fresh tuna — a magnificent fish — good barley porridge, and rich wheat bread. In Plataea, it would have been a feast. In Athens, it was merely dinner with a rich man.