under Miltiades before buying a good farm along the Asopus.
That was it, in my generation.
The fifty Milesian families brought us a wealth of war
experience. Teucer was the best archer our town had ever seen,
and I used him to organize the men who carried bows – in those
days, honey, archers stil walked with the phalanx. And Alcaeus,
who was the chief lord of the survivors, was as good a man in
spear-fighting as Idomeneus, and owned ful panoply, with thigh
guards and arm armour and even foot armour shaped like his
own feet, so that when he was fuly kitted, he looked like a
bronze statue.
The Milesians added real fighting power. And that alowed
them – as Ionians and foreigners – to gain acceptance more
rapidly than they might otherwise have done.
And finaly, there was Cleon, who took one of Simon’s
former farms, a Corvaxae property that I granted him, just over
the hil from mine, running hard by Epictetus’s vineyards. He was
never fond of war, but he’d stood in the front ranks several
times. Plataea was delighted to have him, and Myron got up a
colection to buy him an aspis and a helmet, as he had sold his.
In those days, a smal city like Plataea knew that its warriors
In those days, a smal city like Plataea knew that its warriors
were its lifeblood, and we danced together as often as the feast
cycle alowed. Young men hunted together on Cithaeron, and
some – a few – came to the forge and learned spear-fighting, or
went up the hil to Idomeneus or down the Asopus to Lysius.
We al taught the same things – how to use your shield and your
spear-shaft to keep the enemy’s iron from your body, and only
later how to plunge the iron home yourself.
As the bronze-smith, I had a fair idea who had armour and
how good it was. As a group, Plataeans were wel-to-do, thanks
to the money Athens paid us for grain. And those famous three
victories in a week had put good helmets and greaves in almost
every farm. They might not fit every generation, but they were
there, and when a new generation appeared, there was some
trading and some trips to the bronze-smith. The men were as
ready for war as dancing the war dance and wearing armour to
exercise could make them.
That summer, I started the custom of taking a large group of
young men up on to Cithaeron, camping, living hard and hunting.
We are not aristocrats in Plataea, but what the Spartans say is
true – it is only through hunting that men grow accustomed to
war. Wel, actualy, life as a slave can make an adequate
substitute, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a training programme.
When the barley and the wheat were in the ground, when I’d
sent two wagons of finished bronze away to Athens and another
to Corinth, and before my grapes began to ripen, I told the men,
young and old, who had gathered on a pleasant summer evening
in the yard of my forge that I would lead a hunt on the mountain.
in the yard of my forge that I would lead a hunt on the mountain.
There were only two dozen of us, that first year. We walked
up the long road on Cithaeron’s flank, and I thought of my old
tutor, Calchas, and how much he had taught me. I took the boys
– I can’t cal them anything else – to Idomeneus, and he added in
a dozen young men of his own, boys who had been sent to him
to learn the ways of war. We stayed the night there and had a
bonfire, and the boys listened open-mouthed as we told them
war stories.
Cleon came along. He didn’t say a word, and he drank too
much – but he knew how to hold a spear.
And the next day we began to teach them to hunt deer.
Some of those boys had never thrown a real javelin. Now,
boys are boys, and no boy in Plataea – at least, no citizen’s son
– was so poor that he hadn’t made himself a straight stick with a
sharp tip. But we Plataeans lack the organization of the Spartans
or the Cretans or even the Athenians, where every citizen gets
some training.
I wish I could tel you that I had the foresight to see what was
coming – but I didn’t. I felt, instead, that I owed something to my
home city. By training boys, I could pay it back. So I led them
up Cithaeron, kiled some deer and tried not to laugh as I
watched them stumble about, cut each other with axes, mis-
throw their javelins and tel lies.
Boys. Was I ever so young?
Stil, it was al a great success, although I had to keep
Idomeneus off some of the prettier boys with a stick, and I truly
wondered what kind of Cretan vices he was teaching the boys
who were sent to him – but I was not his keeper. Together we
led them up the mountain, and two weeks later when we came
back down, they were leaner and faster and better men in every
way – or at least, most were. And not just the boys. Cleon was
much more himself. But in every herd there are a few animals
doomed to die, and man is no different.
After the first time, men came and asked for their sons to be
taken, and even some of the older men – such as Peneleos, son
of Epictetus, who had no war training and wanted to catch up –
came to me, and my life filed up. I worked, and in between
bouts of work, I trained the young.
In early autumn, when the grapes began to ripen and I was
watching the weather and al the farmers around me to see who
would plough and plant barley, my sister arrived with gifts and a
new baby, and we hugged her. She went and saw Mater, who
mostly lived alone in a wine haze with a couple of slaves who
knew their business. Then she came back, took a bite of dinner
and shook her head.
‘You need a wife,’ she said.
I al but spat out my food.
‘I’ve found you a fine one,’ she went on. ‘You need someone
to run this house and take care of Mater. When’s the last time
you ate a decent meal?’
I looked at the food on my fine bronze plate. ‘What’s wrong
with this?’ I asked.
‘Any peasant in the vale of Asopus eats better than this,’ she
‘Any peasant in the vale of Asopus eats better than this,’ she
said. ‘Bread and cheese?’
‘My own barley and my own cheese!’ I said.
Penelope looked at me steadily. ‘Listen, Hesiod,’ she said,
and giggled, and I had to laugh with her. Hesiod was a fine
farmer and a brutal misogynist, and while I loved his words, I
didn’t agree with al of them. I knew what Pen meant.
‘I don’t need a wife,’ I said.
‘Which slave warms your bed?’ she asked. ‘Alete? Is it
you?’
Alete was an old Thracian woman who helped with Mater.
She grinned toothlessly. ‘Nah, mistress,’ she said. She laughed.
Pen looked around. ‘Seriously – who is it?’
I shrugged. ‘You are embarrassing me, sister. I have no bed-
warmer in this house. It makes for bad feeling.’
‘I’l tel you what makes for bad feeling,’ Pen shot back.
‘Surly men without wives, in di
rty houses with dul food.’ She
looked at me. ‘Unless that Cretan has trained you to like boys?’
I could feel the teltale signs of defeat. ‘But I don’t need a
wife,’ I said feebly.
‘My lord’s sister Leda went to school – a school for girls – at
Corinth.’ Pen was remorseless, like Persian archery. ‘You get to
choose her hair colour and I’l take care of the rest.’
‘Black,’ I said, almost unbidden. Black like Briseis, I thought.
I cannot marry – I love Briseis.
But I knew Briseis was lost to me for ever, and I was lonely,
in the brief heartbeats where I alowed myself to think about
anything but work and training.
anything but work and training.
Later that autumn, when Atlas’s fair daughters the Pleiades set,
when al the grapes were in and those that went for wine were
trodden and we had a week while we waited to see how good
the wheat might be, I took almost a hundred men up the
mountain. The harvest was already looking to be fabulous –
perhaps legendary. And we needed a break from labour.
Besides, deer meat kept many hearths fed that summer while we
waited to see if the new year would do better than last year’s evil
rains, and the Milesians were poor – they had started with
nothing, and every deer we kiled kept their eyes shining. And in
those days, honey, most Greeks lived and died on barley – and
barley, as Hesiod says, goes into the ground when the Pleiades
set and comes up when they rise – a winter crop. The Milesians
needed food to get them through the winter.
This time we swept the slopes of the mountain with something
like efciency, and Idomeneus cursed and said we’d ruin the
hunting. I promised that the next hunt would go up behind
Eleutherai, a longer expedition and better training – and a new
stock of deer. We kiled seventy animals and carried the meat
home, and while we were up on the mountain, the older men
discussed politics and war.
The Persians were coming closer. The Great King had sworn
to burn Athens, or so men said, and Eretria in Euboea too. The
rumour was that Thebes was wiling to swear fealty to the Great
King for aid against Athens.
‘We’l have to fight,’ Peneleos said.
‘We’l have to fight,’ Peneleos said.
Everyone looked at me. And I was old and wise.
‘Bulshit,’ I said. ‘The Persians are mighty, and their armies
are huge and they own more triremes than al of the Greeks ever
did – but do you know how far Sardis is from Athens?’ So
much for my wisdom. My only concern was closer to home. ‘If
the Thebans get involved,’ I said, ‘then we could find ourselves
in a fight.’
‘My pater says one Plataean is worth ten Thebans,’ said
young Diocles, son of Eumenides. Eumenides had stood his
ground when my brother died at Oinoe.
‘Your pater should know better,’ I said. ‘When the Thebans
come, they’l have ten men for every one of ours. And our knees
wil rattle together like dry leaves in a wind.’
‘We can stand against them in battle or stay in our wals,’
Idomeneus said. ‘What I would fear is raids – greedy men, wel
led, coming for cattle and slaves.’
‘That’s a scary thought,’ Peneleos said. ‘That’s war the way
bandits make war on honest men.’
Hermogenes was eating deer meat, and he belched. ‘That’s
how war is made, out there in the world,’ he said.
‘Aye,’ Cleon said.
‘We should have an alarm, and a select group that could
come out at a moment’s notice and run down thieves,’
Idomeneus said. ‘Better yet, four or five alarms, al a little
different, for the quarters of the territory around us, so that the
moment we hear the alarm, we know where to run.’
We al agreed that the Cretan had a fine idea, and when next
the assembly met after the feasts and contests of Heracles, I
moved that we create a select militia and that the alarms be built,
and it was carried. So those who took part in my deer hunts on
the hilside became the Plataeans’ epilektoi, the picked men, and
we built the alarm fires and set signals after the wheat harvest,
which old men said was the richest in twenty years, and some
said the richest they’d ever seen. At the feast of Hera every one
of us made sacrifice, so that smoke rose without cease to the
heavens, and Hera smiled on us. The Milesians filed their
cottages and their new barns, and sold the surplus over the
mountains in Attica as we did, and their sons came up the
mountain with me, and some began to buy my armour.
Cleon somehow managed to have a poor harvest in a year of
plenty. I went to visit him, taking a wagon to fetch his surplus,
and he brought me just ten medimnoi of grain.
‘What in Pluton’s name?’ I swore. ‘Did you sleep al day?’
Cleon looked at the ground. ‘I’m not cut out to be a farmer,’
he said.
‘What wil you eat this winter?’ I asked.
He made a face. ‘Your handouts?’ he asked, and his voice
was bitter.
Despite Cleon’s failure, it was a good year. After my second
ploughing and before the turning of the year, when the days
finaly begin to get longer and the rains let up a little, I traveled
over the mountains into Attica to meet my prospective bride, a
over the mountains into Attica to meet my prospective bride, a
girl of fourteen years caled Euphoria, whose father was a
wealthy cavalry-class man from the hils north of Athens. She
had been Leda’s schoolmate at Corinth, and she could read and
sing and weave, and when I arrived . . . wel, she’s worth a
better story than that. So perhaps I should tel you how I met
Euphoria.
12
She didn’t have black hair. She was as blonde as the sun, and
her hair was like a banner for men’s attentions. Men crowded
around Euphoria like vultures on a battlefield, like ravens on a
new corn crop, like seaguls on a fishing boat with a fine catch,
and she may have loved the attention she received, but she
appeared to be immune, as some men are to the arrows of
Apolo. She was showered in presents from the time she was old
enough to walk, and some men caled her Helen. Her father was
Aleitus, a famous hunter, and her mother, Atlanta, had won
every woman’s foot race in Greece and was that rarest of
creatures, a female athlete. Euphoria had the body of a grown
woman when she was fourteen, with deep breasts and wide hips
– and she had hair of gold. Have I mentioned that?
My sister filed me in on these details as we sat at the big farm
table in the main kitchen of our house at the edge of winter. The
table in the main kitchen of our house at the edge of winter. The
hearth smoked, and the smoke rose through the rafters in beams
of sunshine, like the arms of the gods reaching to earth. Stil
makes you cough, though.
Pen raised her hand and ordered more smal beer with a
c
rook of her finger. Life as the wife of an aristocrat agreed with
her.
Her husband, Antigonus, was a good man. He doted on her
and yet made good company for me, and several of his friends
slept in the andron and would accompany us over the mountains.
Pen told me that I needed some aristocratic friends. But the very
idea of marrying into the aristocracy of Attica made my stomach
roil, and the thought of marrying a famous beauty put me off my
food.
‘You are a famous man,’ my sister said. ‘You need to marry
wel.’
‘I am the bronze-smith of Plataea,’ I said. ‘What wil her
father say if I take Tiraeus and Hermogenes?’
Pen stuck her tongue out at me. ‘If he’s as wel bred as
people say, he’l welcome them, and you. But why try his
patience? And why don’t you have any presentable friends?’
She roled her eyes at her husband’s sister, Leda, who smiled
knowingly and batted her eyelashes at al the male guests
indiscriminately, despite being married to some lordling at
Thebes.
‘Miltiades? Aristides?’ I laughed. ‘Perhaps Idomeneus? Have
you met Cleon?’
you met Cleon?’
Mater made one of her rare appearances. She dropped on to
a stool by Leda and barked her laugh. ‘Idomeneus is very wel
bred,’ she said, ‘for a wolf.’ She looked around at al of us. ‘If
you take Idomeneus, make sure he doesn’t kil anyone.
Penelope, motherhood agrees with you more than it ever agreed
with me.’ She beamed a mixture of wine and affection at us. ‘I
am so pleased to see both of my children returning to the class
that your father abandoned.’ She turned to me. ‘Cleon is a stray
dog, not a wolf. You’d do better to put him down – he’l bite
your hand in the end.’
I went straight out to the forge and began to pound a lump of
bronze with a hammer. I pounded it into sheet – a slave’s job,
but one that alowed me to hit something very hard, again and
again, until I was calm and Mater was back in her rooms, drunk
and silent.
But the next morning she was back again. ‘Why don’t you
ask Miltiades to meet you?’ she asked. ‘He can stand as your
mentor. He’s a man of property, and as I have cause to
remember, he has beautiful manners.’
‘He’s kiled more men than Idomeneus,’ I spat.
‘Why must you behave like a beast, my love?’ Mater asked,
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