Marathon

by Christian Cameron

  At the shrine of the hero, Idomeneus halted his men – those

  who had survived – and we embraced.

  ‘Good fight,’ he said, with his mad grin.

  We poured libations for the hero. Probably hundreds. It is

  odd, but one of my memories of that autumn day is the wine lying

  in pools before the hero’s tomb. I had never seen so many

  libations poured there, and the image of wine filing the wagon

  ruts is, to me, one of the strongest I associate with Marathon.

  We did not commit hubris. We gave thanks.

  Then we went down into the lengthening shadows of the

  valey, and we halted under our own wals and formed the

  phalanx one more time. Thousands of citizens came out to see us

  – indeed, they’d known we were coming when the first glint of

  bronze was seen on the passes, and runners had long since

  brought them the tale of the battle and the number and names of

  the dead.

  We formed one last time, and Myron came out of the

  phalanx.

  I took off my helmet and handed him my spear. ‘We are no

  longer at war,’ I said. ‘I was the archon of war, and I return my

  spear.’

  He took it. ‘Plataeans,’ he said. ‘I return you to your city, at

  peace.’

  And they cheered – the hoplites, and the new citizens, and

  the women and children and even the slaves.

  It would be good if I could leave it there.

  Pour me a little more wine.

  I looked around for Euphoria – I hadn’t realy expected her,

  as she would have been in her ninth month – but I saw neither

  Hermogenes’ wife nor my sister. I remember that Antigonus and

  I stood together, and I had a joke at the edge of my tongue,

  about how, for the first time, we were timely and our wives were

  late.

  Before I could make that cruel jibe, one of my Thracians –

  the men I’d freed – came on to the Field of Ares. He told us his

  news, tears running down his cheeks. To be honest, I don’t

  remember anything after that, until I stood by her bedside. I had

  missed her by perhaps three hours.

  There was blood – enough blood that she might have died at

  Marathon. She had fought her own fight – a long one – and she

  had not surrendered or given way. She stood her ground until the

  very end, and pushed our child out, and died for it.

  ‘I told her you were coming,’ Pen told me. She held me

  tightly against her, and I felt nothing but the fatigue and the

  crushing lack of emotion that had dogged me since we stormed

  the olive grove. ‘I told her, and she held my hand – oh!’

  Pen wept. Antigonus wept.

  I felt as if I had been wrapped in thick wool.

  I felt as if I had been wrapped in thick wool.

  I drank some wine, and later I lay on some blankets, my eyes

  open. Then, my choices made, I got to my feet. I lifted her – she

  weighed nothing – and carried her outside to the stable. I took a

  horse – no great crime with a brother-in-law – and I carried her

  body across my lap, as I had carried her over the mountains

  when first she was my bride.

  I carried her home.

  Of course, there was nothing left of my home but the forge.

  Cleitus and Simon had burned my house.

  I laid her on the work table in my forge, and I put everything

  on her – every jewel Mater had saved from the house, every

  piece of loot I had taken from Marathon or been given by

  thankful Athenians, until she glittered like a goddess.

  Then I lit my forge.

  I prayed to Hephaestus, and I lit my torch from my forge fire.

  Then I set my forge ablaze, and I left it to burn as her pyre.

  It burned behind me, bright as a new sun. I rode down the

  hil, away from the farm and the fire. I rode steadily until I heard

  the crash as the roof-tree gave, and the whoosh as the rest of the

  building leaped into new flame – and then I pressed my horse to

  a galop and rode away.

  I never promised you a happy story.

  If I tel you more . . .

  If I tel you more, thugater, it wil be another night. And then

  I’l tel you how I broke the mould of my life and cast it away –

  how I went with Miltiades and then to Sicily, and left Greece

  behind me.

  behind me.

  For now, though, leave an old man to weep old tears. So

  many dead – and only me to sing of them now. I am the last.

  But remember, when you pray to the gods, that men stood

  like the heroes of old at Marathon, and were better. And that

  they are stil no better than the women who bear them.

  Wine!

  Historical Afterword

  As closely as possible, this novel folows the road of history. But

  history – especialy Archaic Greek history – can be more like a

  track in the forest than a road with a kerb. I have attempted to

  make sense of Herodotus and his curiously modern tale of nation

  states, betrayal, terrorism and heroism. I have read most of the

  secondary sources, and I have found most of them wanting.

  The Persians were not ‘bad’. The Greeks were not ‘good’.

  And since both cultures grew from the same roots, ‘Western’

  civilization would probably have been much the same had the

  Persians remained the world empire. Or so I believe.

  And yet, and yet . . . the complex web of decisions, betrayals

  and conspiracies in Herodotus somehow gave birth to the first

  real attempt at democracy – at least, the first of which we know.

  I have done my best to make this element of the story as

  essential as the fighting – to try and show how the smal men

  gained political power, despite the overwhelming power of

  landowners and an ancient aristocracy.

  It is nothing but facile error to see Athenian democracy as

  bearing any resemblance to the United States, Great Britain or

  any other modern democracy except in the most general way.

  any other modern democracy except in the most general way.

  There were no ‘middle-class hoplites’ in the front ranks.

  Aristocrats led the demos in every walk of life, and at war they

  served in front, in their superior armour, with their superior

  training, and the evidence for this is on every page of the

  literature, and only the most pig-headed myth-making can ignore

  it. In the period of which I write, the ‘phalanx’ as we now

  imagine it was just being born. Indeed, one possible reading of

  Herodotus would suggest that the ‘phalanx’ was born at

  Marathon. Archers and light-armed men stil served in the front

  lines, and heroic aristocrats stil fought duels – or so the art and

  literature suggest, however the idea is disliked by current

  historians, especialy ‘military’ historians.

  In fact, there were few middle-class hoplites because our

  modern notions of class didn’t exist. A poor man, like Socrates,

  might stil be an aristocrat to his finger ends. A rich man, like the

  former slave who gave a thousand aspides to support the

  rearming of Athens in the fourth century, remained a former

  slave. Unless the term ‘middle class’
has no other meaning than

  to stand as a group between the poor and the rich, it can’t be

  made to apply.

  And finaly, or perhaps first, it may be that only the veterans

  among my readers wil know the truth that military historians

  often cannot stomach – that al races and breeds are equaly

  brave or cowardly, regardless of government, loyalty, race,

  creed or sexual preference. That al men lose combat

  effectiveness with fatigue and confusion.

  That only a few men are kilers, and they are supremely

  dangerous.

  Realy, friends, it is al in the Iliad. And when my inspiration

  failed, I always went back to the Iliad, like a man returning to

  the source of pure water. I have enormous respect for the

  modern works of many historians, classical and modern. But

  they weren’t there.

  I have seen war – never the war of the spear and shield, but

  war. And when I read the Iliad, it comes to me as being true.

  Not, perhaps, true about Troy. But true about war. Homer did

  not love war. Achiles is not the best man in the Iliad. War is

  ugly.

  Arimnestos of Plataea was a real man. I hope that I’ve done

  him justice.

  Acknowledgements

  On 1 April 1990, I was in the back right seat of an S-3B Viking,

  flying a routine anti-submarine warfare flight off the USS Dwight

  D. Eisenhower. But we were not just anywhere. We were off

  the coast of Turkey, and in one flight we passed Troy, or rather,

  Hisarlik, Anatolia. Later that afternoon, we passed down the

  coast of Lesbos and al along the coast of what Herodotus

  thought of as Asia. Back in my stateroom, on the top bunk (my

  bunk, as the most junior officer), was an open copy of the Iliad.

  I wil never forget that day, because there’s a picture on my

  wal of the Sovremenny-class destroyer Okrylennyy broadside

  on to the mock harpoon missile I fired on her from wel over the

  horizon using our superb ISAR radar. Of course, there was no

  Homeric deed of arms – the Cold War was dying, or even dead

  – but there was professional triumph in that hour, and the photo

  of the ship, framed against the distant haze of the same coastline

  that saw battles at Mycale and Troy, wil decorate my wals until

  my shade goes down to the underworld.

  I think that the Killer of Men series was born there. I love

  the Greek and Turkish Aegean, and the history of it. Before

  Saddam Hussein wrecked it in August, my carrier battle group

  Saddam Hussein wrecked it in August, my carrier battle group

  had a near perfect summer, cruising the wine-dark sea where the

  Greeks and Persians fought.

  But it may have been born when talking to various Vietnam

  veterans, returning from that war – a war that may not have been

  worse than any other war, but loomed large in my young

  consciousness of conflict. My grandfather and my father and my

  uncle – al veterans – said things, when they thought I wasn’t

  around, that led me to suspect that while many men can be

  brave, some men are far more dangerous in combat than others.

  Stil later, I was privileged to serve with various men from the

  Special Operations world, and I came to know that even among

  them – the snake-eaters – there were only a few who were the

  kilers. I listened to them talk, and I wondered what kind of a

  man Achiles realy was. Or Hector. And I began to wonder

  what made them, and what kept them at it, and the thought

  stayed with me while I flew and served in Africa and saw various

  conflicts and the effects that those conflicts have on al the

  participants, from the first Gulf War to Rwanda and Zaire.

  The Killer of Men series is my attempt to understand the

  inside of such men.

  This book was both very easy and very hard to write. I have

  thought about the Killer of Men series since 1990 in some way

  or other; when I sat down to put my thoughts into the computer,

  the book seemed to write itself, and even now, when I type

  these final words, I am amazed at how much of it seemed to be

  waiting, prewritten, inside my head. But the devil is stil in the

  waiting, prewritten, inside my head. But the devil is stil in the

  details, and my acknowledgements are al about the investigation

  and research of those details.

  The broad sweep of the history of the Ionian Revolt is realy

  known to us only from Herodotus and, to a vastly lesser extent,

  from Thucydides. I have folowed Herodotus in almost every

  respect, except for the details of how the tiny city-state of

  Plataea came to involve herself with Athens. That, to be frank, I

  made up – although it is based on a theory evolved over a

  hundred conversations with amateur and professional historians.

  First and foremost, I have to acknowledge the contribution of

  Nicolas Cioran, who cheerfuly discussed Plataea’s odd status

  every day as we worked out in a gymnasium, and sometimes

  fought sword to sword. My trainer and constant sparring partner

  John Beck deserves my thanks – both for a vastly improved

  physique, and for helping give me a sense of what real training

  for a life of violence might have been like in the ancient world.

  And my partner in the reinvention of ancient Greek xiphos

  fighting, Aurora Simmons, deserves at least equal thanks.

  Among professional historians, I was assisted by Paul

  McDonnel-staff and Paul Bardunias, by the entire brother- and

  sisterhood of RomanArmyTalk.com and the web community

  there, and by the staff of the Royal Ontario Museum (who

  possess and cheerfuly shared the only surviving helmet

  attributable to the Battle of Marathon), as wel as the staff of the

  Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig, who possess the

  best-preserved ancient aspis and provided me with superb

  best-preserved ancient aspis and provided me with superb

  photos to use in recreating it. I also received help from the library

  staff of the University of Toronto, where, when I’m rich enough,

  I’m a student, and from Toronto’s superb Metro Reference

  Library. Every novelist needs to live in a city where universal

  access to JSTOR is free and on his library card. The staff of the

  Walters Art Galery in Baltimore, Maryland – just across the

  street from my mother’s apartment, conveniently – were cheerful

  and helpful, even when I came back to look at the same helmet

  for the sixth time. And James Davidson, whose superb book,

  Greeks and Greek Love helped me think about the thorny

  issues of ancient Greek sexuality, was also useful to a novelist

  with too many questions.

  Excelent as professional historians are – and my version of

  the Persian Wars owes a great deal to many of them, not least

  Hans Van Wees and Victor Davis Hanson – my greatest praise

  and thanks have to go to the amateur historians we cal

  reenactors. Giannis Kadoglou of Thessaloniki volunteered to

  spend two ful days driving around the Greek countryside, from

  Athens to Plataea and back, charming my five-year-old daughter

 
and my wife while translating everything in sight and being as

  delighted with the ancient town of Plataea as I was myself. I met

  him on RomanArmyTalk, and this would be a very different

  book without his passion for the subject and relentless desire to

  correct my errors.

  But Giannis is hardly alone, and there is – literaly – a phalanx

  of Greek reenactors who helped me. Here in my part of North

  America, we have a group caled the Plataeans – this is, trust me,

  America, we have a group caled the Plataeans – this is, trust me,

  not a coincidence – and we work hard on recreating the very

  time period and city-state so prominent in these books, from

  weapons, armour and combat to cooking, crafts and dance. If

  the reader feels that these books put flesh and blood on the bare

  bones of history – in so far as I’ve succeeded in doing that – it is

  because of the efforts of the men and women who reenact with

  me and show me, every time we’re together, al the things I

  haven’t thought of, who do their own research, their own kit-

  building and their own training. Thanks to al of you, Plataeans.

  And to al the other Ancient Greek reenactors who helped me

  find things, make things or build things.

  Thanks are also due to the people of Lesbos and Athens and

  Plataea – I can’t name al of you, but I was entertained, informed

  and supported constantly in three trips to Greece, and the person

  who I can name is Aliki Hamosfakidou of Dolphin Helas Travel

  for her care, interest and support through many hundreds of

  emails and some meetings.

  In a professional line, I would like to acknowledge the debt I

  owe to Mr Tim Waler, my copy-editor, whose knowledge of

  language – both this one and Ancient Greek – always makes me

  feel humble. He’s pretty good at east and west, too. Thanks to

  him, this book is better than it would ever have been without him.

  Bil Massey, my editor at Orion, found the two biggest errors

  in this story and made me fix them, and again, it is a better book

  for his work. A much better book. Oh, and he found a lot of

  other errors, too, but let’s not mention them. I have had a few

  editors. Working with Bil is wonderful. Come on, authors – how

  editors. Working with Bil is wonderful. Come on, authors – how

  many of you get to say that?

  My agent, Sheley Power, contributed more directly to this