Marathon: Freedom or Death

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.

‘How stands the case with Miltiades?’ I asked after I had eaten my fill. Among Greeks, it is bad manners to ask hard questions during a meal. Truth to tell, it is bad manners in Persia, in Aegypt, in Sicily and in Rome, too.

Aristides wiped his fingers on a cloth — my sister would have kicked him, but customs differ from town to town — and pursed his lips. ‘On the evidence, the jury can do nothing but convict him,’ he said.

I could hear something in his voice. I raised an eyebrow. ‘But?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Men are seldom convicted on evidence,’ he said. ‘Miltiades’ case has become a test of the reach of the Great King into our city. The case was brought with malice, by the Alcmaeonids, and I have reason to believe that the Great King paid for it to be done.’

I laughed. ‘And the sad truth is that every one of us knows that Miltiades had every intention of seizing the city.’

Aristides frowned. ‘I wish you would phrase things more accurately, Plataean. We know nothing of the kind. We know what he might have done had he defeated the Persians and Medes at Lade.’ He shrugged.

I confess that I laughed. ‘Aristides!’ I said, as I understood. ‘You are his advocate? You, his enemy?’

His wife laughed, and I slapped the table, and the Athenians’ byword for justice and honour glared at us as if he was our pedagogue and we were errant children.

‘It’s not funny!’ he snapped.

Try stopping a man from laughing with those words.

‘Besides,’ he said. ‘I am hardly his enemy.’

‘Of course not,’ I said. I laughed again. I couldn’t help myself, and his wife joined me.

‘Why is it,’ he asked, when we began to breathe again, ‘that visitors here always mock me, and you, despoina, always abet them?’

I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘If you will be better than other men, you must be patient with their mockery,’ I said. ‘Besides, we only tease you because we love you.’

‘Why?’ Aristides asked. Like most righteous men, he was impatient of teasing and had neither defence against it nor any idea why it was directed at him.

I shook my head and gave up. ‘Forgive me, lord,’ I said. ‘Imagine I’m but a poor witless foreigner, and tell me how Miltiades might survive this charge.’

Aristides ignored my tone and nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said, taking me at my word. ‘The question before the jury ought to be whether Miltiades sought to make himself tyrant or not. But the question that is actually facing the jury is simpler, and more complex — whether Athens ought to resist Persia or not. Had we won Lade, this trial would never have come about.’

I decided that I should not make the point that if we had won Lade, Miltiades would have landed here with fifty triremes and five thousand hoplites and made himself master in short order. Better not to say every thought that comes to one’s mind.

‘Men know that the Great King took Miletus. Thanks to Phrynichus, starting tomorrow, men will hear how close we came to defeating Datis — and how we were betrayed by the aristocrats of Samos. Do you know that the trierarchs there were stoned by a mob? Or that the eleven captains who stood with us are to have statues?’

‘Someday I will find Dionysius of Samos in a dark alley,’ I said.

‘Too late,’ Aristides said. ‘His oarsmen killed him to erase the shame of their defection.’

‘Good for them,’ I said. It was, truly, the best news I’d heard all day. ‘His shade will never go to Elysium!’

We poured libations to Zeus who watches over oaths, and to the furies who avenge men who are wronged.

‘So,’ Aristides continued, when the wine was pooling on the floor, ‘to summarize, we seek to remind every juror — and indeed, every man — that we fought with the men of Miletus, and that, but for betrayal, we would have been victorious. And we seek to remind them that if the Great King rules here, our sons and daughters will service his soldiers like the virgins of Lesbos and Chios.’

That was close to a blatant lie — it was at least stretching the facts. The rape of the islands had been a horror — but it didn’t represent the daily policy of the Great King. On the other hand, it had been terrible. I nodded.

‘And if the men of this city see Persia as a threat, and see that we can stand against the Great King, then they will silence the Alcmaeonids and stand their ground, and Miltiades will be found innocent.’ Aristides had risen to his feet. He was giving a speech.

I clapped. So did his wife.

He sat down and hung his head. ‘But here in my own home, I’ll say that I have very little hope,’ he said. ‘They tried to kill Sophanes today.’

I grinned. I didn’t know that Sophanes was yet alive. ‘I’ve seen that boy in action,’ I said. ‘Hired thugs will never get him.’

‘Yesterday Themistocles was beaten,’ he went on. ‘He’s rising to be the head of the Demos. I have no time for him — but he’s with us against the Alcmaeonids and their supporters.’ He shrugged. ‘Men are afraid to speak openly.’

I rubbed my chin. ‘Where is my suit against the Alcmaeonids for my slave girl and my horse?’ I asked.

Aristides stopped as if he’d been struck. ‘By Zeus Soter,’ he said, ‘I had forgotten. I must apologize — Miltiades is your proxenos, and he should have reminded me.’ A proxenos is the man — usually a prominent man — who represents the affairs of your city in his own. Miltiades was the proxenos of Plataea in Athens.

I took a sip of wine. ‘I mean to have that woman back,’ I said. ‘I’ll turn to violence if I must. I swore an oath, which was recently brought to my attention. It lowers me to admit this — but I forgot her, too.’

‘More than a year since we swore the suit,’ Aristides said. ‘You must not turn to violence, Arimnestos. This city is the symbol of the rule of law.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. Thugs were beating my friends. Miltiades was in fear of his life from his own people. And I felt alive for the first time in months.

By Aristides’ shoulder, Jocasta raised an eyebrow — and moved one long finger across her throat.

I got her message as clearly as if she’d shouted it, and I smiled at her.

‘What is there to grin at?’ Aristides asked.

I shrugged. ‘It’s good to be here with you,’ I said, with perfect honesty.

The next morning I went and visited Miltiades, who was being kept in one of the caves above the Agora. The men guarding him were mostly his friends.

‘I’m safe here,’ he said with a smile, after he hugged me. ‘Unless Aristides gets himself a bodyguard, they’ll kill him in the Agora. The rule of law is over. The Great King has bought the rich men, and they have bought the thugs. There’ll be little justice after this.’

I could have said that there would have been little enough justice if he had made himself tyrant, but to Hades with that. Miltiades was my childhood hero, and my friend.

‘I mean to take some action,’ I said, glancing around.

‘Legal action?’ Miltiades asked. ‘You are a foreigner.’

‘You are my proxenos,’ I said. ‘And I have a lawsuit sworn against Cleitus of the Alcmaeonids.’

‘So you do,’ he said. He shrugged and raised both eyebrows. ‘I fail to see why this is germane.’

I looked around. ‘You trust all these men?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ Miltiades said, but his eyes said otherwise.

‘Suffice it to say that if I move my case, you will have to act for me.’ I bowed. Miltiades was no Aristides, and he did not know the law the way the Just Man did. ‘And if there is no advantage to you, lord, I, at least, would reclaim the woman and the horse.’

Miltiades looked disgruntled — but he was too good a man to be despondent. ‘I’ll do my best,’ he promised.

‘I need to contact some witnesses,’ I said. ‘Paramanos? And Agios?’

‘What have they to do with your damned horse?’ he asked, and then realization began to dawn. He choked a moment, coughed and called to a boy who stood by, wearing the green and gold of Miltiades’ father. ‘Take Lord Arimnestos to Piraeus,’ he said, ‘and find the men he needs to see.’

‘Aye, lord,’ the boy said with a deep bow.

Aristides was a good man, the Just Man, but it was civil war in the streets, and by putting Miltiades, the fighter, in irons, the Alcmaeonids had muzzled their opposition.

I meant to have my slave girl back. And it seemed to me, after looking around for a few hours, that the fastest way through the tangle of Athenian politics would be to break some heads.

I have great respect for democracy, friends. But democracy needs a little help sometimes.

The first man I met with was Phrynichus. He was easy to find, in a good house high on the hill, hard by the Acropolis. I asked my way there, with one hand on my purse and a wary eye out for Alcmaeonid-paid brutes.

He was happy to see me. His fighting days were probably over — his two wounds had both been almost mortal, and he made it clear to me that he felt that the gods had sent him back to life to redress the balance of the loss at Lade. As he was the man who had sent the letter, I stayed a night with him, ate his food and tried to help out as much as possible, as I could tell that he was living small.

His wife Irene was kind, careful with money and smitten with a sadness that often comes to those who cannot have children — or perhaps poverty was wearing her down. I had a cure for poverty, and I took her aside while her husband napped. She pulled a shawl over her head — she was not used to talking to men without a chaperone present.

I put a purse on the table. ‘Your husband never received his share from our last voyage,’ I said carefully. ‘I don’t like to speak of it — I know he was there for the principle of the thing, and not for filthy loot.’

Her eyes were carefully lowered, but now they came up and locked on mine. ‘I understand,’ she said steadily. ‘You are clearly more of a gentleman than some of our other friends.’

I laughed. ‘Don’t believe it, lady. But that money is his, and perhaps I could buy some wine for dinner?’

She shook her head behind the shawl. ‘I, for one, would appreciate some decent wine,’ she allowed.

When Phrynichus was awake, he sat with me at the farm table that dominated the main room. ‘Irene is happier today,’ he said. ‘What did you say to her?’

‘I took the liberty of buying you some decent wine,’ I said. I put a hand on his shoulder as his face darkened. ‘Don’t give me any shit, brother. You’re poor as a frog without a swamp and you need a decent amphora to get you through the play.’

‘If it ever goes on,’ he said. ‘Fuck me, Arimnestos. Cleitus and the Alcmaeonids paid to suppress it, and now they’ve threatened that if it goes on, I’ll be beaten. Or Irene will be. They say they’ll pay men to disrupt the performance, the way they broke up Miltiades’ festival of return.’

I shook my head. ‘Don’t give an inch,’ I said. ‘I’m working on the problem of the Alcmaeonids.’

‘What can you do?’ he asked. ‘I mean no offence, Arimnestos, but you’re just a foreigner!’

‘And you need a bodyguard,’ I said. I knew where to find one.

That night, we ate good fish and drank good wine, and Irene lied like a good wife and said she’d found a big silver piece in the floorboards. And in the morning, I made excuses and slipped away, feeling bad for having done so. Phrynichus needed me. But what he really needed was a success for his play.

My next stop was Cleon’s. He was more sober than when last I’d found him.

‘You’re a thetes now?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘I drank the money I made with Aristides,’ he said. ‘After they died, I mean. And spent some on whores.’ He looked around the main room of his house. It was clean, because it was empty.

‘What trade do you work?’ I asked.

He looked out of the door into the street. ‘I was a pot-engraver,’ he said. ‘Hard to explain, really. I cut the scenes into the surface of pots before the painter painted them, on the most expensive items. But there’s a whole new style of painting now, with no engraving, and I don’t get much work, and what I do get — well, slaves earn as much as I do.’ He shook his head. ‘Before Yani died, I had a fishing boat — my pater’s. That kept us on the right side of the ledger. But I sold it.’

‘You don’t have any land?’ I asked.

‘Not any more,’ he allowed.

‘Would you work for me?’

‘Here? In Athens?’ he asked.

I watched him for a moment, because I didn’t need a drunk, but I did need to know that the man who’d stood at my shoulder in the fight at Ephesus was still in there. His hair was greying at the temples, his chiton was dirty and he had the weathered skin of a man who’d slept in alleys too many times.

‘No,’ I said. ‘That is, I need you here for a few days. We’ll break some heads. And then you’ll have to leave, because the Alcmaeonids will eventually figure out who you are, and kill you.’

Cleon looked blank. ‘And then?’

‘And then you come with me to Plataea. And start again.’ I walked over to him. ‘Sell this house, go to Plataea and become a citizen. Stand at my shoulder. Be my friend.’

‘On a farm?’ he asked.

‘If that’s what you can do, yes.’ I looked around the house. ‘Anything to keep you here?’

‘Not a fucking thing,’ Cleon said. ‘Who do we kill?’

Paramanos hugged me like a lost brother. I had last seen him covered with wounds from Lade and making a slow recovery when we fled Kallipolis, and we drank more wine than might have been wise.

It’s a funny thing — Paramanos and I could have been great friends all along, I think, but for the fact that I used fear to cow him in the first moments of his service under me, and while he served me, I think he hated me. Relationships between men can be as complicated as those between women.

But Lade changed that, as you’ll see. After Lade, those of us who survived it — we never forgot.

Black joined us, and Herk, my first tutor in the ways of the sea, and he and Cleon embraced, and we drank too much cheap wine, as I mentioned. Other men came around — oarsmen, sailors, hoplites.

‘Miltiades needs us,’ I said.

Agios, once Miltiades’ helmsman, nodded, and Cleon shrugged, but Paramanos shook his head.

‘I’m not a citizen here,’ he said. ‘And my status has been made abundantly clear. When I’ve had my fees paid, I’ll be taking my money and going back to Cyrene.’

Black nodded.

I looked at him. ‘You too?’

‘Athens isn’t my place,’ he said.

‘Herk, you’re a citizen?’ I asked.

‘Oh, indeed,’ he said. ‘Born a thetes, but in the last allotment, I was a hippeis.’ He shrugged. ‘The men of property treat me like shit, for all that I’m a landowner now. You think I lived in Kallipolis as an exile? I hate Athens. The City of Aristocrats.’ He looked around. ‘You know what? For the commoners — the tyranny was better.’

Cleon barked his strange laugh, and I could see that the two of them got along very well.

I need to explain. For me, my loyalty to Plataea was absolute. To hear these three knock Athens — most especially Herk, who, by all accounts had made his fortune in her service — made me angry. Cleon I could understand. His city had let him down. But Herk?

‘You’re a thankless bunch,’ I said. ‘Miltiades made you rich in the service of Athens, and now he needs you, and you are running off to Cyrene?’

Paramanos stroked his beard. ‘Yes.’ He turned his head away. ‘I’ve been threatened. My daughters have been threatened.’

Agios nodded, clearly unhappy.

‘Gentlemen, sitting at this table are five bad men whose names make Syrian merchants shit themselves — and you are afraid of some threats from bum-boys in Piraeus?’ I stood up. ‘I’m going to take action. My actions are going to be carefully thought out, but I’m not going to use the law — except as bait. When I’m done, there won’t be anyone to threaten your daughters. Join me. We all owe Miltiades.’

Paramanos made a curious face. ‘Do we really owe Miltiades, friend?’ He shrugged, but his eyes met mine squarely. ‘Be honest — Miltiades uses us, and now that he’s down, he can’t help us. Why should we help him? Listen — if it was you, or Herk, or Black or Cleon here — I’d carve my way through the bastards. But this is not my city, and not my fight.’

Black shrugged. ‘I’m your helmsman,’ he said. ‘You bought me free. I do what you say.’ He took a drink of wine. ‘I got married,’ he added, and moved as if he feared a reprisal.

‘You got married?’ I asked. ‘What’s she like?’

‘Like any Athenian fishwife, but louder,’ Paramanos said. ‘You can meet her later. Tell me why I should help.’

I could marshal arguments — Heraclitus had taught me well — but I shook my head. ‘No, brother. It’s up to you. For all his little ways, Miltiades has been our friend. I think we owe him.’ I looked around. ‘Yes — he uses us. And by the gods, we know he wanted to be tyrant, and he’d have sold his own mother in a brothel to get it. But how often have we followed him to riches, eh?’

Paramanos shook his head. ‘You know — we all know — that we’ll do it. If only to find out what you have planned.’

‘I need citizens,’ I said. I wasn’t going to stop to consider his sudden change of heart — I’d expected it. ‘How many oarsmen on your ships are citizens? How many marines?’

‘A dozen marines — many of them are zeugitai, members of the hoplite class. And I can round up fifty oarsmen who are thetes.’ He looked at me. ‘Why?’

‘The muscle have to be citizens,’ I said. ‘And we have to have their families safe — on Salamis, for instance.’

My plan was simple — far simpler than Phrynichus and Aristides and their plans with complex choruses and speeches by actors. I explained what I had in mind, and then we mustered the oarsmen. It was winter — most of them were delighted to have a few days’ work. Most of them were so poor when they were ashore that the prospect of moving their families to Salamis — the island off Athens, if you don’t know it — sounded like a festival. I paid them enough to make it a festival.

Being lower-class men themselves, they knew where I could find other men — informants and the like. That was likely to prove the breaking point of my plan, and I had a simple solution to my need for information.

Money.

Twice I walked up the hills of Athens to Miltiades and asked him for more money — ostensibly to plead my case. As he was my proxenos, it was his duty to help me, and the first time he did so with a good grace. The second time, he was none too happy to loan me the value of a good farm in silver coin. But he did.

‘What in the name of Tartarus do you need all this silver for, you Plataean pirate?’

‘Buying jurors,’ I said.

Crime eats money the way vultures eat a dead beast. Bribing a jury is an old and honourable tradition in democratic Athens, one that blatantly favours the rich, of course. Heh, democracy.

All forms of government favour the rich, honey.

I bought quite a few men. I divided the sailors and marines into teams, and I gave one to Cleon, and set them to watching Phrynichus. That was the most public team, and I was going to make Cleon vanish later. He had an additional set of duties, paying informers to look for my girl.

Agios led the scout team. They reconnoitred the Alcmaeonid estates.

The problem with paying out so much money is that it is impossible to keep it quiet.

It was near dark — every window had an oil lamp in it, and the more civic-minded brothel-owners had a big lamp out front, hanging from the exhedra, as well. I was climbing the hill in the alleys south of the Panathenaic Way to check on Phrynichus when they came at me — four men.

Two of them filled the street ahead of me. They had swords.

‘That’s him — the Plataean,’ one called out.

‘A friend sent us,’ said the smaller of the two men ahead of us. ‘We think maybe we should reason with you.’ He laughed.

I could hear movement behind me, and I knew there were more of them. But the two in front of me were right on the edge — we were just shy of that moment when they would be keyed up enough to attack me. I’ve watched the process often enough — some men take for ever to be ready to fight, and others can fight at any moment.

I put a hand on my own sword — Athens was none to keen on men carrying weapons in the streets, but at dark, with a heavy cloak, no one would say anything about it. The smaller man laughed again. The odds were bad — one against four is insanity, unless you have no choice. The street I was in — an alley, really — was no wider than a man lying on his back full length, and I was at an elbow where someone’s semi-legal building crowded the street and made it bend.

One of the men behind me stubbed his toe on a cobblestone and cursed. I heard the curse and felt the movement of his arms as he windmilled them to save himself — and I turned on the ball of my foot and punched the point of my sword into his side. I wasn’t as clever as I’d wanted to be, and my blade skidded over his arms and the point caught in his ribs, and his fist connected with my face — not hard enough to stun me, but hard enough to rock me back.

Worst of all, as he fell away from me the point of my sword remained lodged in his ribs and the hilt was wrenched from my hand.

I pulled my cloak off by yanking it against the fine silver pin — which popped open and tinkled as it landed in the street, a nice find for the first child to look out of his door in the morning. The cloak weights slammed the smaller of the two men in front of me in the face — luck and training there — and made him duck back when he could have gutted me.

There’s no conscious thought in a fight like that. There were no openings, no holds, no attacks that were going to get me free. I had no weapon. I kicked at the bigger of the men in front of me as I changed my stance, and then I leaped through the unshuttered window to my left, my back foot catching the oil lamp on the sill so that it landed behind me and exploded, lamp oil on my cloak and on the floor and fire spreading up my cloak.

But I had a wall between me and my attackers. I threw my burning cloak at them and turned to find three young men staring at me as if I was an apparition from the heavens — perhaps I was, with all the fire running along the floor behind me.

The fire — not a very big fire, I have to add — kept my attackers back for the space of three or four heartbeats, and by that time I was through the room curtain of wooden beads. This was not a brothel or a wine shop. It was a private house, and I passed through a room with four looms against the four walls, through another door as men shouted behind me and out into a courtyard. There were two slaves standing by the gate, and they looked as confused as men usually look in a crisis. I went past them — between them — without slowing, and I was in another street.

I ran up the hill. I could see the Pisistratids’ palace on the Acropolis as a landmark. I remember offering my prayers to Heracles that I had so easily averted an ambush that should have killed me — really, if they hadn’t stopped to talk to me, I’d already have started to rot, eh?

My prayers may have called the god to my aid, but they were otherwise premature. At the next corner I ran full tilt into the larger of the two men who’d confronted me in the alley. I bounced harder than he did, and he landed most of a blow with something in his left hand — a club, I suspect.

It caught me on the outside of my left bicep — hard — and numbed my arm. I stumbled back into a closed door and he recovered his balance, grinned in the feeble light and came to finish me.

But he paused to yell ‘I’ve got him!’ to his mates, and as he did that, the door under my numb hand opened and I fell through it, my legs pumping frantically to keep me upright, so that I carried the young man who’d opened the door right back into the room and knocked him flat.

He was quite small, pretty, and had make-up on his eyes — which were wide with sudden terror. I’d hurt him, no doubt.

There was a cloak hanging on a wooden stand at the edge of the bed — probably the boy’s own, or forgotten by a client. I snatched it as the big man came through the door. I got it on my left arm, which was numb but not useless, and got my feet under me — this was moving so fast that the pain of the blow from his cudgel was just hitting me. The big man was coming in for the kill and I swirled the cloak, which seemed to fill the tiny room, and my right arm moved behind the cloak, lost in it, and my attacker flinched back.

It is a thing known to any trained man that men will flinch from a cloak or a stick, when neither can do them any real harm, even with a direct blow to the face. But my cloak and my fist were both feints, and my right-foot kick caught him in the knee before he could shift his weight off it, and I heard the joint pop. He roared and went down. The hand with the cudgel swept past me, and it was as if he’d decided to hand me his cudgel — despite the dark and the confusion, his left hand brushed against my right, and the club was in my hand.

There were men in the alley outside. By the sound of it, there were quite a few of them — not just the initial four.

My recent opponent was thrashing on the floor and roaring. As he made no move to harm me, I took a deep breath and hit him behind the ear with his own cudgel, and he went out.

The painted boy squeaked and ran through a doorway I’d missed. I followed him, eager to avoid the men on the street. We went straight into the building’s central courtyard, which was full of men and boys on couches. My hip caught a table of pitchers of water and wine, and the whole thing fell with a crash. Then I was across the room, through a door that seemed to me the biggest and into the building’s andron, with painted wall panels and a garishly painted ceiling — Zeus and Ganymede, as you might expect. Then I ran out of the main door under a pair of kissing satyrs and into a street that was brilliantly lit by cressets in the building I had just left — a prosperous brothel.

By the flickering light, I could see men coming for me from the downhill end of the street — a dozen, at least.

So I turned and ran, uphill. There is no fighting a dozen men at the edge of darkness.

I went one street and turned into an alley. I saw a big ceramic rain-cistern under a house gutter and leaped to it at full stride. I got a leg over the roof edge and I was up. I lay flat on the roof. I was unable to breathe, and my two wounds had burst into pain the way a flower opens with the dawn, and it was all I could do not to cry out.

I heard men run by — they were an arm’s reach away — and meet with other men in the next street.

I looked around the roof. It was a low building, the sort of cheap private residence that filled the south slope of the hills before Pericles rebuilt the city. One storey, mud brick on a stone foundation with beams holding a roof that was also a place to cook, sleep in warm weather — make love, when privacy was required. The couple wrapped in blankets and furs had various naked limbs sticking out, and the man pulled the blankets closer, as if blankets would protect him.

I ran to the centre of the roof and looked. South was the high wall of the brothel and east was the wide Panathenaic Way, but north, uphill, the next roof beckoned. I had to keep moving — the men below were not fools.

I ran, leaped and my feet came down badly, punching straight through the seagrass of the roof so that my groin landed on the beam, and for a moment it was all I could do to curl my legs around the beam and moan. In the building underneath me, people screamed — and their screams were answered by running feet.

Sometimes the initial pain is worse than the resulting injury. I got a knee up on the beam and the blow to my groin wasn’t as debilitating as I had feared. I sidestepped north as men gathered around the building, and north again, and this time I stepped over the roof barrier on to the next roof — slate, thank the gods! — and I ran across the firm surface. I could smell a fire that burned charcoal and I could smell hot metal, and I realized I was crossing the roof of a smithy — a big one.

There was an alley at the northern edge of the smithy, and I leaped it without pausing to reflect — and my arms just caught the edge of the higher roof — much higher, because the alley was like a giant step up. I hung there for long heartbeats, trying to gain control of my legs over the pain — and I swung my right leg over the roof edge and rolled.

My hips hurt and my groin hurt and my left shoulder screamed as if I’d been scalded with boiling water. This roof had an outdoor kitchen and a small shed where the owner stored his brazier and spare pots. I got myself into it — a counsel of desperation, let me tell you. If they found me there, I was dead — no more retreat. But I wasn’t thinking well, and my instinct was the instinct of the wounded animal. I pulled the door closed and lay there, panting.

I listened to the men in the street as they searched the houses — broke in, beat people or threatened them. But actions have consequences, and the fates were not blind to my predicament. As they went from house to house, causing mayhem, men — and women — turned against them. Greeks don’t take happily to the invasion of their homes, however poor.

I heard the smith roar with rage as his dinner crashed to the floor when the thugs overturned his table, He had weapons and the strength to use them, and he hit a thug so hard that the blow had that telltale sound of a broken melon — and then the wounded man started calling for his fellows.

The smith roared for the watch. His voice carried, and other voices — housewives, prostitutes and the patrons from the brothel — joined in.

Athens was a mighty city then — but not so big that the uproar of throaty thugs and fifty citizens didn’t carry quickly.

The Scythian archers — the city police since the time of the tyrants — came just as a party of thugs were breaking into the house where I hid. I could follow their progress on the street by the sudden change in sound — the babble of citizens telling the Scythians what had happened.

My breathing was better, although the pain was still there. I lay still, my eye pressed to the door of the shed.

A man’s head came up the ladder from the main room below. I didn’t know him, but his ragged haircut and his expression told me he was one of my pursuers. He looked around the roof quickly, and then I heard him say that the roof was clear.

‘Fucking Scythians!’ came a voice from below, over the shouts of the householder, an older man with a shrill voice.

‘Villains! Out of my house, you scum!’

I heard the man take a blow — a blow so sharp that his voice was cut off in mid-imprecation.

‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ a man said.

‘Fuck that — this bastard is worth a hundred drachmas. Beat the Scythians and make them clear out. He’s hiding — right here. Somewhere.’ I knew the voice — my man from the alley.

‘You fight the cops, you mad bugger.’ The man who’d checked the roof was not having any of it. ‘I’m off.’

‘Coward,’ the leader hissed, but by then, there were Scythians pounding on the door.

Then both of them came up the ladder and on to my roof. Beneath our feet, the Scythians were breaking in the door.

My two would-be attackers slowed briefly at the roof edge, then they dropped over the edge, heading south.

I just lay there, unable to do much to change my fortunes. I saw the Scythians check the roof — they spoke in their barbaric tongue, glanced around carefully, one man by the ladder with an arrow on his bow while another man poked around with his sword, but they didn’t check the little shed.

I waited a long time after they vanished — I waited until the whole quarter was silent. Then I limped down the ladder, picked the householder up and put him on his bed, and sneaked out of the door.

I made it to Phrynichus’s house under my own power. His poor wife was terrified at my appearance.

Phrynichus got me into bed — his own bed, as his apartment was too small for such luxuries as guest chambers. I lay there, trying to frame something polite to say — and then, finally, my psyche released its hold on my body, and I went away.

The next day, I limped about escorted by half a dozen oarsmen. I told all my people to lie low, and I made myself look afraid — and abashed — when Cleitus pushed past me in the Agora.

‘Done meddling?’ he asked with a smile. ‘You don’t look well, foreigner. Perhaps you should stop playing with fire and go home.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I breathed, exaggerating my injuries. In fact, my paid informants were bringing me titbits by the hour. All my plans and preparations took time, and I warned my people — the oarsmen, the informants and some paid thugs — that I wanted no violence until I said the word. And money — some Miltiades’ and some mine — flowed like blood in a sea-fight.

Some of my new friends disliked being made to lie low. There were a few defections, but I was careful with my plans and no one — except Cleon, Paramanos and Herk — knew what I had planned. The informants were blind — each of them had a particular task — and given the scale of reward offered, I expected results, and got them.

Let me interject here. A man who’s been free all his life might struggle at all this — but a man who’s been a slave knows all about how and where to get information. How and where to buy violence. And how to plan revenge. Remember that the world of Athens ran on slaves, and slaves, at some level, dislike being slaves.

A week after my arrival in Athens, I knew where my girl was. She was working in a slave brothel by the Agora. I was tempted to grab her — but to do so would have given the game away. Shortly after my informers found her, the best pair — Thracians, former slaves who ran an ‘inquiry service’ — brought me the names of the men Cleitus had hired to beat Sophanes and Themistocles. I paid them a small fortune, and they left the city for a while — they guessed what I had in mind. Smart lads. Another informer — a woman, a prostitute with a quick mind — located my attacker, the smaller man in the alley, based only on my description. He was a big man in the lower-class neighbourhoods, a wine-shop owner and a money-lender. I paid the woman well and sent her to Salamis, too. My desire to send these people out of the city when they had served my needs was not altogether altruistic — I trusted none of them, and this way my prostitute could not counter-inform to Cleitus. Perhaps I wronged them — many were happy to help, just to strike a blow against the oppression of the aristocrats — but talk is cheap and informing can become a habit. So I sent them away, and Miltiades’ money paid and paid.

I didn’t share my plan with Aristides, or Miltiades, or even Phrynichus, although he was beginning to catch on, as was Cleon. Many Athenians are fine men, and their brilliance is legendary. Trust an Athenian to plead a court case or to write a play. But what all those brilliant men like Aristides and Miltiades had missed was that the Alcmaeonids weren’t playing by the rules. They had taken Persian gold and used it to pay the mob — the same mob that should have been baying for their blue blood — to beat better men.

I had grown up in Ephesus, where the Persians intimidated the citizens, and where the citizens used force to intimidate each other. I had been a slave. I knew how the world worked, in a way that neither the Alcmaeonids nor the Just Man ever would.

When I was ready, I prompted Aristides to bring my civil suit, and he summoned Cleitus to appear in my case just one day after the Attic feast of Heracles, which seemed auspicious to me. The civil court met briefly, eager to be away to their feasts and holidays — many men went to the countryside for the feast of Heracles, of course, and some for the feasts of Dionysus. Across the Agora, a party of shipwrights were raising the theatre — a wooden stage and the big wooden building behind it called the skene, and the wooden benches where the best men sat. I was astounded at the speed with which they put it up — between the opening and closing of the law court, the workmen had the skene completed.

The law court was well briefed and Cleitus was caught by surprise. He turned bright red and shouted some foolishness. A date was set, and Aristides explained to the sitting members of the Boule that Miltiades would have to be released from prison to plead for me, because he was my proxenos.

That was the law.

Cleitus began to protest, and then thought better of it. Why wouldn’t he? He held all the knucklebones, and all his foes were going to come to the same place on the same day — the feast of Dionysus.

I stood by the temporary theatre, watching, willing the thoughts into his head, begging Zeus Soter to help me to recover my oath and punish this man, and the king of the gods heard my prayer. I saw Cleitus lower his fist, turn away and smile. He was an intelligent man, as I had cause to know later — and he saw as well as I did that by bringing all his opponents together, he could hurt us the more easily, with his thugs and with the law. Then he agreed, as if making a magnanimous gesture, to allow my suit to be heard in the Agora on the day following the feast of Dionysus, in just four days.

The notion that we would all be vulnerable then ought to lull my opponent, I hoped. Because I planned to strike at the feast of Dionysus itself.