Marathon: Freedom or Death

11

My third return to Plataea was the easiest. Perhaps my fellow townsmen were becoming accustomed to my travels, or perhaps Simon, son of Simon, had just lost his supporters in Thebes and had no money with which to blacken my name. In any event, I went back over Cithaeron in winter, froze my arse in the high pass and made a sacrifice on the family altar nonetheless, and came down to green Plataea in time for spring harvest.

The truth is that Plataeans can be ignorant hicks, and it’s possible that the winter was so cold that they never noticed I was gone.

Either way, I was there for the first harvest, the barley harvest, and my spirits were high — whatever the raven gave me, it was strong. I settled Cleon on a small farm in Cithaeron’s shadow, and he seemed happy enough. I ploughed my fallow land with Hermogenes, and won his grudging praise for my unstinting work. I made new props for grape vines and I pruned everything I could get a sickle to. I gathered all my male slaves and on the spot freed the two Thracians who had been with me since my first return, and then told the rest exactly how they could work their way to freedom.

When the spring farm work was done, I threw myself into the forge, making pots and pitchers and cups and temple vases with Tiraeus and Bion. For twenty days, my forge was never silent. Even Hermogenes worked the forge, and that was rare, because despite his skills, he’d become a farmer first and foremost.

At the feast of Demeter, we danced the Pyrrhiche and I eyed the new crop of boys-become-men with the wary amusement that men have for boys. They preened and slunk away by turns, and lost their heads whenever a pretty girl walked by. Despite which, by the end of the festival, I had a notion of who was worthy and who was worthless, and where they might stand in the phalanx.

I had not taken naturally to being the strategos of the town — or perhaps I had. My father was briefly the polemarch before his death — the war archon. And no man had been formally appointed to either role since his death. The Plataeans had not stood in battle a single day since the Week of Battles. Indeed, in all the town, there were only six of us who had faced iron in the storm of Ares since then.

There was me. There was Idomeneus, who was accepted as a citizen despite his alienness, because he was the priest of the hero. There was Ajax, a Plataean who had served with the Medes against us in the Chersonese, and of whom we nonetheless thought highly. There was Styges, who had followed us to Lade. Hermogenes had served me for two years in the Chersonese, and had fine armour and a steady hand. Lysius of Plataea was another local man — he’d served for four years 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 still 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 full panoply, with thigh guards and arm armour and even foot armour shaped like his own feet, so that when he was fully kitted, he looked like a bronze statue.

The Milesians added real fighting power. And that allowed them — as Ionians and foreigners — to gain acceptance more rapidly than they might otherwise have done.

And finally, there was Cleon, who took one of Simon’s former farms, a Corvaxae property that I granted him, just over the hill 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 collection to buy him an aspis and a helmet, as he had sold his.

In those days, a small city like Plataea knew that its warriors were its lifeblood, and we danced together as often as the feast cycle allowed. Young men hunted together on Cithaeron, and some — a few — came to the forge and learned spear-fighting, or went up the hill to Idomeneus or down the Asopus to Lysius. We all 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 well-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. Well, actually, 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.

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 call 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 tell 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, killed some deer and tried not to laugh as I watched them stumble about, cut each other with axes, mis-throw their javelins and tell lies.

Boys. Was I ever so young?

Still, it was all 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 filled 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 all 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 all 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 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 all 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’ll tell you what makes for bad feeling,’ Pen shot back. ‘Surly men without wives, in dirty houses with dull food.’ She looked at me. ‘Unless that Cretan has trained you to like boys?’

I could feel the telltale 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’ll 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 allowed myself to think about anything but work and training.

Later that autumn, when Atlas’s fair daughters the Pleiades set, when all 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 killed 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 killed 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 willing to swear fealty to the Great King for aid against Athens.

‘We’ll have to fight,’ Peneleos said.

Everyone looked at me. And I was old and wise.

‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘The Persians are mighty, and their armies are huge and they own more triremes than all 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’ll have ten men for every one of ours. And our knees will rattle together like dry leaves in a wind.’

‘We can stand against them in battle or stay in our walls,’ Idomeneus said. ‘What I would fear is raids — greedy men, well 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, all 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 all 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 hillside 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 filled 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 all day?’

Cleon looked at the ground. ‘I’m not cut out to be a farmer,’ he said.

‘What will 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 finally begin to get longer and the rains let up a little, I travelled over the mountains into Attica to meet my prospective bride, a girl of fourteen years called Euphoria, whose father was a wealthy cavalry-class man from the hills north of Athens. She had been Leda’s schoolmate at Corinth, and she could read and sing and weave, and when I arrived. . well, she’s worth a better story than that. So perhaps I should tell you how I met Euphoria.