Marathon: Freedom or Death

14

We set the wedding for late winter, and I rode back over the mountains with my companions. We celebrated the feast of Artemis at Plataea, and they rode away to their homes.

It is one of the saddest comments on men, honey, that war and death make for a long story, but a winter of contentment and happiness can pass in a single breath. Our barns were full, our byres were full and all that winter we hunted on Cithaeron, we danced the Pyrrhiche and we discussed strategies against Persia. Women sat at their looms and wove and put in their own comments. We stored food, we worked on our leather. My forge roared every day as I made helmets — a few good ones, and more of the new-style open-faced bowls, which men now call ‘Boeotians’. We called them dog-caps. If not for Cleon, the winter would have been perfect — and forgettable.

I spent my spare time learning to engrave. Tiraeus knew something of it, and had a set of gravers among the tools he’d brought with him from when he was a tinker. I bought more tools, fine steel from Corinth.

But a few weeks before I was due to return to Attica, I found Cleon lying out in the freezing rain, drunk and asleep. At first I thought he was dead. I took him home, cleaned him and sobered him, and then he wept.

The next day, he was drunk again. I waited him out and sobered him up.

Tiraeus was in the shop. ‘You’re wasting your time,’ he said. ‘He’s a drunk. Let him go.’

‘He saved my life once.’ I went back to trying to scratch marks accurately on smooth bronze.

By now I was a better engraver than Tiraeus, and I began to put borders on everything I made, acanthus leaves, olive leaves, laurels, waves, whatever I fancied. I was planning to make a fine table setting for my new wife.

Instead, I kept having to sober Cleon. He cost me a day’s ploughing, as I had to leave the turning of the wet, cold earth to other men so that I could sit inside with him. But after another day of it, and with due apologies to Hermogenes and Tiraeus and Styges, who, in effect, lived with me, I sent all the wine away to my warehouse in the town. All of it. We had nothing to drink on the hill but water.

Cleon still managed to find wine, however. He was drunk again the next day, drunk and desperately sorry, so that he followed me around the farm begging me to forgive him and kill him. I’m ashamed to say I punched him and left him where he fell.

On his fifth day in my house he tried to fall on one of my swords. He wedged the sword into the cracks in a floorboard, but he was drunk and botched it, so that when he fell, his weight mostly knocked the blade flat. He ripped himself open over the ribs, and all the slaves had to help move him and clean him.

That night, Mater came downstairs. She came down to where I was sitting with him in the andron. I had no thoughts in my head — I was just going through the motions of friendship, because in just five days I had come to loathe him and his weakness.

But Mater came down, and she sat by him. ‘Leave him to me,’ she said.

So I did.

I have no idea what she said — as one drunk to another.

But the next week, just a few days before I left for Attica, he came out to the forge, sober and in a clean chiton. He sat on the hearth for a while and watched me. I was trying to engrave a pattern of animals — I wanted to put my stag on the bowl I was finishing, and I had botched it so badly that I was angrily polishing the lines off again.

‘May I show you how to draw a stag?’ Cleon asked. He was so hesitant it would have broken your heart, honey.

I was none too tender with him. ‘Try,’ I said. ‘Be my guest.’

I don’t know what I expected — when drunk, men claim all sorts of skills, and I still didn’t know whether he had had a skinful or not, although he looked pale enough.

He took the metal to the rawhide window for light, and he took my black wax and began to draw.

In three lines, I could see the stag. Before he had the antlers done, he wiped the whole right off the bronze and started again, but this time his hand was surer, and the lines went down as if he were copying them from something he could see — and perhaps he could, inside his head.

I was delighted. I was delighted in many different ways — as a craftsman, as a friend, as a man trying to reclaim a drunk from Hades.

And when I took the graver in my fist, he snatched it from me. ‘I do clay, mostly,’ he said, ‘but I know how to grave metal.’

I held up one of my borders. ‘As do I,’ I said.

He frowned. ‘You are scratching,’ he said. ‘You need to cut the metal.’ He picked up my heaviest graver and began to push it across the surface of my bowl. ‘Like this. Careful strokes. Deeper where you want a heavier line.’

At first his hands were tentative and slow, and he left tiny errors on the lines — still deeper and better cut than mine, but wavering. But then he drank some warm milk, and his hand steadied, and before the afternoon was over, Tiraeus had slapped him on the back and the three of us polished the finished bowl together and set it in the glow of the fire to admire our shared work.

‘Can you stay sober?’ I asked him.

He looked at me. ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘How much engraving do you have for me?’

Tiraeus laughed. But I knew he was telling the truth.

I remember the ride over the mountains. We’d already started the first ploughing, and as Hesiod says, ‘The boneless one is gnawing on his foot’.

It was the ugly time when the days grow longer, but only so that more rain can fall, and still nothing comes from the earth, and men think winter may never break. There was snow everywhere on the mountain, and yet our horses made short work of the ride, and we came down into the plains of Attica without losing a toe from frostbite.

Aristides was there first, with Jocasta, an unexpected ally in this marriage business, and she and Pen were immediate friends. Miltiades came with his wife, a vapid Thracian princess I’d met often enough before. Even the Alcmaeonids were represented in the person of Kineas, an elder, a member of the Areopagitica and a powerful man. He was pleasant and dignified. It was a very public wedding, and the little Temple of Aphrodite where we were bound together was filled to the outer row of pillars with guests.

I remember little of the ceremony except my own sense of importance, which makes me laugh now. I was delighted that so many famous men had come, and yet I was decent enough to be equally delighted to see Paramanos and Agios and Harpagos, whose ship was in Piraeus and who had kept his cargo waiting to come up and kiss my bride. With them were a dozen oarsmen and marines who had the wherewithal to travel into the hills above Marathon to see me wed.

Euphoria was so beautiful on her wedding day that I couldn’t think of much else, to tell the truth. I remember the look in her eyes when I lifted the veil, and I remember how she rested her hip against mine in the chariot as we rode from her father’s house to the house we had borrowed to be ‘mine’. Her women bathed her — winter is an unkind time for weddings, I have to tell you — and men sang songs about the size of my member and the depth of her cunny — oh, you blush, my dear. You’ve never heard wedding songs?

And when I undressed her, she devoured me. Who knew that under her humour and her nimble fingers and equally nimble head lurked a woman of flesh and blood? We coupled — well, all night. Her body was like a feast, and all I could do was eat.

But I’ll keep the rest of those memories for myself. I will only brag, like other bridegrooms I have known, that I kept her warm, and she craved my warmth often enough to make my sister blush. Like you, blushing girl — but not so often nor so red. Look, friends — she’s gone off again! You could heat a room with her warmth!

We rode back over the passes into Boeotia and started our new lives.

And for the rest, I remember little enough. Except that we were happy, and healthy, and in love.

It didn’t last. Nothing worth having ever does. But it was the happiest time of my young life.