Marathon: Freedom or Death

15

Spring in Boeotia. The feast of Persephone, the dancing maidens, the birth of ewes and kids, the rain, the mud, the first green, and then the burst of flowers from the ground as if the earth is impatient for new life — which she is. And soon enough, the barley harvest, which was as rich and fecund as the autumn wheat harvest had been.

Euphoria was pregnant. She filled our old house with herself, and as soon as the jasmine blossomed we had sprigs of it in every room. There were flower-wreaths on every door, and a dozen new women, her women, and her father’s gift to me, with as many boarhounds — and they wove and chattered and cooked and laughed and barked.

Mater bloomed as well. I heard her singing with Euphoria on the second day she was in my house, and I shook my head, waiting for my new wife to discover what a horror my mother really was. But Mater did not fail.

Was it Cleon? Was Cleon a mirror to her? Or was it having a daughter-in-law of her own class that brought her downstairs and into our lives?

I grumbled. I won’t lie. I had little love for Mater, and when she was sitting at my table, night after night, she was like a blight on my crops.

Euphoria was not afraid of me. She never was — a rarity in those days, when men feared my wrath. Ah — you still fear it, do you, young man? Very wise. My hand is not yet a willow branch. But in those days. .

Nonetheless, when I was rude to my mother, Euphoria would look at me across the room. ‘May I have a word with you in private, my dear?’ she would ask. And when we had a door between us and the rest of the world, she would say, ‘I am mistress in this house, and I insist that my husband have the manners of a gentleman. Rude to your mother? How boorish is that?’

I remember it well, my honey. Her tongue was as sharp as my sword, and she was seldom wrong. And I was so besotted with her that I seldom troubled her with a reply. Indeed, I felt that I was the luckiest man in the world that such a creature had agreed to be my wife. I sometimes wondered if I was one of those monsters in our myths who keeps the maiden until slain by a hero — was I the hero or the Minotaur?

And we did fight. It will sound odd, when you consider her birth and mine, but I found her stinginess offensive. She disliked spending our winter stores on guests, on Cleon, on Idomeneus. She would keep yesterday’s barley in a pan by the hearth to feed to local men who appeared through the spring mud to talk about politics, and she tasted all the wine in my cellar, then divided the amphorae into those for guests and those for the house.

‘We are not poor!’ I remember shouting at her.

‘And I will keep us that way!’ she shouted back.

On another evening, when Idomeneus made a remark about the age of the lamb he was eating, I winced — there was some screaming. I remember asking, ‘Are you the daughter of some shepherd? No — Attic shepherds are generous. A slave, perhaps?’

‘Slave?’ she roared, turning on me. ‘This from a man with his arms black to the elbows?’

Now this hurt, as I washed and washed each night before I went into the house, because I didn’t want to seem like the blackened smith to my glorious, aristocratic wife.

I cocked back my hand to hit her. Most men hit their wives, and with various amounts of reason — some because they are weak fools who have to be stronger than someone, and others because their women hit them first. But let us be honest — men are, by and large, bigger than women, and far stronger, and my pater taught me that any man who uses force on a woman, to get her into bed or merely win her agreement in argument, is contemptible.

You heard me. If you think otherwise, let’s hear it.

Despite which, married for a month, I found myself with a hand in the air. And I wasn’t going to give her a swat — I was going to knock her teeth out. Trust me — I know what I intended. Rage consumed me. Black hands, indeed.

You have to love someone to be that angry, I think.

She didn’t flinch.

I stormed out of the house rather than hit her. I got a horse and rode over to see Peneleos, and had a cup of wine with him and his sister and his wife. They told me, in short, that I was a fool and I needed to go back and apologize — excellent advice — and I rode back to find Euphoria’s door shut and barred, and I had to listen to the sound of her weeping. I called, and she shouted something.

Peneleos had told me not to worry if we weren’t reconciled before bed. But I couldn’t sleep, and it was a long, long night. I lacked the courage to go to her door again, and when I went to the pantry to get a cup of beer in the night, the two kitchen slaves — both hers — flattened themselves against the wall in terror of me.

When the sun rose, I went out into the courtyard and sang a hymn to Helios, hoping that she would come down, and then I went and lit the forge. Tiraeus came in, munching a crust of stale bread. He had no idea that there had been a quarrel.

‘You look like goat crap,’ he said, after we had worked for an hour.

‘Bad night,’ I said.

‘Bah — newly-weds!’ he said. ‘She’s pregnant. You can stop fucking now.’ His grin took the sting from the words.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We had a fight.’

He shrugged. ‘Never been married,’ he said. ‘But it does seem to me that most people fight. You and me, for instance.’

That was true enough, and Tiraeus and I were, in some ways, closer than any other two men I knew, except maybe me and Hermogenes. When we shared a project, we were inseparable. Craft made us closer than brothers. And still we could disagree on everything and anything, and when a helmet or a cup was in that dangerous stage just short of completion, it would all boil over into anger and disappointment and outrage. We were so used to it that we’d get the edges on a helmet trimmed and shake hands and say, ‘Tomorrow, we fight.’ And we’d laugh — but the next day, as we raised the last lines on the skull, the fight would start.

All of which is by way of saying that, as usual, Tiraeus had a point.

‘So, what did she do?’ he asked.

‘Served Idomeneus some three-day-old stew.’ Put that way, it just didn’t sound as bad.

‘I see. Death sentence for that, I agree. And what did you say?’ Tiraeus punctuated his remarks with taps on the bowl he was planishing.

‘I. . called her a slave. Pretty much.’ I cringed at the thought.

‘Ahh.’ Tiraeus picked up his bowl, stared at the area he was planishing and shook his head. ‘Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.’ He looked at me. ‘You call me the son of a whore all the time.’ His smile told me differently, and I understood — both that he felt I had behaved badly, and that he resented my epithets when I was angry.

And while I took this in, the door opened and there was Euphoria with a cup in her hands — warm wine and spices. ‘Husband?’ she asked from the door. She had never been in the forge before.

‘Wife?’ I asked in reply, and I caught the handle of the cup and pulled her gently in. ‘Welcome to the forge.’

‘Empedocles would have a fit,’ Tiraeus said. He got up from his stool and came over. ‘I’ll just step outside for a piss, eh?’

I put a hand to stop him. ‘Wife, I have behaved badly, and I used a phrase which no free person should ever use to another. I wish to apologize in front of my fellow master smith. And I understand that I am guilty of doing the same to him — when in anger.’

‘You do have a temper,’ Tiraeus said.

Euphoria looked at me for a moment. There were questions in her eyes, and those questions were, in some ways, more painful than shouted arguments and closed doors. ‘Apology accepted,’ she said. ‘I’ve brought you wine, and there’s breakfast for both of you in the andron.’

The breakfast was an apology of its own — eggs and good bread and spiced wine for me and Tiraeus and for Hermogenes when he came in from the vines. And that day I learned what was best about Euphoria — the thing that made me the luckiest of men. When she accepted my apology — why, then, the argument was over. I have known women — Briseis, I must confess — who hold a grudge for ever. But Euphoria, however angry she might have been, dismissed her anger as the sun burns through a morning fog, so that once the anger had passed, it never needed to be recalled.

Beautiful breasts and a lovely waist and a face like a statue are all very well — but an even temper and a sense of fairness will last longer. Ask any married man. Or woman, for that matter.

That was the spring of contentment. We argued — twice, I think, and I’ll tell the story of the second time in a moment — but we also ate and danced and made love and went into Plataea for market days — together. And because Euphoria was such a lovely, pleasant girl, everyone wanted to meet her, and suddenly I was a man with friends, acquaintances, invitations.

Penelope visited twice — it was only thirty stades from her home to mine, and once the roads were dry she could come on a whim. As the days grew longer and hotter, and the season prepared to turn again, she was pregnant, too, and delighted to be so, and she told me with a giggle that she thought that the bonfire of Pan had had a salutary effect, and her husband rolled his eyes.

They were served our best food and drink, I noticed. And then dismissed, because there are fights not worth having.

We hosted Myron to dinner before midsummer’s eve — he hadn’t eaten in my house since my father was alive. His wife had arranged it with Euphoria, although neither was present for the dinner. Instead, most of the men who came were older men. Peneleos was there, and he was my age, as was his older brother Epictetus; and Bion was there because he was my right hand and welcome any time. But the other men were older — Draco seemed older than the hills, and Diocles was only a little younger than Mater, and Hilarion, once the life of the party and a poor farmer, was now a cheerful and wealthy man.

They were my neighbours. We also invited Idomeneus down from Cithaeron, and Alcaeus of Miletus, who had status in Plataea by virtue of being the lord, in effect if not in fact, of fifty good spearmen who were now citizens.

We had a good sacrifice up the hill. I remember that I watched the skies for a day, praying for good weather, and I remember that we still had to squelch our way across the best barley field because we’d had rain, but our little altar was high and dry on the hilltop. Myron made the sacrifice, and he mentioned my father in his prayer. And then we gave the fat and the bones to the god, and squelched our way back down to the house with the slaves carrying the skin and all the meat, and we had quite a dinner — a whole sheep. The slaves shared in it. I had quite a few slaves by then — with my wife’s I had twenty. Too many, and they were starting to breed more.

We had a proper symposium, too, with good talk about civic duty and the difference between men’s laws and god’s laws. It was all very pleasant, and then we began to talk of Persia.

Myron held up his hand and we all stopped talking. ‘I want to discuss a matter of business,’ he said. He had quite a presence by then. I could remember him as a young farmer, but by that time he was an orator and a man of immense dignity.

‘Arimnestos, I intend to put it to the vote after the first feast of Heracles that you be the polemarch of the city. Polemarch and strategos, both.’

‘What’s a strategos?’ Hilarion asked.

That was a fair question. In those days, many towns had a polemarch, but only Athens and Sparta had strategoi. They were officers — real officers, the way we had ofcers when we served Miltiades. Every strategos had responsibility for a body of men when the phalanx formed, and this made the phalanx more flexible in combat. The old polemarchs were often politicians and sometimes soldiers, but they formed the phalanx — that is, they knew where each man should stand in the array. And they fought in the place of honour — the right end of the front rank. Usually, they died there. But they didn’t normally issue any orders — beyond getting every man to the battlefield, and into his place in the line.

On that evening, Plataea had perhaps two thousand hoplites — armoured warriors. We’d grown in the last ten years, and the Milesians had brought us new fighters, and we were richer. Bion and Hermogenes, for instance — both men had been slaves, and yet now they were prosperous farmers with full armour. Wealth — individual wealth — translated directly into fighting power in those days. In my father’s time, we’d fielded fifteen hundred hoplites only by freeing slaves and putting them — virtually unarmed — into the rear ranks.

So, our military power was greater. And Myron proposed formalizing my control of it. I nodded. ‘Of course,’ I said.

‘This is no empty honour,’ Myron said. ‘There is a Persian fleet on the seas. News has reached me that the Medes intend to sack Naxos, and then they will come to Attica. Athens will expect us to stand with them.’

It was still chilly in the evenings. We had a brazier in the middle of the room, but the men were still huddled in their himations, and I remember that I could see my breath when I spoke.

‘This spring?’ Bion asked.

‘This summer, at least,’ Myron answered. ‘Are we ready, Arimnestos?’

I rolled off my couch and cursed the cold floor. ‘We are as ready as a city at peace can be,’ I answered. ‘We dance the Pyrrhiche at least twice as often as we used to do. I take the younger men up the mountain as often as I can — and I will make it more often this spring. Short of war itself, the hunt and the dance are our best methods of training.’

Hilarion shrugged and pulled his cloak over his feet. ‘Why do we need to fight the Persians?’ he asked. ‘I know you all think me slow-witted — but what has the Great King ever done to me?’

‘Not a thing,’ I answered. ‘He is a good ruler and a great man, or so I hear. But, Hilarion, when is the last time you fought in the phalanx?’

‘You know as well as me — the fight at the bridge, where we helped Athens against the men of Euboea.’ He grinned. ‘I didn’t really fight, either. I did some pushing from the fifth rank, I think.’

‘We’ve had fifteen years of peace because Athens has stood between us and Thebes.’ I paused to spit, and every man present joined me.

Diocles nodded. ‘True enough,’ he said.

‘We’re about to pay for those years of peace,’ Myron said. ‘The price will be high. And if the rest of Boeotia submits to the Great King, we will be alone. Our city will be wide open when we march away.’

Myron’s words brought the reality home to every man in the room.

‘By Ares!’ Peneleos said. ‘Is it so bad? Is this certain?’

Myron looked at me — as I was his principal source of information.

‘Peneleos, when there are dark clouds in the north, do you expect rain?’ I asked.

He nodded and raised an eyebrow. ‘I expect it, but it does not always come. Sometimes the rain goes to Thespiae or Hisiae.’

‘Exactly,’ I agreed. ‘The Great King may never take Naxos. He may forget Athens, or the men of Athens may make a peace with him. A storm might come up and wreck his fleet — it’s happened before. But the dark clouds are right there, friends, and we would be foolish not to be prepared.’

‘I plan to ask the assembly for money to repair the walls and raise two new bastions — all stone — to cover the gate,’ Myron said. ‘I will ask that every free man send a slave to work, so that the repairs are done immediately, as soon as the planting is in. And I will be asking for the richest men to contribute to the towers. I will pay for one of them myself.’ He looked around.

Bion gave me a slight nod of the head.

‘I will pay for one third of the second tower,’ I said, ‘with the help of Bion and Alcaeus.’

Idomeneus surprised us. ‘I will pay for one third,’ he said. ‘From my own funds,’ he added.

Diocles and Hilarion and Draco muttered among themselves, and Epictetus and Peneleos, sharing a couch, leaned in, and in the end the five of them agreed to share the cost of a third of the tower.

As the men gathered to walk home, I found myself with Peneleos and Epictetus.

‘I have a hard time seeing myself as a leading man,’ Peneleos said. ‘I’m a second son. I am not that old.’

I laughed. ‘You’re older than me,’ I said. ‘And I’m about to be polemarch.’

Bion shook his head. ‘Plataea lost a generation in the three battles,’ he said. ‘And in the fights with Thebes before that. Think of your fathers and brothers — all dead.’

That was a sobering thought, but a true one. Myron had been my father’s friend. My father should have been here to be polemarch, and Diocles’ father should have been here, and Epictetus’s father, and my brother, and Hilarion’s older brother — on and on.

‘We’re a city of young men,’ Hilarion quipped.

‘If we have to fight the Medes, we’ll be a city of widows,’ Bion answered him.

The assembly was dull enough, and I remember none of it — not even my formal elevation to polemarch and strategos after the feast of Heracles, thirty days after the summer solstice. I was allowed, as polemarch, to choose the other two strategoi myself. We’d decided to have three, one for each of the towns that made up Plataea before the alliance with Athens turned us into a real city.

Right away, my new rank plunged me into politics. I wanted Idomeneus and Alcaeus — or at least Lysius — as officers. I wanted the strategoi to be men who had been under the hand of Ares, who knew the sound of spears and shields. But all of us — even Lysius and Ajax — lived in one district, over by Hisiae. So I wasted good workdays going to meetings to talk with the local men in the other two districts. I knew them all — there were only three thousand citizens back then, and we all knew each other pretty well. I kept hoping to find some retired mercenary, some man who had served under Miltiades or even with the Medes.

Now that I think of it, in those districts closest to the river they had most of the good farmland, and I suspect their sons didn’t need to go to sea to win a few silver coins. Ours did, over by the mountain.

There were good young men from those districts. Bellerophon, son of Epistocles, who lived as close to Thebes as a man could and not be a Theban, was a fine young man with full armour who had been to every deer hunt from the first, got spear-fighting lessons from Lysius and also spent all his spare hours with Idomeneus. He was from the Asopus district. But he was seventeen years old, and no bearded man would take an order from him.

‘Try his pater,’ Myron said, when I asked his advice. ‘He’s a wealthy man, and a decent one. If the son’s such a good warrior, the pater won’t be a sluggard,’ he added.

Hmm. Well, you’ll see how that worked out.

The northern district was the hardest. The men over there were almost Thespian, and they had their own ways, and a few of them complained that in the event of a fight, they’d march with Thespiae and not Plataea. Before the great wars came, men were freer with their citizenship.

But that very freedom saved me in the end. My brother-in-law, Antigonus, owned farms in Plataea. His free men were liable for service as psiloi or peltastai, and it occurred to me that, if Myron would accept it, he would make a first-rate strategos.

So he was granted citizenship. In fact, Myron discovered that his family had always been allowed to be citizens — a very convenient discovery, let me tell you — and I appointed him as strategos. This proved to be a fortuitous choice. Antigonus brought us another fifty hoplites of his own — all men of Thespiae, but people didn’t care so much then, as I say — and he had riches which he used to improve the armour of his district, and of course he had most of that armour made at my forge.

My forge grew that spring. Tiraeus and I shared the same shed, of course, and Bion had, since my pater’s time, had his own anvils and his own fire just up the hill, by his house. But when the money came over the mountain that spring — money from Athens, I mean, for worked bronze we’d sent in the autumn — and when Antigonus placed a huge order for armour and helmets, then Tiraeus wanted to build his own shed.

‘I need a pair of slaves,’ he said. ‘So do you. We do too much of the donkey work. And we need some boys — fee boys, who want to grow to be smiths. We could triple our output.’

I already had Styges, who had gradually made himself into my apprentice. But I found two more for me, and Hermogenes found a couple for his father, and suddenly my forge was crowded.

We put up a shed for Tiraeus, and as soon as it was done, Empedocles came out from Thebes and blessed his fire. We had a sacrifice and Empedocles initiated all of our new boys, slaves and free together, because the god cares nothing for such stuff.

‘You know the Medes are coming, eh?’ he asked me. It was easy to forget that he was a Theban, but sometimes it came back.

‘Even in little Plataea, the news has come,’ I answered.

‘Don’t get your back up. The godless Athenians are in for it. Thebes is safe — we’re not fools.’ He sat back and drank wine.

‘We are.’ I handed him an altar plate I’d made as my sacrifice to the god. On the face, Cleon and I had engraved a scene of the smith god returning to Olympus after being cast forth, led by Dionysus.

‘When did you learn to do such fine work?’ he asked.

‘The older man you raised to the first degree?’ I said. ‘He’s an engraver.’

Empedocles whistled. ‘You have quite an operation here,’ he said. ‘Why not put it all in one building? Like the potters in Corinth? You have water, charcoal, three master-smiths and an engraver. And a reputation, at least as far away as Thebes. They may spit when they mention you, but they’ll all hurry to buy your bronze.’

‘I have never sent a shipment of my bronze to Thebes,’ I said.

‘Men sell it from Athens,’ he said. ‘You are quite well known in Thebes, my boy. Simon son of Simon keeps your name in the ears of many men — although not to your favour. And. .’ He paused, drank from his cup, and looked up at me. ‘And there are men in Thebes who plan to kill you.’

I shrugged. ‘Let them come, then.’

‘Don’t be a fool, boy. Someone — someone with a great deal of money — has hired a whole band of cut-throats.’ He shivered.

‘If they come from Thebes to here, it would be war,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Thebes wants war with Athens.’

Empedocles shook his head. ‘Simon is loud in proclaiming that Athens would not care if you were killed,’ he said.

Now it was my turn to shake my head. ‘Old news, priest. I am the polemarch of Plataea, and my death would burn Thebes the way a hot forge burns charcoal.’

‘They made you polemarch?’ the priest said. ‘You have come far, my boy.’

‘I have, too,’ I agreed. ‘If you find Simon, tell him to go away and never come back — and I, for my part, will not hunt him down and kill him. Let the bad blood be over. But tell your archon — for me, and for my archon — that if men of Thebes come here, or even hired men, coming from Thebes, then we will fight, and Athens will stand with us.’

‘Not if Athens has been destroyed,’ the old priest said. ‘I’m sorry, lad, but what they plan is to get you this summer, while Athens can do nothing to help you. Even now, the Athenians debate in their assembly — they debate sending Miltiades and Aristides away as exiles, and making submission. Perhaps you should join them in exile — just for a while.’

I told Myron everything Empedocles told me, and he dismissed it all with a wave of his hand. ‘I’m sure Simon would like to kill you,’ he said. ‘But Thebes is in an awkward place right now, and they do not need a war with Athens.’

‘Empedocles makes a good point, though,’ I allowed. ‘Once the Persians are at sea — and by all accounts, they are — Athens can hardly send their hoplites over the passes into Boeotia to help us.’

‘The Thebans would be fools to trade short-term advantage for the punishment Athens will dish out later,’ Myron said.

‘Not if they can count on the Medes to defeat Athens,’ I said. ‘Look, they have a workable strategy, or so it appears to me. And I see other hands in this, Myron. If we’re tied up here — why, then there are no hoplites to march to the aid of Athens.’

‘I think you have delusions of grandeur, young man,’ Myron said. ‘I agree — it’s more of a threat than I saw when first I heard of it, but this is not the way cities behave. We are not children in the agora. I will send a messenger to Athens, and another to Thebes. But that will be the end of it.’

I thought he might be right. I only knew pirates and easterners. Here, in sober, steady Boeotia, even the Thebans were probably better men.

‘Perhaps I should muster all our men, just so that the Thebans can see how ready we are.’ I was hesitant to ask this, as a general muster cost our city a little money — and the foundations of the new towers were just going down. But the seed was in the ground, and most farmers had a holiday — or as much holiday as a man can get between ploughing his fallow ground, shoring his grapes and watching the pests eat his olives.

‘That is a fine idea,’ Myron said. ‘One week from today. The Theban heralds will be here by then.’

I don’t remember a thing about that week apart from the glow of the forge and the rush to finish as many bits of harness and armour as I could manage. I had thirty repairs sitting around my house — helmets, breastplates, spearheads. I worked night and day, and so did Tiraeus and Bion. And across the stream, in the city, my compatriot, Heron the Smith, worked iron and steel as fast as I worked bronze.

But the muster was glorious. I could remember what our men looked like when we went off to Oinoe to help Athens — dun cloaks, no swords, men without shields hiding in the rear ranks, and only a dozen men in full bronze.

Now we had a front rank of almost one hundred and twenty-five men, and every one of them had a bronze panoply — breast- and backplate or scale armour, or at least a leather spolas, and an aspis — a few old men with Boeotian shields — greaves on every man, and good helmets, most crested Corinthians. I was pleased to look down my front rank and see how many of those helmets were my own manufacture — almost twenty. And behind them were ranks of men with good shields and good helmets, even if most of them were dog-caps of bronze. Every man in the front rank had a good spear and a sword, and most of the second-rankers, and some of the third- and fourth-rankers, as well.

The Milesians were the best equipped, with armour all the way back to the fifth rank. My brother-in-law’s men were the next best, and they would get better all autumn as I hammered out their bronze. My neighbours looked almost as good — Bion was armoured like Ares, as was Hermogenes, and Tiraeus, Idomeneus and Styges — all of us in full panoply, with thigh guards and arm guards, too.

Fifteen years of peace may rob a town of the fine cutting edge of war practice, but it does give a town the riches to spend on armour.

I had asked every man to have his wife make him a red cloak. I didn’t expect them to be dyed Tyrian red, like the Spartans, although a few rich men did. Most were brick red, from madder, and striped in white or black, as is our way in Plataea. But most men had done it — even those who had no armour — and with those cloaks and our new dog-caps of bronze in every rank, we made a fine show in the agora, and many women stopped to watch and older men clapped to see us.

Myron wore his armour, but he watched. I intended to put him in the fourth rank, dead centre in the phalanx — because he was too important to risk, even though he was a decent fighter and a brave man and owned good armour. He stood at the edge, swapped jokes with men, and finally came up and slapped me on my scaled back.

‘Very good, Arimnestos.’ He pointed at the three Theban heralds, who stood silently off to the side, watching as our men laughed, joked and shone.

Then I called out the epilektoi — most of them eighteen or nineteen years old, although not all, by any means. And while the phalanx sang the Paean of Apollo, we danced our Pyrrhiche.

It is one thing to dance for the war god when musicians play and men sing. It is another to dance in the full light of day, when a thousand men beat the time with their spear-butts and sing from inside their helmets, and the song rebounds from the bronze and rises like a pure offering to the war god and the Lord of the Silver Bow.

Idomeneus and I had changed our dance many times by then. It had been a simple dance that allowed men to learn their place in the ranks and not much more. Our new dance exchanged ranks, taught spear-thrusts and parries, and had men duck to the ground, leap in the air over a thrust, even fight to the rear. My young men danced with unbated weapons, and more than once a sharp spear ripped a furrow across a new-painted shield — but the rhythm went on, and as we sang of the deep-breasted nymphs who served Apollo, we stomped with our left feet and pivoted together, ducked, clashed our spears and exchanged ranks again.

When the hymn was finished, we stood silently for some heartbeats, and then all the women and old men and boys raised a howl of joy to the heavens.

Myron went over to the heralds and handed them a scroll.

‘Tell your masters that we seek no quarrel with mighty Thebes,’ he said. ‘But if Thebes seeks a quarrel with us. .’ He did nothing grand or dramatic, merely flicked his glance down our ranks and over the new towers, one half-built and the other with its foundations complete. He looked back at the heralds. ‘If Thebes seeks some quarrel, she may find us a tougher vine to hack away than ever she imagined.’

My wife loved that I was polemarch, and when I donned my armour for the muster, she embraced me, sharp scales and all. She had come to terms with her husband the smith, but her husband the polemarch was perhaps the figure she had expected in her maiden dreams.

She wove me a new cloak with her own hands, a fine red one dyed scarlet with some rare dye from the east, and with her own hands she dyed a new crest for my new helmet, so that mere days after I finished the helmet, the horsehair and the cloak appeared on my worktable in my forge. That chlamys was as thick as a fleece and as warm as a mother’s embrace. It hangs just there, and moths have troubled it, but any woman among you can see how well woven it is.

The day I found it, I put it on and wore it for her, and then I carried her up to her room and we made love on it. I wore it proudly when I mustered the phalanx before the Theban heralds, and I wore it whenever I wore my armour, for many years after.

I came straight back to the farm after the muster, with all the epilektoi at my heels. I kissed Euphoria, patted her belly, which now had the smallest, sweetest swelling, and gathered a pair of my shop boys to carry my gear. Then in full armour, my picked men and I ran and walked by turns all the way up the mountain to the shrine of the hero. There, Idomeneus and Ajax said the words, and we sacrificed a couple of big steers and ate like kings, and then we lay in our cloaks like real soldiers and woke with the first light to run along the flank of Cithaeron to Eleutherai.

By noon on the second day, I had them all tired and surly, with the cockiness of the muster sweated out of them, and by the fourth day of the hunt even the Milesians were flagging, and my veterans were watching them with a certain callous satisfaction.

I was tired too — try wearing armour for five days! It chafes on your ribs, rubs your hips, weighs on your shoulders. Your helmet becomes a ring of fire on your head, and greaves — greaves become your enemy, not your ally. But the only way to become accustomed to armour is to wear it. There is no other way. I made my picked men run in it, cut firewood in it, gather brush in it, skin deer in it.

My name was taken in vain — often.

‘Curse me now,’ I said. ‘When you fight the Medes, you’ll praise me.’

The sixth day I let them rest. The complaining increased — this is the way with men, slave or free, soldier or priest. Real carping requires breath and time.

The seventh day was supposed to be the last, and we had games. Or rather, we were supposed to have games. The sun was up in the sky, and we had made the sacrifices, and Idomeneus was staring at the guts of a rabbit he had sacrificed. He had the oddest look on his face.

‘I’ve never seen a liver like this,’ he said.

I looked — not that I’d know one liver from another — and past him I saw two things to give me unease.

Over towards Eleutherai, I could see a pair of men on horses, riding the hill road, flat out.

And down in the valley in the direction of my farm, I saw a column of smoke rising.

In Boeotia, fires happen. Woods catch fire in the dry of summer, and men start fires to open up new farmland or simply to get a better view. Men burn off their fields. Houses catch fire when lamps are left unattended.

So I had no need to panic, except that the juxtaposition of the riders and the fire worried me. It was a big fire. And Idomeneus was not happy with the animal he had just sacrificed.

Bion came up next to me. ‘That’s our place,’ he said, and my stomach flipped.

‘How can you be sure?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure,’ he said. ‘Did you bank your forge fire?’

‘By Hephaestus,’ I said, ‘of course I did.’ You are always a feckless young man, to people older than you.

‘Hmm,’ he said.

Idomeneus killed a lamb, slit it open and cursed. ‘I don’t really know much about divination,’ he said from the growing pool of blood at our feet. He was kneeling in the dead lamb’s entrails. ‘But something is wrong. Dead wrong.’

So I ordered the epilektoi to muster, instead of preparing for the games. They cursed at being so early into their armour, but by then they were cursing anything I ordered. Even the young feel pain, or so we old men joked. Our muscles had had years to harden, and theirs were still soft.

About the time the first files were falling in, another column of smoke leaped to the heavens.

‘That’s our beacon fire!’ Tiraeus shouted.

It was true. It was lit in the right place, and it let out smoke in a thick column and then stopped — and then started again. I watched two repeats.

It was the will of the gods that we were already assembled — and that we had armour, and that we were so high up that we could read the signal clearly and see, too, the very moment it burned into life.

But fear reached icy fingers down my throat. If it was Simon, then he had struck at my home and I was not there.

But Euphoria was. Lovely, pregnant Euphoria.

I didn’t scream. I was a good soldier, and a man who had seen a few fights, but I drank a cup of wine to steady my nerves and told myself the truth — that if she was dead, raped or stolen, I was forty stades distant and there was nothing I could do for her.

This is what it is to be a veteran, honey bee. You see too clearly. I counted her dead, or brutalized, and went on with my business. Because war is serious, and I was the commander, and my rage was not yet to be unleashed.

So I finished my wine, ate an apple and didn’t fret while the last ranks fell in. Outside, I didn’t fret. In my gut, I lost a year of my life.

We had started down the road to Eleutherai by the time the riders came up the hill. They knew where to find us — my Thracian freedmen.

‘Lord,’ the lead rider said. ‘Men came — a hundred or more. Your mater says we are to tell you that the farm is closed to them, and safe. But they came from Thebes, and they will go home the same way, on the old road.’

‘Where is my wife?’ I asked.

The older of the two shrugged. ‘Your mater ordered us,’ he said. ‘I know no more.’

While we spoke, another beacon sent its smoke to the heavens.

‘Mater is right,’ I said. ‘They’re running back down the old road to Thebes.’ I turned to my boys. ‘Ares has sent us a serious contest,’ I shouted. ‘Are you ready?’

They shouted — a roar that echoed off the rock walls of the mountain. Later, men said that they heard it out on the farms and thought that Cithaeron had come awake.

I put myself at the head of the first file. ‘Let’s run,’ I said, and we were off.

I sent out the two Thracians as scouts — they had horses and they were good riders. In my head, I did my best to estimate what might happen. The Thebans — if they were Thebans — had a thirty-stade head start. On the other hand, they must have marched all night. They must have been tired.

My boys had had a day of rest.

Most of my boys had never seen a spear thrust in earnest.

I had a long run down the mountain to think about it, and my thoughts were dark. I wanted to run home first. I wanted to know. I wanted to know why it was Mater who had sent these men, and not my wife.

But my farm was in the wrong direction now. From Eleutherai, I would lead my men north and east — the farm was due west.

We passed through Eleutherai like a summer storm. Eleutherai is, technically, in Attica. I told the basileus to send word to Athens — but that help, if it came at all, would be ten days away.

I led my boys out of Eleutherai, down the mountain, down the pass and along the rocky road to Thebes.

As we entered our own territory, we met Lysius and a dozen of his neighbours, all armed, and Teucer, coming across the fields with some light-armed men — and as soon as they met with me and my mounted scouts, they ran off ahead of us. Teucer caused me to writhe with frustration and fear — he’d seen the fire at my farm, and the beacon, but he hadn’t gone up the hill to investigate. He knew nothing.

Lysius and his men fell in with us — they’d met the Thracians on the road. And a dozen stades further on, we met another party, small farmers and Milesian settlers under Alcaeus, so that I had almost two hundred men behind me as we ran across Asopus at mid-morning. I gave them all a break. Swift as I had to be, these men had run almost forty stades, most of them in armour. If we were going to fight, we needed a rest.

The two Thracians were brilliant, covering the ground in front of us and raising the farmers, and I wished I had cavalry like the Lydians and the Medes had. But I didn’t. I rested the men an hour, and then we were off again, cutting across the fields of the eastern township to try and gain a few stades on the men we were pursuing.

It was noon when we found the first body — a man in a dog-cap with a pair of spear wounds in his body. His name was Milos, and he was a farmer from along the Asopus.

We moved his body off the road and ran on. After a stade, there were three dead men all together — all Asopus-side farmers.

‘The men of the Asopus district must have made a stand here,’ Bion said as he panted. ‘Listen, boy — I’m finished. I can’t run another step. I’ll stay and bury these men, and send on anyone who can follow.’

Bion wasn’t the only man who was finished. I told off ten men, so that there would be no shame — and told them to guard the bodies. The rest of us went on at a slow jog.

My Thracians found the next bodies — all strangers. Two of them had arrows in them — Teucer’s arrows. And at the road junction, where the old road to Thebes and the new crossed, there were a dozen more strangers, some wounded and some dead, and two of our men to tell us that our Plataeans were harrying the column as it retreated, and that there were more than a hundred enemies, and perhaps two hundred.

We were close. But I knew we were not going to catch them. We were just ten stades from Theban territory.

Every man in the column knew it, too.

But we said our prayers to Ares and ran on. My slaves had dropped out by then, and I had my shield on my arm and my helmet on top of my head, and most of me hurt as much as if I had already fought. My legs burned, and my left arm felt like a bar of iron sagging from my shoulder, and even my shield strap was an unbearable burden. If I felt like that, what were my boys feeling like?

But we were close.

At the top of the next hill, I was jogging so slowly that walking might have been faster. But when I came over the hill, I could see them — a dozen armoured stragglers in a dense shield wall, trying to avoid a steady rain of arrows.

We were close. My heels grew wings and I ran on.

Behind me, my boys began to shout. I looked back, and men were stripping their greaves off and casting them aside to run faster. Some stopped and threw up, others stripped off their breastplates — and then they ran on.

The dozen stragglers broke when they saw us coming, and the fleetest two made it, but the rest died in a shower of arrows and javelins, and then Teucer was next to me, and other men I knew — about twenty, all light-armed men that Teucer had rallied. I wanted to embrace him, but I didn’t have time.

We ran down the last hill, and I could see the dark mass of them, crossing the stream that made the border between my city and Thebes. There were quite a few of them. And most were already in Theban territory.

I knew immediately what I had to do — what Myron would say if he was here. I ordered the boys to halt.

‘Form up,’ I shouted. ‘Get in your ranks. Form up, form at normal order.’

The ground down to the stream was a single hayfield, and on the far side, another the same. Not for nothing do foreigners call Boeotia the Dance Floor of Ares. Flat ground, perfect for war.

Men and boys came down the road. They were strung out over several stades, and while my little phalanx formed, the enemy scrambled up the banks of the stream to safety on Theban territory. In my heart, I wanted to run down and kill them all — myself, if I had to.

There was more at stake, though. More even than my own revenge, although the image of Euphoria’s death — rape, torment, horror — came before me every time I paused or thought about anything but the task at hand.

My child. She was carrying my child. If this raid came from Simon, how he would enjoy slaying my unborn child.

The mind is a dark place, friends.

I held the line in my head, though. I gathered my men, formed them in ranks and then, and only then, did I take them down the hill.

The enemy now stood in neat ranks on the far side of the stream. They weren’t even trying to make more ground.

They were good fighters. I could see by how quiet they were, how little shifting there was in their ranks. Of course they were tired, and they had lost men — and lost their bodies, as well, which humiliates any soldier.

When we were half a stade away, they began to shout insults at us.

We halted. I walked forward with Teucer. He already had his orders.

There he was — Simon, son of Simon. He wore plain armour and a big crest, and he came out of the ranks to meet me like a long-lost brother.

‘Look who it is,’ he laughed. ‘The polemarch of Plataea. Better stay on your own side of the river, little cousin, or big, bad Thebes will eat your pissant city the way a lion eats a foal.’

‘Nicely put,’ I shouted at him. ‘You brand yourself a whoreson of Thebes, traitor.’ I spat. ‘You are, in fact, your father’s son.’

‘Laugh while you can, Plataean,’ he shouted back. ‘I left your wife dead in your dooryard and burned your fucking house, and there is nothing you can do but cry like a boy. And next time, I’ll get you — and all the men who stand between me and what is mine.’

In that hour, my fate dangled in the wind — along with the battle we were about to fight, and perhaps the fate of Athens, too. With the words ‘dead in your dooryard’, I think that most of my sense of reason left me. Not that I hadn’t expected it, after the sacrifices went foul and the riders appeared and the column of smoke.

I never promised you a happy story, thugater.

Simon taunted me again — something about what he’d done to her body, and how ugly she was. I started forward at him. Had I reached him, he and his two hundred friends would have cut me down, and then what might have happened?

Teucer didn’t flinch, or ask permission. He shot my cousin down, right there, in cold blood. His arrow flew true, and Simon died with a look of complete disbelief on his hateful face and an arrow coming out of the top of his chest, just above his breastplate. And that changed everything. Suddenly, the hired men knew that their paymaster was dead — and I was alive.

My boys charged without a word from me. We sang no Paean, and we were not in any proper formation, but we went over that stream, up the bank, into trained men.

I remember none of it. Oh, that’s a lie — I remember going up the bank, almost losing my footing, the jar of a spear on my aspis and another ringing off my beautiful new helmet. And then I was into them, killing.

After a while, we pushed them off the stream bank, and then they must have known that they’d had it. I remember Teucer at my back, shooting men in the face or foot when they troubled me. Apollo guided his hand, and he was like death.

They were hired men, and their employer was already dead. After a while they broke. I suppose I killed my share of them, but there were far more alive than down when they broke. It is always the way. Men only die when they turn their backs to run.

Our light-armed men were not tired; most of them hadn’t got engaged, except perhaps to lob a few javelins on the unshielded flank. My rage communicated itself to them — and they followed the hired men.

Anyone can kill a man who turns his back.

I followed on wings of rage and revenge, so that when I surfaced from my flood tide of blood, I was far down the road to Thebes. I had no spear, just a sword — my shield was cast aside. Beside me was Idomeneus, and at my back was Teucer, and around us were thirty freedmen and slaves, all busy stripping the corpses.

We were ten stades into Theban territory. My body would scarcely obey me — I couldn’t have raised my sword arm to defend my poor Euphoria.

I looked down the road to Thebes, and it was empty.

Idomeneus laughed aloud.

‘We fucking killed them all!’ he said.

I’ve heard since that over two dozen survived. So we didn’t, in fact, kill them all.

But close enough.

I don’t remember much after that, except that I made my way back to the stream, and men tried to talk to me, and I ignored them. I stripped my armour and left it on the ground with my helmet and my weapons, and I ran — naked — back up the road. I was exhausted, but I ran anyway.

I remember nothing, except that I made the run all the way. Perhaps I walked. Perhaps I lay down and slept. But I doubt it.

The column of smoke from the burning barn rose over all of Plataea, mingling high up with the smoke of three signal fires. I ran across fields, ripping my legs on briar and my feet on the small, hard, spiky nuts that litter our fields at high summer. Not that I noticed.

I ran until I could not see, until my breath came like fire into a bellows, and sweat flew from me. I had run thirty stades in armour, fought a battle, and now I was running another thirty stades. My right arm was all blood to the elbow, sticky and brown, and there were wounds on my thighs and ankles and a deep cut on my left bicep — no idea how it came there — and still I ran.

Did I think that I could save her if I ran far enough?

Perhaps I wanted to burst my heart.

I remember seeing that I had run all the way to the fork at the foot of the hill, and what I remember best was the strange temptation I had to keep going — over the stream and up to the hero’s tomb. And perhaps away over the mountain to Attica, and over the sea to Aegypt. To keep going and never go home, and never know.

Perhaps I lost my wits.

But I turned my feet, lengthened my stride and ran up the dusty lane, sharp gravel under my hard feet.

Halfway up the hill, the road turns just a little, and you can see straight to the gate in the wall that surrounds my house.

The house itself was burning. Although it was stone and mortar, and solidly built, they’d fired the floorboards and the roof beams, and the stone was cracking and falling, and the whole thing had become a chimney, carrying my riches to the skies in an intended sacrifice.

I didn’t give it more than a glance.

My great wooden gate, for which my father had forged the straps and hinges and cut the oak, was broken and twisted. On the ground was a heavy beam from one of the sheds — Tiraeus’s shed, as it later proved. They’d used it to break the gate.

Around the gateway, women lamented. They keened, high wails like the cries of bloody-handed furies tearing to the heavens, demanding revenge. Well — they had their revenge, but as usual, it brought no child born of woman back to life.

I pushed through them. The gateway was packed with corpses, some of them black with fire.

My farm had not fallen lightly, and my people had not died alone.

Bion lay across the threshold, his spear broken in his hand, his body ripped asunder.

Cleon lay by him, throat ripped and with ten great wounds in his body and a broken axe clutched in his hands.

They lay across the woman they had died defending, and even she had a sword in her hand, and the edge of the blade was bloody. She had not gone down easily. She had not been raped. She was dead before such thoughts could occur to any man, however evil.

She was not pregnant, and as I stood there, I realized that her hair was not blonde.

It was not Euphoria. It was Mater. Mater had died in the gateway, sword in hand.

My mind couldn’t accept it — couldn’t take in the loss of the three of them in one blow. In truth, all my being had been aimed at Euphoria, and I had forgotten how many people I loved were in this farm.

Mater.

I lifted Bion off her legs and laid him down with dignity, although his intestines trailed behind him as I dragged him across the yard.

I lifted Cleon too, and now I was weeping, because he had died like a great man, and there were dead enemies at his feet.

And Mater — how I had hated her for so many years. Yet here she was, sword in hand, like any hero you might name. Ares, she died well. And sober.

I rolled her corpse over, and she had that smile on her face — that smile she wore when she saw that I could say the verses of Theognis, or when I brought Euphoria under the roof, or when she met Miltiades.

That she wore that look with a spear in her guts made her seem very great to me.

But when I went to lift her, two other hands reached beneath her shoulders — bloody hands, but smaller.

Euphoria’s hair was wild, her chiton was unpinned at one shoulder, so that one breast showed on the right, and there was blood on her feet. She took Mater’s shoulders and lifted, and we laid her down with the other heroes who fell defending the dooryard.

‘She locked me in the basement,’ Euphoria said. She wasn’t crying. ‘She said it was my duty to live.’

Tiraeus and Styges had held the door to the forge. The hired warriors had given up after they lost two men, then went and fired the house and ran off. So Styges had let my wife out of the basement before the house collapsed into it.

And more, Mater had saved so much — wall hangings, gold and silver — all thrown into the forge building. Bion and Cleon held the gate while she did it, and then she joined them, and they all died together. Or that’s how Styges told it, who had stood in the door of the forge and held it.

Euphoria held me, crooning. She was strong, and I was suddenly unmanned. It was everything — Bion’s death, Cleon’s, Mater’s — and Euphoria being alive. And fatigue, I suppose.

Styges asked me if we had fought. I must have told them something, because the women stopped screaming for vengeance. And then Euphoria brought me wine — neat — and I drank a cup, and passed out like a drunkard.

When I came to, it was night and I could scarcely move. My thighs hurt so much that I had trouble rolling over. I was lying on gravel in my forge yard, and I had a blanket of my wife’s weaving over me, and she was snuggled to my side, her head against my shoulder.

‘I thought you were dead,’ I said.

She shook her head and her arm embraced me, a good, long squeeze.

In the morning, my legs still ached as if I was an old man. My shoulders and arms weren’t much better, and one of the cuts on my thigh was deeper than I had thought and wept pus.

The bastards had raped any female slave they caught and killed three of my male slaves. So my yard had the mourning of defeat, along with the dreadful fear of my slave girls that they were pregnant. I went to the stream and washed myself, with a prayer to the stream itself for the filth I was putting in her, and then I went back up the hill carrying water, and Euphoria began to wash the women clean, which is the only kindness you can do for a raped woman.

I got Styges and Tiraeus, who both had small wounds, to bind mine, and then I helped with theirs, and then we began to take stock.

We hadn’t lost an animal — the byres were up the hill, and the bastards never made it past the yard. They’d burned the one barn they reached, which was full of barley and hay. It was a loss, but it only held the ready stores for the house and the animals. The house was gone, though. A house that my great-grandfather built of stone and mortar — the best house in all of south Plataea. The home of the Corvaxae, great and small.

Simon burned it, destroying the work of his own family, and he killed his own step-mother in the courtyard. May the furies rip his liver for ever. May every shade in Hades treat him with the contempt of a matricide and a traitor.

I was standing in the yard, looking at the wreck of the house — rubble and not much more — when men came through the gate. Teucer and Hermogenes, Idomeneus and Alcaeus and all the men of the epilektoi.

I walked over to Hermogenes and put my arms around him. ‘Bion died in the yard,’ I said.

I took him by the hand to where his father was laid out. The women had already bathed his body with the water I brought them, and anointed him with oil, and put coins on his eyes. Hermogenes fell to his knees, wept and poured sand over his head.

Other, smaller steadings had also been hit. On the way back to Thebes, the hired men had lost their discipline — if they ever had any — and they’d killed and raped whatever they could catch. So I was not alone in my mourning.

But Teucer took me aside. ‘Are you blind with rage?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘Euphoria is alive, and the unborn baby,’ I said. ‘I have my wits about me today.’

Teucer led me outside the old house wall. ‘This man was with them,’ he said. ‘I took him alive. He is my slave now.’

Fair enough. A hired man was nobody’s — not a citizen anywhere. Capture meant enslavement. I had played by those rules — I knew the game.

‘I won’t kill him,’ I said.

The man met my eye for a moment as I approached him. Then he looked at the ground.

‘You fought for my cousin Simon?’ I asked.

‘Simon?’ The man spat. ‘Cleitus paid us. Simon came along for the ride, the incompetent fuck.’

You think he should have held his tongue, friends? But why? He was our slave, and he knew what he had to do if he wanted to live. We needed no threats. Nor would I have done any differently, had I stood in his shoes.

I nodded. I looked at Teucer.

‘Ask him why they came,’ Teucer prompted.

‘Okay, I’m game. Why did you come?’ I asked.

‘We were fucking paid to kill you, mate.’ The man shrugged. ‘Nothing personal.’

Teucer kicked him so hard he fell to the ground. ‘Lord — Arimnestos is called “lord”.’

The man got himself upright. ‘We were paid to kill you, lord,’ he managed. ‘Could have just told me.’

‘Can I buy him from you?’ I asked Teucer.

‘You will kill him?’ Teucer said.

I shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Buy me a good working man, then. This one will be a lazy fuck.’ Teucer put the man’s rope in my hand. ‘All yours. Now ask him what signalled them to start.’

I looked at the captive. He was squatting in the dust, but his eyes still had the glint of — pride, or resentment, or just stubbornness. I liked him a little for that. He was beaten, but not defeated.

He nodded. ‘We was told to wait until we saw fires at Chalcis,’ he said. ‘Runner came in yesterday morning.’

Teucer nodded. ‘See?’ he asked.

I did see. If there was smoke rising over Chalcis — why then, the Persians must be in Euboea.

If the Persians were in Euboea, then the attack on Attica was close — two or three weeks away, at most.

If the Persians were about to attack Attica, then Athens would be paralysed, and it was safe for Simon to attack Plataea.

Secrets inside secrets, like the boxes which nest inside other boxes, smaller and smaller, until there’s a tiny nut or a silver bell in the centre of seven or eight of them. Someone had plotted this very carefully — as I had suspected.

‘Want to be free?’ I said.

‘You bet,’ he said.

‘Hmm. We’ll see. That corpse is my mother. That one is a man who saved my life fighting. That’s my best friend’s father. Those women? My slaves.’ I looked at him, and he grew pale.

‘I-’ he sputtered.

‘Do as you’re told,’ I said. ‘I know you’re a hoplite. Somewhere, you are probably a gentleman.’ I looked around. ‘Right now, you’re a slave, and if you fuck up, someone will kill you. Now — truth now — did you rape?’

He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. And as I said — it was obvious he had been a gentleman. I believed him.

‘Good. Then go and start helping.’

I sent Styges and one of my forge boys running for Myron, and I asked him to order the muster of the whole phalanx on my say-so.

Myron arrived on a mule, without ordering the muster. ‘Why?’ he asked, as soon as he had his leg over the beast’s back. ‘You slaughtered Thebans on their own ground. We’re in for it now.’

I shook my head. ‘Bold front, archon. I don’t think that we did wrong — ask any man here, whose wife is lying with her throat slit. That’s my mother over there.’

He spat. ‘Fucking Thebans. Very well. What do you suggest, polemarch?’

I had the advantage that all the epilektoi were together, so that my officers — that is, my real officers — were there to advise me.

We’d had two hours to plan, and we’d hammered it out while we waited for Myron and cleared the rubble of the house. A hundred men — even a hundred tired men — can accomplish a great deal in a short time. My burned barn was now a dark smudge on the ground and my ruined house was a pile of fire-blackened stone out beyond the house wall. The burned beams had been stacked and three pyres of scrap wood from all the surrounding farms built on the hilltop. All that in a few hours.

By now I was much calmer. I’d had time to breathe, and no one let me do any work — nor did Idomeneus do any, as he was a lord now and a priest. Alcaeus was the same, so the three of us watched other men lift stones while we debated the campaign.

And when Myron asked, we were ready.

‘How are the towers?’ I asked.

‘The west tower is done, and the east will be complete tomorrow or the next day, if the wind continues to blow dry.’ He shrugged. ‘They’ll be done before Thebes can march.’

That confirmed what we’d hoped. ‘Then this is our plan,’ I said. ‘First, we free all the slaves who built the towers.’

‘Zeus Soter!’ the archon said. ‘That’s the whole year’s profits gone.’

I nodded. ‘Not just for you, lord. But listen. We lost ten men yesterday — we’ll lose ten times that in the next month, and that is if we win. We need those men as citizens. Yes?’

He shook his head. ‘Perhaps later-’

I disagreed. ‘We need them now. Because we want to put them in the armour of the dead hired men, install Lysius as their officer and leave them with another fifty picked men to guard the walls. In fact, we don’t want them to sit within the walls. We want them to march down to the ford and camp, with light-armed men prowling around. If you dare-’ I looked around, ‘I’d send Teucer tonight to burn some barns in Thebes.’

Myron shook his head. ‘You are talking about kicking a hornets’ nest,’ he said.

Idomeneus raised a long, plucked eyebrow. ‘Ever faced down a bull in a meadow, archon?’ he asked.

Myron nodded slowly. ‘I have, too. You think that as long as we look tough, they’ll back down.’

Alcaeus laughed. ‘Not really, lord. The truth is, they have twelve thousand hoplites and we do not. But a show of aggression — especially after the tanning we gave those hired men — might slow them up for a week or two.’ He shrugged. ‘Lysius can always pull inside the walls later, when he sees the dust cloud coming.’

Myron gave a grim smile. ‘All this planning suggests that you won’t be here — with the phalanx.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘According to our prisoners, Euboea was burning yesterday. Chalcis is being served up to the Persians. By the time we march, Euboea will have fallen.’

Alcaeus nodded. ‘And Datis has the heart of the sailing season at his back,’ he said. ‘He’ll move straight on to Athens.’

‘And Athens will fall without my phalanx?’ Myron asked softly.

I laughed. ‘A thousand hoplites?’ I made a face. ‘Athens can find twelve thousand, and perhaps fifteen. They don’t need the weight of our spears.’ Secretly, I suspected that they did need the weight of our spears. ‘But Athens has factions, Myron — factions the like of which you can’t imagine. If we appear — to honour our agreements, and without being asked — we will strengthen Miltiades’ hand. Enormously.’

He looked at me, and I looked at him.

‘Archon,’ I said, ‘please. If Athens falls, or Medizes, Plataea is doomed. Thebes will eat us the way a gull eats a snail. Our only hope of preservation is to act — aggressively — for Athens.’

Myron looked out from our hilltop. Men were still carrying brush for the pyres to burn the bodies, and below, other men — my neighbours — were breaking up the biggest chunks of rubble with iron tools.

‘When I was a much younger man,’ he said, after a while, ‘I stood in your forge yard with your father and a few other men, and we agreed to make an alliance with Athens to preserve our city from the yoke of Thebes.’ He turned, and met my eye. ‘I think the decision for today was made that day. I was wrong to slow the muster. I will see to it, and you will take my citizens over the mountain and do what you can.’ He stood straight, as if ten years had fallen from his shoulders. ‘May Zeus and Ares and Grey-Eyed Athena stand by you, for if you lose the phalanx, even in victory, why then our city will fall.’

When he went back to his mule, Alcaeus looked at me. ‘Plataea is lucky to have so many great men in so small a city. Would that Miletus had done as well.’

‘We may yet fail,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘Of course. But not for the lack of trying.’

‘Let’s go and kill some Medes,’ Idomeneus said, and he grinned.

We burned Mater, Bion and Cleon on the hilltop that afternoon, with wine and sacrifices and a priestess of Hera from the temple. And when they were ash, and the fires were great smoking columns not unlike the pillars of smoke that the raiders had left behind, the priestess came to me and proposed that I pay for a statue of Mater in the temple.

‘She was a great woman,’ the priestess said. She was a matron with iron at her temples and a vast reserve of dignity. ‘Young women need examples of how to live — and die.’

I all but spat at her. ‘She was drunk every day of her wedded life,’ I said.

The priestess stepped back. ‘Speak no ill of the dead!’ she commanded. ‘Is that the way you will speak of her? Or as the hero who fell defending your home?’

I gave her the money. There’s a new statue that bears no resemblance to her — the Persians broke the one a local man made, smashing it to gravel with hammers. But in Plataea, the new temple honours Mater as an avatar of Hera. Take from that what you will.

While I mourned, the phalanx mustered.

A thousand men may not sound like many, but every man needs a slave and a donkey or a mule to carry his kit, to cook for him and keep him in fighting trim. And a thousand mules with two thousand men is a long column to lead over mountain tracks. It takes time for men to put their houses in order, and time to gather enough food for thirty days, and time for the slave to kiss his own wife. Time to make sure you have your second-best cloak as well as your war cloak, time to make sure that someone packed you some garlic sausage and some fresh onions from the garden.

My packing was done — my mule was still picketed high above Eleutherai, and my friends had rescued my kit from where I left it by Asopus. My good Persian shirt of scale was on Lysius’s back, and my old helmet with the raven crest was on his head to puzzle the Thebans — and he did it no dishonour.

Euphoria fussed about, finding me oil with lavender in it, and retrieving — as if by a miracle — my father’s heavy walking stick from the collapsed cellar of the house, charred a little but still strong as iron. And when she had seen me cared for, she took me by the hand and led me to our spring, up by the vineyard, and then she bathed with me, in the deep hole by the spring. There were men all about us on the hill, but none came near, and the olive grove hid us. There’s no modesty when you bathe in an open sink of rock, and pregnancy or none, we made love. And then we washed again, and she put on the robe Mater had saved — a beautiful thing of red-purple, with gold embroidery. And I helped her put up her hair in a net of linen.

In the dooryard where Mater had fallen, she poured the libations on my shield and wiped it with a new linen towel, and then she did the same to my sword and my spear, and finally, defying convention, to my helmet.

I longed to crush her to me, but I did not. We were Greeks, not barbarians. Our women send us to war with dry eyes, and we left as if going to the fields and not to face death.

There was still smoke rising to the heavens from the funeral pyres when we marched. As we climbed the hills towards Cithaeron, we were joined by the main body from the agora of the city itself. In the distance, as we climbed, we could see smoke rising over Theban territory, and there were wolfish smiles as we went. The epilektoi marched first, up the same road they’d marched just ten days before on their way to the late-summer hunt.

They weren’t boys any more. When they had torn into the hired men, they took losses — ten killed outright, another dozen dying of wounds. In a community as small as ours, the loss of twenty young men was a knife wound in the gut. Everyone was the friend, the lover, the wife, the sister or brother of one of the dead.

But they had killed, and won, and that changed them most of all. When we walked up the trails to the tomb of the hero, every man in my front rank knew that he was worthy of the blood of his fathers. He knew that he had been proven in fire, and like bronze, hardened by the working.

I could make you an argument that the hired men did us a favour by attacking us, but I’d be full of shit. There is no ‘good war’.

We stopped at the shrine, as Plataeans have since the Trojan War, and we poured libations. Some men shouted for me to sacrifice my new slave on the tomb. His name was Gelon, and he was a Greek from Sicily. He heard them call for his blood and he stood there with my shield on his shoulder, watching me.

I looked at Idomeneus. It was his choice, really. He shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We have shed enough blood, and the hero craves no more.’

He sacrificed a ram we’d brought for the purpose, looked at its entrails and shook his head.

‘This isn’t going to be good,’ he said.

I spat. ‘I didn’t need entrails to tell me that,’ I said.

We slept in our cloaks, and in the morning, after Teucer and the light-armed men rejoined from their raid into Thebes, we marched away over the mountains.