Marathon: Freedom or Death

16

It was hot on the plains of Boeotia, and cold in the passes above Cithaeron. But when we came down off the passes, the sweltering sea-heat nearly choked us, and the humidity was such that a man could sweat through his chiton before he had it over his head.

I intended to keep to the high roads as long as possible. I didn’t want to give away my march. This sounds odd, in light of what transpired, but I was very conscious of the passage of days, and it seemed all too possible, to me, that we would arrive to find Athens surrendered, or beaten — in which case I needed to get away unmolested by the Persian cavalry. I was very aware — as Myron wanted me to be — that I held the future of Plataea under my hand.

So we were wary, and stayed to the north of Attica as the shadows lengthened and the summer ended. We turned east as we came down the main pass, and marched for two days across uncultivated land, skirting Oinoe. Men saw us, but they did not come forward to speak to us, and I had a handful of my light-armed mounted on horses to keep me informed of the terrain, and we made good time.

A week into our march, and we were in Attica proper — an Attica bereft of citizen men. Doors were locked against us, and there were only slaves and women, and few enough of them, too. It was as if a dread disease had swept the land and killed them. There was even wheat left in some fields. One night when we camped, my men reaped a whole field with their swords and left three silver coins on the doorstep of the empty house in payment, and we baked bread the next night after grinding it in an empty grist mill and baking it in ovens we found cold.

A day’s march from Athens, and we could see the Acropolis as clear as day on the horizon. It was not on fire, and I assumed that if Athens had surrendered or made peace, all these folk would have come flooding back down the roads to their farms. So I left my brother-in-law in charge, took my new slave and rode hard for Athens as the sun rose.

The gates were still open.

The streets were packed with people — all the farmers from the farms I’d just marched past, I expect. Most of them didn’t pay me a glance as I rode by, because the only men who would have been interested in me were in the Agora, voting. Any man still on the streets was a slave, a freedman or a foreigner.

If I had thought that the Agora was full for Phrynichus’s play, I was shocked to see how packed it was that late-summer day. I had to dismount and leave my horse with Gelon. Then I shouldered my way forward — I’m not a small man, but neither am I a giant, and no one wanted to make way for me. It took me an hour — five speeches — to make my way from the Tholos to the centre of the Agora, where the speakers stood.

For most of that time, I could see Miltiades.

He stood virtually alone. The men who stood by him were unknown to me, except Aristides and Sophanes, both of whom stood so proudly that they looked like men fighting in a desperate last stand.

When I was close enough, I could hear a man argue from the bema — the speaker’s platform — that there was no need for Athens to march to the aid of Eretria, that Euboea was an ancient enemy of Athens (true enough, friends) and the Great King was welcome to lay them low. And more such stuff. In that hour, as I bulled my away across the Agora and felt every wound on my body, I heard every cringing excuse to avoid war, every noble sentiment against it, speeches of cowardice and speeches of sublime nobility.

When I was almost close enough to touch Miltiades, a man ascended the bema who looked like one of Themistocles’ men. He stood with his head bowed for a moment, and then he raised it.

‘What more can we do?’ he asked. ‘Miltiades asks that we form the phalanx and march to defend the coast — even to save Chalcis. But I ask — why must we fight alone? We have walls. And Sparta is not coming. Thebes has made their own peace. We are alone, men of Athens. Are we the protectors of Greece? Sparta craves that title — let them act the part.’

He got quite a cheer, too.

While men were cheering — it is easy to cheer for other men to do the hard work while you sit home, I find — Miltiades raised his head. He was plainly dressed, for him, in a dark chlamys over a plain white chiton with one stripe. The gold pin at his shoulder was his only concession to rank. He raised his head and his eyes met mine — and lit up the way my eyes lit when they crossed with Euphoria’s.

He waited until he could clasp my hand. And then he pulled me sharply, so that he towed me as one ship will tow another after a storm. He didn’t bother to mount the bema. He simply raised my hand, the way a judge in games raises the hand of a victor.

‘You lie,’ he roared. ‘Plataea is here!’

Chaos.

Men shouted — one thing, and then another. I saw my father-in-law in the crowd, and I saw Aristides, and I saw Cleitus. I had thought him an exile until then. Our eyes met, and the hate flowed like wine.

I was still locked in that when the archon basileus pushed to my side.

‘Do you have an army?’ he asked.

‘A thousand hoplites,’ I said. ‘Which is every man we have.’

He embraced me. He, an aristocrat, who had no love for me or mine, but he embraced me, and then he pointed to the bema. ‘You have my permission to speak,’ he said.

So, although I was a foreigner, I mounted the speaker’s platform. The crowd was not quiet, but I didn’t care. I raised my hand.

‘I have brought the full muster of Plataea,’ I shouted. ‘And left Thebes afraid. Plataea stands with Athens!’

And by the time I came down from the platform, they were already voting Aristides and Miltiades as strategoi, and sending the phalanx out to fight.

As every schoolboy knows, the assembly voted ten strategoi. Aristides and Miltiades were but two of them, and Cleitus of the Alcmaeonids a third. And even when they began to muster the phalanx, half of the generals were still dead set against war — or at least, offensive war. The very next thing they did was to vote for a runner to be sent to Sparta to beg for help — that’s how it sounded to me, anyway. And why not? The Spartans, for all my sneers, were the best soldiers in Greece — perhaps in the world.

I stood with Miltiades as he hurried men to get their kit. Many men of the phalanx were already prepared — had been so for days. Men of the other party were unprepared, or at least most were, so assured were they that the phalanx would not march.

The polemarch of Athens was Callimachus of Aphidna. He was an older man with a fine reputation, both as a warrior and as a politician. I have heard men say that he hesitated, that he only marched when Miltiades threatened to take his men and sail away — Miltiades, after all, had his own army from the Chersonese, almost a thousand hoplites with more military experience than the rest of Athens put together. Not so. Let us be fair. He was hesitant — extremely hesitant — to march. Remember, this was before the Persian fleet had even been sighted. The Persians were just a rumour of terror up the coast — although on a clear day, you could see the fires in Euboea rising to the heavens.

He was hesitant for a reason. I tasted this hesitancy myself.

It is one thing to march in the phalanx. It is another to go in the front rank — and yet another to be a killer of men, a hero, a man who can change a battle. But all of them — the killer, the front-ranker, the rear-ranker — have more in common than any of them share with the polemarch and the strategos. On their shoulders rests the burden — fight, or don’t fight. March or don’t march. Choose correctly, and your name will live for ever. For ever. Choose badly, or get cursed by the gods, and your city is lost, your friends killed, your elders butchered, your women raped and sold as slaves.

Understand?

If you aren’t hesitant about fighting, then you are a fucking idiot.

And those men who voted against the fight? They had to go and stand shoulder to shoulder with the men who voted for the fight, and each had to depend on the other. The city was divided about evenly, I’d say, half for glory, half for caution.

Callimachus was right to hesitate.

I watched the chaotic preparations — the same mess as our Plataean preparations but magnified ten times — and shook my head.

‘Why such a hurry?’ I asked. ‘Tomorrow morning will be as good as this evening — and surely you won’t march before dark?’

Miltiades pursed his lips. ‘If you hadn’t come just when you did, god-sent, I would not have carried this debate,’ he said.

Slaves came up with his kit, and his hypaspist, a Thracian I’d seen with him before, shouldered his shield and flashed me a blond smile.

Miltiades smiled himself when he saw his panoply. ‘If I can get them clear of the city before night falls,’ he said, ‘I have a chance. If we’re here in the morning, we’ll never march.’ He shrugged. ‘I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. I have a feel for these things.’

Aristides came, surrounded by men I knew — Sophanes, of course, but also Agios and Phrynichus and a dozen oarsmen I recognized, all dressed as hoplites. Their kit was as good as our front-rankers. Athens has money, and money buys armour.

‘I suggested that we free a thousand slaves and put them in the ranks,’ Aristides said. ‘And these fools declined, saying that it would be too hard to choose what tribes they would go to.’ He shook his head. ‘Some of them even wanted to decline the service of the armed metics.’

I stood there while the sun sank, and I had nothing to do but think. After a few minutes, or even an hour, I turned to Aristides. ‘Plataea will take your freedmen,’ I said. ‘Put them in my rear ranks. Then your proud citizens have nothing to complain about.’

He gave me a thin-lipped smile. ‘Tomorrow,’ Aristides said. ‘Today, we march out of the city. Miltiades is right. Today, or never.’

The shadows were long enough to make a short man tall when Miltiades took his tribe out of the gate. It was a purely symbolic march — Miltiades was to Athens as I was to little Plataea, and his men were ready. Many carried their own gear, poor men who knew no other trade but fighting, and they had been assembled and ready since the last vote.

Aristides marched next, with the men of the Antiochis. By the time Miltiades’ men cleared the sacred gate, Aristides’ men were ready to march, even though his tribe, by ill-chance, contained many of those most determinedly against the war.

The other strategoi were less ready, but Aristides had set the example by marching despite having a third of his taxis missing, and so the other taxeis of the tribes marched away as soon as their turns came. I stood and waited — after all, I had a horse — and what I saw heartened me. Men continued to come to the square behind the sacred gate, kiss their wives, pour a quick libation and run down the road, with a slave or a servant and a donkey hurrying after them, so that there was a constant flow of stragglers and sluggards behind the march of the army. The strategoi had left almost half the army behind. It could have been a disaster, but the men of Athens — even those against the war — did their duty.

When I mounted my horse, darkness was falling.

‘Have we won, do you think?’ Gelon asked me. I laughed to hear him say ‘we’.

‘We haven’t won,’ I said. ‘We haven’t lost. We’ve marched, and if Miltiades is to be believed, that means we’re still in the game.’

‘You could free me now,’ Gelon said. ‘No one around to kill me.’

I nodded. ‘I could, but I won’t. You fight in the phalanx — and fight well. If you live, I’ll free you.’

‘Free me first,’ he said. ‘I’m fucked if I’m going to fight as a slave. No one will want me anyway. Who ever heard of a slave hoplite?’

That was true. ‘I tell you what, Gelon. If the Athenians free their slaves, I’ll put you in with them.’

‘As a slave?’ he asked, daring.

‘As a free man, you whoreson. Now get your arse moving down the road.’ Gelon made me laugh, in a dark way. I was coming to like him. He bore slavery with a kind of amused contempt that made it impossible for me to punish him while he showed his resistance every minute. I respected that. I also thought that another man — Idomeneus, for instance — would have beaten him to a pulp.

The sun was setting, and although we didn’t know it yet, Chalcis had just been stormed. One of the richest cities in Greece — an ancient rival of Athens, at sea and on land, the city that colonized Sicily and southern Italy and even the coast of Asia — had fallen by treachery to the Great King. Datis ordered the warriors massacred and the women and children sold into slavery, just as he had at Miletus and Lesbos.

His tame Greeks turned away from the slaughter, but the Sakai and the Medes and the Persians butchered the men and the elderly and set fire to the city — every house and every temple. The column of smoke rose to the heavens like a sacrificial fire, and could be seen from the Acropolis, as Datis intended.

Datis sent his cavalry across the bridge to sow terror the way a farmer sows barley.

The women were loaded into his troop ships, weeping at their state — women who had been wives, who had known love, who had sat at their looms proud of their family names.

And the ships, crewed by Phoenicians and Ionian Greeks, got their sterns in the water, unfolded the mighty wings of their oars and turned their ram-prows south, with a gentle wind at their backs and a protected sea. It was too late for Poseidon to intervene. The Great King’s fleet was at sea, the oars pulled to the lamentations of five thousand new slaves.

Their rams were pointed at Attica. And even as we marched out of Athens and made our first camp in the hills north of the city, even as men groused or had second thoughts, Datis’s scouts were riding through the long grass by the beach, at Marathon.