Marathon: Freedom or Death

17

Last night, while we were drinking, the young scribe from Halicarnassus asked me why Athens didn’t meet Datis at sea. It’s a damn good question, given the size of Athens’s fleet today.

The truth is, in the time of Marathon, there was no Athenian fleet. I realize that this sounds impossible, but the fact is that the tyrants and the oligarchs shared a healthy fear of the demos, and the fleet gives the demos power, because the power of the fleet is its rowers, not its hoplites — the thetes who pulled the oars. So noblemen owned warships — Tartarus, friends, I owned a warship at the time of Marathon! Aristides owned one, Sophanes’ family owned one, and Miltiades owned ten at the height of his power. That was the Athenian fleet, the accumulation of the ships of the rich — not unlike the way they formed a phalanx, come to think of it. And all the ships Athens could muster might have made fifty hulls. Before Lade, fifty hulls had been accounted a mighty fleet. But the world was changed by the Great King’s decision to spend Greece into defeat. His six hundred triremes — give or take a hundred — won him Lade, though it strained his empire to maintain them, and they emptied the ocean of trained rowers.

But Athens had nothing to offer against his six hundred. Our hulls were all on the beach at Piraeus, all those that weren’t ferrying refugees across to Salamis or around the coast to the Peloponnese.

The first night we camped in the precinct of a temple of Heracles perched high on the ridge above Athena’s city. My Plataeans were still forty stades away to the north, and I saw no reason to bring them along yet, as we had no word of the enemy and the Athenian camp was in enough disorder as it was.

Greek armies are usually only as good as the time and distance they are from home. The first night, with the army close enough to home to sleep there if they wanted, with none of the discipline or shared experience that an army builds with every camp and every smoky meal, they are just a mob of men with little in common except their duty to the city.

Many of them have no notion how to live rough, or how to eat without their wives and slaves to cook. The aristocrats have no problems — the aristocrat’s life as a gentleman farmer and hunter is perfectly suited to training campaigners. But the potters and the tanners and the small farmers — all strong men — may never have eaten a meal under the wheel of the heavens in their lives.

Gelon and I bedded down with Miltiades’ men, who had none of these problems and little but contempt for their fellow Athenians. These were the men he’d led at Lade and a dozen other fights, and they were confident in themselves and in their lord.

Aristides’ men were a different matter. Let me just say that since Cleisthenes’ reforms — fairly recent when we marched to Marathon — all of the ‘tribes’ of Athens were artificial constructs. Cleisthenes had sought to break up the power bases of the great aristocrats (like Miltiades) by ensuring that every tribe was composed in equal parts of men of the city (the potters and tanners, let’s say), men of the farms (up-country men, small farmers and aristocrats, too) and men of the sea (fishermen, coastal men and oarsmen). It was a brilliant law — it gave every Athenian a shared identity with men from the parts of Attica that most individuals had never visited.

Another thing that he did — another brilliant thing — was to heroize everyone’s ancestors. In Athens, the principal difference between an aristocrat and a commoner was not money — freedmen and merchants often had lots of money, and no one thought of them as aristocrats, believe me! No, the biggest difference was ancestors. An aristocrat was a man descended from a god or from a hero. Miltiades was descended from Ajax of Salamis, and through him back to Zeus. Aristides was descended, like me, from Heracles.

My friend Agios was descended from parents who were citizens, but they had no memory of anything before their own parents. Cleon’s father was a fisherman, but his mother had been a whore.

But when Cleisthenes passed his reforms — this happened while I was a slave in Ephesus — he gave every tribe a heroic ancestor, and declared — by law — that everyone in the tribe could count that ancestor in their descent. I’ve heard men — never Athenians, but other Greeks — say that Cleisthenes brought democracy to Athens. Crap. Cleisthenes was a far, far more brilliant man than that. I never met him, but like most middle-class men, I revere his memory as the man who built the Athens we loved.

What he did was to make every man an aristocrat.

In one stroke of law, every oarsman and every whore’s son had as much reason to serve his city as Aristides and Miltiades and Cleitus. To live well, with arete, and to die with honour. I’m not saying that it worked — any better than any other political idea. But to me, it is a glorious idea, and it made the Athens that stood against the Great King.

The main consequence was that the precinct of Heracles was filled with men who would never, ever have been in a phalanx fifteen years before. When my father died serving alongside Athens in Euboea, their phalanx had about six thousand men, and while the front ranks were superb, the rear ranks were poor men with spears, no shields, no armour and no hope of standing for even a heartbeat against a real warrior. That was the way.

But the new Athens had a phalanx with twice as many spears — almost twelve thousand. And from what I could see, almost all of them had the white leather spolades for which Athens was famous. The city owned the tanning trade back then, and their white leather was prized from Naucratis to the Troad. They all seemed to have helmets, too.

See, what Cleisthenes did was to create a city where a man who made pots and worked a plot of land just big enough to yield two hundred medimnoi of grain — about a tenth of what my farm yielded in a good year — would spend his surplus cash — a very small amount, friends — on armour and weapons. Like an aristocrat.

Thugater, you are laughing at me. Am I too passionate? Listen, honey — I may be tyrant here, but in my heart I’m a Boeotian farmer. I don’t want the aristocrats to rule; I want every man to stand up for himself, take his place in the line, farm his plot, eat his own figs and his own cheese — raise his hand in the assembly and curse when he wants. When I’m honest, I realize that I joined the ranks of the aristos pretty early. It may be that, as my mother said, our family was always with them. But I never wanted power over other men, except in war.

Now you’re all laughing at me. I think I should keep my story for another day. Perhaps I’ll go and sulk in my tent. Perhaps I’ll take blushing girl here for company.

Hah! More wine. That was worth the interruption. Look at that colour!

Now, where was I?

In the morning, I mounted my horse and Gelon got on my mule and we rode away north to find my brother-in-law and the Plataeans. The Athenians turned east after they passed the great ridge and headed for the sea.

I reached my men before noon, and found that they were fed, well slept and ready to march.

Antigonus shrugged. ‘I enjoyed being polemarch,’ he said. ‘Go back to the Athenians. I’ll take it from here.’ He grinned and slapped my back, but when we had the army moving, he came up beside me in the dust. ‘Don’t ever do that to me again,’ he said quietly. ‘When you didn’t come back last night, all I could see was panic and horror. The Persians had you, the fucking Athenians had arrested you — what was I to do?’

‘Just as you did,’ I said, and slapped him on the back in turn.

I had brought a pair of guides from Miltiades, both local men from the Athenian phalanx who knew all the trails and small roads that led east from our position. So we made good time, although the way was never straight and at one point we actually crossed some poor farmer’s wheat field — two thousand men and as many animals crushing his precious crop. But it was the only way to join two paths. Attica had some of the worst roads in the world then.

I rode ahead with Gelon and Lykon and Philip the Thracian, both serving as volunteers as their cities had no part in this war, and we found a camp — three hayfields, all fallow or recently cut, with stone walls all around, on a low ridge with a stream at the bottom. It’s one of the best positions I’ve ever found, and I went back to it on another occasion. We slept secure. I had sentries every night already — a lesson learned from my first campaigns.

We rose with dawn — all that hunting on Cithaeron had good effect — ate hard bread and drank a little wine, then moved. Before noon we were up with the tail of the Athenian force, which was moving down through the olive groves that crowned the ridges around Aleitus’s farm and tower. I knew the trails here — again, from hunting — and my guides were off their own ground. So I took us a little north, over the same ridge where Aleitus’s party had killed two deer, and down through the old orchards where mine had killed six.

Aristides was first that day — the tribes have a strict rotation in everything, from order of march to place in the battle line — and he was the strategos in charge, because the Athenians rotated the command. He was choosing his camp when I rode up with my little party.

He smiled when he saw me. I didn’t smile — any pleasure was wiped from my heart when I saw that he was with Cleitus.

Aristides raised a hand. ‘Stop,’ he said.

I had my hunting spear in my fist.

‘We are here to fight the Medes, not each other,’ Aristides said.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘You found a horse!’ I snorted. ‘I thought I heard that something had happened to them.’

Cleitus had his sword in his hand. ‘How’s your mother?’ he asked.

Aristides hit him — hard — in the temple with his fist. Aristides was a good athlete and a fine boxer, and Cleitus fell from his horse.

But when I rode over to him, Aristides caught my spear hand in a grip of iron.

‘In this army,’ he said, ‘there are other men who hate each other — political foes, personal enemies, men with lawsuits. We have tribes with rivalries, and men with conflicting interests in money — men who have absconded with wives and daughters, men who committed crimes. And worst of all, as both of you know, we have men who have taken money from the Great King and who will use their power to break us the way they broke the East Greeks at Lade — through defection and treachery.’

Cleitus got to his feet and put a hand to his head. ‘You have a heavy hand, sir.’

Aristides nodded. ‘We are in the precinct of Heracles — ancestor to all three of us. You will both come with me to the altar and swear — to the gods — to keep the peace and fight together like brothers. You are leaders. If you fight each other — we are finished.’

‘He killed my mother,’ I said. ‘And his actions served the Great King. He’s taking the Great King’s money. He planned to kill me to keep the Plataeans out of this.’

Cleitus looked at me with the kind of contempt I hadn’t seen in a man’s eyes since I was a slave. ‘You live in a world of delusion, peasant. I would never do anything to serve the Great King. I am an Athenian. I will crush you like the insect that you are — for hubris. For treating my family as if we were at your level. Killed your mother?’ He laughed. ‘It should have been you — and it is no care of mine if some raddled Boeotian whore got in the way.’ He turned to Aristides. ‘I swore to kill him and all his family. He has insulted me and mine.’

Aristides crossed his arms. ‘Cleitus — most men in this army think your family are traitors.’ Cleitus whirled around in angry denunciation, but Aristides cut him off with a raised hand. ‘If you refuse to swear my oath, Cleitus, I will send you from the army, and I will cease defending you to the demos.’ More quietly, he said, ‘This is not the agora, nor the palaestra. He insulted your family? You insulted his? By all the gods, we are talking about the existence of our city! Are you a playground bully or a man of honour?’

I had lowered my spear-point. Aristides always had that effect on me. His moral advantage was almost as great as Heraclitus’s — he lived the words he spoke. But I was still angry.

‘Aristides,’ I said, ‘I honour you more than most men, but he killed my friends and fellow townsmen — and my mother. He killed them for vanity. His so-called revenge? He brought it on himself, by trying to treat me the way he treats the demos — as lesser men.’

‘You killed his horses — fifty horses. The value of ten farms. You killed them.’ Aristides stood in front of me, imperturbable. ‘You killed them to humiliate the Alcmaeonids. Not to save Miltiades — but for your sense of your own honour. Deny it if you can.’

‘He murdered my people!’ Cleitus said. ‘Family retainers!’

‘Thugs,’ I said. ‘Aristides, this is foolishness. You, of all men, know why I did what I did.’

‘I do,’ Aristides said. ‘You did what you did to achieve what you perceived as justice. As did Cleitus.’

‘He killed my mother!’ I yelled.

‘My family is in exile,’ Cleitus said. ‘My uncle died — he died — far from our city. Thanks to you, the dogs of this city bay for our blood and the little men — tradesmen, men whose grandfathers were slaves — treat us with contempt. For that, I would kill you and every man and every woman with a drop of your blood in his veins.’

‘So both of you can wallow in selfishness, pride, self-deceit — and Athens can be burned by the Medes.’ Aristides raised an eyebrow. ‘Come with me — both of you.’

Such was his authority that we followed him. He led us over the brow of the hill on which the precinct of the shrine of Heracles stood. Suddenly, in the blaze of the late-summer son, we were looking down the hill to the plain, the fields and olive groves of one of Attica’s richest areas, all the way to the beach at Marathon.

And from the curve of the beach, as far north as the eye could see, were ships. Hundreds of ships — ships as thick on the sea as ants around an anthill when the plough rips it asunder. Many of them were already stern-in to the beach, over by the marsh at the north end of the bay. They were unloading men, and tents — or so I guessed.

Closer to us, in the open ground at the foot of the hill, there were a dozen Sakai cavalrymen. They were looking up the hill at us. They had gold on their arms, in their hats, on their saddles, and every one of them had a heavy bow at his waist and a pair of long spears in his fist.

‘There they are. The Persians, the Medes, the Sakai — the armoured fist of the Great King, here to chastise Athens for her sins. Now — choose. Stand here, in the sight of the enemy, and fight each other to the death — and on your heads be the future that you squander. Or both of you can swear my oath. Fight side by side. Show the army — every man of whom knows your story, and your hate, believe me — that war with Persia is bigger than family, bigger than revenge. And when the Persians are gone, you may kill each other, for all I care.’

Silence, and the wind sighing over the golden wheat fields down by the sea.

I nodded. ‘I will swear,’ I said. What else could I say? Aristides was the Just Man. What he asked was just.

Nor was Cleitus — for all that I still burn with hate for him — less a man than I. ‘I will swear,’ he said. ‘Because you are right. I will go farther — because I am a better man than this Boeotian pig. I paid men to fight against you, Plataean. But I am sorry that your mother died. For that — alone — you have my apology.’

I might have muttered an apology for the death of his uncle — even if I did, his was the nobler gesture, but then, his was the greater crime.

This is so often the way with men. The gesture is the thing that we remember — the grand apology, the noble death. Did my mother’s noble death wipe clean a lifetime of woe? Did Cleon’s? Is a great apology the equal of a great crime?

I don’t know, and Heraclitus was no longer alive to tell me.

We stood on either side of the low-saddled altar of Heracles, clasped arms like comrades and swore to stand together against the Persians, to support each other and be brothers and comrades. We followed Aristides, word for word, until he finished.

‘Until the Persians are defeated,’ Cleitus added.

‘Until the Persians are defeated,’ I repeated, meeting his eyes.

‘You are both idiots,’ Aristides said.

I’d like to say that a spirit of cooperation swept the army after I swore not to kill Cleitus, but I’m not sure anyone noticed. This is the problem with acts of moral courage and ethical purity. Had I struck him down with my hunting spear, I’m sure there might have been consequences, but having stayed my hand, there was no observable change. Heraclitus and Aristides both told me that the only reward for a correct action is the knowledge of having acted well — fair enough, but I suspect that you have to be Aristides or Heraclitus to feel that such knowledge is enough reward for the sacrifice of something so deeply satisfying as revenge.

At any rate, we made camp in the precinct of Heracles. From the summit, we could see the Persians unloading their ships.

I brought the Plataeans to the north of the Athenians — the left end of our line of camp, and the spot closest to the enemy. We took the rocky end of the temple precinct, almost like a small acropolis.

It wasn’t much ground, but it would be easy to defend, and it had a big stand of cypress trees in the centre — good shade. As I considered it, I saw a man turn aside to relieve himself in the woods, and I caught him. ‘No man relieves himself inside the camp,’ I said.

Even with the hunting, they’d never been on campaign. Most of my men had no idea how fast disease can stalk a camp. So as soon as we’d stopped, I gathered the warriors in a great circle and stood on a pile of shields so that they could all hear me.

‘All men will sleep here, on the rock,’ I said. ‘The cypress trees will give us shade and some shelter, but no man is to cut one, or build a fire under them, for fear of offence to the god. Nor is any man to relieve himself inside the precinct. I will mark a boundary for such things below. Nor will any man use the stream to wash himself, his animal or his clothes, except where I mark it — so that the stream herself will not feel defiled. And so no man’s shit will float down into our cook pots,’ I said, and they laughed, and my point was made.

The Plataean strategoi chose their ground, and then we went down the ancient ramp behind the high ground and chose a low bog for men to use, and had slaves dig trenches across it and lay logs. And we chose a place for the slaves to draw water and wash clothes.

‘Water is going to be a problem,’ Antigonus said.

‘I don’t understand why we have to have all these rules,’ Epistocles said. He shook his head. ‘If I have to go in the night, do you really think I’m going to walk all this way?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well, you can guess again,’ he said, with a foolish little laugh.

‘Epistocles, you are an officer, and men will take their lead from you. If men start pissing in our camp, it will soon become unliveable. This is the most defensible terrain for ten stades. Don’t piss on it.’ I grinned at him, but only in the way I grin when I’m prepared to use my fists to make a man see sense, and he backed away.

‘You seem to think you can give orders like a king,’ he said.

‘This is war,’ I said. ‘Some men it makes kings, and others it makes slaves.’

‘What’s that?’ he said.

‘Never mind,’ I said, and we went off to find space for two thousand men to sleep.

We spent two days making camp and watching the Persians make theirs. They had to land all those men, and some of us wondered why we didn’t just rush them when they had about a third of their men ashore — it was discussed, but we did nothing.

In fact, there was something awe-inspiring about the size of the Persian force and their fleet. They also had almost a thousand cavalry — deadly horse-archers, Persians and Sakai — who had been further north, filtering down from Eretria in pursuit of the last force in the field there, an army of Athenian settlers and Euboeans who had retreated in good order from the initial defeats but gradually died under the arrows of the Sakai. We had had no idea that they still existed until a runner came in on the third morning — a man with an arrow in his bicep who collapsed as soon as he entered the army’s agora.

When Athens had defeated Euboea in my father’s time, they had determined to hold the place thereafter, and they sent four thousand settlers, lower-class Athenians, to become colonists and to hold the best farms. There was no love lost between the settlers and the locals, but when the Persians came, they made a good force. They fought three small actions with the Persians, trying to break out, and finally they got fishing boats and shuttled across the straits, right under the noses of the enemy — but then the cavalry fell on them. Those men had been fighting — and running — for two weeks.

It was Miltiades’ day to command, and he summoned us all as soon as he heard what the messenger had to say.

‘One day’s march north, there are two thousand men — good men, and they’re dying under the arrows of the Sakai.’ He looked around. ‘I propose we take our archers and our picked men, and go and relieve them.’

Callimachus shook his head. ‘You cannot split the army,’ he said. ‘And you cannot defeat their cavalry. That’s why we camped here — remember, fire-breather? So that their arrows could not easily reach us.’

Miltiades shook his head. ‘With picked men, if we move fast and take archers of our own — we can beat them. Or at least scatter them, the way dogs can drive lions off their prey.’

Aristides nodded. ‘We have to try. To leave those men to their deaths — no one would ever speak well of us again.’

Miltiades looked around. ‘Well?’

‘I have a hundred Plataeans who can run the whole distance,’ I said. ‘And twenty archers to run with them.’

Miltiades smiled. But before he could speak, the polemarch shook his head.

‘If we must do this, then every man should go — in the dark. We can feel our way with guides, and be across the ridge before the Medes know we’ve gone. We’ll catch their cavalry napping.’ He looked around, the weight of the responsibility heavy on him. I think he would rather that the Euboeans had died at home.

But he was right. Miltiades wanted a heroic raid, but if we were all together, and we moved fast, we’d accomplish the mission with much less risk.

Everyone chose Callimachus’s method over Miltiades’.

We rose in the dark, hours before the morning star would rise, and we slipped away behind our temple precinct hill, leaving three thousand chosen men to hold the camp behind us. By the time the sun was up, our leading men — my Plataeans — were less than ten stades from the hilltop where our Euboean-Athenians were making their stand.

I wanted to run down the road with my epilektoi, but I knew that the only way to do this was with massed bodies of impenetrable spears. I hadn’t fought cavalry since the fight on the plains by Ephesus, but what I had learned there seemed pertinent — stay together and wait for the horsemen to flinch.

By mid-morning, we were spotting Sakai scouts, and Teucer brought one down with a well-aimed arrow. The next time we saw a party of them form, Teucer had a dozen of his light-armed men together, and they lofted arrows with a little breeze behind them. The Sakai rode out from under their little arrow shower, but their counter-shots fell well short, and after that, it was like a deadly game of rovers. Our archers could out-range theirs, and that meant that they couldn’t come in on us, and twice Teucer’s little band took one of the Sakai off his horse, or left the horse dead, and they gave us room.

The Athenians had a city archer corps, all dressed like Scythians. They were mostly poor men, but very proud, and they shot well enough. There were two hundred of them, and they were all together just behind my Plataeans, so that the one time an enterprising Mede worked around my flank in some hedgerows, he emerged into a veritable hail of arrows and ran off leaving two of his men in the wheat.

Casualties like that — ones and twos — don’t seem important when I tell a story as big as Marathon. But in skirmishes — in harassment — a dozen dead men can be as important as a lost battle. Our arrows were hitting them, and they weren’t reaching us.

So just before noon, their captain, whoever he was, decided that enough was enough and sent his best men to stop me.

I wish I could say that I saw what was coming — but it was more luck than anything that we weren’t caught naked.

As usual, I have to digress. Hoplites — heavy warriors — don’t wander the countryside all dressed up for war. It is hot in Greece, and the aspis is heavy, as is your thorax and your helmet and your spear. Once a man has the aspis on his shoulder and a spear in his hand, his speed is cut on the march.

Perhaps it is just that Greeks are lazy. I have, in fact, spent all day marching with an aspis on my shoulder. But in the old days, we seldom did it. Instead, we carried our weapons, and our servants — sometimes free hypaspists, sometimes slaves — carried our helmets and shields.

After the cavalry tried to work around our rear, I halted the column and ordered the Plataeans to arm. That actually increased my vulnerability for a while. Imagine two thousand men on the road, just two or three abreast, in no particular order. Then imagine that every second man is busy finding his shield-bearer and getting his aspis on his arm, his helmet on his head. Some men had their body-armour on and others did not. Some men had additional pieces of armour — thigh armour and arm guards, such as I wore. All of these were carried by servants.

In my case, I wore my scale cuirass all day, but the rest of my gear was in a wicker basket on Gelon’s back. I even considered changing my shoes — I had ‘Spartan’ shoes on my feet, and I considered, given the difficult fields on either side of the road, changing to boots.

Some men were sitting in the road, changing sandals. Others were stripping naked to change into a heavier chiton to wear under armour.

Got the picture? Chaos. I hate to think how long we were on that road without a single spear pointing at the enemy. I aged.

It is different at sea. At sea, you do not engage until you are ready. But on land — especially facing cavalry or light troops — they can hit you whenever they desire it. I was the leader, and I had fucked up. I could feel it. And now — too late — I was trying to retrieve my error. It was a lesson, if you like.

As soon as I had a party of men armed, I filled the road with them, regardless of their place in the phalanx. And as soon as the bulk of my men were armed, I started them filing off the road to the left, where I could see the shields of our Euboean refugees flashing among the rocks on the hillside.

Our guide, the wounded runner, pointed and gestured, and my eyes were on him when the Persian cavalry came for us. We had about a third of our men formed when they galloped around the corner of the field from behind a grove of olives. They already had arrows on their bows. Their leader was out in front on a big bay horse, and as he came around the corner he gave a whoop, leaned over and shot.

That arrow went into my shield and the head emerged on my side, a finger’s width, just over my wrist where my hand entered the antilabe.

‘Form close!’ I called, and I was scared — shocked silly. I had just enough nerve to tip my helmet from the back of my head over my face. Every man pressed into the centre of the front rank as the shields overlapped.

Where had they come from?

I cursed my failing in not forming up earlier, and I wondered how the rest of my column was doing, and I nearly shat myself in fear. These were not Lydians with spears. These were noble Persians, well led, with discipline and murderous bow-fire, and my men were unprepared.

The first hail of arrows hit our shields. A man screamed as an arrow went into his knee above the greave — his scream might have been my scream.

They came past us, close enough for us to see the markings on their horses and the embroidery on their barbarian trousers and to feel the earth moved by four hundred hooves.

The next storm of arrows broke over us like a big wave on a beach. I felt my shield lifted, moved, rocked as if hail was falling on me, and something screamed of my helmet and I blinked away the pain. My vision was limited to the eye slit in my Corinthian, and sweat was pouring down my body. But I saw it now — the Persian commander had sprung an ambush from behind the olive grove, and I was lucky that I’d paused to form my men or we’d already be dead. Luck. Tyche. And he had made two mistakes. He sprang his trap a little early, before my left flank was out in the field, away from the rocky wall that his horses didn’t want to cross. And he went for us — the formed men — when he could have fallen like a smith’s hammer on my unformed men on the road.

Instead, we were trapped against the field edge with a rubble pile from an old barn on one flank and the road full of slaves and Athenians on the other — but we’d stood our ground. It sounds easy enough. You try it.

Even as his first arrows rattled against us and men fell, he learned his third error, although I was as surprised as I imagine he was.

We had archers in our ranks.

As the Persians swept past us, Teucer and his archers rose from within our ranks, or knelt under the rims of our shields, and shot. Indeed, Teucer was leaning his weight against my hips as he shot, arrow after arrow. He had no horse between his thighs, no reins to manage, and his quiver hung comfortably under his left arm, where I carry my sword in battle, and he drew and shot and drew and shot, three arrows for every one by the Persians, and his had Apollo’s hand behind them.

When an arrow hits a man in the phalanx, he screams and falls, and his armour makes a mournful clatter as he goes down — but his mates close over him, alive or dead. It is but one step to the front to fill the hole.

When a horseman takes an arrow — better yet, when a horse takes an arrow — it can be a disaster for a dozen other men. One horse can fall over another, and a few casualties, by ill-luck or the will of the war god, can stop a charge dead, or cause the animals to flow around their target the way small boys divert a stream on a summer’s day.

We had fewer than three hundred men formed, but all of Teucer’s archers were in our ranks — perhaps thirty men, and some javelins — and they shot at least one Persian for every one of us who fell. I suspect that, man for man, the Persians were the finer archers — but the best archer on a horse, shooting at armoured men behind big shields, is going to lose the contest to the poorer man with his feet firm on the ground, shooting at the enormous target of a man on a horse.

And Teucer was the best archer I’ve ever known. He was safe under my shield rim, and his arrows did not miss. He made chaos of their files, and they broke and rode away, and their red-bearded officer lay, redder now, with one of Teucer’s black-fletched arrows in his throat.

We spearmen played no role, except to stand and not run, and to be a living wall of wood and bronze for Teucer’s archers. We didn’t bloody our spears that day. The archers won that engagement for us, and gained status with us as a consequence.

The Persian commander watched his best cavalry break around us, leaving a dozen of his noblemen face down in the hayfields, and he gathered the rest of his cavalry and rode away, no doubt reckoning, like a professional, that the terrain was against him and he had no reason to take a risk.

He was wrong. There’s more to battle than counting the odds and chances and watching the ranges of the enemy weapons. The Athenians and Plataeans were Greeks — men of the phalanx, where fights are decided not by spear-fighting but by the will of the mass. To every Plataean — and to every Athenian coming late to the fight — it appeared that we were the better men, and the Persians were afraid. Not true, of course, but on such foolishness is victory made.

We watched their dust cloud go, and a few fools shouted that we should follow them, but the Persians wanted us out in the open and we were happy in among the olive groves and low ridges where they couldn’t easily ride around our flanks. We let them go.

In half an hour, Miltiades passed through my position. I chose to stay formed and watch the Persians, lest they fall on the rest of the column, or at least, that was my decision on the spot. Miltiades went up the hill and fetched out the Euboeans. I’ll be honest — I was shaken. To my mind, Teucer and his archers had just saved me from a string of foolish errors. Command is different. It is not the same as serving in the front rank. I had been thinking of the wrong things, at the wrong time, and I knew how close my whole force — every Plataean — had come to dying at the hands of a hundred Persians.

The rescued Euboeans were in poor shape. They had no archers — few Greeks did, in those days, except old-fashioned cities like Plataea, and we wouldn’t have had half as many without the Milesians — and the Persian cavalry had been able to get close, every day, whenever they wanted. A few of the Euboeans had the spirit to abuse the corpses of the dead Persians as they came down — one man told me that this was the closest he’d come to hitting one since the first day — but the rest simply stumbled off the steep rocks of their hill and begged us for water in the croaking of frogs, for they were parched and weary and had given up hope.

Then we all turned on our heels and marched back to our camp. And the Persian cavalry rode away. I lost three men dead — all young epilektoi in the front rank. Lykon took an arrow in the greave — it held, but he couldn’t walk for a day from the pain. My wounded were mostly gashes to the head and neck — sometimes arrows went deep in the phalanx and got in among the men with no helmets, skidding from head to head. Two men with arrows in their thighs had to be carried, and that was hot, miserable work.

As soon as our scouts said that the Persian cavalry was gone, most men peeled off their armour and gave it to slaves to carry, but I wouldn’t allow my epilektoi out of theirs — I was deeply shaken by the speed with which the Persian cavalry had appeared from behind the olive grove. No one grumbled this time. But it was a long walk back to camp, looking over our shoulders all the way, and blessing every hill, every stream, every rocky field that covered us.

Greece is treacherous ground for horses. Praise the gods.

The rescue of the Euboeans may have been full of arete, and it may have pleased the gods, but it cost us in several ways and it had disastrous consequences.

First, the Euboeans were spent. Of almost two thousand men who came down off that hill, fewer than two hundred stayed with the army. The rest simply went home. This is another part of being Greek that needs explaining. Even the Athenian-Euboeans felt that they had done their duty, and more. They had faced weeks of danger and survived, and they went to Athens or returned to their farms without anyone’s permission — and no one suggested otherwise. The actual Euboeans, about a hundred of them, remained, mostly because their city was gone and their wives were enslaved and they had no further reason to live. They were a silent lot.

Second, the Euboeans saw the Persians as invincible. It is no fault of their own, but when men have been harried and driven for weeks, beaten and beaten again, they magnify the danger and the power of the foe to increase their own sense of worth. I am an old man of war, and I have seen it many times. When they sat in our camp and told their story to crowds of Athenians — many of whom had been against this fight from the first — they spread fear like a palpable thing. They didn’t mean to do it, but they did. The day after we rescued them, our army was ready to fall apart.

Third, all the Persian cavalry had been sent to dog the Euboeans. Datis, like any good commander, had sent his best troops to prevent the Euboeans from linking up with us. Now that we’d ‘gained’ them, the Persian cavalry — mostly Sakai, to be honest — were no longer distracted.

The morning after we ‘rescued’ the Euboeans, I combed my hair on the summit of the precinct of Heracles, sitting on a rock. When I had combed it out, Gelon braided it quickly — two thick braids which he wrapped around the crown of my head as padding for my helmet. He did it better than any of my other servants or hypaspist had done — tighter and faster, too. I remember that we had just seen a raven off in the left of the sky — a poor omen — and we were wondering aloud why the gods bothered to send a bad omen.

Down at the base of the hill, a big group of Athenians — mostly poor men with no armour — were cutting brush for bedding. They were in a long field, and at the far end was a stand of brush and ferns, and twenty or so men were cutting the brush and gathering bags of fern. They sang as they worked, and I remember being content — even happy — as I listened to them.

The Sakai fell on them like the Eagle of Zeus falling from the heavens on a rabbit. They came on horses, and they leaped the stone walls at either end of the field, cutting the men off from the camp as easily as if they were children caught stealing apples in an orchard. One brave man tried to run, and three of them chased him down, laughing. They were so close that we could see them laugh. The leader took a rope off his quiver, whirled it around his head like a performer and tossed it neatly over the runner. Then he turned his horse and dragged the man, screaming, over the rough ground.

At my side, Teucer drew his bow. It was a long shot, even for my master archer, but he drew the feathers all the way to his mouth and loosed, and the arrow seemed to linger in the air for ever — flying and falling. The Sakai man was riding parallel to our hill and he didn’t see the arrow, and it fell into him as if Apollo guided it. He tumbled from his horse and screamed.

I hoped the man caught in the rope would rise and run. But he didn’t move. I think he was already dead.

The other Sakai let up a thin cry, and as one, they turned and butchered the Greeks they had caught. They killed them all — twenty men lost in a few heartbeats. They ripped skin from their victims’ heads and their backs the way men skin a rabbit, and they rode across our front, flourishing their ghastly prizes and screaming their thin war cries. Then they rode away.

A day later, our servants were afraid even to get water from the stream.

The meetings of the strategoi were demoralizing, too. We met every morning and every evening — and some days more often. If two strategoi began to talk and a third saw them together, he would wander over, and before you knew it, all eleven would be there.

They seemed to love to talk, and they would discuss the most trivial things as seriously as they discussed — endlessly — the strategic options of the campaign. Firewood? Worth an hour of discussion. A general pool of sentries? Worth an hour of discussion. A new type of sandal for fighting? An hour.

By the fourth day, I was ready to scream. Because what we needed to discuss was the war. The Persians. The enemy. But like the proverbial corpse at a symposium, we never seemed to discuss the options fully. I had come to the conclusion that the polemarch liked all the talk because each day of talk made him feel useful, while postponing the moment of decision for yet another day.

It was on the fourth day that Aristides exploded.

‘If the Medes could be destroyed with talk, we would certainly triumph!’ he shouted. It came from nowhere, and his orator’s voice carried across the summit of the camp, and all the strategoi fell silent. Gods, half the camp fell silent.

The Athenian polemarch glared at him. ‘It is not your turn to speak,’ he said.

Aristides, the Just Man, stood his ground. ‘This is all drivel,’ he said. ‘If no one else will say it, I will. The Persians are peeling our army apart. There is dissension and fear. Our numbers are even — they have a few more men, perhaps. We must attack them and defeat them before our men follow the Euboeans home.’

Cleitus — the unlikeliest ally — agreed. ‘We must do something about their cavalry,’ he said. ‘Our men fear the horses like nothing else.’

‘Why don’t we simply return to Athens and show them the strength of our walls?’ Leontus asked. He was the most brazen of the anti-war strategoi, a handsome man who had the reputation of being a servant of the Alcmaeonids. ‘I hear so much about how we should fight a battle. Are you fools?’ He grinned. ‘Datis has a few thousand men more than we have, and a force of cavalry we can never hope to match. If we pack and march away in the night, he’ll burn some olive groves and go home. He hasn’t the time to lay siege to Athens.’

He looked around. Many of the strategoi agreed with him. I had to admit that he had a point — and I loathed him, politically.

‘Miltiades brought us here to save the Euboeans,’ he went on. ‘And look what we saved! A few beaten men. The assembly never meant for us to fight Persia. Let’s gather the army and have a vote. I’ll wager gold against silver that they vote to go home and defend the walls. And who can blame them?’

But arrogant men often over-reach. I’ve done it a few times myself, and I know. He carried on when he ought to have been silent.

‘You think you have an army? We have nothing. There aren’t enough gentlemen to fight any one of their regiments, and the rest of these men are chaff — useless mouths. The Plataeans will vanish at the first onset — bumpkins, a political stunt by Miltiades to make the rest of you credulous fools feel as if we have allies. The best men of Euboea didn’t stop the Medes for ten days. And their own lower orders sold the town to the enemy.’

Leontus might have carried the hour if he’d shut up before he offended every man standing there.

Aristides gave me the slightest of smiles and nodded his head. He was encouraging me to speak. In fact, he was egging me on.

‘Are you bought and paid for?’ I asked.

Leontus whirled, face red.

‘You lie,’ I added. I wasn’t angry, but I put on a good angry face. I knew what politics required. If I humiliated Leontus — immediately and publicly — his suggestions would wither and die on the vine. ‘My men stood and faced the Persian cavalry. You lie when you say we will run. But since the Persians have bought you, you are paid to say such things.’

I walked over to him — deadly Arimnestos, killer of men.

Leontus was not, in fact, a coward. ‘This is insane,’ he said. ‘I only say what-’

‘How much gold have the Medes paid you?’ I roared.

He flinched. He only flinched from my bellow, but the men in the circle thought that he looked guilty, and there was a murmur.

‘We are going to be massacred!’ he shouted, and left the meeting in a swirl of his cloak.

That helped morale, I can tell you.

The next day, the fifth day since the Persians landed, I sent my servants down to the stream in the morning to draw water, with all of Teucer’s men concealed in the rough ground at the foot of the hill.

But the Sakai had not been the eyes and ears of the Persian Empire for nothing. A dozen horsemen came up, looked at the Plataean servants in the stream and rode away. They smelled a rat.

Such is war.

At the other end of the line, Miltiades tried a similar stunt, sending a forage party far out into the fields near the beach to gather hay and cut standing wheat, and laying an ambush with his old soldiers, but the Mede cavalry looked it over and rode away.

In the centre, emboldened by our success, the city men of two tribes went down the hill with sickles to gather wheat. Most men had eaten all the food they had brought, and fear of the Persian cavalry was keeping supplies from reaching us.

The Sakai fell on them in full view of the army, killed or wounded fifty and dragged twenty of them off into slavery. In an Athenian tribe of a thousand men, the loss of fifty was considerable.

At the next meeting, Miltiades finally spoke. Many men disliked him and feared his pretensions — he made little secret of his intention to make himself tyrant. Generally, he did best for the cause of the war by saying little. But that evening, he had had enough.

‘War is not a game for children,’ he said bitterly. He had their attention, right enough. ‘Demostocles, your men went down the hill like fools.’

‘We only did what you did!’ Demostocles shouted.

Aristides shook his head. ‘You don’t have a clue, do you? You don’t understand, because you’ve never made war.’ He crossed his arms. ‘This is not a day of battle with Aegina. This is not a war of Greeks with Greeks. The Plataeans and Miltiades’ men laid ambushes and had reinforcements ready. We call this “covering” our foragers. And the Sakai and the Medes and the Persians — they have made war, too. They saw little things — a broken bush, a line of footprints in tall grass — and they knew that the men were covered. And let them be. But in the centre, you took no precautions-’

‘Leontus is right!’ Demostocles said. ‘They are better men than us, and we will all be killed. I am not afraid of your Plataean thug, Miltiades! No one can accuse me of taking Persian gold! They are better at this skulking manner of war than we are. I want to demand a vote — right now — to go back to the city.’

Aristides’ voice was calm — and strong. ‘You are afraid. And like a schoolboy caught in a lie, you don’t wish to admit that you made an error. So, better that we abandon the campaign and retreat to the city than face the Medes, eh? Or is it that you’d rather abandon the campaign than admit that you need to ask the rest of us how to make war?’

‘Vote,’ Demostocles demanded. ‘And fuck you, you pompous prig. I was killing men with my spear when you were shitting green.’

‘Too bad,’ I said. ‘If you’d learned anything about war, you’d be a better strategos.’ I held up my hand to silence him. ‘Listen — I’m not pissing on you. When we went after the Euboeans, I almost lost my whole phalanx. Why? Because I had no idea how fast the cavalry could come at me. Our servants still had our shields — Ares, it could have been a disaster.’ I shrugged. ‘And I’ve been at war since I was seventeen. Fighting the Persians is not like any other war. We have to roll with the punches and learn from mistakes, the way a good pankrationist does when he fights a bigger man. Eh?’

It was always rewarding to say something sensible and have men like Aristides give me that look, the look that indicated that in the main they thought me a mindless brute.

Demostocles looked stunned that I’d admitted to failing. It took the wind out of his sails and left him speechless. Concession and apology can be like that.

‘We need a concerted foraging strategy,’ I said. ‘Every taxis cannot go on its own. And I think we need to contest the plain with them — even if it costs us. We need to go down there and show them who owns those fields, man to man. If we let their cavalry ride where they please, eventually they will beat us. Or that’s how it seems to me.’

The polemarch gave me a long look, as if up until then he’d thought me a fool. Perhaps he had. I was, after all, Arimnestos the killer of men, not Arimnestos the tactician.

Miltiades came forward again. ‘I have a plan,’ he said. ‘I think we need to attack their cavalry, and put it out of the war.’

Many voices spoke up then, and not all of them were strategoi. The problem of the Greeks is that we all like to talk, and all the famous men came to the meetings of the strategoi, whether they held rank or not. Themistocles was a strategos but Sophanes was not, and he attended anyway. Cimon, Miltiades’ eldest, held no rank, and he was always there, and seemed to feel freer to speak than his father — on and on. So we had closer to a hundred men than eleven.

The many voices shouted Miltiades down. Leontus began urging a vote on returning to Athens. Of the hundred men standing there by the altar, the vast majority were with Leontus. What I couldn’t tell was how many of the strategoi were with Leontus and Demostocles.

But the voices calling for the vote were loudest.

Callimachus stepped forward and blew the horn at his hip, and the Athenians grew quieter.

‘We will vote on the idea of returning to the city,’ he said.

Uproar.

‘We will vote in the morning,’ he said. ‘This meeting is adjourned.’

Miltiades followed him as he walked away to his tent. A dozen other men went to follow them, and Aristides and I tried to stop them by forcing them to face us and debate the whole issue — we kept them there several minutes, and Miltiades was gone.

Somewhere in there, I caught Aristides’ eye. He gave a small shake of his head.

He thought we’d had it.

So did I.

I went straight back to my camp and found my brother-in-law and Idomeneus, and I took them off into our little stand of cypress trees.

‘If the army breaks up, we need to plan our own retreat,’ I said.

‘Ares’ dick!’ Idomeneus said. ‘You must be joking, lord. Or is it Lade again?’

I shook my head. ‘Aristides thinks they’ll vote to retreat to Athens in the morning, and there will be immediate desertions. He paints a bleak picture, lads.’ I shrugged. ‘We’re a long way from home. And if there is a traitor-’

Idomeneus shook his head. ‘We’re all right,’ he said. ‘Keep the archers safe, head for the hills and walk the high ground all the way home. Could take a while, but we’ll live.’

‘What do we eat, drink?’ I asked. His strategy was the one I liked, too — but it was fraught with danger.

‘Steal what we can — hunt when we can.’ Idomeneus shook his head. ‘It will suck, that’s for sure, lord. But the boys will get it done.’

Antigonus looked at the speaker’s bema in the middle of the encampment. ‘If what you say is really true,’ he said, ‘we should be gone in the morning.’

‘Then men will say we deserted,’ I said.

Antigonus shrugged. ‘Will we care? If these bastards run for Athens, the Persians will eat them, and someone in the city will sell it out just the way the Euboeans were sold. And the Ionians.’

‘And it won’t be a thetes,’ Idomeneus added. ‘I heard that bastard at your little meeting, lord. Chalcis was betrayed by an aristocrat.’

I nodded. ‘I heard that, too. Doesn’t matter, though. Antigonus, what’s your point?’

He frowned and looked at the ground. ‘It’s not a very glorious thought,’ he admitted, ‘but if Athens is going down, we don’t need to give a shit about what they think of us — our duty is to get our people home alive.’

It made sense. He was a good man, my brother-in-law.

‘If we cut and run before the Athenians break up,’ Idomeneus said with his terrible, callous practicality, ‘their cavalry will waste a day or two killing Athenians and we’ll never see them. Lord, it could save many men.’ Then he reverted to form. ‘Seems a horrible waste, though.’ He grinned.

‘Waste?’ I asked.

‘This should be the most glorious battle of our time,’ Idomeneus said. ‘If these fuckheads waste it, I’ll go and fight for Persia. I’ll never forgive them.’

‘Get the boys ready to march — without getting them ready to march. Tell them we might try a raid on their foragers tomorrow and they’ll be a day in the field.’ I was keeping my options open.

I went and walked through the camp — the whole camp.

It was like the camps of the East Greeks before Lade.

Worse, in a way, because at every fire, men urged others to go home. To cut and run. I thought they were cowards, and then I realized that, in effect, I’d just done the same.

Why can’t Greeks get along? Why can’t they maintain a common goal?

We lost Lade when the Samians sailed away and abandoned us — for the greed of a few men.

I saw Marathon going the same way, and I wanted to weep.

It was almost dark when Paramanos found me.

‘You move too fast,’ he said. ‘Miltiades wants you.’

That was like the old days. I knew what he would want. He’d want the Plataeans to join with his men — the professionals — in covering the retreat of the army. I’d already thought it through. I was about to tell my own lord — a man to whom I owed a great deal — to sod off. I wasn’t losing any Plataeans to save Athens.

That’s how bad things were that night.

Miltiades had a tent. Few men did in those days. Greece is kind to soldiers, and it seldom rains. But Miltiades had fought everywhere, and he had a magnifcent tent — another reason for men to hate him. If they needed a reason, of course.

I went in, and a slave handed me a big cup of wine.

Miltiades was wearing a simple dark chiton and had boots on.

‘I need you and twenty of your best men,’ he said.

That caught me by surprise. ‘What for?’ I asked.

‘We’re going to raid the Persian camp,’ he said. ‘It’s the only hope we have. I convinced Callimachus to put of the vote until tomorrow night. He fears treason in the city just as much as I do. He’s not a fool. He’s just cautious.’ Miltiades drank some wine. ‘Listen — Phidippides the herald just came in from the mountains. The Spartans haven’t marched yet. It’ll be five days — at least — before we can expect them. But they are coming.’

Aristides came in through the beaded door. He was wearing plain leather armour. ‘They want us to die,’ he said.

Miltiades shrugged. ‘They’re pious men, our Lacedaemonian friends. They have a festival.’ He shrugged. ‘To be honest, I doubt I’d hurry to save Sparta from the Medes, either. But when Phidippides’ news is known, the last heart will go out of the army. Five days is too long. We have to strike.’

‘I’m ready,’ Aristides said.

‘Arimnestos hasn’t heard the plan,’ Miltiades said. He glanced at me. ‘Will you do it?’

‘Do what?’ I asked.

‘We need a demonstration in front of the Persians — by men who can fight or run in the dark.’ He shrugged. ‘I can give you all the Athenian archers to go with you. I wouldn’t sacrifice you,’ he said, as if reading my mind.

‘Where will you be?’ I asked, but I was already smiling, because, by all the gods, I saw the whole plan as neatly as if it was stitched into leather. ‘The horses!’

‘Told you he was smarter than he looked,’ Miltiades said.

‘If we pull this off, the army will stay,’ Aristides said.

‘And if we fuck it up, we’ll be dead,’ Miltiades said. He shrugged. ‘I can’t take any more officers’ meetings.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ I said. ‘I can get a hundred men.’

‘Then take a hundred,’ Miltiades said. ‘The more you take, the more noise you’ll make. What can you do, though?’

I remember making a face. I remember laughing. ‘Have you noted that, while we sit here doing nothing, the Persians sit there doing nothing?’ I said.

They both nodded.

I raised my cup and poured a libation. ‘Ares — Zeus’s least favoured child. If they fear us at all — and they must — then they have to fear a night attack.’ I grinned. ‘So let’s feed them one. I’ll go for their ships.’

Ever been out for a walk at night?

Ever been out for a walk outside the city?

As joyously as we prepared to make our raid, the truth was that none of us had ever been in a night attack. There’s a reason why men don’t make night attacks on land.

At sea, it’s different. At sea, there’s always a little light — and not much to bump into, if you steer badly. But on land?

I roused my epilektoi as soon as I got back, but just preparing them to march took me too much time. By the time I’d led them to the base of the hill and out into the fields, the moon was high and we were late.

The Athenian archers were supposed to meet us opposite their camp — which turned out to be far too vague a direction on a dark night. I looked for them for as long as my heart could take it. Miltiades was long gone, heading up into the hills to get around the marsh and the Persian camp, and I needed to make noise to keep the enemy focused on me. I was taking too long. Everything was taking too long.

I gave up on the Athenian archers when I saw how far the moon had moved across the sky.

‘Where the fuck are they?’ I hissed at Teucer when I got back to my own men. The archer shrugged.

So we set off across the fields in the middle watch of the night, an hour late for our plan and moving too fast. We made a great deal of noise.

The hedgerows, which seemed to run straight by day, were like the maze of the Minotaur by night. I’d follow one for a distance and then realize that I had gone close to the sea rather than closer to the enemy — and time was passing. I could all but hear Clotho’s shears trimming the wick of Miltiades’ life.

When the Pleiades were high in the sky, I took my bearings like a sailor, found the north star and realized that, again, I was leading the long file of my men away from our camp and towards the sea — and not closer to the enemy encampment.

Resolutely I put my right shoulder to the sound of the sea — close now — and searched the next wall for a gate. I crossed, the rest of the men stumbling behind me and making enough noise for an army, which I guess was the idea, and found myself walking across a hayfield in the full light of the moon — towards the sea.

Of course, the beach curves — radically, in come places — and I’d simply missed my mark. Again.

My heart was pounding, my anxiety had reached a lethal intensity, my helmet burned my head and I was sweating through my armour — and we still weren’t within long bowshot of the enemy.

Idomeneus came up beside me. ‘You thinking we should go on the beach?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. Because there was no cover at all on the beach. We’d be seen two stades away, even at night.

Of course, even as I thought that, I realized that being seen two stades away might be a fine thing.

‘Actually, yes,’ I said. ‘We’re going along the beach.’

Idomeneus laughed. ‘Good — I was worried you were lost.’

I chuckled — I remember the falsity of my laugh, how it caught in my throat. When you are the fearless leader, it is important to appear fearless — and knowledgeable. I thought of all the stupid things I’d seen other leaders do. Now I knew why they did it. Somehow, command on land was not like command at sea — too many choices, perhaps. Maybe it’s just that your men can simply walk away if they lose trust in you.

Down to the beach.

As soon as we reached the beach, I could see the enemy camp — the ships, drawn up as thickly as fleas on a dog, and the fires inland from the beach all the way past the marsh to the hills. We seemed incredibly close, although in reality we were five long stades from the ships — but because of the curve of the beach, we were looking at the ships across the water, and they were close.

As soon as we were down the dune, I hissed the order to form front by files. We were strung out, but the boys were fast and probably as eager to get formed up — to feel the comfort of the next man’s shield — as I was to get them formed.

Still no alarm. So we moved forward. Sand filled my sandals, and I had to remind myself that the beach was, despite the labour, easier on me, and easier on the lads, than tying to cross the farms of the Marathon plain.

After two stades, we seemed to be level with the first Persian ships — and still there was no alarm. I tried to reassure myself that if Miltiades were attacking, I’d hear something from him — the hills were visible as a loom of dark against the paler darkness of the sky to the north and west.

Another stade, and the ships were so close that it seemed we could swim to them. We were just two stades — less, I think — from the ships that were beached when a man on one of the anchored ships, a Greek, called out, asking who we were.

‘Men!’ I responded, but in Persian.

‘What?’ he asked, his voice echoing over the water.

‘Men!’ I called back again, this time in Greek.

And that satisfied him.

By such threads do empires hang.

Now we were running — stumbling more like — through the dark. I had a new notion — that I’d put fire into some of their ships. I’d done it before, at Lade, and it had done the trick, and there were plenty of fires near the ships.

Less than a stade — no alarm.

How the gods must have laughed.

We came to the first fires — a line of blazes long since burned down to coals — and my men broke ranks and began to slaughter the oarsmen at the fires without my orders. The whole situation slipped away from me in those moments — one second, I had a column of trained warriors running through the dark, and the next, there were screams and all my men had gone.

Or that’s how it seemed to me.

To my mind, killing the oarsmen was a complete waste of time, but as a diversion, it did well enough. The problem was that there were about a hundred of us, and almost sixty thousand oarsmen. With the best will in the world, my men couldn’t make a dent in them. And then they began to fight back.

It was chaos on the beach, and Tartarus, too — arrows falling from the sky as the Medes who had camped just to the north shot into the confusion, and the thousands of oarsmen, unable to believe there were so few of us, fell on each other — Phoenicians against Cilicians, Greeks against Aegyptians.

I pulled Idomeneus out of the fighting and dragged him clear the way you pull a dog out of a fight.

‘Order the rally!’ I remember shouting at him. He had a horn and I did not.

He looked at me with dull, lust-filled eyes. ‘I was fighting,’ he said reproachfully.

‘Order the rally!’ I said again.

He lifted the horn and sounded three long blasts.

All along the beach, men heard it. Some understood and some were lost in the fog of combat.

I put my spear in the gut of a man with no shield — I had to assume in the dark that anyone without a shield was one of theirs — and ran back a few paces.

‘Plataea! On me!’ I roared, again and again.

Men came to me in dribs and drabs, some bringing their little swirl of combat with them, some alone.

It took for ever. Everything takes for ever in the dark. Idomeneus sounded the horn again, and again later, and still I had fewer than half of my men — my picked, best armoured men. I could not afford to leave them on the beach.

The trouble — my fault — was that I had not set a rally point or explained to them what I wanted after we hit the enemy. I had to trust that they would know the signal from the hunting expeditions.

In the end, most did, but men died because I didn’t know enough to plan the recall as part of the attack. Another lesson learned at bloody Marathon.

Every time we blew the rally, we ran back down the beach, a little farther from the ships. By the time I had eighty men — perhaps a few more — we were a stade from the enemy. We should have been clear.

We weren’t. We had taken too long — far too long. And the sun was coming up in the east — still only a line of grey-pink out over the ocean towards Euboea, but it was going to rise like the hand of doom. We were just eighty men, caught a long way from our camp.

I cursed and killed a man. By then we were fighting Medes — real soldiers. They weren’t swarming us, but their braver souls started to come in close while others shot at us from a distance. The light was still bad, their bowstrings were damp and Teucer and his lads were shooting back, so we were relatively unscathed, but I could see better with every passing minute, and that meant that they could, too.

I was in the centre of my own line. Nothing for it — we needed a miracle.

‘Ready to charge!’ I called out.

There was that reassuring sound as every man closed a little to the centre and the shields tapped together. Perhaps you’ve heard it in drill — it is a sound that always gives you heart, that rattle. It means your friends are still together — still in good order, still with enough heart to fight.

I took a deep breath. We were fighting Medes — they couldn’t understand me.

‘When I say charge,’ I bellowed, as loud as my throat and lungs could manage, ‘you go fifty paces forward, turn and run as if the hound Cerberus was at your heels. Hear me, Plataeans!’

There was a cry — something like a war cry, something like a sigh.

‘Charge!’ I called, and we went at them.

The Medes were ready for it. They broke as soon as they saw us come, and only our boldest and fastest caught any of them. I certainly didn’t — the Mede I had my eye on vanished into the near-dark of the bushes up the beach.

Idomeneus, bless him, sounded a single blast as I hit my forty-seventh stride, and we turned together, like a figure in the Pyrrhiche — which it is — and ran. We were off down that beach like frightened boys chased by an angry parent, and every man understood that we had to break contact now, or die when the sun rose.

But Persians have good soldiers, too. Somewhere in the scrub was an officer who knew his business, and within seconds of us running, they were chasing us and arrows began to fall. Then it was every man for himself. Some of my boys cut inland, across country. A few ditched their shields. Most didn’t — when archers are shooting you, the last thing you want to give up is your shield.

I stuck to the beach, and most of the Medes followed, worse luck. Had they stayed a little longer, run away from our false charge a little further, we might have made a clean exit, but we were not so lucky.

After a few minutes of running, I looked back and they were gaining. After all, they had light body armour, which most of them were not wearing anyway, as they’d been awakened by our attack. They had neither helmets nor greaves.

They were cautious, but they were getting the measure of us.

An arrow hit the middle of the back of the yoke of my armour. Thanks to Ares’ hand, it turned on the two layers of bronze, but the power knocked me flat. As I rose, another arrow hit the same place, then another glanced off my shield, heavy arrows, and another rang on my helmet, and I thought — Fuck, this is it.

I got my feet under me and turned.

One of the Medes fell to the beach, his life leaking out between his fingers as he grabbed at the shaft embedded in his guts.

Teucer was right at my shoulder, shooting calmly. One, two — and men fell.

‘Turn a little left,’ he said.

I did, and two arrows hit the face of my shield, and he shot back — zip, pause, zip.

With every shot, a Mede fell.

Another arrow into my shield, but now the Medes were scrambling for cover — Teucer dropped four right there, coughing their lungs out in the sand.

‘Run,’ I said. I gave him three steps while I stayed — another arrow off the top of my helmet — and then I turned and ran.

My breath was coming like a horse’s after a gallop — I sucked in air the way a drunkard sucks wine and my legs burned as if I had run ten stades. The wound Archilogos had given me in the fall of Miletus had a curious numbness to it against the pain of all my other muscles, and sweat rolled down my forehead and into my eyes.

The light was growing. I was running down a beach that was well enough lit for target practice, and I was going more and more slowly.

Ares, it makes me want to spit sand to remember it: fleeing like a coward, and knowing — knowing — that in a few moments I would be dead anyway. When it is your last — when all is lost — it doesn’t matter whether you were a demonstration or a deception or a last stand, friends. No one worth a shit wants to die with his back to the foe.

So I turned.

An arrow meant for my back screamed off the face of my shield.

I meant to take one with me, but I was out of everything, the daimon had no more to give me, and I — the great fighter of the Plataeans — slumped down behind my shield. I got smaller and smaller as the arrows thudded in.

But I could breathe, and I did. I panted like a dog, and I couldn’t think of anything, and arrows fell on my shield like hail on a good crop — twice, arrowheads blew right through the face of my aspis.

Oh, children, that hour was dark. When I had my breath back, I knew it was just a matter of how I chose to die. I could make it last, down under the rim of my aspis, until they got a man into the brush to my left who could shoot me in the hip or the arse. No laughing matter. I could try to turn again, but to Hades with that. My legs were gone. It seemed to me that the best course was to attack them. It would get the whole thing over with the quickest, and if anyone watched me — if there was a single bard left in Greece to sing after this debacle — at least men would say that Arimnestos died with his face to the foe.

I took a dozen more breaths, rationing them, taking the air in deep. Then I allowed myself five more — the margin of life and death. Five breaths.

Arrows continued to slam into the face of my shield.

On the edge of the fifth, I rose to my feet. I sneaked a last glance down the beach behind me — and my heart leaped with joy. It was empty. My men had got away.

In some situations, nothing would be grimmer than to die alone, but in this one, it filled me with power. Being alone made me feel less a failure. More a hero.

I leaned forward, into the arrow storm, summoned up power in my legs I didn’t think I had and charged.

Anyone asleep?

Hah! You flinched, thugater. You think perhaps I died there, eh?

Pour me a little more wine, lad.

Yes, I charged. As soon as I got my face over the rim of my aspis, I could see that they were well bunched up, about fifty strides away — that’s why so few arrows missed, I can tell you.

I remembered running with Eualcidas, at the fight in the pass. Here, like there, my feet crunched on gravel. I kept my shield up, and the arrows fell on it like snow on a mountain.

And then they stopped.

There were screams — screams of pain and screams of terror. I lowered my aspis a finger’s breadth and peered forward, though the pre-dawn murk, the sweat, the slits of my helmet.

The Medes were falling — a dozen of them were down and the rest were scattering. When I reached them — alive, of course, you daft woman — not a man was alive, and they looked like porcupines for the arrows in them.

I turned away from rosy-fingered dawn and the pale sea. There were men coming out of the bush — a hundred men, with bows.

The Athenian archers had found me.

I laughed.

I mean, what in Hades can you do but laugh?

When you write this, I suppose you’ll leave out all the little men — the archers and peltastai. And when I say ‘little’, I mean small in the eyes of the great. But they were good men, as you’ll see. The psiloi. The ‘stripped’ men who wear no armour. This is the story of the little men, and you can ignore what happened next if you wish. But it had more effect on the battle than most of the heavily armed men and the gentry would ever want to admit.

The archers were elated — they’d saved a famous hero and laid waste to the Medes, and I knew that as long as those men lived in their little houses and their shacks on the flank of the Acropolis, they’d tell and retell that story in their wine shops, at the edge of the Agora, in the bread stalls.

Several of them — the boldest — sprinted down the beach and tore a souvenir loose from the huddle of corpses. The first man to pass me shot me a grin.

‘You alive, boss?’ he asked as he ran by.

I had fallen to one knee. I gave him a smile, got to my feet and wandered after him.

In the distance, the Medes began to rally. Did I mention that they were first-rate soldiers? Just lost half their numbers in an ambush, and they were coming back. I hate any man who says the Medes and Persians were cowards.

The Medes on the sand were wearing gold and silver — professional soldiers wearing their pay. The Athenian archers were poor men and my friend, the first who passed me, whooped when he reached the bodies. But he was a public-spirited man, and he held something aloft that flashed in the new sun and he shouted ‘Gold!’ and the rest of the archers came pouring out of the scrub at the edge of the beach, some men jumping down the bluffs and sand dunes.

They stripped those corpses like men who knew their way around a corpse. I cast no aspersions, but by the time I caught up with them, there was nothing left but skin, gristle and bone.

‘Better look to your bows, lads,’ I said, pointing down the beach. I stepped forward and fielded an arrow that might have hit a man, scooping it on the face of my shield, and the muscles in my shield arm protested hard.

‘Lad, my arse,’ an older man said, but he grinned. He had thick arms and heavy shoulders — an oarsman, I suspected. ‘You’re that Plataean, then, eh?’

‘I am,’ I said. Then I put some iron in my voice. ‘Bows!’ I shouted.

Most men jump when I say jump. The archers did.

‘Who’s the master archer, then?’ I asked.

After most of them had loosed a couple of arrows — with no effect beyond driving the Medes back up the beach — the older man turned to me again. ‘With the other half of the boys — they went for the centre of the camp. We couldn’t find you. And I kept getting lost — so I made for the beach.’ He gave a lopsided grin. ‘I’m a sailor — or was. Beaches make sense to me.’

I had to laugh. ‘We need to get out of here,’ I said.

‘That’s sense, too. We’ve had our lick at the Persians.’ He looked around. ‘And we’ve got whatever they brought.’ He called to the men by the bodies, ‘Got all the bows? All their quivers? Arrows?’

To me, he said, ‘All their kit is better than ours — better bows, by far.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Give me a Persian bow anytime,’ he said, flourishing his own.

‘These aren’t Persians,’ I said. I pointed at the low felt hats and boots. ‘They’re Medes, a subject people of the Persians — similar, but not the same. They wear less armour. Sakai are different again — bigger beards, more leather and better bows.’

‘Ain’t you the sophist, though.’ The former sailor held out his arm. ‘Leonestes of Piraeus.’ Arrows began to drop all around us.

‘Let’s run,’ I said.

We did. After a few hundred strides, they had to carry me — I was mortified, to say the least. One young sprig took my aspis and another peeled off my helmet.

We left the beach when it began to angle away from our camp and we ran inland. It was easier in daylight — I could see the line of hills and mountains at the far edge of the plain and the rising ground that marked the shrine and sanctuary of Heracles.

As soon as we left the beach, we lost the Medes. I think they’d finally reached the end of their enthusiasm. My Plataeans must have put down twenty of them — perhaps as many as fifty. It’s never good when armoured men face unarmoured. And then the ambush by the archers probably dropped at least another thirty. Fifty dead is more like a bad day’s battle than a couple of skirmishes before breakfast.

The Medes retired to lick their wounds. We carried on across the hayfields and wheat fields and fallow barley fields, jumping stone walls and avoiding hedgerows. We were about halfway to the sanctuary of Heracles when I felt the ground moving. I needed to stop — my lungs were white-hot with pain. Other men must have felt the same — as soon as my group stopped, all of them did.

The feeling that the earth was trembling increased. I looked around — and saw the dust.

‘Cavalry!’ I panted. ‘Into the brush!’

To our right was a fallow field with low stone walls and patches of jasmine and other low bushes. It was also full of rocks.

We piled in, in no particular order.

‘Get to the wall. This one! You — stand there! Bows up!’ That was me — the orders flowed out of me as if I was channelling the power of Ares.

Leonestes joined me. ‘Form a line — get your arse to that wall, boy! Bows up — you heard the man! Get a shaft on the string, you whoreson.’

The cavalry was almost on us. But as is so often the case on a real battlefield, they hadn’t seen us. They had other prey.

‘The first volley will win or lose this,’ I said. My voice was calm. I remember how all the fear of the night raid had been replaced by my usual steady confidence. Why? Because in the dark I had no idea what I was doing, did I? Out here, it was just a ship-fight on land.

Men on the flank of the galloping cavalry saw us, of course — but far too late to make any change of direction for the mass. But if Miltiades had raided the horses, he hadn’t had much effect, I remember thinking to myself.

I glanced at Leonestes, because he was taking so long to give the order that I wondered if he was waiting for me to give it.

He winked. Turned his head to the enemy — raised his bow.

‘Loose!’ he roared. ‘Fast as you can, boys!’

The next shafts rose while the first flight were in the air. Rose and fell, and a third volley came up, far more ragged than the first two. Some of the Athenian archers were little more than guttersnipes with bows, while others had fine weapons and plenty of training — probably archers from ships.

So among a hundred archers, there were maybe twenty real killers, another fifty halfway decent archers and thirty kids and makeweights.

Same in the phalanx, really.

The arrows fell on the cavalry and they evaporated. I remember that when I was a child snow fell on the farm — and then the weather changed and the sun came out, hot as hot, and the snow went straight to the heavens without melting. The cavalry went like that: a brief interval of thrashing horse terror, all hooves and blood, and some arrows coming back at me — a man took one and died just an arm’s length from me — and then they were gone, out of our range, and rallying.

That fast.

They slipped from their horses, adjusted their quivers — and came at us. A couple of dozen began riding for our right flank — the flank closest to the sea. They did this so fast that I think they must have practised it. For the first time, I understood the fear the men of Euboea had for the Persians. These were real Persians — high caps, scale shirts, beautiful enamelled bows.

I ran across the ground to the men we’d just killed — the horses were still screaming. Six. Our brilliant little improvised ambush had put down only six men.

I picked up two bows, scooped the big Persian quivers off their horses while arrows decorated the ground around me and ran back towards the thin line of Athenians.

I got a fine bow — wood so brown that it seemed purple, or perhaps that was dye, and horn on the inside face of the bow, with sinew in between. There was goldwork on the man’s quiver, and a line of gold at the nocks on the bow.

‘Anyone who doesn’t have a Persian bow, get back,’ Leonestes shouted. ‘Way the fuck back, boys. A hundred paces.’

The dismounted Persians in front of us — about fifty of them — walked confidently forward. Even as I watched, they stopped. Most of them planted arrows in the ground for easy shooting.

The cavalry reaching around our right flank was making heavy going of it — they’d found the tangle of walls and hedgerows. Some of the younger Athenians began to drop shafts on them, as if it was sport. It’s always easier to be a hero when the enemy can’t shoot back, I find.

The Persians to our front weren’t in any hurry. The cavalry gave up on our right flank — a poor, hasty decision and just the kind of thing that happens in war. They got low on their horses’ necks and rode across our front, and one of our archers with a Persian bow emptied a saddle as they crossed us — heading for our left flank, closer to the hills and the camp.

In war, people make mistakes, just as they do in peace. A few minutes ago, these self-same Persians had been chasing someone across our right flank. We’d put a stop to that — and in the to and fro of combat, our Persian adversaries had forgotten their original foes.

The cavalry rode hard to get around our left, and then suddenly they were fleeing, and they had empty saddles — and there were men behind them throwing spears, and other men with armour running at them.

This transformed our fight — one moment, the Persians were exchanging slow, careful shafts with our best archers, and the next, they were running to get their mounts before our friends on the left captured the lot. It was close, but the Persians won the race and rode away.

They rode about a stade, pulled up and were hit by an invisible hand that plucked a couple of them from their saddles and made all the horses scream — slingers. Only a dozen of them, as I later learned — but that was the final straw for the Persians, and they raced for their camp.

That’s the part of the fighting that I saw. I stayed out there, with the archers, for an hour or more, and men came past us — little men, as I say — dozens of them, with javelins and bows and slings, and a few with nothing but a sack of rocks.

No one will ever fully explain that morning. Word went out that Miltiades was in trouble, I guess. Or Themistocles asked them to go out and support the archers. Who knows? It wasn’t part of any master plan, that much I know. However it came about, a couple of thousand Greek freedmen and light-armed men — men too poor to have a panoply and fight in the phalanx, but citizens too proud to abandon Greece — flooded the fields and hedgerows and stone walls. I estimate that, with the Athenian archers added in, they might have killed three hundred of the enemy. Nothing, you might say.

Nor was there any glory to it. When you are naked and have no weapon but a bag of rocks, you don’t go walking out in the open. No — you crawl along hedgerows and share the stone walls with the foxes and the tortoises, too.

But the Persians and their allies simply didn’t have a horde of light-armed men to keep our light-armed men at bay, and they couldn’t afford the steady casualties it would have taken to clear the field. And our little men made those fields a nightmare.

As the morning wore on, our light-armed began to take losses. If they were too bold, in their little groups, the enemy would cut them off and slaughter them. All told, I would bet that if the gods made a count, then the barbarians actually killed more Greeks than we killed barbarians that day.

But again — as I keep saying — war is not about numbers. War is about feelings, emotions, fatigue, joy, terror.

I got up the hill to our camp and was thronged by men who had to clasp my hand or slap my back.

‘We lost you!’ Idomeneus was weeping. ‘Oh, lord, I am ashamed.’

I shook my head. Who would not be delighted by this display of loyalty?

Teucer had it the worst. ‘I was right at your shoulder, lord,’ he said, clearly unhappy. ‘And then I found that I was by another scaled shirt — and it was Idomeneus. I had lost you in the dark.’

‘All dirt comes out in a good wash,’ I said. ‘How many did we lose?’

Idomeneus shook his head. ‘Too many, lord. Almost twenty. And your brother-in-law, and Ajax, and Epistocles, and Peneleos.’

Ares, that hurt. Not Epistocles — his loss was Plataea’s gain. But the rest — Pen would kill me for losing her husband, and Peneleos. .

‘Maybe they’ll come in,’ Teucer said. ‘You did.’

I lay down, my spirits low. It always happens after a fight, but this was worse. I hadn’t done anything except get my men lost — I had scarcely bloodied my spear. But I’d lost twenty of my best — irreplaceable men with heavy armour and fighting skills. Ajax was as good a spearman as I was — or he had been.

I was lying in the shade, feeling bad, when Miltiades came.

‘You’re alive, then,’ he said. ‘Praise the gods.’

That made me smile, because Miltiades so seldom invoked the gods — not in that voice.

‘I’m alive,’ I said. ‘And unwounded. But I lost a lot of men.’

He still had his shield on his shoulder — you can reach a point of exhaustion where you simply forget to strip kit off. In fact, I was lying in my scale corslet. I clambered to my feet to embrace him. He was looking beyond me, back towards my camp.

‘I never got near their horses,’ he said, in disgust. ‘We waited for your diversion, and when it came, we struck whatever was nearest.’ He gave me a grim smile. ‘I missed their horse lines in the dark, and we were in among the Sakai. We killed a few, I suppose.’

I had never seen Miltiades so down.

‘And Aristides?’ I asked. I was suddenly struck with fear. What if Aristides was dead?

‘He made it to the horse lines,’ Miltiades said bitterly. ‘But accomplished nothing, and lost twenty hoplites getting away. He may have killed twenty of their horses.’

‘But he lives?’

Miltiades nodded heavily. ‘He lives.’ He shrugged. ‘It is chaos out in that field. Half the hoplites will have lost their shield-bearers before this debacle is over. Better if we’d fought a field battle.’ He stared at the ground. ‘How did it go so wrong?’

I had my canteen, and I poured him a cup of water, and he dropped his shield and sat heavily. He had a gash on his leg — he wasn’t wearing greaves. I washed his leg myself, and when Gelon came up I sent him for an old chiton I could rip to shreds for wrapping.

I didn’t want him to see that Miltiades was weeping.

You can see, from the hindsight of forty years, that all was not lost — but trust me, thugater, while Miltiades sat on his aspis and wept, I felt like joining him. We had lost many good men — and to our minds, schooled in the war of the phalanx, we had accomplished nothing.

We had not robbed the Persians of their cavalry, and we had not put heart into the phalanx with a bloodless victory.

But while Miltiades wept, the light-armed started coming in from the fields — and the barbarians did nothing to stop them. Indeed, had I gone to the edge of the field, I’d have seen something that five thousand other Greeks saw — a stupid act of bravado that changed everything.

One of the groups of psiloi had crawled quite close to the Persian camp and found no one to fight, so they grew bored. Before they could crawl back, one boy leaped up on a stone wall — in full view of both armies — and bared his behind at the Persians, sitting on their horses by their camp. He made lewd gestures, and waved, and fanned his buttocks.

The Persian cavalry sat tight.

Everyone saw this exchange — everyone but Miltiades and me, of course. And in those moments, our light-armed felt their power. The barbarians felt their power. Every thrown rock made our boys bolder and every empty saddle made the Persians more afraid.

Before I limped back to camp — with my aspis on my shoulder and my helmet on the back of my head — we owned the fields of Marathon from the mountains to the sea, although I didn’t know it yet. And not because of our gentry and our hoplites.

It is funny, is it not? We went to rescue the Euboeans, and in succeeding, we almost wrecked our army. And then, to retrieve that error, we mounted the raid on the Persian camp. We all got lost in the dark, and accomplished nothing — but as a consequence of our intention, the ‘little’ men came to our rescue, and flooded the plain with stones and arrows, and the barbarians felt defeated.

Best of all, the elated little men came up the hill to the camp and bragged of their stone-throwing victories to their masters, the hoplites.

Shame is a powerful tonic with Greeks. So is competition and emulation. And no gentleman wants to face the idea that his servant may be the better man. Eh?

That was the day of the little men. Before it dawned, we were on the edge of defeat. After it, we had enough votes to stand our ground. And that, in many cases, was the margin.

Listen, then. This is the part you came for. The Battle of Marathon. But remember that we only stood our ground because the little men won it for us.

Wine for all of them, boys.

The first sign of change came while Miltiades was drying his eyes and restoring his demeanour. I had bound his leg and he was using a scrap of my old chiton to wash his face.

My brother-in-law walked up as if his appearance were nothing extraordinary. I wrapped him in an embrace that he still remembers, I’d wager.

He looked sheepish. ‘We got lost,’ he said.

That made me laugh. And laughter helps, too.

I think that was the turning point. Antigonus came in with seven of our missing men — not a wound on them. They’d gone to ground at the break of day, but as our psiloi gradually drove the barbarians off the fields, his little party got bolder and managed to move from field to field. They’d even kept their shields.

Ajax came in without his aspis and with a serious wound in his thigh, carried by a trio of Athenian freedmen who asked for payment.

‘Stands to reason, don’it, lord? We gave up lootin’ to carry your frien’, eh?’

I could barely understand the man, but I gave him a silver owl and another to each of his friends, and then I got Miltiades to send his doctor. The arrowhead was still lodged deep in Ajax’s thigh. The doctor brought a selection of what appeared to be arrowhead moulds — long, hollow shafts with a hollow for the head of an arrow at the end. They split in half. He used them with ruthless efficiency — rammed the tool into the wound, got the little mould around the arrowhead, so that the barb of the arrow was neatly surrounded with smooth, safe metal, and pulled the shaft free. There was a great deal of blood, but Ajax stopped screaming as soon as the shaft came clear, and he managed a watery smile.

‘Ares’ cock,’ he grunted. ‘I think I’m fucked.’ His eyes rolled, and he panted, shaking with the exhaustion that only the panic of pain can cause.

‘Don’t be a whiner,’ the doctor quipped and shook his head. ‘Don’t try and run the stade for a few days,’ he added, and smiled. Then he poured raw honey — a lot of it — straight on the wound, and wrapped it so tight I saw his arms bulge with the effort.

Miltiades watched, fascinated — all forms of making and craft fascinated him. By then, more and more of the psiloi were coming up the hill, and the camp had started to buzz.

I heard laughter, and the unmistakable sound of a man bragging. And then more laughter.

I looked at Miltiades. ‘They don’t sound beaten,’ I said.

Perhaps it was the rest and the wine, but Miltiades, a man fifteen years older than me, leaped to his feet. He looked alive.

He went out from the stand of trees, and the next I looked, he was standing in the middle of a group of the Athenian archers, with Themistocles, and they were laughing. Leonestes saw me and beckoned, and I went over.

‘Just telling our tale,’ Leonestes said. ‘How we rescued you. How you charged the Persians-’

‘Medes-’

‘Barbarians — all by yourself. Like a loon.’ He grinned.

Miltiades raised an eyebrow. Then he stepped up on the dry stone of the sanctuary wall and peered out over the plain towards the Persian camp. ‘They aren’t stirring,’ he said. ‘I can see a line of mounted men, right close to their camp. Nothing else.’

I think that’s when the light dawned on all of us.

‘I think they’re scared,’ I said.

‘They’re a long way from home,’ Antigonus added with a nod at their ships.

Miltiades agreed. ‘It’s hard to put yourself in the enemy’s place, isn’t it?’ he said.

Themistocles fingered his beard. ‘Have we won, do you think?’ he asked.

‘Won?’ Miltiades asked. ‘Don’t be silly. But we’ve pushed them off the ground, and our supplies can reach us. And maybe we’ve made them feel what we feel. But won?’ He looked at the cavalry far across the plain. ‘We won’t win until we put a spear into every one of them, Themistocles. These are Persians.’

Themistocles was looking at their fleet. ‘We should never have let them land,’ he said. ‘But that’s for another day. What’s the plan now?’

Miltiades laughed. He seemed ten years younger than he had a few minutes before. ‘First, we win the vote,’ he said. ‘Then, we fight.’

By mid-afternoon, the vote was a foregone conclusion. The hoplites were shamed by their servants. There’s no other way to put it. Every gentleman needed to wet his spear, and that was that.

There were more than three thousand men, by my reckoning, around the altar that evening as we gathered for the vote of the strategoi. They shouted for the vote and they demanded that the army make a stand.

Leontus tried his best. First he demanded that I be excluded from the vote, as I was a foreigner. The polemarch allowed that. I thought that Miltiades would explode — but then the massed hoplites and not a few of their servants started to chant.

Fight, fight, fight!

Miltiades relaxed.

But when it came to the vote, the result was a shock — five strategoi for fighting, and five for marching back to Athens.

The massed hoplites began to chant again — fight, fight, fight!

Someone threw a rock that hit Leontus. Athenians can be bastards. Other men threw rotten figs and eggs, too.

Callimachus raised his arms, and even the loudest hoplites fell silent.

‘Don’t be children,’ he said, in his powerful voice. They didn’t make him polemarch for nothing. Grown men — spear-fighters — flinched at the admonition in his voice. ‘This is the life of Athens we discuss here. These are the men you appointed as strategoi. Act like citizens.’

So they did. And I was afraid that Callimachus, so calm and so in command, was going to carry us right back to the city.

Callimachus ordered the strategoi to vote again, but the result was another tie. War and politics make for strange alliances. Cleitus of the Alcmaeonids voted with Aristides the Just and Themistocles the democrat and Miltiades the would-be tyrant. The fifth vote for battle was Sosigenes, a well-known orator.

The dissenters were just as disparate, and the split belied any notion that men had been bought by barbarian gold, despite all the muttering after the battle. Men were voting from actual conviction, and that is when politics grows most heated and most dangerous.

I happened to be next to Callimachus after the second vote.

‘By Zeus, lord of judges,’ he said. ‘I should never have allowed that smooth-tongued bastard to exclude you, Plataean.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’d have fixed this.’

He gave me a hard smile, and then Miltiades came across the circle of strategoi and stepped up on his aspis. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘the polemarch is also a strategos. He must have the deciding vote.’

Miltiades’ comment brought new silence.

Callimachus muttered one word. I heard him say it. He said ‘Bastard’ quite clearly.

Callimachus looked around the circle, and the silence of the army was thick enough to make cloth. ‘Should I ask for another vote?’ he asked the strategoi. All of them shook their heads.

Miltiades opened his mouth to speak, but Callimachus glared him into silence.

Callimachus had a pebble in his hand. He tossed it back and forth, for as long as it takes a man to eat a slice of bread. ‘We do not just stand here for Athens,’ he said, looking around, and men in the front rows repeated what he said. He spoke slowly, like the orator he was. ‘Nor do we stand only for Athens and Plataea,’ he added, with a nod to me. ‘What we say here, what we do here, win or lose, is for all the Hellenes. If we return to Athens and submit earth and water to the Great King. .’ He looked around again. The silence after his words were repeated was absolute.

He tossed the pebble at Miltiades’ feet. ‘Fight,’ he said.

The hoplites erupted in cheers, like men watching a race at a games. The cheers were audible everywhere — even in the barbarian camp.

Immediately after the vote, the dissenters gathered around Miltiades, and Leontus took his hand. ‘We’ll be there in the line,’ he said. ‘We want to win.’

‘Not the way we wanted it,’ said another, Euphones of Oinoe. ‘But we’ll stand our ground.’

Then the dissenters walked off. I think they were wrong, but by the gods, they did their part on the day, and that’s how a vote is supposed to work. That’s what made Athens great — not just the men who voted for the fight, but those who voted against and fought anyway.

Then all the men who had backed him gathered around, and you would think they’d just voted a new festival — they were beaming with happiness, and hundreds of men came from the surrounding dark to pump their hands and clap their backs.

‘So,’ Aristides said, when the mass of well-wishers had gone to their rest. ‘Fight tomorrow?’

‘Too many front-rankers fought today,’ Miltiades said.

‘Or ran,’ I said, with a wink, and the other strategoi laughed.

Miltiades agreed. ‘Took exercise, at any rate,’ he quipped. I thought he looked a foot taller. ‘Tomorrow, Themistocles, I want the little men back in the fields, sniping at the barbarians. But tomorrow, I’ll have five hundred Athenians — fifty men of every tribe — at the base of the hill, formed close. To give the psiloi cover if they have to run.’

‘To show we’re still warriors, more like,’ I added.

That got me a look.

Aristides nodded. ‘Tomorrow’s my command day. You have a plan? You should be in command.’

Themistocles agreed. ‘I have the next day,’ he said.

‘And I the next,’ the polemarch added. ‘You may have my day, as well.’

Miltiades grunted. ‘Watch yourselves,’ he said. ‘Too many days and I could be addicted, like a drunkard to wine or a lotus-eater.’ He looked out over the darkening plain. ‘But I will fight on my own day, so men may not say that I acted from hubris. Let the barbarians stew.’

‘They may march,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘If they march, we fight, whatever day it is,’ he said. ‘But the more I look at this — now that my eyes are opened — the better it appears for us. Look — they have a fine camp, and good protection from wind and weather. But where can they go from Marathon? All roads go through us. If our little men bleed them every day — and I speak frankly, gentlemen — what care we if we lose psiloi? But every dead Mede is one less for the day.’

No one disagreed. It was true.

The next day, the psiloi went down the hill in a wave. They were better organized than on the first day, and Themistocles played a role in that. And he led the hoplites out on to the plain — more than five hundred, or so I thought.

The barbarians countered with oarsmen, turned hastily into light-armed men of their own, but it was a poor decision, as every dead man was that much less motive power for their ships.

The second day, our light-armed were tired. Only a few went out, and the enemy cavalry killed some of them. The balance was returning, and men shouted for Miltiades to lead us to battle. Muttering began that the army had voted for battle and now Miltiades was hesitating.

‘Men are childish fools,’ Miltiades muttered as he watched the beaten psiloi trudge up the hill. ‘Don’t they see? We’ve won! All we have to do is sit here and fill the plain with psiloi! And watch them eat — their horses will be out of forage in a day.’

But the hoplites didn’t see, and the pressure to fight mounted.

The third day, the light-armed men went out together, and the barbarians stayed in their camp — they had to be feeling the same fatigue as our men by then. But in our camp, the hoplites boiled over. Sophanes — Aristides’ friend, and mine — led the protest. He came up to Miltiades with fifty spearmen behind him and demanded that Miltiades lead us to the plain — there and then.

‘Are we cowards, that we are letting our servants do the fighting?’ Sophanes asked. ‘What kind of city will we have, if my shield-bearer can tell me that he — not I — drove the Medes from Holy Attica?’

He had a point, as you all can see. If we are honest with ourselves, we hold citizen rights from our cities because we fight. True, eh? So if we — the armoured men, the heroes — were in camp, and the little men were fighting, then who was a citizen, really?

But Miltiades also knew he had a winning strategy. Men like Aristides worried about the consequences, but Miltiades was a fighter. And as we had put him in charge, his only concern was winning.

He took Sophanes aside, talked to him the way a man talks to his son and sent him back to his friends. He’d convinced the young men to give him another day or two.

Not that it mattered. The barbarians had had enough.

On the evening of the third day, the barbarians came out of their camp — and their army was unbelievably big. It was carefully planned, and they flowed out of their camp like water from a pot — and every contingent had its place. And then, having filled the plain from flank to flank, they came forward at a fast walk.

The psiloi ran for their lives. What else could they do? More than a few of them died, caught in the plain by the cavalry on the flanks or the bows of the Sakai and the Medes and the Persians in the centre.

Aristides had the hoplites on the plain that day, and he held his ground until the last of the little men ran past, and then, in good order, his hoplites walked back up the hill to us. But the barbarians didn’t pursue. They turned about and walked back across the plain, fifteen stades back to their camp. The whole attack had taken less than the time it took for a speaker in a law case to give his argument.

I was getting into my corslet by that time, afraid that we were about to be attacked right up the hill, my eyes glued to the manoeuvres of the enemy. Miltiades came up next to me, jumped up on the wall and watched them as they retreated. He had Phrynichus with him, I remember, and Phrynichus had a stylus and a wax tablet.

‘Persians on the right — cavalry and then infantry — their best. Just like us. Mounted Sakai on the left; then East Greeks. They look like the marines of all the ships — some Phoenicians there. And then the dismounted Sakai. Persians again in the centre — dismounted. Maybe Medes. More Medes on the right.’ He watched them carefully. ‘They fill the plain, Arimnestos.’

Phrynichus wrote the Persian battle order carefully. I was looking at the fact that the Persian right would have all their best troops. It would be opposite our left. That would be the Plataeans. Like the day my father faced the Spartans at Oinoe, we would bear the brunt of their best men.

Of course I was afraid, young man. We were not the invincible hoplites of Greece. We were men who had lost every battle we’d tried with the damned Persians. But I swallowed my fears, like a man should. I nodded, and my voice barely caught when I spoke.

‘About twelve thousand, give or take. Not as deep as we fight.’

‘Deep enough, though.’ Miltiades gave half a grin. ‘We need to fill the plain, too.’

‘Hah!’ I said. I could see it — if our hoplites brushed against the hills and the sea, the cavalry had no way to slip around us — and no hoplite feared a horseman in front of him.

Actually, that’s bravado. All men on foot fear cavalry — but a mass of spearmen who keep their nerve are not really at risk, however loud the thunder of hooves.

‘Plataeans on the left, then the tribes in order or precedence,’ Miltiades said. ‘That puts your men on the far left and mine on the far right. You ready for five hundred new citizens?’

‘What, tonight?’ I quipped. But in my heart, I was afraid. My Plataeans, against the Persians. It was not just a matter of whether we could win. It was that I was taking my friends, my brother-in-law; by the gods, I was taking my city into action with the most dreaded foe in all the bowl of earth.

‘I’m about to free every slave in the camp,’ Miltiades said, and his eyes sparkled. ‘Then I’ll send them to you. The free men and the psiloi — I’ll arm them and fill the back of my tribes with them.

‘Half of them won’t have spears,’ I pointed out.

‘They’ll take up space,’ he said. ‘They can get up in the rough ground on your flank if you have to spread out — or help thicken your charge if you need. And if the cavalry gets around you,’ he shrugged, ‘well, they’ll buy you time while they die.’

I nodded. ‘Are we going to run at the barbarians? Or walk?’

Miltiades chewed on his moustache. ‘I thought we might tell off the picked men to go at a run — starting at long bowshot. The way Eualcidas did it.’

I shrugged. ‘Why don’t we all run at them?’ I said. ‘I’m not saying anyone will shirk — but if we’re all charging forward it’s hard for anyone to take a step back.’

‘We’d end up with holes in the shield wall,’ he said.

‘We’d scare the shit out of them,’ I countered.

He sighed. ‘This is a big risk, and you want to do something new,’ he said. He nodded. ‘I’ll think on it. I’m going to free the slaves.’

‘I’ll get a feast together,’ I said, and grinned.

The sun was still up when a crowd of poor men — recently freed slaves — appeared in our camp. Themistocles led them.

‘Plataeans!’ Themistocles said. ‘Athens has freed these men, and asks your aid in enfranchising them.’

I had Myron right there. I had warned him, and he rose to it like — well, like the archon of Plataea.

‘Freedmen!’ he said, and they were quiet — probably still delighted to hear that they were freed. ‘Many of you are, in your hearts, men of Athens. Perhaps you will always feel that way. But Plataea is honoured to have you — and if you will let us, we will make you feel honoured to be Plataeans. Welcome! Come to our fires, and let us feed you your first meal as free men and citizens.’

We had bread and olives, pork and wine all prepared, and we fed the poor bastards a feast. Our own men joined in. I went over to Gelon and tapped him. ‘You’re free, too,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘You’re all right,’ he said, and went to stand with the freedmen.

They ate the way starving men eat, and drank like men who never saw enough wine. Our citizens joined them, and moved among them — speaking to one, learning the name of another. And serving them, like slaves.

Makes me weep — sorry, honey bee. I need a moment.

When they were done with libations, and being blessed by our priests, and eating, I stood on my aspis.

‘I was once a slave,’ I said.

That shut them up.

‘I was once a slave, and war made me free. Now I am the polemarch of Plataea. I know how well a freed slave fights. So I won’t give you a long speech.’ I pointed out of the firelight, towards the barbarians. ‘Right now, not one of you has the value of a medimnos of grain. But over there, in that camp, are your farms and your ploughs and your oxen — your house and your barns — for some of you, your brides. Every Sakai wears the value of a Plataean farm on his back — some Persians are worth three or four.’ I pointed at the men who had marched here with me. ‘Tomorrow night, we will pool everything we take — every item we win with our spears, and men who fight will each take away a share. Everyone will share. Now,’ I said, and I hopped off my aspis to stride among them, ‘who has a spear? Stand over here. A helmet? Anyone?’

It took for ever — the sun slipped below the western rim and I was still trying to build my phalanx. My Plataeans were generous — men who’d picked up a good helmet offered their old one to the new men, and men with a spare leather hat traded it round, and so on. It went on and on. Men with two spears shared one. Men gave slaves a pair of sandals. A chlamys. Anything that would help the poor bastards to live a minute longer.

I received four hundred new citizens, give or take a few, and we managed to arm almost two hundred of them as spearmen, if not hoplites. Most had to roll up a cloak and use it as a shield. Many had neither helmet nor hat, and behind them stood men with a bag of rocks or a pair of javelins or a sling.

But when I had them all placed, and as well armed as I could, I sent them to bed. ‘Sleep well,’ I said. ‘Dream of a rich farm in Plataea.’ I hoped that they would, because I knew that it was as close as most of them would ever get.