Salamis

Prologue

Here we are again — the penultimate night of my feast. Quite a crowd for an old man’s ravings.

But this is the best of tales since Troy — with sorrow and joy, men and women, heroes and traitors and men, like Themistocles, who were both. May you never see such times, thugater.

The first night, I told you of my youth and how I went to Calchus the priest to be educated as a gentleman, and instead learned to be a spear fighter. Because Calchus was no empty windbag, but a Killer of Men, who had stood his place many times in the storm of bronze. And veterans came from all over Greece to hang their shields for a time at our shrine and talk to Calchus, and he sent them away whole, or better men, at least. Except that the worst of them, the Hero called for, and the priest would kill them on the precinct walls and send their shades shrieking to feed the old Hero, or serve him in Hades.

Mind you, friends, Leithos wasn’t some angry old god demanding blood sacrifice, but Plataea’s hero from the Trojan War. And he was a particularly Boeotian hero, because he was no great man-slayer, no tent-sulker. His claim to fame is that he went to Troy and fought all ten years. That on the day that mighty Hector raged by the ships of the Greeks and Achilles sulked in his tent, Leithos rallied the lesser men and formed a tight shield wall and held Hector long enough for Ajax and the other Greek heroes to rally.

You might hear a different story in Thebes, or Athens, or Sparta. But that’s the story of the Hero I grew to serve, and I spent years at his shrine, learning the war dances that we call the Pyrrhiche. Oh, I learned to read old Theognis and Hesiod and Homer, too. But it was the spear, the sword and the aspis that sang to me.

When my father found that I was learning to be a warrior and not a man of letters, he came and fetched me home, and old Calchus — died. Killed himself, more like. But I’ve told all this — and how little Plataea, our farm town at the edge of Boeotia, sought to be free of cursed Thebes and made an alliance with distant Athens. I told you all how godlike Miltiades came to our town and treated my father, the bronze-smith and Draco the wheelwright and old Epictetus the farmer like Athenian gentlemen — how he wooed them with fine words and paid hard silver for their products, so that he bound them to his own political ends and to the needs of Athens.

When I was still a gangly boy — tall, and well-muscled, as I remember, but too young to fight in the phalanx — Athens called for little Plataea’s aid, and we marched over Cithaeron, the ancient mountain that is also our glowering god, and we rallied to the Athenians at Oinoe. We stood beside them against Sparta and Corinth and all the Peloponnesian cities — and we beat them.

Well, Athens beat them. Plataea barely survived, and my older brother, who should have been my father’s heir, died there with a Spartiate’s spear in his belly.

Four days later, when we fought again — this time against Thebes — I was in the phalanx. Again, we triumphed. And I was a hoplite.

And two days later, when we faced the Euboeans, I saw my cousin Simon kill my father, stabbing him in the back under his bright bronze cuirass. When I fell over my father’s corpse, I took a mighty blow and when I awoke, I had no memory of Simon’s treachery.

When I awoke, of course, I was a slave. Simon had sold me to Phoenician traders, and I went east with a cargo of Greek slaves.

I was a slave for some years, and in truth, it was not a bad life. I went to a fine house, ruled by rich, elegant, excellent people: Hipponax the poet and his wife and two children. Archilogos, the eldest and a boy, was my real master, and yet my friend and ally, and we had many escapades together. And his sister, Briseis-

Ah, Briseis. Helen, returned to life.

We lived in far-off Ephesus, one of the most beautiful and powerful cities in the Greek world, yet located on the coast of Asia. Greeks have lived there since the Trojan war, and the temple of Artemis there is one of the wonders of the world. My master went to school each day at the temple of Artemis, and there the great philosopher, Heraclitus, had his school, and he would shower us with questions every bit as painful as the blows of the old fighter who taught us pankration at the gymnasium.

Heraclitus. I have met men, and women, who saw him as a charlatan, a dreamer, a mouther of impieties. In fact, he was deeply religious — his family held the heredity priesthood of Artemis — but he believed that fire was the only true element, and change the only constant. I can witness to both.

It was a fine life. I got a rich lord’s education for nothing. I learned to drive a chariot, and to ride a horse and to fight and to use my mind like a sword. I loved it all, but best of all …

Best of all, I loved Briseis.

And while I loved her — and half a dozen other young women — I grew to manhood listening to Greeks and Persians plotting various plots in my master’s house, and one night all the plots burst forth into ugly blossoms and bore the fruit of red-handed war, and the Greek cities of Ionia revolted against the Persian overlords.

Now, as tonight’s story will be about war with the Persians, let me take a moment to remind you of the roots of the conflict, because they are ignoble, and the Greeks were no better than the Persians, and perhaps a great deal worse. The Ionians had money, power, and freedom: freedom to worship, freedom to rule themselves under the Great King, and all it cost them was taxes and the ‘slavery’ of having to obey the Great King in matters of foreign policy. The ‘yoke’ of the Persians was light and easy to wear, and no man alive knows that better than me, because I served, slave though I was, as a herald between my master and the mighty Artaphernes, the satrap of all Phrygia. I knew him well; I ran his errands, dressed him at times, and one dark night, when my master Hipponax caught the Persian in his wife’s bed, I saved his life when my master would have killed him. I saved my master’s life, as well, holding the corridor against four Persian soldiers of high repute — Aryanam, Pharnakes, Cyrus and Darius. I know their names because they were my friends, in other times.

And you’ll hear of them again. Except Pharnakes, who died in the Bosporus, fighting Carians.

At any rate, after that night of swords and fire and hate, my master went from being a loyal servant of Persia to a hate-filled Greek ‘patriot’. And our city, Ephesus, roused itself to war. And amidst it all, my beloved Briseis lost her fiancé to rumour and innuendo, and Archilogos and I beat him for his impudence. I had learned to kill, and to use violence to get what I wanted. And as a reward, I got Briseis — or to be more accurate, she had me. My master freed me, not knowing that I had just deflowered his daughter, and I sailed away with Archilogos to avoid the wrath of the suitor’s relatives.

We joined the Greek revolt at Lesvos, and there, on the beach, I met Aristides — sometimes called the Just, one of the greatest heroes of Athens, and Miltiades’ political foe.

That was the beginning of my true life. My life as a man of war. I won my first games on a beach in Chios and I earned my first suit of armour, and I went to war against the Persians.

But the God of War, Ares, was not so much in charge of my life as Aphrodite, and when we returned to Ephesus to plan the great war, I spent every hour that I could with Briseis, and the result, I think now, was never in doubt. But Heraclitus, the great sage, asked me to swear an oath to all the gods that I would protect Archilogos and his family, and I swore. Like the heroes in the old stories, I never thought about the consequence of swearing such a great oath and sleeping all the while with Briseis.

Ah, Briseis! She taunted me with cowardice when I stayed away from her and devoured me when I visited her, sneaking, night after night, past the slaves into the women’s quarters, until, in the end, we were caught. Of course we were caught.

And I was thrown from the house and ordered never to return, by the family I’d sworn to protect.

Three days later I was marching upcountry with Aristides and the Athenians. We burned Sardis, but the Persians caught us in the midst of looting the market and we lost the fight in the town and then again at the bridge, and the Persians beat us like a drum, but I stood my ground, fight after fight, and my reputation as a spear fighter grew. In a mountain pass, Eualcides the Euboean and I charged Artaphernes’ bodyguard, and lived to tell the tale. Three days later, on the plains north of Ephesus, we tried to face a provincial Persian army with the whole might of the Ionian Revolt, and the Greeks folded and ran rather than face the Persian archery and the outraged Phrygians. Alone, on the far left, the Athenians and the Euboeans held our ground and stopped the Carians. Our army was destroyed. Eualcides the hero died there, and I went back to save his corpse, and in the process found that Hipponax, my former master, lay mortally wounded. I gave him the mercy blow, again failing to think of the oath I’d sworn, and my once near-brother Archilogos thought I’d done it from hate, not love. And that blow stood between us and any hope of reconciliation. To Archilogos, I’d raped his sister and killed his father after swearing an oath to the gods to protect them. And that will have bearing on tonight’s tale.

From the rout of Ephesus, I escaped with the Athenians, but the curse of my shattered oath lay on me and Poseidon harried our ship, and in every port I killed men who annoyed me until Hagios, my Athenian friend, put me ashore on Crete, with the King of Gortyn, Achilles, and his son Neoptolymos, to whom I was war tutor. I tutored him so well that, in the next great battle of the Ionian War, Neoptolymos and I were the heroes of the Greek fleet, and we helped my once-friend Archilogos break the Persian centre. It was the first victory for the Greeks, but it was fleeting, and a few days later, I was a pirate on the great sea with my own ship for the first time. Fortune favoured me — perhaps, I think, because I had in part redeemed my oath to the gods by saving Archilogos at the sea battle. And when we weathered the worst storm I had ever seen, Poseidon had gifted me the African-Greek navigator Paramanos and a good crew in a heavy ship. I returned to Lesvos and joined Miltiades, the same who had wooed the Plataeans at the dawn of this tale. And from him I learned the facts of my father’s murder and I determined to go home and avenge him.

I found Briseis had married one of the architects of the Ionian Revolt, and he was eager to kill me — the rumour was that she called my name when he was with her at night. And I determined to kill him.

After two seasons of piracy with Miltiades and further failures of the rebels to resist the Persians, I found him skulking around the edge of a great melee in Thrace and I killed him. I presented myself to Briseis to take her as my own — and she spurned me.

That’s how it is, sometimes. I went back to Plataea an empty vessel, and the Furies filled me with revenge. I found Simon and his sons sitting on my farm — Simon married to my mother, planning to marry his youngest son Simonalkes to my sister Penelope.

I’ll interrupt my own tale to say that I did not fall on Simon with fire and sword, because four years of living by the spear had taught me that things I had learned as a boy from Calchus and heard again from Heraclitus were coming to seem important and true — that justice was more important than might. I let the law of Plataea have its way. Simon hanged himself from the rafters of my father’s workshop, and the Furies left me alone with my mother and my sister.

That would make a fine tale, I think, by itself, but the gods were far from done with Plataea, and by the next spring there were storm clouds brewing in all directions. An Athenian aristocrat died under my hypaspist’s sword — Idomeneus, who comes all too often into these stories, a mad Cretan — he had taken up the priesthood of the old shrine. I went off to see to the crisis and that road took me over the mountains to Athens and into the middle of Athenian politics — aye, you’ll hear more of that tonight, too. There I fell afoul of the Alcmaeonidae and their scion Cleitus, because it was his brother who had died in our sanctuary and because my cowardly cousin Simon’s sons were laying a trap for me. He stole my horse and my slave girl, but that’s another story. Because of him, I was tried for murder and Aristides the Just got me off with a trick. But in the process, I committed hubris — the crime of treating a man like a slave — and Aristides ordered me to go to Delos, to the great temple of Apollo, to be cleansed.

Apollo, that scheming god, never meant me to be cleansed, but instead thrust me back into the service of Miltiades, whose fortunes were at an all-time ebb. With two ships I re-provisioned Miletus, not once but twice, and made a small fortune on it, and on piracy. I took men’s goods, and their women, and I killed for money, took ships, and thought too little of the gods. Apollo had warned me — in his own voice — to learn to use mercy, but I failed more often than I succeeded, and I left a red track behind me across the Ionian Sea. And in time, I was a captain at the greatest sea battle of the Ionian Revolt — at Lade. At Lade, the Great King put together an incredible fleet, of nearly six hundred ships, to face the Greeks and their allies with almost three hundred and fifty ships. It sounds one-sided, but we were well trained; we should have been ready. I sailed with the Athenians and the Cretans and we beat the Phoenicians at one end of the line and emerged from the morning fog expecting the praise of our navarch, the Phocaean Dionysus — alongside Miltiades, the greatest pirate and ship-handler in the Greek world. But when we punched through the Phoenicians, we found that the Samians, our fellow Greeks, had sold out to the Persians. The Great King triumphed, and the Ionian revolt collapsed. Most of my friends — most of the men of my youth — died at Lade.

Briseis married Artaphernes, who had slept with her mother — and became the most powerful woman in Ionia, as she had always planned.

Datis, the architect of the Persian victory, raped and plundered his way across Lesvos and Chios, slaughtering men, taking women for the slave markets, and making true every slander that Greeks had falsely whispered about Persian atrocities.

Miletus, that I had helped to hold, fell. I saved what I could. And went home, with fifty families of Miletians to add to the citizen levy of Plataea. I spent my fortune on them, buying them land and oxen, and then … then I went back to smithing bronze. I gave up the spear.

How the gods must have laughed.

A season later, while my sister went to a finishing school to get her away from my mother’s drunkenness, I went back to Athens because my friend Phrynicus, who had stood in the arrow storm at Lade with me, was producing his play, The Fall of Miletus. And Miltiades had been arrested for threatening the state — of which, let me say, friends, he was absolutely guilty, because Miltiades would have sold his own mother into slavery to achieve power in Athens.

At any rate, I used money and some of the talents I’d learned as a slave — and a lot of my friends — to see that Phrynicus’s play was produced. And, incidentally, to win my stolen slave-girl free of her brothel and wreak some revenge on the Alcmaeonidae. In the process, I undermined their power with the demos — the people — and helped the new voice in Athenian politics — Themistocles the Orator. He had little love for me, but he managed to tolerate my success long enough to help me — and Aristides — to undermine the pro-Persian party and liberate Miltiades.

I went home to Plataea feeling that I’d done a lifetime’s good service to Athens. My bronze-smithing was getting better and better and I spent the winter training the Plataean phalanx in my spare time. War was going to be my hobby, the way some men learn the diaulos or the kithara to while away old age. I trained the young men and forged bronze. Life grew sweeter.

And when my sister Penelope — now married to a local Thespian aristocrat — decided that I was going to marry her friend Euphonia, I eventually agreed. I rode to Attica with a hunting party of aristocrats — Boeotian and Athenian — and won my bride in games that would not have disgraced the heroes of the past. And in the spring I wed her, at a wedding that included Themistocles and Aristides and Miltiades — and Harpagos and Agios and Moire and a dozen of my other friends from every class in Athens. I went back over the mountains with my bride and settled down to make babies.

But the storm clouds on the horizon were coming on a great wind of change. And the first gusts of that wind brought us a raid out of Thebes, paid for by Cleitus of the Alcmaeonids and led by my cousin Simon’s son Simonalkes. The vain bastard named most of his sons after himself — how weak can a man be?

I digress. We caught them — my new Plataean phalanx — and we crushed them. My friend Teucer, the archer, killed Simonides. And because of them we were all together when the Athenians called for our help, because the Persians, having destroyed Euboea, were marching for Athens.

Well, I won’t retell Marathon. Myron, our archon and always my friend, sent us without reservation, and all the Plataeans marched under my command — and we stood by the Athenians on the greatest day Greek men have ever known, and we were heroes. Hah! I’ll tell it again if you don’t watch yourselves. We defeated Datis and his Persians by the black ships. Agios died there on the astern of a Persian trireme, but we won the day. Here’s to his shade. And to all the shades of all the men who died at Lade.

But when I led the victorious Plataeans back across the mountains, it was to find that my beautiful young wife had died in childbirth. The gods stole my wits clean away — I took her body to my house and burned it and all my trappings, and I went south over Cithaeron, intending to destroy myself.

May you never know how black the world can be. Women know that darkness sometimes after the birth of a child, and men after battle. Any peak of spirit has its price, and when a man or woman stands with the gods, however briefly, they pay the price ten times. The exertion of Marathon and the loss of my wife unmanned me. I leapt from a cliff.

I fell, and struck, not rocks, but water. And when I surfaced, my body fought for life, and I swam until my feet dragged on the beach. Then I swooned, and when I awoke, I was once again a slave. Again, taken by Phoenicians, but this time as an adult. My life was cruel and like to be short, and the irony of the whole thing was that now I soon craved life.

I lived a brutal life under a monster called Dagon, and you’ll hear plenty of him, tonight. But he tried to break me, body and soul, and nigh on succeeded. In the end, he crucified me on a mast and left me to die. But Poseidon saved me — washed me over the side with the mast and let me live. Set me on the deck of a little Sikel trading ship, where I pulled an oar as a near-slave for a few months. And then I was taken again, by the Phoenicians.

The degradations and the humiliations went on, until one day, in a sea fight, I took a sword and cut my way to freedom. The sword fell at my feet — literally. The gods have a hand in every man’s life. Only impious fools believe otherwise.

As a slave, I had developed new friendships; or rather, new alliances, which, when free, ripened into friendship. My new friends were a polyglot rabble — an Etruscan of Rome named Gaius, a couple of Kelts, Daud and Sittonax, a pair of Africans from south of Libya, Doola and Seckla, a Sikel named Demetrios and an Illyrian kinglet-turned-slave called Neoptolymos. We swore an oath to Poseidon to take a ship to Alba and buy tin and we carried out our oath. As I told you last night, we went to Sicily and while my friends became small traders on the coast, I worked as a bronze-smith, learning and teaching. I fell in love with Lydia, the bronze-smith’s daughter — and betrayed her, and for that betrayal — let’s call things by their proper names — I lost confidence in myself, and I lost the favour of the gods, and for years I wandered up and down the seas, until at last we redeemed our oaths, went to Alba for the tin, and came back rich men. I did my best to see Lydia well suited, and I met Pythagoras’s daughter and was able to learn something of that great man’s mathematics and his philosophy. I met Gelon the tyrant of Syracuse and declined to serve him, and sailed away, and there, on a beach near Taranto in the south of Italy, I found my friend Harpagos and Cimon, son of Miltiades, and other of the friends and allies of my youth. I confess, I had sent a message, hoping that they would come. We cruised north into the Adriatic, because I had promised Neoptolymos that we’d restore him to his throne, and we did, though we got a little blood on it. And then the Athenians and I parted company from my friends of Sicily days — they went back to Massalia to till their fields, and I left them to go back to being Arimnestos of Plataea. Because Cimon said that the Persians were coming. And whatever my failings as a man — and I had and still have many — I am the god’s own tool in the war of the Greeks against the Persians.

For all that, I have always counted many Persians among my friends, and the best of men — the most excellent, the most brave, the most loyal. Persians are a race of truth-telling heroes. But they are not Greeks, and when it came to war …

We parted company off Illyria, and coasted the Western Peloponnese. But Poseidon was not yet done with me, and a mighty storm blew up off of Africa and it fell on us, scattering our little squadron and sending my ship far, far to the south and west, and when the storm blew itself out, we were a dismasted hulk riding the rollers, and there was another damaged ship under our lee. We could see she was a Carthaginian. We fell on that ship and took it, although in a strange, three-sided fight — the rowers were rising against the deck crew of Persians.

It was Artaphernes’ own ship, and he was travelling from Tyre to Carthage to arrange for Carthaginian ships to help the Great King to make war on Athens. And I rescued him — I thought him a corpse.

So did his wife, my Briseis, who threw herself into my arms.

Blood dripped from my sword, and I stood with Helen in my arms on a ship I’d just taken by force of arms, and I thought myself the king of the world.

How the gods must have laughed.

Last night I told you of our lowest ebb. Because Artaphernes was not dead, and all that followed came from that fact. He was the Great King’s ambassador to the Carthaginians, and our years of guest-friendship — an exchange of lives going back to my youth, if you’ve been listening — required me to take him and my Persian friends, his bodyguards, and Briseis, my Helen reborn, to Carthage, though my enemy Dagon had sworn to my destruction in his mad way, and though by then Carthage had put quite a price on my head.

Hah! My role in taking part of their tin fleet. I don’t regret it — the foundation of all our fortunes, thugater.

At any rate, we ran Artaphernes — badly wounded — into Carthage, and escaped with our lives after a brilliant piece of boat handling and the god’s own luck. Possibly Lydia’s finest hour. And I saw Dagon.

We ran along the coast of Africa and stopped at Sicily, and there I found my old sparring partner and hoplomachos Polymarchos. He was training an athlete for the Olympics and in a moment I made peace with the gods and took Polymarchos and his young man to Olympia, where we — my whole ship’s crew — watched the Olympics, spending the profits of our piracy in a fine style, and making a wicked profit off the wine we brought to sell. There, we played a role in bridging the distance between Athens and Sparta, and there I saw the depth of selfish greed that would cause some men — like Adeimantus of Corinth — to betray Greece and work only for his own ends. I hate his memory — I hope he rots in Hades — but he was scarcely alone, and when Queen Gorgo — here’s to the splendour of her, mind and body — when Queen Gorgo of Sparta called us ‘a conspiracy to save Greece’ she was not speaking poetically. Even the Spartans had their factions and it was at the Olympics that I discovered that Brasidas, my Spartan officer, was some sort of exiled criminal — or just possibly, a man who’d been betrayed by his country, and not the other way around.

With only a little jiggling of the wheel of fate, we made sure Sparta won the chariot race and we left the Olympics richer by some drachmas and wiser by as much, as we’d had nights and nights to thrash out plans for the defence of Greece.

So it was all the more daunting when King Leonidas and Queen Gorgo of Sparta asked me to take their ambassadors to the Great King, the king of Persia. That’s another complex tale; the old Spartan king had killed the Persian heralds, an act of gross impiety, and Leonidas sought to rid Sparta of that impiety. So he sent two messengers to far-off Persepolis, two hereditary heralds.

And me.

Well, and Aristides the Just of Athens, who was ostracised — exiled — for being too fair, too rigid, too much of a prig …

I laugh. He was probably my closest friend — my mentor. A brilliant soldier — his finest hour will come soon — and a brilliant speaker, a man who was so incorruptible that ordinary men sometimes found him easy to hate. An aristocrat of the kind that makes men like me think there might be something to the notion of birth; a true hero.

We went to the Great King by way of Tarsus, where I was mauled by a lion, and Babylon, where I was mauled by a woman. Of the two, Babylon was vastly to be preferred. In Babylon we found the seed of the revolt that later saved Greece. When we arrived at Persepolis, I knew immediately that our embassy was doomed — the arrogance of the Persians and Medes was boundless, and nothing we could do would placate or even annoy them. I told you last night how the Spartan envoys — and Brasidas, my friend — and I danced in armour for the Immortals, and were mocked.

Our audience with the Great King was more like staged theatre, intended by his cousin Mardonius to humiliate us before the King had us executed.

But, luckily, my friend Artaphernes had a long arm and his own allies. In other places I have discussed him — another great man, another hero, another mentor. The greatest of my foes, and one I never defeated. But in this we were allies; he did not want Mardonius to triumph, nor did he seek to destroy Athens or Sparta. Because of Artaphernes, we had a few friends in Persepolis, and we were rescued from death by the Queen Mother, who smuggled us out of the city and let us free on the plains; not because she loved Greece, but only because she feared Mardonius and his extreme, militaristic policies.

We ran. But in running, with our Persian escort of Artaphernes’ picked men (and my boyhood friend Cyrus!), we left Brasidas to fan the flames of revolt in Babylon, and we slipped home.

In Sardis, after weeks of playing cat and mouse with all the soldiers in Asia, I saw Artaphernes. He was sick and old, but strong enough to ask me for a last favour — that when I heard he was dead, I should come and take Briseis. Yes, the love of my life was his wife, the Queen of Ionia as she had always meant to be. Artaphernes’ son, also called Artaphernes, hated her, and hated me.

At any rate, we made it to my ships, and sailed across the wintry sea to Athens. In the spring, the Revolt of Babylon saved Greece from invasion, and the leaders of the Greek world gathered at Corinth and bickered. Endlessly. My ships made me rich, bringing cargoes from Illyria and Egypt and Colchis and all points in between, and I sailed that summer, going to the Nile delta and back, and ignoring the cause of Greek independence as much as ever I could.

But in the end, the Persians came. Last night I told you all of the truth: the internal divisions of the Greeks, and their foolish early efforts — the march to the Vale of Tempe and its utter failure, and the eventual arrangement for a small land army to hold the Hot Springs of Thermopylae while the great allied fleet held Cape Artemisium.

Leonidas, best of the Spartans, held the pass at Thermopylae. And we, as ragtag a fleet as ever put oar to water, held the waters off Artemisium — day after day. Storms pounded the Persians. We pounded the Persians. Once we fought them to a standstill, and on the last day we beat them.

But at our backs, a traitor led the Medes around the Spartan wall, and King Leonidas died.

The so-called Great King desecrated his body and took his head. The Great King’s soldiers did the same to all three hundred Spartans and to others besides. Dogs ripped the body of my noble brother-in-law, Antigonus. My sister would weep for his shade, and I would weep too.

No gods laughed. The week after Thermopylae was the worst of the Long War — the worst week many of us had ever known.

Calliades was archon in Athens, and the Eleians celebrated the Seventy-fifth Olympiad, that in which Astylus of Syracuse won the stadion. It was in this year that King Xerxes made his campaign against Greece. It was the year of the climax of the Long War.

I was there.