The Great King

Prologue

If you all keep coming, night after night, my daughter will have the greatest wedding feast in the history of the Hellenes. Perhaps, should my sword-arm fail me, I can have an evening-star life as a rhapsode.

Heh. But the truth is, it’s the story, not the teller. Who would not want to hear the greatest story of the greatest war ever fought by men? And you expect me to say ‘since Troy’ and I answer — any soldier knows Troy was just one city. We fought the world, and we triumphed.

The first night, I told you of my youth, and how I went to Calchas the priest to be educated as a gentleman, and instead learned to be a spear fighter. Because Calchas was no empty windbag, but a Killer of Men, who had stood his ground 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 Calchas, 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 skulked 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 Pyricche. Oh, I learned to read old Theogonis 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 Calchas. . 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 bronzesmith — and Draco the wheelwright and old Epiktetus 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 Kitharon, 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 elder 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 for Artemis, and there the great philosopher, Heraklitus, 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.

Heraklitus. 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 hereditary priesthood of Artemis — but he believed that fire was the only true element, and change the only constant. I can witness 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 — as a slave — as a herald between my master and the mighty Artapherenes, 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 Heraklitus, 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 up-country 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 Artapherenes’ 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, we 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 Goryton, 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 to 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 — he 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 Heraklitus 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 — Idomeneaus, 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 — 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 low. With two ships, I reprovisioned 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 Phokaian 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 Lades.

Briseis married Artapherenes, 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, which 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 prise 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 of good service to Athens. My bronze smithing was getting better and better. 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 Moir 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 the Alcmaenoidae and led by my cousin Simon’s son Simonides. The vain bastard named all 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 with the black ships. Agios died there on the stern 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 Kitharon, 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 I was free, ripened into friendship. My new friends were a polyglot rabble — an Etruscan of Roma 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 bronzesmith, learning and teaching. I fell in love with Lydia, the bronzesmith’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 Syracusa and declined to serve him, and sailed away, and there, on a beach near Taranto in the south of Italia, I found my friend Harpagos and Cimon, son of Miltiades, and others among 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 gods’ 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 Peloponnesus. But Poseidon was not yet done with me, and a mighty storm blew up off 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 Artapharenes’ 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.

Olympia — 484 BCE