sun was lower in the sky.
We sat and drank wine until the sun set, wine that went
straight to my head, and we ate a big tuna that Melaina’s father
caught. He came and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Stephanos
loved you,’ he said. ‘You’re a good man.’
That made me cry. I cried easily in those days.
It was harder to abandon Chios than it had been to leave
Miletus, because unlike these cheerful fisherfolk, I knew what
was coming to them. The light hand of Persia was about to be
was coming to them. The light hand of Persia was about to be
replaced by an iron fist. I watched the sun set, and I knew that it
would be a long time before I saw it rise here, in the east.
Melaina came into my bed that last night, while I lay looking
at the rafters. I didn’t send her away, although our lovemaking
had more grief to it than lust. But she left before dawn, and she
was a proper daughter again on the beach when she poured a
libation and washed Harpagos’s shield in wine.
Then my keel was in the water, and I ceased to think of her,
because we went to sail an ocean ful of enemies.
We ran north, evading everything we saw, until we entered
the Bosporus.
Kalipolis was stil free. We beached, and I embraced
Miltiades.
I’l make this brief. We wintered there. In the spring,
Histiaeus – Istes’ brother, who left him to die – came to us,
asking that we folow him to make a pre-emptive attack on the
coast of Phoenicia – to show that the East Greeks weren’t
beaten. It was a strategy that was a year too late.
‘I’l stay and defend the Chersonese,’ Miltiades said. ‘It is
mine. But I wil lose no more men in Asia.’
Histiaeus was captured in Phrygia a month later, trying to
forage for food for his oarsmen. Datis executed him for treason.
It was a cheap death for a man who had led the Ionian Revolt.
He should have died on the wals with his brother.
Less than a week later, Datis flooded the Chersonese with
Scythian and Thracian mercenaries. He outspent Miltiades, ten
to one, and in a week we lost four of our towns.
to one, and in a week we lost four of our towns.
We expected it, though. The east was lost. We loaded our
ships, taking every Greek man and woman – the survivors of
Miletus, and Methymna and Teos, and al of Miltiades’ men and
their women. We filed ten triremes and as many Athenian grain
ships, and we sailed away. The Scythians burned Kalipolis
behind us, but we left it empty.
Datis landed an army on Lesbos, and he swept the island
with a chain of men al the way across, looking for rebels. He
crucified those he caught, and he took the best of the boys and
al of the unmarried girls, and sold them as slaves or took them
for the harem. Then he went to Chios and did the same.
There was no force in the world that could stop him. He
harried the Aeolians, seling their children to brothels, and then he
harried the Ionians, and humiliated them, island by island, until
there was no longer the sigh of a girl or the worship of Aphrodite
from Sardis to Delos. He broke the world of my youth. He
destroyed it. I grew to manhood in the world of Alcaeus and
Sappho. He destroyed Sappho’s school and sold the students to
satisfy the lusts of his soldiers.
You children know the world Athens made, and you think it
good. I love Athens – but there was a fairer world once, a
brighter place, with better poets and freer ways. Where Greeks
and Persians could be friends with each other, with Aegyptians
and Lydians.
Datis kiled it, to break the spirit of the Greeks and reduce
them to servitude. Truly, it was the rape of the islands that taught
us Greeks what the Persians were capable of, and showed us
us Greeks what the Persians were capable of, and showed us
why we would have to fight, or see our culture die.
Artaphernes resisted Datis, of course. But Datis was the
Great King’s nephew and had won the great battle, and
Artaphernes was considered soft on Greeks.
Datis raped the islands, and we sailed away and left them. I
sailed Black Raven into Corinth and unloaded the refugees,
While Black took him back to sea as a paid ship, for Athens, I
brought them north, to Plataea.
Idomeneus was a bastard, for al I loved him, and when the
treasure had gone over the side, none of it was mine or his – so I
stil had riches, and I spent them that summer. I settled forty
families in the vale of Asopus, and when I was finished, the
money of my piracy was gone, washed clean in rescuing them
from poverty, or so I hoped.
And then I was just another farmer with a forge, for my gold
was gone.
While I was spending money like a drunken sailor, I heard
the rumours – that I was a murderer, that I was accursed of
Apolo. Al my father’s friends spoke up for me, as wel as al my
own friends – Hermogenes and Epictetus the Younger, and
Myron and his sons – but my absences, my riches and the
constant murmurs of the sons of Simon, from Thebes, had their
effect. Men pushed me away, in the little ways that men use
when they are afraid. And to my shame, I responded with
arrogance and let the distance grow.
It was a dark winter, with one beam of light. For when I was
It was a dark winter, with one beam of light. For when I was
settling my Milesians, I met Antigonus of Thespiae, the young
basileus of that town. He took ten of my families and made them
citizens, and we became friends quickly – and as quickly, he
courted my sister. He was a wealthy man, and he might have had
any maiden in the valey of the Asopus, but he courted Pen, and
in the spring he wed her, and men came to that wedding who
had whispered about me, and my life was the better for it.
My mother stayed sober until the priest was gone, and I
kissed her, and she cried. Then I folded my finery away and
went back to the forge, and she went back to drinking, and men
went back to whispering that the Corvaxae were al accursed.
There were other fights, that last year. But the Ionian Revolt
died with Istes, as he fel, shouting ‘Miletus’.
I suppose we thought that the Long War was over. And I
had forgotten my slave girl. I tried to forget Briseis, and Melaina.
I tried to forget al of it. I ignored my armour and my helmet and
I worked on bronze kettles and drinking cups.
Until the archon came and asked me to return to teaching the
Pyrrhiche.
My calf throbbed and burned, and my hips hurt when we
danced, but they al admired my splendid Persian scale shirt and
my rich red cloak, and Myron came and embraced me.
‘Your new citizens have made us richer by a thousand gold
darics,’ he said.
‘And fifty shields in the phalanx,’ Hermogenes said.
The men of Plataea came to me, and clasped my arm. Glad
to have you back, they said, but now I sensed the hesitation in
their grips and the
tendency of their eyes to wander when they
spoke. Plataeans didn’t just take off to fight in other people’s
wars. Or show up with a passel of foreigners.
But I was the devil they knew. And by then, thanks to the
word-fame of my role at Lade, I was famous – so famous that it
was hard for my neighbours to accept me as a man who danced
and sweated and had trouble with his grape vines. Fame makes
you different – ask any man who has won the laurel at Olympia
or Nemea.
May none of you ever experience defeat, and the death of al
your friends. Idomeneus remained, back at the tomb of the hero,
but he was as mad as a wild dog. Black was fighting against
Aegina for Athens. Hermogenes was like another man – a good
man, but a farmer and a husband. Al the rest of them were
dead. Even Archilogos was dead. And I didn’t dare alow my
mind to think about Briseis. In some way, I let her be dead, as
wel.
But one of the saddest truths of men is that no grief lasts for
ever.
My helmet was waiting, just where I had left it, on a leather bag
on the great square bench that Pater had built. I had to hobble
around the shop – my calf never healed, and as I said, I never
ran wel again – and I was angry al the time. Hermogenes forced
me to work, and Tiraeus fired the forge, and after mending a few
pots, my hands remembered their duty.
I think it was a month after the Pyrrhiche, and perhaps three
months after Pen’s wedding, before I looked at the helmet. I was
surprised by what a good helmet it was, how far along I had left
it. It seemed like ten years – like a lifetime. There was the ding
where I’d mis-struck when the boy came to me with news from
Idomeneus. I blinked away tears. Then I took out the ding with
careful, methodical planishing, which seemed more restful than
dul.
When the bowl was as smooth as Briseis’s breasts, I turned
the helmet over and looked at the patterns I’d incised.
I had started the ravens on the cheekplates before I left. I did
not love Lord Apolo any more. But the ravens seemed apt. If I
ever stood in the phalanx again, I wanted to wear ravens.
Instead of going to work on the helmet, I took a piece of
scrap, pounded it out flat and tapped the ravens to life on a
practice piece. I made a dozen errors, but I worked through
patiently, reheating as I went. It was two days before I was
satisfied, and then I went back and put the ravens on the
cheekplates in an afternoon. I had time left to go and help my
slaves prop the grape vines. Then I went back, looked my work
over carefuly and polished it as the sun set behind the hils of
home. I filed the ravens with lead on the inside, planished a little
more.
Tiraeus kept an eye on me while he put a new bail on an old
bronze bucket for the temple. And then he looked at my work.
bronze bucket for the temple. And then he looked at my work.
‘You’ve grown up,’ he said. And then, his voice rough, he
pointed at the back of the skulpiece. ‘Little rough there.’
I picked up the hammer.
Ting-ting.
Ting-ting.
Part II
Marathon
Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the
Athenian,
who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Gela;
of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak,
and the long-haired Persian knows it well.
Epitaph on the Stele of Aeschylus the Playwright
9
It was late autumn, and the rains lashed the farm, and my slaves
stayed in by the fire and made baskets for the next year’s crop. I
was in the forge, hammering out the face of a new aspis – I
needed a shield.
The world was moving. I could feel it. The last cities of
Lesbos were faling to the Persians, and in Athens, the stasis –
the conflict – between the aristocrats and the demos was so bad
that it had come to murder in the streets, or so men said, and
Persian gold flowed like water to buy the best men. Closer to
home, Thebes had begun agitating to take our city, or at least
reduce our boundaries. And one voice carried clear from their
agora to ours – Simon, son of Simon, loud in condemnation of
our archon, Myron, and eager for my blood. Smal traders
bought us this news.
Empedocles the priest came out from Thebes in the last
Empedocles the priest came out from Thebes in the last
golden light of autumn, while the hilside of Cithaeron was a glow
of red oak leaves. When he had given the blessing of Hephaestus
to my forge and relit our fires after we swept the shop, he raised
Tiraeus to the rank of master, as the man deserved. Then he
looked at my helmet, running his thumb over the eyebrows and
using calipers to pick out the measurements of the ravens on the
cheekpieces.
‘This is master work,’ he said. He handed it to Tiraeus, and
Tiraeus handed it to Bion. ‘And you are the master in this shop,
so it is right that you too should be raised.’
I think that the fires in my heart relit that day. I had not
expected it, although in retrospect there were a thousand little
signs that my friends had made plans for me to be raised to the
rank of master. Other pieces were brought out by Tiraeus –
sister’s wedding guests – and Empedocles laughed with joy to
see them, and that laughter went through me like lightning on a
summer’s day. I was, you know, for a time, the master warrior
of al Helas – but it never gave me the joy that making gave me.
Oh, there’s a lie. Kiling can be a joy. Or merely a job, or
worse.
So, because two of us had been raised, we gave a special
sacrifice at the Temple of Hera, where my sister, now a matron,
had just been anointed as a priestess. She was two months
pregnant, just starting to show, and she officiated with the dignity
of her new status. And Antigonus of Thespiae saw nothing
of her new status. And Antigonus of Thespiae saw nothing
wrong with having a master smith as a brother-in-law, so he
came with a train of aristocrats to my sacrifice, and Myron
arrived with the best men of Plataea, and I saw the wine of a
whole crop drained in a few hours – but I reckoned it wine wel
spent, because my heart was beating again.
The next day, I took ten more amphorae of wine up the hil to
the tomb of the hero, and I gave a smaler feast for Idomeneus
and his men, and many of our Milesians as wel. We drank and
we danced. Idomeneus had built a great bonfire, five trees’
worth of wood, and we alternated between too hot and too
cold, drank the wine and sang.
It was late in the evening, and the fire burned high, and the
younger men and women were piling my straw into a great bale
– the better to share other warmths.
I was twenty-seven, an
d I had never felt so old. But I was
happy, pleasantly tired from dancing – the first good dancing
since my leg was wounded. I was a master smith, and men came
to my forge to talk about the affairs of the city. I might have been
content.
Idomeneus came and leaned against me in the warm-chil of
the fire’s edge.
‘What ever happened to that slave girl you took away to
Athens?’ he asked. ‘Did you sel her?’
I had forgotten.
The gods sometimes work al together, and the next day, when
my head rang like my forge from the wine, Hermes sent me a
my head rang like my forge from the wine, Hermes sent me a
messenger from Athens, with payment for a load of finished
bronze. He brought news that Miltiades had been arrested for
wishing to restore the tyranny. And he brought a letter from
Phrynichus, and a copy of his play, the famous Fall of Miletus.
When I read it, I wept.
In the letter, Phrynichus explained that the play had been
written to awaken the men of Athens to what the Persians were
up to. He said that he had written it so that men might recognize
Miltiades for his role in trying to save the East Greeks.
And he asked me to come to the opening of the play.
In Athens, they have a different form of theatre to what we
have in Boeotia, and I think I should explain. Once, in my
grandfather’s time, I suppose, drama was about the same
everywhere – much like a rhapsode singing the Iliad, except that
the poet or a professional musician performed works of praise to
the gods, or sometimes the story of a hero. In Athens, there was
always a set of plays – at least three – and the best of the three
received a prize in honour of the god Dionysus. Athens was
certainly not the only city to give praise to the god of wine, nor to
offer a prize for the finest poems in his honour, but Athens has a
tendency to take things to extremes.
The tyrant Hippias was a great worshipper of Dionysus, and
men say that he inaugurated the practice of using a chorus – a
group of singers – to support the main line of the play. So the
dramas became more like a team sport – the poet or singer and
his team of chorus members competed. It was demanding, both
physicaly and mentaly, and that competition fired men to make
physicaly and mentaly, and that competition fired men to make
it better, more complex, more vivid.