King was welcome to lay them low. And more such stuff. In that
hour, as I buled my away across the Agora and felt every
wound on my body, I heard every cringing excuse to avoid war,
every noble sentiment against it, speeches of cowardice and
speeches of sublime nobility.
When I was almost close enough to touch Miltiades, a man
ascended the bema who looked like one of Themistocles’ men.
He stood with his head bowed for a moment, and then he raised
it.
‘What more can we do?’ he asked. ‘Miltiades asks that we
form the phalanx and march to defend the coast – even to save
form the phalanx and march to defend the coast – even to save
Chalcis. But I ask – why must we fight alone? We have wals.
And Sparta is not coming. Thebes has made their own peace.
We are alone, men of Athens. Are we the protectors of Greece?
Sparta craves that title – let them act the part.’
He got quite a cheer, too.
While men were cheering – it is easy to cheer for other men
to do the hard work while you sit home, I find – Miltiades raised
his head. He was plainly dressed, for him, in a dark chlamys over
a plain white chiton with one stripe. The gold pin at his shoulder
was his only concession to rank. He raised his head and his eyes
met mine – and lit up the way my eyes lit when they crossed with
Euphoria’s.
He waited until he could clasp my hand. And then he puled
me sharply, so that he towed me as one ship wil tow another
after a storm. He didn’t bother to mount the bema. He simply
raised my hand, the way a judge in games raises the hand of a
victor.
‘You lie,’ he roared. ‘Plataea is here!’
Chaos.
Men shouted – one thing, and then another. I saw my father-
in-law in the crowd, and I saw Aristides, and I saw Cleitus. I
had thought him an exile until then. Our eyes met, and the hate
flowed like wine.
I was stil locked in that when the archon basileus pushed to
my side.
‘Do you have an army?’ he asked.
‘A thousand hoplites,’ I said. ‘Which is every man we have.’
‘A thousand hoplites,’ I said. ‘Which is every man we have.’
He embraced me. He, an aristocrat, who had no love for me
or mine, but he embraced me, and then he pointed to the bema.
‘You have my permission to speak,’ he said.
So, although I was a foreigner, I mounted the speaker’s
platform. The crowd was not quiet, but I didn’t care. I raised my
hand.
‘I have brought the ful muster of Plataea,’ I shouted. ‘And
left Thebes afraid. Plataea stands with Athens!’
And by the time I came down from the platform, they were
already voting Aristides and Miltiades as strategoi, and sending
the phalanx out to fight.
As every schoolboy knows, the assembly voted ten strategoi.
Aristides and Miltiades were but two of them, and Cleitus of the
Alcmaeonids a third. And even when they began to muster the
phalanx, half of the generals were stil dead set against war – or
at least, offensive war. The very next thing they did was to vote
for a runner to be sent to Sparta to beg for help – that’s how it
sounded to me, anyway. And why not? The Spartans, for al my
sneers, were the best soldiers in Greece – perhaps in the world.
I stood with Miltiades as he hurried men to get their kit.
Many men of the phalanx were already prepared – had been so
for days. Men of the other party were unprepared, or at least
most were, so assured were they that the phalanx would not
march.
The polemarch of Athens was Calimachus of Aphidna. He
was an older man with a fine reputation, both as a warrior and as
was an older man with a fine reputation, both as a warrior and as
a politician. I have heard men say that he hesitated, that he only
marched when Miltiades threatened to take his men and sail
away – Miltiades, after al, had his own army from the
Chersonese, almost a thousand hoplites with more military
experience than the rest of Athens put together. Not so. Let us
Remember, this was before the Persian fleet had even been
sighted. The Persians were just a rumour of terror up the coast –
although on a clear day, you could see the fires in Euboea rising
to the heavens.
He was hesitant for a reason. I tasted this hesitancy myself.
It is one thing to march in the phalanx. It is another to go in
the front rank – and yet another to be a kiler of men, a hero, a
man who can change a battle. But all of them – the kiler, the
front-ranker, the rear-ranker – have more in common than any
of them share with the polemarch and the strategos. On their
shoulders rests the burden – fight, or don’t fight. March or don’t
march. Choose correctly, and your name wil live for ever. For
ever. Choose badly, or get cursed by the gods, and your city is
lost, your friends kiled, your elders butchered, your women
raped and sold as slaves.
Understand?
If you aren’t hesitant about fighting, then you are a fucking
idiot.
And those men who voted against the fight? They had to go
and stand shoulder to shoulder with the men who voted for the
and stand shoulder to shoulder with the men who voted for the
fight, and each had to depend on the other. The city was divided
about evenly, I’d say, half for glory, half for caution.
Calimachus was right to hesitate.
I watched the chaotic preparations – the same mess as our
Plataean preparations but magnified ten times – and shook my
head.
‘Why such a hurry?’ I asked. ‘Tomorrow morning wil be as
good as this evening – and surely you won’t march before
dark?’
Miltiades pursed his lips. ‘If you hadn’t come just when you
did, god-sent, I would not have carried this debate,’ he said.
Slaves came up with his kit, and his hypaspist, a Thracian I’d
seen with him before, shouldered his shield and flashed me a
blond smile.
Miltiades smiled himself when he saw his panoply. ‘If I can
get them clear of the city before night fals,’ he said, ‘I have a
chance. If we’re here in the morning, we’l never march.’ He
shrugged. ‘I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. I have a feel
for these things.’
Aristides came, surrounded by men I knew – Sophanes, of
course, but also Agios and Phrynichus and a dozen oarsmen I
recognized, al dressed as hoplites. Their kit was as good as our
front-rankers. Athens has money, and money buys armour.
‘I suggested that we free a thousand slaves and put them in
the ranks,’ Aristides said. ‘And these fools declined, saying that
it would be too hard to choose what tribes they would go to.’
He shook his head. ‘Some of them even wanted to decline the
He shook his head. ‘Some of them even wanted to decline the
service of the armed me
tics.’
I stood there while the sun sank, and I had nothing to do but
think. After a few minutes, or even an hour, I turned to Aristides.
‘Plataea wil take your freedmen,’ I said. ‘Put them in my rear
ranks. Then your proud citizens have nothing to complain about.’
He gave me a thin-lipped smile. ‘Tomorrow,’ Aristides said.
‘Today, we march out of the city. Miltiades is right. Today, or
never.’
The shadows were long enough to make a short man tal
when Miltiades took his tribe out of the gate. It was a purely
symbolic march – Miltiades was to Athens as I was to little
Plataea, and his men were ready. Many carried their own gear,
poor men who knew no other trade but fighting, and they had
been assembled and ready since the last vote.
Aristides marched next, with the men of the Antiochis. By the
time Miltiades’ men cleared the sacred gate, Aristides’ men were
ready to march, even though his tribe, by il-chance, contained
many of those most determinedly against the war.
The other strategoi were less ready, but Aristides had set the
example by marching despite having a third of his taxis missing,
and so the other taxeis of the tribes marched away as soon as
their turns came. I stood and waited – after al, I had a horse –
and what I saw heartened me. Men continued to come to the
square behind the sacred gate, kiss their wives, pour a quick
libation and run down the road, with a slave or a servant and a
donkey hurrying after them, so that there was a constant flow of
stragglers and sluggards behind the march of the army. The
stragglers and sluggards behind the march of the army. The
strategoi had left almost half the army behind. It could have been
a disaster, but the men of Athens – even those against the war –
did their duty.
When I mounted my horse, darkness was faling.
‘Have we won, do you think?’ Gelon asked me. I laughed to
hear him say ‘we’.
‘We haven’t won,’ I said. ‘We haven’t lost. We’ve marched,
and if Miltiades is to be believed, that means we’re stil in the
game.’
‘You could free me now,’ Gelon said. ‘No one around to kil
me.’
I nodded. ‘I could, but I won’t. You fight in the phalanx –
and fight wel. If you live, I’l free you.’
‘Free me first,’ he said. ‘I’m fucked if I’m going to fight as a
slave. No one wil want me anyway. Who ever heard of a slave
hoplite?’
That was true. ‘I tel you what, Gelon. If the Athenians free
their slaves, I’l put you in with them.’
‘As a slave?’ he asked, daring.
‘As a free man, you whoreson. Now get your arse moving
down the road.’ Gelon made me laugh, in a dark way. I was
coming to like him. He bore slavery with a kind of amused
contempt that made it impossible for me to punish him while he
showed his resistance every minute. I respected that. I also
thought that another man – Idomeneus, for instance – would
have beaten him to a pulp.
The sun was setting, and although we didn’t know it yet, Chalcis
had just been stormed. One of the richest cities in Greece – an
ancient rival of Athens, at sea and on land, the city that colonized
Sicily and southern Italy and even the coast of Asia – had falen
by treachery to the Great King. Datis ordered the warriors
massacred and the women and children sold into slavery, just as
he had at Miletus and Lesbos.
His tame Greeks turned away from the slaughter, but the
Sakai and the Medes and the Persians butchered the men and
the elderly and set fire to the city – every house and every
temple. The column of smoke rose to the heavens like a
sacrificial fire, and could be seen from the Acropolis, as Datis
intended.
Datis sent his cavalry across the bridge to sow terror the way
a farmer sows barley.
The women were loaded into his troop ships, weeping at their
state – women who had been wives, who had known love, who
had sat at their looms proud of their family names.
And the ships, crewed by Phoenicians and Ionian Greeks,
got their sterns in the water, unfolded the mighty wings of their
oars and turned their ram-prows south, with a gentle wind at
their backs and a protected sea. It was too late for Poseidon to
intervene. The Great King’s fleet was at sea, the oars puled to
the lamentations of five thousand new slaves.
Their rams were pointed at Attica. And even as we marched
out of Athens and made our first camp in the hils north of the
out of Athens and made our first camp in the hils north of the
city, even as men groused or had second thoughts, Datis’s
scouts were riding through the long grass by the beach, at
Marathon.
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 puled 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 al the ships Athens
could muster might have made fifty huls. Before Lade, fifty huls
could muster might have made fifty huls. Before Lade, fifty huls
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
huls were al on the beach at Piraeus, al 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 stil 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 usualy 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 dut
y 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 smal farmers – al strong men – may
never have eaten a meal under the wheel of the heavens in their
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 felow
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 – al 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, smal
farmers and aristocrats, too) and men of the sea (fishermen,
coastal men and oarsmen). It was a briliant 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 briliant 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.
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 –