Killer of Men

by Christian Cameron

  Arimnestos – Child of Chalkeotechnes and Euthalia.

  Aristagoras – Son of Molpagoras, nephew of Histiaeus. Aristagoras led Miletus while Histiaeus was a virtual prisoner of the Great King Darius at Susa. Aristagoras seems to have initiated the Ionian Revolt – and later to have regretted it.

  Aristides – Son of Lysimachus, lived roughly 525 – 468 BC, known later in life as ‘The Just’. Perhaps best known as one of the commanders at Marathon. Usually sided with the Aristocratic party.

  Artaphernes – Brother of Darius, Great King of Persia, and Satrap of Sardis. A senior Persian with powerful connections.

  Bion – A slave name, meaning ‘life’. The most loyal family retainer of the Corvaxae.

  Briseis – Daughter of Hipponax, sister of Archilogos.

  Calchas – A former warrior, now the keeper of the shrine of the Plataean Hero of Troy, Leitus.

  Chalkeotechnes – The Smith of Plataea; head of the family Corvaxae, who claim descent from Herakles.

  Chalkidis – Brother of Arimnestos, son of Chalkeotechnes.

  Darius – King of Kings, the lord of the Persian Empire, brother to Artaphernes.

  Draco – Wheelwright and wagon builder of Plataea, a leading man of the town.

  Empedocles – A priest of Hephaestus, the Smith God.

  Epaphroditos – A warrior, an aristocrat of Lesbos.

  Eualcidas – A Hero. Eualcidas is typical of a class of aristocratic men – professional warriors, adventurers, occasionally pirates or merchants by turns. From Euboeoa.

  Heraclitus – circa 535 – 475 BC. One of the ancient world’s most famous philosophers. Born to aristocratic family, he chose philosophy over political power. Perhaps most famous for his statement about time, ‘You cannot step twice into the same river’. His belief that ‘strife is justice’ and other similar sayings which you’ll find scattered through these pages made him a favorite with Nietzche. His works, mostly now lost, probably established the later philosophy of Stoicism.

  Herakleides – An Aeolian, a Greek of Asia Minor. With his brothers Nestor and Orestes, he becomes a retainer – a warrior – in service to Arimnestos. It is easy, when looking at the birth of Greek democracy, to see the whole form of modern government firmly established – but at the time of this book, democracy was less than skin deep and most armies were formed of semi-feudal war bands following an aristocrat.

  Heraklides – Aristides’s helmsman, a lower class Athenian who has made a name for himself in war.

  Hermogenes – Son of Bion, Arimnestos’s slave.

  Hesiod – A great poet (or a great tradition of poetry) from Boeotia in Greece, Hesiod’s ‘Works and Days’ and ‘Theogony’ were widely read in the sixth century and remain fresh today – they are the chief source we have on Greek farming, and this book owes an enormous debt to them.

  Hippias – Last tyrant of Athens, overthrown around 510 BC (that is, just around the beginning of this book), Hippias escaped into exile and became a pensioner of Darius of Persia.

  Hipponax – 540 BC – c. 498 BC. A Greek poet and satirist, considered the inventor of parody. He is supposed to have said ‘There are two days when a woman is a pleasure: the day one marries her and the day one buries her’.

  Histiaeus – Tyrant of Miletus and ally of Darius of Persia, possible originator of the plan for the Ionian Revolt.

  Homer – Another great poet, roughly Hesiod’s contemporary (give or take fifty years!) and again, possibly more a poetic tradition than an individual man. Homer is reputed as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two great epic poems which, between them, largely defined what heroism and aristocratic good behavior should be in Greek society – and, you might say, to this very day.

  Kylix – A boy, slave of Hipponax.

  Miltiades – Tyrant of the Thracian Chersonese. His son, Cimon or Kimon, rose to be a great man in Athenian politics. Probably Miltiades was the author of the Athenian victory of Marathon, but Miltiades was a complex man, a pirate, a warlord, and a supporter of Athenian democracy.

  Penelope – Daughter of Chalkeotechnes, sister of Arimnestos.

  Sappho – A Greek poetess from the island of Lesbos, born sometime around 630 BC and died between 570 and 550 BC. Her father was probably Lord of Eressos. Widely considered the greatest lyric poet of Ancient Greece.

  Simonalkes – Head of the collateral branch of the Plataean Corvaxae, cousin to Arimnestos.

  Simonides – Another great lyric poet, he lived circa 556 BC – 468 BC, and his nephew, Bacchylides, was as famous as he. Perhaps best known for his epigrams, one of which is:

  Ω ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτιτῇδε

  κείμεθα, τοῖςκείνωνῥήμασι πειθόμενοι

  Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,

  That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

  Thales – circa 624 BC – c. 546 BC The first philosopher of the Greek tradition, whose writings were still current in Arimnestos’s time. Thales used geometry to solve problems such as calculating the height of the pyramids in Aegypt and the distance of ships from the shore. He made at least one trip to Aegypt. He is widely accepted as the founder of western mathematics.

  Theognis – Theognis of Megara was almost certainly not one man but a whole canon of aristocratic poetry under that name, much of it practical. There are maxims, many very wise, laments on the decline of man and the age, and the woes of old age and poverty, songs for symposia, etc. In later sections there are songs and poems about homosexual love and laments for failed romances. Despite widespread attributions, there was, at some point, a real Theognis who may have lived in the mid-6th century BC, or just before the events of Killer of Men. His poetry would have been central to the world of Arimnestos’s mother.

  It may seem odd to you, thugater, who has only known me as an old man, and an aristocrat, that I was once young and poor. And indeed, when the singers rise to sing of our ancestors, and men say that we are descended from Heracles and Zeus, I always laugh in my gut, because when I was young the smell of sheep dung was more common in our house than the smell of incense, and my mother’s hands were red and hard, despite her high birth and constant complaints.

  But you, who have soft hands and whose only work is the loom, should know that those days were happy days too. And that it is worth knowing that a man can live as happily on a farm in Boeotia as in a city in Asia. Life is not all rose water and porphyry.

  Listen then. And may the Muses aid me – I am old, and my memory may lose the furrow where the plough should go. I pour this libation to Heracles, my ancestor, who endured the twelve labours, and to all the jealous gods, who gave me this good life, despite famine and peril, and a long war.

  Part I

  The Lovely Bloom of Youth

  As long as some mortal has the lovely bloom of youth, he plans with a light heart many things that are never to be fulfilled.

  Simonides, fr. 20

  1

  The thing that I remember best – and maybe it’s my first memory, too – is the forge. My father, the smith – aye, he farmed too, because every free man in Boeotia counted his wealth in farmland – but Pater was the bronze-smith, the best in our village, the best in Plataea, and women said that he had the touch of the god upon him, because he had a battle wound that made him lame in his left foot, and because his pots never leaked. We were simple folk in Boeotia, not fancy boys like Athenians or joyless killers like the men of Sparta – we valued a man who made a pot that didn’t leak. When Pater pounded out a seam, that seam held. And he liked to add more – he was always a man to give more than he got, so that a housewife who paid him ten hard-won drachmas and a bowl of potted rabbit might find that Pater had put a carefully tooled likeness of Demeter or Hecate beneath the rim of the pot, or worked her name into the handle of the cauldron or tripod.

  Pater did good work and he was fair. What’s more, he had stood his ground twice in the storm of bronze, so that every
man knew his measure. And for all that, he was always ready to share a cup of wine, so the front of the smithy had become a gathering place for all the men of our little village on a fair day when the ploughing was done – and sometimes even a singer or a minstrel, a rhapsode. The smithy itself was like a lord’s hall, as men brought Pater their quarrels – all except his own bloody family, and more of that later – or came to tell him their little triumphs.

  He was not much as a father. Not that he hit me more than a dozen times, and every one deserved, as I still remember. I once used my father’s name to buy a knife in the polis – a foolish thing, but I wanted that knife. It broke in my hand later – yet another tale, lass – but I meant no harm. When Pater learned that I had pledged his name for a simple blade he’d have made me himself, he struck me with the whole weight of his fist. I cried for a day from the shame.

  He had the raising of us all to himself, you see. My mother was drunk from the time I first remember her – drinking away the forge, Pater would say when the darkness was on him. She’s your grandmother, lass – I shouldn’t speak ill of her, and I’ll try to tell her true, but it’s not pretty.

  She was the daughter of a lord, a real lord, a basileus from down the valley in Thespiae. They met at the Great Daidala in the year of the Olympics, and the rumour of my youth had it that she was the wildest and the most beautiful of all the daughters of Apollo, and that Pater swept her up in his great arms and carried her off in the old way, and that the basileus swore a curse on their marriage.

  I respect the gods – I’ve seen them. But I’m not one to believe that Hera comes to curse a woman’s womb, nor Ares to push a spear aside. The gods love them that love themselves – Mater said that, so she wasn’t a total failure as a mother, I reckon. But she never did aught to love herself, and her curse was her looks and her birth.

  She had three children for Pater. I was the middle one – my older brother came first by a year, and he should have had the smithy and maybe the farm besides, but I never faulted him for it. He had red hair and we called him ‘Chalkidis’, the copper boy. He was big and brave and all a boy could want in an older brother.

  I had a sister, too – still do, unless Artemis put an arrow into her. My mother gave her the name of Penelope, and the gods must have been listening.

  I know nothing of those first years, when Pater was as handsome as a god, and Mater loved him, and she sang in the forge. Men say they were like gods, but men say a great many things when an event is safely in the past – they tell a lot of lies. I’ll no doubt tell you a few myself. Old man’s prerogative. I gathered that they were happy, though.

  But nothing ended as my mother expected. I think she wanted something greater from my father, or from herself, or perhaps from the gods. She began to go up in the hills with the maenads and ran wild with other women, and there were words in the forge. And then came the first of the Theban years – when the men of Thebes came against us.

  What do you know of Thebes? It is a name in legend to you. To us, it was the curse of our lives – poor Plataea, so far from the gods, so close to Thebes. Thebes was a city that could muster fifteen thousand hoplites, while we could, in an emergency and freeing and arming our most trustworthy slaves, muster fifteen hundred good men. And this is before we made the Great Alliance with Athens. So we were a lonely little polis with no friends, like a man whose plough is broken and none of his neighbours have a plough to loan.

  They came at us just after the grain harvest, and the men went off to war. Whenever I hear the Iliad, thugater, I weep when I hear of mighty Hector’s son being afraid of his father’s shining helmet. How well I remember it, and Pater standing there in his panoply, the image of Ares. He had a bronze-faced shield and a splendid helmet he had forged himself from one piece of bronze. His horsehair plume was black and red for the smith god. He wore a breastplate of solid bronze, again of his own making, and thigh guards and arm guards of a kind you scarcely see any more – aye, they were better men. He carried two spears in the old way, and long greaves on his legs, and when he stood in the courtyard with the whole panoply he gleamed like gold.

  Mater was drunk when she poured the libation. I can see it in my head – she came out in a white chiton, like a kore going to sacrifice, but the chiton had purple stains. When she went to bless his shield she stumbled and poured wine down his leg, and the slaves murmured. And she wept, and ran inside.

  So Pater went off to fight Thebes, and he came back carried by two men on his chlamys and his spears, and his shield was gone. We lost. And Pater lost most of the use of his left leg, where Mater spilled the wine, and after that there was nothing between them but silence.

  I suppose I was five. Chalkidis was six, and we lay in the loft of the barn and he whispered to me about Pater’s part in the battle and about our cousins – the grandsons of Pater’s father’s brother. Aye, thugater, we count such relations close in Boeotia. Pater had no brothers – his father must have read Hesiod one too many times – and this batch of surly cousins were the nearest relations I had on Pater’s side. On Mater’s side they scarcely allowed that we were kin – until later, and that’s another tale, but a happier one.

  My brother said that Pater was a hero, that he’d stood his ground when other men ran, and he saved many lives – and that when the Thebans took him, they hadn’t stripped him, but ransomed him like a lord. I was young and I knew nothing of ransom, only that Pater, who towered over me like a god, was unable to walk and his mood was dark.

  ‘The other Corvaxae were the first to run,’ Chalkidis whispered. ‘They ran and left Pater’s side open to the spears, and now they slink through the town and fear what Pater will say.’

  We were the Corvaxae – the men of the Raven. Apollo’s raven. Look up, lass – there’s the black bird on my aspis, and may the gods send I never feel it on my arm again! You know what the sage says – count no man happy until he is dead. I pour a libation in his memory – may his shade taste the wine.

  The black bird is also on our sails and on our house. I was five – I knew little of this, except that I knew that Pater told me it was a good omen when a raven landed on the roof of the smithy. And our women were Corvaxae, too – black-haired and pale-skinned, and clannish. No man in our valley wanted to cross my mother, or my sister, in their day. They were Ravens of Apollo.

  And the truth is that my story starts in that fight. It is from that day that the other Corvaxae turned against Pater, and then against me. And from that day that the men of Plataea decided to find a new way of keeping their little town free of Thebes.

  It took Pater almost a year to get to his feet. Before that year, I reckon we were rich, as peasants in Boeotia measured riches. We had a yoke of oxen and two ploughs, a house built of stone with a tower, a barn that stood all weather and the smithy. Pater wore the full panoply when the muster was called, like a lord. We ate meat on feast days and we had wine all year.

  But I was old enough to understand that at the end of that year we were not rich. Mater’s gold pin went, and all our metal cups. And my first bad memory – my first memory of fear – is from that year.

  Simonalkes – the eldest of the other branch of the Corvaxae, a big, strong man with a dark face – came to our house. Pater had to walk with a crutch, but he rose as fast as he could, cursing the slaves who helped him. My brother was in the andron – the men’s room – pouring wine for Simon like a proper boy. Simon put his feet up on a bench.

  ‘You’ll be needing money,’ Simon said to Pater. Not even a greeting.

  Pater’s face grew red, but he bowed his head. ‘Are you offering me aid, cousin?’

  Simon shook his head. ‘You need no charity. I’ll offer you a loan against the farm.’

  Pater shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. If Pater thought that he was hiding his anger, he was wrong.

  ‘Still too proud, smith?’ Simon said, and his lip curled.

  ‘Proud enough to stand my ground,’ Pater said, and Simon’s face changed colo
ur. He got up.

  ‘Is this the famous hospitality of the Corvaxae?’ Simon said. ‘Or has your whore of a wife debased you, too?’ He looked at me. ‘Neither of these boys has your look, cousin.’

  ‘Leave my house,’ Pater said.

  ‘I came to tender help,’ Simon said, ‘but I’m met by accusations and insults.’

  ‘Leave my house,’ Pater said.

  Simon hooked his fingers in his belt and planted his feet. He looked around. ‘Is it your house, cousin?’ He smiled grimly. ‘Our grandfather built this house. Why is it yours?’ Simon sneered – he was always good at sneering – and snapped his fingers. ‘Perhaps you’ll marry again and get an heir.’

  ‘My sons are my heirs,’ Pater said carefully, as if speaking a foreign language.

  ‘Your sons are the children of some strangers on the hillside,’ our cousin said.

  Pater looked as angry as I’d ever known him, and I’d never seen two grown men take this tone – the tone of hate. I’d heard it from Mater in the women’s quarters, but I’d never heard it rise to conflict. I was afraid. And what was I hearing? It was as if cousin Simon was saying that I was not my father’s son.

  ‘Bion!’ Pater shouted, and his biggest slave came running. Bion was a strong man, a trustworthy man with a wife and children who knew he’d be freed as soon as the money came back, and he was loyal. That’s right, thugater. Melissa is Bion’s granddaughter, and now she’s your handmaiden. She’s never been a slave, but Bion was once. As was I, lass, so don’t you wrinkle your nose.

  ‘You’ll be even poorer if I have to kill your slave,’ Simon said.

  Pater thumped one crutch-step closer and his heavy staff shot out and caught Simon in the shin. Simon went down and then Pater hit him in the groin, so that he screamed like a woman in childbirth – I knew that sound well enough, because Bion’s wife provided him with a child every year.