Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  Hipponax — 540-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 behaviour 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 the author of the Athenian victory of Marathon, 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 Eresus. 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 c.556–468 BC, and his nephew, Bacchylides, was as famous as he. Perhaps best known for his epigrams, one of which is:

  Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,

  That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

  Thales — c.624-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 this series. His poetry would have been central to the world of Arimnestos’s mother.

  I’m not any younger, and that’s a fact. But I gather my story’s a good one. Or you young people wouldn’t cluster around so eagerly to hear my tale.

  Honey, you’ve brought your scribbler back to me. He’s promised to write it all out in the new way, although if I was allowed, I’d rather hear a rhapsode sing it the old way. But the old ways died with the Medes, didn’t they? It’s all different now. The world I’m telling you about is as dead as old Homer’s heroes at Troy. Even my thugater here thinks I’m the relic of a time when the gods still walked abroad. Eh?

  You young people make me laugh. You’re soft. But you’re soft because we killed all the monsters. And whose fault is that?

  And the blushing girl’s come back — ah, it makes me younger just to see you, child. I’d take you myself, but all my other wives would object. Hah! Look at that colour on her face, my young friends. There’s fire under that skin. Marry her quick, before the fire catches somewhere it oughtn’t.

  It looks to me as if my daughter has brought every young sprig in the town, and some foreigners from up the coast as well, just to hear her old man speak of his fate. Flattering in a way — but you know that I’ll tell you of Marathon. And you know that there is no nobler moment in all the history of men — of Hellenes. We stood against them, man to man, and we were better.

  But it didn’t start that way, not by as long a ride as a man could make in a year on a good horse.

  For those of you who missed the first nights of my rambling story, I’m Arimnestos of Plataea. I told the story of how my father was the bronze-smith of our city, and how we marched to fight the Spartans at Oinoe, and fought three battles in a week. How he was murdered by his cousin Simon. How Simon sold me as a slave, far to the east among the men of Ionia, and how I grew to manhood as a slave in the house of a fine poet in Ephesus, one of the greatest cities in the world, right under the shadow of the Temple of Artemis. I was slave to Hipponax the poet and his son Archilogos. In time they freed me. I became a warrior, and then a great warrior, but when the Long War began — the war between the Medes and the Greeks — I served with the Athenians at Sardis.

  Why, you might ask. My thugater will groan to hear me tell this again, but I loved Briseis. Indeed, to say I loved her — Hipponax’s dark-haired daughter, Artemis’s avatar and perhaps Aphrodite’s as well, Helen returned to earth — well, to say I loved her is to say nothing. As you will hear, if you stay to listen.

  Briseis wasn’t the only person I loved in Ephesus. I loved Archilogos — the true friend of my youth. We were well matched in everything. I was his companion, first as a slave, and then free — and we competed. At everything. And I also loved Heraclitus, the greatest philosopher of his day. To me, the greatest ever, almost like a god in his wisdom. He, and he alone, kept me from growing to manhood as a pure killer. He gave me advice which I ignored — but which stayed in my head. To this day, in fact. He taught me that the river of our lives flows on and on and can never be reclaimed. Later, I knew that he’d tried to keep me from Briseis.

  When her father caught us together, it was the end of my youth. I was cast out of the household, and that’s why I was with the Athenians at Sardis, and not in the phalanx of the men of Ephesus to save Hipponax when the Medes gave him his mortal wound.

  I found him screaming on the battlefield, and I sent him on the last journey because I loved him, even though he had been my owner. It was done with love, but his son, Archilogos, did not see it that way, and we became foes.

  I spent the next years of the Ionian Revolt — the first years of the Long War — gaining word-fame with every blow I struck. I should blush to tell it — but why? When I served at Sardis, I was a man that other men would trust at their side in the phalanx. By the time I led my ship into the Persians at the big fight at Cyprus, I was a warrior that other men feared in the storm of bronze.

  The Greeks won the sea-fight but lost on land, that day at Cyprus. And the back of the revolt should have been broken, but it was not. We retreated to Chios and Lesbos, and I joined Miltiades of Athens — a great aristocrat, and a great pirate — and we got new allies, and the fighting switched to the Chersonese — the land of the Trojan War. We fought the Medes by sea and land. Sometimes we bested them. Miltiades made money and so did I. I owned my own ship, and I was rich.

  I killed many men.

  And then we faced the Medes in Thrace — just a few ships from each side. By then, Briseis had married the most powerful man in the Greek revolt — and had found him a broken reed. We beat the Persians and their Thracian allies and I killed her husband, even though he was supposedly on my side. I laugh even now — that was a good killing, and I spit on his shade.

  But she didn’t want me, except in her bed and in her thoughts. Briseis loved me as I loved her — but she meant to be Queen of the Ionians, not a pirate’s trull, and all I was in those years was a bloodyhanded pirate.

  Fair enough. But it shattered me for a while.

  I left Thrace and I left Miltiades, and I went home to Plataea. Where the man who had killed my father and married my mother was lording it over the family farm.

  Simon, and his four sons. My cousins.

  Your cousins too, thugater. Simon was a wreck of a man and a coward, but I’d not say the same of his get. They were tough bastards. I didn’t hack him down. I went to the assembly, as my master Heraclitus would have wanted me to do.

  The law killed
old Simon the coward, but his sons wanted revenge.

  And the Persians were determined to finish off the Ionians and put the Greeks under their heel.

  And Briseis kept marrying great men, and finding them wanting.

  The world, you know, is shaped like the bowl of an aspis. Out on the rim flows the edge of the river-sea that circles all, and up where the porpax binds a man’s arm is the sun and the moon, and the great circle of earth fills all between. Medes and Persians, Scythians and Greeks and Ionians and Aeolians and Italians and Aethiopians and Aegyptians and Africans and Lydians and Phrygians and Carians and Celts and Phoenicians and the gods know who else fill the bowl of the aspis from rim to rim. And in those days, as the Long War began to take hold like a new-started fire on dry kindling, you could hear men talking of war, making war, killing, dying, making weapons and training in their use, all across the bowl of that aspis from rim to rim, until the murmur of the bronze-clad god’s chorus filled the world.

  It was the sixth year of the Long War, and Hipparchus was archon in Athens, and Myron was archon for his second term in Plataea. Tisikrites of Croton won the stade sprint at Olympia. The weather was good, the crops were rolling in.

  I thought I might settle down and make myself a bronze-smith and a farmer, like my father before me.

  Ares must have laughed.

  Part I

  Lade

  The time will come, Milesians, devisers of evil deeds

  When many will feast on you; a splendid gift for them,

  Your wives will wash the feet of many long-haired men,

  And other men will assume the care of my temple at Didyma

  Oracle of Apollo to the Men of Miletus, In Herodotus, Book 6:19

  1

  Shield up.

  Thrust overhand.

  Turn — catch the spear on the rim of my shield, pivot on my toes and thrust at my opponent.

  He catches my spear on his shield and grins. I can see the flash of his grin in the tau of his Corinthian helmet’s faceplate. Then his plumes nod as he turns his head — checks the man behind him.

  I thrust overhand, hard.

  He catches my blow, pivots on the balls of his feet and steps back with his shield facing me.

  His file-mate pushes past him, a heavy overhand blow driving me back half a step.

  The music rises, the aulos pipe sounding faster, the drums beating the rhythm like the sound of marching feet.

  I sidestep, faster, and my shield rim flashes like a live thing. My black spear is an iron-tipped tongue of death in my strong right hand and I am one with the men to the right and left, the men behind. I am not Arimnestos the killer of men. I am only one Plataean, and together, we are this.

  ‘Plataeans!’ I roar.

  I plant my right foot. Every man in the front rank does the same, and the pipes howl, and every man crouches, screams and pushes forward, and three hundred voices call: The Ravens of Apollo! The roar shakes the walls and echoes from the Temple of Hera.

  The music falls silent, and after a pause the whole assembly — all the free men and women, the slaves, the freedmen — erupt in applause.

  Under my armour, I am covered in sweat.

  Hermogenes — my opponent — puts his arms around me. ‘That was. .’

  There are no words to describe how good that was. We danced the Pyrrhiche, the war dance, with the picked three hundred men of Plataea, and Ares himself must have watched us.

  Older men — the archon, the lawmakers — clasp my hand. My back is slapped so often that I worry they are pulling the laces on my scale armour.

  Good to have you back, they all say.

  I am happy.

  Ting-ting.

  Ting-ting.

  The day after the feast of Ares, and I was back at work — planishing. Planishing is when you use a hammer to smooth out finished work — tap-tap, tap-tap. The hammers need to be polished, and the anvil needs to be crisp and well surfaced, and you need a stake of just the right shape with a polished surface, and your strokes need to be perfectly placed, crisp and all the same strength. It was not my strong point.

  I remember it well, because I was making myself a new helmet, and thinking of Miltiades. All my other orders were completed, winter was coming and there was no reason that I shouldn’t play with my equipment. My barns were full, my people fed and I had a sack of silver buried under the shop floor — without having to send to Miltiades for my gold. I had decided I would not go back to Miltiades.

  Miltiades of Athens — the tyrant of the Chersonese — was my father’s patron, and sometimes mine. I’d fought and killed for him, but I’d left him when the killing became a habit I had to break. And when Briseis said she would not have me. Hah! One of those is the true reason.

  But Athens, mighty Athens — the bulwark of the Hellenes against the Persians — was deeply divided. Miltiades was no hero back then. Most Athenians saw him as a fool and a tyrant who was bringing the wrath of the Great King of Persia down on Greece. Rumour came over the mountains from Attica and Athens that he was to be declared atimos and lose his citizen rights — that he would be exiled — that he would be murdered. We heard that the faction of the tyrant-slayers — the Alcmaeonids — was ascendant.

  I have to tell you, as an aside, that calling the Alcmaeonids tyrant- slayers is both incorrect and laughable, but a fine example of how easily fooled mortal men are by good orators. The mighty Alcmaeonids, the richest family in Attica and perhaps all of Greece — one of their many scions killed one of Pisistratus’s sons in Athens. It was a private quarrel, but we still call the overhand sword cut the ‘Harmodius blow’, and most men think that the dead man was the tyrant of Athens.

  In fact, the only reason that the Alcmaeonids would have arranged the death of the Pisistratids was so that they could seize the city and rule themselves. They were all in the game — all the great men of Athens. They prated about democracy, but what they wanted was power.

  In the early days of the Long War, I was bitter — disillusioned, even — to find that the heroic Miltiades was a pirate and a thief, not a freedom fighter. Oh, he was brave as Achilles and wily as Odysseus, but beneath his aristocratic manners lurked a man who would kill a beggar for an obol if it would finance his schemes. After a while, I took to hating him for his failure to be the man I wanted him to be. But I’ll tell you this, my children — he was a better man than any of the Pisistratids or the Alcmaeonids. When he wanted something, he reached for it.

  At any rate, it was late summer and the rumours of open conflict in Athens, our ally, had begun to disturb even sleepy Plataea. As the saying went, when Athens caught a cold, Plataea sneezed.

  I recall all this, because I was thinking of Miltiades while I was working on my helmet. I thought about him a lot. Because, to tell the truth, I was already bored.

  I’d shaped the helmet twice — first, I’d made the bowl far too deep, and the result looked so odd that I’d melted the bronze, added a little more tin and poured a new plate on the slate where Pater had done the same. I made a wine bucket from that bronze. I didn’t trust twiceforged stuff for armour.

  The second time I was more careful with my prayers and I made a real invocation to Hephaestus, and I took time to draw the curve in charcoal on a board as part of the invocation. I raised the bowl of the helmet carefully, for an hour or two each day after propping the vines and gathering olives with my slaves and my household, and this helmet grew like a child in a mother’s belly. Like a miracle. So on that day, I remember I was growing afraid — I, who feared no man in the meeting of the spears, was afraid. Because the object I was making was beautiful, and better than I ever expected of my own work, and I was scared that I might ruin it.

  So I planished slowly.

  Ting-ting.

  Ting-ting.

  The anvil rang like a temple bell with every blow. My apprentice, Tiraeus, held the work and rotated it as I requested. He was older than me, and in some ways better trained, but he’d never settled with on
e master, and before he met me, he’d never even learned the signs that any man can learn who dedicates to the smith god. I’d had him a month, and he’d changed. Just like that — like molten metal settling into the mould. He’d been ready to take a new shape, and he was no work of mine, but it still felt odd to have an older man — and in many ways a better smith — as my apprentice.

  He raised his head, as if listening.

  Ting-ting.

  Ting-ting.

  Like a temple bell, my anvil called aloud to the gods.

  I was deep into it — the focus that the gods send to a man intent on a task — when I heard what Tiraeus heard. The same focus, to be honest, that comes in combat. How Aristides would writhe to hear me suggest a link between the two.

  I ramble. I heard a horse in the yard.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ my apprentice ordered. That’ll give you an idea of his actual status. He gave me orders.

  Behind me, Bion, my father’s former slave apprentice and now almost a master smith in his own right, was rewelding a pot. His hammer rang on his own anvil — heavier blows than mine.

  ‘What the man says,’ Bion grunted. ‘Never stop once you’re in a task.’

  That was a long speech, for Bion. But I was young, and a horse in the yard promised adventure. As I said, months of farming and smithing had left me — bored.

  I took water from the bucket by the door and saw a young man in a fine wool chlamys slip off his horse’s neck, showing a lot of leg and muscle, as pretty young men are wont to do.

  ‘I have a message for Lord Arimnestos,’ he said portentously. His disappointment showed in every line of his body. He’d expected better.

  Pen — my sister, Penelope — came down the steps from her eyrie with the women, and Hermogenes, Bion’s son and my best friend, came in from the fields, both drawn by the horseman. I let Pen have the boy. He was handsome, and Pen needed some suitors or my life was going to become very difficult indeed.