Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  That was the law.

  Cleitus began to protest, and then thought better of it. Why wouldn’t he? He held all the knucklebones, and all his foes were going to come to the same place on the same day — the feast of Dionysus.

  I stood by the temporary theatre, watching, willing the thoughts into his head, begging Zeus Soter to help me to recover my oath and punish this man, and the king of the gods heard my prayer. I saw Cleitus lower his fist, turn away and smile. He was an intelligent man, as I had cause to know later — and he saw as well as I did that by bringing all his opponents together, he could hurt us the more easily, with his thugs and with the law. Then he agreed, as if making a magnanimous gesture, to allow my suit to be heard in the Agora on the day following the feast of Dionysus, in just four days.

  The notion that we would all be vulnerable then ought to lull my opponent, I hoped. Because I planned to strike at the feast of Dionysus itself.

  10

  Even back then, before we fought the Medes, the theatre of Athens was a famous thing, and much talked of throughout the Greek world. Technically, I wasn’t welcome at the performances, as I was a foreigner, but again, before the performances were moved out of the Agora, everyone went — slaves and free men and citizens and even a few women — bolder spirits or prostitutes.

  Athenian prostitutes aren’t like the poor tribal girls in this town, thugater. Do I shock you, blushing maiden? What I mean is that in Athens, slave and free, man and woman, prostitutes have several protections before the law and, in an odd way, status. A few are even citizens. In those days, they strolled around the agora openly, made sacrifices — at least barley-cake sacrifices — at the public altars, and performed their services to the community behind the Royal Stoa. Not that I have any direct knowledge. .

  It is also important to remember that theatre performances went on all day, not in the evening, and that one play followed another in fairly short order, interspersed with prayers and sacrifice at the public altars — don’t forget that in those days, the drama was still a religious expression, and a symbol of civic piety. Men went soberly, as if to temple. When the satyr plays were introduced, to celebrate the god’s love of revelry, that was different, although still pious. An initiate of Dionysus is still pious while puking, we used to say. And worse.

  I stayed with Aristides the night before. He planned to make a tour of his farms before going to the Agora, so I rose early and walked through the deserted streets with Styges by my side. Both of us were heavily armed, and I had bandages on my left arm and all down my right leg where I’d cut it leaping from roof to roof.

  We walked across the Agora, past the still-empty wooden theatre and the altars of the twelve gods, right around behind the Royal Stoa. There, while girls and boys plied a brisk trade against the wall of the old building despite the early hour, I found Agios and Paramanos and Cleon.

  ‘Ready?’ I asked.

  They all nodded. Cleon was sober. ‘Have you got Phrynichus?’ he asked.

  ‘I have him. Styges goes straight from here to watch him. You make sure we don’t have a surprise during the performance.’

  We shook hands all around and they walked off down the hill. I stood alone, watching them go, surrounded by the urgent noises of men having a quick tumble or getting their flutes played on the day of the festival — many men thought it was good luck to couple on the wine god’s day.

  Then I gathered my wits and headed back to Aristides. I made it in time to eat a crust of bread in his kitchen with his wife and two of his boarhounds, and then I borrowed a horse and accompanied him around his farms, with Aeschylus the playwright at my left side and Sophanes on my right. Aristides mocked us for nursemaiding him. For my part, I had come to enjoy his company as a philosopher, and I was afraid that by the end of the day we would no longer be friends. But I had no intention of letting him be attacked when my own plan was so close to fruition.

  We had just completed a tour of grain barns — Aristides was a wealthy man, for all his pretended humility — and we were riding down a road with steep property walls on either side when I saw a group of men on foot coming the other way — a dozen men, and many with cudgels.

  ‘Back, my lord,’ I said, turning my horse.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Aristides said. ‘That’s Themistocles. No friend of mine, but hardly an enemy.’

  Which shows what a foreigner I was — he was one of the best-known orators in Athens, even then. And I’d never seen him.

  Themistocles was another minor aristocrat, but by dint of constant public speaking and a good deal of political strategy, he had made himself the head of the Demos party — the popular party, or the party of the lower classes. In those days, such a role was considered a threat by all the other aristocrats. The path to tyranny usually lay through the control of the masses. Only the lower-class voters could form armed mobs big enough to force the middle class into accepting a tyranny.

  I think I should say at this point how I think Athens worked then. Now, to be sure, nothing I’m going to say bears any resemblance to what Solon wanted for Athens, or even what the Pisistratid tyrants wanted. This is merely my observation on what actually happened.

  There was Athens — the richest city in mainland Greece. Sparta may or may not be more powerful, but no one on earth would willingly buy a Spartan pot. Eh? The poor bastards don’t even make their own armour.

  All Athenians — or at least, all rich Athenians of good birth — seemed to be locked in a contest for power. An Athenian would put this differently, and prate about arete and service to the state. Hmm. Listen, children — most of them would have sold their mothers to become tyrant.

  So, for those locked in the great games there were three roads to power — although each road had some side turnings and branches. A rich man might follow the path of arete, spending his money wisely on monuments at home and at Olympia or Delphi, competing in games and putting up teams of chariot horses, paying for triremes for the state, sponsoring religious festivals — all as part of a slow rise to public esteem. In this way, and by using public honours to promote his own followers, a man might build a gigantic faction that would allow him to leap to the tyranny. The Pisistratids had done it, making themselves tyrants. And the Alcmaeonids were on the same path, and Cleitus, in particular, exemplified the path of arete.

  That said, I have to add that there was a deep division among the old aristocrats. On the one hand, there were the eupatridae, or well-born, descended from the gods and heroes, like the Pisistratids and the Philaids, Miltiades’ family. On the other hand, there were the new men, the new families — all still aristocrats, but ‘recently’ ennobled by wealth and political position. The first of these families were the dreaded Alcmaeonids, whose famous ancestor, Alcmaeon, was enriched in Lydia by Croesus. There were other families of ‘new men’, and while at times the new men and the old families acted together — as aristocrats — to protect wealth and privilege, at other times they were at daggers drawn.

  Then again, a man like Themistocles could choose a different path. He was born to comfort, and his father, Neocles, was reckoned rich enough, but he was not well-born by any means. However, by making himself the hero of the masses, the voice of the oppressed, the hand of justice to the lower classes, Themistocles harnessed the largely unvoiced power of the disenfranchised and the under-enfranchised, and turned them into a powerful force that could, on occasion, defeat the middle class and the upper class and demand power for their chosen orator. For all that the Pisistratids were wealthy aristocrats, they had always held the love of the demos — the people. And remember, odd as it sounds, in a well-run tyranny, the poor men had the most power.

  Finally, a man such as Miltiades might find a third path. Miltiades and his father were members of one of the oldest and richest of the eupatridae families, but they rose to power and wealth through overseas adventures — piracy, in fact. Through military action, sometimes in the name of Athens and sometimes in their own name, they accrued wealth by
something like theft, and enriched other men who then became their followers and dependants, allowing them to attract a following in all three classes — and allowing them to build up a massive military force that neither of the other two systems ever created. If we had won at Lade, Miltiades might well have been tyrant of Athens. He’d have had the money, and the military power. That’s the real reason Cleitus hated him.

  Let me add that, however cynical I am, and was, about the striving of these men for power, I will testify before the gods that Aristides, for all his priggishness, never had any end in view other than the good of Athens. His party, if you can call it that, his faction existed only to support the rule of law and prevent any of the others from rising to tyranny. So let us say that there was a fourth faction — a faction of men who followed the path of arete with no end in view but the good of their city.

  Naturally, that fourth party was the smallest.

  So, I had fallen into the middle of the competition, and now I was sitting on my horse, blocking the narrow lane, as Themistocles and a dozen club-armed thugs surged towards us.

  ‘Chairete!’ Aristides called.

  Themistocles was a handsome man, tall, well-built, with broad shoulders and long legs and a full beard like a fisherman. He had a sort of bluff, hail-fellow-well-met humour that made men like him. He stepped forward, but I’d have known him anyway, as he was a head taller than his followers and the best man among them. He looked like a good man in a fight.

  ‘Aristides! A pleasure to meet an honest man, even if he is mounted on a horse!’ His horse comment was meant to remind his own people that he, Themistocles, was walking, not riding.

  Aristides nodded. ‘I’m doing the rounds of my farms. Are you to be at the festival today?’

  Themistocles leaned on his stick. ‘Love of the gods and love of the people go hand in hand, Aristides.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘I see we might make common cause, as we all seem to be sporting some token from the Alcmaeonids!’ He pointed at the bump on his head and his black eye — to Aristides’ injuries, and my bandages. Then he turned to me and, with an exaggerated manner, said, ‘You must be the foreigner from Plataea, sir.’

  Clearly he knew exactly who I was.

  I slid from my mount and took his hand in the Athenian way. ‘Arimnestos of Plataea at your service,’ I said.

  He nodded, glanced at Aristides, then back at me, and I thought he might let go of my hand. ‘I have heard. . things about you.’ He looked at one of his men. ‘Recently.’

  I smiled. ‘Nothing that might disconcert you, I hope?’

  Themistocles considered me, and then looked up at Aristides. He was finding, as men have found since the invention of the horse, that it is much easier to stare a man down than to stare him up. ‘Your foreign flunky is making trouble among my people,’ he said to Aristides.

  Aristides shrugged. ‘The Plataean is no man’s flunky, Themistocles. And just as he is not my flunky, so they are not your people.’

  ‘Don’t be a stiff-necked prig,’ Themistocles said, all the oil leaving his voice. He leaned closer. ‘Your man has tried to buy my mob. We should be acting together these days, not making separate efforts. And the mob is mine, sir.’

  Aristides looked at me, and I couldn’t read what he was thinking. ‘Is this true?’ he asked.

  I smiled. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘You lie,’ Themistocles spat.

  Aristides pushed his horse between us. ‘Themistocles, I have warned you before that utterances of this sort will not win you friends.’

  ‘Get your money out of town, foreigner,’ Themistocles shot at me. ‘No one buys mobs without my say-so.’ That last was directed at Aristides, not me.

  I stepped towards him and his people began to close around me. ‘I am Arimnestos of Plataea,’ I called out. ‘And if one of you lays a hand on me, I’ll start killing you.’ I looked around at them, and they desisted. The man closest to me was a big man, but when his eyes met mine, he stepped back and gave me a smile.

  I was the Arimnestos the man-killer.

  Aristides looked pleased, which puzzled me.

  ‘I mean no disrespect,’ I said to Themistocles. I wanted no trouble with the demagogue. ‘What I have paid for will only benefit you.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’ he asked.

  Aristides was watching me. I shrugged. ‘I would not tell every man on this road,’ I said. ‘Nor have I bought a mob. I have bought information, and I paid well.’

  ‘What kind of information?’ Themistocles demanded.

  ‘Information regarding my court case, of course,’ I said.

  This satisfied him immediately. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘A certain slave in the brothels, I gather?’ he said, looking knowing and yet deeply concerned. The only sign of his hypocrisy was the speed of his direction changes.

  ‘Exactly!’ I proclaimed, as if stunned by his perspicacity.

  He dropped me as if our business was done, then he and Aristides exchanged a commonplace or two and we passed through his retinue. When I glanced back, Themistocles was smiling at me. Aristides was not.

  ‘What are you up to?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. I smiled at him. ‘Nothing that would interest you, sir.’

  He rubbed his beard. ‘You’ve got Themistocles riled, and that’s never a good thing.’ He reined his horse. ‘You know what you are doing? You’re sure?’

  I shrugged, because I wasn’t at all sure that I knew what I was doing. ‘I’m fighting back,’ I said.

  ‘Gods stand by us,’ Aristides said.

  When the sun was high, we left our horses at his stables and walked into the city together. Men were gathered everywhere, and I was reminded of Athens’s power by seeing how many men she commanded. There must have been twelve thousand men of fighting age in the Agora for the performances, and that is a fair number of decently trained men — a greater total than Thebes and Sparta together, and therein lies the secret of Athens’s strength. Manpower.

  When Athenians gather, they talk. It seems to be the lifeblood of the city, and they talk of everything from the power of the gods to the roles of men, the rights of men, the place of taxes, the weather, the crops, the fish — and back to the gods. Standing with Aristides in the Agora, trying to guard him, I was dizzied by the power of the ideas expressed — piety and impiety, anger and logic, farming advice, military strategy — all in a matter of a few minutes.

  We were all crushed together when the magistrates went to the public altar of Zeus near the Royal Stoa and made the opening sacrifices. Then the ‘good men’, the athletes, the Olympic victors, the poets, the priests and high aristocrats, processed to the wooden seats that had been arranged — pray, don’t imagine anything elegant or splendid like modern Athens, honey. We’re talking about wooden stands that creaked when too many fat men climbed the steps! But after some time, the crowd settled, and the poor metics and foreigners and lower-class citizens pushed in around the sides and in the space between the stage area and the stands.

  Early on, I spotted Cleitus. He was wearing a magnificent embroidered himation over a long chiton of Persian work, and he was easy to pick out, as he was sitting in the first row of the stand.

  A set of priests and priestesses came forward, purified the crowd and made sacrifices. Then we all sang a hymn to Dionysus together and the plays began.

  I don’t remember much about the first play — just that it was a typically reverent piece about the birth and nurture of the god. At least, according to an Athenian. We have our own ideas about Great Bacchus in Boeotia. But the second play was Phrynichus’s.

  I saw him as soon as the chorus came out. He was behind them, wearing a long white chiton like the one that the archon in Plataea wears, and he looked more scared than he had been when the Aegyptians were storming our deck at Lade.

  I began to push through the crowd towards him. It was not easy — everyone had heard that The Fall of Miletus was a different kind of play, and men wanted to see th
e poet, to watch him as they watched his play. I had managed to get close to him when the chorus, dressed as skeletons in armour, linked arms and sang:

  Hear me, Muses! What I tell,

  Is wrought with horror, and yet heroes walked there, too!

  And where our fair maidens once walked,

  Fire has swept like the harrow,

  Breaking the clods of dirt, and making the ground smooth.

  Hear me, furies! And men of Athens!

  We died on our walls, in our streets, in the breach,

  Where the Great King’s siege mound rose.

  So that, where once our maidens for their young swains sighed,

  Those same young men wore bronze, and for the

  Want of Athens, there we died.

  I’ve heard Aeschylus, and I’ve heard young Euripides. But for power, give me Phrynichus. And he was actually at the battle — well, Aeschylus and his brother were there, too. Aeschylus was also next to me as I came up to Phrynichus, pushing rudely through the crowd. He took my shoulder.

  ‘Not now,’ he said, pointing to Phrynichus, who was watching his chorus exactly as Agios watched his oarsmen in a sea-fight.

  So I stopped and listened. I had been there, of course — and yet I was enraptured by his words. He laid the blame for the fall of the east on Athens. That was the point of his play — that the rape of Ionia was caused by the greed of Athens. Yes, he made Miltiades a hero — and that must have sat ill with some — but the greatest hero was Istes, and he towers over the play like Heracles come to earth.

  It was frightening to listen to a man speak words I had spoken in council. And there was the man playing Miltiades — not that he was named, for in those days, that might have been considered impiety — and he stood forth and said:

  Today, we are not pirates. Today, we fight for the freedom of the Greeks, although we are far from home and hearth.

  And men cheered. Cleitus looked around. He was angry — doubly angry, I think. His men should have made a disturbance by then, shouldn’t they?