Greek armies are usually 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 duty 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 small farmers — all strong men — may 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 fellow 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 — all 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, small farmers and aristocrats, too) and men of the sea (fishermen, coastal men and oarsmen). It was a brilliant 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 brilliant 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.
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 — never Athenians, but other Greeks — say that Cleisthenes brought democracy to Athens. Crap. Cleisthenes was a far, far more brilliant man than that. I never met him, but like most middle-class men, I revere his memory as the man who built the Athens we loved.
What he did was to make every man an aristocrat.
In one stroke of law, every oarsman and every whore’s son had as much reason to serve his city as Aristides and Miltiades and Cleitus. To live well, with arete, and to die with honour. I’m not saying that it worked — any better than any other political idea. But to me, it is a glorious idea, and it made the Athens that stood against the Great King.
The main consequence was that the precinct of Heracles was filled with men who would never, ever have been in a phalanx fifteen years before. When my father died serving alongside Athens in Euboea, their phalanx had about six thousand men, and while the front ranks were superb, the rear ranks were poor men with spears, no shields, no armour and no hope of standing for even a heartbeat against a real warrior. That was the way.
But the new Athens had a phalanx with twice as many spears — almost twelve thousand. And from what I could see, almost all of them had the white leather spolades for which Athens was famous. The city owned the tanning trade back then, and their white leather was prized from Naucratis to the Troad. They all seemed to have helmets, too.
See, what Cleisthenes did was to create a city where a man who made pots and worked a plot of land just big enough to yield two hundred medimnoi of grain — about a tenth of what my farm yielded in a good year — would spend his surplus cash — a very small amount, friends — on armour and weapons. Like an aristocrat.
Thugater, you are laughing at me. Am I too passionate? Listen, honey — I may be tyrant here, but in my heart I’m a Boeotian farmer. I don’t want the aristocrats to rule; I want every man to stand up for himself, take his place in the line, farm his plot, eat his own figs and his own cheese — raise his hand in the assembly and curse when he wants. When I’m honest, I realize that I joined the ranks of the aristos pretty early. It may be that, as my mother said, our family was always with them. But I never wanted power over other men, except in war.
Now you’re all laughing at me. I think I should keep my story for another day. Perhaps I’ll go and sulk in my tent. Perhaps I’ll take blushing girl here for company.
Hah! More wine. That was worth the interruption. Look at that colour!
Now, where was I?
In the morning, I mounted my horse and Gelon got on my mule and we rode away north to find my brother-in-law and the Plataeans. The Athenians turned east after they passed the great ridge and headed for the sea.
I reached my men before noon, and found that they were fed, well slept and ready to march.
Antigonus shrugged. ‘I enjoyed being polemarch,’ he said. ‘Go back to the Athenians. I’ll take it from here.’ He grinned and slapped my back, but when we had the army moving, he came up beside me in the dust. ‘Don’t ever do that to me again,’ he said quietly. ‘When you didn’t come back last night, all I could see was panic and horror. The Persians had you, the fucking Athenians had arrested you — what was I to do?’
‘Just as you did,’ I said, and slapped him on the back in turn.
I had brought a pair of guides from Miltiades, both local men from the Athenian phalanx who knew all the trails and small roads that led east from our position. So we made good time, although the way was never straight and at one point we actually crossed some poor farmer’s wheat field — two thousand men and as many animals crushing his precious crop. But it was the only way to join two paths. Attica had some of the worst roads in the world then.
I rode ahead with Gelon and Lykon and Philip the Thracian, both serving as volunteers as their cities had no part in this war, and we found a camp — three hayfields, all fallow or recently cut, with stone walls all around, on a low ridge with a stream at the bottom. It’s one of the best positions I’ve ever found, and I went back to it on another occasion. We slept secure. I had sentries every night already — a lesson learned from my first campaigns.
We rose with dawn — all that hunting on Cithaeron had good effect — ate hard bread and drank a little wine, then moved. Before noon we were up with the tail of the Athenian force, which was moving down through the olive groves that crowned the ridges around Aleitus’s farm and tower. I knew the trails here — again, from hunting — and my guides were off their own ground. So I took us a little north, over the same ridge where Aleitus’s party had killed two deer, and down through the old orchards where mine had killed six.
Aristides was first that day — the tribes have a strict rotation in everything, from order of march to place in the battle line — and he was the strategos in charge, because the Athenians rotated the command. He was choosing his camp when I rode up with my little party.
He smiled when he saw me. I didn’t smile — any pleasure was wiped from my heart when I saw that he was with Cleitus.
Aristides raised a hand. ‘Stop,’ he said.
I had my hunting spear in my fist.
‘We are here to fight the Medes, not each other,’ Aristides said.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘You found a horse!’ I snorted. ‘I thought I heard that something had happened to them.’
Cleitus had his sword in his hand. ‘How’s your mother?’ he asked.
Aristides hit him — hard — in the temple with his fist. Aristides was a good athlete and a fine boxer, and Cleitus fell from his horse.
But when I rode over to
him, Aristides caught my spear hand in a grip of iron.
‘In this army,’ he said, ‘there are other men who hate each other — political foes, personal enemies, men with lawsuits. We have tribes with rivalries, and men with conflicting interests in money — men who have absconded with wives and daughters, men who committed crimes. And worst of all, as both of you know, we have men who have taken money from the Great King and who will use their power to break us the way they broke the East Greeks at Lade — through defection and treachery.’
Cleitus got to his feet and put a hand to his head. ‘You have a heavy hand, sir.’
Aristides nodded. ‘We are in the precinct of Heracles — ancestor to all three of us. You will both come with me to the altar and swear — to the gods — to keep the peace and fight together like brothers. You are leaders. If you fight each other — we are finished.’
‘He killed my mother,’ I said. ‘And his actions served the Great King. He’s taking the Great King’s money. He planned to kill me to keep the Plataeans out of this.’
Cleitus looked at me with the kind of contempt I hadn’t seen in a man’s eyes since I was a slave. ‘You live in a world of delusion, peasant. I would never do anything to serve the Great King. I am an Athenian. I will crush you like the insect that you are — for hubris. For treating my family as if we were at your level. Killed your mother?’ He laughed. ‘It should have been you — and it is no care of mine if some raddled Boeotian whore got in the way.’ He turned to Aristides. ‘I swore to kill him and all his family. He has insulted me and mine.’
Aristides crossed his arms. ‘Cleitus — most men in this army think your family are traitors.’ Cleitus whirled around in angry denunciation, but Aristides cut him off with a raised hand. ‘If you refuse to swear my oath, Cleitus, I will send you from the army, and I will cease defending you to the demos.’ More quietly, he said, ‘This is not the agora, nor the palaestra. He insulted your family? You insulted his? By all the gods, we are talking about the existence of our city! Are you a playground bully or a man of honour?’
I had lowered my spear-point. Aristides always had that effect on me. His moral advantage was almost as great as Heraclitus’s — he lived the words he spoke. But I was still angry.
‘Aristides,’ I said, ‘I honour you more than most men, but he killed my friends and fellow townsmen — and my mother. He killed them for vanity. His so-called revenge? He brought it on himself, by trying to treat me the way he treats the demos — as lesser men.’
‘You killed his horses — fifty horses. The value of ten farms. You killed them.’ Aristides stood in front of me, imperturbable. ‘You killed them to humiliate the Alcmaeonids. Not to save Miltiades — but for your sense of your own honour. Deny it if you can.’
‘He murdered my people!’ Cleitus said. ‘Family retainers!’
‘Thugs,’ I said. ‘Aristides, this is foolishness. You, of all men, know why I did what I did.’
‘I do,’ Aristides said. ‘You did what you did to achieve what you perceived as justice. As did Cleitus.’
‘He killed my mother!’ I yelled.
‘My family is in exile,’ Cleitus said. ‘My uncle died — he died — far from our city. Thanks to you, the dogs of this city bay for our blood and the little men — tradesmen, men whose grandfathers were slaves — treat us with contempt. For that, I would kill you and every man and every woman with a drop of your blood in his veins.’
‘So both of you can wallow in selfishness, pride, self-deceit — and Athens can be burned by the Medes.’ Aristides raised an eyebrow. ‘Come with me — both of you.’
Such was his authority that we followed him. He led us over the brow of the hill on which the precinct of the shrine of Heracles stood. Suddenly, in the blaze of the late-summer son, we were looking down the hill to the plain, the fields and olive groves of one of Attica’s richest areas, all the way to the beach at Marathon.
And from the curve of the beach, as far north as the eye could see, were ships. Hundreds of ships — ships as thick on the sea as ants around an anthill when the plough rips it asunder. Many of them were already stern-in to the beach, over by the marsh at the north end of the bay. They were unloading men, and tents — or so I guessed.
Closer to us, in the open ground at the foot of the hill, there were a dozen Sakai cavalrymen. They were looking up the hill at us. They had gold on their arms, in their hats, on their saddles, and every one of them had a heavy bow at his waist and a pair of long spears in his fist.
‘There they are. The Persians, the Medes, the Sakai — the armoured fist of the Great King, here to chastise Athens for her sins. Now — choose. Stand here, in the sight of the enemy, and fight each other to the death — and on your heads be the future that you squander. Or both of you can swear my oath. Fight side by side. Show the army — every man of whom knows your story, and your hate, believe me — that war with Persia is bigger than family, bigger than revenge. And when the Persians are gone, you may kill each other, for all I care.’
Silence, and the wind sighing over the golden wheat fields down by the sea.
I nodded. ‘I will swear,’ I said. What else could I say? Aristides was the Just Man. What he asked was just.
Nor was Cleitus — for all that I still burn with hate for him — less a man than I. ‘I will swear,’ he said. ‘Because you are right. I will go farther — because I am a better man than this Boeotian pig. I paid men to fight against you, Plataean. But I am sorry that your mother died. For that — alone — you have my apology.’
I might have muttered an apology for the death of his uncle — even if I did, his was the nobler gesture, but then, his was the greater crime.
This is so often the way with men. The gesture is the thing that we remember — the grand apology, the noble death. Did my mother’s noble death wipe clean a lifetime of woe? Did Cleon’s? Is a great apology the equal of a great crime?
I don’t know, and Heraclitus was no longer alive to tell me.
We stood on either side of the low-saddled altar of Heracles, clasped arms like comrades and swore to stand together against the Persians, to support each other and be brothers and comrades. We followed Aristides, word for word, until he finished.
‘Until the Persians are defeated,’ Cleitus added.
‘Until the Persians are defeated,’ I repeated, meeting his eyes.
‘You are both idiots,’ Aristides said.
I’d like to say that a spirit of cooperation swept the army after I swore not to kill Cleitus, but I’m not sure anyone noticed. This is the problem with acts of moral courage and ethical purity. Had I struck him down with my hunting spear, I’m sure there might have been consequences, but having stayed my hand, there was no observable change. Heraclitus and Aristides both told me that the only reward for a correct action is the knowledge of having acted well — fair enough, but I suspect that you have to be Aristides or Heraclitus to feel that such knowledge is enough reward for the sacrifice of something so deeply satisfying as revenge.
At any rate, we made camp in the precinct of Heracles. From the summit, we could see the Persians unloading their ships.
I brought the Plataeans to the north of the Athenians — the left end of our line of camp, and the spot closest to the enemy. We took the rocky end of the temple precinct, almost like a small acropolis.
It wasn’t much ground, but it would be easy to defend, and it had a big stand of cypress trees in the centre — good shade. As I considered it, I saw a man turn aside to relieve himself in the woods, and I caught him. ‘No man relieves himself inside the camp,’ I said.
Even with the hunting, they’d never been on campaign. Most of my men had no idea how fast disease can stalk a camp. So as soon as we’d stopped, I gathered the warriors in a great circle and stood on a pile of shields so that they could all hear me.
‘All men will sleep here, on the rock,’ I said. ‘The cypress trees will give us shade and some shelter, but no man is to cut one, or build a fire un
der them, for fear of offence to the god. Nor is any man to relieve himself inside the precinct. I will mark a boundary for such things below. Nor will any man use the stream to wash himself, his animal or his clothes, except where I mark it — so that the stream herself will not feel defiled. And so no man’s shit will float down into our cook pots,’ I said, and they laughed, and my point was made.
The Plataean strategoi chose their ground, and then we went down the ancient ramp behind the high ground and chose a low bog for men to use, and had slaves dig trenches across it and lay logs. And we chose a place for the slaves to draw water and wash clothes.
‘Water is going to be a problem,’ Antigonus said.
‘I don’t understand why we have to have all these rules,’ Epistocles said. He shook his head. ‘If I have to go in the night, do you really think I’m going to walk all this way?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well, you can guess again,’ he said, with a foolish little laugh.
‘Epistocles, you are an officer, and men will take their lead from you. If men start pissing in our camp, it will soon become unliveable. This is the most defensible terrain for ten stades. Don’t piss on it.’ I grinned at him, but only in the way I grin when I’m prepared to use my fists to make a man see sense, and he backed away.
‘You seem to think you can give orders like a king,’ he said.
‘This is war,’ I said. ‘Some men it makes kings, and others it makes slaves.’
‘What’s that?’ he said.
‘Never mind,’ I said, and we went off to find space for two thousand men to sleep.
We spent two days making camp and watching the Persians make theirs. They had to land all those men, and some of us wondered why we didn’t just rush them when they had about a third of their men ashore — it was discussed, but we did nothing.
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