Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  In fact, there was something awe-inspiring about the size of the Persian force and their fleet. They also had almost a thousand cavalry — deadly horse-archers, Persians and Sakai — who had been further north, filtering down from Eretria in pursuit of the last force in the field there, an army of Athenian settlers and Euboeans who had retreated in good order from the initial defeats but gradually died under the arrows of the Sakai. We had had no idea that they still existed until a runner came in on the third morning — a man with an arrow in his bicep who collapsed as soon as he entered the army’s agora.

  When Athens had defeated Euboea in my father’s time, they had determined to hold the place thereafter, and they sent four thousand settlers, lower-class Athenians, to become colonists and to hold the best farms. There was no love lost between the settlers and the locals, but when the Persians came, they made a good force. They fought three small actions with the Persians, trying to break out, and finally they got fishing boats and shuttled across the straits, right under the noses of the enemy — but then the cavalry fell on them. Those men had been fighting — and running — for two weeks.

  It was Miltiades’ day to command, and he summoned us all as soon as he heard what the messenger had to say.

  ‘One day’s march north, there are two thousand men — good men, and they’re dying under the arrows of the Sakai.’ He looked around. ‘I propose we take our archers and our picked men, and go and relieve them.’

  Callimachus shook his head. ‘You cannot split the army,’ he said. ‘And you cannot defeat their cavalry. That’s why we camped here — remember, fire-breather? So that their arrows could not easily reach us.’

  Miltiades shook his head. ‘With picked men, if we move fast and take archers of our own — we can beat them. Or at least scatter them, the way dogs can drive lions off their prey.’

  Aristides nodded. ‘We have to try. To leave those men to their deaths — no one would ever speak well of us again.’

  Miltiades looked around. ‘Well?’

  ‘I have a hundred Plataeans who can run the whole distance,’ I said. ‘And twenty archers to run with them.’

  Miltiades smiled. But before he could speak, the polemarch shook his head.

  ‘If we must do this, then every man should go — in the dark. We can feel our way with guides, and be across the ridge before the Medes know we’ve gone. We’ll catch their cavalry napping.’ He looked around, the weight of the responsibility heavy on him. I think he would rather that the Euboeans had died at home.

  But he was right. Miltiades wanted a heroic raid, but if we were all together, and we moved fast, we’d accomplish the mission with much less risk.

  Everyone chose Callimachus’s method over Miltiades’.

  We rose in the dark, hours before the morning star would rise, and we slipped away behind our temple precinct hill, leaving three thousand chosen men to hold the camp behind us. By the time the sun was up, our leading men — my Plataeans — were less than ten stades from the hilltop where our Euboean-Athenians were making their stand.

  I wanted to run down the road with my epilektoi, but I knew that the only way to do this was with massed bodies of impenetrable spears. I hadn’t fought cavalry since the fight on the plains by Ephesus, but what I had learned there seemed pertinent — stay together and wait for the horsemen to flinch.

  By mid-morning, we were spotting Sakai scouts, and Teucer brought one down with a well-aimed arrow. The next time we saw a party of them form, Teucer had a dozen of his light-armed men together, and they lofted arrows with a little breeze behind them. The Sakai rode out from under their little arrow shower, but their counter-shots fell well short, and after that, it was like a deadly game of rovers. Our archers could out-range theirs, and that meant that they couldn’t come in on us, and twice Teucer’s little band took one of the Sakai off his horse, or left the horse dead, and they gave us room.

  The Athenians had a city archer corps, all dressed like Scythians. They were mostly poor men, but very proud, and they shot well enough. There were two hundred of them, and they were all together just behind my Plataeans, so that the one time an enterprising Mede worked around my flank in some hedgerows, he emerged into a veritable hail of arrows and ran off leaving two of his men in the wheat.

  Casualties like that — ones and twos — don’t seem important when I tell a story as big as Marathon. But in skirmishes — in harassment — a dozen dead men can be as important as a lost battle. Our arrows were hitting them, and they weren’t reaching us.

  So just before noon, their captain, whoever he was, decided that enough was enough and sent his best men to stop me.

  I wish I could say that I saw what was coming — but it was more luck than anything that we weren’t caught naked.

  As usual, I have to digress. Hoplites — heavy warriors — don’t wander the countryside all dressed up for war. It is hot in Greece, and the aspis is heavy, as is your thorax and your helmet and your spear. Once a man has the aspis on his shoulder and a spear in his hand, his speed is cut on the march.

  Perhaps it is just that Greeks are lazy. I have, in fact, spent all day marching with an aspis on my shoulder. But in the old days, we seldom did it. Instead, we carried our weapons, and our servants — sometimes free hypaspists, sometimes slaves — carried our helmets and shields.

  After the cavalry tried to work around our rear, I halted the column and ordered the Plataeans to arm. That actually increased my vulnerability for a while. Imagine two thousand men on the road, just two or three abreast, in no particular order. Then imagine that every second man is busy finding his shield-bearer and getting his aspis on his arm, his helmet on his head. Some men had their body-armour on and others did not. Some men had additional pieces of armour — thigh armour and arm guards, such as I wore. All of these were carried by servants.

  In my case, I wore my scale cuirass all day, but the rest of my gear was in a wicker basket on Gelon’s back. I even considered changing my shoes — I had ‘Spartan’ shoes on my feet, and I considered, given the difficult fields on either side of the road, changing to boots.

  Some men were sitting in the road, changing sandals. Others were stripping naked to change into a heavier chiton to wear under armour.

  Got the picture? Chaos. I hate to think how long we were on that road without a single spear pointing at the enemy. I aged.

  It is different at sea. At sea, you do not engage until you are ready. But on land — especially facing cavalry or light troops — they can hit you whenever they desire it. I was the leader, and I had fucked up. I could feel it. And now — too late — I was trying to retrieve my error. It was a lesson, if you like.

  As soon as I had a party of men armed, I filled the road with them, regardless of their place in the phalanx. And as soon as the bulk of my men were armed, I started them filing off the road to the left, where I could see the shields of our Euboean refugees flashing among the rocks on the hillside.

  Our guide, the wounded runner, pointed and gestured, and my eyes were on him when the Persian cavalry came for us. We had about a third of our men formed when they galloped around the corner of the field from behind a grove of olives. They already had arrows on their bows. Their leader was out in front on a big bay horse, and as he came around the corner he gave a whoop, leaned over and shot.

  That arrow went into my shield and the head emerged on my side, a finger’s width, just over my wrist where my hand entered the antilabe.

  ‘Form close!’ I called, and I was scared — shocked silly. I had just enough nerve to tip my helmet from the back of my head over my face. Every man pressed into the centre of the front rank as the shields overlapped.

  Where had they come from?

  I cursed my failing in not forming up earlier, and I wondered how the rest of my column was doing, and I nearly shat myself in fear. These were not Lydians with spears. These were noble Persians, well led, with discipline and murderous bow-fire, and my men were unprepared.

  The
first hail of arrows hit our shields. A man screamed as an arrow went into his knee above the greave — his scream might have been my scream.

  They came past us, close enough for us to see the markings on their horses and the embroidery on their barbarian trousers and to feel the earth moved by four hundred hooves.

  The next storm of arrows broke over us like a big wave on a beach. I felt my shield lifted, moved, rocked as if hail was falling on me, and something screamed of my helmet and I blinked away the pain. My vision was limited to the eye slit in my Corinthian, and sweat was pouring down my body. But I saw it now — the Persian commander had sprung an ambush from behind the olive grove, and I was lucky that I’d paused to form my men or we’d already be dead. Luck. Tyche. And he had made two mistakes. He sprang his trap a little early, before my left flank was out in the field, away from the rocky wall that his horses didn’t want to cross. And he went for us — the formed men — when he could have fallen like a smith’s hammer on my unformed men on the road.

  Instead, we were trapped against the field edge with a rubble pile from an old barn on one flank and the road full of slaves and Athenians on the other — but we’d stood our ground. It sounds easy enough. You try it.

  Even as his first arrows rattled against us and men fell, he learned his third error, although I was as surprised as I imagine he was.

  We had archers in our ranks.

  As the Persians swept past us, Teucer and his archers rose from within our ranks, or knelt under the rims of our shields, and shot. Indeed, Teucer was leaning his weight against my hips as he shot, arrow after arrow. He had no horse between his thighs, no reins to manage, and his quiver hung comfortably under his left arm, where I carry my sword in battle, and he drew and shot and drew and shot, three arrows for every one by the Persians, and his had Apollo’s hand behind them.

  When an arrow hits a man in the phalanx, he screams and falls, and his armour makes a mournful clatter as he goes down — but his mates close over him, alive or dead. It is but one step to the front to fill the hole.

  When a horseman takes an arrow — better yet, when a horse takes an arrow — it can be a disaster for a dozen other men. One horse can fall over another, and a few casualties, by ill-luck or the will of the war god, can stop a charge dead, or cause the animals to flow around their target the way small boys divert a stream on a summer’s day.

  We had fewer than three hundred men formed, but all of Teucer’s archers were in our ranks — perhaps thirty men, and some javelins — and they shot at least one Persian for every one of us who fell. I suspect that, man for man, the Persians were the finer archers — but the best archer on a horse, shooting at armoured men behind big shields, is going to lose the contest to the poorer man with his feet firm on the ground, shooting at the enormous target of a man on a horse.

  And Teucer was the best archer I’ve ever known. He was safe under my shield rim, and his arrows did not miss. He made chaos of their files, and they broke and rode away, and their red-bearded officer lay, redder now, with one of Teucer’s black-fletched arrows in his throat.

  We spearmen played no role, except to stand and not run, and to be a living wall of wood and bronze for Teucer’s archers. We didn’t bloody our spears that day. The archers won that engagement for us, and gained status with us as a consequence.

  The Persian commander watched his best cavalry break around us, leaving a dozen of his noblemen face down in the hayfields, and he gathered the rest of his cavalry and rode away, no doubt reckoning, like a professional, that the terrain was against him and he had no reason to take a risk.

  He was wrong. There’s more to battle than counting the odds and chances and watching the ranges of the enemy weapons. The Athenians and Plataeans were Greeks — men of the phalanx, where fights are decided not by spear-fighting but by the will of the mass. To every Plataean — and to every Athenian coming late to the fight — it appeared that we were the better men, and the Persians were afraid. Not true, of course, but on such foolishness is victory made.

  We watched their dust cloud go, and a few fools shouted that we should follow them, but the Persians wanted us out in the open and we were happy in among the olive groves and low ridges where they couldn’t easily ride around our flanks. We let them go.

  In half an hour, Miltiades passed through my position. I chose to stay formed and watch the Persians, lest they fall on the rest of the column, or at least, that was my decision on the spot. Miltiades went up the hill and fetched out the Euboeans. I’ll be honest — I was shaken. To my mind, Teucer and his archers had just saved me from a string of foolish errors. Command is different. It is not the same as serving in the front rank. I had been thinking of the wrong things, at the wrong time, and I knew how close my whole force — every Plataean — had come to dying at the hands of a hundred Persians.

  The rescued Euboeans were in poor shape. They had no archers — few Greeks did, in those days, except old-fashioned cities like Plataea, and we wouldn’t have had half as many without the Milesians — and the Persian cavalry had been able to get close, every day, whenever they wanted. A few of the Euboeans had the spirit to abuse the corpses of the dead Persians as they came down — one man told me that this was the closest he’d come to hitting one since the first day — but the rest simply stumbled off the steep rocks of their hill and begged us for water in the croaking of frogs, for they were parched and weary and had given up hope.

  Then we all turned on our heels and marched back to our camp. And the Persian cavalry rode away. I lost three men dead — all young epilektoi in the front rank. Lykon took an arrow in the greave — it held, but he couldn’t walk for a day from the pain. My wounded were mostly gashes to the head and neck — sometimes arrows went deep in the phalanx and got in among the men with no helmets, skidding from head to head. Two men with arrows in their thighs had to be carried, and that was hot, miserable work.

  As soon as our scouts said that the Persian cavalry was gone, most men peeled off their armour and gave it to slaves to carry, but I wouldn’t allow my epilektoi out of theirs — I was deeply shaken by the speed with which the Persian cavalry had appeared from behind the olive grove. No one grumbled this time. But it was a long walk back to camp, looking over our shoulders all the way, and blessing every hill, every stream, every rocky field that covered us.

  Greece is treacherous ground for horses. Praise the gods.

  The rescue of the Euboeans may have been full of arete, and it may have pleased the gods, but it cost us in several ways and it had disastrous consequences.

  First, the Euboeans were spent. Of almost two thousand men who came down off that hill, fewer than two hundred stayed with the army. The rest simply went home. This is another part of being Greek that needs explaining. Even the Athenian-Euboeans felt that they had done their duty, and more. They had faced weeks of danger and survived, and they went to Athens or returned to their farms without anyone’s permission — and no one suggested otherwise. The actual Euboeans, about a hundred of them, remained, mostly because their city was gone and their wives were enslaved and they had no further reason to live. They were a silent lot.

  Second, the Euboeans saw the Persians as invincible. It is no fault of their own, but when men have been harried and driven for weeks, beaten and beaten again, they magnify the danger and the power of the foe to increase their own sense of worth. I am an old man of war, and I have seen it many times. When they sat in our camp and told their story to crowds of Athenians — many of whom had been against this fight from the first — they spread fear like a palpable thing. They didn’t mean to do it, but they did. The day after we rescued them, our army was ready to fall apart.

  Third, all the Persian cavalry had been sent to dog the Euboeans. Datis, like any good commander, had sent his best troops to prevent the Euboeans from linking up with us. Now that we’d ‘gained’ them, the Persian cavalry — mostly Sakai, to be honest — were no longer distracted.

  The morning after we ‘rescued
’ the Euboeans, I combed my hair on the summit of the precinct of Heracles, sitting on a rock. When I had combed it out, Gelon braided it quickly — two thick braids which he wrapped around the crown of my head as padding for my helmet. He did it better than any of my other servants or hypaspist had done — tighter and faster, too. I remember that we had just seen a raven off in the left of the sky — a poor omen — and we were wondering aloud why the gods bothered to send a bad omen.

  Down at the base of the hill, a big group of Athenians — mostly poor men with no armour — were cutting brush for bedding. They were in a long field, and at the far end was a stand of brush and ferns, and twenty or so men were cutting the brush and gathering bags of fern. They sang as they worked, and I remember being content — even happy — as I listened to them.

  The Sakai fell on them like the Eagle of Zeus falling from the heavens on a rabbit. They came on horses, and they leaped the stone walls at either end of the field, cutting the men off from the camp as easily as if they were children caught stealing apples in an orchard. One brave man tried to run, and three of them chased him down, laughing. They were so close that we could see them laugh. The leader took a rope off his quiver, whirled it around his head like a performer and tossed it neatly over the runner. Then he turned his horse and dragged the man, screaming, over the rough ground.

  At my side, Teucer drew his bow. It was a long shot, even for my master archer, but he drew the feathers all the way to his mouth and loosed, and the arrow seemed to linger in the air for ever — flying and falling. The Sakai man was riding parallel to our hill and he didn’t see the arrow, and it fell into him as if Apollo guided it. He tumbled from his horse and screamed.

  I hoped the man caught in the rope would rise and run. But he didn’t move. I think he was already dead.

  The other Sakai let up a thin cry, and as one, they turned and butchered the Greeks they had caught. They killed them all — twenty men lost in a few heartbeats. They ripped skin from their victims’ heads and their backs the way men skin a rabbit, and they rode across our front, flourishing their ghastly prizes and screaming their thin war cries. Then they rode away.