The Marathon Conspiracy

by Corby, Gary

  Incredibly, Leana gets lost in modern retellings of their story. The bias isn’t ancient. All the ancient sources, including Herodotus, Plutarch, and Pausanias, are united and fulsome in their praise of her. It seems to be modern writers who’ve lost track of the female hero.

  The social status of Leana is a bit of a mystery. She’s usually described as the mistress of Aristogeiton. I think this highly unlikely, because the one thing everyone agrees on is that Harmodius and Aristogeiton were as gay as can be. Also, given the praise heaped upon her, Leana must surely have been a citizen. I fudged it by making her the unmarried sister of Aristogeiton. This also helps me to explain the deep admiration Callias had for her.

  Leana is the only mortal woman ever to be given a statue atop the Acropolis. In those days it was illegal to erect a statue in honor of a woman, but Callias insisted, and then paid for it himself.

  Pausanias reports seeing the statue three hundred years later. I copied his description of Leana’s memorial: a dangerous lioness who roars without a tongue.

  CALLIAS WAS THE first culturally modern European, to my mind, even more so than Pericles or Socrates. Callias was instrumental in the second, successful plot to overthrow Hippias.

  It’s my own idea, but I think as certain as such things can be, that Callias was one of the original plotters recruited by Harmodius and Aristogeiton, one of those who had to flee when the conspiracy went wrong at the last moment. Callias must have been almost the same age as Harmodius. That he was at the forefront of the next plot shows he was of a like mind. That he went out of his way to honor Leana demonstrates a connection.

  Callias went on to make himself the richest man in Greece through his business acumen, his management expertise, and his people skills. Athens had a number of good military men, but when it was peace they wanted, it was to Callias that the Athenians turned for the negotiations.

  He eventually fell madly in love with Elpinice, the sister of Cimon, who happened to be the mortal enemy of Pericles. Elpinice and Callias had several sons and three daughters.

  Callias asked each daughter as she came of age who she wanted for a husband. Each girl in turn checked out the local talent and then made her selection. Callias offered the father of the target young man a dowry so large that no sane father could refuse. This turnabout of the usual process was so talked about that it even made it into the ancient histories. It also showed the extent to which Callias valued his womenfolk.

  In his final years, Callias pulled off his greatest coup. The nonaggression pact that finally ended the Persian Wars is called the Peace of Callias, because he engineered it.

  Callias, then, was a man who, at enormous personal risk, was instrumental in the birth of democracy. He was a self-made millionaire who didn’t hesitate to fight in the ranks as a common soldier when his state needed him. He was the city’s premier diplomat. He had a gloriously happy home life and then, to top it off, he successfully negotiated peace in the Middle East.

  THAT HIPPIAS KEEPS a diary is something of an innovation. Paper was an expensive luxury item. However, it’s reasonable that Hippias had access to a lot of paper and might have written because of an odd fact: the works of Homer were first recorded thanks to the father of Hippias, a man named Peisistratus, who was also a tyrant. Up until then the entire Iliad and The Odyssey had been passed down as oral tradition. Peisistratus feared the works would be garbled generation by generation, so he caused scribes to write down the whole thing.

  It’s quite likely that Hippias had a hand in the recording of Homer’s works. He could have picked up the scribbling habit then.

  NOBODY KNOWS WHAT happened to the sister of Harmodius, the girl whose public shaming led to the first plot against the tyranny. Since she had no remaining male protector after her brother died, there’s every chance that the real child filled an unmarked grave. In the story I give the much more pleasant possibility that friends helped her escape to the sanctuary, where she flowers to become the High Priestess.

  This book is intertwined with a famous legend of Homeric revenge.

  Hippias refers in his diary to the sister of Harmodius as a future Elektra. The tyrant would have been intimately familiar with the legend that when King Agamemnon returned from Troy, his wife took to him with an axe. Aeschylus mentions this unfortunate incident when he describes the play he’s writing about Orestes.

  Elektra and Orestes were the children of Agamemnon. They grew to avenge the death of their father, just as Hippias fears that Thea might grow to avenge her brother.

  Elektra and Orestes had a sister named Iphigenia, whose fate was quite different to theirs.

  There are two stories about Iphigenia. In the Homeric version, her father sacrifices her to the gods in return for fair weather on the trip to Troy. The Athenians had an alternative ending, where the goddess Artemis appears at the last moment to save Iphigenia. Iphigenia then travels to Brauron, where on the instruction of the Goddess she founds the Sanctuary of Artemis and becomes its first High Priestess. Her body is said to be buried there.

  Thus not only does Thea act the role of Elektra when she avenges her family against Hippias, but as High Priestess she’s also the direct successor of Elektra’s sister Iphigenia.

  A MINOR EVENT occurs toward the end of this book that is going to change the world. The characters have no way of knowing it, but they were present at the birth of modern philosophy, and so were you. It happens when Diotima decides that from now on, she will teach Socrates.

  The real Diotima was the teacher of the real Socrates. You might be amused to hear that Diotima succeeded in her plan to make Socrates read girlie poetry. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates—now an old man—stands to explain his philosophy and the meaning of love, and he says right away that everything he knows he learned from Diotima, a priestess of Mantinea.

  I SWORE WHEN I began this series that it wouldn’t take me three books to get Nico and Diotima married.

  It didn’t. It took me four.

  Nico can finally cross off marrying Diotima from his list of life ambitions. Now he can turn his attention to the first two ambitions that he listed to Pericles, at the start of The Pericles Commission: to win an official position in the running of Athens, and to find a way to make investigation pay.

  Yet for now the happy couple have a chance to settle down. Their friend Aeschylus will be putting on his final play next year, at the greatest arts festival of the ancient world, the Great Dionysia of Athens, to which thousands came from across the civilized world to see the best plays ever written. Nico and Diotima will be there to see them too.

  Which will entangle them in the theatrical disaster of Death ex Machina.

  TIMELINE

  THE TIMELINE LISTS the dark and bloody deeds that lead up to the Marathon conspiracy. This book is fiction, but everything the characters talk about that happened in their past is real history.

  You don’t need any of this to enjoy the book, but if you’d like to know how the characters got to where they are, here are fifty-five years of murder and mayhem, plus a certain amount of conspiracy, plotting, justified paranoia, and unrequited lust:

  515 BC Athens has been ruled for many years by a tyrant named Hippias and his younger brother Hipparchus.

  In those days, the word “tyrant” didn’t have the negative meaning that it does today. But that’s about to change.

  514 BC Hipparchus, the brother of the tyrant, falls desperately in love with a young man named Harmodius. But Harmodius already has a lover, an older man named Aristogeiton. Harmodius rejects the advances of the tyrant’s brother.

  Out of the pure spite of his unrequited love, Hipparchus publicly slanders the young sister of Harmodius, so badly that the child’s life is ruined.

  514 BC Harmodius seeks revenge for the damage done to his sister. But he and his lover, Aristogeiton, know that to harm the brother of the tyrant means death, unless they can bring down the whole tyranny at the same time. They gather together men who wish to end the tyranny
, and also a young woman named Leana. They conceive a plot to kill both brothers at the next public festival.

  The plot goes horribly wrong at the last moment. Harmodius knifes Hipparchus to death, but is himself killed in the attempt. Aristogeiton is captured. The other conspirators flee, leaving Hippias the tyrant unharmed. With his brother murdered, Hippias is determined to find and destroy everyone who opposes his rule.

  Aristogeiton dies under torture a few days later, without ever revealing anything of the plot.

  Hippias orders the arrest of Leana, whom he guesses was involved. Under torture Leana bites out her own tongue, to stop herself from revealing the names of the other conspirators. In so doing she saves their lives, but loses her own.

  ~ Four years of increasingly paranoid rule pass ~

  510 BC Hippias is overthrown by a second plot against him. He escapes with his life, and runs to the Persians.

  The Athenians erect statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, to stand side by side in the agora. They’ll be known forever after as the Tyrannicides. Leana becomes the only mortal woman in history to be awarded a statue atop the Acropolis.

  ~ Twenty years of self-rule pass ~

  490 BC Hippias convinces the Persians to re-install him as Tyrant of Athens. In return he’ll make Athens a client-state of Persia. The Persians land an army on the beach, at a place called Marathon.

  The Athenian citizen-militia marches out to face the enemy. The Athenians are outnumbered almost ten to one, but they won’t have Hippias back at any price.

  In the ensuing battle, the grossly outnumbered Athenians totally thrash the Persians. Athens takes only 203 casualties, to 6,400 Persian dead.

  After the battle, the Athenians see someone on the mountain behind them flash a signal to the enemy. It looks like there are traitors prepared to deal with Persia. Speculation is wild, but the identity of the signalers is never discovered.

  Hippias dies shortly after the battle.

  ~ Ten years pass ~

  480 BC The Persians make a second attempt. This time they invade Greece with the largest army the world has ever seen. In desperation, the Greeks unite.

  Athens falls and is sacked. The Persians carry off many treasures, including the statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. They also send a small force, to sack the treasures of a sacred Sanctuary of Artemis, at a nearby town called Brauron.

  Incredibly, after a great sea battle at Salamis, the Persians lose again. This is becoming a habit.

  480 BC The Golden Age of Greece begins. At that very moment, as the Athenians reclaim their ruined city, a boy named Nicolaos is born to a sculptor and his wife.

  ~ Twenty-one years pass, during which Nicolaos grows up and democracy begins ~

  459 BC Fifty-five years have passed since those first bloody deeds, when Harmodius and Aristogeiton and Leana died to bring down the tyranny. A man who was young in those days would be an old man now. Such a man would have spent his entire life in the Persian Wars. He risked everything in the great sea battle at Salamis. He saw Athens fall and then rise again to become the greatest city in the world. But most of all, he would remember the day of the desperate Battle of Marathon, when the future of Europe hung on the point of his spear. He would remember the secret signal from behind the lines, which flashed to the enemy, even as the Persian dead lay about him on the blood-red sands, so that now, in 459 BC, when the skeletal remains of the tyrant Hippias are discovered in a cave not far from Athens, it will trigger the unfortunate events of The Marathon Conspiracy.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THANKS FIRST AND foremost to my family, Helen, Catriona, and Megan, who were remarkably patient while I wrote this book. Blossom the donkey owes his life to Catriona. He would like to take this opportunity to thank her.

  Helen reads and checks everything five times throughout the course of producing each book. I’m not sure where that item appeared in the marriage vows, but she nevertheless takes it as a sacred duty.

  Juliet Grames made this book a whole lot better with her excellent editing. I discovered after I’d submitted the manuscript that she’d previously edited an academic text on the Battle of Marathon, thus making her the perfect editor for The Marathon Conspiracy.

  Stefano Vitale has produced the covers for all my books, each a lovely work of art.

  Janet Reid, world’s best literary agent, made all this possible by selling the series, and then using her people-management skills to keep everyone around her calm and more or less sane.