in their city that they need our grain. Aye – they import grain all the way from Propontis and the Euxine!'
Men shifted restlessly.
'I'm no hand at this. So here's what I'm trying to say. We cannot fight Thebes alone. We need a friend. Athens should be that friend. They need our grain.' He shrugged. 'I talked to some men in Athens. They talk to farmers as if they were men of substance, in Athens. Not like some bastards I've known, eh? And the men I talked to were very interested. Interested in being friends.'
He looked around.
I remember that I found the idea so exciting that I thought I might burst. Athens – glorious Athens, as an ally?
Which goes to show what you know when you're seven years old. The rest of them shuffled their feet and looked at the ground.
Draco shrugged. 'Listen, Epictetus. Your idea has merit – and it's time we started to talk about these things. No man here will deny that we need a friend. But Athens is so far. Over the mountains. Five hundred stades as the raven flies – more for a man and a cart.'
Myron, another farmer, leaned forward on his heavy staff. 'Athens would never send their phalanx over the mountains to protect us,' he said. He had a scar on his thigh from the same fight where Pater had been made lame. 'We need a friend with five thousand hoplites who will stand their ground beside us, not a friend who will come and avenge our corpses.'
Epictetus nodded to Myron – they had each other's measure, those two. 'It might be true,' he said. 'But we need a friend far enough away that he won't force us to be more than just an ally.' He looked around. 'Like Thebes and the so-called federation.'
All the men spat at the mention of Thebes.
Myron nodded. 'That's sense. How about Corinth?'
Evaristos, the handsomest of the men, shook his head. 'Corinth is too close and has too many ships and too few hoplites. And no need for our grain. And loves Thebes too well.'
Draco held out his cup to one of our slaves. 'A splash more, darling,' he said. 'What of Sparta? They've an army worth something, or so I hear.'
'Ten times the distance as Athens,' Epictetus said.
'I know,' Draco said. 'I made my pilgrimage last year to Olympia-'
'We know!' many of the men called, tired of Draco's endless travel tales.
'Listen, you oafs!' Draco shouted. They jeered him with humour, but then they were silent. He went on, 'Sparta is not like us. Their citizens – all they do is train for war.'
'And fuck little boys,' Hilarion put in. If the least rich of the farmers, he was the most cheerful and the best with a crowd. And the least respectful of authority. He shrugged. 'Hey – I've been to Sparta. Women there are lonely.'
Draco glared at Hilarion. 'Whatever their personal foibles, gentlemen, they're the best soldiers in Greece. And they don't farm, or make pots, or work metal. They fight. They can march here, if they have a mind to. Their farms will be tilled whether they march or not.'
'Their wives are lonely whether they march or not,' Hilarion added. 'Maybe while they march to save us, I'll just slip over the isthmus and visit a few of them.'
Pater spoke for the first time. 'Hilarion,' he said softly. He met the younger man's eyes, and Hilarion dropped his.
'Sorry,' he said.
Pater walked into the middle of them. 'My sense of what you say,' he began, 'is that you all support the idea of finding ourselves a foreign friend.'
They looked at each other. Then Epictetus stood and emptied his cup. 'That's the right of it,' he said.
'But none of us knows what will suit us – Athens or Sparta or Corinth – or perhaps Megara.' Pater shrugged. 'We're a bunch of Boeotian farmers. Epictetus here has at least been to Attica, and Draco's been to the Peloponnese.' He looked around. 'Who would want to be our friend?'
Epictetus winced, but said nothing.
'If we trained harder, our men could beat the Thebans!' said Myron's son, a fire-breather called Dionysius. 'And then we'd have no need of these foreigners.'
Myron put a hand on his son's shoulder. The boy was only just old enough to take his stand, and hadn't been there for the defeat. 'Boy, when they bring five thousand against our one thousand,' he said, 'there's no amount of training that will help us. No man here cares a tinker's damn how many we kill – only that we win.'
The older men nodded agreement. The Iliad was a fine story for children, but Boeotian farmers know just what war brings – burned crops, raped daughters and death. The glory is fleeting, the expense immense and the effect permanent.
They talked more, but that's how I remember it – the day the idea was born. In fact, it was just grumbling. We all hated Thebes, but they weren't hurting us any.
Epictetus stayed to dinner, though. And he offered to carry the cream of Pater's work over the mountains to Athens – and back, if it didn't sell. And Pater agreed. Then Epictetus commissioned a cup. He'd clearly seen the priest's cup and wanted one for himself.
'A cup I can drink from, in the fields or at home,' he said.
'What do you want on it?' Pater asked.
'A man ploughing a field,' Epictetus said. 'None of your gods and satyrs. A good pair of oxen and a good man.'
'Twenty Athenian drachmas,' Pater said. 'Or for nothing, if you carry my goods to Athens.'
Epictetus shook his head. 'Twenty drachmas is what you're worth,' he said. 'And I'll carry your goods anyway. If I take it as a gift, I owe you. If I pay you, you owe me.' That's the kind of man he was.
Pater worked like a slave for the rest of the summer, making finer things than were his wont. He made ten platters, the kind gentlemen served feasts on, and he made more cups, including the fanciest of the lot, with a ploughman, for Epictetus. And he made a Corinthian helmet – simple in design but perfect in execution. Even in the summer of my seventh year, I knew perfection in metal when I saw it.
Pater had no patience in him to teach the young, but he let me put it on my head. He laughed. 'You'll be a big man, Arimnestos,' he said. 'But not yet.'
He made bronze knives for me and for my brother, fine ones with some work on the backbone of the blade and horn scales on either side of the grip.
I worked like a slave that summer, because we were poor and we had just Bion's family as slaves – and Bion was far too skilled to waste his time putting air on the fire or punching holes in leather, or any of the other donkey work. And though my brother was too small to plough, he ploughed anyway, with help from Bion's son Hermogenes. Together they made a man.
Occasionally men like Myron would appear out of the air and take a turn at the plough, or repair a wheel, or perhaps sow a field. We had good neighbours.
When I wasn't in the forge, I was in the fields too. I loved that farm. Our land was at the top of a hill – a low hill, but it gave a view from the house. In the paved yard, where men stood to talk, you could see mighty Cithaeron rising like a slope-shouldered god, and you could see the walls of our city just across a little valley. Up on Cithaeron, we could see the hero's tomb and the sacred spring, and if we looked towards Plataea, we could see the Temple of Hera clear as a lamp in a dark room. The trees of Hera's grove were like spears pointing up the hill at our little acropolis, even though they were stades away. We had an apple tree at the top of the olive grove, and I went up and trimmed the new growth in the spring and again in the autumn. We had grapes on the hillside, and when we had no other work to do, Hermogenes and Chalkidis and I would build trellises to carry the vines.
There was a small wood by the stream at the base of the hill, and the old people had dug a fish pond. I could pretend that we were great lords, with our own hill fort and our own woods for hunting, although we didn't have an animal larger than a rabbit to hunt. But there's no memory dearer to me than walking home from the agora in Plataea with Bion – we must have just sold some wine, or perhaps some oil, and I was allowed to go to town – walking home past the turning where our road went down to the stream and then up the hill to our house, and thinking, this is my land. My father is king here.
Most nights, unless Mater was raving drunk, we'd meet in the courtyard after dinner and watch the sun set.
