Marathon: Freedom or Death

in a morning race, and Bellerophon, who was grinning.

‘We have to clear the olive grove as quickly as we can,’ Miltiades said. ‘We can’t leave them behind us — we’ll have to march for Athens.’

There was a groan. I think we all groaned at the thought of walking a hundred stades to Athens.

Miltiades stood straighter. ‘We are not done,’ he said. ‘If the old men and boys we left behind surrender the city to their fleet — and there are people in the town who might do it — then all this would be for nothing.’ He sighed.

Phidippides, the Athenian herald, pushed forward. ‘Give me leave, lord,’ he said, ‘and I’ll run to Athens and tell them of the battle.’

Miltiades nodded, his face full of respect. ‘Go! And the gods run with you.’

Phidippides was not a rich man, and had only his leather cuirass, a helmet and his aspis. He dropped the aspis and helmet on the ground and eager hands helped him out of his cuirass. He stripped his chiton off and put his sword belt on his naked shoulder.

Someone handed him a chlamys, and he gave us a grin. ‘Better than mine in camp!’ he said. ‘I’ll be there before the sun sets, friends.’

He’d fought the whole day, but he ran off the field, heading south, his legs pumping hard — not a sprint, but a steady pace that would eat the stades.

Miltiades turned to me — or perhaps to Aristides. ‘I have to get the army ready to march,’ he said. ‘I need one of you to lead the assault on the grove.’

I’ll give Miltiades this much — he sounded genuinely regretful.

‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

‘Then we do it together,’ Aristides said. He looked at his men — the front-rankers of his tribe. ‘We need to do this,’ he said quietly. ‘We broke. We must find our honour in the grove.’

Miltiades nodded curtly. ‘Go with the gods. Get it done and follow me.’ He took his hyperetes and began to walk across the fields. The boy at his side blew his trumpet, and all across the field, Athenians and Plataeans looked up from their fatigue, summoned back to the phalanx.

Many of my Plataeans were right there — perhaps a hundred men. They were a mix of front- and rear- rankers, the best and the worst, and the Athenians were in the same state, although there were more of them, and they had more armour and better weapons.

Mind you, the Plataeans were working hard to remedy that, stripping the Persians at our feet.

‘They can’t have many arrows left,’ I said.

‘Why not?’ Cleitus asked.

‘They’d be shooting us,’ Teucer answered.

Aristides smiled a little sheepishly. Then he frowned. ‘You have a plan, Plataean?’

I shrugged, and the weight of my scale corslet seemed like the weight of the world. Even Cleitus — bloody Cleitus, who I hated — looked at me, waiting.

The truth is, I didn’t have enough energy to hate Cleitus. He was one more spear — and a strong spear, too. So I raised my eyes and looked at the grove. The precinct wall was about half a man tall, of loose stones, but well built, and beyond the wall the grove climbed a low hill — completely inside the wall, of course. It was a virtually impregnable position.

‘Seems to me they’re as tired as we are — and their side lost. Nothing for them now but death or slavery.’ I was buying time, waiting for Athena or Heracles to put something in my head besides the black despair that comes after a long fight.

I remember I walked a little apart, not really to think, but because the weight of their expectations was greater than the weight of my scale thorax and my aspis combined, and I wanted to be free of it for a moment.

And it was as if a goddess came and whispered in my ear, except that I still fancy it was Aphrodite, whose hymn had been on my lips when I fell asleep. Because I turned my head, and there it was.

I put my helmet back on my head and my shield on my arm. I was only a few steps from the others. ‘I see a way to distract them and save some fighting. I think you Athenians should go for them — right over the wall, at the low point by the gate. The rest of us — you see the little dip in the ground there?’ I nodded my head. ‘Don’t point. If fifty of us go there, up that little gully, I doubt they’ll see us coming. The rest of you form up twenty shields wide and ten deep. When we hit the grove, well, you come at the gate, and it’s every man for himself.’

Aristides nodded. ‘If they see you coming, you’ll be shot to pieces,’ he said.

‘Then we’d best hope they’re low on arrows,’ I said. ‘No time for anything fancy.’

Someone shouted, ‘Can we fire the grove?’

‘No time,’ I said. In truth, it was the best solution.

Let me tell you something, young man. I believe in the gods. One of them had just shown me the gully. And that olive grove was sacred to Artemis. And the gods had stood by me all day. To me, this was the test. It is always the test of battle. How good are you when you are wounded and tired? That’s when you find out who is truly a hero, my children. Anyone can stand their ground with a full belly and clean muscles. But at the end of day, when the rim of the sun touches the hills and you haven’t had water for hours and flies are laying eggs in your wounds?

Think on it. Because hundreds of us were measured, and by Heracles, we were worthy of our fathers.

‘You man enough for this, Plataean?’ Cleitus asked, but his voice was merely chiding — almost friendly.

‘Fuck off,’ I said, equally friendly.

‘Let’s get to it,’ Aeschylus said. He put the edge of his aspis between Cleitus and me. ‘This isn’t about you, Cleitus.’

I remember that I smiled. ‘Cleitus,’ I said softly, and he met my eye. ‘Today is for the Medes,’ I said. I offered my hand.

He took it and clasped it hard.

Aeschylus nodded. ‘I ask to be the first into the grove,’ he said. ‘For my brother.’

Athenians and aristocrats. Not a scrap of sense.

So the Athenians formed a deep block the width of the low wall. Behind the screen they provided, I took my Plataeans — household first — in a pair of long files and ran off to the south, around the edge of the low hill. I pushed my legs to do their duty. I think ‘run’ may be a poor description of the shambling jog we managed — but we did it.

We ran around the edge of the hill and there was the entry to the gully, as I’d expected. That gully wasn’t as deep as a man is tall — but it was shaped oddly, with a small bend just before the west wall of the grove, and I trusted my guess and led my men forward — still in a file.

The Persians had formed a line — not, to be honest, a very thick line — facing Aristides’ small phalanx. We could see them, and by a miracle, they still hadn’t seen us. It was, well, miraculous. But on the battlefield, men die because they see what they expect to see.

Then Aristides and Aeschylus led their men forward. They were so tired that they didn’t cheer or sing the Paean, but simply trotted forward, and all the Persians shot into them.

The clatter of the arrows on their shields and the solid impacts drowned the sound of our movement.

‘Form your front!’ I called softly, but my men needed no order.

The men behind me started to sprint forward. I didn’t slow. The neatness of our line was immaterial. And by the gods, Aphrodite was there, or some other goddess, lifting us to one more fight, raising us above ourselves. Two or three times in my life I’ve felt this, and it is. . beyond the human. And at Marathon, every one of us at the grove felt it.

I was at the edge of the gully, and it sloped steeply up, head height, to the base of the stone wall. The Persians had assumed this part was too tricky for us to storm.

I was first. I ran up the gully lip — and at the top a Persian shot me.

His arrow smacked into my aspis at point-blank range, and then I was past him, over the wall in a single leap, and a flood of Plataeans poured in behind me. I have no idea who killed that man, or, to be honest, how I got over the wall — but we were in, past the wall, among the trees.

I crashed into the end of the Persian line — most of them never saw us coming, so focused were they on