Marathon: Freedom or Death

Pour me a little more wine.

I looked around for Euphoria — I hadn’t really expected her, as she would have been in her ninth month — but I saw neither Hermogenes’ wife nor my sister. I remember that Antigonus and I stood together, and I had a joke at the edge of my tongue, about how, for the first time, we were timely and our wives were late.

Before I could make that cruel jibe, one of my Thracians — the men I’d freed — came on to the Field of Ares. He told us his news, tears running down his cheeks. To be honest, I don’t remember anything after that, until I stood by her bedside. I had missed her by perhaps three hours.

There was blood — enough blood that she might have died at Marathon. She had fought her own fight — a long one — and she had not surrendered or given way. She stood her ground until the very end, and pushed our child out, and died for it.

‘I told her you were coming,’ Pen told me. She held me tightly against her, and I felt nothing but the fatigue and the crushing lack of emotion that had dogged me since we stormed the olive grove. ‘I told her, and she held my hand — oh!’

Pen wept. Antigonus wept.

I felt as if I had been wrapped in thick wool.

I drank some wine, and later I lay on some blankets, my eyes open. Then, my choices made, I got to my feet. I lifted her — she weighed nothing — and carried her outside to the stable. I took a horse — no great crime with a brother-in-law — and I carried her body across my lap, as I had carried her over the mountains when first she was my bride.

I carried her home.

Of course, there was nothing left of my home but the forge. Cleitus and Simon had burned my house.

I laid her on the work table in my forge, and I put everything on her — every jewel Mater had saved from the house, every piece of loot I had taken from Marathon or been given by thankful Athenians, until she glittered like a goddess.

Then I lit my forge.

I prayed to Hephaestus, and I lit my torch from my forge fire.

Then I set my forge ablaze, and I left it to burn as her pyre.

It burned behind me, bright as a new sun. I rode down the hill, away from the farm and the fire. I rode steadily until I heard the crash as the roof-tree gave, and the whoosh as the rest of the building leaped into new flame — and then I pressed my horse to a gallop and rode away.

I never promised you a happy story.

If I tell you more. .

If I tell you more, thugater, it will be another night. And then I’ll tell you how I broke the mould of my life and cast it away — how I went with Miltiades and then to Sicily, and left Greece behind me.

For now, though, leave an old man to weep old tears. So many dead — and only me to sing of them now. I am the last.

But remember, when you pray to the gods, that men stood like the heroes of old at Marathon, and were better. And that they are still no better than the women who bear them.

Wine!

Historical Afterword

As closely as possible, this novel follows the road of history. But history — especially Archaic Greek history — can be more like a track in the forest than a road with a kerb. I have attempted to make sense of Herodotus and his curiously modern tale of nation states, betrayal, terrorism and heroism. I have read most of the secondary sources, and I have found most of them wanting.

The Persians were not ‘bad’. The Greeks were not ‘good’. And since both cultures grew from the same roots, ‘Western’ civilization would probably have been much the same had the Persians remained the world empire. Or so I believe.

And yet, and yet. . the complex web of decisions, betrayals and conspiracies in Herodotus somehow gave birth to the first real attempt at democracy — at least, the first of which we know. I have done my best to make this element of the story as essential as the fighting — to try and show how the small men gained political power, despite the overwhelming power of landowners and an ancient aristocracy.

It is nothing but facile error to see Athenian democracy as bearing any resemblance to the United States, Great Britain or any other modern democracy except in the most general way. There were no ‘middle-class hoplites’ in the front ranks. Aristocrats led the demos in every walk of life, and at war they served in front, in their superior armour, with their superior training, and the evidence for this is on every page of the literature, and only the most pig-headed myth-making can ignore it. In the period of which I write, the ‘phalanx’ as we now imagine it was just being born. Indeed, one possible reading of Herodotus would suggest that the ‘phalanx’ was born at Marathon. Archers and light-armed men still served in the front lines, and heroic aristocrats still fought duels — or so the art and literature suggest, however the idea is disliked by current historians, especially ‘military’ historians.

In fact, there were few middle-class hoplites because our modern notions of class didn’t exist. A poor man, like Socrates, might still be an aristocrat to his finger ends. A rich man, like the former slave who gave a thousand aspides to support the rearming of Athens in the fourth century, remained a former slave. Unless the term ‘middle class’ has no other meaning than to stand as a group between the poor and the rich, it can’t be made to apply.

And finally, or perhaps first, it may be that only the veterans among my readers will know the truth that military historians often cannot stomach — that all races and breeds are equally brave or cowardly, regardless of government, loyalty, race, creed or sexual preference. That all men lose combat effectiveness with fatigue and confusion.

That only a few men are killers, and they are supremely dangerous.

Really, friends, it is all in the Iliad. And when my inspiration failed, I always went back to the Iliad, like a man returning to the source of pure water. I have enormous respect for the modern works of many historians, classical and modern. But they weren’t there.

I have seen war — never the war of the spear and shield, but war. And when I read the Iliad, it comes to me as being true. Not, perhaps, true about Troy. But true about war. Homer did not love war. Achilles is not the best man in the Iliad. War is ugly.

Arimnestos of Plataea was a real man. I hope that I’ve done him justice.