Marathon: Freedom or Death

two bullies with clubs. Even then, at seventeen, he was a foe to reckon with.

My man was big — titanic, in fact. I hate fighting big men — they don’t feel pain, they have a natural confidence that is hard to break and they are strong.

My man was still trying to figure out why I wasn’t dead. I shared his confusion, but I wasn’t going to dwell on it.

It crossed my mind that I probably didn’t want to kill him. Legal troubles, and all that.

I sidestepped, got down in my stance and flicked my chlamys at his eyes.

Behind him, Sophanes landed a blow with a crack that must have been heard at the peak of Cithaeron, and his man went down. The other backed away.

My opponent had a club and a knife. He cut at me with the gross ineptitude of the professional bruiser.

I killed him. It was no big deal — he was big, not skilled, and as the club rose I put my knife in between the shoulder muscles and the throat. Interesting point — I can remember that I had been planning a much more complicated feint when he left himself wide open from sheer folly and I took him. That’s single combat.

I threw my chlamys over Sophanes’ second opponent. It had corner weights and the gossamer wool settled like a net. Sophanes stepped in with his stave in two hands and broke the man’s head as if we’d planned the move for weeks in the palaestra. That was the fight.

I felt much better. When you are enraged at injustice and humiliated by your helplessness in the face of towering bureaucracy, killing a couple of thugs is deeply satisfying. At least, it is to me. Sophanes must have felt the same, as he flashed me a grin and we embraced. Then he went to his friend, who was starting to stir. I stripped the bodies of cash. Each had a little purse with a dozen silver owls — quite a sum.

The daimon of combat was wearing off, and suddenly I thought: Why am I alive?

The first blow should have been the last. I never saw it coming. And I was bleeding — just a little — from a deep puncture above my hip. A prostitute fetched water and cleaned my wound and said a prayer for me. Meanwhile, I cast around the ground, trying to find the dagger. All I could think was that the blade must have snapped.

The dagger was under the dead titan — lost things are always in the last place you look, I find. Glaucon was getting colour back in his face, and a pair of local girls were stroking him while a doctor felt his skull. Sophanes helped me roll the dead man over, and there was the dagger — a single finger of bright steel sticking out of Aristides’ wax tablet.

Sophanes whistled and made a sign of aversion. ‘The gods love you, Plataean.’

I’d fought with pleasure, but the sight of the tablet with the dagger right through it made me shake for a moment — just a moment.

That close.

I gave the girls five owls — a fortune — to make the body vanish. Sophanes was, I think, both appalled and thrilled.

The morning was young, and I found a brothelkeeper and had him take the other two thugs and lock them in his cellar, which was cut straight into the rock of the hillside. I paid him, too. The free-spending habits of a life of piracy instantly conquered a few months’ attempt to be a farmer. Kill people, take their money, spend it recklessly.

Yet I had changed — because another part of me registered that I’d just spent the value of thirty-five medimnoi of grain at current prices — merely to get rid of a body.

We left Glaucon to recover — ostensibly to watch the prisoners. I went and bought a wine krater. It’s that one, right there — Achilles and Ajax playing polis. It tickles my fancy, that it wasn’t all war. Men had time to gamble at Troy.

The sun was high, but not yet noon, when we got back to the brothel. Glaucon looked like a dog with too many bones — he’d had his flute played, I could tell — but the two men were both in the cellar. One was dead. Blows to the head can have that effect. Sophanes didn’t like that — that he’d killed a man.

I shrugged. ‘If you fight, you will kill,’ I said.

The other was terrified. He wasn’t a citizen and the punishment for his crime would be the silver mines until he died. Nor was he brave. But all he knew was that some men and women, all veiled, had paid the titan to find me and kill me. They’d been paid at sunrise, in the grove of Pan.

That’s all he knew.

I looked at him, tried a few more questions, listened to his tears — and cut his throat. Sophanes was shocked. I stepped back to avoid the flow of blood, and then handed the brothelkeeper five more drachmas.

He nodded to me, as one predator to another.

The two boys who had been sent to ‘guard’ me were spluttering.

‘Listen, lads,’ I said. I caught their arms and held them. ‘All he had coming was to be worked to death as a slave. Right?’ I looked at both of them. ‘And now the only story that will ever be heard is ours. Hard to cook up a lie if none of your witnesses can speak.’

‘You. . killed him!’ Glaucon got out, after some muttering.

‘He tried to kill you,’ I pointed out.

‘That was in the heat of battle,’ Sophanes said. ‘By Zeus Soter, Plataean, this was murder. It’s different.’

I shrugged. ‘Not when you’ve killed as many men as I have,’ I said. ‘Console yourself that he was a foreign metic, probably an escaped slave, and a man of no worth whatsoever. He wasn’t even brave.’ I wiped my knife on the dead man’s chiton, poured a little olive oil from my aryballos to keep it bright, sheathed it and headed up the rock-carved steps.

We were a silent crew as we walked to my murder trial. I was pretty sure that my two companions were no longer in the grips of hero worship.

Athenian justice is swift. I arrived a little early, but most of the Areopagitica was already on the hill, and the last of the old men made their climb just behind me. Aristides was there. He had a bruise on one shoulder that he hadn’t had that morning.

‘Tried to kill you?’ I said quietly.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And you, I take it?’

I handed him the tablet with the dagger through it. Heads turned all over the summit.

He was angry. ‘This is not Athens,’ he spat. ‘What are we, some court of Medes? Some soft-handed Lydians? Next, men will turn to poison.’ But then he calmed. ‘This will tell in your favour. I’ll hand it around. The symbolism is so clear, it’s like an augury — the dagger through the law!’

So I watched the tablet passed from man to man, and the muttering must have helped me a little.

Aristides was calm and forceful when the trial started. Let me digress a moment: you’ve noticed that I wandered the city without much trouble. I could have run. But of course I didn’t. That’s how it was then — Athens assumed that I would come to my trial, and I did.

In a murder trial, each side gets one speech — a couple of hours by a water-clock — first the prosecution, then the defence. And the verdict is delivered immediately after the defence delivers its argument. We’re much the same in Plataea, although it’s years since we had a proper murder trial. Simon, my cousin, killed himself rather than face the tribunal.

So we all stood in the blazing sun, and Cleitus of the Alcmaeonids began his speech. I can’t remember all he said, but I know it was damning and at the same time utterly inaccurate.

‘I accuse Arimnestos of Plataea, the man who stands before you, of the murder of my cousin Nepos. Nepos was murdered within the precincts of a shrine — foully murdered, with impiety — unarmed, standing making an oration to the gods.’ Cleitus had a good voice.

I couldn’t speak. But I could roll my eyes. So I did.

‘All of you know of this man — a notorious pirate, a man who serves with the vicious cut-throat Miltiades. With Miltiades, he sacked Naucratis. With Miltiades, he attacked the Great King’s ships, and those of our allies at Ephesus and other places — over and over again. It is men like this who bring the just wrath of the Great King down on our city.’

Well, I couldn’t really disagree with that, so I smiled genially.

‘Don’t let this man’s reputation as a fighter cloud your vision, though, gentlemen. Look at him. This is no