Marathon: Freedom or Death

men. I knew the process and I used it for my own ends. We rowed when we might have sailed, and I hardened their muscles as if they were athletes, and I promised them a gold daric a man if they got us in and out of Miletus again.

I waited for the dark of the moon, and the gods sent me a dark night and heavy seas. We had lights on our sterns, and we rowed across in the dark, with the rowers cursing their ill-luck and praying with every stroke — but after a month of constant adventure, my crew could row in the dark.

We went down the bay with the wind at our backs, under boatsails alone, north around Lade. The wind defeated the currents and allowed us to move quickly, and the Phoenicians were snug in their blankets when we went past, because it was raining and winter had come. But some fool laughed aloud and alerted them, and when we had unloaded and turned our bows to the open sea, they were formed across the bay, fifteen ships waiting for our three. And they were good sailors. I watched them for a while from the safety of the Milesian archers, and then I took my little squadron back into the harbour.

All the gold darics in the world weren’t going to save me. I was blockaded in Miletus, and it looked as if our luck had run its course.

4

The Persian fleet didn’t actually have any Persians in it, of course. There were Ionian Greeks and Phoenicians and a handful of very capable Aegyptians on those beaches, and I stood in the so-called Windy Tower of Miletus and watched them.

To the south, the Persian siege mound grew every day. No Persians there, either — just slaves culled from the countryside, hundreds and hundreds of agricultural slaves from the Milesians’ own farms carrying brush and soil, while fending off rocks and arrow shafts, and dumping it under the walls, so that the siege mound grew the width of a man’s hand every night.

The Milesian aristocrats remained confident, however. Their city had never fallen, and they still had stores — they hadn’t killed all their animals yet, and only the lower-class people were suffering. When I was taken up to the acropolis, it was as if I’d entered a city free of war — I was bathed by slaves, anointed with oil and served a meal that included thin-sliced beef tongue.

But in the lower city, the people were starving.

My grain put heart into them, and I wasn’t the only captain who got through — just the only one who’d done it twice. And this late in the season, my second cargo — three ships’ worth — saved the city. Histiaeus and his brother did not hesitate to tell me so.

My second night in the city, Istes led the warriors in an attack out of a postern gate and set fire to a brush pile the enemy had been preparing — brush piled as high as a city wall, intended to help with the last days of the siege mound. But they couldn’t burn the soil, and in the morning the slaves were back at work.

Persian archers appeared periodically and shot into the city — fire arrows, sometimes, but mostly just war shafts, carefully aimed. Every day they killed a man or two on the walls. On the other hand, they kept the city supplied with arrows.

Archilogos, or whoever was in command over there on the beaches of Lade, was not giving up either. They formed a cordon every night, and had small boats rowing across the channel, and at least two ships out in the bay north of the island. At dawn and dusk they sortied out with at least fifteen ships, and I didn’t see much hope for escape.

But on the third night, the city’s defenders sallied out again, and this time I went with them. It is ironic that, once you have the reputation as a great warrior, you must support it constantly. I could no more sit in the acropolis while the men raided than I could abstain from eating.

The city was well appointed with regard to armour, and Lord Histiaeus gave me a bell corslet and a fine Cretan helmet with a magnificent horsehair plume. It was a bit like living in the Iliad. I took my marines, and Philocrates the Blasphemer, who had settled into the life of piracy like a veteran. I got him arms as well, a full panoply.

‘You look like Ares come to life,’ I said to him, when he was dressed in bronze.

‘Ares is a myth to frighten children,’ he said.

‘I see that a storm at sea and a life of war is not enough to restore your respect for the gods,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘You can’t respect what ain’t there.’

I stood back a little and regarded him. There was something frightening about him. He ignored portents, laughed at talismans and called the gods by foul names. At first only the Iberians would eat with him, but as he continued to blaspheme and the skies never swallowed him up, other men began to accept him. That said, I have to say that he had changed. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but he explained it himself later, as you’ll hear, if you come back for more of this story tomorrow.

At any rate, sixty of us went out of the postern gate nearest the harbour. It was pelting down with rain — we slipped on the mud, and I blessed my good Boeotian boots even as the other men cursed their open sandals. The ground in front of the walls had been churned to a froth by the passage of thousands of men, slaves and soldiers, and both sides dumped their waste and filth into that no-man’s-land. It was foul.

You’d think that after a hundred of these raids, the Persians would have set a watch, but of all their contingents, only the Aegyptians kept a regular guard. Most of their crack troops were cavalrymen who disdained such rigorous pastimes as guard duty, and who am I to comment? I never knew a Greek who was willing to stand a night watch.

We crossed the mud and the ordure in the lashing rain, and then we went over the fresh brush they’d piled in lieu of a wall around their camp. No hope of lighting a fire on this night, but we had a different goal in mind.

We weren’t after Artaphernes. If he’d been at the siege, he might have had Briseis, and my approach would have been very different. Indeed, since I’m trying to tell the whole truth here, I’ll add that I didn’t feel any particular commitment to the rebels. They weren’t Plataeans, for instance. I was loyal enough to Miltiades, but you’ll note that I wasn’t criss-crossing the seas looking for him. Nor was I sailing up and down looking for the rebel fleet to offer my services. Mind you, once I was trapped in Miletus, my options were limited. But I wasn’t an idealist. I was a Plataean, and I was Briseis’s lover — or rather, the same, but in the other order.

But neither the satrap nor his new wife was at the siege that autumn. Datis was Artaphernes’ lieutenant, and our aim was to kill him. His great red and purple tent showed clearly across the lines by day, and we’d worked out a couple of sea-marks — torches mounted at two different heights in the town — to guide us to his tent. He was a relative of the Great King — Artaphernes was one of the king’s many brothers, and this Datis was a cousin, or some such, and a famous warrior, and the rumours were that when he took Miletus, he’d be sent with a great fleet against Chios and Lesbos — and perhaps Athens. Or so men said.

No one expected us to succeed in killing him, but it was this sort of constant pressure that kept the besiegers on edge and encouraged them to pack it up for the winter and head home.

We crept through the dark, soaked to the skin, squelching in mud, turning frequently to get our line of approach from the torches on the walls, and we crept forward, cursed by men in the tents whose ropes we bumped — little knowing, of course, that we were mortal foes. I wondered if this was what Odysseus had felt when he left the Trojan horse to sneak into the town of Troy. The Iliad is very real at times — but no one ever seems to be wet or cold, or have the flux. I find that these three are the proper children of Ares, not Havoc and Panic and whatever else the poets ascribe. Who ever had a war without wet and cold?

We were in the middle of the column, so we had no idea what — or who — alarmed the camp, but suddenly we were discovered. It was raining so hard that no one could light a torch, and as soon as the enemy came out of their tents, they lost all sense of the situation.

Our men killed the first to come close to them, then scattered. That’s what we’d planned. The Milesians simply vanished. They had raided the camp before and knew it well enough. My marines were not so lucky, and in the dark we followed the wrong men. We thought we were following Milesians and we ended up in the horse lines, where a dozen conscientious Persian troopers had run to protect their mounts. Our men started fighting them with no cue from me. My marines were armoured and the Persians were unarmed, and they died — taking two of my men with them. Persians are brave.