Marathon: Freedom or Death

I had no idea how many men I had under command, or how much damage we’d done, but I knew that it was time to go. I had a horn — the gift of Istes — and I ran clear of the flame, the men closest to me following, and I stopped in the dark to sound the horn, but the only sound I made was the bleat of an old ewe looking for her last lamb.

‘Give me that,’ Philocrates said, and he took it and blew a mighty blast. There was the sound of running feet, and we braced ourselves — we had no shields, and we were going to be reaped like ripe grain if the enemy had a phalanx to set against us.

But it was Idomeneus, laughing like a hyena, with fifty of our sailors and marines on his heels. Towards the back of his rout, there was fighting, but so far our enemies were disorganized.

‘Get them into the ship!’ I called — because the Storm Cutter was coming ashore for us.

Some men took some hide boats they found there — Tyche favours the brave, or so they say, and thirty men made it away in the small boats. But the fighting was intensifying, and I could hear the enemy getting into a line, their shields tapping against each other in the dark, and the fires behind them showed me how fast they were building the shield wall.

The enemy hoplites were backlit by burning ships, and mine were hidden by darkness. ‘One quick charge!’ I told the men I could find. ‘On me, on me!’ I called, and I picked up a heavy rock. ‘Get close and throw,’ I said. ‘Put one man down, and run for the ship. Don’t stay and fight!’

Maybe a dozen men listened to me and obeyed. We ran down the dune out of the darkness, and just a pace or two from their shield wall I threw my rock — a big rock, I can tell you. My rock caught my foe in the shin and he went down, and I jumped through the gap in their line and plunged my spear into the unshielded side of the man next to me.

Then the night was full of shouts. Fighting at night is nothing like fighting by day. Men fall down when no foe assails them — they lose their way in the melee. I turned to run and somehow found myself deeper in their line.

I came upon Archilogos as another ship burst into pitch-soaked flame behind my former friend. I think he recognized me as soon as I recognized him. Neither of us had a helmet on — no one wears a helmet at night.

I knew that if I stopped moving, I was dead or taken, so I shoved him — he had a shield and I had none. I had sworn to protect him, so I couldn’t try to harm him — such a thing would haunt me for ever.

He roared and cut at me with a long kopis — the sword flared like flame over my head. I tangled his blow with my spear and jumped back, slamming into a man who had no idea whether I was friend or foe. I fell, lost my spear and rolled, and another man fell on top of me.

That should have been the end.

Archilogos called ‘Doru! Stand and face me!’ and he cut at the man I’d tripped over. That’s fighting in the dark. I saw the flash of his blow and heard it thunk home in another man’s shield.

I gave up trying to find my spear, or even getting to my feet. I crawled and then I rolled, and at one point a man stepped on my breastplate in the dark. The hinges gave, but held, and he stepped away, thinking me a corpse.

There was shouting behind me, where I’d been. I reckoned that the Ionian Greeks were fighting each other. Later I heard that the Greeks and Phoenicians started fighting. Many men were forced allies of the Persians, and not sorry to kill a Tyrian in the dark, I can tell you, and it may be that we only lived because the Ionians helped us.

At any rate, I got to my feet after what seemed an eternity of being helpless, tore my chlamys from my neck, cast it at my feet and ran to the beach.

Storm Cutter was already backing water.

I was out of my breastplate even as I ran — I cut the straps with my eating knife, running parallel to the ship’s course, easily outpacing it as it backed water. I dropped the thing on the sand — a fortune in well-tooled bronze, but a small price to give the gods for freedom — and I ran to the edge of the sea and dived in without pausing on the shingle, my knife still in my hand.

Four strokes out, I got my arms around an oar and called for the rowers to pull me in. Something hit me in the head and I started to go down — I took another blow between the shoulder blades, and my last thought was that their archers had got me.

5

Well, I wasn’t dead. Does that surprise you?

Idomeneus and Philocrates hauled me up the side. I’d been hit on the head by an oar, and when I awoke I had a rip on my scalp and a bruise on my side as if I’d been hit with an axe.

We lost sixteen men — heavy casualties from the sixty or so raiders who’d started the night together. Later I learned that six of them turned back from the swim and remained in Miletus. The rest were killed. Two of them were marines, men who had been with me for years.

On the other hand, we were free. In those days, we seldom stopped to mourn the dead, although it was a humiliation to me to have left their bones behind. Greeks pride themselves on retrieving their dead — even on a raid. The sun was well up in the sky before I could think, but my first thoughts were full of joy — joy at the cleanliness of the sea and the blueness of the sky. Sieges are ugly.

The sea is never ugly, even when he means to kill you.

We made our way north, up the Samian channel, and we took our time because we had three crews packed into two ships, with a dozen Milesian archers thrown in for good measure. They were good men. Teucer was their leader — when a father names his son after the greatest archer in the Iliad, he must expect the boy to grow to pull a bow, eh? Teucer and Philocrates were friends almost before he had his sandals off, and they could be seen throwing knucklebones by the helmsman’s station all through the day, as neither had a station except in combat.

We stopped for meals and we set good lookouts, but the sea remained empty until we were off Ephesus.

There, out in the roadstead, we caught a pair of Aegyptian ships with a pair of Cilicians for escort, or so we thought. Now, the Cilicians were great pirates — they preyed on everyone, but as the Ionian Revolt grew, they took service with the Great King because preying on the Ionians and the Carians promised the richest pickings.

Cilicians seldom use triremes. They are poor men, and they prefer smaller, lighter ships, like the hemiolia, a bireme with a heavy sailing rig and a third half-deck in the stern. The two Cilicians in the distance were hemioliai. Their raked masts marked them for what they were.

My head hurt as if a horse had stepped on it, and I had to sit on the bench by the helmsman and watch as Idomeneus and Stephanos planned our attack on the little convoy.

Closer up, we could see that the two Cilicians were not guarding the Aegyptians. They were taking them. One of the low merchant ships had already been grappled and there was blood in the water.

Naturally, the Cilicians thought we were Phoenicians. Not that they cared. Cilicians are against every race.

They ran — north.

We let them go and took the Aegyptians for ourselves. One of their ships had already been taken and abandoned, and he was empty of life, decks red with sticky blood and already breeding flies, but the cargo was mostly intact — raw hides and ivory.

The second ship ran, and Stephanos showed me how fast the former slave ship really was. The sun was not yet at its height when Stephanos caught the Aegyptian over against the Asian coast and brought him back to where we were grappled to the first capture, the oarsmen blessing the gods for the luck of a cargo of ivory and praying that the other ship was as rich. It was, laden with ceramic bottles of perfume and bales of ostrich plumes, an absurdly rich cargo that made us all laugh for sheer joy.

We landed on the beach at Chios with the two prizes in tow and the Aegyptian captain still cursing his poor luck at being attacked twice in a single afternoon. I loaded all the valuables into one ship, gave the hides to the