Marathon: Freedom or Death

I won’t tell you that I really understood all this, that dark autumn and winter, with the rain lashing the shutters and the fires sputtering and smoking, and a hundred bored and angry Greeks fighting like dogs for the leadership of the rebellion. But I understood that all was not as it seemed. And it slowly dawned on me that whatever men said aloud, Samos and Lesbos and Rhodos and Miletus all hated each other, and Athens more than most of them hated Persia.

So you children can see that it’s a miracle we ever got a fleet together at all.

Cimon left, but Miltiades and I both stayed, and over the course of hours of debate, it was decided to relieve Miletus for the winter, fill the city with supplies and go back to our homes. We were to rally in the spring on the beaches of Mytilene, find the Persian fleet and crush it. With the main Persian fleet finished, we’d have the initiative, and then we could act against the Persian land forces as we saw fit.

It was a good plan. Dionysius and Miltiades hammered it out, even against their own interests. Miltiades had no love for Miletus, as I have said, and Dionysius had every reason to favour a long war of commerce, as he was a pirate by profession. But the two of them joined together in something like alliance, and the Lesbians and Chians backed them. It is odd — a thing I’ve seen many times — that men will rise to nobility out of squalor and greed, especially when there is competition and worthy fellowship. On their own, Miltiades and Dionysius were greedy pirates. Together, they competed against one another to be the saviours of Greece.

Their plan left a lot unsaid. There was nothing about rescuing the cities of the Asian coast. Rather, it was the strategy of all those Greeks who had water between them and the hooves of the Persian cavalry. It left the mainlanders as slaves.

It was also the first realistic plan the rebels had ever made.

Dionysius offended everyone by insisting that most of the ships were ill-trained and that we should spend our first months when we rallied together in spring training our rowers and marines. I agreed with him, but his manner of stating this obvious truth was arrogant.

‘You aristocrats are like children when you go to sea,’ he said. ‘My boys do nothing but row. They don’t go to sea with their heads full of the Iliad. They go to sea to win — to take enemy ships and turn them into silver and gold. Have you seen the Phoenicians manoeuvre? Have you seen how hard they train their crews? Ever face a Cilician in narrow waters? Can your oarsmen row you into a diekplous? Turn on an obol and ram an enemy under the stern? No. Hardly one of you. When we come to the day — the moment of truth — there’s not twenty ships here that can be trusted in a close action. Let me train your crews. A little sweat now, and liberty is the prize.’

If he’d stuck to that as a theme, he might have won them over, but every one of them fancied himself the greatest captain of the ages, fit to be trierarch on the Argo. It is a Greek failing.

So with nothing decided on save action, we loaded grain and root vegetables and ships full of pigs and goats, and we sailed for Miletus in midwinter, which was thought to be daring in those days. Not like now, when we make war in every season. We were so powerful that we went through the Samian channel, caring nothing whether the Persians knew we were coming.

The enemy squadron at Lade had had word of us, and their sails were just notches on the horizon by the time we sailed down the bay, and their camp was a field of burning embers. They hadn’t even left a garrison. We took the island and landed the stores in Miletus.

The populace of the lower town hailed us as heroes and we all feasted together, but I noticed that whole families wanted to be taken away when we sailed. Histiaeus frowned, but he didn’t forbid any of the lower-class families to leave.

I drank wine with Istes — wine I’d brought myself. We sat on folding stools in the agora, and drank from a kylix his slave boy carried, Athenian work with two heroes fighting.

‘Ever think of leaving?’ I asked.

He watched my ship for a long time, drank his wine and shook his head. ‘No. But yes.’ He laughed. ‘You’re a hero. You know the rules. I can’t leave. I’ll die here — this year or next.’

A stick-figure girl came by with a heavy pot on her head — carrying water. She glanced admiringly at the two of us — fine, well-muscled men, and killers too.

‘What’s her glance worth?’ Istes said. ‘What would it be like for you to awaken one day to find that she spits on your shadow?’

I understood all too well. ‘But if we take too many of your people away. .’ I began.

Istes shook his head. ‘Don’t say it, my friend,’ he whispered. ‘My brother. . does not feel as I do.’

‘How do you feel?’ I asked.

‘I think we should go to Sicily and start again, far from the Persians, the Medes, the Lydians and the fucking Athenians.’ He shrugged. ‘I am filled with joy at every citizen family that gets away, to remember what Miletus was.’

I must have looked startled at the force of his expression, because he leaned back and drank more wine. ‘You asked. I answered. But my brother — he is determined that we will meet our ends here. All of us. Sail before he makes a law against emigration.’ His deep brown eyes locked with mine. ‘Take all the families of those archers.’

I looked around. ‘Why?’

Istes shrugged. ‘He is mad,’ he said, and then would say no more.

We sailed that afternoon, as the first of the great winter storms brewed to the east. We were the last to be allowed to take citizen refugees out of Miletus. The city had new heart, and food for the winter.

But the siege mound was not any smaller, and Datis did not decamp, as the Persian army had in other winters. He stayed, and his men built a proper wall around their camp, so that the raids had to stop. And the mound grew higher.

I took sixteen citizen families to Lesbos. Most of them had money, and they offered us — me and Stephanos — a good rate to take them all the way across the deep blue to Sicily.

Miltiades convinced them to come and settle in the Chersonese instead, and before the second Heracleion, we landed them at Kallipolis and settled in for the winter. My red-haired Thracian had found another man, but there were more fish like her in the sea, and I caught one quickly enough with a necklace of gold beads — a delicate blonde with a heart-shaped face and no other heart at all. She spoke Lydian and Greek and another language, too, close enough to what the Iberians spoke to make each other laugh.

It might have been a good winter for me, except that there was a long letter from Penelope about the farm, and it wasn’t good — Epictetus the elder was dead, some of our stock had died in a pest and she needed me to come home so that she could be wed — but not a word of whom she might marry.

And enclosed in her letter was another slip of white vellum, written in the same hand.

Some say a phalanx of infantry is the most beautiful thing, but I still insist it is you who is the most beautiful. Come and be rich.

I held the parchment close to an oil lamp, and more words came through on the surface — written in acid, and now burned into the hide.

Come soon.

6

I was able to help Penelope. I sent my gold home to her, with Idomeneus as my courier. He went with a good grace — he wasn’t missing any killing, and he knew it.

Briseis was another matter. It is harder, when the first flush of love is past, to understand what value to place on that love. I had gone to her rescue before — more than once — and never been better for saving her. In fact, I was never sure I had saved her. Should I cast life aside, crew up my ship and race for Ephesus?

I’d thought about it all autumn. Ephesus is less than six hundred stades from Miletus, and on that night when I’d found myself on a stolen horse, avoiding Persian archers, my first thought had been to ride for Ephesus and find her.