Marathon: Freedom or Death

soft-handed volunteers from Lesbos, Chios and Samos — were the most reluctant to work.

I’ll say this, too. Dionysius knew his business. I thought my crew to be the best-trained oarsmen in the world, but Dionysius quickly disabused me of my notions of arete. When he laid out a course with inflated skins, I told him it was impossible for a trireme to row through it, and he put me to shame by showing me how in his Sea Snake.

I spent a week training, and the more of his tricks I learned, the more I disliked his manner of teaching them. He was abusive when he might have been instructional, and abusive when he might have praised. And when I attempted to explain to him how deeply he offended most of his navarchs, he dismissed my criticism as a petty attempt to get back at him for his superior ship-handling.

‘You’re a quick learner,’ he said, ‘but in your heart you are no seaman, just another petty lordling. Don’t linger on the sea when we’ve beaten the Medes, boy — it’s for better men.’

What do you say to that?

I said nothing. But I was searching for an excuse to sail away, at least for a few days.

My excuse came up quickly enough. I was a captain in my own right, for all that I served Miltiades, and I attended the fleet council when I had time — which was all the time.

While Dionysius focused on seamanship, Miltiades and old Pelagius of Chios wanted intelligence. Miltiades had spies in Sardis but no way to contact them, and what we all needed to know was the progress of the Persian fleet — where were they? Did the fleet even exist? Were they forming at Tyre? Sidon? Naucratis?

We imagined that the Persians feared us.

I knew someone who could answer all those questions. She lay on a couch, just a few hundred stades away.

‘Drop me on the beach by Ephesus,’ I said.

Every head in the council turned.

‘I know the town as if I was born to it. And I have friends there — people who are no friends to the Persians. Perhaps I can even contact one of your spies in Sardis, Miltiades.’ I bowed to him. ‘Give me the word.’

One of the great advantages of being a hero is that when you propose something daring, no one will stand in your way. It’s as if everyone assumes that this sort of thing is your destiny.

By early summer, I was growing a trifle cynical about my role as a hero. But the Greeks were sending me to Ephesus. We had spies in the Persian camp at Miletus, and I knew that Briseis had not accompanied her husband to war.

She was alone, in Ephesus.

I set off the next day, free of bloody Dionysius and his sea-wrack tyranny, and free too of the ugly competitions between Miltiades and Aristides and the Samian leaders.

I daydreamed about taking Storm Cutter up the river to the city of Artemis, bold as new-forged bronze, but I didn’t. Instead, I bought a sailing smack from some Samians, and Idomeneus and Harpagos and I sailed him ourselves, with Philocrates our unpaid passenger. The blasphemer had grown on me, and he’d shown no interest whatsoever in returning to Halicarnassus to trade grain for hides and lie when he swore oaths.

‘I was born for this,’ he said, not less than twice a day. And he smiled his curious smile of self-mockery. ‘I miss Teucer, the bastard. He needs to come back aboard so that I can win back my money.’

Teucer’s family were snug in the Chersonese, but the archer himself was back on the walls of Miletus, and we all missed him.

We sailed the fishing boat through easy seas, right around Mycale. We spent the night there, frying fresh sardines on an iron pan and drinking new wine from a leather bag. In the morning we were away again, up the coast and past the ruins of the old town that guard the promontory beyond Ephesus, and in the last light of the second day I could see the Temple of Artemis glow in the sunset, the old granite lit red like sandstone in the setting sun.

They left me on the coast road, twenty stades from the city. I told them to return for me in three days, and I put on my leather bag, checked the hang of my sword and pulled my chlamys about me. I had two spears and a broad straw hat, like a gentleman hunter.

I walked, and no one paid me a second glance.

As I made my way up the road to the city, I thought of my last journey up that road — delirious with fever, a slave bound to the temple, destined to die hauling stone. Ten years or less separated me from that boy. Indeed, the river of time flows in only one direction, as my master loved to say.

In a few hours, I would see him. He, at least, would never betray me, or any other Greek who served the rebellion.

I had determined to go to Heraclitus first, because I loved him, and because I had no idea what to expect with Briseis, nor had I any notion of where her loyalties would lie. She must have heard by now of my encounters with her brother the previous autumn and winter.

In truth, I was afraid of meeting her. But as always, fear forced me to act. I can never abide to see myself as afraid, and even as a child I would drive myself to do things that I feared, only to prove myself — to myself.

Briseis had always seen through this aspect of my character — and used it against me.

I heard her voice as I walked, and I tasted her tongue on my lips, and other parts of her, too, in my imagination. I thought of the first time she had come to me, fresh from humiliating her enemy for her, just as she had expected me to. And of the reward, although at the time I thought her another woman entirely. See? You are blushing, my dear. Boys only think of one thing, and how to get at it.

Boys are predictable, girls.

When I looked up, I had walked to our gate. To the house of Archilogos, which had been the house of Hipponax. To the house of Briseis. I was standing in full view of the gate, like a fool.

I’d like to say that I did something witty, or wily, like Odysseus. But I didn’t. I stood there in the sun and waited for her. I suppose I thought that the Cyprian one would send her into my arms.

No such thing happened.

Only when the tops of my shoulders started to burn from the sun did I come to my senses and turn away. I walked up an alley, cut north to the base of the temple acropolis and then went to the old fountain building.

It was gone.

That was a shock. In its place was an elegant construction of Parian marble and local granite, with fine statues of women carrying water, cut so that that hydriai on their heads supported the roof.

I didn’t belong there. There were a few free women and a great many slaves, and I was the only free man — the only man armed, and as such, a figure of fear.

Heraclitus’s river had flowed right by, and I could not dip my toe again.

I fled.

I went up to the temple, where hunters were never uncommon, although I was a stranger and I was a man in a city where most of the men were at war. I left my spears with the door warden and I climbed to the palaestra, made a small sacrifice to the goddess and looked around the porticoes for my master.

Thank the gods, he was there. Had he been absent, I think my panic might have killed me.

He knew me immediately. His performance was admirable — he finished his lesson, a point about the way Pythagoras formed a right triangle, then he teased a new student, and finally, as naturally as if we’d planned it, he came to me, took my arm and led me away.

‘You cannot walk abroad here, my boy,’ he said.

‘And yet I have done so all day,’ I said.

‘That others are fools does not make you less a fool,’ he said.

Oh, I had missed you, my master.

He sent all his slaves away before he let me take the cloak from over my head, then we sat for hours, drinking good wine and eating olives. He was thin as a stick, as if he lived in a city under siege, and I forced him to eat olives, and his skin seemed to grow better even as I watched.

‘Why are you starving yourself, master?’ I asked.

‘I fast until Greece is free,’ he said.

‘Then eat!’ I hugged him. ‘We have nigh on four hundred ships at Samos. All the cities of Ionia have united, and the Persians will never find a fleet to stand against us. No later than next spring, you’ll see us sail up the river,