Marathon: Freedom or Death

‘Take your ship and leave!’ he ordered, screaming at me. ‘Traitor!’

Leagus escorted me out of the door and down the beach. Then he took my arm. ‘He’s the best seaman I know,’ Leagus said. ‘But the power has unhinged him. I have no idea why. The mere sight of so many ships — it did something to him. I thought your words might sober him.’

I didn’t know what to say. Men come to power in different ways and they react to it in different ways, as they do with wine and poppy juice and other drugs. But when I walked back to Miltiades, I was sombre and my head hurt. I threw myself down on one of the rugs he had laid over the sand.

‘I thought you ought to see that for yourself,’ Miltiades said.

‘I tried to tell him about the bribes,’ Aristides said. ‘He ordered me killed — then exiled — on and on. He’s lost his mind.’

Miltiades gave me a tired smile. ‘It is odd — I should have had the command. But now a madman has it, and yet the fleet seems unable to take the command from him, and I can’t seem to rise to the occasion.’ Miltiades looked at me.

I sat up. ‘Are you suggesting I should do something?’ I asked.

Miltiades shrugged.

I looked at Aristides, and he would not meet my eye. Oh, everyone in Athens is so pious, until the moment when the need of the city outweighs all that petty morality. ‘You two want me to kill Dionysius?’ I asked.

Aristides looked resolutely away.

Miltiades shrugged again. ‘I certainly can’t do it.’

‘Neither can I,’ I said. ‘It would be an offence against hospitality. And I have sworn an oath to Apollo.’

Aristides turned and met my eye. ‘Good,’ he said, and suddenly I knew that I’d misjudged him. I had passed some sort of test.

‘Well,’ Miltiades said, ‘I guess we’re with the gods.’

That was all right with me. I trusted Apollo to save the Greeks.

The next week saw more training. I had Storm Cutter in the water constantly, working on various manoeuvres. Most of the Lesbians did the same, and a few of the Samians, and all the Cretans. We may not have been the paragons that Dionysius wanted, but we were a hardened fleet, and the rowers were in condition.

Miltiades insisted that we learn some squadron manoeuvres, so we practised every day as a squadron, and Nearchos chose to throw in his lot with us. Nearchos was the boy I had trained to manhood, son of Achilles, Lord of Crete. He was no longer an arrogant, whiny puppy of seventeen, either. He was a man now, a hero of the sea-fight near Amathus in Cyprus, and he led five ships.

He was popular with the Athenians, and it was through him that I became friends with Phrynichus the poet. Phrynichus went about collecting stories every afternoon when men lay down for a nap, and after he had met Nearchos and heard his version of the deck-to-deck fighting at Amathus, the two of them sought me out.

I was lying on a carpet in Miltiades’ tent, my head on a rolled chlamys, unable to sleep. To be honest, those days were as black for me as the days after Hipponax sent me from his house and tried to kill me. My head hurt, and pain is often part of low spirits. But I could not get the thought of her out of my head — as if her image and the pain were one thing.

‘Arimnestos?’ Nearchos asked.

I sprang to my feet, went out into the sun and we embraced. For two men encamped on the same beach, we hardly ever saw each other. He introduced the playwright, who asked me about the fight at Amathus, and I sat by the fire and told my story.

When I was done, Phrynichus asked me how many men I thought I had put down that day.

I shrugged. ‘Ten?’ I said. ‘Twenty?’ I must have frowned, because he smiled.

‘I mean no offence,’ he said. ‘You have the reputation as a great killer of men. Perhaps the greatest in this fleet.’

What do you say to that? I thought that I probably was, but it would have been hubris to say as much. ‘Sophanes of Athens is a fine warrior,’ I said. ‘And Epaphroditos of Lesbos is a killer, too.’

Phrynichus raised an eyebrow.

I leaned forward. He was a great poet, a man of honour. Moreover, his words could make a man immortal — if you believe that word-fame lasts for ever, and I do. ‘You have fought in a close battle?’ I asked.

He rolled his hand. ‘I’ve been in a few ship fights,’ he said. ‘I faced a man on a deck once. Never a big fight, in phalanx.’

I smiled. ‘But you know how it is, then. When you ask me how many men I put down — how can I answer? If I cut a man’s hand, does he fall? Is he finished? If I put my spear in his foot, he’ll stay down for the whole fight, but I suspect he’ll till his fields next season. Yes?’

He nodded.

‘When I fight my best, I don’t even know what’s happening around me. In my last fight — off Miletus — I put a man down with a blow from my shield, and he was behind me.’ I shook my head, because I wasn’t putting this well. ‘Listen, I’m not bragging. I just don’t know. I fight by area, not by numbers. In a ship fight, I work to clear an area, and then I move.’

He smiled. ‘You are a craftsman of war,’ he said.

I met his grin. ‘Perhaps.’

He leaned forward. ‘May I serve with you in the battle? I’d like to see you in action.’

Look, short of Pindar or Simonides or Homer risen from the grave, he was the most famous poet of our day, and he was asking to watch me in the great battle where we were going to break Persia. What was I to say?

By an irony that I have long savoured, young Aeschylus and his brother were both in Cleisthenes’ ship as marines — so that we had in one squadron the greatest living poet and the next. They had not yet competed head to head — but young Aeschylus could be seen haunting the same fires as Phrynichus, so that no sooner did I befriend the playwright than I met his young rival.

This is the thing that makes the Greeks strong, it seems to me. Aeschylus admired Phrynichus — so he sought to best him. Admiration begets emulation and competition. And in the same way, I was already a famous fighter, and men already sought to emulate me — and best me.

Never mind. I speak of Phrynichus.

Truth to tell, Simonides was a better poet. And Aeschylus wrote better plays. But Phrynichus made me immortal, and besides, he was a quicker man with a pun or a rhyme than either of the others — he could compose a drinking song on the spot. It must have been that same week that we were on the beaches of Samos, and we were all lying around a campfire — a huge fire — having a beachside symposium. There must have been a hundred men there — oarsmen and aristocrats mingled, as it used to be in those days. We had Samian girls waiting on us, paid for by Miltiades, and they were fine girls — not prostitutes, but farm girls, brisk and flirtatious, despite their mothers hovering nearby.

But one girl stood out. She was not a beauty, but she stood square and straight like a young ash. She had a beautiful body, muscled like an athlete, firm breasts, broad hips and a narrow waist. And she talked like a man, straight at you, if you asked for wine or some such. When she played at jumping the fire — showing her muscled legs and leaping high enough to fly away into the smoke-filled dark — all the men wanted her, even those who usually preferred men. She had that spark — that in Briseis is a raging fire. I felt it too, though I was only a week from my love, and in that week I hated all women with equal fervour.

The girl moved among us, and we all admired her, and then Phrynichus leaped to his feet and seized a kithara that one of the boys had been playing, and he sang us a song.

How I wish I could remember it!

He called her Artemis’s daughter, of course, and he sang that her portion and her dowry was time, honour, the word-fame of man, and that her sons would conquer the world and be kings, and her daughters would sacrifice to the Muses. He sang of her in a parody of the elegies that men receive when they win games at Olympus or Nemea, and he praised her skill at jumping fires.

And he did all this while rhyming inside every line, so that his pentameters rolled like a marching army. We were spellbound.

The girl wept when it was done. ‘What have I to live for that will compare to this?’ she asked, and we all applauded her.