Marathon: Freedom or Death

But for the record, Aristides, he may have beaten you in this race,’ he grinned, and his teeth sparked, ‘but I beat him, as I remember.’

We all laughed. I remember it well, the eight of us laughing. In all the Long War, there were a few moments like that, that sparkled like bronze in the sun. We weren’t fighting for our lives. We weren’t freezing cold or burning hot. No one was going to die. We were comrades — captains, leaders, but men who stood together. Later, when all Greece was at the point of extinction, we never laughed like that.

There is a Spartan joke, that eirene — peace — is an ideal men discern from the observation that there are brief intervals between wars.

You laugh, children. Hmm.

I wish I could end this story right there — with eight of us lined up on the sand, ready to race. I remember it so well. Young Hipparchus, the Samian, was retying his sandals when Miltiades called us to order, and the poor boy fumbled the retie and ended up running with one sandal.

Miltiades held his cane even with the ground, and then swept it away like a sword cut, and we were off.

The race itself was an anticlimax of the worst sort, because Aristides and Epaphroditos became entangled within a few lengths of the starting line, and although neither fell, they never caught the rest of us — and they should probably have been first. Or perhaps not. But they were the two I had expected to have to outperform, and their removal gave me wings.

I passed Sophanes in the first five steps and ran easily, knees high, arms pumping, because my greaves fitted perfectly. In the race in armour, the armour is part of the contest, and my armour fitted.

Sophanes wasn’t going to surrender meekly, however, and after fifteen paces, we were side by side, well in advance of the other runners. He tried to cut inside me at the turning post, and I shoved him with my big Boeotian shield, and he had to fall back a step.

Hipparchus, running with one sandal flapping, was still game, and he came on past the men who should have been the front-runners — because they were disheartened by their collision, I suspect. But his badly tied sandal finally fell away, tripping him, and he went down. He let out a cry as he fell, and I think Sophanes must have looked back, and that was the step he never retrieved. I ran to the finish and crossed first by the length of my leg.

Then I had a long rest while the other heats ran — three of them. The final eight had me and Sophanes of Athens, as well as my own man, the Aeolian Herakleides, Nearchos of Crete and some Chians I didn’t know.

Nearchos came and put an arm around me. ‘This is the life,’ he said. ‘Better than ploughing fields on Crete.’

‘You’ve never ploughed a field in your life, lord,’ I said, and they all laughed.

‘He was my war tutor,’ Nearchos told Sophanes.

‘No wonder you are a hero now,’ Sophanes said — the boy had a nice turn of phrase.

That was a race. No one fell, and no one clashed at the start line, where most mishaps happen. We all went off at full stride, and in that final race, no one had a loose sandal strap, a bad shield, a pebble.

We ran for the gods. I don’t remember much of it — I was tired, and I was flying like a ship before the wind, without a thought in my head. But I remember that as we came to the turning post, all in a clump, Nearchos was first by a hand’s breadth — but his paces were a little too long, and he landed his left foot well past the post and started his turn late. Quick as a shark takes bait, I turned inside him, my light shield almost catching the post as I scraped by, so that Sophanes, Nearchos and I were exactly together as we came out of the turn and ran for the spear Miltiades held out across the finish.

What can I say? We ran. We flew. We were in step, stride for stride, all the way home, and the army roared its approval at us, although I remember none of that. What I remember is how fast that spear grew, and how nothing mattered but reaching it. Nothing.

I won because my shield was a palm’s breadth larger than theirs, and touched the spear first. Nothing else. Rather than arrogance, my victory made me feel humble, and I embraced both of them.

I’m not ashamed to say that I wept. As they say at Olympia, for a moment I had been with the gods. I think that all three of us had been.

The rest is a blur of exhaustion. Stephanos took me out in the second round of pankration, but Sophanes of Athens put him down in the third round before losing to Aeschylus the poet’s brother in the finals. Athenians are good at games. They train harder than other men — even the Spartans.

I passed at boxing, and I watched a big Lesbian brute — Callimachus, no less, and never was a fighter better named — beat his way through other men like a plough through a field on its second pass, when all the big chunks are broken and the bad rocks already pulled. Aristides caught him again and again, but he was big enough to shake off the blows and continue, and he finally wore Aristides down and hit him hard, and Aristides raised his hand in surrender.

And then we were lighting the fires, and men were preparing for fighting in armour. I was tired, and I suspected that I had won the games. I was surprised at my own hesitation.

Is this how cowardice begins, I wondered, or how youth ends?

But I tied my corslet back on my torso, picked up my shield and went down the beach to the fires, with Idomeneus carrying my shield and my sword.

Aristides grinned sheepishly at me and shook his head. He was wearing a clean chitoniskos, and no armour.

‘That brute almost killed me,’ he said ruefully. He grinned at the ‘brute’ to take the sting out of his remark. ‘I want to live to fight the Medes.’

I nodded. I felt the same way myself, but I also felt that as one of the best fighters, I would be seen to shirk if I balked at the armoured combat. Paramanos helped me into my armour and gave me a drink of wine.

‘I think the gods have stolen your wits,’ he said. ‘Fighting your friends in the dark with sharp weapons. Grow up!’ But he cuffed me on the back and wished me good fortune. ‘Not much of a field, eh?’

There were only a couple of dozen men brave enough, or foolish enough, to fight with sharp weapons, in armour, at the edge of dark. Many of them were Athenians and Milesians. ‘The fewer the men, the greater the honour,’ I said, but I remember giving him a sarcastic grin to go with the line from Pindar.

I faced Aeschylus’s brother in the first round, and he hit hard, cutting pieces from the oak rim of my shield, but I ticked him in the pectoral under his sword arm on our third engagement, drawing blood from a place that showed when he overexposed his side in a long sweeping cut. The cut itself was under his armour, and I had to make him take the breastplate off to show it, and he was as surprised as Dionysius. I was awarded the victory, and the young man apologized for doubting my word.

I had a long rest, and my muscles started to stiffen before my second bout — which was against another Athenian.

Sophanes. Of course.

He was good — fast, light on his feet, careful. He wanted to dance.

I faced him with the opposite strategy. I stood my ground, barely reacting, offering nothing, allowing him to dance while I waited with bovine patience.

There isn’t much to hit on a man wearing Greek armour and greaves and fighting behind an aspis or a Boeotian. I stood my ground, backing from his wilder rushes, and waited him out. After a number of engagements — some men were booing me, because I was so dull — my blade licked out and cut him on the bicep, and it was over.

‘You fight like an old man,’ Miltiades said to me.

‘I plan to be one,’ I said, which got a good response.

Most men felt I had won the games by that time, and my friends began to gather, dumping wine on my head, kissing me or throwing their arms around me. Epaphroditos and two of his men picked me up, carried me to the edge of the water and threw me in. Then a small crowd came and fished me out, and I cursed them for the effect on my armour.

The third round was just two of us. Too many bouts resulted in double hits, or real wounds, and knocked both men out of the competition. In our rules then, a double hit disqualified both men.

So it was me — and Istes.

He was reputed to be the greatest swordsman in Greece.

So was I.

It was still bright enough to fight, and we had fires lit on either side of us, and I think almost every man in