Marathon: Freedom or Death

I’ve seldom been with men so elated before a battle. What the four of us had done the day before was to show the Athenians, at least, that we could take the Persians man to man. The success of our venture — a palpable success, I’d add, with looted armour, a bow-case and a magnificent sword — had a powerful effect on every man on our beach, Athenians, Chians, even the mercenaries. The personal wealth of the Persians was legendary — but we’d just proven it.

I’ll say this for Dionysius of Phocaea: his ship was the first off the beach, and he rowed up and down, coaxing us to greater efforts, telling every division, and even every ship, where to take their place in the line.

We formed in the bay with Lade behind us, and our line formed with the Samians on the left, with the Lesbians next. These two contingents made up more than half our line, one hundred and eighty triremes. Erythrae and Phocaea only contributed ten ships between them, but they were the best trained, and they were in the centre. Then came the Chians — a hundred ships under old Pelagius and his nephew, Neoptolemus, the finest of men and the proudest single force for size and beauty. On the right, we had the smaller contingents from Teos, Priene and Myos — about thirty ships altogether, perhaps the worst of our entire fleet. The smaller islands were hard-pressed to raise and crew a trireme. It was as if they had exhausted themselves by providing the thing, and had no energy left for training.

To the right of the mixed squadron were the Milesians, sixty-eight ships. On this day, Histiaeus came out of his city and led them in person. Some said that the men of Miletus had told him to go and not come back — his madness had worsened, and men feared him. But he left Istes in command of the Windy Tower.

And finally, to the right of the Milesians, there was Miltiades’ contingent and the Cretans under Nearchos. They called us the Athenians, but unlike the force that Aristides had led at Sardis five years before, we were really pirates. None of my rowers was an Athenian citizen, although many of them had been born under Athena’s gaze. More were Thracians, or Byzantines, or broken men from Boeotia and the Peloponnese. Even our marines were a polyglot bunch.

Nearchos’s contingent was another fine one, with five well-built ships and highly trained crews. I had drummed it into the boy to take war seriously, and he did. He had spent a fortune on his oarsmen, and his ships were painted red, his helmet was painted red and he had a red shield with gold fittings.

A group of us — my friends and old comrades, and Miltiades’ officers — met on the beach as if by common consent, to pour libations and pray and drink wine in the new dawn. It is nice to be the last squadron to form. There’s plenty of time to make sure that all the rowers have their cushions, that all the thole pins are sound and secure, the hulls are smooth, every buckle is buckled and every lace fresh, new and strong. The vanguard must hurry out in the dark, leaving their canteens behind, or some other thing that irritates you all day in a big fight.

Paramanos got us together, going from group to group as we armed and inviting us to Miltiades’ awning. When I arrived, I accepted the congratulations of every man on my feat of arms the day before.

‘Nice thorax,’ Aristides said. He took my hand. ‘And a noble fight,’ he added with a smile.

As Istes said, what would it be like to awaken one morning and find that you had forfeited all that adulation? And from such a man as Aristides?

That is what it is to be a hero. Unless you never deserved it, once you go up that ladder, you cannot come down.

At any rate, we were all there — all the best men of our contingent. Aristides made the sacrifices, and Cimon stood on one side of me, while Paramanos stood on the other, and Agios, Miltiades’ personal helmsman and my former mentor, winked at me across the sacrificial fire.

They were all there, the friends of my first life, and some from my second — my pirates. Miltiades, and Phrynichus, and Nearchos whom I had trained, and his brother, and Idomeneus stood behind me with Phrynichus, and Philocrates took his share of the prayer without a ribald comment, and Herakleides the Aeolian, one of my first men, now commander of a trireme, and Stephanos. I smiled, because my men had done well.

We sang the paean of Apollo, and we made sacrifice, and then Miltiades handed round a great kylix of unwatered wine.

‘Today, we are not pirates,’ he said. ‘Today, we fight for the freedom of the Greeks, although we are far from home and hearth.’

Let me tell you, Miltiades was always my model of a man — of greatness. He stood taller, acted taller, than other men. I still ape his manners — the way I swirl a cloak and the way I put my hand on the hilt of my sword are his. And when the sense of occasion was on him, he was not like a god. He was a god. Even Aristides was like a pale, priggish shadow next to the blazing sun of his glory.

We all drank, and when the kylix came back to Miltiades, he raised it on high. ‘May we all be heroes,’ he said, and poured the rest into the sand.

My ship was the last one in the water — the rightmost ship in the rightmost division. It meant that we had to row far to the east, well down the bay.

I must explain the way of it, or you young people will never understand what happened in the battle. First I’ll draw the bay — a great shape like an empty sack, open on the west and with the bottom at the east. Up near the mouth of the sack — the lower side of the mouth, see? — is the island of Lade, and Miletus sticks into the mouth of the sack by the island, like a man pushing his thumb in. And the Persian camp, the siege, was south and west of the city, so that, as we formed our line, west to east, from the top of the sack to the bottom as it were, the city and the Persian camp were both behind us. We were, in effect trying to keep the Persian fleet from getting to the city and the camp.

Our line extended from the island all the way along the bay to well east of the Persian camp. Our line stretched for almost thirty stades.

There’s an irony, too. We fought there again — at Mycale. But I’ll tell that story when I get to it.

The Persians started forming earlier than we did and were still forming when my men rowed us the last few ship-lengths to form to the right of Stephanos in Myrmidon. So we rested on our oars and watched as the Aegyptian contingent formed opposite us, and then more Phoenicians beyond them.

Facing nothing.

Their line was, in fact, almost twice as long as ours. Part of that was because they left gaps between their divisions, and part was because aside from the Phoenicians, who were great sailors, and well trained, the rest of their ships had as little notion of keeping formation as the worst of ours. I could see the Cilicians, away at the Samian end of the line, and they were more like a cloud of gnats than a squadron.

For all that, I didn’t like being outflanked by the Phoenicians. They’d split their best contingent, putting a hundred Phoenician ships at either end of their great crescent. They put their worst ships in the middle. Their plan was clear — to close rapidly on our flanks and crush us before we broke their centre.

We were still lying on our oars when Miltiades came out of the line under his boatsail. He was the leftmost ship in our squadron, hard by Nearchos. Together, we and the Cretans had sixteen ships — the best manned, and probably the best trained except for the Phocaeans.

Miltiades passed down the line and hailed each captain as he came up. When he got to me, he turned his ship under oars so that it came to rest on my right, usurping my place of honour.

‘When we go forward, follow me,’ Militades called. ‘We’re going to form a column, race downwind to the east, and try to sting the Phoenicians.’ He laughed.

Fifteen of us against a hundred Phoenicians. ‘Long odds,’ I called back.

Whatever he replied was carried away by the rising wind, but I heard the word ‘hero’, and I waved.

Idomeneus had a mad grin on his face. ‘This’s what I came for,’ he said.

I looked at the mass of Phoenician ships and smiled.

Like most pirates, most of my rowers were pretty well armed. Every man had a javelin at least, and many had a pelte or a buckler. A good number had better gear — a helmet, a leather hat, an aspis. On board the mighty Ajax, every man had a helmet and a spear, and some had swords. The older and more successful a pirate was, the better kit his rowers had, and that gave us a huge advantage in a boarding fight. On the Phoenicians, their rowers were slaves or captives or paid freedmen, but none of them had arms. Not that that ever seemed to cause them to row any worse, but if a boarding fight lasted more than a few minutes, our ships would always overwhelm theirs. In fact, one of our ships could put two hundred trained fighters against ten of theirs. That’s why they preferred a fight of manoeuvre.

We’d also killed most of the best Phoenician crews at Amathus. They were shy now, and cautious of