Marathon: Freedom or Death

Black got the sailors and the oarsmen to their places — bodies flung over the side, oars coming out through the ports.

We were too slow. The lighter Phoenician was coming at us from the north, already up to ramming speed and turning to get the best possible angle. But he was lining up on an abandoned, sinking ship. He had no way of knowing that we were all in his own command ship, or that it was already taken and the bodies gone.

It stank of blood and shit, but we had some life in us yet. We poled off with anything we could get our hands on — broken oars, spears, boat-pikes. Our first five strokes were so ragged that I was ready to despair, and Mal cracked his voice screaming, but the new ship was a spear-length longer, and half our oarsmen were in unfamiliar benches, a few on the wrong side altogether.

We had just enough way on us to row clear of the abandoned Storm Cutter. He served us one more time, taking one more victim with him into the deep. Wounded as he was, the Phoenician was over-eager and rammed home amidships at full speed. His ram cracked timbers and the water poured in, and Storm Cutter quickly filled and sank — still stuck to the Phoenician’s ram. His rowers backed water like heroes, seeking to withdraw their ram, but their bow went down and down, as if Poseidon’s mighty hand had them by the bronze.

They might yet have made it, but Nearchos of Crete shot from under our stern and hulled them neatly amidships while they were utterly defenceless, and they were dead men.

The cheering from the west was louder now.

We could feel it. The Phoenicians — their best — were shying off. Their navarch was dead, and no one was giving them orders, and the northernmost ships turned for the beach and ran.

We lay on our oars and panted, and some men laughed, and others wept. We had been close to death. I could feel the scythe on my cheek.

Behind us, while we did nothing, the handful of Chians under Neoptolemus harried the last Phoenicians to withdraw, and we had eighteen ships when Miltiades came past us and ordered us to form on his right. Ajax had a scar on her port-side timbers where a Phoenician ram had only just failed to get a kill, but otherwise he still looked like the mightiest ship on the Bay of Lade.

Just south of me, a pair of Chians carried the last Phoenician ship in our part of the battle, by boarding.

None of us, to be honest, could believe it. I suppose we expected that we’d get stuck in and the Lesbians would have to come and rescue us after they broke the Aegyptians, but we’d done it ourselves.

Miltiades harried us into line. The Phoenicians were re-forming on the Mycale shore in front of their camp. Forty ships or more — against eighteen — and we’d routed them.

I drank off a canteen of water and passed around another of wine.

As it came back to me, Black made a noise of disgust. He was looking over the sea to the west. He spat in the sea, drank from the wine and handed the canteen to Idomeneus.

‘We’re fucked,’ he said.

I turned around. I can remember that moment as if it was today, this morning’s breakfast beer. Until I turned, I was a hero in a victorious fleet, and we had just broken Persia’s sea power, and I was going to be a prince in Boeotia with Briseis at my side.

The rising sun had finally burned of the haze.

We were alone.

Strictly speaking, we weren’t alone, and I’ll leap ahead and tell what happened, because from my deck it was hideously confusing. Just accept my word, children — we spent the rest of the day in an exhausted rage of fear and betrayal and confusion.

The Samians had changed sides.

Not all of them, of course. Some remained loyal to the rebellion, and more fled the treachery, although some men would say they were the worst cowards of all, taking no side. Of a hundred ships, eleven stayed with us and fought to the end. Those eleven tried to fight a hundred Phoenicians and every man aboard died trying, and the men of Samos still have a stele to them and their captains in the agora of their city.

But Aeaces, the former tyrant of Samos, had bought the aristocrats among them, and Dionysius of Samos (not to be confused with our mad navarch, Dionysius of Phocaea) changed sides, the bastard.

The treachery of the Samians left the Lesbians to the fates. Epaphroditos chose to die, and he led his own men — the men of Methymna and Eresus — into the enemy, and they took many of the Cilicians down with them. But the Mytilenians chose another path, hoisted their sails and ran for it — twenty ships that we needed desperately.

In the centre, the Chians saw they were being deserted and did the noblest thing of all. They stayed together and resolved to cut their way out. They had no idea we had won on the right — who would have expected it of us? — so they hurled themselves against the mass of levies and mercenaries in the centre. That was the chaos that greeted us when the haze finally burned off, so that we couldn’t see any of our ships at first because we didn’t think to look for them behind the line of Aegyptians facing us.

Now, I also have to add that up to this point Datis, the Persian commander, thought that his own left — the Phoenicians we’d beaten — had been enveloped by a larger force. Friends like Cyrus told me later that that’s what Datis had been told by the beaten remnants, because beaten men count every foe two or three times. So despite the defection of the Samians and the destruction of the Lesbians, Datis thought that the battle was still in the balance. He was holding back his reserve of Aegyptian triremes, waiting to see the rest of our fleet.

That’s battle, on a giant scale. When hundreds of ships face each other, no one man can command them, or even guess what occurs. Datis won the Battle of Lade in the first hour, but the haze and the defeat of the eastern Phoenician squadrons made him cautious. Otherwise, he could have closed the gap and trapped us all in the sack. Miltiades would have died there, and Aristides, and Aeschylus. And many other good men.

As it is, I will cry when I tell who died. Just wait.

We rowed south, avoiding contact with the Aegyptian squadron. They had smaller ships than ours, and as I say, we could see no reason for their caution — all we could see was disaster.

We formed a circle, with our sterns together — a favourite ploy of the Athenians, like a phalanx formed in a box against cavalry. In this case, Miltiades did it so that we might shout from stern to stern.

Aristides spoke first. ‘We must attack into their centre,’ he said. ‘The Milesians are still fighting, and many of the Chians.’

Paramanos shouted over him. ‘Foolish bravery, my lord. Our few ships can’t save one of them.’

‘We can die with them,’ Aristides retorted.

To be honest, that was my plan, as well. A defeat this great — the destruction of the whole fleet of the Greeks — would be the end of Greek independence. For ever. You who live now, you cannot imagine a time when Athens had fifteen ships on her best day, and eight of them were ours. Sparta had none.

Of course, I cared nothing for the East Greeks — except my friends. But the rebellion was all I had known, and the men of that rebellion were the friends of my youth, and besides — first and foremost — I knew that in that hour Briseis was lost to me.

I think I moaned aloud. No one heard me but the gods.

Nearchos shook his head. ‘These are not my ships to squander, but those of Lord Achilles my father,’ he said, with more maturity than I had. ‘I will accept the dishonour — but I will withdraw. On my head be it.’

Miltiades balanced on the curving stern boards of his ship. He held up his hand for silence. ‘Nearchos has the right of it,’ he said. ‘It is our duty, for the sake of all the Hellenes, to save what we can and live to fight again.’

Aristides cursed — something I had never heard him do. ‘Fight again?’ he said. ‘With what?’

‘Our wits, our ships and our swords,’ Miltiades said.

In that hour, he rose to greatness. From that moment, he was no longer Miltiades, tyrant of the Chersonese. From that moment, he made himself the leader of the resistance, although many years would pass before men knew it.

‘We must save as many of the Milesians and Chians as we can,’ he said. ‘Nearchos, go with honour. We were victorious. Tell your men — tell your sons. Had all men fought like you, we would have had the victory.’ Then he turned to me. ‘Arimnestos — we need to cut a hole in the net around the Chians.’

I had nothing left to give, but his words were like a summons and I stood straighter by the rail of my ship.