Marathon: Freedom or Death

The music rises, the aulos pipe sounding faster, the drums beating the rhythm like the sound of marching feet.

I sidestep, faster, and my shield rim flashes like a live thing. My black spear is an iron-tipped tongue of death in my strong right hand and I am one with the men to the right and left, the men behind. I am not Arimnestos the killer of men. I am only one Plataean, and together, we are this.

‘Plataeans!’ I roar.

I plant my right foot. Every man in the front rank does the same, and the pipes howl, and every man crouches, screams and pushes forward, and three hundred voices call: The Ravens of Apollo! The roar shakes the walls and echoes from the Temple of Hera.

The music falls silent, and after a pause the whole assembly — all the free men and women, the slaves, the freedmen — erupt in applause.

Under my armour, I am covered in sweat.

Hermogenes — my opponent — puts his arms around me. ‘That was. .’

There are no words to describe how good that was. We danced the Pyrrhiche, the war dance, with the picked three hundred men of Plataea, and Ares himself must have watched us.

Older men — the archon, the lawmakers — clasp my hand. My back is slapped so often that I worry they are pulling the laces on my scale armour.

Good to have you back, they all say.

I am happy.

Ting-ting.

Ting-ting.

The day after the feast of Ares, and I was back at work — planishing. Planishing is when you use a hammer to smooth out finished work — tap-tap, tap-tap. The hammers need to be polished, and the anvil needs to be crisp and well surfaced, and you need a stake of just the right shape with a polished surface, and your strokes need to be perfectly placed, crisp and all the same strength. It was not my strong point.

I remember it well, because I was making myself a new helmet, and thinking of Miltiades. All my other orders were completed, winter was coming and there was no reason that I shouldn’t play with my equipment. My barns were full, my people fed and I had a sack of silver buried under the shop floor — without having to send to Miltiades for my gold. I had decided I would not go back to Miltiades.

Miltiades of Athens — the tyrant of the Chersonese — was my father’s patron, and sometimes mine. I’d fought and killed for him, but I’d left him when the killing became a habit I had to break. And when Briseis said she would not have me. Hah! One of those is the true reason.

But Athens, mighty Athens — the bulwark of the Hellenes against the Persians — was deeply divided. Miltiades was no hero back then. Most Athenians saw him as a fool and a tyrant who was bringing the wrath of the Great King of Persia down on Greece. Rumour came over the mountains from Attica and Athens that he was to be declared atimos and lose his citizen rights — that he would be exiled — that he would be murdered. We heard that the faction of the tyrant-slayers — the Alcmaeonids — was ascendant.

I have to tell you, as an aside, that calling the Alcmaeonids tyrant- slayers is both incorrect and laughable, but a fine example of how easily fooled mortal men are by good orators. The mighty Alcmaeonids, the richest family in Attica and perhaps all of Greece — one of their many scions killed one of Pisistratus’s sons in Athens. It was a private quarrel, but we still call the overhand sword cut the ‘Harmodius blow’, and most men think that the dead man was the tyrant of Athens.

In fact, the only reason that the Alcmaeonids would have arranged the death of the Pisistratids was so that they could seize the city and rule themselves. They were all in the game — all the great men of Athens. They prated about democracy, but what they wanted was power.

In the early days of the Long War, I was bitter — disillusioned, even — to find that the heroic Miltiades was a pirate and a thief, not a freedom fighter. Oh, he was brave as Achilles and wily as Odysseus, but beneath his aristocratic manners lurked a man who would kill a beggar for an obol if it would finance his schemes. After a while, I took to hating him for his failure to be the man I wanted him to be. But I’ll tell you this, my children — he was a better man than any of the Pisistratids or the Alcmaeonids. When he wanted something, he reached for it.

At any rate, it was late summer and the rumours of open conflict in Athens, our ally, had begun to disturb even sleepy Plataea. As the saying went, when Athens caught a cold, Plataea sneezed.

I recall all this, because I was thinking of Miltiades while I was working on my helmet. I thought about him a lot. Because, to tell the truth, I was already bored.

I’d shaped the helmet twice — first, I’d made the bowl far too deep, and the result looked so odd that I’d melted the bronze, added a little more tin and poured a new plate on the slate where Pater had done the same. I made a wine bucket from that bronze. I didn’t trust twiceforged stuff for armour.

The second time I was more careful with my prayers and I made a real invocation to Hephaestus, and I took time to draw the curve in charcoal on a board as part of the invocation. I raised the bowl of the helmet carefully, for an hour or two each day after propping the vines and gathering olives with my slaves and my household, and this helmet grew like a child in a mother’s belly. Like a miracle. So on that day, I remember I was growing afraid — I, who feared no man in the meeting of the spears, was afraid. Because the object I was making was beautiful, and better than I ever expected of my own work, and I was scared that I might ruin it.

So I planished slowly.

Ting-ting.

Ting-ting.

The anvil rang like a temple bell with every blow. My apprentice, Tiraeus, held the work and rotated it as I requested. He was older than me, and in some ways better trained, but he’d never settled with one master, and before he met me, he’d never even learned the signs that any man can learn who dedicates to the smith god. I’d had him a month, and he’d changed. Just like that — like molten metal settling into the mould. He’d been ready to take a new shape, and he was no work of mine, but it still felt odd to have an older man — and in many ways a better smith — as my apprentice.

He raised his head, as if listening.

Ting-ting.

Ting-ting.

Like a temple bell, my anvil called aloud to the gods.

I was deep into it — the focus that the gods send to a man intent on a task — when I heard what Tiraeus heard. The same focus, to be honest, that comes in combat. How Aristides would writhe to hear me suggest a link between the two.

I ramble. I heard a horse in the yard.

‘Don’t stop,’ my apprentice ordered. That’ll give you an idea of his actual status. He gave me orders.

Behind me, Bion, my father’s former slave apprentice and now almost a master smith in his own right, was rewelding a pot. His hammer rang on his own anvil — heavier blows than mine.

‘What the man says,’ Bion grunted. ‘Never stop once you’re in a task.’

That was a long speech, for Bion. But I was young, and a horse in the yard promised adventure. As I said, months of farming and smithing had left me — bored.

I took water from the bucket by the door and saw a young man in a fine wool chlamys slip off his horse’s neck, showing a lot of leg and muscle, as pretty young men are wont to do.

‘I have a message for Lord Arimnestos,’ he said portentously. His disappointment showed in every line of his body. He’d expected better.

Pen — my sister, Penelope — came down the steps from her eyrie with the women, and Hermogenes, Bion’s son and my best friend, came in from the fields, both drawn by the horseman. I let Pen have the boy. He was handsome, and Pen needed some suitors or my life was going to become very difficult indeed.

My mother stayed in the women’s porch and didn’t emerge — probably because she was drunk. Hades — for a certainty she was drunk. She was the only child of the basileus of Hispae — a small place west of Plataea. She ran off with my pater — a smith, but a powerful man in his own right. She thought he’d become a great man. He did — but not in the way she wanted. He became a great smith. She became a drunk. Did I say this was a pretty story?