property, and another hundred women and children. Four thousand died and forty thousand were sold into slavery.
And that was just the start.
We made Chios in three days — three desperate days, when Harpagos, Idomeneus and Black did the work of keeping us alive while my body made the hard choices between life and death. I missed the moment when Idomeneus made a speech — he ordered the treasure thrown over the side, and he told them that the babes of the Milesians would be their treasure, and asked them to count the weight of the silver and tell him which was the most valuable, and they cheered as they threw it over. I missed that, although it is all part of the story.
The Milesians pitched in and rowed, and we shared what food we had, and everyone who had lived to flee the walls of Miletus lived to see the beaches of Chios.
The next thing I remember was Melaina weeping. There was a pyre for Stephanos, and another for Philocrates, and Phrynichus wept as he said their elegies. Alcaeus of Miletus — one of the gentlemen we’d rescued — organized funeral games.
Melaina cared for me, cleaning my wounds, bathing me, cleaning away the wastes of my body. My fever broke in the second week, and by the third week I could walk. Summer was almost over.
‘The Persians will come,’ I said. ‘Come with me. I owe you — and your brother’s shade — that much.’
She shrugged. ‘I’ll stay anyway,’ she said. ‘I’m a fisherman’s daughter. I don’t like the change. And my father is here, and my sisters, and all the children. Can you move the whole of Chios?’
Another week, while my body healed. Black was restless, eager to get to sea. Suddenly, there were Cilician pirates everywhere, and down the coast, a village burned.
Finally, I set a sailing date. The evenings were brisk, and the sun was lower in the sky.
We sat and drank wine until the sun set, wine that went straight to my head, and we ate a big tuna that Melaina’s father caught. He came and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Stephanos loved you,’ he said. ‘You’re a good man.’
That made me cry. I cried easily in those days.
It was harder to abandon Chios than it had been to leave Miletus, because unlike these cheerful fisherfolk, I knew what was coming to them. The light hand of Persia was about to be replaced by an iron fist. I watched the sun set, and I knew that it would be a long time before I saw it rise here, in the east.
Melaina came into my bed that last night, while I lay looking at the rafters. I didn’t send her away, although our lovemaking had more grief to it than lust. But she left before dawn, and she was a proper daughter again on the beach when she poured a libation and washed Harpagos’s shield in wine.
Then my keel was in the water, and I ceased to think of her, because we went to sail an ocean full of enemies.
We ran north, evading everything we saw, until we entered the Bosporus.
Kallipolis was still free. We beached, and I embraced Miltiades.
I’ll make this brief. We wintered there. In the spring, Histiaeus — Istes’ brother, who left him to die — came to us, asking that we follow him to make a pre-emptive attack on the coast of Phoenicia — to show that the East Greeks weren’t beaten. It was a strategy that was a year too late.
‘I’ll stay and defend the Chersonese,’ Miltiades said. ‘It is mine. But I will lose no more men in Asia.’
Histiaeus was captured in Phrygia a month later, trying to forage for food for his oarsmen. Datis executed him for treason. It was a cheap death for a man who had led the Ionian Revolt. He should have died on the walls with his brother.
Less than a week later, Datis flooded the Chersonese with Scythian and Thracian mercenaries. He outspent Miltiades, ten to one, and in a week we lost four of our towns.
We expected it, though. The east was lost. We loaded our ships, taking every Greek man and woman — the survivors of Miletus, and Methymna and Teos, and all of Miltiades’ men and their women. We filled ten triremes and as many Athenian grain ships, and we sailed away. The Scythians burned Kallipolis behind us, but we left it empty.
Datis landed an army on Lesbos, and he swept the island with a chain of men all the way across, looking for rebels. He crucified those he caught, and he took the best of the boys and all of the unmarried girls, and sold them as slaves or took them for the harem. Then he went to Chios and did the same.
There was no force in the world that could stop him. He harried the Aeolians, selling their children to brothels, and then he harried the Ionians, and humiliated them, island by island, until there was no longer the sigh of a girl or the worship of Aphrodite from Sardis to Delos. He broke the world of my youth. He destroyed it. I grew to manhood in the world of Alcaeus and Sappho. He destroyed Sappho’s school and sold the students to satisfy the lusts of his soldiers.
You children know the world Athens made, and you think it good. I love Athens — but there was a fairer world once, a brighter place, with better poets and freer ways. Where Greeks and Persians could be friends with each other, with Aegyptians and Lydians.
Datis killed it, to break the spirit of the Greeks and reduce them to servitude. Truly, it was the rape of the islands that taught us Greeks what the Persians were capable of, and showed us why we would have to fight, or see our culture die.
Artaphernes resisted Datis, of course. But Datis was the Great King’s nephew and had won the great battle, and Artaphernes was considered soft on Greeks.
Datis raped the islands, and we sailed away and left them. I sailed
Idomeneus was a bastard, for all I loved him, and when the treasure had gone over the side, none of it was mine or his — so I still had riches, and I spent them that summer. I settled forty families in the vale of Asopus, and when I was finished, the money of my piracy was gone, washed clean in rescuing them from poverty, or so I hoped.
And then I was just another farmer with a forge, for my gold was gone.
While I was spending money like a drunken sailor, I heard the rumours — that I was a murderer, that I was accursed of Apollo. All my father’s friends spoke up for me, as well as all my own friends — Hermogenes and Epictetus the Younger, and Myron and his sons — but my absences, my riches and the constant murmurs of the sons of Simon, from Thebes, had their effect. Men pushed me away, in the little ways that men use when they are afraid. And to my shame, I responded with arrogance and let the distance grow.
It was a dark winter, with one beam of light. For when I was settling my Milesians, I met Antigonus of Thespiae, the young basileus of that town. He took ten of my families and made them citizens, and we became friends quickly — and as quickly, he courted my sister. He was a wealthy man, and he might have had any maiden in the valley of the Asopus, but he courted Pen, and in the spring he wed her, and men came to that wedding who had whispered about me, and my life was the better for it.
My mother stayed sober until the priest was gone, and I kissed her, and she cried. Then I folded my finery away and went back to the forge, and she went back to drinking, and men went back to whispering that the Corvaxae were all accursed.
There were other fights, that last year. But the Ionian Revolt died with Istes, as he fell, shouting ‘Miletus’.
I suppose we thought that the Long War was over. And I had forgotten my slave girl. I tried to forget Briseis, and Melaina. I tried to forget all of it. I ignored my armour and my helmet and I worked on bronze kettles and drinking cups.
Until the archon came and asked me to return to teaching the Pyrrhiche.
My calf throbbed and burned, and my hips hurt when we danced, but they all admired my splendid Persian scale shirt and my rich red cloak, and Myron came and embraced me.
‘Your new citizens have made us richer by a thousand gold darics,’ he said.
‘And fifty shields in the phalanx,’ Hermogenes said.
The men of Plataea came to me, and clasped my arm.
But I was the devil they knew. And by then, thanks to the word-fame of my role at Lade, I was famous — so
