had weapons and the strength to use them, and he hit a thug so hard that the blow had that telltale sound of a broken melon — and then the wounded man started calling for his fellows.
The smith roared for the watch. His voice carried, and other voices — housewives, prostitutes and the patrons from the brothel — joined in.
Athens was a mighty city then — but not so big that the uproar of throaty thugs and fifty citizens didn’t carry quickly.
The Scythian archers — the city police since the time of the tyrants — came just as a party of thugs were breaking into the house where I hid. I could follow their progress on the street by the sudden change in sound — the babble of citizens telling the Scythians what had happened.
My breathing was better, although the pain was still there. I lay still, my eye pressed to the door of the shed.
A man’s head came up the ladder from the main room below. I didn’t know him, but his ragged haircut and his expression told me he was one of my pursuers. He looked around the roof quickly, and then I heard him say that the roof was clear.
‘Fucking Scythians!’ came a voice from below, over the shouts of the householder, an older man with a shrill voice.
‘Villains! Out of my house, you scum!’
I heard the man take a blow — a blow so sharp that his voice was cut off in mid-imprecation.
‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ a man said.
‘Fuck that — this bastard is worth a hundred drachmas. Beat the Scythians and make them clear out. He’s hiding — right here. Somewhere.’ I knew the voice — my man from the alley.
‘You fight the cops, you mad bugger.’ The man who’d checked the roof was not having any of it. ‘I’m off.’
‘Coward,’ the leader hissed, but by then, there were Scythians pounding on the door.
Then both of them came up the ladder and on to my roof. Beneath our feet, the Scythians were breaking in the door.
My two would-be attackers slowed briefly at the roof edge, then they dropped over the edge, heading south.
I just lay there, unable to do much to change my fortunes. I saw the Scythians check the roof — they spoke in their barbaric tongue, glanced around carefully, one man by the ladder with an arrow on his bow while another man poked around with his sword, but they didn’t check the little shed.
I waited a long time after they vanished — I waited until the whole quarter was silent. Then I limped down the ladder, picked the householder up and put him on his bed, and sneaked out of the door.
I made it to Phrynichus’s house under my own power. His poor wife was terrified at my appearance.
Phrynichus got me into bed — his own bed, as his apartment was too small for such luxuries as guest chambers. I lay there, trying to frame something polite to say — and then, finally, my
The next day, I limped about escorted by half a dozen oarsmen. I told all my people to lie low, and I made myself look afraid — and abashed — when Cleitus pushed past me in the Agora.
‘Done meddling?’ he asked with a smile. ‘You don’t look well, foreigner. Perhaps you should stop playing with fire and go home.’
‘Yes, lord,’ I breathed, exaggerating my injuries. In fact, my paid informants were bringing me titbits by the hour. All my plans and preparations took time, and I warned my people — the oarsmen, the informants and some paid thugs — that I wanted no violence until I said the word. And money — some Miltiades’ and some mine — flowed like blood in a sea-fight.
Some of my new friends disliked being made to lie low. There were a few defections, but I was careful with my plans and no one — except Cleon, Paramanos and Herk — knew what I had planned. The informants were blind — each of them had a particular task — and given the scale of reward offered, I expected results, and got them.
Let me interject here. A man who’s been free all his life might struggle at all this — but a man who’s been a slave knows all about how and where to get information. How and where to buy violence. And how to plan revenge. Remember that the world of Athens ran on slaves, and slaves, at some level, dislike being slaves.
A week after my arrival in Athens, I knew where my girl was. She was working in a slave brothel by the Agora. I was tempted to grab her — but to do so would have given the game away. Shortly after my informers found her, the best pair — Thracians, former slaves who ran an ‘inquiry service’ — brought me the names of the men Cleitus had hired to beat Sophanes and Themistocles. I paid them a small fortune, and they left the city for a while — they guessed what I had in mind. Smart lads. Another informer — a woman, a prostitute with a quick mind — located my attacker, the smaller man in the alley, based only on my description. He was a big man in the lower- class neighbourhoods, a wine-shop owner and a money-lender. I paid the woman well and sent her to Salamis, too. My desire to send these people out of the city when they had served my needs was not altogether altruistic — I trusted none of them, and this way my prostitute could not counter-inform to Cleitus. Perhaps I wronged them — many were happy to help, just to strike a blow against the oppression of the aristocrats — but talk is cheap and informing can become a habit. So I sent them away, and Miltiades’ money paid and paid.
I didn’t share my plan with Aristides, or Miltiades, or even Phrynichus, although he was beginning to catch on, as was Cleon. Many Athenians are fine men, and their brilliance is legendary. Trust an Athenian to plead a court case or to write a play. But what all those brilliant men like Aristides and Miltiades had missed was that the Alcmaeonids weren’t playing by the rules. They had taken Persian gold and used it to pay the mob — the same mob that should have been baying for their blue blood — to beat better men.
I had grown up in Ephesus, where the Persians intimidated the citizens, and where the citizens used force to intimidate each other. I had been a slave. I knew how the world worked, in a way that neither the Alcmaeonids nor the Just Man ever would.
When I was ready, I prompted Aristides to bring my civil suit, and he summoned Cleitus to appear in my case just one day after the Attic feast of Heracles, which seemed auspicious to me. The civil court met briefly, eager to be away to their feasts and holidays — many men went to the countryside for the feast of Heracles, of course, and some for the feasts of Dionysus. Across the Agora, a party of shipwrights were raising the theatre — a wooden stage and the big wooden building behind it called the
The law court was well briefed and Cleitus was caught by surprise. He turned bright red and shouted some foolishness. A date was set, and Aristides explained to the sitting members of the Boule that Miltiades would have to be released from prison to plead for me, because he was my proxenos.
That was the law.
Cleitus began to protest, and then thought better of it. Why wouldn’t he? He held all the knucklebones, and all his foes were going to come to the same place on the same day — the feast of Dionysus.
I stood by the temporary theatre, watching, willing the thoughts into his head, begging Zeus Soter to help me to recover my oath and punish this man, and the king of the gods heard my prayer. I saw Cleitus lower his fist, turn away and smile. He was an intelligent man, as I had cause to know later — and he saw as well as I did that by bringing all his opponents together, he could hurt us the more easily, with his thugs and with the law. Then he agreed, as if making a magnanimous gesture, to allow my suit to be heard in the Agora on the day following the feast of Dionysus, in just four days.
The notion that we would all be vulnerable then ought to lull my opponent, I hoped. Because I planned to strike at the feast of Dionysus itself.
10
Even back then, before we fought the Medes, the theatre of Athens was a famous thing, and much talked of throughout the Greek world. Technically, I wasn’t welcome at the performances, as I was a foreigner, but again,
