friends killed, your elders butchered, your women raped and sold as slaves.
Understand?
If you aren’t hesitant about fighting, then you are a fucking idiot.
And those men who voted against the fight? They had to go and stand shoulder to shoulder with the men who voted for the fight, and each had to depend on the other. The city was divided about evenly, I’d say, half for glory, half for caution.
Callimachus was right to hesitate.
I watched the chaotic preparations — the same mess as our Plataean preparations but magnified ten times — and shook my head.
‘Why such a hurry?’ I asked. ‘Tomorrow morning will be as good as this evening — and surely you won’t march before dark?’
Miltiades pursed his lips. ‘If you hadn’t come just when you did, god-sent, I would not have carried this debate,’ he said.
Slaves came up with his kit, and his hypaspist, a Thracian I’d seen with him before, shouldered his shield and flashed me a blond smile.
Miltiades smiled himself when he saw his panoply. ‘If I can get them clear of the city before night falls,’ he said, ‘I have a chance. If we’re here in the morning, we’ll never march.’ He shrugged. ‘I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. I have a feel for these things.’
Aristides came, surrounded by men I knew — Sophanes, of course, but also Agios and Phrynichus and a dozen oarsmen I recognized, all dressed as hoplites. Their kit was as good as our front-rankers. Athens has money, and money buys armour.
‘I suggested that we free a thousand slaves and put them in the ranks,’ Aristides said. ‘And these fools declined, saying that it would be too hard to choose what tribes they would go to.’ He shook his head. ‘Some of them even wanted to decline the service of the armed metics.’
I stood there while the sun sank, and I had nothing to do but think. After a few minutes, or even an hour, I turned to Aristides. ‘Plataea will take your freedmen,’ I said. ‘Put them in my rear ranks. Then your proud citizens have nothing to complain about.’
He gave me a thin-lipped smile. ‘Tomorrow,’ Aristides said. ‘Today, we march out of the city. Miltiades is right. Today, or never.’
The shadows were long enough to make a short man tall when Miltiades took his tribe out of the gate. It was a purely symbolic march — Miltiades was to Athens as I was to little Plataea, and his men were ready. Many carried their own gear, poor men who knew no other trade but fighting, and they had been assembled and ready since the last vote.
Aristides marched next, with the men of the Antiochis. By the time Miltiades’ men cleared the sacred gate, Aristides’ men were ready to march, even though his tribe, by ill-chance, contained many of those most determinedly against the war.
The other strategoi were less ready, but Aristides had set the example by marching despite having a third of his
When I mounted my horse, darkness was falling.
‘Have we won, do you think?’ Gelon asked me. I laughed to hear him say ‘we’.
‘We haven’t won,’ I said. ‘We haven’t lost. We’ve marched, and if Miltiades is to be believed, that means we’re still in the game.’
‘You could free me now,’ Gelon said. ‘No one around to kill me.’
I nodded. ‘I could, but I won’t. You fight in the phalanx — and fight well. If you live, I’ll free you.’
‘Free me first,’ he said. ‘I’m fucked if I’m going to fight as a slave. No one will want me anyway. Who ever heard of a slave hoplite?’
That was true. ‘I tell you what, Gelon. If the Athenians free their slaves, I’ll put you in with them.’
‘As a slave?’ he asked, daring.
‘As a free man, you whoreson. Now get your arse moving down the road.’ Gelon made me laugh, in a dark way. I was coming to like him. He bore slavery with a kind of amused contempt that made it impossible for me to punish him while he showed his resistance every minute. I respected that. I also thought that another man — Idomeneus, for instance — would have beaten him to a pulp.
The sun was setting, and although we didn’t know it yet, Chalcis had just been stormed. One of the richest cities in Greece — an ancient rival of Athens, at sea and on land, the city that colonized Sicily and southern Italy and even the coast of Asia — had fallen by treachery to the Great King. Datis ordered the warriors massacred and the women and children sold into slavery, just as he had at Miletus and Lesbos.
His tame Greeks turned away from the slaughter, but the Sakai and the Medes and the Persians butchered the men and the elderly and set fire to the city — every house and every temple. The column of smoke rose to the heavens like a sacrificial fire, and could be seen from the Acropolis, as Datis intended.
Datis sent his cavalry across the bridge to sow terror the way a farmer sows barley.
The women were loaded into his troop ships, weeping at their state — women who had been wives, who had known love, who had sat at their looms proud of their family names.
And the ships, crewed by Phoenicians and Ionian Greeks, got their sterns in the water, unfolded the mighty wings of their oars and turned their ram-prows south, with a gentle wind at their backs and a protected sea. It was too late for Poseidon to intervene. The Great King’s fleet was at sea, the oars pulled to the lamentations of five thousand new slaves.
Their rams were pointed at Attica. And even as we marched out of Athens and made our first camp in the hills north of the city, even as men groused or had second thoughts, Datis’s scouts were riding through the long grass by the beach, at Marathon.
17
Last night, while we were drinking, the young scribe from Halicarnassus asked me why Athens didn’t meet Datis at sea. It’s a damn good question, given the size of Athens’s fleet today.
The truth is, in the time of Marathon, there was no Athenian fleet. I realize that this sounds impossible, but the fact is that the tyrants and the oligarchs shared a healthy fear of the demos, and the fleet gives the demos power, because the power of the fleet is its rowers, not its hoplites — the thetes who pulled the oars. So noblemen owned warships — Tartarus, friends, I owned a warship at the time of Marathon! Aristides owned one, Sophanes’ family owned one, and Miltiades owned ten at the height of his power. That was the Athenian fleet, the accumulation of the ships of the rich — not unlike the way they formed a phalanx, come to think of it. And all the ships Athens could muster might have made fifty hulls. Before Lade, fifty hulls had been accounted a mighty fleet. But the world was changed by the Great King’s decision to spend Greece into defeat. His six hundred triremes — give or take a hundred — won him Lade, though it strained his empire to maintain them, and they emptied the ocean of trained rowers.
But Athens had nothing to offer against his six hundred. Our hulls were all on the beach at Piraeus, all those that weren’t ferrying refugees across to Salamis or around the coast to the Peloponnese.
The first night we camped in the precinct of a temple of Heracles perched high on the ridge above Athena’s city. My Plataeans were still forty stades away to the north, and I saw no reason to bring them along yet, as we had no word of the enemy and the Athenian camp was in enough disorder as it was.
Greek armies are usually only as good as the time and distance they are from home. The first night, with the army close enough to home to sleep there if they wanted, with none of the discipline or shared experience that an army builds with every camp and every smoky meal, they are just a mob of men with little in common except their
