Marathon: Freedom or Death

duty to the city.

Many of them have no notion how to live rough, or how to eat without their wives and slaves to cook. The aristocrats have no problems — the aristocrat’s life as a gentleman farmer and hunter is perfectly suited to training campaigners. But the potters and the tanners and the small farmers — all strong men — may never have eaten a meal under the wheel of the heavens in their lives.

Gelon and I bedded down with Miltiades’ men, who had none of these problems and little but contempt for their fellow Athenians. These were the men he’d led at Lade and a dozen other fights, and they were confident in themselves and in their lord.

Aristides’ men were a different matter. Let me just say that since Cleisthenes’ reforms — fairly recent when we marched to Marathon — all of the ‘tribes’ of Athens were artificial constructs. Cleisthenes had sought to break up the power bases of the great aristocrats (like Miltiades) by ensuring that every tribe was composed in equal parts of men of the city (the potters and tanners, let’s say), men of the farms (up-country men, small farmers and aristocrats, too) and men of the sea (fishermen, coastal men and oarsmen). It was a brilliant law — it gave every Athenian a shared identity with men from the parts of Attica that most individuals had never visited.

Another thing that he did — another brilliant thing — was to heroize everyone’s ancestors. In Athens, the principal difference between an aristocrat and a commoner was not money — freedmen and merchants often had lots of money, and no one thought of them as aristocrats, believe me! No, the biggest difference was ancestors. An aristocrat was a man descended from a god or from a hero. Miltiades was descended from Ajax of Salamis, and through him back to Zeus. Aristides was descended, like me, from Heracles.

My friend Agios was descended from parents who were citizens, but they had no memory of anything before their own parents. Cleon’s father was a fisherman, but his mother had been a whore.

But when Cleisthenes passed his reforms — this happened while I was a slave in Ephesus — he gave every tribe a heroic ancestor, and declared — by law — that everyone in the tribe could count that ancestor in their descent. I’ve heard men — never Athenians, but other Greeks — say that Cleisthenes brought democracy to Athens. Crap. Cleisthenes was a far, far more brilliant man than that. I never met him, but like most middle-class men, I revere his memory as the man who built the Athens we loved.

What he did was to make every man an aristocrat.

In one stroke of law, every oarsman and every whore’s son had as much reason to serve his city as Aristides and Miltiades and Cleitus. To live well, with arete, and to die with honour. I’m not saying that it worked — any better than any other political idea. But to me, it is a glorious idea, and it made the Athens that stood against the Great King.

The main consequence was that the precinct of Heracles was filled with men who would never, ever have been in a phalanx fifteen years before. When my father died serving alongside Athens in Euboea, their phalanx had about six thousand men, and while the front ranks were superb, the rear ranks were poor men with spears, no shields, no armour and no hope of standing for even a heartbeat against a real warrior. That was the way.

But the new Athens had a phalanx with twice as many spears — almost twelve thousand. And from what I could see, almost all of them had the white leather spolades for which Athens was famous. The city owned the tanning trade back then, and their white leather was prized from Naucratis to the Troad. They all seemed to have helmets, too.

See, what Cleisthenes did was to create a city where a man who made pots and worked a plot of land just big enough to yield two hundred medimnoi of grain — about a tenth of what my farm yielded in a good year — would spend his surplus cash — a very small amount, friends — on armour and weapons. Like an aristocrat.

Thugater, you are laughing at me. Am I too passionate? Listen, honey — I may be tyrant here, but in my heart I’m a Boeotian farmer. I don’t want the aristocrats to rule; I want every man to stand up for himself, take his place in the line, farm his plot, eat his own figs and his own cheese — raise his hand in the assembly and curse when he wants. When I’m honest, I realize that I joined the ranks of the aristos pretty early. It may be that, as my mother said, our family was always with them. But I never wanted power over other men, except in war.

Now you’re all laughing at me. I think I should keep my story for another day. Perhaps I’ll go and sulk in my tent. Perhaps I’ll take blushing girl here for company.

Hah! More wine. That was worth the interruption. Look at that colour!

Now, where was I?

In the morning, I mounted my horse and Gelon got on my mule and we rode away north to find my brother- in-law and the Plataeans. The Athenians turned east after they passed the great ridge and headed for the sea.

I reached my men before noon, and found that they were fed, well slept and ready to march.

Antigonus shrugged. ‘I enjoyed being polemarch,’ he said. ‘Go back to the Athenians. I’ll take it from here.’ He grinned and slapped my back, but when we had the army moving, he came up beside me in the dust. ‘Don’t ever do that to me again,’ he said quietly. ‘When you didn’t come back last night, all I could see was panic and horror. The Persians had you, the fucking Athenians had arrested you — what was I to do?’

‘Just as you did,’ I said, and slapped him on the back in turn.

I had brought a pair of guides from Miltiades, both local men from the Athenian phalanx who knew all the trails and small roads that led east from our position. So we made good time, although the way was never straight and at one point we actually crossed some poor farmer’s wheat field — two thousand men and as many animals crushing his precious crop. But it was the only way to join two paths. Attica had some of the worst roads in the world then.

I rode ahead with Gelon and Lykon and Philip the Thracian, both serving as volunteers as their cities had no part in this war, and we found a camp — three hayfields, all fallow or recently cut, with stone walls all around, on a low ridge with a stream at the bottom. It’s one of the best positions I’ve ever found, and I went back to it on another occasion. We slept secure. I had sentries every night already — a lesson learned from my first campaigns.

We rose with dawn — all that hunting on Cithaeron had good effect — ate hard bread and drank a little wine, then moved. Before noon we were up with the tail of the Athenian force, which was moving down through the olive groves that crowned the ridges around Aleitus’s farm and tower. I knew the trails here — again, from hunting — and my guides were off their own ground. So I took us a little north, over the same ridge where Aleitus’s party had killed two deer, and down through the old orchards where mine had killed six.

Aristides was first that day — the tribes have a strict rotation in everything, from order of march to place in the battle line — and he was the strategos in charge, because the Athenians rotated the command. He was choosing his camp when I rode up with my little party.

He smiled when he saw me. I didn’t smile — any pleasure was wiped from my heart when I saw that he was with Cleitus.

Aristides raised a hand. ‘Stop,’ he said.

I had my hunting spear in my fist.

‘We are here to fight the Medes, not each other,’ Aristides said.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘You found a horse!’ I snorted. ‘I thought I heard that something had happened to them.’

Cleitus had his sword in his hand. ‘How’s your mother?’ he asked.

Aristides hit him — hard — in the temple with his fist. Aristides was a good athlete and a fine boxer, and Cleitus fell from his horse.

But when I rode over to him, Aristides caught my spear hand in a grip of iron.

‘In this army,’ he said, ‘there are other men who hate each other — political foes, personal enemies, men with lawsuits. We have tribes with rivalries, and men with conflicting interests in money — men who have absconded with wives and daughters, men who committed crimes. And worst of all, as both of you know, we have men who have taken money from the Great King and who will use their power to break us the way they broke the East Greeks at Lade — through defection and treachery.’

Cleitus got to his feet and put a hand to his head. ‘You have a heavy hand, sir.’

Aristides nodded. ‘We are in the precinct of Heracles — ancestor to all three of us. You will both come with me to the altar and swear — to the gods — to keep the peace and fight together like brothers. You are leaders. If you fight each other — we are finished.’

‘He killed my mother,’ I said. ‘And his actions served the Great King. He’s taking the Great King’s money. He planned to kill me to keep the Plataeans out of this.’