Marathon: Freedom or Death

Cleitus looked at me with the kind of contempt I hadn’t seen in a man’s eyes since I was a slave. ‘You live in a world of delusion, peasant. I would never do anything to serve the Great King. I am an Athenian. I will crush you like the insect that you are — for hubris. For treating my family as if we were at your level. Killed your mother?’ He laughed. ‘It should have been you — and it is no care of mine if some raddled Boeotian whore got in the way.’ He turned to Aristides. ‘I swore to kill him and all his family. He has insulted me and mine.’

Aristides crossed his arms. ‘Cleitus — most men in this army think your family are traitors.’ Cleitus whirled around in angry denunciation, but Aristides cut him off with a raised hand. ‘If you refuse to swear my oath, Cleitus, I will send you from the army, and I will cease defending you to the demos.’ More quietly, he said, ‘This is not the agora, nor the palaestra. He insulted your family? You insulted his? By all the gods, we are talking about the existence of our city! Are you a playground bully or a man of honour?’

I had lowered my spear-point. Aristides always had that effect on me. His moral advantage was almost as great as Heraclitus’s — he lived the words he spoke. But I was still angry.

‘Aristides,’ I said, ‘I honour you more than most men, but he killed my friends and fellow townsmen — and my mother. He killed them for vanity. His so-called revenge? He brought it on himself, by trying to treat me the way he treats the demos — as lesser men.’

‘You killed his horses — fifty horses. The value of ten farms. You killed them.’ Aristides stood in front of me, imperturbable. ‘You killed them to humiliate the Alcmaeonids. Not to save Miltiades — but for your sense of your own honour. Deny it if you can.’

‘He murdered my people!’ Cleitus said. ‘Family retainers!’

‘Thugs,’ I said. ‘Aristides, this is foolishness. You, of all men, know why I did what I did.’

‘I do,’ Aristides said. ‘You did what you did to achieve what you perceived as justice. As did Cleitus.’

‘He killed my mother!’ I yelled.

‘My family is in exile,’ Cleitus said. ‘My uncle died — he died — far from our city. Thanks to you, the dogs of this city bay for our blood and the little men — tradesmen, men whose grandfathers were slaves — treat us with contempt. For that, I would kill you and every man and every woman with a drop of your blood in his veins.’

‘So both of you can wallow in selfishness, pride, self-deceit — and Athens can be burned by the Medes.’ Aristides raised an eyebrow. ‘Come with me — both of you.’

Such was his authority that we followed him. He led us over the brow of the hill on which the precinct of the shrine of Heracles stood. Suddenly, in the blaze of the late-summer son, we were looking down the hill to the plain, the fields and olive groves of one of Attica’s richest areas, all the way to the beach at Marathon.

And from the curve of the beach, as far north as the eye could see, were ships. Hundreds of ships — ships as thick on the sea as ants around an anthill when the plough rips it asunder. Many of them were already stern-in to the beach, over by the marsh at the north end of the bay. They were unloading men, and tents — or so I guessed.

Closer to us, in the open ground at the foot of the hill, there were a dozen Sakai cavalrymen. They were looking up the hill at us. They had gold on their arms, in their hats, on their saddles, and every one of them had a heavy bow at his waist and a pair of long spears in his fist.

‘There they are. The Persians, the Medes, the Sakai — the armoured fist of the Great King, here to chastise Athens for her sins. Now — choose. Stand here, in the sight of the enemy, and fight each other to the death — and on your heads be the future that you squander. Or both of you can swear my oath. Fight side by side. Show the army — every man of whom knows your story, and your hate, believe me — that war with Persia is bigger than family, bigger than revenge. And when the Persians are gone, you may kill each other, for all I care.’

Silence, and the wind sighing over the golden wheat fields down by the sea.

I nodded. ‘I will swear,’ I said. What else could I say? Aristides was the Just Man. What he asked was just.

Nor was Cleitus — for all that I still burn with hate for him — less a man than I. ‘I will swear,’ he said. ‘Because you are right. I will go farther — because I am a better man than this Boeotian pig. I paid men to fight against you, Plataean. But I am sorry that your mother died. For that — alone — you have my apology.’

I might have muttered an apology for the death of his uncle — even if I did, his was the nobler gesture, but then, his was the greater crime.

This is so often the way with men. The gesture is the thing that we remember — the grand apology, the noble death. Did my mother’s noble death wipe clean a lifetime of woe? Did Cleon’s? Is a great apology the equal of a great crime?

I don’t know, and Heraclitus was no longer alive to tell me.

We stood on either side of the low-saddled altar of Heracles, clasped arms like comrades and swore to stand together against the Persians, to support each other and be brothers and comrades. We followed Aristides, word for word, until he finished.

‘Until the Persians are defeated,’ Cleitus added.

‘Until the Persians are defeated,’ I repeated, meeting his eyes.

‘You are both idiots,’ Aristides said.

I’d like to say that a spirit of cooperation swept the army after I swore not to kill Cleitus, but I’m not sure anyone noticed. This is the problem with acts of moral courage and ethical purity. Had I struck him down with my hunting spear, I’m sure there might have been consequences, but having stayed my hand, there was no observable change. Heraclitus and Aristides both told me that the only reward for a correct action is the knowledge of having acted well — fair enough, but I suspect that you have to be Aristides or Heraclitus to feel that such knowledge is enough reward for the sacrifice of something so deeply satisfying as revenge.

At any rate, we made camp in the precinct of Heracles. From the summit, we could see the Persians unloading their ships.

I brought the Plataeans to the north of the Athenians — the left end of our line of camp, and the spot closest to the enemy. We took the rocky end of the temple precinct, almost like a small acropolis.

It wasn’t much ground, but it would be easy to defend, and it had a big stand of cypress trees in the centre — good shade. As I considered it, I saw a man turn aside to relieve himself in the woods, and I caught him. ‘No man relieves himself inside the camp,’ I said.

Even with the hunting, they’d never been on campaign. Most of my men had no idea how fast disease can stalk a camp. So as soon as we’d stopped, I gathered the warriors in a great circle and stood on a pile of shields so that they could all hear me.

‘All men will sleep here, on the rock,’ I said. ‘The cypress trees will give us shade and some shelter, but no man is to cut one, or build a fire under them, for fear of offence to the god. Nor is any man to relieve himself inside the precinct. I will mark a boundary for such things below. Nor will any man use the stream to wash himself, his animal or his clothes, except where I mark it — so that the stream herself will not feel defiled. And so no man’s shit will float down into our cook pots,’ I said, and they laughed, and my point was made.

The Plataean strategoi chose their ground, and then we went down the ancient ramp behind the high ground and chose a low bog for men to use, and had slaves dig trenches across it and lay logs. And we chose a place for the slaves to draw water and wash clothes.

‘Water is going to be a problem,’ Antigonus said.

‘I don’t understand why we have to have all these rules,’ Epistocles said. He shook his head. ‘If I have to go in the night, do you really think I’m going to walk all this way?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well, you can guess again,’ he said, with a foolish little laugh.

‘Epistocles, you are an officer, and men will take their lead from you. If men start pissing in our camp, it will soon become unliveable. This is the most defensible terrain for ten stades. Don’t piss on it.’ I grinned at him, but only in the way I grin when I’m prepared to use my fists to make a man see sense, and he backed away.

‘You seem to think you can give orders like a king,’ he said.

‘This is war,’ I said. ‘Some men it makes kings, and others it makes slaves.’

‘What’s that?’ he said.

‘Never mind,’ I said, and we went off to find space for two thousand men to sleep.

We spent two days making camp and watching the Persians make theirs. They had to land all those men, and