hail was falling on me, and something screamed of my helmet and I blinked away the pain. My vision was limited to the eye slit in my Corinthian, and sweat was pouring down my body. But I saw it now — the Persian commander had sprung an ambush from behind the olive grove, and I was lucky that I’d paused to form my men or we’d already be dead. Luck. Tyche. And he had made two mistakes. He sprang his trap a little early, before my left flank was out in the field, away from the rocky wall that his horses didn’t want to cross. And he went for us — the formed men — when he could have fallen like a smith’s hammer on my unformed men on the road.
Instead, we were trapped against the field edge with a rubble pile from an old barn on one flank and the road full of slaves and Athenians on the other — but we’d stood our ground. It sounds easy enough. You try it.
Even as his first arrows rattled against us and men fell, he learned his third error, although I was as surprised as I imagine he was.
We had archers in our ranks.
As the Persians swept past us, Teucer and his archers rose from within our ranks, or knelt under the rims of our shields, and shot. Indeed, Teucer was leaning his weight against my hips as he shot, arrow after arrow. He had no horse between his thighs, no reins to manage, and his quiver hung comfortably under his left arm, where I carry my sword in battle, and he drew and shot and drew and shot, three arrows for every one by the Persians, and his had Apollo’s hand behind them.
When an arrow hits a man in the phalanx, he screams and falls, and his armour makes a mournful clatter as he goes down — but his mates close over him, alive or dead. It is but one step to the front to fill the hole.
When a horseman takes an arrow — better yet, when a
We had fewer than three hundred men formed, but all of Teucer’s archers were in our ranks — perhaps thirty men, and some javelins — and they shot at least one Persian for every one of us who fell. I suspect that, man for man, the Persians were the finer archers — but the best archer on a horse, shooting at armoured men behind big shields, is going to lose the contest to the poorer man with his feet firm on the ground, shooting at the enormous target of a man on a horse.
And Teucer was the best archer I’ve ever known. He was safe under my shield rim, and his arrows did not miss. He made chaos of their files, and they broke and rode away, and their red-bearded officer lay, redder now, with one of Teucer’s black-fletched arrows in his throat.
We spearmen played no role, except to stand and not run, and to be a living wall of wood and bronze for Teucer’s archers. We didn’t bloody our spears that day. The archers won that engagement for us, and gained status with us as a consequence.
The Persian commander watched his best cavalry break around us, leaving a dozen of his noblemen face down in the hayfields, and he gathered the rest of his cavalry and rode away, no doubt reckoning, like a professional, that the terrain was against him and he had no reason to take a risk.
He was wrong. There’s more to battle than counting the odds and chances and watching the ranges of the enemy weapons. The Athenians and Plataeans were Greeks — men of the phalanx, where fights are decided not by spear-fighting but by the will of the mass. To every Plataean — and to every Athenian coming late to the fight — it appeared that we were the better men, and the Persians were afraid. Not true, of course, but on such foolishness is victory made.
We watched their dust cloud go, and a few fools shouted that we should follow them, but the Persians wanted us out in the open and we were happy in among the olive groves and low ridges where they couldn’t easily ride around our flanks. We let them go.
In half an hour, Miltiades passed through my position. I chose to stay formed and watch the Persians, lest they fall on the rest of the column, or at least, that was my decision on the spot. Miltiades went up the hill and fetched out the Euboeans. I’ll be honest — I was shaken. To my mind, Teucer and his archers had just saved me from a string of foolish errors. Command is different. It is not the same as serving in the front rank. I had been thinking of the wrong things, at the wrong time, and I knew how close my whole force — every Plataean — had come to dying at the hands of a hundred Persians.
The rescued Euboeans were in poor shape. They had no archers — few Greeks did, in those days, except old-fashioned cities like Plataea, and we wouldn’t have had half as many without the Milesians — and the Persian cavalry had been able to get close, every day, whenever they wanted. A few of the Euboeans had the spirit to abuse the corpses of the dead Persians as they came down — one man told me that this was the closest he’d come to hitting one since the first day — but the rest simply stumbled off the steep rocks of their hill and begged us for water in the croaking of frogs, for they were parched and weary and had given up hope.
Then we all turned on our heels and marched back to our camp. And the Persian cavalry rode away. I lost three men dead — all young epilektoi in the front rank. Lykon took an arrow in the greave — it held, but he couldn’t walk for a day from the pain. My wounded were mostly gashes to the head and neck — sometimes arrows went deep in the phalanx and got in among the men with no helmets, skidding from head to head. Two men with arrows in their thighs had to be carried, and that was hot, miserable work.
As soon as our scouts said that the Persian cavalry was gone, most men peeled off their armour and gave it to slaves to carry, but I wouldn’t allow my epilektoi out of theirs — I was deeply shaken by the speed with which the Persian cavalry had appeared from behind the olive grove. No one grumbled this time. But it was a long walk back to camp, looking over our shoulders all the way, and blessing every hill, every stream, every rocky field that covered us.
Greece is treacherous ground for horses. Praise the gods.
The rescue of the Euboeans may have been full of arete, and it may have pleased the gods, but it cost us in several ways and it had disastrous consequences.
First, the Euboeans were spent. Of almost two thousand men who came down off that hill, fewer than two hundred stayed with the army. The rest simply went home. This is another part of being Greek that needs explaining. Even the Athenian-Euboeans felt that they had done their duty, and more. They had faced weeks of danger and survived, and they went to Athens or returned to their farms without anyone’s permission — and no one suggested otherwise. The actual Euboeans, about a hundred of them, remained, mostly because their city was gone and their wives were enslaved and they had no further reason to live. They were a silent lot.
Second, the Euboeans saw the Persians as invincible. It is no fault of their own, but when men have been harried and driven for weeks, beaten and beaten again, they magnify the danger and the power of the foe to increase their own sense of worth. I am an old man of war, and I have seen it many times. When they sat in our camp and told their story to crowds of Athenians — many of whom had been against this fight from the first — they spread fear like a palpable thing. They didn’t mean to do it, but they did. The day after we rescued them, our army was ready to fall apart.
Third, all the Persian cavalry had been sent to dog the Euboeans. Datis, like any good commander, had sent his best troops to prevent the Euboeans from linking up with us. Now that we’d ‘gained’ them, the Persian cavalry — mostly Sakai, to be honest — were no longer distracted.
The morning after we ‘rescued’ the Euboeans, I combed my hair on the summit of the precinct of Heracles, sitting on a rock. When I had combed it out, Gelon braided it quickly — two thick braids which he wrapped around the crown of my head as padding for my helmet. He did it better than any of my other servants or hypaspist had done — tighter and faster, too. I remember that we had just seen a raven off in the left of the sky — a poor omen — and we were wondering aloud
Down at the base of the hill, a big group of Athenians — mostly poor men with no armour — were cutting brush for bedding. They were in a long field, and at the far end was a stand of brush and ferns, and twenty or so men were cutting the brush and gathering bags of fern. They sang as they worked, and I remember being content — even happy — as I listened to them.
The Sakai fell on them like the Eagle of Zeus falling from the heavens on a rabbit. They came on horses, and they leaped the stone walls at either end of the field, cutting the men off from the camp as easily as if they were children caught stealing apples in an orchard. One brave man tried to run, and three of them chased him down, laughing. They were so close that we could see them laugh. The leader took a rope off his quiver, whirled it around his head like a performer and tossed it neatly over the runner. Then he turned his horse and dragged the man, screaming, over the rough ground.
