Marathon: Freedom or Death

At my side, Teucer drew his bow. It was a long shot, even for my master archer, but he drew the feathers all the way to his mouth and loosed, and the arrow seemed to linger in the air for ever — flying and falling. The Sakai man was riding parallel to our hill and he didn’t see the arrow, and it fell into him as if Apollo guided it. He tumbled from his horse and screamed.

I hoped the man caught in the rope would rise and run. But he didn’t move. I think he was already dead.

The other Sakai let up a thin cry, and as one, they turned and butchered the Greeks they had caught. They killed them all — twenty men lost in a few heartbeats. They ripped skin from their victims’ heads and their backs the way men skin a rabbit, and they rode across our front, flourishing their ghastly prizes and screaming their thin war cries. Then they rode away.

A day later, our servants were afraid even to get water from the stream.

The meetings of the strategoi were demoralizing, too. We met every morning and every evening — and some days more often. If two strategoi began to talk and a third saw them together, he would wander over, and before you knew it, all eleven would be there.

They seemed to love to talk, and they would discuss the most trivial things as seriously as they discussed — endlessly — the strategic options of the campaign. Firewood? Worth an hour of discussion. A general pool of sentries? Worth an hour of discussion. A new type of sandal for fighting? An hour.

By the fourth day, I was ready to scream. Because what we needed to discuss was the war. The Persians. The enemy. But like the proverbial corpse at a symposium, we never seemed to discuss the options fully. I had come to the conclusion that the polemarch liked all the talk because each day of talk made him feel useful, while postponing the moment of decision for yet another day.

It was on the fourth day that Aristides exploded.

‘If the Medes could be destroyed with talk, we would certainly triumph!’ he shouted. It came from nowhere, and his orator’s voice carried across the summit of the camp, and all the strategoi fell silent. Gods, half the camp fell silent.

The Athenian polemarch glared at him. ‘It is not your turn to speak,’ he said.

Aristides, the Just Man, stood his ground. ‘This is all drivel,’ he said. ‘If no one else will say it, I will. The Persians are peeling our army apart. There is dissension and fear. Our numbers are even — they have a few more men, perhaps. We must attack them and defeat them before our men follow the Euboeans home.’

Cleitus — the unlikeliest ally — agreed. ‘We must do something about their cavalry,’ he said. ‘Our men fear the horses like nothing else.’

‘Why don’t we simply return to Athens and show them the strength of our walls?’ Leontus asked. He was the most brazen of the anti-war strategoi, a handsome man who had the reputation of being a servant of the Alcmaeonids. ‘I hear so much about how we should fight a battle. Are you fools?’ He grinned. ‘Datis has a few thousand men more than we have, and a force of cavalry we can never hope to match. If we pack and march away in the night, he’ll burn some olive groves and go home. He hasn’t the time to lay siege to Athens.’

He looked around. Many of the strategoi agreed with him. I had to admit that he had a point — and I loathed him, politically.

‘Miltiades brought us here to save the Euboeans,’ he went on. ‘And look what we saved! A few beaten men. The assembly never meant for us to fight Persia. Let’s gather the army and have a vote. I’ll wager gold against silver that they vote to go home and defend the walls. And who can blame them?’

But arrogant men often over-reach. I’ve done it a few times myself, and I know. He carried on when he ought to have been silent.

‘You think you have an army? We have nothing. There aren’t enough gentlemen to fight any one of their regiments, and the rest of these men are chaff — useless mouths. The Plataeans will vanish at the first onset — bumpkins, a political stunt by Miltiades to make the rest of you credulous fools feel as if we have allies. The best men of Euboea didn’t stop the Medes for ten days. And their own lower orders sold the town to the enemy.’

Leontus might have carried the hour if he’d shut up before he offended every man standing there.

Aristides gave me the slightest of smiles and nodded his head. He was encouraging me to speak. In fact, he was egging me on.

‘Are you bought and paid for?’ I asked.

Leontus whirled, face red.

‘You lie,’ I added. I wasn’t angry, but I put on a good angry face. I knew what politics required. If I humiliated Leontus — immediately and publicly — his suggestions would wither and die on the vine. ‘My men stood and faced the Persian cavalry. You lie when you say we will run. But since the Persians have bought you, you are paid to say such things.’

I walked over to him — deadly Arimnestos, killer of men.

Leontus was not, in fact, a coward. ‘This is insane,’ he said. ‘I only say what-’

‘How much gold have the Medes paid you?’ I roared.

He flinched. He only flinched from my bellow, but the men in the circle thought that he looked guilty, and there was a murmur.

‘We are going to be massacred!’ he shouted, and left the meeting in a swirl of his cloak.

That helped morale, I can tell you.

The next day, the fifth day since the Persians landed, I sent my servants down to the stream in the morning to draw water, with all of Teucer’s men concealed in the rough ground at the foot of the hill.

But the Sakai had not been the eyes and ears of the Persian Empire for nothing. A dozen horsemen came up, looked at the Plataean servants in the stream and rode away. They smelled a rat.

Such is war.

At the other end of the line, Miltiades tried a similar stunt, sending a forage party far out into the fields near the beach to gather hay and cut standing wheat, and laying an ambush with his old soldiers, but the Mede cavalry looked it over and rode away.

In the centre, emboldened by our success, the city men of two tribes went down the hill with sickles to gather wheat. Most men had eaten all the food they had brought, and fear of the Persian cavalry was keeping supplies from reaching us.

The Sakai fell on them in full view of the army, killed or wounded fifty and dragged twenty of them off into slavery. In an Athenian tribe of a thousand men, the loss of fifty was considerable.

At the next meeting, Miltiades finally spoke. Many men disliked him and feared his pretensions — he made little secret of his intention to make himself tyrant. Generally, he did best for the cause of the war by saying little. But that evening, he had had enough.

‘War is not a game for children,’ he said bitterly. He had their attention, right enough. ‘Demostocles, your men went down the hill like fools.’

‘We only did what you did!’ Demostocles shouted.

Aristides shook his head. ‘You don’t have a clue, do you? You don’t understand, because you’ve never made war.’ He crossed his arms. ‘This is not a day of battle with Aegina. This is not a war of Greeks with Greeks. The Plataeans and Miltiades’ men laid ambushes and had reinforcements ready. We call this “covering” our foragers. And the Sakai and the Medes and the Persians — they have made war, too. They saw little things — a broken bush, a line of footprints in tall grass — and they knew that the men were covered. And let them be. But in the centre, you took no precautions-’

‘Leontus is right!’ Demostocles said. ‘They are better men than us, and we will all be killed. I am not afraid of your Plataean thug, Miltiades! No one can accuse me of taking Persian gold! They are better at this skulking manner of war than we are. I want to demand a vote — right now — to go back to the city.’

Aristides’ voice was calm — and strong. ‘You are afraid. And like a schoolboy caught in a lie, you don’t wish to admit that you made an error. So, better that we abandon the campaign and retreat to the city than face the Medes, eh? Or is it that you’d rather abandon the campaign than admit that you need to ask the rest of us how to make war?’

‘Vote,’ Demostocles demanded. ‘And fuck you, you pompous prig. I was killing men with my spear when you were shitting green.’

‘Too bad,’ I said. ‘If you’d learned anything about war, you’d be a better strategos.’ I held up my hand to