bushes, rocks — it was not like the painting in the stoa, children. There were no straight lines at Marathon.
But the Sakai saw us and gave more ground. They tried to run and re-form to face us, but the Athenians stayed on them, and they died. Those Sakai were gallant, and they tried, again and again, to make a stand and hold the line.
As we passed the edge of their formation, we saw why.
Our own centre was shattered, as if a herd of cattle had passed through. Where Aristides had stood, there were only victorious Persians, Datis’s bodyguard and dead Greeks.
I cursed under my breath, trying to see. Had we lost? I faltered, and my voice roared ‘Forward!’ without my volition — some god took my throat, I swear. I went forward.
Then, as we turned the flanks of the Sakai, they folded as fast as a man can lose a boxing match. One moment they were outmatched, but still game, their line backing away but their men fighting hard, and the next they were finished, flying for their lives. They started to run in earnest because we were behind them. I didn’t want to fight the Sakai anyway. I wanted to come to grips with Datis. The day was neither lost nor won, and with everything in the balance, my men were not going to stop and fight men in flight.
‘Paean! Again!’ I roared, and they obeyed — although as long as I have been a soldier, I have never heard the Paean sung twice in the same action.
Now I could see the Greek centre — well back, almost where we had started our charge, and only clumps of men. I could see horsehair crests there, and Persian felt hats. And men looking towards us.
It all happened in moments, heartbeats of time, too little for me to give an order or change our front. The Persian centre was killing the Antiochae — and then they were running, racing over the stubble of the hay for their camp. The sight of us behind them — however ill-formed our phalanx really was — terrified them the way our charge apparently had not.
The Sakai had held the flanks for Datis and his picked men to wreck the Athenian centre, and the dead were everywhere, or so it seemed. But by the gods, when they saw us coming behind, threatening to cut them off from the ships, I saw men grab the satrap — hard to miss in his scarlet and gold — and run him to a horse. His picked killers ran at his heels like dogs on a hunt.
They were too far away for my formed men to reach. They ran through the hole in our lines and down towards the beach. Some of their men ran west, away from the beach, following an officer. More — I didn’t see this — ran west and north — around
The right wing — our right, Miltiades’ men — had fought as hard as we had and been just as victorious, and even as we came up to the Persians, Miltiades’ men began to form a new phalanx facing us — one of the strangest sights I’ve seen on a battlefield, two victorious phalanxes from the same side facing each other over three stades of ground, with Persians streaming away between us.
There was no holding my men then. It started with the rear-rankers — the freedmen. They saw their fortunes running by, hundreds and hundreds of gold-laced Persians running for their camp, and they left their ranks and started in pursuit. I called for them to halt — and more men joined them.
All my men streamed away after them. I stopped, popped my helmet on the back of my head, took a swig of water and spat it out, and bandaged my knee. By my side, Idomeneus was panting, bent double, staring fixedly at the stubble, and Teucer was humming to himself, scouring the grass for spent shafts.
When I raised my head, I could see all the way to the ships. There was haze in the distance, but I could see that the barbarians had formed again, well down the field, and there was fighting there, and over in the olive grove west of the swamp, too.
Most of my oikia — my own men — stood around me. Styges had a cut on his sword arm, Gelon looked as fit as a statue, and a dozen of my new freedmen had chosen to loot the corpses in the area. So I had maybe twenty men, and there were knots of fighting all over the field. Men were leaving the field, too — dribs and drabs of Greeks, wounded or just too tired too continue. Not everyone lived the life of the palaestra and the gymnasium. And there was no real discipline — man who felt he’d done enough could just turn and walk away.
But I was the polemarch of Plataea, and there was still fighting. The Greeks around me were saying ‘Nike, Nike.’
Maybe. But to me, the sound from the north was an ominous one. It suggested that the battle wasn’t over yet.
I tested my wounded leg, and it was solid enough. Pain is pain. Fatigue is fatigue.
‘Zeus Soter,’ one of the new men said. He had a wound on his hand with blood flowing out of it, despite the rag he’d put on it. ‘I feel like shit!’ he said. ‘I need to sit.’
I grabbed his shoulder. ‘You feel bad?’ I asked. ‘Think how they feel!’ I pointed to the row of dead Sakai, naked now and their white bodies lying in a row where our rear-rankers had stripped them.
Idomeneus barked his battle laugh.
‘More fighting,’ he said.
We all drank our canteens dry, and then Greeks came up from the wreck of the Athenian centre — some ashamed, and others proud. Many had run, and others fought on until the Persians were forced back — and you can guess which group included Aristides.
‘By the gods, Plataean, I think we have won!’ he shouted as he ran up. He had the cheekplates of his helmet cocked back to give him a better view. There was blood flowing down his leg, and Idomeneus and I insisted he be bandaged before we went forward again. Aristides brought a hundred men with him — they were weary, but they wanted to be in at the kill.
We moved down to the beach. The fighting seemed heaviest by the ships, and we could see black hulls launching all along the bay. It seemed too good to be true, but one after another, ships pushed their sterns off the sand and their oars came out. Some stayed in close, rescuing men from the water.
Others simply fled.
That was when we knew we’d won.
The barbarians had formed a line by the ships — whether by intention or merely in desperation — and Miltiades’ men were fighting there. Most of my men and many of Miltiades’ went up into the camp and started to loot.
The fighting by the ships was deadly. Aeschylus’s brother fell there, and Callimachus, the polemarch of Athens. Cimon, Miltiades’ eldest son, took a wound there, and Agios was wounded when he leaped aboard an enemy ship and started to clear it.
We were walking — I can hardly call it a march — along the beach, passing over the wreckage of the Persians — corpses of men and horses as thick as seaweed after a storm, dead Medes cut down by Miltiades’ men. And as clear as an actor on the stage of the Agora, I heard Agios calling. Then I saw him, on the stern of an enemy ship half a stade away.
I wasn’t going to let him die while I had breath in my body. I started to run.
At my back, all my oikia followed me.
Aristides and Miltiades heard him, too.
And like a flood, the best spears of the army converged on the stern of that ship. We weren’t far — a hundred paces.
How long does it take to cut your way through a hundred paces of panicked Medes and desperate Persians?
Too long.
I went through the remnants of the Medes with my trusted men at my shoulders, but then we hit the Persians, and we slowed. There were a dozen of them — not men I knew, thank the gods, but the same sort of men as Cyrus and his friends, and they fought like demons, and we slowed.
Agios probably died then, while I was face to face with an armoured Persian. The Persian fought well. We must have exchanged four or five cuts before my spear ripped his forearm and my next thrust sent his shade down to Hades. As I stepped past him, the Persians backed away, grabbing at a man with a hennaed beard. His helmet was gold and set with lapis, and I’d seen him before.
Datis.
I thrust at him and saw my spear drive home under the skirts of his armour, and then his men were all around him. I was an arm’s length from the ship where Agios lay dying, pierced fifty times, shot with arrows and continuing to call the battle cry of Athens, so that the whole army heard him, and men pressed forward, possessed
