Gary Corby: The Marathon Conspiracy

“Diotima, what’s wrong?” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Nico, they killed these girls at the sanctuary at Brauron?”

“Yes. Why? Have you heard of it?”

“Of course I’ve heard of it,” she snapped at me, but I could hear the tears forming. “I spent a year there. Nico, I used to be one of those girls. That was my school .”

At that moment the house slave walked in to tell me there was a man at the door, demanding to see me. He couldn’t have sounded unhappier if he’d been announcing a plague victim. The house slaves had never reconciled themselves to my chosen trade.

“Something about a dead man,” the slave said, and jerked his thumb at the front door. “He says he wants to confess to murder.”

“My name is Glaucon. I’ve come about the death of Hippias,” the visitor said.

We spoke in the andron, the room at the front of every house reserved for men to talk business. I’d directed the slave to take Glaucon there.

Glaucon was an older man, perhaps fifty. Well, that was no surprise. Fifty was the minimum age for anyone who might have information about a death that had happened thirty years ago.

“How did you hear about me?” I asked.

“Word is passing among all the veterans of Marathon. They say the body of Hippias has been found.”

“That’s supposed to be a secret. Only Pericles and the archons and their assistants know.”

“Oh, word gets around,” he said vaguely.

“I see.” I guessed the assistants to the archons had been talking.

“I’ve come to confess,” Glaucon said. “I killed Hippias.”

I blinked and waited for the punch line, but then I realized he wasn’t joking.

Glaucon said, “When I heard you were on the case, I realized there was no hope of hiding my crime. My best chance was to throw myself on the mercy of the Athenian people.”

I rubbed my hands and tried not to look too gleeful. This was going to be my fastest case yet. Pericles would be amazed. But still, I had to make sure. There was one vital point.

I asked, “What of the girls, the dead one and the missing one? Is she still alive? Where is she?”

Glaucon looked at me with an odd expression. He said, “What girls?”

It was my turn to be perplexed. “You don’t know?”

“I’d appreciate it if you could announce my guilt as soon as possible,” Glaucon said. “Could they schedule my trial for this month, do you think?”

The door slammed open. There stood a complete stranger, an older man with gray hair, who if his straight back and wide shoulders were anything to go by was in good shape. The house slave stood obscured behind him, jumping to see over the intruder’s shoulder. Our slave was beside himself with anxiety. “He pushed his way in, master! I couldn’t stop him. I’m sorry-”

“What has this mountebank been telling you?” the stranger demanded, glaring at Glaucon.

“Who are you?” I said.

“My name is Hegestratus. I’m a candidate for the post of city treasurer in the next election.”

“So?”

“So Glaucon is running, too.”

“I fail to see the relevance,” I told him. “Glaucon has this moment confessed to the murder of Hippias, the last tyrant of Athens.”

“That’s utter bull droppings,” snapped Hegestratus.

“How do you know?” I challenged him.

“Because I killed Hippias. I’ve come to confess.”

As the day progressed, a small queue of men lined up outside our door, all waiting to confess to the murder of Hippias. They had one thing in common: every one of them was a candidate in the coming elections. Every one of them wanted to enhance his chances by being known as the killer of the most hated man in the city’s history. There wasn’t the slightest danger to the men in confessing. No jury in Athens would convict them.

There were so many I had to enlist Diotima to take notes.

“It’s ridiculous,” I groaned. “Why are we doing this?”

“Because everyone wants to know the name of the man who killed Hippias,” Diotima said. “So they can congratulate him.”

“We’ll have to work out who really killed Hippias, and then announce the lucky winner.”

“That will be tricky, since it probably happened thirty years ago, and we don’t even know how he died,” Diotima pointed out. “The skull’s nice, but a body would help, even if it’s only a skeleton.”

“Yes, it would.” I’d taken the remains with me, Pericles not having any use for an extra skull. I set it on the table, and Diotima and I had stared at it in fascination. The one thing we knew for sure was that the victim hadn’t been knocked on the head: the bone was all in place.

“How many confessions does that make?” I asked Diotima.

Diotima ran her finger down the list and frowned. “Thirty-six,” she said.

“It must have been a crowded murder scene.”

“Very,” Diotima agreed. “Especially since four of them claim to have decapitated Hippias with their swords. Ten knifed him in the chest, eight used spears, and most of the rest strangled him. I wonder if that was before or after the first four had cut off his head?”

There was nothing we could do about it now. We heard a banging on the door, huge resounding thumps. I’d recognize that ham-fisted knocking anywhere: it was Pythax, Diotima’s stepfather, and with him would be Diotima’s mother, Euterpe.

Diotima and I looked at each other in despair. We were scheduled to marry at the next full moon; our fathers had signed the agreement. Now our parents were about to meet, all four together, for the first time.

I liked the idea of being married, I just didn’t like the idea of getting married.

Getting married meant a ceremony. I disliked ceremonies at the best of times. But worse than that, planning our wedding required my family to talk to Diotima’s family, and that was a disaster of such epic proportions as to make the Trojan War look like a mild disagreement.

“A small, private affair, with close friends attending,” my mother, Phaenarete, said.

“I was thinking more along the lines of all the best families in Athens,” said Euterpe, the mother of my bride. Euterpe was a former high-class courtesan and desperate to establish herself in respectable society.

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” said my mother. She’d been quietly respectable all her life. “We couldn’t possibly find room for that many people.”

What she left unsaid was that we couldn’t possibly afford to feed them either.

“We gotta have my guardsmen there,” said Pythax.

“You want to invite slaves to a citizen wedding?” said my father, Sophroniscus, utterly aghast.

“They’re my buddies,” Pythax growled. “They’d be insulted if I didn’t.” Pythax was a new-made citizen, who through his enormous merit had risen from being a slave himself to command of the Scythian Guard of Athens, the men who enforce the peace. Pythax had a foot on each side of the social divide: not comfortable in his new milieu, but no longer at home in his old.

“I forbid it!” said Sophroniscus, his face purple.

“Who’s paying for this?” Pythax demanded.

“We both are,” Sophroniscus replied.

It was part of the wedding contract. Each of our fathers thought the other was the richer. They both thought they’d gotten a good deal in the marriage contract. Little did they know they were each as poor as the other, and Diotima and I weren’t about to tell them. It meant both our fathers were constantly thinking of reasons why the other should pay for things.

“Pythax, dear husband,” said Euterpe. “We couldn’t possibly have your friends at the ceremony. Think what the good families would say.”