Christian Cameron: Marathon: Freedom or Death

The first-rank man opposite me was brave, or foolish, and stood his ground. I knocked him flat. I threw my borrowed spear at the next man and it stuck in his shield, dragging it down. Gelon put a spear-tip into the top of his thigh and I stepped on his chest and pressed forward, reaching for a sword that wasn’t there — a moment of fear — and I was into the third rank.

This part I remember as if it was yesterday, thugater. I had no weapon, and the next man should have killed me, but he cowered, and my right arm shot out as if it had its own life in combat, grabbed the rim of his scalloped shield and spun it to the left. His shield arm snapped. He went down. He screamed, and his scream was the surrender of the Persians to panic.

And the rest were running.

The screaming man with the broken arm had a perfectly good spear, and the gods gifted it to me as he let go and it seemed to leap into my hand.

I looked left — Hermogenes was coming into the flank of the Medes. No idea where the beaten Persian cavalry had got to, but the Persians were wrecked — men in front and the flank — and they ran, and the Medes started to run with them.

All in as long as it takes to tell the tale. After an hour of endless pushing, we were winning.

To my right, the Medes were backing fast, but they were not beaten, and their rear ranks continued trying to lob arrows high to drop them on our phalanx, and it was working. My men were still dying. But the Sakai had no shields, and our spears were hurting them.

I was no longer in command. We were no longer a phalanx. Plataeans and Athenians were intermixed along two stades, and men were plunging into the front of the Sakai, in groups or alone.

I remember that I stooped and picked up a Sakai axe and put it in my shield hand. Better than no weapon, I thought, if my short Persian spear broke.

I could hear a Mede demanding that his men rally — and they did. The Persians tried to form on them — they had lost many men. And the Persian cavalry came forward with a shout and a hail of arrows.

Hermogenes’ men were still milling around, in no sort of order — but remember, he had twelve ranks of men behind him. The cavalry hit his front ranks, and they locked up — spear and aspis against horse and sword and bow. Our line moved back a pace, and then the men on my left ran at the flanks of the horses and started pulling the Persians from their saddles.

The Medes — like lions — came forward to take advantage of our confusion — or simply to save the Persians — I have no idea.

‘On me!’ I roared. ‘Charge!’

The Medes were shocked as we ran at them again. Some stopped dead, and others kept coming, and they had no more order than we did.

That’s when the fighting was the worst — the fiercest. They were shamed from their brief rout and meant to have our heads, while we already thought that we were the better men and meant to have theirs. Both sides lost their cohesion, and men died fast. Blows came out of everywhere and nowhere, and the only hope was to be fully armoured, as I was. I must have taken ten blows that should have been wounds, on my arm and shoulder plates, on my scale shirt, on my helmet. Some must have been from my own men, in the confusion.

Then, somehow, I was in among the Persian cavalry, not the Medes, though I have no memory of running at them, and that made my fighting easier — anyone on a horse was a target. Mounted men seldom have shields. I was like Nemesis.

Idomeneus must have decided to stay at my shoulder, and I had Gelon at my back — and we killed them. Ahh, I remember Marathon, children. That day, I was a god of war. My armour flashed and shone, and men fell under every blow of my spear. I ripped men from their horses. Mounted men have to fight to the front — they cannot face to the flanks or rear. Not against two rapid blows, anyway.

Idomeneus and Gelon were not much worse than me, though, and as the fight became looser, and ranks dissolved, we were more dangerous, not less. I had a simple goal — my usual goal in a melee — to burst out of the back of the enemy formation. So I killed and wounded, I knocked men off their mounts and stepped on them, and I kept going forward, and my little group stuck to me.

It is possible to get lost in a big fight, the way a man may get lost in the woods. Confined in the eye slits of your helmet, it is possible to take a wound or die simply because some bastard turned you around. It is essential to have men at your back whom you trust — men who will turn you back round, or kill the opponent who is circling outside the realm of your helmet. But with such men, anything is possible, and it is incredible how a man can move inside a melee if he has purpose and companions.

I went at a rider in a rich purple cloak and he turned and jammed his heels in — and when I followed him we burst free and then we were running in a hayfield, and the fight was behind us. The fleeing man took an arrow and fell back over the rump of his horse, and he rode away like that — a surprising distance, as I remember. Then Teucer, at my elbow, grunted and released another arrow, high, and it fell on him and he crashed to earth. He tried to rise, and a third arrow finished him.

Teucer came out from the cover of Idomeneus’s shield, nocking an arrow, and the Persian cavalry folded up and ran — again — and this time they left half their men or more dead on the ground because we’d burst through them. Then the Medes broke and ran, shooting as they went. There were horses down in the brush, and men screaming, and horses bellowing. Ares, it was grim — blood on the ground, enough of it to splash over your sandals when the man next to you made a kill or died. So much blood that the copper-bronze smell fills your nostrils, more even than the stink of sweat, the smell that men have when they are afraid, the smell of men’s guts like new-butchered deer. Only when you stop do you notice it — the stench of Ares — and then it makes you gag, especially if some unarmoured boy has been cut to death at your feet, his lips already blue-white and bled out, his eyes bulging from the horror and pain.

War.

But, as I say, the Medes ran, the Persian cavalry ran or died, and the Sakai, despite their leader’s calls, had not been keen for the second engagement, and the whole mass went back. This time, they went back to the east, down towards the beach, trying to hide themselves among the Sakai of the centre, I think.

Teucer started shooting into them, and then he was out of shafts. It seems odd to tell it, but the only arrows I remember at that point were his, although I’m told that the Sakai kept shooting until the very end.

I had other concerns. The Athenians were pushing the Sakai, and the Sakai, whether by intention or by chance, where backing only at our end of the line — so that they swung like a gate, still linked to their centre two stades away.

At our end, we’d won. The Persians, cavalry and infantry were dead or broken, fleeing, throwing away their shields. Once a man discards his shield, he’s done. The Medes ran, and the Sakai nearest us were — well, mostly they were dead.

Idomeneus was at my shoulder.

‘Sound the rally!’ I panted.

I could see it — by Ares and by Aphrodite — that’s what I remember best of that whole glorious day. I could see what I needed to do, as if Athena stood at my shoulder, or perhaps Heracles, and whispered it in my ear.

I pivoted my body to face the beach, twelve stades away, and spear my arms wide. ‘Rally here!’ I called. ‘On me!’

Idomeneus went into his place, and Gelon and Teucer. In seconds, fifty more men were fitting in, and then a hundred. A long minute, and an arrow slew one of my Plataeans almost at the end of my spear, but by now the whole mass of them was forming up, fifteen hundred men.