Christian Cameron: Marathon: Freedom or Death

It looks to me as if my daughter has brought every young sprig in the town, and some foreigners from up the coast as well, just to hear her old man speak of his fate. Flattering in a way — but you know that I’ll tell you of Marathon. And you know that there is no nobler moment in all the history of men — of Hellenes. We stood against them, man to man, and we were better.

But it didn’t start that way, not by as long a ride as a man could make in a year on a good horse.

For those of you who missed the first nights of my rambling story, I’m Arimnestos of Plataea. I told the story of how my father was the bronze-smith of our city, and how we marched to fight the Spartans at Oinoe, and fought three battles in a week. How he was murdered by his cousin Simon. How Simon sold me as a slave, far to the east among the men of Ionia, and how I grew to manhood as a slave in the house of a fine poet in Ephesus, one of the greatest cities in the world, right under the shadow of the Temple of Artemis. I was slave to Hipponax the poet and his son Archilogos. In time they freed me. I became a warrior, and then a great warrior, but when the Long War began — the war between the Medes and the Greeks — I served with the Athenians at Sardis.

Why, you might ask. My thugater will groan to hear me tell this again, but I loved Briseis. Indeed, to say I loved her — Hipponax’s dark-haired daughter, Artemis’s avatar and perhaps Aphrodite’s as well, Helen returned to earth — well, to say I loved her is to say nothing. As you will hear, if you stay to listen.

Briseis wasn’t the only person I loved in Ephesus. I loved Archilogos — the true friend of my youth. We were well matched in everything. I was his companion, first as a slave, and then free — and we competed. At everything. And I also loved Heraclitus, the greatest philosopher of his day. To me, the greatest ever, almost like a god in his wisdom. He, and he alone, kept me from growing to manhood as a pure killer. He gave me advice which I ignored — but which stayed in my head. To this day, in fact. He taught me that the river of our lives flows on and on and can never be reclaimed. Later, I knew that he’d tried to keep me from Briseis.

When her father caught us together, it was the end of my youth. I was cast out of the household, and that’s why I was with the Athenians at Sardis, and not in the phalanx of the men of Ephesus to save Hipponax when the Medes gave him his mortal wound.

I found him screaming on the battlefield, and I sent him on the last journey because I loved him, even though he had been my owner. It was done with love, but his son, Archilogos, did not see it that way, and we became foes.

I spent the next years of the Ionian Revolt — the first years of the Long War — gaining word-fame with every blow I struck. I should blush to tell it — but why? When I served at Sardis, I was a man that other men would trust at their side in the phalanx. By the time I led my ship into the Persians at the big fight at Cyprus, I was a warrior that other men feared in the storm of bronze.

The Greeks won the sea-fight but lost on land, that day at Cyprus. And the back of the revolt should have been broken, but it was not. We retreated to Chios and Lesbos, and I joined Miltiades of Athens — a great aristocrat, and a great pirate — and we got new allies, and the fighting switched to the Chersonese — the land of the Trojan War. We fought the Medes by sea and land. Sometimes we bested them. Miltiades made money and so did I. I owned my own ship, and I was rich.

I killed many men.

And then we faced the Medes in Thrace — just a few ships from each side. By then, Briseis had married the most powerful man in the Greek revolt — and had found him a broken reed. We beat the Persians and their Thracian allies and I killed her husband, even though he was supposedly on my side. I laugh even now — that was a good killing, and I spit on his shade.

But she didn’t want me, except in her bed and in her thoughts. Briseis loved me as I loved her — but she meant to be Queen of the Ionians, not a pirate’s trull, and all I was in those years was a bloodyhanded pirate.

Fair enough. But it shattered me for a while.

I left Thrace and I left Miltiades, and I went home to Plataea. Where the man who had killed my father and married my mother was lording it over the family farm.

Simon, and his four sons. My cousins.

Your cousins too, thugater. Simon was a wreck of a man and a coward, but I’d not say the same of his get. They were tough bastards. I didn’t hack him down. I went to the assembly, as my master Heraclitus would have wanted me to do.

The law killed old Simon the coward, but his sons wanted revenge.

And the Persians were determined to finish off the Ionians and put the Greeks under their heel.

And Briseis kept marrying great men, and finding them wanting.

The world, you know, is shaped like the bowl of an aspis . Out on the rim flows the edge of the river-sea that circles all, and up where the porpax binds a man’s arm is the sun and the moon, and the great circle of earth fills all between. Medes and Persians, Scythians and Greeks and Ionians and Aeolians and Italians and Aethiopians and Aegyptians and Africans and Lydians and Phrygians and Carians and Celts and Phoenicians and the gods know who else fill the bowl of the aspis from rim to rim. And in those days, as the Long War began to take hold like a new-started fire on dry kindling, you could hear men talking of war, making war, killing, dying, making weapons and training in their use, all across the bowl of that aspis from rim to rim, until the murmur of the bronze-clad god’s chorus filled the world.

It was the sixth year of the Long War, and Hipparchus was archon in Athens, and Myron was archon for his second term in Plataea. Tisikrites of Croton won the stade sprint at Olympia. The weather was good, the crops were rolling in.

I thought I might settle down and make myself a bronze-smith and a farmer, like my father before me.

Ares must have laughed.

Shield up.

Thrust overhand.

Turn — catch the spear on the rim of my shield, pivot on my toes and thrust at my opponent.

He catches my spear on his shield and grins. I can see the flash of his grin in the tau of his Corinthian helmet’s faceplate. Then his plumes nod as he turns his head — checks the man behind him.

I thrust overhand, hard.

He catches my blow, pivots on the balls of his feet and steps back with his shield facing me.

His file-mate pushes past him, a heavy overhand blow driving me back half a step.

The music rises, the aulos pipe sounding faster, the drums beating the rhythm like the sound of marching feet.

I sidestep, faster, and my shield rim flashes like a live thing. My black spear is an iron-tipped tongue of death in my strong right hand and I am one with the men to the right and left, the men behind. I am not Arimnestos the killer of men. I am only one Plataean, and together, we are this .

‘Plataeans!’ I roar.

I plant my right foot. Every man in the front rank does the same, and the pipes howl, and every man crouches, screams and pushes forward, and three hundred voices call: The Ravens of Apollo! The roar shakes the walls and echoes from the Temple of Hera.

The music falls silent, and after a pause the whole assembly — all the free men and women, the slaves, the freedmen — erupt in applause.