Christian Cameron: Salamis

Ah, Briseis! She taunted me with cowardice when I stayed away from her and devoured me when I visited her, sneaking, night after night, past the slaves into the women’s quarters, until, in the end, we were caught. Of course we were caught.

And I was thrown from the house and ordered never to return, by the family I’d sworn to protect.

Three days later I was marching upcountry with Aristides and the Athenians. We burned Sardis, but the Persians caught us in the midst of looting the market and we lost the fight in the town and then again at the bridge, and the Persians beat us like a drum, but I stood my ground, fight after fight, and my reputation as a spear fighter grew. In a mountain pass, Eualcides the Euboean and I charged Artaphernes’ bodyguard, and lived to tell the tale. Three days later, on the plains north of Ephesus, we tried to face a provincial Persian army with the whole might of the Ionian Revolt, and the Greeks folded and ran rather than face the Persian archery and the outraged Phrygians. Alone, on the far left, the Athenians and the Euboeans held our ground and stopped the Carians. Our army was destroyed. Eualcides the hero died there, and I went back to save his corpse, and in the process found that Hipponax, my former master, lay mortally wounded. I gave him the mercy blow, again failing to think of the oath I’d sworn, and my once near-brother Archilogos thought I’d done it from hate, not love. And that blow stood between us and any hope of reconciliation. To Archilogos, I’d raped his sister and killed his father after swearing an oath to the gods to protect them. And that will have bearing on tonight’s tale.

From the rout of Ephesus, I escaped with the Athenians, but the curse of my shattered oath lay on me and Poseidon harried our ship, and in every port I killed men who annoyed me until Hagios, my Athenian friend, put me ashore on Crete, with the King of Gortyn, Achilles, and his son Neoptolymos, to whom I was war tutor. I tutored him so well that, in the next great battle of the Ionian War, Neoptolymos and I were the heroes of the Greek fleet, and we helped my once-friend Archilogos break the Persian centre. It was the first victory for the Greeks, but it was fleeting, and a few days later, I was a pirate on the great sea with my own ship for the first time. Fortune favoured me — perhaps, I think, because I had in part redeemed my oath to the gods by saving Archilogos at the sea battle. And when we weathered the worst storm I had ever seen, Poseidon had gifted me the African-Greek navigator Paramanos and a good crew in a heavy ship. I returned to Lesvos and joined Miltiades, the same who had wooed the Plataeans at the dawn of this tale. And from him I learned the facts of my father’s murder and I determined to go home and avenge him.

I found Briseis had married one of the architects of the Ionian Revolt, and he was eager to kill me — the rumour was that she called my name when he was with her at night. And I determined to kill him.

After two seasons of piracy with Miltiades and further failures of the rebels to resist the Persians, I found him skulking around the edge of a great melee in Thrace and I killed him. I presented myself to Briseis to take her as my own — and she spurned me.

That’s how it is, sometimes. I went back to Plataea an empty vessel, and the Furies filled me with revenge. I found Simon and his sons sitting on my farm — Simon married to my mother, planning to marry his youngest son Simonalkes to my sister Penelope.

I’ll interrupt my own tale to say that I did not fall on Simon with fire and sword, because four years of living by the spear had taught me that things I had learned as a boy from Calchus and heard again from Heraclitus were coming to seem important and true — that justice was more important than might. I let the law of Plataea have its way. Simon hanged himself from the rafters of my father’s workshop, and the Furies left me alone with my mother and my sister.

That would make a fine tale, I think, by itself, but the gods were far from done with Plataea, and by the next spring there were storm clouds brewing in all directions. An Athenian aristocrat died under my hypaspist’s sword — Idomeneus, who comes all too often into these stories, a mad Cretan — he had taken up the priesthood of the old shrine. I went off to see to the crisis and that road took me over the mountains to Athens and into the middle of Athenian politics — aye, you’ll hear more of that tonight, too. There I fell afoul of the Alcmaeonidae and their scion Cleitus, because it was his brother who had died in our sanctuary and because my cowardly cousin Simon’s sons were laying a trap for me. He stole my horse and my slave girl, but that’s another story. Because of him, I was tried for murder and Aristides the Just got me off with a trick. But in the process, I committed hubris — the crime of treating a man like a slave — and Aristides ordered me to go to Delos, to the great temple of Apollo, to be cleansed.

Apollo, that scheming god, never meant me to be cleansed, but instead thrust me back into the service of Miltiades, whose fortunes were at an all-time ebb. With two ships I re-provisioned Miletus, not once but twice, and made a small fortune on it, and on piracy. I took men’s goods, and their women, and I killed for money, took ships, and thought too little of the gods. Apollo had warned me — in his own voice — to learn to use mercy, but I failed more often than I succeeded, and I left a red track behind me across the Ionian Sea. And in time, I was a captain at the greatest sea battle of the Ionian Revolt — at Lade. At Lade, the Great King put together an incredible fleet, of nearly six hundred ships, to face the Greeks and their allies with almost three hundred and fifty ships. It sounds one-sided, but we were well trained; we should have been ready. I sailed with the Athenians and the Cretans and we beat the Phoenicians at one end of the line and emerged from the morning fog expecting the praise of our navarch, the Phocaean Dionysus — alongside Miltiades, the greatest pirate and ship-handler in the Greek world. But when we punched through the Phoenicians, we found that the Samians, our fellow Greeks, had sold out to the Persians. The Great King triumphed, and the Ionian revolt collapsed. Most of my friends — most of the men of my youth — died at Lade.

Briseis married Artaphernes, who had slept with her mother — and became the most powerful woman in Ionia, as she had always planned.

Datis, the architect of the Persian victory, raped and plundered his way across Lesvos and Chios, slaughtering men, taking women for the slave markets, and making true every slander that Greeks had falsely whispered about Persian atrocities.

Miletus, that I had helped to hold, fell. I saved what I could. And went home, with fifty families of Miletians to add to the citizen levy of Plataea. I spent my fortune on them, buying them land and oxen, and then … then I went back to smithing bronze. I gave up the spear.

How the gods must have laughed.

A season later, while my sister went to a finishing school to get her away from my mother’s drunkenness, I went back to Athens because my friend Phrynicus, who had stood in the arrow storm at Lade with me, was producing his play, The Fall of Miletus. And Miltiades had been arrested for threatening the state — of which, let me say, friends, he was absolutely guilty, because Miltiades would have sold his own mother into slavery to achieve power in Athens.

At any rate, I used money and some of the talents I’d learned as a slave — and a lot of my friends — to see that Phrynicus’s play was produced. And, incidentally, to win my stolen slave-girl free of her brothel and wreak some revenge on the Alcmaeonidae. In the process, I undermined their power with the demos — the people — and helped the new voice in Athenian politics — Themistocles the Orator. He had little love for me, but he managed to tolerate my success long enough to help me — and Aristides — to undermine the pro-Persian party and liberate Miltiades.