It was a strong field — Epaphroditos, Sophanes, Stephanos, Aristides himself, Lord Pelagius’s nephew Nestor, Nearchos of Crete and his younger brother, Neoptolemus, Sophanes’ friend Glaucon, and Dionysius of Samos’s son Hipparchus, a fine young man without his father’s arrogance. He was next to me in the first heat, and I made the mistake of giving way at the first step — I never caught him. But I placed second, and went on to the next round.
The men I named had all gone on in their rounds. We were down to two eights, and the men running were the heroes of our army, the champions of the East Greeks and their allies. I was proud just to run with them. I drank water, pissed some of it away and lined up, the aspis on my arm as heavy as lead after just one race.
I was between Epaphroditos and Aristides, chatting with both, waiting for Miltiades to start us, when the cry went up.
The Persian fleet was sailing around the point. Their fleet was immense, and it came and came and came. They crossed the bay under sail and put in to the beaches at the foot of Mycale, and I stood on the shore and counted them.
Five hundred and fifty-three ships, first to last, biremes and hemioliai included. Just two hundred more ships than we had, including all of our lighter ships.
On the other hand, the Cyprians sailed like fools, and the Aegyptians were so wary that they edged away from us, though we didn’t launch a single ship.
We took it as an omen, that the Persians had come while we competed. We watched them, and we laughed and called out to them to come and join us, and then, as if by common consent, we turned our backs on their display of imperial power and went back to our athletics.
I remember that walk away from the shore, because I hated the aspis I had on my arm, an awkward thing with a badly turned bowl and an ill-fitting bronze porpax. I still had the cheap wicker Boeotian I had purchased on the beach at Chios a year before, a far less pretty shield with a split-ash face and a plain leather porpax, but it weighed nothing. In those days, there was no rule about competitions and shields, and besides, the Boeotian was, in fact, the shield I would carry to fight. I dropped my heavy aspis on my blanket roll, picked up my Boeotian and trotted to the start line.
Aristides looked at my shield with interest. ‘Surely that big thing will impede your running,’ he said.
I shrugged. ‘It weighs less on my arm,’ I said.
‘I seem to remember that you beat me in this race four years ago,’ he said.
I grinned. ‘Luck, my lord. Good fortune.’
Aristides smiled. ‘You are rare among men, Arimnestos. Most men would tell me that they were about to beat me again.’
I shrugged, watching Miltiades go to the start line. ‘In a few heartbeats, we will know,’ I said.
Epaphroditos laughed. ‘Listening to you two is like an education in arete,’ he said. ‘Me, I’ll just run my best. But for the record, Aristides, he may have beaten you in this race,’ he grinned, and his teeth sparked, ‘but I beat him, as I remember.’
We all laughed. I remember it well, the eight of us laughing. In all the Long War, there were a few moments like that, that sparkled like bronze in the sun. We weren’t fighting for our lives. We weren’t freezing cold or burning hot. No one was going to die. We were comrades — captains, leaders, but men who stood together. Later, when all Greece was at the point of extinction, we never laughed like that.
There is a Spartan joke, that eirene — peace — is an ideal men discern from the observation that there are brief intervals between wars.
You laugh, children. Hmm.
I wish I could end this story right there — with eight of us lined up on the sand, ready to race. I remember it so well. Young Hipparchus, the Samian, was retying his sandals when Miltiades called us to order, and the poor boy fumbled the retie and ended up running with one sandal.
Miltiades held his cane even with the ground, and then swept it away like a sword cut, and we were off.
The race itself was an anticlimax of the worst sort, because Aristides and Epaphroditos became entangled within a few lengths of the starting line, and although neither fell, they never caught the rest of us — and they should probably have been first. Or perhaps not. But they were the two I had expected to have to outperform, and their removal gave me wings.
I passed Sophanes in the first five steps and ran easily, knees high, arms pumping, because my greaves fitted perfectly. In the race in armour, the armour is part of the contest, and my armour fitted.
Sophanes wasn’t going to surrender meekly, however, and after fifteen paces, we were side by side, well in advance of the other runners. He tried to cut inside me at the turning post, and I shoved him with my big Boeotian shield, and he had to fall back a step.
Hipparchus, running with one sandal flapping, was still game, and he came on past the men who should have been the front-runners — because they were disheartened by their collision, I suspect. But his badly tied sandal finally fell away, tripping him, and he went down. He let out a cry as he fell, and I think Sophanes must have looked back, and that was the step he never retrieved. I ran to the finish and crossed first by the length of my leg.
Then I had a long rest while the other heats ran — three of them. The final eight had me and Sophanes of Athens, as well as my own man, the Aeolian Herakleides, Nearchos of Crete and some Chians I didn’t know.
Nearchos came and put an arm around me. ‘This is the life,’ he said. ‘Better than ploughing fields on Crete.’
‘You’ve never ploughed a field in your life, lord,’ I said, and they all laughed.
‘He was my war tutor,’ Nearchos told Sophanes.
‘No wonder you are a hero now,’ Sophanes said — the boy had a nice turn of phrase.
That was a race. No one fell, and no one clashed at the start line, where most mishaps happen. We all went off at full stride, and in that final race, no one had a loose sandal strap, a bad shield, a pebble.
We ran for the gods. I don’t remember much of it — I was tired, and I was flying like a ship before the wind, without a thought in my head. But I remember that as we came to the turning post, all in a clump, Nearchos was first by a hand’s breadth — but his paces were a little too long, and he landed his left foot well past the post and started his turn late. Quick as a shark takes bait, I turned inside him, my light shield almost catching the post as I scraped by, so that Sophanes, Nearchos and I were exactly together as we came out of the turn and ran for the spear Miltiades held out across the finish.
What can I say? We ran. We flew. We were in step, stride for stride, all the way home, and the army roared its approval at us, although I remember none of that. What I remember is how fast that spear grew, and how nothing mattered but reaching it. Nothing.
I won because my shield was a palm’s breadth larger than theirs, and touched the spear first. Nothing else. Rather than arrogance, my victory made me feel humble, and I embraced both of them.
I’m not ashamed to say that I wept. As they say at Olympia, for a moment I had been with the gods. I think that all three of us had been.
The rest is a blur of exhaustion. Stephanos took me out in the second round of pankration, but Sophanes of Athens put him down in the third round before losing to Aeschylus the poet’s brother in the finals. Athenians are good at games. They train harder than other men — even the Spartans.
I passed at boxing, and I watched a big Lesbian brute — Callimachus, no less, and never was a fighter better named — beat his way through other men like a plough through a field on its second pass, when all the big chunks are broken and the bad rocks already pulled. Aristides caught him again and again, but he was big enough to shake off the blows and continue, and he finally wore Aristides down and hit him hard, and Aristides raised his hand in surrender.