It was late in the evening, and the fire burned high, and the younger men and women were piling my straw into a great bale — the better to share other warmths.
I was twenty-seven, and I had never felt so old. But I was happy, pleasantly tired from dancing — the first good dancing since my leg was wounded. I was a master smith, and men came to my forge to talk about the affairs of the city. I might have been content.
Idomeneus came and leaned against me in the warm-chill of the fire’s edge.
‘What ever happened to that slave girl you took away to Athens?’ he asked. ‘Did you sell her?’
I had forgotten.
The gods sometimes work all together, and the next day, when my head rang like my forge from the wine, Hermes sent me a messenger from Athens, with payment for a load of finished bronze. He brought news that Miltiades had been arrested for wishing to restore the tyranny. And he brought a letter from Phrynichus, and a copy of his play, the famous Fall of Miletus. When I read it, I wept.
In the letter, Phrynichus explained that the play had been written to awaken the men of Athens to what the Persians were up to. He said that he had written it so that men might recognize Miltiades for his role in trying to save the East Greeks.
And he asked me to come to the opening of the play.
In Athens, they have a different form of theatre to what we have in Boeotia, and I think I should explain. Once, in my grandfather’s time, I suppose, drama was about the same everywhere — much like a rhapsode singing the Iliad, except that the poet or a professional musician performed works of praise to the gods, or sometimes the story of a hero. In Athens, there was always a set of plays — at least three — and the best of the three received a prize in honour of the god Dionysus. Athens was certainly not the only city to give praise to the god of wine, nor to offer a prize for the finest poems in his honour, but Athens has a tendency to take things to extremes.
The tyrant Hippias was a great worshipper of Dionysus, and men say that he inaugurated the practice of using a chorus — a group of singers — to support the main line of the play. So the dramas became more like a team sport — the poet or singer and his team of chorus members competed. It was demanding, both physically and mentally, and that competition fired men to make it better, more complex, more vivid.
While I was a slave in Ephesus, someone brought in the interaction between chorus and poet, so that men spoke and answered each other as if in a simple conversation in the agora. This may seem a small thing to you, children, but imagine a poor peasant from Attica, allowed to watch Heracles debate with the gods over his fate. Agamemnon begging his son to avenge him. Strong stuff. Sophists decry it as the end of men’s piety, but I’ve always loved it.
Phrynichus had long led the way, winning prize after prize. But when he wrote The Fall of Miletus, he set drama on another course, because instead of writing about the gods and heroes, he wrote about an event that had just happened in the world of men. His play had many actors — not just a chorus, but a dozen more men each taking a separate role. There was Istes, fighting to the last on the wall — and Histiaeus, and Miltiades — and me.
I was not a citizen of Athens then, so I was not permitted to appear in the play. Besides, that might have seemed to some like hubris. But Phrynichus asked me to come to the judging of the play, to stand with him as his guest, and to stand by Miltiades.
The crops were in, and my slaves were, for the most part, decent men who could work for a month without me. Besides, Hermogenes would be there, and Tiraeus. I didn’t stop to think. I took a horse, borrowed Idomeneus’s young man, Styges, as my servant and rode over the mountain to Attica.
This time, I was much more careful in my approach to mighty Athens, and I rode clear around the city and arrived at Aristides’ gate as the autumn sun set and men pulled their chlamyses closer against the wind and dark cold.
His wife came to the gate, summoned by servants. She surprised me by granting me the flash of her smile and a quick kiss on the cheek.
‘Arimnestos of Plataea, you are ever a friend of this house,’ she said. ‘My husband is late coming in from the Agora. Please come in!’
I have always valued that woman. ‘Despoina, this is Styges, acting as my hypaspist. He is no slave.’
She nodded to him. ‘I’ll see to his bed, then,’ she said. ‘You’ll want to bathe.’
Not a question.
I was just clear of my bath, towelling down and wishing I had not put quite so much warm water on her floor, when Aristides came in through the curtain and embraced me, his wool cloak still carrying the cold of the outside. ‘Arimnestos!’ he said.
I had last seen him as his ship swept past mine, out of the pocket of death, at Lade. ‘You lived,’ I said with satisfaction.
‘And you as well, my Plataean hero. By the gods, you fought like Heracles himself.’ He embraced me again.
Other men had said as much, but other men were not the soft-spoken prig of justice, Aristides, and I valued those words — well, up to this very hour.
I followed him to a table set beside his wife’s loom, and the three of us ate together. Later, it became the fashion to exclude women from many things, but not then. There was meat from a sacrifice, fresh tuna — a magnificent fish — good barley porridge, and rich wheat bread. In Plataea, it would have been a feast. In Athens, it was merely dinner with a rich man.
‘How stands the case with Miltiades?’ I asked after I had eaten my fill. Among Greeks, it is bad manners to ask hard questions during a meal. Truth to tell, it is bad manners in Persia, in Aegypt, in Sicily and in Rome, too.
Aristides wiped his fingers on a cloth — my sister would have kicked him, but customs differ from town to town — and pursed his lips. ‘On the evidence, the jury can do nothing but convict him,’ he said.
I could hear something in his voice. I raised an eyebrow. ‘But?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Men are seldom convicted on evidence,’ he said. ‘Miltiades’ case has become a test of the reach of the Great King into our city. The case was brought with malice, by the Alcmaeonids, and I have reason to believe that the Great King paid for it to be done.’
I laughed. ‘And the sad truth is that every one of us knows that Miltiades had every intention of seizing the city.’
Aristides frowned. ‘I wish you would phrase things more accurately, Plataean. We know nothing of the kind. We know what he might have done had he defeated the Persians and Medes at Lade.’ He shrugged.
I confess that I laughed. ‘Aristides!’ I said, as I understood. ‘You are his advocate? You, his enemy?’
His wife laughed, and I slapped the table, and the Athenians’ byword for justice and honour glared at us as if he was our pedagogue and we were errant children.
‘It’s not funny!’ he snapped.
Try stopping a man from laughing with those words.
‘Besides,’ he said. ‘I am hardly his enemy.’
‘Of course not,’ I said. I laughed again. I couldn’t help myself, and his wife joined me.
‘Why is it,’ he asked, when we began to breathe again, ‘that visitors here always mock me, and you, despoina, always abet them?’
I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘If you will be better than other men, you must be patient with their mockery,’ I said. ‘Besides, we only tease you because we love you.’
‘Why?’ Aristides asked. Like most righteous men, he was impatient of teasing and had neither defence against it nor any idea why it was directed at him.
I shook my head and gave up. ‘Forgive me, lord,’ I said. ‘Imagine I’m but a poor witless foreigner, and tell me how Miltiades might survive this charge.’