I shrugged, because I wasn’t at all sure that I knew what I was doing. ‘I’m fighting back,’ I said.
‘Gods stand by us,’ Aristides said.
When the sun was high, we left our horses at his stables and walked into the city together. Men were gathered everywhere, and I was reminded of Athens’s power by seeing how many men she commanded. There must have been twelve thousand men of fighting age in the Agora for the performances, and that is a fair number of decently trained men — a greater total than Thebes and Sparta together, and therein lies the secret of Athens’s strength. Manpower.
When Athenians gather, they talk. It seems to be the lifeblood of the city, and they talk of everything from the power of the gods to the roles of men, the rights of men, the place of taxes, the weather, the crops, the fish — and back to the gods. Standing with Aristides in the Agora, trying to guard him, I was dizzied by the power of the ideas expressed — piety and impiety, anger and logic, farming advice, military strategy — all in a matter of a few minutes.
We were all crushed together when the magistrates went to the public altar of Zeus near the Royal Stoa and made the opening sacrifices. Then the ‘good men’, the athletes, the Olympic victors, the poets, the priests and high aristocrats, processed to the wooden seats that had been arranged — pray, don’t imagine anything elegant or splendid like modern Athens, honey. We’re talking about wooden stands that creaked when too many fat men climbed the steps! But after some time, the crowd settled, and the poor metics and foreigners and lower-class citizens pushed in around the sides and in the space between the stage area and the stands.
Early on, I spotted Cleitus. He was wearing a magnificent embroidered himation over a long chiton of Persian work, and he was easy to pick out, as he was sitting in the first row of the stand.
A set of priests and priestesses came forward, purified the crowd and made sacrifices. Then we all sang a hymn to Dionysus together and the plays began.
I don’t remember much about the first play — just that it was a typically reverent piece about the birth and nurture of the god. At least, according to an Athenian. We have our own ideas about Great Bacchus in Boeotia. But the second play was Phrynichus’s.
I saw him as soon as the chorus came out. He was behind them, wearing a long white chiton like the one that the archon in Plataea wears, and he looked more scared than he had been when the Aegyptians were storming our deck at Lade.
I began to push through the crowd towards him. It was not easy — everyone had heard that The Fall of Miletus was a different kind of play, and men wanted to see the poet, to watch him as they watched his play. I had managed to get close to him when the chorus, dressed as skeletons in armour, linked arms and sang:
Hear me, Muses! What I tell,
Is wrought with horror, and yet heroes walked there, too!
And where our fair maidens once walked,
Fire has swept like the harrow,
Breaking the clods of dirt, and making the ground smooth.
Hear me, furies! And men of Athens!
We died on our walls, in our streets, in the breach,
Where the Great King’s siege mound rose.
So that, where once our maidens for their young swains sighed,
Those same young men wore bronze, and for the
Want of Athens, there we died.
I’ve heard Aeschylus, and I’ve heard young Euripides. But for power, give me Phrynichus. And he was actually at the battle — well, Aeschylus and his brother were there, too. Aeschylus was also next to me as I came up to Phrynichus, pushing rudely through the crowd. He took my shoulder.
‘Not now,’ he said, pointing to Phrynichus, who was watching his chorus exactly as Agios watched his oarsmen in a sea-fight.
So I stopped and listened. I had been there, of course — and yet I was enraptured by his words. He laid the blame for the fall of the east on Athens. That was the point of his play — that the rape of Ionia was caused by the greed of Athens. Yes, he made Miltiades a hero — and that must have sat ill with some — but the greatest hero was Istes, and he towers over the play like Heracles come to earth.
It was frightening to listen to a man speak words I had spoken in council. And there was the man playing Miltiades — not that he was named, for in those days, that might have been considered impiety — and he stood forth and said:
Today, we are not pirates. Today, we fight for the freedom of the Greeks, although we are far from home and hearth.
And men cheered. Cleitus looked around. He was angry — doubly angry, I think. His men should have made a disturbance by then, shouldn’t they?
Hah! I’m keeping my plan from you children. It helps build the story, does it not? But not many men can say that in one day they bested Cleitus of the Alcmaeonids and Themistocles of Athens in a contest of wits. Let me tell it my own way.
The play was only halfway through when the first man in the crowd gave way to tears. And by the time Istes died (in the play, he asks ‘Where is Athens?’ as he falls to his death), men were weeping, some were pouring dust on their heads and the whole row of Alcmaeonids were looking uneasy under all that dignity and good breeding.
It was a mighty play.
And then there was my contribution.
Not long after Istes’ death, when the angry crowd was to understand that the maidens of Miletus were being ravished offstage by the Persian archers, I saw a man come to Cleitus. His face was broad and puffy — or did I imagine that? And when he whispered into his master’s ear, Cleitus flushed red and stood up.
We were separated by ten horse-lengths, but the gods meant him to know. I caught his eye. And I smiled.
Whatever the news was, it passed from man to man along the Alcmaeonid family seats. Several of them pointed at me.
Aeschylus watched them, and then Sophanes pushed up next to me.
‘What have you done?’ he asked.
‘An act of piety and justice,’ I said quietly.
I wasn’t there to see it, but Cleon told the tale well. This is what happened.
In a south-side brothel owned by the Alcmaeonids, a group of oarsmen swaggered in demanding wine — no uncommon thing during the feast of Dionysus. But when they had their wine, they demanded to see all the girls, and having chosen one, they beat the owner and his bruisers to death with their fists. Four men died. The girl they took away with them.
Oh, it’s a nasty business, children.
Out by the tanneries, a small crowd descended on a taverna known to be owned by one of the gangs of toughs who ‘organized’ things in the town. They pulled four men out of the taverna and stabbed them to death. The four men were literally cut to ribbons.
Up on the hill by the Acropolis, another pair of bruisers were caught by a small mob and cudgelled to death. Sailors were blamed.
But the worst atrocity, in the eyes of the ‘good men’, was that someone — or some group of men — invaded one of the largest Alcmaeonid farms. In fact, it was Cleitus’s home farm. His workers were badly beaten, and every horse in his barns was killed, throats cut with knives. Every horse.
Not everything I planned came off. I had wanted my own horse back, but the men who were sent to the farm misunderstood, and my nice mare died with all their stock. I hadn’t meant so many men to die — ten is a big body count for a peaceable city — but when you make soup, the vegetables are best cut small.
I did what had to be done. I wanted the Alcmaeonids to be struck with terror. I didn’t want them to consider fighting back.
I couldn’t be certain what the consequences of my little gambit would be. And perhaps the consequences would have been less, if not for Phrynichus’s play.
Cleitus had meant for the play to be cancelled, or if not cancelled, he’d planned a disturbance in the Agora that would have forced the magistrates to take action. That’s what should have happened, but his bruisers were cooling corpses by then, their shades already far on the road to Hades. I’d paid another crowd of oarsmen and their friends to attend the play. I packed the crowd to get it cheering, but that was unnecessary, and I regret that I thought so little of Phrynichus. I didn’t pay them to attack the Alcmaeonids. That happened all by itself.