And the ships, crewed by Phoenicians and Ionian Greeks, got their sterns in the water, unfolded the mighty wings of their oars and turned their ram-prows south, with a gentle wind at their backs and a protected sea. It was too late for Poseidon to intervene. The Great King’s fleet was at sea, the oars pulled to the lamentations of five thousand new slaves.
Their rams were pointed at Attica. And even as we marched out of Athens and made our first camp in the hills north of the city, even as men groused or had second thoughts, Datis’s scouts were riding through the long grass by the beach, at Marathon.
17
Last night, while we were drinking, the young scribe from Halicarnassus asked me why Athens didn’t meet Datis at sea. It’s a damn good question, given the size of Athens’s fleet today.
The truth is, in the time of Marathon, there was no Athenian fleet. I realize that this sounds impossible, but the fact is that the tyrants and the oligarchs shared a healthy fear of the demos, and the fleet gives the demos power, because the power of the fleet is its rowers, not its hoplites — the thetes who pulled the oars. So noblemen owned warships — Tartarus, friends, I owned a warship at the time of Marathon! Aristides owned one, Sophanes’ family owned one, and Miltiades owned ten at the height of his power. That was the Athenian fleet, the accumulation of the ships of the rich — not unlike the way they formed a phalanx, come to think of it. And all the ships Athens could muster might have made fifty hulls. Before Lade, fifty hulls had been accounted a mighty fleet. But the world was changed by the Great King’s decision to spend Greece into defeat. His six hundred triremes — give or take a hundred — won him Lade, though it strained his empire to maintain them, and they emptied the ocean of trained rowers.
But Athens had nothing to offer against his six hundred. Our hulls were all on the beach at Piraeus, all those that weren’t ferrying refugees across to Salamis or around the coast to the Peloponnese.
The first night we camped in the precinct of a temple of Heracles perched high on the ridge above Athena’s city. My Plataeans were still forty stades away to the north, and I saw no reason to bring them along yet, as we had no word of the enemy and the Athenian camp was in enough disorder as it was.
Greek armies are usually only as good as the time and distance they are from home. The first night, with the army close enough to home to sleep there if they wanted, with none of the discipline or shared experience that an army builds with every camp and every smoky meal, they are just a mob of men with little in common except their duty to the city.
Many of them have no notion how to live rough, or how to eat without their wives and slaves to cook. The aristocrats have no problems — the aristocrat’s life as a gentleman farmer and hunter is perfectly suited to training campaigners. But the potters and the tanners and the small farmers — all strong men — may never have eaten a meal under the wheel of the heavens in their lives.
Gelon and I bedded down with Miltiades’ men, who had none of these problems and little but contempt for their fellow Athenians. These were the men he’d led at Lade and a dozen other fights, and they were confident in themselves and in their lord.
Aristides’ men were a different matter. Let me just say that since Cleisthenes’ reforms — fairly recent when we marched to Marathon — all of the ‘tribes’ of Athens were artificial constructs. Cleisthenes had sought to break up the power bases of the great aristocrats (like Miltiades) by ensuring that every tribe was composed in equal parts of men of the city (the potters and tanners, let’s say), men of the farms (up-country men, small farmers and aristocrats, too) and men of the sea (fishermen, coastal men and oarsmen). It was a brilliant law — it gave every Athenian a shared identity with men from the parts of Attica that most individuals had never visited.
Another thing that he did — another brilliant thing — was to heroize everyone’s ancestors. In Athens, the principal difference between an aristocrat and a commoner was not money — freedmen and merchants often had lots of money, and no one thought of them as aristocrats, believe me! No, the biggest difference was ancestors. An aristocrat was a man descended from a god or from a hero. Miltiades was descended from Ajax of Salamis, and through him back to Zeus. Aristides was descended, like me, from Heracles.
My friend Agios was descended from parents who were citizens, but they had no memory of anything before their own parents. Cleon’s father was a fisherman, but his mother had been a whore.
But when Cleisthenes passed his reforms — this happened while I was a slave in Ephesus — he gave every tribe a heroic ancestor, and declared — by law — that everyone in the tribe could count that ancestor in their descent. I’ve heard men — never Athenians, but other Greeks — say that Cleisthenes brought democracy to Athens. Crap. Cleisthenes was a far, far more brilliant man than that. I never met him, but like most middle-class men, I revere his memory as the man who built the Athens we loved.
What he did was to make every man an aristocrat.
In one stroke of law, every oarsman and every whore’s son had as much reason to serve his city as Aristides and Miltiades and Cleitus. To live well, with arete, and to die with honour. I’m not saying that it worked — any better than any other political idea. But to me, it is a glorious idea, and it made the Athens that stood against the Great King.
The main consequence was that the precinct of Heracles was filled with men who would never, ever have been in a phalanx fifteen years before. When my father died serving alongside Athens in Euboea, their phalanx had about six thousand men, and while the front ranks were superb, the rear ranks were poor men with spears, no shields, no armour and no hope of standing for even a heartbeat against a real warrior. That was the way.
But the new Athens had a phalanx with twice as many spears — almost twelve thousand. And from what I could see, almost all of them had the white leather spolades for which Athens was famous. The city owned the tanning trade back then, and their white leather was prized from Naucratis to the Troad. They all seemed to have helmets, too.
See, what Cleisthenes did was to create a city where a man who made pots and worked a plot of land just big enough to yield two hundred medimnoi of grain — about a tenth of what my farm yielded in a good year — would spend his surplus cash — a very small amount, friends — on armour and weapons. Like an aristocrat.
Thugater, you are laughing at me. Am I too passionate? Listen, honey — I may be tyrant here, but in my heart I’m a Boeotian farmer. I don’t want the aristocrats to rule; I want every man to stand up for himself, take his place in the line, farm his plot, eat his own figs and his own cheese — raise his hand in the assembly and curse when he wants. When I’m honest, I realize that I joined the ranks of the aristos pretty early. It may be that, as my mother said, our family was always with them. But I never wanted power over other men, except in war.
Now you’re all laughing at me. I think I should keep my story for another day. Perhaps I’ll go and sulk in my tent. Perhaps I’ll take blushing girl here for company.
Hah! More wine. That was worth the interruption. Look at that colour!
Now, where was I?
In the morning, I mounted my horse and Gelon got on my mule and we rode away north to find my brother-in-law and the Plataeans. The Athenians turned east after they passed the great ridge and headed for the sea.
I reached my men before noon, and found that they were fed, well slept and ready to march.
Antigonus shrugged. ‘I enjoyed being polemarch,’ he said. ‘Go back to the Athenians. I’ll take it from here.’ He grinned and slapped my back, but when we had the army moving, he came up beside me in the dust. ‘Don’t ever do that to me again,’ he said quietly. ‘When you didn’t come back last night, all I could see was panic and horror. The Persians had you, the fucking Athenians had arrested you — what was I to do?’