The Athenians had a city archer corps, all dressed like Scythians. They were mostly poor men, but very proud, and they shot well enough. There were two hundred of them, and they were all together just behind my Plataeans, so that the one time an enterprising Mede worked around my flank in some hedgerows, he emerged into a veritable hail of arrows and ran off leaving two of his men in the wheat.
Casualties like that — ones and twos — don’t seem important when I tell a story as big as Marathon. But in skirmishes — in harassment — a dozen dead men can be as important as a lost battle. Our arrows were hitting them, and they weren’t reaching us.
So just before noon, their captain, whoever he was, decided that enough was enough and sent his best men to stop me.
I wish I could say that I saw what was coming — but it was more luck than anything that we weren’t caught naked.
As usual, I have to digress. Hoplites — heavy warriors — don’t wander the countryside all dressed up for war. It is hot in Greece, and the aspis is heavy, as is your thorax and your helmet and your spear. Once a man has the aspis on his shoulder and a spear in his hand, his speed is cut on the march.
Perhaps it is just that Greeks are lazy. I have, in fact, spent all day marching with an aspis on my shoulder. But in the old days, we seldom did it. Instead, we carried our weapons, and our servants — sometimes free hypaspists, sometimes slaves — carried our helmets and shields.
After the cavalry tried to work around our rear, I halted the column and ordered the Plataeans to arm. That actually increased my vulnerability for a while. Imagine two thousand men on the road, just two or three abreast, in no particular order. Then imagine that every second man is busy finding his shield-bearer and getting his aspis on his arm, his helmet on his head. Some men had their body-armour on and others did not. Some men had additional pieces of armour — thigh armour and arm guards, such as I wore. All of these were carried by servants.
In my case, I wore my scale cuirass all day, but the rest of my gear was in a wicker basket on Gelon’s back. I even considered changing my shoes — I had ‘Spartan’ shoes on my feet, and I considered, given the difficult fields on either side of the road, changing to boots.
Some men were sitting in the road, changing sandals. Others were stripping naked to change into a heavier chiton to wear under armour.
Got the picture? Chaos. I hate to think how long we were on that road without a single spear pointing at the enemy. I aged.
It is different at sea. At sea, you do not engage until you are ready. But on land — especially facing cavalry or light troops — they can hit you whenever they desire it. I was the leader, and I had fucked up. I could feel it. And now — too late — I was trying to retrieve my error. It was a lesson, if you like.
As soon as I had a party of men armed, I filled the road with them, regardless of their place in the phalanx. And as soon as the bulk of my men were armed, I started them filing off the road to the left, where I could see the shields of our Euboean refugees flashing among the rocks on the hillside.
Our guide, the wounded runner, pointed and gestured, and my eyes were on him when the Persian cavalry came for us. We had about a third of our men formed when they galloped around the corner of the field from behind a grove of olives. They already had arrows on their bows. Their leader was out in front on a big bay horse, and as he came around the corner he gave a whoop, leaned over and shot.
That arrow went into my shield and the head emerged on my side, a finger’s width, just over my wrist where my hand entered the antilabe.
‘Form close!’ I called, and I was scared — shocked silly. I had just enough nerve to tip my helmet from the back of my head over my face. Every man pressed into the centre of the front rank as the shields overlapped.
Where had they come from?
I cursed my failing in not forming up earlier, and I wondered how the rest of my column was doing, and I nearly shat myself in fear. These were not Lydians with spears. These were noble Persians, well led, with discipline and murderous bow-fire, and my men were unprepared.
The first hail of arrows hit our shields. A man screamed as an arrow went into his knee above the greave — his scream might have been my scream.
They came past us, close enough for us to see the markings on their horses and the embroidery on their barbarian trousers and to feel the earth moved by four hundred hooves.
The next storm of arrows broke over us like a big wave on a beach. I felt my shield lifted, moved, rocked as if hail was falling on me, and something screamed of my helmet and I blinked away the pain. My vision was limited to the eye slit in my Corinthian, and sweat was pouring down my body. But I saw it now — the Persian commander had sprung an ambush from behind the olive grove, and I was lucky that I’d paused to form my men or we’d already be dead. Luck. Tyche. And he had made two mistakes. He sprang his trap a little early, before my left flank was out in the field, away from the rocky wall that his horses didn’t want to cross. And he went for us — the formed men — when he could have fallen like a smith’s hammer on my unformed men on the road.
Instead, we were trapped against the field edge with a rubble pile from an old barn on one flank and the road full of slaves and Athenians on the other — but we’d stood our ground. It sounds easy enough. You try it.
Even as his first arrows rattled against us and men fell, he learned his third error, although I was as surprised as I imagine he was.
We had archers in our ranks.
As the Persians swept past us, Teucer and his archers rose from within our ranks, or knelt under the rims of our shields, and shot. Indeed, Teucer was leaning his weight against my hips as he shot, arrow after arrow. He had no horse between his thighs, no reins to manage, and his quiver hung comfortably under his left arm, where I carry my sword in battle, and he drew and shot and drew and shot, three arrows for every one by the Persians, and his had Apollo’s hand behind them.
When an arrow hits a man in the phalanx, he screams and falls, and his armour makes a mournful clatter as he goes down — but his mates close over him, alive or dead. It is but one step to the front to fill the hole.
When a horseman takes an arrow — better yet, when a horse takes an arrow — it can be a disaster for a dozen other men. One horse can fall over another, and a few casualties, by ill-luck or the will of the war god, can stop a charge dead, or cause the animals to flow around their target the way small boys divert a stream on a summer’s day.
We had fewer than three hundred men formed, but all of Teucer’s archers were in our ranks — perhaps thirty men, and some javelins — and they shot at least one Persian for every one of us who fell. I suspect that, man for man, the Persians were the finer archers — but the best archer on a horse, shooting at armoured men behind big shields, is going to lose the contest to the poorer man with his feet firm on the ground, shooting at the enormous target of a man on a horse.
And Teucer was the best archer I’ve ever known. He was safe under my shield rim, and his arrows did not miss. He made chaos of their files, and they broke and rode away, and their red-bearded officer lay, redder now, with one of Teucer’s black-fletched arrows in his throat.