Miltiades opened his mouth to speak, but Callimachus glared him into silence.
Callimachus had a pebble in his hand. He tossed it back and forth, for as long as it takes a man to eat a slice of bread. ‘We do not just stand here for Athens,’ he said, looking around, and men in the front rows repeated what he said. He spoke slowly, like the orator he was. ‘Nor do we stand only for Athens and Plataea,’ he added, with a nod to me. ‘What we say here, what we do here, win or lose, is for all the Hellenes. If we return to Athens and submit earth and water to the Great King. .’ He looked around again. The silence after his words were repeated was absolute.
He tossed the pebble at Miltiades’ feet. ‘Fight,’ he said.
The hoplites erupted in cheers, like men watching a race at a games. The cheers were audible everywhere — even in the barbarian camp.
Immediately after the vote, the dissenters gathered around Miltiades, and Leontus took his hand. ‘We’ll be there in the line,’ he said. ‘We want to win.’
‘Not the way we wanted it,’ said another, Euphones of Oinoe. ‘But we’ll stand our ground.’
Then the dissenters walked off. I think they were wrong, but by the gods, they did their part on the day, and that’s how a vote is supposed to work. That’s what made Athens great — not just the men who voted for the fight, but those who voted against and fought anyway.
Then all the men who had backed him gathered around, and you would think they’d just voted a new festival — they were beaming with happiness, and hundreds of men came from the surrounding dark to pump their hands and clap their backs.
‘So,’ Aristides said, when the mass of well-wishers had gone to their rest. ‘Fight tomorrow?’
‘Too many front-rankers fought today,’ Miltiades said.
‘Or ran,’ I said, with a wink, and the other strategoi laughed.
Miltiades agreed. ‘Took exercise, at any rate,’ he quipped. I thought he looked a foot taller. ‘Tomorrow, Themistocles, I want the little men back in the fields, sniping at the barbarians. But tomorrow, I’ll have five hundred Athenians — fifty men of every tribe — at the base of the hill, formed close. To give the psiloi cover if they have to run.’
‘To show we’re still warriors, more like,’ I added.
That got me a look.
Aristides nodded. ‘Tomorrow’s my command day. You have a plan? You should be in command.’
Themistocles agreed. ‘I have the next day,’ he said.
‘And I the next,’ the polemarch added. ‘You may have my day, as well.’
Miltiades grunted. ‘Watch yourselves,’ he said. ‘Too many days and I could be addicted, like a drunkard to wine or a lotus-eater.’ He looked out over the darkening plain. ‘But I will fight on my own day, so men may not say that I acted from hubris. Let the barbarians stew.’
‘They may march,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘If they march, we fight, whatever day it is,’ he said. ‘But the more I look at this — now that my eyes are opened — the better it appears for us. Look — they have a fine camp, and good protection from wind and weather. But where can they go from Marathon? All roads go through us. If our little men bleed them every day — and I speak frankly, gentlemen — what care we if we lose psiloi? But every dead Mede is one less for the day.’
No one disagreed. It was true.
The next day, the psiloi went down the hill in a wave. They were better organized than on the first day, and Themistocles played a role in that. And he led the hoplites out on to the plain — more than five hundred, or so I thought.
The barbarians countered with oarsmen, turned hastily into light-armed men of their own, but it was a poor decision, as every dead man was that much less motive power for their ships.
The second day, our light-armed were tired. Only a few went out, and the enemy cavalry killed some of them. The balance was returning, and men shouted for Miltiades to lead us to battle. Muttering began that the army had voted for battle and now Miltiades was hesitating.
‘Men are childish fools,’ Miltiades muttered as he watched the beaten psiloi trudge up the hill. ‘Don’t they see? We’ve won! All we have to do is sit here and fill the plain with psiloi! And watch them eat — their horses will be out of forage in a day.’
But the hoplites didn’t see, and the pressure to fight mounted.
The third day, the light-armed men went out together, and the barbarians stayed in their camp — they had to be feeling the same fatigue as our men by then. But in our camp, the hoplites boiled over. Sophanes — Aristides’ friend, and mine — led the protest. He came up to Miltiades with fifty spearmen behind him and demanded that Miltiades lead us to the plain — there and then.
‘Are we cowards, that we are letting our servants do the fighting?’ Sophanes asked. ‘What kind of city will we have, if my shield-bearer can tell me that he — not I — drove the Medes from Holy Attica?’
He had a point, as you all can see. If we are honest with ourselves, we hold citizen rights from our cities because we fight. True, eh? So if we — the armoured men, the heroes — were in camp, and the little men were fighting, then who was a citizen, really?
But Miltiades also knew he had a winning strategy. Men like Aristides worried about the consequences, but Miltiades was a fighter. And as we had put him in charge, his only concern was winning.
He took Sophanes aside, talked to him the way a man talks to his son and sent him back to his friends. He’d convinced the young men to give him another day or two.
Not that it mattered. The barbarians had had enough.
On the evening of the third day, the barbarians came out of their camp — and their army was unbelievably big. It was carefully planned, and they flowed out of their camp like water from a pot — and every contingent had its place. And then, having filled the plain from flank to flank, they came forward at a fast walk.
The psiloi ran for their lives. What else could they do? More than a few of them died, caught in the plain by the cavalry on the flanks or the bows of the Sakai and the Medes and the Persians in the centre.
Aristides had the hoplites on the plain that day, and he held his ground until the last of the little men ran past, and then, in good order, his hoplites walked back up the hill to us. But the barbarians didn’t pursue. They turned about and walked back across the plain, fifteen stades back to their camp. The whole attack had taken less than the time it took for a speaker in a law case to give his argument.
I was getting into my corslet by that time, afraid that we were about to be attacked right up the hill, my eyes glued to the manoeuvres of the enemy. Miltiades came up next to me, jumped up on the wall and watched them as they retreated. He had Phrynichus with him, I remember, and Phrynichus had a stylus and a wax tablet.
‘Persians on the right — cavalry and then infantry — their best. Just like us. Mounted Sakai on the left; then East Greeks. They look like the marines of all the ships — some Phoenicians there. And then the dismounted Sakai. Persians again in the centre — dismounted. Maybe Medes. More Medes on the right.’ He watched them carefully. ‘They fill the plain, Arimnestos.’
Phrynichus wrote the Persian battle order carefully. I was looking at the fact that the Persian right would have all their best troops. It would be opposite our left. That would be the Plataeans. Like the day my father faced the Spartans at Oinoe, we would bear the brunt of their best men.
Of course I was afraid, young man. We were not the invincible hoplites of Greece. We were men who had lost every battle we’d tried with the damned Persians. But I swallowed my fears, like a man should. I nodded, and my voice barely caught when I spoke.
‘About twelve thousand, give or take. Not as deep as we fight.’
‘Deep enough, though.’ Miltiades gave half a grin. ‘We need to fill the plain, too.’