Ah, but I worked too.
I polished the phalanx of Plataea the way Hermogenes was polishing breastplates — the bronze thorakes that keep men safe in the storm of iron. I had my Epilektoi out in the hills after deer, over the fields after a wolf, up the mountain for boar — every week. I organised them into Spartan-style messes, as I’d learned from Brasidas, and I made up three new Pyricche that winter; first I taught them to my elite, and then to the entire phalanx.
There was considerable grumbling. Hilarion objected that he didn’t want to be a hero in the Iliad and had a farm to manage. Draco’s grandson Andromachos thought that he was too good a warrior to need to drill.
The sons and cousins of Simon stood in a group at drills and glowered.
But they did the dances. And I tried to be fair, but I refused to have faction in my ranks. It is the principal duty of a strategos — or a polemarchos — to choose a place in the phalanx for each man, and to assign the places. A weak leader causes dissent. A strong leader can cause unease. Not every man appointed to the front rank truly wants to be there. The front rank is the place of honour, but it is a terrifying place to endure a battle, even for me.
That said, I had some superb warriors, and a good number of warriors who were ‘merely’ fine, and veteran. With my marines and sailors added in — all citizens, now, and some had bought property with their profits — I could muster sixteen hundred men, and the front two ranks of eight were almost all veterans of a dozen fights.
I concentrated on teaching them a variety of simple manoeuvres and a few complex ones. I was determined that they would be able to form at a run, from a long file of men into a phalanx, and in any direction, because my experience of war said that this one talent was better for the group than that every man present be Achilles come to earth as an individual. I made them march with their aspides on their shoulders or on their arms — everywhere. As often as I could, I made them run.
Draco’s sons built us carts, and we hoarded sacks for grain, so that we could march out of Plataea with our food and our weapons and move at a donkey’s speed. My understanding was that we’d be marching all the way to Thessaly in the spring, and I was determined to be ready.
Listen — when Greek armies march, they take no food. They expect to fight within a day of home, and so they expect farmers to come to the camp, make a small, rude agora and open stalls to sell food. The small pay a hoplite receives is supposed to buy the food for him and his slave or hypaspitos.
None of us had ever marched a great army of Greeks over the mountains — anywhere, really. But when we lay on our kline and imagined it, or talked it through, we all agreed — all of us being Aristides and me and Leonidas and Adamanteis and a dozen more leaders of military contingents — we all agreed we’d need carts and food and baggage like a Persian army, and this would make us slower and more vulnerable to their cavalry.
Bulis came twice that winter, both times with different Spartans — bringing messages about the allied army assembly points, and collecting information on the Great King. It was from Bulis I learned that Carthage was still trading with Athens, and it was from Bulis that we learned that the Great King’s army had marched. And that he had appointed an assembly for his fleet.
That made my heart flutter.
Leonidas was sending the Plataeans with the land army. Bulis reviewed all my phalanx and was complimentary — by which I mean that, after watching two hours of sweating middle-aged men deploying from file to column, column to phalanx and back, sudden movements to the flank, oblique marching, and running charges and step-by-step retreats and closing with a mass dancing of my new, Spartan-style Pyricche, he turned to me and nodded.
‘Good,’ he said.
The reward for all our efforts was to be sent away from our friends, the Athenians, who, with Corinth and Aegina and Corcyra, were mostly forming the fleet. We would march with the men of the Peloponnesus and Boeotia, to face the Persian land army at Tempe.
I was very much of two minds about this. Like most Greeks, I am equally at home on land or sea, but I owned two fighting ships and had two more ‘in my tail’, as we say, and I wanted to lead them in person. Further, by sending my best-armed marines and sailors off to Tempe, I was depriving my squadron of their marines and officers.
Almost every contingent had this problem. I solved mine by sending all my marines and sailors to the fleet and filling their places with Athenian exiles led by Aristides.
To add to my troubles, my brother-in-law was one of my best officers, but in this crisis he was with the men of Thespiae — really his home, not Plataea — and suddenly I lost him, forty armoured men and two veteran officers. The Thespians were the better for all those Marathon men, but I was the worse for it, and I cursed a great deal in early spring. Antigonus seemed equally disgruntled, and my sister Penelope cried, worried that without me to protect him — you had to see Antigonus, who was a head taller than me — without me to protect her husband, he’d be lost.
I offer all this wealth of petty detail not because it will truly interest you, but because today, when you young people think of us going to fight the Persians, there is a myth — the myth is that there was a mighty allied army. There was no allied army. That spring, as we prepared to march off to Thessaly, we were a hundred contingents, and however good willed we were about being Greek, we had no experience outside our own phalanxes — except a handful of men, like me, who’d served as mercenaries. And the mercenaries became the glue that bound the whole together.
Nor did we march as an army. Indeed, many contingents were transported from the isthmus — my own, for example — by ship to Thessaly, while other contingents marched overland. The allies had failed to nominate an assembly point because, despite our best efforts, most Greeks still thought of this as a fight between two poleis. They imagined that we could assemble our army in the Vale of Tempe, send a herald to the Persians, and fight.
And because we did not march together, we never had a chance to drill together, or form a phalanx together.
So we assembled, one contingent at a time, in Thessaly, at the base of the major pass into Macedon. It was cold — still winter in the passes. Our commander was a Spartan — Euanetus, son of Carenus. The Athenian contingent, which was surprisingly large given the number of ships Athens was manning, was commanded by Themistocles in person. We had, among all of us, almost fourteen thousand hoplites and another six thousand Thessalian cavalry, and we could fill the pass with a phalanx eight men deep and still have the Spartan contingent in reserve and half the cavalry hidden. Leonidas was rallying the main army behind us, but I think we assumed that the great army of forty thousand hoplites would never be needed.
My Plataeans were one of the first contingents to arrive at Tempe, and we used the time to drill. Even my young men hated me after two weeks looking at the mountains of Macedon through the eye-slots of their helmets, and the new Athenian helmets with cheek pieces that raised were suddenly very popular, because no matter how cold the nights and mornings, by midday a man in armour was like a lobster boiled in his shell.
Xerxes, had he been quick enough, could have walked over us any time he liked. The Spartans were late, the Athenians later — in fact, although Aristides and I knew nothing of it, the Athenians were outraged at being required to send sixty ships and a phalanx too, and, as Themistocles said to me the night the Athenians arrived, there were seventy triremes beached in Piraeus for want of marines and officers.