Salamis (3 page)

Miletus, that I had helped to hold, fell. I saved what I could. And went home, with fifty families of Miletians to add to the citizen levy of Plataea. I spent my fortune on them, buying them land and oxen, and then … then I went back to smithing bronze. I gave up the spear.

How the gods must have laughed.

A season later, while my sister went to a finishing school to get her away from my mother’s drunkenness, I went back to Athens because my friend Phrynicus, who had stood in the arrow storm at Lade with me, was producing his play,
The Fall of Miletus.
And Miltiades had been arrested for threatening the state – of which, let me say, friends, he was absolutely guilty, because Miltiades would have sold his own mother into slavery to achieve power in Athens.

At any rate, I used money and some of the talents I’d learned as a slave – and a lot of my friends – to see that Phrynicus’s play was produced. And, incidentally, to win my stolen slave-girl free of her brothel and wreak some revenge on the Alcmaeonidae. In the process, I undermined their power with the demos – the people – and helped the new voice in Athenian politics – Themistocles the Orator. He had little love for me, but he managed to tolerate my success long enough to help me – and Aristides – to undermine the pro-Persian party and liberate Miltiades.

I went home to Plataea feeling that I’d done a lifetime’s good service to Athens. My bronze-smithing was getting better and better and I spent the winter training the Plataean phalanx in my spare time. War was going to be my hobby, the way some men learn the diaulos or the kithara to while away old age. I trained the young men and forged bronze. Life grew sweeter.

And when my sister Penelope – now married to a local Thespian aristocrat – decided that I was going to marry her friend Euphonia, I eventually agreed. I rode to Attica with a hunting party of aristocrats – Boeotian and Athenian – and won my bride in games that would not have disgraced the heroes of the past. And in the spring I wed her, at a wedding that included Themistocles and Aristides and Miltiades – and Harpagos and Agios and Moire and a dozen of my other friends from every class in Athens. I went back over the mountains with my bride and settled down to make babies.

But the storm clouds on the horizon were coming on a great wind of change. And the first gusts of that wind brought us a raid out of Thebes, paid for by Cleitus of the Alcmaeonids and led by my cousin Simon’s son Simonalkes. The vain bastard named most of his sons after himself – how weak can a man be?

I digress. We caught them – my new Plataean phalanx – and we crushed them. My friend Teucer, the archer, killed Simonides. And because of them we were all together when the Athenians called for our help, because the Persians, having destroyed Euboea, were marching for Athens.

Well, I won’t retell Marathon. Myron, our archon and always my friend, sent us without reservation, and all the Plataeans marched under my command – and we stood by the Athenians on the greatest day Greek men have ever known, and we were heroes. Hah! I’ll tell it again if you don’t watch yourselves. We defeated Datis and his Persians by the black ships. Agios died there on the astern of a Persian trireme, but we won the day. Here’s to his shade. And to all the shades of all the men who died at Lade.

But when I led the victorious Plataeans back across the mountains, it was to find that my beautiful young wife had died in childbirth. The gods stole my wits clean away – I took her body to my house and burned it and all my trappings, and I went south over Cithaeron, intending to destroy myself.

May you never know how black the world can be. Women know that darkness sometimes after the birth of a child, and men after battle. Any peak of spirit has its price, and when a man or woman stands with the gods, however briefly, they pay the price ten times. The exertion of Marathon and the loss of my wife unmanned me. I leapt from a cliff.

I fell, and struck, not rocks, but water. And when I surfaced, my body fought for life, and I swam until my feet dragged on the beach. Then I swooned, and when I awoke, I was once again a slave. Again, taken by Phoenicians, but this time as an adult. My life was cruel and like to be short, and the irony of the whole thing was that now I soon craved life.

I lived a brutal life under a monster called Dagon, and you’ll hear plenty of him, tonight. But he tried to break me, body and soul, and nigh on succeeded. In the end, he crucified me on a mast and left me to die. But Poseidon saved me – washed me over the side with the mast and let me live. Set me on the deck of a little Sikel trading ship, where I pulled an oar as a near-slave for a few months. And then I was taken again, by the Phoenicians.

The degradations and the humiliations went on, until one day, in a sea fight, I took a sword and cut my way to freedom. The sword fell at my feet – literally. The gods have a hand in every man’s life. Only impious fools believe otherwise.

As a slave, I had developed new friendships; or rather, new alliances, which, when free, ripened into friendship. My new friends were a polyglot rabble – an Etruscan of Rome named Gaius, a couple of Kelts, Daud and Sittonax, a pair of Africans from south of Libya, Doola and Seckla, a Sikel named Demetrios and an Illyrian kinglet-turned-slave called Neoptolymos. We swore an oath to Poseidon to take a ship to Alba and buy tin and we carried out our oath. As I told you last night, we went to Sicily and while my friends became small traders on the coast, I worked as a bronze-smith, learning and teaching. I fell in love with Lydia, the bronze-smith’s daughter – and betrayed her, and for that betrayal – let’s call things by their proper names – I lost confidence in myself, and I lost the favour of the gods, and for years I wandered up and down the seas, until at last we redeemed our oaths, went to Alba for the tin, and came back rich men. I did my best to see Lydia well suited, and I met Pythagoras’s daughter and was able to learn something of that great man’s mathematics and his philosophy. I met Gelon the tyrant of Syracuse and declined to serve him, and sailed away, and there, on a beach near Taranto in the south of Italy, I found my friend Harpagos and Cimon, son of Miltiades, and other of the friends and allies of my youth. I confess, I had sent a message, hoping that they would come. We cruised north into the Adriatic, because I had promised Neoptolymos that we’d restore him to his throne, and we did, though we got a little blood on it. And then the Athenians and I parted company from my friends of Sicily days – they went back to Massalia to till their fields, and I left them to go back to being Arimnestos of Plataea. Because Cimon said that the Persians were coming. And whatever my failings as a man – and I had and still have many – I am the god’s own tool in the war of the Greeks against the Persians.

For all that, I have always counted many Persians among my friends, and the best of men – the most excellent, the most brave, the most loyal. Persians are a race of truth-telling heroes. But they are not Greeks, and when it came to war …

We parted company off Illyria, and coasted the Western Peloponnese. But Poseidon was not yet done with me, and a mighty storm blew up off of Africa and it fell on us, scattering our little squadron and sending my ship far, far to the south and west, and when the storm blew itself out, we were a dismasted hulk riding the rollers, and there was another damaged ship under our lee. We could see she was a Carthaginian. We fell on that ship and took it, although in a strange, three-sided fight – the rowers were rising against the deck crew of Persians.

It was Artaphernes’ own ship, and he was travelling from Tyre to Carthage to arrange for Carthaginian ships to help the Great King to make war on Athens. And I rescued him – I thought him a corpse.

So did his wife, my Briseis, who threw herself into my arms.

Blood dripped from my sword, and I stood with Helen in my arms on a ship I’d just taken by force of arms, and I thought myself the king of the world.

How the gods must have laughed.

Last night I told you of our lowest ebb. Because Artaphernes was not dead, and all that followed came from that fact. He was the Great King’s ambassador to the Carthaginians, and our years of guest-friendship – an exchange of lives going back to my youth, if you’ve been listening – required me to take him and my Persian friends, his bodyguards, and Briseis, my Helen reborn, to Carthage, though my enemy Dagon had sworn to my destruction in his mad way, and though by then Carthage had put quite a price on my head.

Hah! My role in taking part of their tin fleet. I don’t regret it – the foundation of all our fortunes, thugater.

At any rate, we ran Artaphernes – badly wounded – into Carthage, and escaped with our lives after a brilliant piece of boat handling and the god’s own luck. Possibly
Lydia’s
finest hour. And I saw Dagon.

We ran along the coast of Africa and stopped at Sicily, and there I found my old sparring partner and hoplomachos Polymarchos. He was training an athlete for the Olympics and in a moment I made peace with the gods and took Polymarchos and his young man to Olympia, where we – my whole ship’s crew – watched the Olympics, spending the profits of our piracy in a fine style, and making a wicked profit off the wine we brought to sell. There, we played a role in bridging the distance between Athens and Sparta, and there I saw the depth of selfish greed that would cause some men – like Adeimantus of Corinth – to betray Greece and work only for his own ends. I hate his memory – I hope he rots in Hades – but he was scarcely alone, and when Queen Gorgo – here’s to the splendour of her, mind and body – when Queen Gorgo of Sparta called us ‘a conspiracy to save Greece’ she was not speaking poetically. Even the Spartans had their factions and it was at the Olympics that I discovered that Brasidas, my Spartan officer, was some sort of exiled criminal – or just possibly, a man who’d been betrayed by his country, and not the other way around.

With only a little jiggling of the wheel of fate, we made sure Sparta won the chariot race and we left the Olympics richer by some drachmas and wiser by as much, as we’d had nights and nights to thrash out plans for the defence of Greece.

So it was all the more daunting when King Leonidas and Queen Gorgo of Sparta asked me to take their ambassadors to the Great King, the king of Persia. That’s another complex tale; the old Spartan king had killed the Persian heralds, an act of gross impiety, and Leonidas sought to rid Sparta of that impiety. So he sent two messengers to far-off Persepolis, two hereditary heralds.

And me.

Well, and Aristides the Just of Athens, who was ostracised – exiled – for being too fair, too rigid, too much of a prig …

I laugh. He was probably my closest friend – my mentor. A brilliant soldier – his finest hour will come soon – and a brilliant speaker, a man who was so incorruptible that ordinary men sometimes found him easy to hate. An aristocrat of the kind that makes men like me think there might be something to the notion of birth; a true hero.

We went to the Great King by way of Tarsus, where I was mauled by a lion, and Babylon, where I was mauled by a woman. Of the two, Babylon was vastly to be preferred. In Babylon we found the seed of the revolt that later saved Greece. When we arrived at Persepolis, I knew immediately that our embassy was doomed – the arrogance of the Persians and Medes was boundless, and nothing we could do would placate or even annoy them. I told you last night how the Spartan envoys – and Brasidas, my friend – and I danced in armour for the Immortals, and were mocked.

Our audience with the Great King was more like staged theatre, intended by his cousin Mardonius to humiliate us before the King had us executed.

But, luckily, my friend Artaphernes had a long arm and his own allies. In other places I have discussed him – another great man, another hero, another mentor. The greatest of my foes, and one I never defeated. But in this we were allies; he did not want Mardonius to triumph, nor did he seek to destroy Athens or Sparta. Because of Artaphernes, we had a few friends in Persepolis, and we were rescued from death by the Queen Mother, who smuggled us out of the city and let us free on the plains; not because she loved Greece, but only because she feared Mardonius and his extreme, militaristic policies.

We ran. But in running, with our Persian escort of Artaphernes’ picked men (and my boyhood friend Cyrus!), we left Brasidas to fan the flames of revolt in Babylon, and we slipped home.

In Sardis, after weeks of playing cat and mouse with all the soldiers in Asia, I saw Artaphernes. He was sick and old, but strong enough to ask me for a last favour – that when I heard he was dead, I should come and take Briseis. Yes, the love of my life was his wife, the Queen of Ionia as she had always meant to be. Artaphernes’ son, also called Artaphernes, hated her, and hated me.

At any rate, we made it to my ships, and sailed across the wintry sea to Athens. In the spring, the Revolt of Babylon saved Greece from invasion, and the leaders of the Greek world gathered at Corinth and bickered. Endlessly. My ships made me rich, bringing cargoes from Illyria and Egypt and Colchis and all points in between, and I sailed that summer, going to the Nile delta and back, and ignoring the cause of Greek independence as much as ever I could.

But in the end, the Persians came. Last night I told you all of the truth: the internal divisions of the Greeks, and their foolish early efforts – the march to the Vale of Tempe and its utter failure, and the eventual arrangement for a small land army to hold the Hot Springs of Thermopylae while the great allied fleet held Cape Artemisium.

Leonidas, best of the Spartans, held the pass at Thermopylae. And we, as ragtag a fleet as ever put oar to water, held the waters off Artemisium – day after day. Storms pounded the Persians. We pounded the Persians. Once we fought them to a standstill, and on the last day we beat them.

But at our backs, a traitor led the Medes around the Spartan wall, and King Leonidas died.

The so-called Great King desecrated his body and took his head. The Great King’s soldiers did the same to all three hundred Spartans and to others besides. Dogs ripped the body of my noble brother-in-law, Antigonus. My sister would weep for his shade, and I would weep too.