The Great King (45 page)

On the last day, Leonidas walked among the delegates and asked each how many hoplites his city could bring. And when he had counted them all, he nodded, and said – quite loud, so that it carried acorss the temple –

‘Sixty thousand.’

Silence fell.

‘If every city here does as they have promised, we Greeks can put sixty thousand hoplites in the field.’ He looked around, imperious in his scarlet cloak, but he would have been imperious naked.

Adamanteis didn’t exactly shrug, but he said – loudly enough to be heard – ’Xerxes will have a million.’

Themistocles laughed. It was a derisive, orator’s laugh, but it cut through whatever noble thing Leonidas meant to say.

‘We Greeks are poor. We don’t have enough wood to build more ships, nor enough food to feed all our people, nor enough bronze to make more armour, nor iron to make weapons.’ He raised his hands. ‘But thanks to the will of the gods, we will have enough Persians to allow all of us to be heroes.’

We arrived at the conference as factions – as Megarans and Plataeans and Lacedaemonians and Athenians and Thebans and Thesbians.

Most of us left it as Greeks.

Tempe, (
plur.
) a valley in Thessaly, between mount Olympus at the north, and Ossa at the south, through which the river Peneus flows into the Ægean. The poets have described it as the most delightful spot on the earth, with continual cooling shades, and verdant walks, which the warbling of birds rendered more pleasant and romantic, and which the gods often honored with their presence. Tempe extended about five miles in length but varied in the dimensions of its breadth so as to be in some places scarce one acre and a half wide. All vallies that are pleasant, either for their situation or the mildness of their climate, are called
Tempe
by the poets.

John Lampriere ‘Classical Dictionary’ 1788

That winter was one of the most delightful of my life. Perhaps it is only warm and full of light in memory – perhaps I see it that way in contrast to the two years of fear and horror that were to come.

But I had my daughter, and my son. I had Aristides all to myself, except for Jocasta, who has always been one of my ideal women. We were a happy house. Hipponax might have made a great deal of trouble, with his tendency to violence and his angry need for my approval, locked in a house with two old heroes, some women, and a lot of wine. But he didn’t. He’d had a strong mother and a strong grandfather – he had good bones, as Plataeans say. And he had Hector.

It was not all ease and light – the two of them stole a sacred bull and drove it through the town; they cut a swathe through the town’s unmarried girls and that had consequences; and when they were caught drunkenly spraying urine on a statue of Pan erected by the victors of Marathon, I decided it was time to send them away for a while. I sent them to Idomeneaus on the mountain.

And Euphonia adored them. It could have gone either way, but she chose to follow them around and gaze adoringly at each in turn – and to brag about their exploits to other girls.

As for me, as I say, I was with Aristides. When you are twenty, men of thirty-five seem quite old – and finished, mature, fully developed. But when you come around to that old age, you find yourself young, fit, hale – and still growing, if not in size, then in skill and maturity and some other ways. At thirty-five, I found Aristides to be more the man I wanted to be than any of them – even Leonidas. Oh, he was still a prig. His sense of honesty was so absolute that he would insist on telling his wife where she had gained weight, or how her breasts had looked when she was a maiden.

You may laugh, but I’d like to suggest to the men present that, unless you are Aristides, this is a foolish way to behave with your wife or anyone else’s.

Yet despite this failing, and his stubbornness, which could be blind and obstinate or pure and noble, he was in every other way the man I wanted to be. I especially admired his calm. I am a good man in a crisis – none better on a blood-drenched deck. But tell me that the house is out of olive oil and the best maidservant is pregnant and guests are at the door, and I am a very difficult man.

One night, with the winter rains pouring on the fields of Green Plataea and Kitharon lost in the dark and clouds, we lay – promiscuously, let me add. One aspect of change that Aristides had accepted was private dinners with the women in chairs. We had lamb in something saffron and sticky, and a slave had dropped the whole platter, and in a spectacular display of terror – he was new – he’d then collapsed across the as-yet-undamaged food, and then, leaping to his feet, managed to smear saffroned mutton on my second-best chiton.

Really, it was as good as Athenian comedy.

But I shot off my kline and struck him. Then I was in the kitchen, demanding that my butler get the mess cleaned up, when Jocasta brushed past me, shot me a withering glare, and snapped her fingers for attention.

They all ignored me and looked at her.

‘That was an accident and nothing to be afraid of,’ she said crisply. ‘Get Paolis cleaned up and see if we can have those nice large beans from last night – eh?’ She smiled at the cook, who had to smile back.

Then she turned on me – the very look that I would give to a helmsman who abused his authority on one of my ships. ‘Would you be kind enough to step in here?’ she asked, stepping into the cook’s tiny office.

I had to bend my head to get in, and I was so close to Jocasta that I could smell the mint on her skin.

‘The trouble with men is that, since they feel they are best at crises, they seek to create a crisis at every turn,’ she snapped. ‘A new slave dropped a platter. The Queen of Sparta was not at your table, and by Aphrodite, sir, even if she had been, there was no cause to strike the boy, who was already terrified. Your anger communicated itself to the servants, and now it will be an hour before we eat.’

Yes, yes.

The nice thing about getting lessoned by Jocasta is that, like a good trierarch, her authority was absolute. I couldn’t even manage male indignation. I merely stood, the hero of a dozen battles, and was dressed down – rightfully so – for cowardice and panic in the face of a dropped platter.

I’m sure a dozen other incidents occurred that winter, but that’s the one that sticks with me.

The three forges roared, too. They made armour and helmets, and the small phalanx of Plataeans grew better and better armed, until we were a fair show. Women complained that pots were not being repaired, and indeed, Myron called our building the ‘Forge of Ares’. Heron the ironsmith took on a pair of journeymen from Thrace – that is, Greeks from the Greek cities of Thrace, not Thracians – and they made magnificent swords, folded and folded again while still white hot so that the breath of the smith god showed on the surface, or that’s what they told me. Their swords were as good as the sword I’d brought from Babylon – flexible, sharp and beautiful. I had one hilted up in ivory.

And we made money. Aristides mocked me and said I was now a true aristocrat – my forges made money, my farms made money, and my ships, captained by other men who took the risks – Moire made a winter voyage to Aegypt – made yet more money, so that I sat and learned to be calm and dignified at home while other men worked.

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.