The Great King (49 page)

Themistocles came back from Sounion to see our capture and to embrace us all. I was put in the oddest postion – I hadn’t won the sea fight or taken the prize, but everyone treated me as if I had – I finally brought the Ithacan trierarch forward, a middle-aged pirate named Helios, and introduced him.

‘This is the man who actually took the Carthaginian,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘We’d all be dying of lack of water right about now but for yon,’ he claimed.

That evening, over wine at Paramanos’ house in Piraeus, Themistocles laid out his plan.

‘I’d like you to crew all your own ships and five more from Athens,’ he said. ‘Can Plataea do it?’

I began to count in my head. ‘Not and send a single man with Leonidas,’ I said.

Themistocles made a gesture of dismissal. ‘Leonidas has eight thousand men to hold a pass less than half a stade wide,’ he said. ‘He’ll have Thebans and Thespians and his own Spartans and thousands of local men. It is at sea we need men.’

I sat back on my kline and sipped wine. ‘Where
are
my ships?’ I asked.

Themistocles nodded. ‘All at Sounion, on the beaches there, and around below Brauron,’ he said. ‘I will put all of your ships, and all the Plataeans, and Aristides’ ship under you.’

I fingered my beard and ate a date. I’d gone three days without food and I was permanently hungry and every old wound and muscle-pull ached or burned. Some ached
and
burned. Lack of food can really hurt.

‘I’ll send over the mountains,’ I said. ‘But none of my Plataeans will know how to row.’

He shrugged. ‘Half our fleet doesn’t know how to row,’ he said.

The next week I’ll pass over like the blur of exhausted activity that it was.

I sent a professional runner to Plataea for the Phalanx, and told them they’d be serving on ships – the Epilektoi as marines, the rest as oarsmen. I asked Myron to put it to the assembly. Then I took
Andromeda
around the long point of Attica and gathered ‘my’ ships at Marathon. Why not? It was the site of my greatest day. All of my best men had been there except Moire and a few of the young.

The Plataeans knew how to get there.

We towed five empty hulls, light as cockleshells with nothing aboard but cordage and oars, around. We got them ready for sea.

I took back from the fleet all of the men who were serving elsewhere. Cimon cursed me for taking Giannis back, but I had a place for him better than serving as a marine.

I had
Lydia
. She was five years old, but dry, sound as a nut, and had a crew – like no other crew I’ve ever had. After I shifted men around I still kept her old crew, so that out of a hundred and eighty rowers, I had only forty new men of Plataea.

Andromeda
I gave to Megakles.

Demetrios had Aristides’ superb
Athena Nike.
The great man himself was still not allowed ‘home’ from exile and, stubborn and obedient to the letter of the law, refused even to board an Athenian ship as a marine. But, as you’ll see, he went aboard a Plataean ship.

Taciturn Harpagos had
Storm Cutter.

Moire of Plataea – as he now called himself – had my troublesome Corinthian
Amastis.

Paramanos – who should have been with Cimon – chose to be with me. He had
Black Raven
, the third ship of that name. He owned her, too.

Then I stripped my friends of their command elements to captain new ships. As an aside, you will have noticed that the first ships I’ve mentioned were all privately owned. I owned
Storm Cutter
, although years of careful maintenance (and that costs silver) may have made her Harpagos’s ship – in fact, we all behaved as if she belonged to him.
Lydia
was mine, pure and simple, and
Amastis
was mine in law – at least, in Plataean and Athenian law. Paramanos owned his ship and Aristides owned his – he had owned more, once, but they’d been lost.

The five ships I endeavoured to man were ‘public’ ships, purchased and fitted out by Athens as a state. This was a new arrangement. Demetrios told me that he’d commanded a state galley in the war with Aegina and he admitted that often they were indifferent ships – because there was no rich man to keep watch on the shipwrights. But of the five hulls they sent us, three were excellent and the other two merely average – all a little lighter than I’d have preferred.

Again, I’ve heard men claim that Athens built her light triremes because of her superior crews. It makes me smile. That summer, half the allied fleet was rowed by men who’d never
seen
an oar before that summer – like Boeotian farmers! Athens built light ships because they’d be easier for untrained men to handle, and because, to crew two hundred ships and send a phalanx, Athens had to skimp on marines. And finally, lightly built ships required less wood, and wood is expensive.

I just want you to get all this.

We were going to fight a fleet that outnumbered us two or three to one. They had professional crews and heavier ships and many, many more marines. They’d been together for almost a year and most of our oarsmen had never been out of sight of land.

I’d like to tell you that our advantage was that we were fighting for freedom, but I’m an old pirate and I’ll tell you that men fight wonderfully well for loot. Xerxes had promised his men the rape of Greece.

The morale of the fleet was not good when I joined it. News that the Corcyrans – whose numbers would have been a wonderful addition – were prevaricating off Ithaca came as a blow.

Adamenteis of Corinth said openly that the Peloponnesian League should fall back to the isthmus and leave Athens to its fate. Themistocles made all his usual arguments.

But then, the Plataeans arrived.

They came down the mountain from the direction of Athens, singing the paean, and all the work on the beach of Marathon stopped, even though they were ten stades away.

Did I mention that time doesn’t run straight?

The Plataeans’ paean rang against the mountainsides, but it also rang through time, and every one of us who had stood in the stubble on that day, ten years before, raised his head like an old dog smelling a much-loved master.

And the Plataean phalanx came down the mountain singing, song after song, as if a march of three hundred stades was nothing to them, as perhaps it was not.

Men went back to work on the beach, but some men smiled. Oh, my friends, no one called us bumpkins and sheep lovers that day, and when the bronze dog caps were close, the Athenians gathered on the edge of the beach and cheered and cheered – ring after ring until my throat ached and my heart was full.

Idomeneaus brought them to the very edge of the beach, where the Persians had had their ships. He halted, and despite being a small army of Boeotian bumpkins, they halted like Spartiates and grounded their spears, all together.

Of course, it was a piece of theatre. If you’ve been paying attention, you know that Greek armies seldom march in their armour, much less with their aspides on their shoulders. But Idomeneaus, for all that he is mad with violence, is no one’s fool.

He halted, as I say, and the men grounded their spears. The cheering Athenians fell silent, and the Corinthians were silent from curiosity, and the Megarans too. Aeginians came and stood.

Idomeneaus saluted me. ‘Well!’ he said, loud enough to carry to Athens. ‘Here we are again. Are the Persians here?’ he asked.

Men laughed.

‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re over by Thrace.’

His whole face lit up. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Let’s go!’

That story was retold ten times an hour over the next days.

It is easy for any Greek to make great claims for his city. We are all hopelessly partial. Biased. I admit it. I would put Plataea before Athens or Corinth or Syracusa in everything; even while I suspect our temple of Hera is really small and provincial, I will never admit it. So I’m biased.

But I think we transformed the fleet.

Our men came singing. A thousand men who had faced the Persians – and beaten them. Not one Plataean complained about having to row. Men of fifty winters climbed down into the sweltering benches, took up the oars with the same practical interest as they used the spear, the plough or the potter’s wheel, and learned.

The second night, when the aches were pounding away – when some of the older hoplites had discovered that I was only putting my youngest, fittest Plataeans in armour, and that meant many older men were going to row – we were gorging on Athenian mutton on the beach of Marathonas, and a young Athenian from Cimon’s flagship was complaining about the work – and the dishonour.

Myron – who had come in person – stood up and put a hand on his back like the old man he was. ‘Dishonour, is it?’ he asked. ‘The only dishonour would be to be left behind. In a hundred years, men will no longer claim descent from the gods. They will only say – my grandsire was there when we warred down the Great King.’

All conversation stopped.

‘But!’ a young man wailed – half in self-mockery, I think – ‘But it’s hot and it stinks of piss down in the benches! My shoulders hurt and I’ve no skin on my hands!’

Empedocles, son of Empedocles the Old, laughed. ‘I don’t disagree, young man,’ he said. ‘Let’s all take an oath, then. After we beat the Medes, we’ll never row again!’

The laughter went on for a long time.

Every commander knows that laughter is precious.

Mostly, we rowed up and down.

I confess that I found some irony in the time I’d spent training my phalanx to Spartan-like perfection so that we could use them as oarsmen instead. At least every oarsman understood the basic tactics.

And because they were my phalanx, and not slaves, I got all my people together on the beach every morning, and told them what we’d do – every signal, every manoeuvre. Most of them didn’t understand a bit of it, at first, but by the end of the first week, when we had our first rumours of contact with the Persian fleet, most men knew when to reverse their benches and when to rest on their oars before the orders were passed. Citizens can be much better oarsmen than ‘professionals’, who are too often broken ex-slaves.

And farmers are strong.

Every night, Themistocles hammered home that our tactics must be simple and pure. All the Athenian helmsmen understood the complexity of the diekplous, where you pass through the enemy formation breaking oars and then turn back to envelop their second line. But Themistocles knew better than most men how few of our oarsmen could handle a complex ramming attack.

It will also help explain things if I say that I took eighty veteran oarsmen from each of my other ships – including Demetrios’s magnificent long killer, the
Athena Nike
, and I put those, almost one hundred each, into the Athenian public ships and replaced them with Plataeans. In this way, ten of my eleven ships had lower-deck oarsmen who were raw beginners, but upper-deck men and full deck crews of veterans. It also eliminated any possibility of rivalry, and I told them all the first night we were together that we’d share the loot equally – no extra for the officers – a very popular move on my part, let me add. Men love freedom, but loot is . . . more immediate. I put ten Plataean Epilektoi on every deck as marines, saving only
Athena Nike
and
Lydia
, which got their own marines back.

Gelon got a ship. As she was a public ship and had only a number, he called her
Nemesis.

Idomeneaus got a ship. After all, he’d had one before. He called her
Hera.

Leukas got a ship. After much thought, he called her
Parthenos
, which he claimed was the Greek for a goddess in faraway Alba.

I gave the fastest of my public ships to Giannis. He called her
Sea Horse.
He had, after all, sailed and led and fought his way into the Outer Sea and back. He knew almost everything. And I let him have Alexandros to command his marines.

And of course, I gave the best of the public ships to Sekla. He consulted with a priest of Poseidon and called her
Machaira.

So as soon as we felt that our oarsmen could manoeuvre from column to line and back, Themistocles had us practise forming close together for defence. He assumed we’d always be on the defensive. The strategy that he and Leonidas had evolved was brutally simple – we’d hold out all summer and force Xerxes to retreat before winter came. None of us could imagine that Xerxes was rich enough to keep his army fed and in the field all winter.

After a few days of practising the most essential single skill of fleet combat – that’s rowing backwards all together, if you don’t know – Themistocles ordered us to try the ‘wheel’.

It was almost the end of the fleet.

The wheel is a complex manoeuvre that depends on perfect timing and brilliant control.

When complete, every ship comes to rest with the stern posts touching and their oars in – you can form as few as fifteen ships like this. It forces your opponents to run in against your bow and to concede the initiative of any boarding action. It allows the force that has formed the wheel to move marines from ship to ship in perfect freedom while every attacking ship has to fight individually. The advantage of the wheel is so great that when a defender forms one, the attacker usually just sails around the outside. There’s not much he can do, unless he can somehow attack from every direction all at once – and even then, remember that the wheel’s defenders have the advantage of interior lines.

That’s the good part.

Here’s the bad part. To form the wheel from line ahead, you have to row backwards, get up enough speed to make it to your final resting spot
and no more
, pull your oars in and steer. If you are going too fast astern, you foul another ship and you may even damage each other. If you don’t pull hard enough, you come to a complete stop on the water in the face of the enemy and, for a bonus, you may be between two other ships with no room to deploy your oars.

Now throw in untrained oarsmen and hundreds of ships trying to do this all at once.

The first time we tried, we had formed a grand crescent off the point of Marathon, and my squadron was on the left of the line – that’s where we’d been at Marathon. Greeks can be creatures of habit.