The Great King (11 page)

Now, let me confess something to you, my daughter. He was smarter than almost anyone. He alone saw all the ramifications of building a mighty fleet for Athens, and he remained true to them. Other men made compromises – Themistocles was above such stuff. But in the world of mortals, there are no absolute answers, and so, when Themistocles became the saviour of all Greece, he had already planted the seeds of treason.

Hah! Aeschylus might yet write a play. It has all the great themes, does it not?

It is one of the little tricks of the gods that, as soon as a man takes part in some great moment, discussing the affairs of all Greece or considering ethics or philosophy, in the next moment he either has to deal with an angry child, an intestinal ailment, or a bureaucracy. Or perhaps all three at the same time. Just when you feel your most godlike, someone will come along to remind you that you really live in a Cratinus play, not an Aeschylus.

The evening began well, with Paramanos and Harpagos and Moire and some of my other friends and former associates in piracy joining us for wine. It had only been a few weeks since we had raided Illyria, and we were all rich and full of ourselves – which, I can tell you, makes for a fine symposium. We had couches of straw laid out, and the slaves and my oarsmen built us a fine fire of wood they collected high on the slopes – I remember Leukas complaining about how far the men had to go to get wood. Truly, with twenty thousand people on the plain, wood was hard to find.

And the place stank – have I mentioned that? Humans are not the cleanest of animals. I had Megakles pace off our camp and we dug latrines. Most other people didn’t. If you catch my drift.

At any rate, I was just reclining on my elbow, with Hector pouring me some wine mixed three to one with water, while Harpagos was telling of our heroism at Lades. There must have been fifty men at our fire, and a few women – drawn not so much by my famous name as by the promise of free wine.

Out of the sunset came Polymarchos, like the proverbial ghost at the wedding.

He crouched by my pallet like a slave waiting on his patron. I could tell it annoyed him to be so subservient, and thus I could tell he needed something.

Power has many difficult aspects.

‘Relax,’ I said. ‘What’s the trouble?’

He shook his head. ‘They’re threatening to disqualify my athlete. You know he’s late?’

I nodded. Like any Greek, I knew that athletes had to be present thirty days before their event, to train – very hard. In effect, to prove that they had the right to compete. Young Astylos was only four days early. I shrugged. ‘He was shipwrecked,’ I mentioned.

Polymarchos hung his head. ‘Would you consider . . . speaking to the judges?’ he asked.

I misunderstood. ‘I can speak about the storm, surely.’

He met my eye. ‘I suspect they’ve been bribed.’ He looked around. ‘There’re other men here who came late, and there have been many men admitted late over the years.’

Cimon, at my elbow, leaned in. ‘Bribed is such a strong word,’ he said with a smile. ‘You mean that someone has an interest – perhaps a political interest – in strict enforcement.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘What events are we discussing?’

Polymarchos looked annoyed to be interrupted, but he shrugged it off. ‘Stadion and diaulos,’ he said.

Cimon nodded. ‘Athenians in both events,’ he said.

Let me tell you how the world works.

In that one line, Cimon was saying that he – he, one of the most powerful men in Athens – had an interest in the two running events. It was all in the twist of his mouth, the light of his eye. But it was there.

As was – by implication – the question. Is this important to my friend Arimnestos?

I had become one of them. I understood the nuance of power. I was being asked – politely, one aristocratic pirate to another – if I was prepared to expend my prestige and patronage on Polymarchos and his runner.

No, pause and think. You must understand this, or you will never understand what happened in the years of the Long War, as we fought the Medes. Hellenes compete about everything. Small men will race turtles, and great, rich men and women race chariots, and those of us in between will compete with whatever comes to hand. So here was Cimon – a friend of my youth, a man I trusted absolutely – stating that he was not going to help me to help Polymarchos – unless I made it worth his while. And nothing bald had been said.

Greeks are not natural allies. That’s all I’m trying to say. Business and political competitors; always looking for advantage. In business, in politics, on the seas or in the stadium.

I met his eye. ‘I’d like to see this young man entered,’ I said.

Cimon smiled. He didn’t say anything as wild as ‘what would that be worth to you?’ but I was suddenly reminded of Anarchos. There were similarities.

He rolled to his feet with the agility of a trained man. ‘Let’s go and see the judges, then,’ he said. ‘I came through the storm, too. Perhaps they’ll want my testimony.’ He flashed me a toothy smile, and I knew I owed him a favour. He was going to help me put ‘my’ runner in the race, despite the fact that Athens had a competitor in that race.

But I owed Polymarchos. It is hard to say exactly why, or how. Part of my general debt to the gods for my mistreatment of Lydia, I think.

I had a name, then, but not nearly the name I have now. The same was true of Cimon. Yet, despite the fact that we were not yet truly famous men, it took us almost an hour to cross the camp to the temple. Night was falling – fires were lit across the plain. The smell of burning wood and the smell of dung – human and animal – and the smell of cooking onions and meat and the sweat of twenty thousand mostly unwashed and unoiled humans rose to the gods. Small clay oil lamps lit the camp, and sparkled in the falling twilight like a thousand tiny stars. It was a glorious night, except for the smell.

Polymarchos was impatient – he clearly thought that the judges would pack it in for the night. And he might have been right, except that I sent Hector running across the camp as my herald. So we walked, and men accosted us and offered us wine and praise, and asked us pointless questions so that we would speak to them, or asked us to make judgements on things about which we knew almost nothing. Such is the life of fame.

Eventually we made it to the temple, with Polymarchos all but bouncing up and down as we approached the broad steps. But the judges were still seated at their five tables, all lit by handsome bronze and silver lamps, and as we approached, most of the judges rose and bowed.

We were interrupting something official, that much I could tell. There was a man – a very handsome older man with the long, oiled hair of a Spartan aristocrat, and a woman – I assumed his wife, not beautiful, yet somehow magnificent, with arm muscles like an oarsman’s and hair, thick and black as the falling night, piled like a tower on her head. She had the oddest eyes – one very slightly higher than the other, and both very slightly slanted, as you see in some people from the Sakje and the Aethiops.

I am not doing either one of them justice. He was dressed in nothing but a simple scarlet cloak pinned with gold, and she wore a fortune in jewellery – but for both of them their principal adornment was their sheer fitness. They looked like gods.

They looked angry. Deeply angry.

So did the judges. Who also, let me add, looked afraid.

Cimon nodded pleasantly to the Spartan couple, and the man – he was over fifty, and he had the kind of dignity that I’ve only seen a dozen times in my life – returned a small, but very genuine nod. He said, ‘Under any other circumstance I would be delighted to speak to you, Cimon.’ Of course, he didn’t do anything but nod, but that’s what he meant.

There were two more Spartiates – Spartan aristocrats – standing behind them, a middle-aged man in top shape and a much older man who had the beard of a philosopher and the body of an athlete. When the Spartan woman turned away from the judges with a look that might have turned almost anyone to stone, the other two followed her mutely. They wore their resentment more openly.

Cimon put a hand on my arm and we stopped. Cimon, who bowed to no man, inclined his head – as he might have to the gods – and the man and woman both stopped on the steps above us and returned the compliment. I’d like to think I didn’t stop and gape, but honestly, they were . . . it is hard to describe. They were like Briseis. Greater than mere mortals.

Then they swept by us. Cimon didn’t try to speak to them – it was quite clear that they had failed to gain their objective with the judges, whatever it was, and that this probably imperilled us, as well.

I didn’t know precisely who they were, but I had a good idea I was watching one of the two kings of Sparta – Leonidas, the younger of the two, and his scandalous wife Gorgo. He was the right age, and her mismatched eyes were a guarantee. Men whispered that if she hadn’t been the daughter of a king, Gorgo would have been exposed – killed – as a baby, because her face was deformed. Men whispered that she was a witch. A sexual deviant. A lust-mad, power-mad harridan.

Well, men whisper all sorts of crap when they are bored, and most of it is about women. Men also whispered that Leonidas was a usurper who had taken his throne illegally. No one ever expected him to be king – it is a long and particularly Spartan story, but he was not in line for the throne, and so he was sent to the Agoge, the particularly brutal school for aristocratic boys that characterises the Spartans. Where, let me add, young Leonidas excelled. And later, he was an effective warrior with an immense reputation throughout Greece. The day my father’s poor Plataeans held the Spartans for a few moments on the plain by Oinoe, Leonidas would have been in the front rank. For all I know, he and my father crossed spears.

I’ll digress, because although no one not born in Lacedaemon can pretend to truly understand the bloody Spartans, it is worth having a sense of their politics and their lives before I go on with my story. In my father’s time – when Aegina, the island off Attica, was a close ally of Sparta, Sparta and her ally Aegina, backed by the Peloponnesian League, had mostly dictated Athenian politics. The manner in which they did this was complicated. I’ve spoken of it elsewhere, but suffice it to be said that only twenty years before I was admiring Gorgo’s cleavage, which was superb, Athens had been, to all intents and purposes, a tributary ally of Sparta’s.

Now, Sparta always had two kings. All of Spartan politics is a matter of balance, and they claim that their great lawmaker, Lycurgus, ensured balance in every form of government. Two kings to watch each other; a council of old men called ephors to watch the kings; an assembly of free men to watch the ephors, and whole nations of slaves – the helots – to do all the work. Sparta rules an area that had once been three separate states, and had enslaved two whole Greek populations. To some Greeks, this was hubris on a major scale.

To others, it was an ideal form of government.

At any rate – please pay attention, this is essential – the two kings of my boyhood weren’t just rivals, but deadly enemies – Cleomenes, who was the father of Gorgo, and Demaratus, who will come into this story again and again. And the focus of their rivalry was about their relations with Athens and with Aegina. Well, that and everything else. I leave the everything else aside for the moment.

Just before the time of Marathon, Persia sent ambassadors throughout Greece, requesting that every state in Greece offer earth and water – tokens of submission to the Great King. In fact, this was just after the time of my wedding. Aegina voted to send such tokens. Athens and Sparta had intense internal political disagreements about what to do. In Sparta – so men say – King Cleomenes, whose forceful and militaristic policies had animated Sparta for twenty-five years – had the Persian ambassadors thrown in a well, and told them they could get earth and water from it if they could climb out. By doing so, of course, he committed a gross impiety – the murder of an ambassador is an offence to the gods – but he also guaranteed that Sparta could do nothing but fight.

Still with me?

In Athens, the Persian ambassadors behaved with astounding arrogance. It was the talk of my wedding. I’ll add that it is very un-Persian, and I suspect that someone in Susa or Sardis sent the wrong men. At any rate, there was a rape – and Persians were killed. I have heard a dozen self-justifications from men who were present. The murder of ambassadors is always a crime against the gods, no matter how you tell the story.

I’ve heard Miltiades suggest, in his cups, that it was done for the same reason that the Spartans did it – to make it impossible for Athens to do anything but fight.

Be that as it may be – it was the winter before the first coming of Datis and the Medes, and the men of Aegina were threatening to allow the Persians to use their harbours to conquer Athens. Cleomenes of Sparta forbade them to do so, and took hostages from the leading men of Aegina. Demaratus, his fellow king, felt that he had acted with hubris, and above the law.

Just to be a barracks lawyer, he was right, and any Spartan worth his salt will admit it. Cleomenes had a clear vision – right or wrong – of how Greece should be, and he was determined to resist Persia, and once set on that course, he was like a runaway chariot.

When the dust settled, Demaratus – the rightful King of Sparta – had been framed in a case that claimed he was illegitimate and not the King of Sparta. It was all a put-up job – a scandal at the time – but he was exiled. He ran to Persia, where he sat at the right hand of the throne of the Great King. More than a few Spartans left with him. There was an enormous split.

His younger brother was Leonidas. Leonidas was installed overnight, and after immense political manoeuvring, married off to a woman about a third his age – Gorgo, the wry-faced daughter of overbearing, hubris-filled Cleomenes.

Follow that? It’s like a particularly juicy play about the gods at their worst. That’s everyday life in Sparta. Murder, scandal, back-stabbing, all with lots of pious sentiment and high moral tone and some ruthless athletics.

I’m not a fan. Mostly, their kings don’t die in bed – or on the battlefield. They die in exile.