Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [14]
Now, when the men of Thebes bested us that time, our leaders signed their treaty, accepted their laws and accepted the federation, the way a poor man accepts a bad sausage in the market when he dares not haggle. But the treaty said nothing about the Daidala. And Plataea’s turn was coming – her first turn to celebrate the festival in nigh on fifty years.
For a year after the battle, men said little about it. But then the Plataean Daidala was just a few years away – and towns worked for years to make the festival great. So it was that not long after the priest came to our house – this is how I remember it – and the forge fire was relit, men started to come back to the forge. First they came to have their pots mended, and their ploughs straightened, but soon enough they came to talk. As the weather changed, and Pater worked outside, men would come as soon as their farm work was done – or before – and they would sit on Pater’s forging stumps, or recline against the cow’s fence or her shed. They would bring their own wine and pour it for each other or for Pater, and they would talk.
I was a boy, and I loved to hear men talk. These were plain men, not lords – but not fools, either. Even here in this house I hear the life of the rustic made a thing of fun. Perhaps. Perhaps there are boors who think more of the price of an ass than of a beautiful statue. What of it? How many of these philosophers could plough a straight furrow, eh, girl? There is room in the world for many kinds of wisdom – that was the revelation of my life, and you should write it down.
Hah! It is good to be lord.
At any rate, by the end of the day we’d have the potter, Karpos, son of Phoibos, the wheelwright, Draco, son of Draco, the leather worker, Theron, son of Xenon, some of their slaves and a dozen farmers in the yard. And they would debate everything from the immortality of the gods to the price of wheat at the market in Thebes – and Corinth, and Athens.
Athens. How often in this story will I mention her? Not my city, but crowned in beauty and strong, in a way Plataea could never be strong – yet capricious and sometimes cruel, like a maiden. As you will be, soon enough, my dear. Athens is now the greatest city in the world – but then she was just another polis, and outside of Attica, men paid her little heed.
Yet she was starting to learn her power. I must weary you with some history. Athens had been under a tyranny for forty years – the Pisistratidae. Some say that the tyrants were good for Athens, and some say they were bad. I have friends of both groups, and I suspect the truth was that the tyrants were good in some ways and bad in others.
While the tyrants were lording it over Athens, the world was changing. First, Sparta rose to power, initially by crushing the cities nearest to her, and then by forcing the rest of their neighbours into a set of treaties that compelled them to serve Sparta. Now, in the Peloponnese – everywhere else, too – only men of property fought in the battles. Slaves might throw rocks, and poor farmers might throw a javelin, but the warriors were aristocrats and their friends.
Armies were small, because there are, thank the gods, only so many aristocrats in the world. But when Sparta created her ‘League’, she changed the world. Suddenly the Peloponnese could field a bigger army than anyone else. Spartans are great warriors – just ask them – but what made them dangerous was their size. Sparta could put ten thousand men in the field.
The other states had to respond. Thebes formed her own league, the Federation of Boeotia, but other states had to find another way to provide that manpower. In Plataea, we took to arming every free man. Even so, we could never, as I have said, muster more than fifteen hundred armed men.
In Athens, the tyrants kept their armies small. They did not permit men to carry arms abroad, and when they