The Great King Read Online Free PDF Page A

with the black ships. Agios died there on the stern 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 Kitharon, 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 I was free, ripened into friendship. My new friends were a polyglot rabble – an Etruscan of Roma 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 bronzesmith, learning and teaching. I fell in love with Lydia, the bronzesmith’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 Syracusa and declined to serve him, and sailed away, and there, on a beach near Taranto in the south of Italia, I found my friend Harpagos and Cimon, son of Miltiades, and others among 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 gods’ 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