I watched them curiously. They were very different from the hoplites of Boeotia. For one thing, they were the most aggressive woman-hunters I'd ever seen, especially the Persians, and if there was a boy-lover among them, I never met him. Second, they were lazy. Not at their soldier-work – when I visited their camps, I saw swordplay and archery of a high calibre. But if they were not drilling or shooting, they did nothing but swear, fight and fuck – sorry, dear.
In my day, in the west, we had no 'professional' soldiers, except the Spartan nobles, and even the Spartans occupied themselves with ceaseless athletics and hunting. I'd never seen full-time soldiers who sat in wine shops, drinking, spitting and grabbing girls.
They were tough. They were rich, too. The average Persian cavalryman had a groom for his horse and a slave for his kit. He had his own tent and perhaps another felt shelter for his slaves and his gear. Every one of them had bronze and silver cups, water pitchers, plates – I'd never seen a soldier with so much stuff.
And they had women in their camps. Some were wives and some were prostitutes, and many seemed to fall in some mysterious (only to me) gap between the two defined roles. They worked hard, too – harder than the men, washing, cooking, sewing and minding children.
A Persian cavalry regiment was like a travelling town where all the citizens were lords. I liked them quite a bit. They liked me, too. Most of them had never seen a western Greek. They were contemptuous of Ionians, as poor warriors, but they'd heard that we Boeotians were fighters, and I told my war stories to the four men I liked best – a pair of brothers and their two friends, all from the same small town near Persepolis. They were lords, or they called themselves noblemen, and you might well ask why they talked to Greek slaves.
I was in camp on an errand to Artaphernes, carrying a herald's staff for my master. Artaphernes had a tent in camp and a lavish establishment, and he was sometimes there and sometimes at our house, for reasons that were beyond me. When he was in camp, I was the herald, mostly because he liked me and I could get to him faster than other messengers.
I was picking up a little Persian – camp Persian, hardly what anyone speaks at court. But I was there every day or two, and the delivery of a message to a satrap of Persia is never a simple or quick task, especially if there is an answer. One time I remember cooling my heels all day only to discover that the satrap was already at our house.
At any rate, one day my four Persians were on duty outside the satrap's tent-palace, and after I showed them my staff, I entertained them by pretending it was a sword and doing my exercises, since I was missing lessons by running errands. And Darius – in those days, it seemed that all Persians were called Darius – called out and asked my name.
'I'm Doru,' I said, 'companion to Archilogos, son of Hipponax.' I shrugged.
'You have the wrist of a real swordsman,' Darius said. He took my herald's staff, a pair of solid bronze rods, and hefted it. 'I'd be hard put to do my cuts with this. Cyrus, try your sword arm on this toy.' He tossed my staff to his brother, who caught it.
They were as alike as statues in a temple portico – skin the colour of old wood, jet-black hair and clear brown eyes, handsome as gods.
Cyrus whirled my staff through some exercises – not my exercises, so I watched with fascination. He tossed it to me. 'Let's see you do that, boy!' he said.
So I did. I copied his moves, interested in the differences, and all four Persians applauded, and after that we were all friends. They were easy men to like, and we fenced sometimes. They never used shields, which made them very different men to face. Cyrus also taught me a trick that has saved my life fifty times – how to kill a man with his own shield. Have you seen it?
Here – you, scribe. Take that shield off the wall – I won't eat you – and put it on your arm. So you do know how to hold a shield – good for you. My opinion of you just went up. Now face off against me – damn this hip. Pretend you have a sword. Now watch, honey.
Just like that, and I've broken his arm and killed him. Sorry, lad. You can get up now. Useful trick, eh? All I do is grab the rim of the shield and rotate it. There's no man born, no matter how strong, who can hold the centre of a wheel while I rotate the rim. Yes? This is based on a mathematical principle that I could explain if I was given enough wine, but for the moment, it suffices that it is true. And see how our pen-pusher's arm is in the porpax – that bronze strap across his upper forearm? So he can't escape his shield once I start to rotate the rim – and I break his arm.
If he was a killer, he might gut me with his blade while I break his arm. If he isn't – and few men are killers, thank the gods – then I push his now helpless arm and shield rim into his face, smash his nose and he's dead. See? Cyrus taught me that, bless him.
They were free-giving, hard-drinking men, and I grew to love them in two weeks. They seemed more alive than other men. More real. They fought duels all the time, cutting other Persians over fancied or real slights, over a misspoken word or a cold shoulder. They were dangerous dogs, and they bit hard.
My status as a slave meant nothing to them, of course. To them, all Greeks were their slaves. Which rankled, but they were so far above me that I couldn't be offended at their attitude to the Ionians – an attitude I shared.
At any rate, the summer passed with lessons and struggles. I was seeing an Aethiopian girl from a house as lavish as ours, the Lekthantae, hereditary priests and priestesses of Artemis, one of the noblest and richest families of the city. Salwe was tall and thin and dark like night, and while we never loved each other, she had a sharp mind and a vicious tongue and we entertained each other, in and out of bed. I loved going out to the Persian camp. I loved working through the ever more complex problems of geometry that Heraclitus gave me. I would sit in the fountain house – after Master lifted the ban – and sing on my lyre, and Salwe would sing with me, her voice capable of curious harmony that she said her people in Africa always sang. It was a good summer.
The tyrants of Ionia were gathering in the houses of the upper town, and so we had dinner with Hippias again, and dinner with Anaximenes of Miletus, who had replaced the traitor Aristagoras as tyrant of Miletus. Aristagoras was reputed to have spoken that summer to the assembly of Athens, just as Hippias predicted, and to have been granted a fleet of Athenian ships to come and make war on the Great King in the name of the 'rebellion'.
There was no rebellion. All the leaders of Ionia were in and out of our house, and the great cities – Miletus, Ephesus, Mytilene – were, if not solid in loyalty to the Great King, at least uninterested in revolt. Some men wanted war, but most of them were penniless exiles.
It was odd, but as a slave, I probably knew more about what was happening than the satrap. I knew that on the dockside, where young men gathered when the ships came in from all over the Ionian, men spoke of Aristagoras as a hero and of Athens as a liberator. Gentlemen and rowers, seamen, small merchants – they were all fired by the idea of independence. But the nobles and the rich in the upper town were insulated from this talk, just as they were insulated from the gossip of their slaves.
As the number of incidents between the Persian soldiers and the townspeople – and the sailors – mounted, Artaphernes was forced to confront the reality that there were people in Ephesus – many people – who viewed any Persian as a foe. And his soldiers didn't help. Darius and Cyrus thought nothing more comical than to separate a pretty Greek girl from her Ionian boyfriend – by a mixture of force and persuasion that, let's be honest, young women enjoy. Some young women. At any rate, multiply their efforts by a hundred, and there wasn't a Greek virgin left in the lower town to marry her behorned and already cuckolded man, and that is the fastest way to violence.