The Battle of Marathon

There are two astonishing ratios about the Battle of Marathon.

There were almost exactly 11,000 Greeks: that's 1,000 men from each of the tribes of Athens, and 1,000 men from nearby Plataea.

The Persians used 600 boats to ferry in troops. The actual number of troops is unknown, but for that number of transport craft it comes to between 30,000 and 100,000 Persians, including a few thousand cavalry.

So the first ratio is that the Greeks were outnumbered somewhere between 3:1 to 9:1, depending what assumptions you want to make about Persian transports.

The next ratio is known with great precision:

203 Greek dead.
6,400 Persian dead.

That's 32 Persian dead for every Greek who fell.

Which isn't bad going when you're not just outnumbered, but also you're the attacking side.

The casualty numbers are known because the Greeks set up a memorial that listed all their fallen.  The Persian numbers are known because before the battle the Greeks had promised to the Gods to sacrifice a goat for every enemy they killed.  They counted the Persian dead carefully and then discovered they'd killed so many enemies that they couldn't find enough goats.  They paid off their debt to the Gods on a yearly instalment plan that took thirteen years to complete.

Despite its vast importance, there's very little agreement about what actually happened.  Modern historians can’t even agree on which direction the opposing lines faced, let alone details like whether the Persian cavalry took the field.

One theory goes that the Persians were aligned with their backs to the sea, and the Greeks attacked from inland.  Like so:

Wrong

I just can't credit this.  As you can see the plain of Marathon forms a rectangle that runs lengthways along the coast, ringed by mountains to landward.  The Greeks would have to be insane to place their grossly outnumbered troops where they could be easily outflanked by the numerically superior Persians.  Also this alignment puts their left flank in easy reach of the Persian cavalry.

I'm pretty sure if you gave this problem to any modern military commander, he would instantly place his outnumbered Greeks so that they had to span the shortest possible line. Which would be like this:

Right.  From The Battle of Marathon by Peter Krentz

This map comes from the excellent The Battle of Marathon by Peter Krentz. My copy's sitting by my left elbow as I write this.

You'll notice there's solid land in the top right of one map and a small bay in the other. Most maps put a marsh there. In fact the Greek coastline changes constantly and all three options have been on that spot at one time or another. Nobody really knows what was there when the battle was fought.

The Greeks made the decision to take the fight to the enemy.  Each soldier lightened his battle load as much as possible the night before and then they marched out at first light.

The next big point of contention is that Herodotus states, very clearly, that the Greeks marched to within 8 stadia of the enemy, and then they ran in the rest of the way under a hail of arrows.

At the ancient Olympics there was an event in which the competitors ran two lengths of the stadium — two stadia — in soldier’s kit.  The men of Marathon ran four times that distance, knowing that at the end they would have to fight for their lives against an enemy many times more numerous.

A lot of modern historians discount that story out of hand, on the grounds that heavy infantry can't run almost a mile and then fight.

The problem is, that the ancient sources are absolutely unanimous that that's what happened.  Every written source, every sculptural relief , gives the same picture.  And Herodotus, who is often vague on numbers, is absolutely precise on this one.  Herodotus also goes out of his way to make the point that everyone dropped as much load as they could, even shedding armour so they could move fast.

Why did they have to run?  I think the reason was the Persian cavalry, who could have torn the Greeks apart. Herodotus says the cavalry was there, but once the battle begins he never mentions them.  I think the reason is that the Greek plan was to engage the enemy line before the enemy cavalry had time to deploy. With the mountains on one side and the sea on the other, it meant that once the infantry engaged the mounted troops were bottled up behind their own line.

The fact is that modern elite troops could make that run.  The counter-argument is that the citizen militia of Athens weren't professional soldiers.  Which is true.  But what is also true is that we're talking about the most successful citizen army in all history, and those guys in the line knew with utter certainty that they wouldn't live to midday if they didn't cross the field in time.

It's official: our Stephanie is a published author

Back in September 2009, a lady named Stephanie Thornton made her first comment on this humble blog.  She became a regular reader and commenter.  She was interested in history and historical fiction, you see.  Probably you are too!

Since then, those of us who know a good writer when we see one have been following Stephanie's adventures.  Because Stephanie was writing a novel.  Like many of us.  She wrote, and then she revised, and revised, and revised, and revised, and revised...I could go on for some time here...  

And then she signed with an agent.

And then she revised some more.  But I always thought she'd make it.

Penguin's New American Library agreed.

And so on bookstore shelves this week we have The Secret History, the story of Theodora, who rose from desperate poverty to become Empress of the Byzantine Empire, by none other than our Stephanie Thornton.

Giveaways of The Ionia Sanction and Sacred Games

So here's the other reason I mentioned BookLikes the other day.

If you wander over to their Giveaway Page, you will find 10 hardback copies of Ionia Sanction and 10 hardback copies of Sacred Games to be given away to the US and Canada, and 20 ebooks of Sacred Games for the entire world.

If anyone would care for a copy, this is your chance!  (You need to be a BookLikes member, needless to say.)

The Push-Me-Pull-You Conundrum

I've faced some tough questions in my time, but none tougher than this one from my younger daughter...

How does a Push-Me-Pull-You go to the toilet?

BookLikes

After GoodReads sold out to Amazon, in more ways than one, I cast about for alternative book sites and came across an interesting one, still in beta at the time, called BookLikes.com.   One of the things I like about it is it has more of an international flavour, which is not surprising because the people who created it are in fact all Polish!  Despite which, they're very much centered on English language books and link through to B&N, Amazon, and Powell's.

Creating an account not only creates a GoodReads-like bookshelf and follower system, but also creates your own blog under their domain, that's accessible by the whole world.  So if you want a free blog that's book-oriented, then it's sort of a natural.  I don't use it that way because I have my own very lovely blog, but I can see where someone might find that useful.

Proxenos: a job both ancient and modern

It's not every day you get email from a US Consul.  But such was the case a week ago when I received a lovely email from Mr Mark Mohr.  Mr Mohr's a retired US diplomat and a mystery reader.  And very glad I am that he emailed, because he mentioned something interesting to do with The Ionia Sanction.

In The Ionia Sanction there's a character named Thorion.  Thorion has a special job: he's a proxenos.

Proxenos was one of the most interesting official jobs a man could have in Classical Greece.  The pro means for, the xenos means foreigner.  Hence proxenos means someone who acted on behalf of foreigners.

The system worked like this:  cities didn't have a diplomatic service back then, so what they did was find men among the other cities who were well-disposed toward them, and then ask those foreign men to act on their behalf.

Thorion is a citizen of Athens, and always has been.  But he married a woman from Ephesus and he has intricate trade connections to Ephesus.  Thorion therefore acts as the proxenos for Ephesus in Athens.  He officially represents them.

If someone from Ephesus is in Athens and in trouble, he can go to Thorion for help.  If a merchant in Ephesus wants to trade in Athens, he could ask Thorion for advice and introductions to Athenian traders.  If Athens was considering passing some trade law that would disadvantage Ephesus, then Thorion -- even though he was a citizen of Athens -- might reasonably stand up to argue against it, and his fellow citizens would expect him to do just that.

The proxenoi appear to have been at least as effective as the consulates of modern times.  With the hundreds of Greek city-states, and their intricate political and trade alliances, the proxenoi must have formed a complex and fascinating network of men.

I thought the proxenoi were no more, replaced by modern consuls.  But to my delight, I was wrong.  Mark mentioned:

"Actually, there is such a system in modern diplomacy; they are known as honorary consuls. For example, when I was [US Consul] in Brisbane, a prominent Greek-Australian attorney was the honorary consul for Greece. At the time I was in Brisbane, only eight consuls were citizens of the sending country, whereas more than twenty honorary consuls, all Australian citizens, represented foreign interests. So apparently the Greek gift of the proxenoi system continues into present times."

Not only do the proxenoi still exist, but they're in my own country.  And one of them is proxenos for Greece!

The NSA Line Eater

With all the excitement at the moment about the NSA watching your internet traffic, I can't resist adding a bit of folklore from the early days of the internet.

Back in the good old days before web pages, the standard system of community chatter were newsgroups.  In fact newsgroups still exist.  The newsgroup for mystery novels for example is rec.arts.mystery.

There was a bug in the original newsgroup system, so that sometimes one or two lines from a posting might randomly disappear.

This instantly gave rise to the belief that a creature lived inside the internet, and that it survived by eating random lines of text.  The creature was dubbed the Line Eater.  People even added what was called Line Eater Food into their posts to make sure the creature had enough to eat.

I first became aware of the Line Eater in the mid-eighties (I'm showing my age here); the Line Eater lived for a few more years, until it was finally extinguished when someone found the bug.  I'm stretching my memory, but I think it was that if a line was exactly 80 characters long and began with whitespace then the newsgroup software overwrote the buffer and simply dropped that line.

RIP the Line Eater.

The Line Eater inspired another theory: that the NSA was reading all the  posts in every single newsgroup, and that the missing lines were the proof.  This became known as the NSA Line Eater and was much more sinister.  The anarchy-oriented denizens of the internet began adding what they called NSA Food  to the signatures of all their posts.  They added words like KGB, bomb, assassin, and, of course, NSA, all designed to tweak the interest of the eavesdroppers.  This was all very silly, but since the early netizens were uni students, that's par for the course.

Except that as it turned out, the NSA really was reading all the posts.  It was part of a massive traffic analysis system called ECHELON.  Traffic analysis means keeping an eye on who's talking to whom without necessarily reading the messages.  ECHELON was a Cold War construct run by the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  I wouldn't be at all surprised if this Prism thingy turns out to be merely a subset of Echelon, which has been running for at least fifty years.

Casting Sacred Games

Third in Marshal's book blogs is My Book, The Movie, in which authors have a go at casting actors for their characters (without the inconvenience of needing the actors to agree...).

It's surprising how difficult this can be!  Each time I have a go at it, I come up with a different answer.  It's not so much that the characters have changed, but that perception of the actors changes over even a few years.  Though looking back on it, I find I've cast Russell Crowe for Pythax in The Pericles Commission, and then used him for King Pleistarchus in Sacred Games.

For Diotima I had Rachel Weisz in The Pericles Commission, my wife Helen as Diotima in The Ionia Sanction, and now with Sacred Games I think I might have hit on the perfect Diotima.  I'm rather pleased with my idea for Nico too.

Writers Read

The second of Marshal Zeringue's book blogs is Writers Read, where he asks various writers what they're currently reading.  I confess I have fun reading the answers of other writers, since it amounts to recommendations from people who should, in theory, know something about books.

I've answered this question for him three times now, and looking back on my past answers, I'm struck by how totally inconsistent I am.  But I do appear to move in themes.

Right now, I seem to be having a retro period.

The Page 69 Test

In what's become something of a tradition, I've written an entry for Sacred Games at the Page 69 Test.

The idea is for an author to discuss page 69 of his book.  Is it representative?  How does it progress the story?   What, when you get down to it, is really the point of page 69?  Is it merely some halfway point between 68 and a better life on 70?

If you want to see what happens on my page 69, and why it matters (I hope), then click on through!

The Page 69 Test and two other book sites are run by Marshal  Zeringue, someone who cares very much about reading and goes out of his way to encourage the habit.  Thanks Marshal!