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Persian Wars 1 – Marathon (6 August; 2,490 BP*)

The chest heaves from exertion, epic the mind reels – at vision of fallen men, once known (so many, or … so few?) to never be omitted from collective memory … from the thoughts of Miltiades architect of Athens’ campaign (collapse the middle, envelope via dual flanks), destined to reside in the passing thought(s) of even fewer descendents … whose freiheit and very frame of thought and philosophy resided in the simple outcome of (so few) archaic battles – Hellene pitted against pawns of Darius; … now the once-revered Greek general is but a partial broken statue and somewhere hidden in the hills … ashes in a tomb.

Few realities are so sweet as blood, freshly spilled … there is nothing in the character of the gently descending plains of Marathon to suggest the course of transitory history would, in part, be decided on such a small strand astride thalassa … nor anything specific (other than the triad of sun-water-sand) to foretell the bodies

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of one-hundred and ninety-two defenders would litter the slowly uplifting coastal landscape, scarcely two metres above the level sea. Mingled waters from sacred cisterns – of Kassotis and Castalia, poured forth from the umbilicus of Gaia, dressed wounds of warriors who died nonetheless, there was no power to heal, veer the boat to the left on the River Styx, remove the coins from empty sockets … what there was coiled closely around t h a n a t o s and weighed upon the souls of surviving infantry. Can a name only, without the man, persist throughout cascading centuries? Inscriptions on monuments fade with / each / frost / or / rain. Armies of Sparta did not arrive until the funeral pyres had faded and yet scores of brothers both in blood and arms were dead and gone. After an emblematic scrutiny of the fields where ‘immortals’ laid still, They returned to Laconia – unscathed. Their day of reckoning would come …

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2 – Thermopylae (17 August; 2,480 BP)

A discourse – in the shadow of Lygdamis’ Portara, Naxos

Leonidas: “Perhaps the earliest tale of valor my father told me was of the Gigantomachy. I dreamt of turning into a lion, like Dionysis to devour my opponent. Perhaps your father told you as a boy of the death of your namesake at the hands of Herakles and Apollo?”

Ephialtes: (a nod: nei) “Thus the gods became sole masters of all creatures.”

Silence.

Leonidas: “I was your king, … root of the prosperous olive tree. And yet you repaid fealty with treachery.”

Ephialtes: “… Spartan military life was such to deny honour. Should all accolades have gone to your house? There is an ancient proverb that none can judge the life of any man for good or bad until that man is dead; but I, for my part, though still living, know well that mine is miserable and hard.”

Leonidas: “What was denied you? The foot soldier’s desire is always and only to appease the ruling king and subdue all enemies. This has been known for centuries. Even Themistocles would agree! Did you not kill other men? Did you not thwart the invaders alongside others trained in the same manner?”

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Ephialtes: “Like every man, I was born, my mother raised me until the age of seven, I was taken from her and thrust into a life-long obligation of marching, beatings, taking orders, and partaking in campaigns I scarcely believed in or had any control over. I showed them the way … so as to change that very predicament. My life, … my decision.”

T he death of H onour comes like A Nemean lion during the night watch, or N othing more than A hoplite T raitor … having turned from Delphic O racle and mother S parta.

Leonidas: “Obligation? I and my best warriors went to an early grave for your insubordinate fantasizing! Generations of my forefathers, kings of Sparta, died in their old age after long lives of service, filled with the privileges of our society. Would you deny your king this?”

Ephialtes: “Privilege?! You utter this word as if were a birth-right. And what of other men, accorded less blue blood and doomed to different fates? I count myself among them! But – unlike them – I was not content with my fate. Allotted fate. Rage–Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Ephialtes …”

Leonidas: “Bah, spoken as one who has read and believes the heresies of Lysistrata!” No man's connected with it; if that were the case, they'd soon come fluttering along. No, no.”

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Ephialtes: “Lewd to the least drop in the tiniest vein, our sex is fitly food for Tragic Poets, our whole life's but a pile of kisses. But, hardy Spartan, if you join with me all may be righted yet. A few years ago a void formed when the Siddhartha ascended – like Icarus flying to the east … yet never arriving.”

(A long silence. The two stare at the Aegean expanse; begrudging awe conquers them.)

T hat social H eiarchy of Iron A ge Hellas N avigated by light of A thena’s sword obliges T he korax to bring an O live branch at Apollo’s beckon; S lowly that world will fall.

Leonidas: “You know nothing of being doomed. To have the Medes hoard encircled about our final desperate stand, fighting to the last man, even with our bare teeth … bodies piled as high as …”

Ephialtes: “Speak no more of it. I witnessed it all unfold. The moment you abandoned the narrow pass … your doom was sealed. As was mine so many years ago when Sparta chose a life of administering death on men who needn’t necessarily be enemies unto me.”

Leonidas: “Did you rejoice in our agony on Kolonos Hill?”

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T houghts adrift – an empire H angs ominously on A ccumulated flashes of N ecrophobic reasoning – racing across myriad minds A s the last breath of T hin air escapes, and soul joins O rions Belt at the centre; S oldier, your tapho is but transitory …

Ephialtes: “No, my king. Tears were my libation, though the victors offered me wine. I couldn’t leave the plain – the personal cost of treason, again wishes and orders given by others. If only I could have fallen with you …”

Leonidas: “Then your cup will be filled many times over before you taste of death. As my own life could have been, may your mortality be long, Ephialtes. Elati of Poseidon’s sea will forever be on your lips, but not from the crashing waves we perished but a stone throw from. The root is cut from the tree, but olives shall still come forth – nourishing the armies of Sparta. Oil for the lamp and soul, …nectar of Olea for three-hundred martyrs. Tell Simonides when he passes by that ‘Leonidas lies here,’ obedient to the laws of Sparta. One hundred score years plus twenty more shall pass before my name is inscribed at Thermopylae, but in the comparative light of eternity, … it will suffice.”

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3 – Salamis (22 September; 2,480 BP)

Saronic Gulf isle: as to gulf of solar system gulf of Milky Way constellations and the space between asteria therein, gulf of Orion Supercluster – random god-cast of galaxies too numerous for comprehension, as a cluster of Xerxes’ battle-rammed warships lying in splinters on seabed of the narrows. The length and breadth and girth of Greek trireme mirror the black monolith from Kubrick’s Odyssey: ‘golden triad’ linking solid matter (wood, iron, blood, et cetera) to rectangular harmonic, the mathematical perfection of oars gliding in semicircular arcs en echelon over tepid waves churning saltwater into chaotic whirlpools ceasing to exist before the next oar-stroke touches water. Do numbers alone define why we still feel awe across the monochromatic blur of centuries? 76,000 maritime troops reared by women of the Argolid, Achaea, and Attica versus 541,000 equals raised by mothers of Chaldaia and Babylonia … does meaning in such comfortable statistics get lost via numb repetition through ages

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of mankind and Aquarius? Salamis was such a dawning of a “new chapter” in the violent saga of mortal men …

Normandy Antietam Jerusalem Carmel Cave

… weathered earth visited by epic machy, waged and carried-out by biped hominids, thinking themselves to be favoured by their imagined pantheon of gods.

Go stand at the very place upon Mt. Aigaleo where Persian labour positioned the throne of Xerxes, stare out to the northwest at the inter-fingered quilt of land, sea, and sky … on a blue moon the straits will speak – almost inaudibly – but unequivocally of a day not long before, measured by duration of our brief tenure on this Holocene stage, when two opposed bands of brothers slew each other on the water just below. One declined from intended conquest of all known lands, the other flowered (with exception of the Peloponnesian Wars) into a philanthropic age. The varied fate of ancient brothers-in-arms. Cain slew Abel in the fields … a less fluid grave than the environs of Pireas; thus the War must conclude on Terra Firma, less than a day’s walk from the omphalos of Gaia.

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4 – Plataea (27 August; 2,479 BP)

Along the Silk Road scythian traders are said to have woven the myth of the Griffin, melding eagle, python, and lion – their vision molded like mental clay from protrusions of Protoceratops skulls and bones, weathering from softer western Gobi sands. By the same measure of limited human ethos, Euripides set one cyclopean eye (gouged by Odysseus et al.) in the proboscidian kephali of Poseidon’s son; fiction feared by Before Christ travelers of Adriatica and its plethoric islets en route to Ithaca, until Alexander – seeking some measure of empiric reprisal for Persian deeds of old – had shadow of Elephas indicus cast over Bucephalus and his insatiable rider. Now the bones of extinct mammoths tell a less mythological tale then when Artistotle’s admonishments fell on deaf ears.

Bones are nonetheless bones. Femur, scapula radius & ulna … it matters not. Those remembered by history (myopic and perfumed faintly of sea salt) curve like bent iron and metamorphose as attribute of ethnic

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import rises like an asymptote. Then, as stars and tides and legends surely must all bow to entropy, … bones become dust. Forming new manifestations of matter. Wherefore art the bones of those slewn on the Plataean Plain? Of Mardonios, or Pausanias? Mere dust? Crushed under boulders of Phaedriades hurled down by Philacus and Autonous? Or in stars which are neither Persian nor Greek? Adrenaline and sheer plod carried them in a final battle charge into a phalynx of spears as they faded from Sirius to faintly luminous Proxima Centauri … as Darius’ brainchild empire joined the bones of 100,000 in certain dust and improbable defeat. Lured into Boeotian interior by divination song of seers Pythia, Sibyl, Cassandra (it matters not), blinded by the megamaniacal dream … few would return to the seaport of Chirrha. Fewer yet to the familiar environs of fair Lydia across the Aegean. For two drachmai, Charon would steer these dead over the Styx, … where their greaves could be forever removed. Loses at Mykale and the Hellespont -- opposite the plains of Troy, laden with ashes of even more hoplites of the Geometric (no less stoic Achilles) – register diminutive in the beyond … time abounds in unfathomable measure for reflection.

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Shock and awe – spread by mariners and trading vessel – uttered by mortals, yet regarded as tidings from the resident of Olympus – settled into circum-Mediterranean conscience. Zeus, Athena, Asklepios held out, though buffeted briefly by Ahura Mazda… fifth century (sensu Caesar) demigod ‘over there.’ Generals from either hoard now share a sip of ambrosia in the necropolis, having cast their lots in the three-dimensional lands. Christopher Collom 8–12 to 8-29-2004

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LEGEND • *Time intervals for each ‘battle-canto’ (e.g. 6 August; 2,490 BP*) are listed in years Before Present, or ‘B.P.’ Thus, the battle of Marathon occurred in 490 B.C. (or ‘Before Christ’), but two-thousand four-hundred and ninety years BP – including the two millennia after the death of Jesus Christ (A.D.). “Present” is defined as the year 2000 A.D. (a.k.a. ‘Y2K’) because it is culturally symbolic, and easily added to or subtracted from. At the time this poem was written, therefore, the last of the great battles (Plataea) occurred 2,483 years ago: 2,479+4=2,483 (with 4 being the # of years since Y2K).

• Speakers in Canto 2: Leonidas (martyred general and king of the Spartans) and Ephialtes (Greek traitor that showed the Persian army a way around the pass at Thermopylae, resulting in the deaths of >1,000 Greeks, including Leonidas).

• Collages at end of each canto are the writer’s own graphic expressions of themes and images pertaining to each battle. Copyright permission for some images was not obtained; remaining illustrations scanned from published sources.

©2004 Blue Eyes Press