They say the strategos Miltiades contrived the defeat of the Persians at Marathon, but that thereafter he overreached and the goddess Nemesis took his life in payment for his pride. Strict academic history has it that he died of a gangrenous wound after assaulting the island of Paros, but there is a text I have seen which maintains he was devoured from within by the tendrils of an orchid. Upon the beach of Paros, as the men of sixty ships bled their way uphill, Miltiades took his ease and considered his revenge upon the people for an earlier slight. He drank wine and slept, and a flower seeded by the goddess took root in his ear and burrowed inward. For a month he could see the world only through a cage of green shoots, and then he was blind in one eye and then the other. The orchid persisted in its growth, and the island threw back his invaders. By the time he returned to Athens to be tried for his venality, and perhaps more importantly his incompetence, he was half mad with pain and revulsion. He told the judges he could hear the flow of sap in his skull, and they agreed to burn the horror out of him as a combination of punishment and mercy. They summoned the greatest alchemists of the time and saw it done. The process was almost miraculously precise: the flower turned to ash—but Miltiades died anyway, his brain and bones having been almost entirely replaced by green stems.