Brotus couldn’t stand the way his twin brother stood alone before the altar. Light from the two torches at the entrance to Kastor’s tomb reflected off his bronze armor, making him look almost golden against the darkness. Most infuriating was the way the torchlight caught on his cross-crested helmet, the helmet reserved for Spartan kings. Brotus had worn such a helmet only for a single day, the day Leonidas returned so unexpectedly from Marathon to snatch it away from him. Brotus felt an almost physical craving to have the heavy helmet, with its white horsehair crest, on his own head again. He was so close―but now this message from Demaratus had sparked talk of recalling the deposed king and restoring him. It was crazy. Unfair.
And little Leo strutting about so pompously, as if he didn’t know he was a usurper!
Brotus couldn’t stand it a moment longer. He stepped up beside his twin brother and growled, “Except for being king, you’re no better than the rest of us!”
Leonidas, startled out of his thoughts, turned and answered without pausing to think, “If I weren’t better than you, I wouldn’t be king.”*
Brotus snarled back, “Piss off!” and ducked away into the darkness.
Gorgo watched him go warily. She knew Brotus’ hate was undiminished, and she knew he would kill Pleistarchos if he could find a way to do it without being discovered. She also knew that there was no way to eliminate this threat short of killing Brotus, which was something neither she nor Leonidas was prepared to do―or to order. She stepped beside her husband. They were now almost alone. “Shouldn’t we go home?” she asked softly.
“Not yet. Give me a moment,” Leonidas answered, and slipped past the altar into Kastor’s tomb.
The tomb was unlit except by the torches on the outside of the entrance. Leonidas had to stop just inside the door to let his eyes adjust. He sensed, more than saw, the statue of the mortal brother of Divine Helen and Divine Polydeukes in the darkness.
Brotus’ words were ringing in his ears: “You are no better than the rest of us.”
“But you can choose to be,” a voice said very distinctly in the darkness.
Leonidas looked around. Had someone said that? No. It had just been a thought. It was also nonsense. Choose what?
“Choose to earn the highest privilege of all: immortality.”
Leonidas held his breath, and every fiber of his body strained to see or hear the presence that was speaking. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness. He could clearly see even into the corners of the little temple. He was certain that no other living creature was here with him. Yet he was not alone. The Kouros smiled at him, his long curls hanging down his back and his hands raised in welcome. It was just a statue made by man, Leonidas knew that. But the Gods were known to inhabit inanimate objects when it suited them….
Leonidas answered the God mentally, afraid to speak: “My twin won’t retrieve me from the underworld as yours did.”
“He does not need to retrieve you,” the Other insisted. “He is irrelevant. You alone decide your destiny.”
“How?” Leonidas asked, incapable of imagining what he could do to gain the ultimate honor of life after death. He was acutely aware of his mortality, and if mortals could simply choose immortality, they all would.
“Earning immortality is harder than you think,” the alien voice corrected his unspoken thoughts with a touch of amusement, before adding, “It requires selflessness rather than vanity, self-sacrifice rather than greed.”
Leonidas shook his head doggedly in answer to the voice he did not dare contradict. He knew many humble men, good men, selfless men, and countless self-sacrificing wives and mothers, all of whom lay dead and buried now.
“Immortality lies beyond the grave,” the disembodied voice continued patiently, “but only if you make the right choice.”
Leonidas felt certain that he was encountering Kastor himself, the God to whom he had so often spoken in one-way conversations in the past. The God he had begged, promised, bargained with…. “What choice?” he asked cautiously.
“You must live to improve the condition of those in your care.”
Leonidas nodded; he could―would―strive to do that.
But then the voice came again. “And die for a good purpose.”
“What purpose?”
“You will know when the time comes.”
“But―” Leonidas started, but he broke off his thought. The temple was abruptly cold. A gust of wind rushed in and swirled around inside, knocking over a tripod and temporarily dimming the torches at the door.
“Leo?” Gorgo called anxiously. “Are you all right?”
Leonidas knew Kastor was gone. He turned and went back outside. He put his arm around Gorgo and pulled her closer to him, kissing the top of her head, in need of her warmth and softness.
“Is everything all right?” she asked again.
“Fine. I have decided I must speak with our allies about a common defense against Persia. I think I will start with Corinth.”
“May I come with you?” Gorgo asked, motivated by an irrational desire not to be separated from Leonidas for even a single month.
“Why not?” Leonidas answered. “We’ll take Kallias home and bring Simonidas along―to cheer him up and show him a little of the world.”
* Plutarch records this exchange without identifying by name the man who challenged Leonidas, saying he was “no better.”
CHAPTER 17
A SPARTAN ABROAD
IT WAS ALMOST A QUARTER-CENTURY SINCE Leonidas had first visited Corinth, and he could still vividly recall how fascinated and alienated he had been by the opulence, the noise, the gaudy colors…. Nor had he forgotten how intimidated he had been by the Corinthian polemarch Archilochos. On this first visit Leonidas had found him arrogant and ungrateful, though he had been a gracious host four years later.
Now he was a testy and aging man. His hair was completely white and thinning, his skin splotched and sagging. His finger joints were disfigured with knobs of excess calcium that made them claw-like. “I have resigned all my offices,” Archilochos informed his guest irritably. “I’ve had enough of all the bickering! I’m fed up with it!”
Leonidas glanced at Lychos, inwardly alarmed. He needed Corinth, and he had always counted on his friendship with Corinth’s leading citizen to help him get what he wanted. He asked anxiously, “Has Lychos succeeded you, then?”
“No, no,” father and son spoke at the same time. Lychos added, “I have no political ambitions,” while his father protested indignantly, “Damned fools don’t think a cripple can be a polemarch―though you witnessed with your own eyes what a fighter the boy is!”
“I owe my life to your son, sir,” Leonidas agreed earnestly.
“But they treat him like he was worthless! They―”
“Calm down, father! We can’t blame them for wanting a more vigorous polemarch.”
“But they could at least have elected you archon!” Archilochos countered indignantly.
“Could have, but the craftsmen complain we landowning merchants do not represent their interests. They say we favor agriculture over manufacturing, and that we ship owners make as much money carrying Athenian goods as Corinthian ones.” Turning to Leonidas, he explained, “The manufacturers feel the landowning merchant class has not done enough to keep Athenian products out of the Peloponnese―and they are now powerful.”
“We should never have given them the vote!” Archilochos fumed.
“Then they would have killed us all,” Lychos countered, with a sad smile and a glance at Leonidas.
“Some of these new citizens can’t even read or write!” Archilochos ranted.
“But they can calculate fast enough,” Lychos pointed out. “They know what’s happened to their profit margins in the last two decades.”
“But isn’t that attributable to Persian dominance in the Aegean?” Leonidas asked hopefully. He needed allies against Persia, not men angry with their own leaders.
“Not really,” Lychos answer
ed for his father. “Persian dominance in the Aegean has forced us to shift our trade to the west―above all, to Sicily. There are good profits to be made there, too, but our manufacturers are facing increasing competition from Athenian pottery and from Lacedaemonian bronze work.” He ended with a smile and a bow of his head to Leonidas.
“What if I told you the Persian emperor plans to invade the Peloponnese?” Leonidas asked.
Archilochos snorted and snapped, “Let him try!” but Lychos met Leonidas’ eyes and nodded. “I’ve heard similar rumors. They say he has built a fleet of a thousand ships.”
“A figure of speech!” Archilochos scoffed. “Comes from Homer.”
“He crushed the Egyptians,” Leonidas pointed out.
“They were never fighters,” Archilochos dismissed the Egyptians.
“You need to talk to Adeimantus, son of Ocytus,” Lychos answered Leonidas. “We can invite him to a symposium tomorrow or the next day.”
“I don’t like the man!” Archilochos told his son, frowning. “A petty man. A man whose hands smell of wet clay!”
“He made his money with tiles―virtually all the painted, glazed tiles you see on temples and houses in the city came from his factory. But he has the ear of the ordinary citizens.”
“He only has property because he divorced his wife to marry his cousin’s heiress,” Archilochos reminded his son.
“His means of obtaining property is not important. He has property and he was elected archon.”
“The man doesn’t know the bow from the stern on a trireme,” Archilochos scoffed.
“But he knows how to convince other men to man our triremes. You need to talk to him, Leo.”
Later, after his father had gone to bed and the youths had slipped out for a night on the town, Lychos suggested to Leonidas that they drink a last cup together. Leonidas knew Lychos was a moderate drinker and that this had nothing to do with more wine. He waited.
Lychos craned to watch his father’s progress from the door of the andron. Only after his father disappeared from the landing on the next floor did he turn his attention back to Leonidas and urge, “Go to Athens, Leo.”
“Athens? We’ve been at war with them four times in my lifetime.”
“Yes, but they will fight Persia, and they have forty thousand citizens. That’s more than Lacedaemon and Corinth together.”
“But only ten thousand hoplites,” Leonidas demurred.
“That’s still twice what Sparta or Corinth can field separately. Furthermore, Aegina’s aggression has provoked Athens into building more triremes. Last I heard, the Athenians had nearly sixty. That’s slightly more than Corinth has nowadays. Last but not least, they’ve struck silver―a huge amount of it. My elder boy, Agathon, wrote me about it. He says there’s more silver than anyone thought possible in a single lode. All Athens is arguing about what to do with it. There’s a risk they will simply divvy it up among themselves, squander it to make the hoi polloi happy. It would be far better spent to complete the walls they started to build around Piraeus before Marathon. Or to outfit hoplites at city expense, as Sparta does. If you tell them what you have told us, maybe they will wake up to the danger and stop thinking everything was decided seven years ago at Marathon.”
Leonidas did not have positive memories of Athens. He remembered it as crowded, chaotic, filthy, and unjust. He thought of how the Thespian scholar Ibanolis had been reduced to slavery simply for not paying his taxes, and he thought of the shabby treatment Miltiades had received from the Athenian assembly.
“You could stay with Aristides,” Lychos coaxed. “He is a good and honest man.”
“With Gorgo?” Leonidas questioned provocatively.
Lychos was taken aback. He would not dream of taking his wife out of the safety of her house, much less traveling with her to another city. It was one thing for Leonidas to bring her here; she had met him during his visit to Sparta, and Leonidas and he were old friends. Taking her to Athens would be entirely different. Cautiously he asked, “Are you sure you want to expose her to the risks and hazards of such a journey? Besides, Gorgo must be anxious to return to her children.”
“The children are in the agoge. Gorgo is curious about the rest of the world. If I go to Athens, she will accompany me, but I question the utility of such a trip. The Athenians are notorious for not listening to anyone. They do not even listen to their own leaders for very long. Someone once described them to me as a school of fish that changes direction in a split second for no apparent reason.”
Lychos laughed at the apt image, but then grew serious and urged, “Leo, Athens is the most important power in Hellas―after Lacedaemon, of course. If we want to have a chance against the might of Persia, we must fight together.”
Leonidas sighed. Whether he liked it or not, Lychos was right. “All right, I’ll go―eventually.”
Lychos shook his head. “You must reach Athens before the end of the Lenaia. That’s when they will hold an Assembly to vote on the silver. Right now the Athenians can think of nothing but theater, but thirty days from now they will start thinking about that silver, and everyone will want to get their hands on it. If you wait until next year or even next spring, it could be too late. I could put a ship at your disposal if you want.”
“No offense, but a Spartan king cannot travel to Athens aboard a Corinthian ship. It would make me look dependent at best, and ridiculous at worst. I’ll send for one of my own.”
When word reached the Spartan fleet at its home base of Gytheon that King Leonidas required a trireme in Corinth, the duty vessel was launched at once. Although this was not the sailing season and merchant vessels kept to the safety of their harbors (if they weren’t pulled up on the beach for repairs and maintenance), triremes were built to take any weather, and the trip along the coastline to Corinth entailed little danger. Because of a heavy east-northeast wind, however, the trireme turned west and set all sail, with the obvious intention of sailing westward around the Peloponnese.
Eurybiades watched it until it was out of sight, and then called his crew together. His crew now numbered two hundred men; for taking Sperchias and Bulis safely to Persia and back, Eurybiades had been rewarded with command of Sparta’s newest trireme, the Minotaur. In fact, he had been charged with overseeing the construction and with recruiting the crew, at Leonidas’ personal orders and expense. Eurybiades had chosen to use the shipyard at Skandia, and the keel had been laid down only six months earlier. The launch had taken place barely a fortnight ago, and the Minotaur had not yet completed her sea trials.
But Eurybiades was an ambitious and impatient man. He had already hired the bulk of his penteconter crew, and many of the other oarsmen were local men from Kythera. He was willing to take a chance. With the wind whipping his long black braids and trying to drag his himation right out of his hands, he put his proposal to the crew collected in a curious group around him.
“King Leonidas requires a trireme in Corinth. The duty vessel has departed, heading west. It will take two days by that route. If we can row through the Malean Straits, we can beat them by as much as a day and be the first ship to respond to the king’s summons.” Eurybiades did not need to say that rowing against the northeasterly gale would be exhausting; even the least experienced among them knew that. He chose not to stress that it would also be extremely dangerous. They would have a mountainous lee shore licking its chops the whole voyage north, and they would also be crossing the Gulf of Argos, the lair of Sparta’s most tenacious foe. While it was not likely that Argive warships would be prowling around at this time of year, they could not exclude the possibility. A prudent man would not suggest this voyage, not with an untried ship and crew.
Eurybiades was not prudent; he was driven by the desire to prove what he could do. It was the kind of competitive instinct that drove other men to athletic feats or to climb mountains or explore the unknown. But Eurybiades also knew that he could achieve nothing with an unwilling or frightened crew. He knew that he had to sw
eep them up in his own enthusiasm. With his old crew, that would have been no problem. Even now, his helmsman of nearly a decade was asking rhetorically with a deep growl, “Why are we wasting time? Let’s launch the bloody boat.”
But Eurybiades wasn’t worried about the men from his penteconter, nor about the perioikoi deck hands and marines. They would not bear the brunt of the hardships. It was the 170 men who manned the oars who had to be willing to fight a running gale. And more than half these men were helots.
Eurybiades had initially concentrated his recruiting on Kythera, talking to the sons of fishermen, men often too poor (after surrendering half their catch to their masters) to support a family. But he had not found nearly enough men to man a trireme, so the remaining oar-banks had been filled with country lads who streamed down to Boiai, where he put in with a ship still smelling like a lumberyard and nearly one hundred vacancies at the oars.
Eurybiades focused on Hierox, his bosun or rowing master, the keleustes. Hierox was a burly man with a full black beard that looked permanently salt-soaked. He too was a Kytheran, a perioikoi who had kicked around on foreign ships for half a lifetime before attaching himself to Eurybiades like a barnacle. They had been inseparable ever since, a team that could make even a half-rotten penteconter a dangerous pirate with the help of marines like Prokles.
To this man had fallen the main responsibility for sorting the wheat from the chaff as the country bumpkins, still stinking of the barnyard and literally unable to tell stem from stern, streamed in looking for a berth. To him had fallen the even more difficult task of trying to make seamen of these farm lads. Eurybiades knew that this man would sail into Hades itself with him―but only if he thought the crew was up to it. Eurybiades found himself regretting his own impulsiveness. He should have consulted Hierox first.
Hierox seemed to be thinking the proposition through carefully. He looked up, sniffed the wind, and squinted at the breakers, which were rolling into the bay in stately rows to dissolve with a roar and hiss on the long beach. Then at last he asked dubiously, “What happens once we reach Corinth?”
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