I smiled – winningly, I hope. ‘Much the same way we carried the day at Marathon,’ I said. ‘Courage, and the love of the gods.’
He nodded. ‘That’s well said – piety like yours is rarer in these godless days, my friend. But – that was a raid. A punitive expedition. Men say that if the Great King comes, he’ll have a million men. On our best day, Athens can raise fifteen thousand hoplites.’
I nodded. ‘Sparta can bring twice that, with her allies. Thebes the same again, and Corinth and Argos the same again. With Athens as allies, we’ll match anything Persia can get here.’ I waved my hands. ‘Greece is not Asia. They will have real trouble feeding and watering a giant army.’
He looked back at our daughters, riding side by side. ‘Perhaps. Perhaps age makes cowards of us. But listen, my lord. Why not send the earth and water? We submit. Persia sends a satrap. So?’ He shrugged. ‘No virgins are raped.’ He looked me right in the eye. ‘No boys die on spear points.’ Then he flushed, and looked back at Brasidas, who was close enough to hear him. ‘I’m sure I sound like a fearful coward to you, sir.’
Brasidas shrugged. ‘No man of Marathon is a coward to me, sir. But – I agree.’ Brasidas looked at me and had the good grace to flash a wry smile. ‘I do not understand, myself, why we must fight. Mere lip-service may suffice.’
‘This from a Spartan!’ my new friend said, and slapped his thigh.
Brasidas raised an eyebrow. ‘I am a Plataean, now.’
I nodded. ‘I can tell – you talk more.’
The priestesses of Brauron were not like other Greek women I knew. They were neither pretty nor ugly – in fact, the dozen I met ran a full gamut of feminine types – but they all had the air of command. Because of my time with the Keltoi, I recognised that they were free. They did not see me as husband, father or lord. But as a peer. Or even less. Interesting.
Sittonax said he found the priestesses to be the most interesting women he’d met in Greece, and one of the senior priestesses invited him to dinner. But not me – which was fine. I saw my daughter’s quarters, which were very like a boy’s military camp on Crete – in fact, my Spartan’s eyebrows shot up and later he said it was like a politer Agoge for girls. And it was.
Euphonia had two advantages – her open disposition, which made friends easily, and Peisander’s daughter Hermione, who was well known, from just across the mountain. I felt that I left my little daughter in good hands. But that night, riding back to a small inn kept for parents, I felt as if I’d just left Briseis. I felt as if a little hole had been ripped in my heart. I had only had a daughter for one single month.
If you are expecting me to talk about how I rescued Aristides from ostracism, I’m sorry to say I did not. Phrynicus and Peisander shared only one political issue – they both detested the ostracism. I kept them to that subject all the way back across the plains of Attica, but it was increasingly clear to me that my friend was doomed.
Despite being in favour of the war with Persia, Aristides fought the creation of a large and powerful Athenian fleet tooth and nail, rising every day in the assembly to rally the old families and the aristocrats against Themistocles. Men said he planned to take the tyranny to stop the democrats.
Men like Peisander thought that would be a fine thing.
We stayed another night with the aristocrat, and then Phrynicus and I and his charming wife rode slowly down towards the sea, crossed the ridges until we could see the magnificent acropolis rising in the distance, and then down again into the city.
‘Themistocles wants to build walls,’ he said.
His wife rolled her eyes.
‘He has been a good friend to us!’ Phrynicus insisted.
‘As long as you write his panegyrics,’ she commented. She smiled at me. ‘He is caught in the middle. He was friends as a boy with both.’
‘You know that when Themistocles was a boy, he was not allowed into the main gymnasium because his mother was foreign,’ Phrynicus said. ‘So he took to exercising at a small palaestra just outside the old walls by the statue of Herakles. More and more of us went there with him, until it turned out we’d basically taken all the students out of the main gymnasium.’ Phrynicus shot me his wry smile. ‘I think we gave him a taste of power and he’s never looked back.’
‘And Aristides was one of the boys who saw him shut out of the aristocratic gymnasium?’ I asked.
Phrynicus wrinkled his nose. ‘Can you imagine Aristides the Just doing any such thing? But they’ve always been rivals. Rivals for girls and sometimes boys, rivals for commands. Aristides is a far better soldier. Themistocles is a better orator and, frankly, sees farther ahead. Aristides is more honourable. Themistocles is more capable of making the hard decisions. Aristides is a better negotiator.’ He rolled his right hand back and forth as he read off this litany.
‘Together, they make one perfect man?’ I asked.
Phrynicus’s wife snorted.
I went and lived with Paramanos, who was very prosperous and had a fine house in Piraeus, with a dozen slaves and sixteen rooms in two storeys – three wings around a tiled courtyard, very elegant. I didn’t recognise it at the time, but my greatest disappointment in Plataea had been that Hermogenes and I were no longer close friends. There was some wall between us – and I blamed silver and fame.
I had no such reserve with Paramanos, and that was all the odder, as we had not started friends and, in fact, we had been closer to allies than philoi. He’d been my slave and then my freedman – helmsman in my ship, and then sub-captain. Now, as a rich Athenian merchant – Miltiades had arranged citizenship for him and his Cyrenian-born daughter – we were peers.
Paramanos had purchased the contract of a beautiful young hetaera – five years. He confessed to me in private that he would probably offer her marriage. She was younger and, like Gorgo and the priestesses at Brauron, very open. She sat in a chair while we dined, made jokes both coarse and clever, and played. She also told Paramanos when he had had too much to drink and laid out for him what he needed to do to help his daughter along towards her wedding.
I liked her. We flirted and debated some philosophy and she fairly doted on me when I said that I had known Heraklitus. She was, for a woman, very well read – she was better educated than some Athenian men.
But I digress.
I had to sail to Sparta to pick up my charges, and time was of the essence because I needed good sailing weather. But – obedient to my orders – none of my ships were available. Storm Cutter and Lydia were both running small cargoes. Paramanos’s Black Raven had once been my ship – but it was Paramanos’s ship now, and he regularly carried silver to the Ionians and brought back dyed wool – an excellent trade for a fast, well-armed ship.
So I had days to wait, and I politicked for Aristides. I went up to the city from Piraeus and visited the assembly. Oh – I was a citizen of Athens. I can’t remember whether I’ve said, but after Marathon, Athens had made me – and a dozen other Plataeans including my brother-in-law – Athenian citizens. Perhaps the finest thing was that they had the priestess of Athena Nike pray every morning for the ‘City of Green Plataea’. I know, because I so swelled with pride when I learned this that I rose the next morning in the dark and walked up to the town. I was the only worshipper in the temple – nothing so fine as what is now planned. Afterwards, an acolyte came and took my donation.
‘Are you by any chance a Plataean?’ he asked, and I grinned and admitted I was. He was delighted.
As I left the little temple, I noted that I was being followed. I did nothing about it – I went down the other side of the acropolis, past the festival site, and walked into the area where the rich had their homes – like a little parkland in the city. My two followers moved from wall corner to wall corner. If they had simply strolled, they’d have been much harder to spot.
I was alone – rare for me, but I hadn’t wanted Brasidas or Alexandros or any of the others at my shoulder in temple. So I moved as if unaware of my tail, and went to
Aristides’ house.
We embraced, but we’d just been together for two weeks, and Jocasta gave my hand a squeeze – like a massive embrace from that very proper aristocratic lady. I heard it all over again, but Aristides was resigned and clearly was working to bring Jocasta to this point of view. I had never seen open discord between them, but Jocasta was sufficiently moved to disagree – flatly – with her husband in front of a third party. Aristides looked hurt.
I pretended not to be there.
Eventually, Jocasta walked away to see to a servant’s injury. Aristides waited until we could hear her bare feet on the marble of the foyer, and then he leaned close.
‘I have to say this, my friend. Themistocles and I are not friends – but I have accepted this exile. I will go with you to the Great King. Athens cannot be seen to send an ambassador. But a man in exile – a conservative?’ He nodded.
And I understood.
It had always seemed odd to me that, whatever their differences, these two leaders of the resistance party were at loggerheads. I had smelled the rat, but I hadn’t come to the correct conclusion.
‘You should tell Jocasta,’ I said. ‘She keeps all your other secrets.’
I said it deadpan, and he, being Aristides the prig, didn’t find it funny. But I did.
Eventually, I left, being unwilling to invite myself to dinner. I’d had three cups of wine and I wore no weapon, and so I picked up one of Aristides’ sticks by the door and flourished it at him. ‘I need to borrow one,’ I said.
‘He never leaves home with them,’ Jocasta said. ‘But every time he visits our farms outside the walls, he walks home with a new one.’
‘I like them!’ Aristides said ruefully.
You might think that, as one of the richest men in the world, Aristides could be allowed to own as many walking staffs as he liked – but if you think that, you’ve never been married.
They were waiting in the near-dark, just north of Aristides’ house, and they had knives.
I slipped through Aristides’ house as silently as a thief and left by the back gate, which Jocasta held for me while looking as if she doubted my sanity.
I poured a little oil on the fire by saying, ‘Your husband has something to tell you,’ and once out through the back gate I walked through the alley – used only by slaves and tradesmen – with twelve-foot stone walls towering over me on either side. It was almost dark.
I lay down at the corner and looked around it at ground level. That’s how I know there were four of them, all well armed. I assumed they were sent by bloody Cleitus, of the Alcmaeonidae. I didn’t feel like fighting three younger men, and besides, I didn’t need to fight them.
I slipped across the alley and vanished into the sacred precinct of the unfinished temple of Olympian Zeus. The Pisistradae had started it and left the drums for the columns lying around like children’s toys. Young couples came to . . . well, to use the columns. I was treated to more than my share of erotic breathing as I crossed the space, and emerged on the east slope of the acropolis, which I skirted. Twice I doubled back in the dense street grid, and I sat in one of the fountain houses, watching my back trail. Things you learn as a slave stay with you for life.
That night I ate with Paramanos and my people – and with Giorgios and Nicolas, returned from their pilgrimage. Next day I attended the Athenian assembly and voted against ostracism for Aristides.
We lost. Aristides was exiled for ten years.
His exile did not include forfeiture of any property – his wife could continue to live on the east slope of the acropolis and his managers could continue to run his farms. By Athenian standards, it was lenient, if you left out the crushing unfairness of it. The problem was that men like Aristides had had the habit of making themselves tyrants for more than a hundred years. Aristides had it all – money, good looks, a war record, and oratory skills. I suspect that, even if he had not been chosen as the secret ambassador, he would have had to go. Perhaps the secret mission to the Great King was a sop.
Frankly, Athenian politics always appals me. They punish the best men and raise fools.
Mind you, in the same assembly, I voted in favour of spending the year’s excess from the silver mines on building new triremes – the second or third year they’d done that. I must have been one of the few men in that assembly to vote that way – against ostracism, in favour of the fleet. Most Athenians saw these as conflicting interests, because they were too close to the problems.
Well.
Late that afternoon, Lydia swept into Piraeus with a hull full of hides and Ionian wine, and the next morning I had her laded with white Athenian leather, fine bronze wares and pottery. I arranged a farewell dinner with Phrynicus, and sailed away west, for Sparta.
I don’t remember anything about the sea voyage. I suspect it was fraught with the usual perils and probably had as many irritated rowers and magnificent dolphins as every other trip across the Aegean, but what I remember is Sparta itself.
I suspect that most people do not imagine Sparta as beautiful; Athens is beautiful – she has the acropolis and two hundred years of magnificent architecture. Plataea is beautiful because of Kitharon and because of the green fields that stretch away, the visible signs of Demeter’s blessing to man and Hera’s blessing to Green Plataea.
Sparta is also beautiful. Did she not give birth to Helen? And are not the women of Lacedaemon all Helen’s daughters? High up the vale, with mountains rising on either hand, the carpet of olive trees rolling across the valley – Sparta has a unique wonder.
But I cannot abide the helots. Or rather, the Spartans themselves. On every hand in Sparta, one sees them – and they are somehow more wretched than slaves in Athens or Plataea. Perhaps that is merely my own prejudice, but few helots are ever freed, and the enslavement is racial, not by chance or war-capture. Many have been slaves for so many generations that they think their state is natural – as do their masters. I admire Sparta for many things – but the enslavement of the helots casts a shadow, and that shadow, to me, is at the core of who they are.
I left Brasidas on the ship with Sekla. Spartans are less forgiving than other Greeks in matters of skin colour. I took only Alexandros and Hector, and we purchased horses by the beach at Gytheio where Lydia was selling her wares. When we came in stern first, there were a pair of Carthaginian triremes on the beach to trade, and two more over by the Migonion. But they wanted nothing more from us than to buy our goods, and there was not a sign of Dagon. I rode north to Sparta with no greater concern than to pick up my passengers and make haste before the autumn storms hit.
We entered the city on the main road, as well paved as the Panathenaic way, and rode past the temple of the Dioscuri, which was every bit as elegant as anything in Athens – the local stone lent itself to the remarkable quality of the Peloponnesian sunshine. It was high summer, and just before midday, when most Spartan citizens rested in the shade, and even slaves seemed to dart from shadow to shadow. The three of us wore straw hats with brims so wide we seemed to be in tents.
The agora was as busy as any in Greece – the goods unloaded on the beach at Gytheio were already on sale in the capital. In the agora, the midday sun was ignored – there were hundreds of men and women moving about, and long awnings. It was here that I saw the main difference between Sparta and Athens. Sparta has magnificent temples but too little shade, and Spartans are too proud to pretend to need a stoa. In fact, I saw mostly helots sitting under the old oak trees that ringed the agora. Citizens stood proudly in the sun, as if daring Helios to do his worst.
I wore a big hat.
We dismounted at the edge of the agora, and it was there that I got my first taste of helot life. An adolescent Spartiate – probably in the last years of the Agoge – demanded water from a helot woman, and when he didn’t get it fast enough, he said, ‘Obey, bitch,’ and struck her.
Instead of screaming for help, she cringed away and fetched him water.
Perhaps it was not a representative
incident. Perhaps I misjudge them.
At any rate, we asked directions.
If I expected a palace for the two kings, I was wrong. The kings live well – they have the kind of staff one associates with the richest Athenians. But their homes are private houses, and Leonidas lived in a beautiful house with three wings around a courtyard with its own olive tree and a small fountain. The courtyard had three arcades of columns, one on each side, for shade. A wall and a set of barracks for slaves, and a small warehouse, took up the fourth side of the complex.
We were ushered in by a helot butler, and brought into the courtyard. There we were served a marvellous water, full of bubbles from some god-touched spring. The helots served Hector as freely as they served Alexandros and me.
Alexandros smiled at Hector. ‘I think you are in for an easy few days.’
I laughed. ‘Am I such a hard master? But perhaps we could send him to the Agoge.’
Another helot came in. ‘Masters, the Lady Gorgo wishes you to know that she will join you directly.’
Indeed, the lady herself followed hard on the slave’s message. She was dressed simply, in a long yellow chiton pinned in the Dorian manner. She wore a girdle of gold tied with a Herakles knot and wore a diadem in her hair.
‘Ah, Helen,’ I said. I said it lightly.
Her eyes crossed mine the way a man’s do when he is ready to draw a weapon.
‘In Sparta, no woman is ever compared to Helen,’ she said. She nodded agreeably. ‘Pardon me. Your words took me aback, and I should have nothing for you but praise. The king is at exercise and will join us soon, as will some of your other friends here.’ She nodded pleasantly enough to Alexandros and to young Hector.
I intervened to make introductions. ‘My lady, this is my captain of marines, Alexandros, a gentleman of Plataea, and this is my hypaspist, Hector, son of Anarchos, now also a citizen of Plataea.’
Long War 04 - The Great King Page 20