Salamis

The Wedding

The trip home had adventures of its own and I will only mention a few. We took food in Ephesus — stripped it from a town still unaware how few we were. In fact, I confess that we stripped Diomedes’ palace and left his wife and children destitute — but un-raped and alive. We stripped the house of Hipponax, and took aboard a number of family servants and slaves. And then we sailed into a setting sun and landed a few hours later, after heavy rowing, on the beaches of Chios. Before night fell, Harpagos had gone to his sister, who looked at him dry-eyed.

‘He lived longer than I expected,’ she said. ‘So have you.’

She was never one for soft words.

And when we’d arranged for his funeral pyre, and we walked away, Briseis — her head wrapped in a bandage — took my hand in the darkness.

‘She loves you,’ Briseis said.

I shook my head. ‘I have been the death of her brother, her husband and her cousin,’ I said. ‘She loved me once.’

Briseis shrugged. ‘It is no easy thing, being the lover of a hero.’

I lacked the strength to laugh. But I caught her shoulders and kissed her.

‘It is no easy thing, to be the lover of Briseis,’ I said.

She broke off our kiss. ‘Why should it be easy?’ she asked. ‘Why should anything good be easy?’

And when I tried to be insistent in my advances, she put a hand on my chest and pushed hard.

‘Marry me,’ she said. ‘Until then, no.’ She laughed at me, in the darkness. ‘Listen, Achilles. My head looks like the Gorgon and my courses are on me, and I have never desired a man more, or less, at the same time. Wait and be a groom so that I may, once more, be a bride. I swear, who has been Aphrodite’s tool, that I will never know another man. Indeed, long and long have I awaited this day.’

I knelt. ‘Lady, I have a wedding prepared in far Hermione.’

She laughed. ‘What barbarous place is that? Is it near Plataea?’

‘Oh, my love, Plataea is destroyed by the Great King. Hermione is a town in the Peloponnese that has taken in the survivors.’ I could hear my crew, drinking wine on the beach. I didn’t like the sound of the wind. The time of storms was upon us — it was late for anyone to sail the ocean.

‘And you? Are you now destitute?’ she asked.

I sat on a rock and dragged her down beside me. ‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘I won’t really know for weeks and perhaps longer. Until I see how many of my ships survived the autumn.’

She nodded. The moon was high and I could see the signs of age on her face.

Not that I cared.

‘I was a fool,’ she said. ‘I was a fool to aim at worldly power when I might have spent my youth with you.’ She looked me in the eye and shrugged. ‘But we are what we are. I never wanted home and hearth. I wanted to sail the earth and sea as my brother did.’ She shrugged.

‘Where are your sons?’ I asked her.

She leaned closer to me. A chill wind blew across the sand. ‘They went as horsemen with the army, thanks to Artaphernes. My husband, not the viper his son.’

I nodded. I had a hard time imagining that — if they were indeed of my blood — they loved horses.

‘I was a fool,’ I said. ‘To want the life of the spear and ship when I could have been a bronze-smith in a shop, and been happy. But only with you.’

We sat in silence.

‘We are not so old,’ Briseis said. ‘I almost feel I might be beautiful, in the right lighting.’

I laughed. ‘Lady of my heart, truly, I never fought better than I fought today. So I am young in the midst of being old, and I invite you to join me. Tomorrow, the aches and pains-’

‘Hands off, improvident suitor!’ she said, quoting Homer. She leapt up. ‘My mother warned me about boys like you,’ she said. ‘Don’t follow me.’

And she walked off into the darkness.

And I drank wine with my people and Archilogos, who I found drinking with Seckla, of all people.

Early the next morning, Harpagos’s funeral pyre lit the dawn and we shared wine and poured more on the fire. And as if the fire was a beacon, Artemisia’s ships joined us on the beach of Chios one by one — the Red King, and her own swift ship. Archilogos we already had by us.

We met them on the beach. I was crowned with laurel from the funeral, clad only in a himation, without arms, and Brasidas the same. But the rest of our marines — thirty of them, at least — were full armed.

Artemisia was not in armour either. She was dressed like a slightly outlandish matron, in purple and saffron peplos and chlamys, and her clothing was beautifully embroidered, with her magnificent red hair as an ornament, so that one could easily see she was a queen. And she, despite being tall, floated over the sand and didn’t seem to stumble or wallow as many of the rest of us did.

Briseis was by me. She was, of course, a priestess of Aphrodite, and Harpagos, like many men of Chios, was a devotee and an initiate, so that Briseis had said the rites and sung the hymns. She was very plainly dressed in a dark chiton, long and slim as a dark flame, with a single stripe of brightest white.

We all came together from our opposite ends of the beach.

I had an olive branch, as did the Red King, for all that he was in full armour and had a sword on.

‘I have your son,’ I said.

‘And I yours,’ Artemisia said.

But she was looking at Briseis.

It struck me — in a moment of wonder — that they must know each other, as they were of an age, from the same social class, and from cities not so very far apart.

Briseis laughed. ‘Artemisia!’ she cried. ‘You!’

She turned to me. ‘We were at Sappho’s school together as girls,’ she said.

And the other woman shook her head. ‘The circle of the world seems vast,’ she said. ‘And yet, the compass sometimes seems very small.’

I had her son and his military tutor brought down the beach. ‘I release your son and his ship as well,’ I said. ‘And I have done better than my part of the bargain. I include two sons of Xerxes I found on the beach at Ephesus.’

To be fair, Seckla took them prisoner while Brasidas and I were racing up the hill.

The Queen of Halicarnassus laughed like a man and kissed both my cheeks.

‘You are the most honest Greek I have ever met,’ she said.

‘Foolish, more like,’ the Red King said. He had my son Hipponax by the elbow and he gave him a gentle shove. ‘I hope, Plataean, when next we meet, that we do not have all these women and children between us.’

I looked at him. His old-fashioned Corinthian helmet gave me little of his face. ‘Are we enemies?’ I asked. ‘Do you owe me some vengeance?’

He laughed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But men say you are the best warrior of the Greeks. You are too old to hold that title. I will strip it from your dead hand.’ He bowed. ‘Do not think I do not honour you, Arimnestos of Plataea. But I will be the best spear in the world.’

He nodded, helmet still firmly on his head, turned, and stalked away with a dozen scarlet marines at his back.

As we prepared to leave the beach at Chios, a fishing smack brought us word that Artaphernes, son of Artaphernes, had come into Ephesus with a regiment of Lydian cavalry and found us gone. The fisherman told us that Artaphernes rode his horse into the sea, looking towards Chios, and cursed my name.

It’s good for men to know who you are. Powerful enemies show that you haven’t wasted your life, don’t they?

The next evening found us on the beach at Tenos. Now, you may recall that the ships of Tenos came over to us just before the fight at Salamis and the island had declared for the League of Corinth. So we found Megakles safe and happy enough, with a mountain of food ready to serve out to my oarsmen.

We half-emptied the hull and ate ourselves to repletion, and then weathered a nasty day of squall after squall to pass up the west coast of Andros where we could see much of the League fleet on the beach.

I had no temptation to land and place myself at Themistocles’ service. Listen — he may have been the greatest of the Greeks, or a traitor. But I could not trust him, and it was clear to me that, having beaten the Great King, he would now go from hubris to hubris.

I wanted no part in the loot of Andros. The island was poor sand anyway. But Moire and Harpagos’s nephew Ion felt differently, and I saluted them and sent them on their way to join the League fleet. Naiad surprised us by declaring that they would winter with the Greek fleet, if we could feed them, and we could.

And Briseis had moved to her brother’s ship. To say I burned for her is not to do justice.

My dreams were dark, though I had Briseis, and Archilogos warmed to me, day by day. Leukas was alive, and far from dead.

I should have been with the gods — the victory, the pursuit, the accomplishment of the dream of a lifetime.

Instead, for the whole of the voyage home, I was haunted by the dreams of the past, the deaths of those I’d loved and hated. I think I feared more on the voyage home than the voyage out. A day of dark skies and low squalls all but unmanned me, so sure was I that the gods would now take from me what they had briefly granted.

That is, all too often, the way of the gods. Is it not?

Megalos, again. The last time that autumn, and my squadron limped in after a long day skirmishing with Poseidon’s winds. No man sang or drank wine on the beach that day — we fell into dreamless sleep, too tired to do more than pour libations and fall on straw. And in the morning, sore from days of rowing, we pointed our bows straight into a strong wind — and pulled.

But towards the hour when a man goes to the agora to see his friends, the winds relented of their torments and we got a light breeze from the north — cold as a woman’s refusal, but gentle enough that we chose to raise sail and run slantwise, south by west, across it. And gentle as that wind was, it lasted the day and saw us to Aegina — and the next dawn it waited for us, and wafted us, without another thought of ugly death, across the Aegean Sea to Hermione.

And there, in that lovely town which rises over a promontory with beaches facing two ways, like a proper port, I saw Athena Nike beached, high above the water. And somehow, seeing Aristides’ ship there, I knew that now I could cease to worry, at least for a little while.

We were a tired crew of Argonauts when, ship-by-ship, we landed on that beach. It seemed a third of the fleet was there: Cimon’s Ajax and a dozen others I knew, and even Xanthippus’s Horse Tamer. But we landed, and from pride I landed last, allowing each of my captains to pick his place and run his stern up the beach. It was smartly done and quite a crowd gathered. They cheered, by the gods — cheer on cheer carrying out over the water, especially when they saw Archilogos’s ship, which of course they assumed was a capture.

And there was Aristides — and there Jocasta. There Penelope. There was Hermogenes, smiling as if he’d just won the laurel in a contest, and Styges and Teucer and a dozen other Plataeans. There was Hector, and, further along the beach, Cleitus, with his wife and daughter, and my own steward, Eugenios, and my daughter Euphonia.

Many times in my life, coming home has had its own perils. Or I have brought the perils home with me.

But in Hermione, which was temporarily Plataea too, and Athens as well, I landed to the cheers of my kin and friends. I leaped over the stern to the beach, and Simonides my cousin embraced Achilles his brother — and then embraced me.

I pulled away to lift my arms. Above me, Briseis looked over my head at a thousand people or more.

She smiled and looked down at me. And jumped into my arms with the trust of many years, and I put her on the sand without, I hope, a grunt.

By my shoulder, Jocasta said, ‘And this is Briseis, I make little doubt.’

I had long wondered how she might greet the woman of my dreams, who was so much her opposite — so much more like Gorgo of Sparta.

She folded her in an embrace. ‘Are you marrying him?’ she asked.

Briseis’s eyes were too bright for a mortal woman, and her look at me held too much meaning for words. ‘I cannot resist him,’ she said.

Jocasta took her hand. ‘Then we have a great deal to do,’ she said.

And my daughter came. She looked at Briseis — and took her hand and kissed it.

And my Briseis, hard as steel, burst into tears.

A few paces away Hipponax leapt from the stern of Moire’s ship. He reached for Heliodora, but she swayed like a reed and ran.

Despite his armour, he gave chase.

They were both laughing.

Hector’s Iris stood at the back of the crowd shyly. I think she wondered if he really wanted her — if, indeed, he meant the promise he’d made. I can read men, and sometimes women, and I saw her there, and the look in her eyes.

But Hector was a much greater man than his father Anarchos, and he stood on the stern of his ship, his armour burning in the sun, until he saw her. And then he leaped into the shallows and ran at her as if he was charging a line of Median spearmen.

And then she laughed from joy, and we were home.

Leukas was the last man off the ship. He didn’t leap, and a dozen of us competed to help him onto the sand.

He knelt and kissed the beach. ‘I never expected to reach here alive,’ he admitted.

Brasidas nodded. ‘Me neither,’ he said. ‘This is not the ending I had imagined for any of us.’

Styges had to hear of Idomeneus’s end — and had to weep. Many other wives came down to that beach, hoping against hope, and were disappointed. No homecoming of warriors is unmarred by this reality, but our losses might have been so much the worse — I had to content myself with that. Because amidst my happiness I was aware that I had achieved fame, victory, and the woman I loved by the shields and spears of my friends, and I had left many of them face down in the sands of time. They did not haunt me every day, but they certainly had, the last week before landing. Briseis may have brought her own dowry of silver and gold, but her bride price was paid in spears, bronze, iron and blood.

And Brasidas. I think that night he was very close to the edge.

We had a house — Eugenios had it prepared, and it was small, but so was Hermione. It had a bridal chamber, and I slept on a mat on the floor so as not to ruin the beauty of the place before the big day. But it had a beautiful garden, and that night — a few days before my wedding — I sat with Brasidas, a cup of wine, and the stars of autumn. I confess, men are difficult beasts. I wanted to be celebrating victory with Aristides, and bathing in Jocasta’s good cheer, and dandling my daughter on my knee — and watching Briseis.

But I was drinking in the darkness with Brasidas, because he was my friend, and he was in pain.

‘I thought I’d be dead,’ he said suddenly. It was such an uncharacteristic thing for him to say.

I shook my head.

‘Xerxes is beaten and I am alive,’ Brasidas said. He drank again, and I realised that, for the first time since I had known him, he was drunk.

I sat back — we were sitting, not reclining. The house had but one kline, and that had a special purpose.

‘Xerxes is not beaten,’ I said. ‘If I understand Aristides, Mardonius has withdrawn to Thessaly, but he’ll be back.’

‘Xerxes has run away,’ Brasidas said thickly. ‘Leonidas is dead. Demaratus will never return.’ His dark eyes were like spears in the starlight. ‘I will never be avenged.’

I didn’t know what he was avenging, and it didn’t seem the time to ask.

‘Revenge is for fools,’ I said. ‘Take a wife and be happy.’

Brasidas laughed. It was not hollow, or bitter, but real mirth. ‘Arimnestos,’ he said. ‘Of all men, can you see me with a farm and wife?’

‘Yes,’ I said with perfect honesty. ‘We are Greeks, not Medes. We have more music than the song of the spear and the hymn of woeful Ares. There is another loom beside the beat of spear on spear, or oar on oar.’

Brasidas’s head snapped round. ‘You know,’ he said after a sip of wine, ‘only you could say that. Killer of Men. Spear of the West. You have the world fame, and yet you are a bronze-smith and a farmer.’

I raised my cup and poured a libation to my own dead — those I’d slain, and those who’d followed me and died.

‘Listen, Brasidas,’ I said. ‘Every oarsman at Salamis carried a spear. No man is the “Spear of the West”, and every man, every thetes with his cushion, is a Killer of Men. This is not Sparta. And in time — I’m sorry — but Sparta’s dream of war will have to change.’

Brasidas stared long into the darkness. So much darkness. I knew it was there.

Then he raised his head. ‘Perhaps I must truly become a Plataean,’ he said.

And several amphorae later, he said, ‘Do you think the Queen of Halicarnassus is single?’

We laughed, and I knew he would live. He had been to the edge and walked away.

That’s how it is. I hope none of the rest of you ever see that darkness. But if you do — find a friend. It is a like a fight: and fights are better fought in the phalanx than alone.

I spent the next day trying to find a chariot.

Hah! It’s the turn of all the kore — the maidens — to know what I’m talking about. After nights of sailing tackle, ship design, aspides and swords, finally, I’ve reached something that interests my own thugater.

Ouch!

You will give your husband-to-be quite an image of yourself, my dear, if you show so much temper in public.

In good families, at least in Attica and in Plataea, you need a chariot for a wedding.

Hermione is a small town — a very pretty one, but small — and not much given to display. But eventually a chariot was found and Hermogenes and Styges and Tiraesias and I scandalised the whole town by stripping naked, taking over a forge and a wood shop, and rebuilding the ruin of a chariot from the wheels to the pole. I don’t think the little vehicle had been used in fifty years. The tyres were leather and the wheels had broken spokes, and the body had long since fallen to tatters.

We worked while a rhapsode from Thespiae told us the Iliad, and it wasn’t work, it was holiday. Our Plataean silversmith melted down some old jewellery of mine to make decorations and a pair of leather workers made headstalls and reins while Cimon, perhaps the best cavalryman in Athens, went across the ridge to buy me a pair of colts that men said were the prettiest in Attica. Jocasta came in with Penelope and Euphonia several times an hour to ask my opinion on some things about which I knew nothing, like flowers. I don’t think, in a thousand questions, that I gave a satisfactory answer to more than ten.

But they were planning my wedding, and they needed my permission.

Archilogos had a house, arranged by Eugenios, who, like the genius he was, had assumed my raid would be successful, and had further assumed that my bride would wish a traditional wedding. May all the gods bless you, Eugenios!

Now the manner of a wedding among the aristocratic classes is this: first, there is a proclamation of engagement. For many people, and this is true throughout Attica and even Boeotia, the engagement is the wedding, and many a baby born in the best families can count back its nine months to the night of the parents’ engagement. But it is a familial ceremony, and often done in the bride’s home, although sometimes the groom’s. The wedding itself, on the other hand, marks the day that the woman goes to live in the man’s house, and is a much more public, riotous, and wine-soaked affair.

My first wedding, to Euphonia, my beloved honey-haired girl, had included both the engagement and the wedding, but the final acts of the wedding had been somewhat lacklustre, as she had come over the mountains to Plataea and her family had not followed.

As an aside, her father, Aleitus, was in Hermione and asked, with his beautiful manners, to be included in the wedding, as family. And of course, weddings were supposed to be for young people, not old men like me. I was about to turn thirty-six. Briseis was one year younger, an old matron of thirty-five with two grown sons.

So I asked Aleitus to take the place of my father, and I asked Simonides and his boys to stand with me, alongside my friends.

I need to mention that in one ceremony, I was to wed Briseis, Hector was to wed Iris, and Hipponax to wed Heliodora. I told my boys that they had to find their own chariots.

Well.

I remember little of that week in Hermione, except that it was beautiful. There were tears — we had a ceremony of remembrance for many who fell at Salamis, including Idomeneus. But for the most part, we had happy work and the memory of a great victory; we, as a people, had survived hardship, and we were unbowed. My ships rode at anchor or were overturned on the beach, and in fact, after we’d forged bronze tyres and sweated them over new-cut wheels (made by a professional, let me add) and cut and painted a magnificent Tyrian-dyed cover for the cab of the chariot, and gilded it, and reassembled the whole — after we’d done all that, and then repeated our triumph for Hector and for Hipponax — of course I helped them with their chariots! — then we bought a cargo of pinewood from Arcadia and we built ship sheds on the promontory below the temple and set our fighting ships to dry.

On Hermoú, the day of the week named for Hermes, patron of the city, we went to the temple of Poseidon on the headland. The engyesis was a major event. Cleitus spoke at length, praising me — how he enjoyed that — and my son Hipponax. And Xanthippus — I must give the man his due — stood up for his daughter like a gentleman, and his wife Agariste, who quite clearly disapproved of whatever union had begot Iris, nonetheless did her proud, with linens and wools, a loom, and a fine wagonload of household goods. Xanthippus spoke eloquently about the need to rebuild in the aftermath of the war and that the rebuilding was beginning even then, in exile, in the Peloponnese.

Aleitus, representing my father, and Simonides, gave speeches welcoming their family into ours, so to speak. Simonides even went so far as to make a joke about the destruction of our cities, and the houses to which these brides would be carried.

Men laughed. That’s how confident we had become that we would triumph. It was funny: we were exiles, and our cities destroyed, our temples all thrown down. Our ships outside on the beaches of Pron and on the waves — our wooden walls — were all the fortune any of us had.

The girls, Iris and Heliodora, both fifteen, and Briseis, at thirty-five still the most beautiful — wore veils of fine Egyptian linen in pure white and never pulled them back, although they were flimsy enough to see through. Briseis wore a fine chiton of dark blue, with a woven edge in a startling Persian pattern in red, white, and black, and she wore a chlamys across her shoulders leaving only the fine linen of her chiton exposed on one breast — an unheard of innovation in Hermione, I can tell you, and while the younger girls wore their peploi more modestly, every woman present was watching Briseis. Her Ionian fashion was both exotic and enticing and dignified. Nor did she wear the crown of a kore, but instead wore the headpiece of a priestess of Aphrodite.

Heliodora, probably the richest girl, wore the plainest chiton in wool, with a magnificent embroidered border that I had no doubt she had done herself. She was that sort of person.

Iris wore a vivid red peplos that had cost Xanthippus a fortune, because he was that sort of person. And libations were poured, hymns to Poseidon sung, and the girls went back to ‘their’ homes in a torchlit procession. All the women followed them — by prior arrangement they all shared a beautiful house overlooking the agora for that one night — and all the women went to a single party, while all the men went to the home of Aristides, which was ‘my’ house for the evening, and that of Hipponax and Hector.

Very little was done the next day. I’ll leave you to imagine what kind of party we had — we, the victors of Salamis, with a whole town to supply our wine. It was there, on a kline with my ‘father’ Aleitus, that I heard the story, from him and from Aristides, of the storming of Psyttaleia, and a dozen other tales of the fighting that day.

But the next day more ships entered the little harbour, and still more landed at Thermisia and on the beaches of Troezen north of us. Themistocles had taken Andros, or driven them to capitulate, or made a face-saving gesture towards victory (no one could quite tell me) and the sailing season was well and truly past. Winter was coming on.

But the returning sailors, who included my friend Lykon of Corinth, and Ion and Moire, had news. They had scouted all the way to Skiathos opposite Thessaly, and Mardonius had taken Larissa, ejected its inhabitants despite their status as ‘allies’ and was wintering his horses in the green fields of the north.

It sobered us. At first blush many men had been sure that the whole Persian host was fleeing and our work was done. But in fact, as Lykon attested, already Persian ambassadors were going out to every city, demanding earth and water before the next onslaught.

We were far from despair, but we were thoughtful.

On the day given to Aphrodite, in the last week of Pyanepsion, Gorgo came. Now, in truth, Sparta is not so very far from Hermione, as the city had cause to know all too well a hundred years before, but I had not expected her, a new widow, to come. And yet, when you consider how very hard she had worked for the League … and between Troezen and Hermione, we had most of the League’s captains.

Pyanepsion! I’ve become an Athenian. And well I might — I’d been voted a citizen after Marathon; my sons were both made citizens, Iris was allowed to be a citizen by birth (essential if her children were to be citizens), and yet in poor old Boeotia, in Green Plataea of my youth, that late harvest month was called Pamboiotios, and it had some weeks left to run.

Pardon me for once again wandering like a drunken shepherd, but I digress only to come to my point. It was in Hermione that week and that month, and not in Corinth, that the League began to look at the next step in the war.

It was, I think, two days before my wedding. I was fighting my own black mood; I remember asking my daughter if Briseis was well, I was so sure that Apollo or some sly god would snatch her and my happiness from me.

Euphonia put her arms around me. ‘She said the best thing,’ my daughter said. ‘She said she’d always wanted a daughter, and now she was getting a beautiful, talented girl without the pain of childbirth or the wakeful nights.’ Euphonia sat back. She was sitting by me in the garden of my borrowed house. ‘I thought to be offended, and then I thought that you, too, had me without the pain of bearing me or hearing me cry as a baby.’

Penelope, who was living in my house, put a cup of wine in my hand. ‘You were the best baby,’ she said wistfully. ‘My sons were loud and demanding, and you were always sweet-’

‘I pulled your loom over when I was six,’ Euphonia said.

There was a brief silence.

‘I thought Andronicus did that,’ Penelope said with that dangerous tone in her voice.

I remember looking out from the little portico where we were sitting, and seeing the marvellous stars, thousands and thousands on a perfect autumn evening. I thought we were going to have a row, and I was willing myself away.

But Pen just hugged my daughter. ‘Well, that loom is ashes now, my child,’ she said. To me, she said, ‘Your chosen wife gives more orders than any woman I’ve ever met. And spends more time on her appearance.’ She raised a hand to forestall my response. ‘Despite which, she is easy to like. Her clothes are going to cause a scandal in Athens, I promise you — she all but wears one breast bare! We’ll all have to exercise like Spartans to support them, I do declare.’

Pen, in fact, still had a fine figure, and ran for exercise, but I understood her comment.

‘Ionia is different,’ I said. ‘And she has led a different life from you.’

Penelope sat and hugged her knees like a much younger woman. She looked at my daughter.

‘Oh, I see! Adult things. I know how babies happen!’ Euphonia said. She tossed her head and flounced off. ‘Perhaps I should attend the Queen of Sparta? She always speaks to me as if I am an adult!’

I had grown wise enough as a parent to merely blow her a kiss.

‘She asked me,’ Penelope said. It was dark in our little porch with its beautiful columns and the fragrant garden. ‘She asked me how long I would wait to marry again.’

I blinked.

‘She said did I really want to sleep alone? And I knew I did not. Oh, brother, is that treason?’ Penelope was suddenly crying and I wondered, guiltily, if it was my place to comfort those in need just that week. Brasidas — the strongest man I knew — and now my sister, who, with Jocasta, was my model of strong women.

Yet, using silence to cover my confusion, I had to admit that loyalty to a dead partner could be very cold comfort. ‘I think you must do what seems best,’ I said.

‘That’s a cowardly answer,’ Penelope spat at me. ‘You mean I should do what is right? I’m asking you what is right!’

In fact, she was asking my permission to find someone, or to leave off mourning eventually. I knew it. I bit my lip. She was my sister and I confess I saw no reason for her — or any man or woman — to spend what could be a long life, alone or with her sons.

A voice floated out of the darkness. ‘My husband told me to find a good man and make strong sons, if he should die.’

That was Gorgo’s voice, and she came up the smooth, ancient steps to our little portico. With her were two Thracian women and Bulis — but her being out in the darkness would still have been a scandal in Athens.

In Hermione, though, there were no rules. I won’t belabour the point, but we were a nation at war; we knew we were riding the fell beast in a pause between two deadly engagements. Girls and boys flirted and even kissed and their elders winked at it. It was not like the Athens or Plataea of my youth.

We all knew we were living on borrowed time, I think.

At any rate, the Queen of Sparta, widowed in the same hour as my sister, came up the steps, and she and Bulis sat with us. Eugenios came and placed lit oil lamps on small tables, and cakes appeared. And more wine.

But not before Gorgo said her piece.

‘I will always see Leonidas as a demigod,’ Gorgo said. She neither choked with emotion nor sounded happy. Her voice was neither flat nor full, but almost light in its delivery, like an oracle. ‘But I will never compare him to any man who follows him into my bed. What is, is.’ She smiled at Penelope, who came and embraced her.

She looked at me. ‘We have all missed the Mysteries, have we not?’ she asked, by which she meant the Eleusinian Mysteries, which should have been celebrated the week of Salamis. And her statement, ‘what is, is’ is contained in the Mysteries, although I was not, at that time, an initiate.

Bulis looked at me. I waved, and Eugenios put wine in his hand, and then another cup by the Queen.

My daughter returned, looking smug. Behind her came Jocasta, pink by torchlight with embarrassment and secret joy at being out of her house after dark. And Aristides. And Brasidas joined us and sat close by Gorgo.

‘We meet in the darkness like conspirators,’ Bulis said.

Gorgo spoke, again like an oracle. ‘In the darkness, we can all pretend we were never here,’ she said.

Euphonia laughed and almost got sent to bed.

I’d like to say that we then went on to solve the League’s problems, but mostly we sat and watched the stars and drank wine.

Jocasta laughed softly. ‘I’ve always wondered what men do at parties.’

Aristides laughed. ‘You have? Really, this is quite a bit better than most symposia. For one thing, Eugenios mixes wine better than any host I know, and for another, each of us thinks before we speak.’

Jocasta leaned back so that her head rested on her husband’s shoulder. Even then, in the near dark and in the afterglow of a famous victory, Aristides looked shocked that his wife would touch him in public. It’s who he was.

‘The wine is going to my head,’ Jocasta said. ‘Tell me, men. Will we defeat the Great King?’

I remember the silence. Far away, a cat yowled. Closer, there was the scent of the fig tree, like cinnamon and honey on the wind that rustled the branches to tell us that winter was coming.

‘You know that Mardonius has the army in Thessaly?’ I asked.

Gorgo nodded, her profile sharp against the light of one of the oil lamps. ‘I know more than that,’ she said quietly. ‘I know from … a friend … that Mardonius, who, according to my source, seeks to be Great King himself, will seek to invade Attica again.’

Jocasta moaned. We all sat up.

‘He believes that, even now, Athens can be destroyed so thoroughly that her citizens will disperse or leave the League.’ She looked at Aristides. ‘And even now there are many in Sparta who speak of holding the isthmian wall at Corinth and leaving Boeotia and Attica to their fate.’

Bulis nodded silently.

‘Most of the peers who wanted to save all Greece,’ he said, ‘died with the King.’

We all sat silently and digested that.

‘Tomorrow I will meet Themistocles and escort him to Sparta,’ Gorgo said. ‘I hope that he, at least, as one of the architects of the Temple of Nike at Salamis, will help me to convince the ephors to march an army in the spring.’

Brasidas laughed. ‘The architect of the Temple of Nike,’ he said. ‘Why do the Athenians think women cannot be orators? That’s a beautiful phrase.’

Jocasta laughed. ‘You, Gorgo, were the architect of that victory. Themistocles was merely a stonemason.’

The Spartan queen shook her head. ‘Too much praise is like too much wine. I must go to bed. But I will keep Themistocles waiting one more day — if it means I can attend a certain wedding.’

She looked at my daughter — remember, we were guest friends, and my daughter had known her now for some years. ‘Sing us something, my child,’ she said. ‘We are old and silent.’

Jocasta laughed again, she was becoming immodest, by her own lights. ‘Yes, what shall we sing?’ she asked. ‘I thought men sang at these parties.’

Euphonia stood up and sang. But like most very young people, she sang to shock. And her voice was as beautiful as her mother’s had been.

And may Zeus’s pure daughter, she who holds securely the sacred wall, willingly, meeting my will, look upon me; and, grieved at our pursuit, come with all her might, a virgin to a virgin’s aid, to deliver me- That the mighty race of our honourable mother may escape the embrace of man (ah me), unwedded, unvanquished.

Brasidas, who loved my daughter, laughed aloud.

I sat up. ‘That is a song against marriage,’ I said.

My daughter tossed her head. ‘It is a song we sing at Brauron, when we are little bears,’ she said. ‘Some of the priestesses say men have no purpose but to break us and marriage is to women what taming is to horses.’

Gorgo forsook her mourning long enough to laugh her hearty, man’s laugh. ‘A fine song,’ she said. ‘I can see she is truly your daughter. But Euphonia, never let any child born of woman tell you that marriage breaks man or woman. Is all Greece stronger, or weaker, for the League we have made against the Persians?’

‘Stronger, of course,’ shot back my daughter.

‘So it is with marriage. Despite a thousand kinds of compromise, the result is stronger than either one was alone.’ She rose. Bulis rose with her like a shadow. She leaned over and kissed Jocasta. ‘I swear by Aphrodite I will not come as the Queen of Sparta,’ she whispered.

‘Thanks all the gods,’ Jocasta murmured. ‘I have enough troubles as it is.’

Anyway, that’s all I remember of that evening. I think Gorgo had another meeting with Jocasta, but that’s for another story and another night.

And then it was my wedding day.

It was bright and sunny, not quite warm — almost perfect for wearing a heavy himation in public. I had a magnificent one, a length of fabric I’d taken — to be honest, Hector had done the taking — two days after the battle. It had probably been Artemisia’s and she had the best taste I knew of, except Briseis. It was Tyrian red, with tasselled ends and gold-tablet woven borders. I didn’t have a zone rich enough to wear with it, but Cimon did. It is amazing how, no matter how much you prepare, something is forgotten, and Cimon sent back to ‘his’ house, first for a zone of gold, and then for sandals — how on earth had I expected to be wed in my military ‘Spartan shoes’?

His spare sandals were a rich white, so white I didn’t really know that leather could be so white. They had gold tassels and gold laces and, frankly, they looked ridiculous on my feet. Almost every toe I have has been broken, some four or five times. There are parts of me that are handsome still, and back then, at the height of my powers, I was accounted handsome, I think, but never for my feet.

In truth, I think part of getting wed is proving to your soon-to-be wife that you will wear whatever it takes. I wore the sandals and the zone. And as I stepped up into my chariot — alone, symbolically — I ran a fond hand over the bronze tyre of the wheel that I had helped forge.

And all my friends — I mean all of them, all that were living and, I think, a few of my dead — followed my chariot through the steep streets of Hermione, to the house where Archilogos waited. It was by then the edge of evening and the sun was setting red and mighty in the west behind the hills. I have no idea how I spent that day: looking for sandals, apparently. But I remember the light on the ships and the roof of the temple of Poseidon. I remember Aeschylus and Phrynicus becoming shrews as they matched wits against each other; I thought of telling them to be quiet, but I was old enough to realise that they were, in fact, enjoying themselves. And Styges was there, and Tiraesias and Hermogenes and Brasidas and Bulis, and Moire, and Ion who was too young to be one of my friends and was clearly more comfortable with the younger men, my sons.

And there they were, each more beautiful than the last, if I may say it of them. Hector’s hair was like a blond flame, long like a Spartan’s, and Hipponax, heavier, but strong and calm, with his ringlets oiled and a superb woollen himation that just possibly his bride had made for him. And there with me were most of my marines — Sitalkes was gone to find his wife at Corinth and missed it all — and many oarsmen, too. Kineas strode by one of my chariot wheels like a god and he made me think somehow of Neoptolymos, the friend of my youth, the Cretan.

There were so many men we filled the streets, and three chariots — I tried to take it all in, but Aristides has told me since that he and some of the more formally dressed men were only just leaving their houses because of the press when I was arriving in the courtyard of Archilogos.

We had arranged that each of us would go to our bride’s house, pick her up in our chariot and lead a procession of her dowry through the streets to the temple of Poseidon, where we would all make offering and sacrifice, and where, by the courtesy of the town’s elders, we were allowed to make a marriage feast inside the precinct, as it was the only area in the town large enough for so many.

And it seemed unreal to me that I was going to wed Briseis in this pretty little town that was not my own, or hers, amid the same men who I led onto enemy decks and through enemy formations, all wreathed, all laughing. There was Leukas, who had been born almost in Hyperborea, and there was Seckla, in a magnificent robe of shining white and gold (loot, I suspect, from one of the Carthaginians), and he was from so far south of Thebes (Thebes of Egypt, that is) that he said it was as far from his home to Thebes as it was from Thebes to Athens. And there was Ka, who wore, instead of a himation or a chiton, the skin of a leopard, a fabulous spotted cat, or perhaps it was two, but it made him look even more exotic and even less Greek.

Of course, he was almost a foot taller than all the other men, as well. It made him easy to find, in a fight. Ka was a contrast to Moire. Ka never tried to be Greek; Moire was as Greek as he sought to be.

Anyway, I couldn’t quite get my mind around the reality of it. The chariot rolled along well enough, and the horses, for horses, behaved themselves. Cimon was beside himself with what a fine team they were and how magnificent they’d be if he could only replace the offside horse with a bigger one. They were all grey, unmatched and yet somehow matched, and it’s true that the offside horse was smaller. But they filled the street, they obeyed me like slaves, and they didn’t upset my magnificent himation. Listen, when I was a slave boy on Hipponax’s farm, learning to drive a chariot, little did I imagine that the next chance I would have would be in the streets of a tiny town in the Peloponnese, on the road to wedding my master’s daughter!

Cimon was striding along by the horses. He didn’t seem to think I could be trusted with them. Did you know that when Themistocles proposed that the men of Athens put to sea and defend Attica in ships — that ‘wooden walls’ was the oracle of Delphi’s way of telling them to fight at sea — Cimon went to the temple of Athena and sacrificed his bits and bridles and went from the altar straight to a ship? A magnificent act, and one that helped weld the richest men in Athens to the poorest.

Despite which, he didn’t really think I was any good with horses. And he was right.

Then we were there.

At the last moment a little of my boyhood flowed into my hands, and despite my himation and my gilded sandals, I napped the reins. My four greys leapt forward — like most horses, they wanted to run. The street in front of me was empty; well, mostly empty, and I enjoyed making Cimon leap for a sausage stall, and we moved down the last hundred paces at a fast trot and I left my crowd behind.

The entrance to the yard of the house that Archilogos had rented was not very wide, and at right angles to the street. I had, naturally enough, never been in the yard, but I knew I was to take the chariot in. And I do like to make an entrance.

One of the tricks you learn when you learn to race a chariot, or to be a charioteer in combat — you paying attention, ladies? I trained for this as a slave — is to stop one wheel and pivot the whole chariot on the other. It takes great horses and good timing, and some terrible daimon of youth invaded me and made me try to do it entering the courtyard of the house of my bride.

I checked the horses with my voice, threw all my weight to the right, and reined in the lead horse, and he all but pivoted on his back feet.

By Poseidon, Lord of Horses, the gate seemed narrower than the wheels of my chariot. It was a foolish chance to have taken with a vehicle my friends and I had rebuilt from worm-eaten wood and rotted rawhide.

My right hub clipped the doorpost hard enough that white plaster fell like a little shower of snow, and then we were through, still moving very fast.

There’s a thing you do, as a charioteer, to pick up your master: you pivot the chariot all the way around and rein in, all but scooping the man off his feet with the back deck of woven cords. The daimon was strong in me, and I now reined my offside leader and my back wheels skidded on the smooth marble.

It was almost perfect.

Unfortunately, the axle clipped a small, very elegant standing column.

And knocked it over. It took a long time to fall, and it broke into several sections and lay there, accusingly.

Archilogos — by the eternal irony of the gods, the master for whom I would have driven my chariot in combat, had the world ever gone that way — stood under the stoa of the courtyard and laughed very hard. He was beautifully dressed, and his ruddy curls bounced with his mirth. He tried to say something — and was off again in another paroxysm of laughter.

Behind me, my crowd of friends and about a thousand oarsmen approached the gate. They made a roar like the sea.

And then Briseis stepped out into the open.

It was not what she was wearing; it was not the magnificent gold earrings she had in her ears, the crown of a priestess on her head, the gold bracelet she wore or the gilded sandals that cradled her arched feet.

It was her eyes, which were only for me.

Somehow, in that moment, we were wed. Never before, not ever, anywhere, had those eyes been entirely intent on me and no one else — no ‘next thing’, no plot, no intrigue. Her brother was laughing, and as she passed him, her right hand reached out and viciously poked him in the side — a very sisterly act. Remember that they had not been together in many years.

He reached for her arm to respond in kind, and froze, aware that three hundred or more men were watching him.

They grinned at one another.

And then she reached out a hand, and the smell of musk and jasmine and mint embraced me. I took her hand and she rose into the chariot like Venus riding the dawn.

‘Please do not hit another column,’ she said very quietly. Her lips parted, and sound emerged, and it was all I could do not to stare at her for ever, or take her in front of all those people!

Instead, training and good breeding took hold, and I snapped the reins. My horses leapt forward and by luck — or the grace of Aphrodite — we sailed through the doorposts without blemish, although I was ashamed to note a long white gouge on the one as we passed. Men flattened themselves to be out of my way, and called out.

Oh, in those days, thugater, men and women said such things.

She swayed, and I put a hand around her waist. And the fingers of my left hand found that her chiton was open-pinned, not sewn down the side, and at the contact with the smooth skin of her hip, I almost lost my horses.

‘Drive the chariot, my husband,’ she said. ‘Drive me later, if you will.’

And she laughed, and all the happiness that a man could feel, that the gods allow, flooded me. By Zeus Sator, by all the gods who sit in Olympus, what more can we ask? Victory in war, and the woman you love …

The street cleared. I made the turn at the base of the hill and it was flat for two hundred paces until the promontory rose away with the temple of Poseidon sitting atop it, and I tightened my grip on her waist and snapped the reins and gave a shout — and my horses obeyed.

From a walk to a trot, trot straight to a gallop, and we tore along that stade of a street, scattering a few bystanders, and our clothes and hair billowed, dust rose in a cloud, and for the length of the time it takes a man to sing a hymn, we were gods. And then, as the horses began to take the rise in the road and I reined them in, perhaps not beautifully, but competently, and they slowed, so that they were shiny with sweat, composed and walking elegantly, as we entered the sacred precinct.

‘That is my answer,’ I said. And was rewarded with her smile, and her blush. Who knew she could blush like that?

And we walked up into the temple.

I had, of course, forgotten to bring a sword. But you need a sword for sacrifices, and I felt a fool until Eugenios stepped out of the crowd and put my own sword belt over my head as if the whole thing was planned.

I did not behead a bull. The chariot-driving had been as much adventure as I needed on my wedding day and I killed a ram fastidiously, raising the hem of my himation before the blood could flow.

But the auspices were brilliant, in birds of the air and in the livers of dead animals, and my sons made their kills and the smell of roasting fat rose to the gods. The sun on the pine trees all around the shrine — the last of the summer was ours for that day, and the scent of pines and the smell of cooking meat, the salt air, the spilled wine …

We did not short the gods. Libations were poured to many gods and many absent friends: Paramanos, Onisandros, Idomeneus, and many others. We prayed and then we ate, we drank and then we danced.

I won’t relate the whole. I could make it longer than the Battle of Salamis, for truly, it was better in every way. Weddings are about life, while battles are about death.

But I will say that the three brides, Iris and Heliodora and Briseis, danced together. And I confess that, for once, Briseis was not best. She was beautiful, and she was all I wanted, but the Brauron girls danced the dance of Artemis for the last time, and they were superb. And then we all danced together, men in the outside ring, women in the inside, and wine and the flash of limbs and the open sides of many a chiton began to work on me, so that passion became very like lust. I remember a woman, who looked very much like Gorgo but insisted that her name was Io, which made me laugh. She and Jocasta danced and talked and danced and talked. I saw the two of them with my bride at one point, and they all laughed together, and I worried.

I danced until my head was clear, and then I went and sat and I found myself with Cimon and Aristides, and Eugenios and Ka — a very eclectic group of couches indeed. I ate a barley roll, the white kind we call ‘of Lesvos’, and chased it with some wine.

‘You should take your bride to your house,’ Aristides said. He was watching his wife dance again. ‘Because if you do not, there will be Lapiths and Centaurs on this very grass.’

‘Indeed,’ Cimon said, ‘I just saw a lass with her back all pine needles, and I do not think she was napping.’

So I made my rounds, hugging Cleitus, embracing Agariste, who was, if not very drunk, certainly jolly, and Xanthippus, who suddenly, full of wine, began to propound to me a forward naval strategy — an attack on the Persians in Ionia.

His wife pulled him down on their couch.

And I kissed my new daughters-in-law, who watched me with downcast eyes, as my leaving would mean that they were to leave too.

We walked to the chariots and the noise increased so acutely that I knew we were in for a loud night.

There was a moment … again, just as she mounted the chariot … half a hush, and Briseis put her hand on my arm where it rested as if it had been there all my life. I thought she might admonish me like a wife — you know, that I was drunk and needed to drive slowly.

Instead, she smiled into my eyes. Her own were huge and deep. And in a voice suffused with emotion, she said, ‘You are now related to two of the three most powerful families in Athens, my love.’

‘So we are,’ I said.

I didn’t whip my horses to a gallop. I did move along briskly, however, purely to leave the more boisterous elements behind us, and I confess that I went down the hill a little too fast and almost missed the turn along the northern beach, but Poseidon stayed by me and I did not. And I let the horses run a few strides and then calmed them, my hand already searching in the folds of her Ionian chiton.

She leaned into me with her whole body. Until a women does this, no man knows what a kiss is. I was driving horses, but Briseis was always as mad as I, or madder. We kissed; the world went by in a blur, and only Eros, who protects lovers, kept us from a foolish death.

And then we rolled to a stop in front of ‘my’ house. I jumped down, and lifted her. Behind me there was shouting. Hundreds of men and many women were pouring down the hill, but the chariots had kept them back, and we had a stade or more head start.

I carried her across the threshold of my borrowed house. My hands were already on her pins.

I did not put her down until I crossed the garden. I carried her into the tiny house and past the table where Eugenios had set cakes and wine and, as I tore at her clothes, I said:

σφαίρῃ δηὖτέ με πορφυρέῃ

βάλλων χρυσοκόμης Ἔρως,

νήνι ποικιλοσαμβάλῳ

συμπαίζειν προκαλεῖται.

ἣ δ’ — 5 ἐστὶν γὰρ ἀπ’ εὐκτίτου

Λέσβου — τὴν μὲν ἐμὴν κόμην -

λευκὴ γάρ — καταμέμφεται,

πρὸς δ’ ἄλλην τινὰ χάσκει.

Golden-haired Eros once again

hurls his crimson ball at me:

he calls me to come out and play

with a girl in fancy sandals.

But she’s from civilised Lesvos:

she sneers at my hair because it’s grey …

I was quoting Anacreon. She rolled away from me on the bed and took off her magnificent sandals and threw them at me, laughing, and she reached between my legs and said, ‘I am, however, unlikely to turn in wonder for another girl.’ Then she was on me.

And it was she, not I, as the sound of copper pots and bronze ladles and wooden spoons beaten on iron kettle lids filled the garden outside our door, as voices suggested positions, and others asked how big I might be, and a few made ruder jokes at her expense — it was she, who, already astride me, gathered all our clothes, a fortune in dyed wool and linen, leaned back so that I could see every inch of her splendour in the moonlight, and cast the whole ball of Tyrian red and indigo blue, glinting with gold, straight out of our garden window to the crowd below.

They roared. They roared like oarsmen in the moment of victory and like hoplites in the last push at Marathon. And I looked up into her face, still crowned with Aphrodite’s golden tiara, still wearing her earrings and nothing else …

Ah … Good night, friends. The rest you will have to guess for yourselves.