His Majesty read with great interest these words of the Greek Xeones which I, His historian, placed before Him in their transcribed form. The army of Persia had advanced by this date deep into Attika and made camp at that crossroads called by the Hellenes the Three-Cornered Way, two hours' march northwest of Athens. There His Majesty made sacrifice to God Ahura Mazda and distributed decorations for valor to the leading men among the Empire's forces. His Majesty had not for the preceding several days summoned into His presence the captive Xeones to hear from him in person the continuance of his tale, so consumed was He with the myriad affairs of the army and navy in the advance. Yet did His Majesty not fail to follow the narrative in His spare hours, studying it in this, the transcribed form in which His historian daily submitted it.
In fact His Majesty had not been well for the previous several nights. His sleep had been troubled; the attendance of the Royal Surgeon had been summoned. His Majesty's rest was disturbed by untoward dreams whose content He divulged to no one, save the Magi and the circle of His most trusted counselors: the general Hydarnes, commander of the Immortals and victor at Thermopylae; Mardonius, field marshal of His Majesty's land forces; Demaratos, the deposed Spartan king and now guest-friend; and the warrioress Artemisia, queen of Halicarnassus, whose wisdom in counsel His Majesty esteemed beyond all others'.
The incubus of these troublous dreams, His Majesty now confided, appeared to be His own remorse over the desecration, following the victory at the Hot Gates, of the body of the Spartan Leonidas. His Majesty reiterated his regret at the defilement of the corpse of this warrior who was, before all, a king.
The general Mardonius beseeched His Majesty to recall that He had scrupulously observed all sacred ritual prescribed to expiate the lingering vapors of blood guilt, if in fact any such had been incurred. Had not His Majesty subsequent!) I ordered the execution of all those of the royal party, including His own son, the prince Rheodones, who had participated in the event? What more needed doing? Yet despite all this, His Majesty declared, the royal slumber remained restless and unsound. His Majesty in wistful tone expressed the fancy that He, perhaps in induced visions or seantic trance, might acquaint Himself personally with the shade of the man Leonidas and share with him a cup of wine.
A silence of no short duration followed. This fever, the general Hydarnes ventured at last, has dulled Your Majesty's edge of command and compromised its keenness. I beg Your Majesty speak no more in this manner.
Yes, yes, you're right, my friend, His Majesty replied. As you are always.
The commanders turned their attention to matters military and diplomatic. Reports mere delivered. The advance force of Persian infantry and cavalry, fifty thousand strong, had entered Athens and taken possession of the city. The Athenian citizenry had abandoned the place utterly, betaking themselves, with only those goods which they could bear upon their persons, by sail across the strait to Troezen and the island of Salamis, inhere they now held themselves as refugees, huddling about fires upon the hillsides and bewailing their sorrows.
The city itself had offered no resistance, save that of a small band of fanatics who occupied the High City, the Acropolis, whose precincts in ancient times had been bounded by a wooden palisade. These desperate defenders had fortified themselves in this site, placing, it seems, their faith in the oracle of Apollo which some weeks previous had declared,… the wooden wall alone shall not fail you.
These lamentable remnants were routed easily by imperial archers, who slew them at a distance.
So much, Mardonius decreed, for the prophecy. The bivouac fires of the Empire now burned upon the Athenian acropolis. Tomorrow His Majesty Himself would enter the city. Plans were approved for the racing of all temples and sanctuaries of the Hellenic gods and the torching of the remainder of the city. The smoke and flames, it was reported by the intelligence officer, would be visible across the strait to the Athenian populace now cowering in the high goat pastures upon the island of Salamis. They will have a front-row seat, the lieutenant said with a smile, at the annihilation of their universe.
The hour had now grown late, and His Majesty had begun to display indications of fatigue. The Magus, observing, suggested that the evening might now profitably be brought to a close. All rose from their couches, prostrated themselves and made their exit, save the general Mardonius and Artemisia, whom by subtle gesture of His Majesty's hand were bade to stay. His Majesty indicated that His historian would remain as well, to record [he proceedings. Clearly His Majesty's peace was troubled.
Now alone in the tent with His two closest confidants, He spoke, relaying a dream.
I was on a battlefield, which seemed to extend to infinity, and oner which the corpses of the slam spread beyond sight. Cries of victory filled the air; generals and men were vaunting triumphantly. Abruptly I espied the corpse of Leonidas, decapitated, •with its head impaled upon a spike, as we had done at Thermopylae, the body itself nailed as a trophy to a single barren tree in the midst of the plain. I was seized with grief and shame. I raced toward the tree, shouting to my men to cut the Spartan down. In the dream it seemed that, if I could only reaffix the king's head, all would be well. He would revive, and even befriend me, which outcome I dearly desired, I reached to the spike, upon which the severed head sat impaled…
And the head was His Majesty's own, the lady Artemisia broke in.
Is the dream that transparent? His Majesty inquired.
It is nothing and signifies nothing, the warrioress declared emphatically, continuing in a tone that deliberately made light of the matter and urged His Majesty with all speed to put it from his mind. It means only that His Majesty, who is a king, recognizes the mortality of all kings, Himself included. This is wisdom, as Cyrus the Great Himself expressed when he spared the life of Croesus of Lydia.
His Majesty considered Artemisia's words for long moments. He unshed by them to be convinced, yet, it was apparent, they had not succeeded entirely in stanching His concern.
Victory is yours, Your Majesty, and nothing can take it from you, the general Mardonius now spoke. Tomorrow we will hum Athens, which was the goal of your father, Darius, and your own and the reason you have assembled this magnificent army and navy and hate toiled and struggled for so long and overcome so many obstacles. Rejoice, my lord! All Greece lies prostrate before you, You have defeated the Spartans and skin their king. The Athenians you have driven before you like cattle, compelling them to abandon the temples of their gods and all their lands and possessions. You stand triumphant, Sire, with the sole of your slipper upon the throat of Greece.
So complete was His Majesty's victory, Mardonius declared, that the Royal Person need detain Itself not one hour longer here in these hellish precincts at the antipodes of the earth. Leave the dirty work to me, Your Majesty. You yourself take ship home for Susa, tomorrow, there to receive the worship and adulation of your subjects, and to attend to the far more pressing matters of the Empire, which have been in favor of this Hellenic nuisance too long neglected. I will mop up for you. What your forces do in your name is done by you.
And the Peloponnese? the warrioress Artemisia put in, cit-ing the southern peninsula of Greece, which atone of the whole country remained unsubdued. What would you do with it, Mardonius?
The Peloponnese is a goat pasture, the general responded. A desert of rocks and sheep dung, with neither riches nor spoil, nor a single port possessed of haven for more than a dozen garbage scows. It is nothing and contains nothing which His Majesty needs.
Except Sparta.
Sparta? Mardonius replied contemptuously, and not without heat. Sparta is a village. The whole stinking place would fit, with room to spare, within His Majesty's strolling garden at Persepolis. It is an up-country burg, a pile of stones. It contains no temples or treasures of note, no gold; it is a barnyard of leeks and onions, with soil so thin a man may kick through it with one strike of his foot.
It contains the Spartans, the lady Artemisia spoke.
Whom we have crushed, Mardonius replied, and whose king His Majesty's forces have slain.
We slew three hundred of them, replied Artemisia, and it took two million of us to do it.
These words so incensed Mardonius that he seemed upon the point of rising from his couch to confront Artemisia physically. My friends, my friends. His Majesty's conciliating tone made to quell the momentary upset, We are here to take counsel, not brawl with each other like schoolchildren.
Yet the lady's fervor still burned. What is that between your legs, Mardonius, a turnip? You speak like a man with balls the size of chickpeas.
She addressed Mardonius directly, controlling her anger and speaking with precision and clarity.
His Majesty's forces have not even sighted, let alone confronted or defeated, the main force of the Spartan army, which remains intact within the Peloponnese and no doubt in full preparedness, and eagerness, for war. Yes, we have killed a Spartan king. But they, as you know, have two;
Leotychides now reigns, and Leonidas' son, the boy Pleistarchus; his uncle and regent, Pausanias, who will lead the army and whom I know, is every inch the equal of Leonidas in courage and sagacity. So the loss of a king means nothing to them, other than to harden their resolve and inspire them to yet greater prodigies of valor as they seek to emulate his glory.
Now consider their numbers. The Spartiate Peers alone comprise eight thousand heavy infantry.
Add the Gentleman-Rankers and the perioikoi and the tally multiplies by five. Arm their helots, which they mast certainty will do, and the total swells by another forty thousand. To this stew toss in the Corinthians, Tegeates, Eleans, Mantineans, Plataeans and Megarians, and the Argives, whom these others will compel into alliance if they have not done so already, not to mention the Athenians, whose backs we have driven to the wall and whose hearts are primed with the valor of desperation.
The Athenians are ashes, Mardonius broke in. As will be their city before tomorrow's sun sets.
His Majesty appeared of two minds, torn between the prudence of his general's counsel and the passion of the warrioress's advice. He turned to Artemisia. Tell me, my lady, is Mardonius right? Ought I to settle myself upon pillows and take ship for home?
Nothing could be more disgraceful, Your Majesty, the lady replied without hesitation, nor more unworthy of your own greatness. She rose to her feet now and spoke, pacing before His Majesty beneath the arcing linen of His pavilion.
Mardonius has recited the names of the Hellenic cities which have offered tokens of submission, and these I admit are not inconsiderable. But the flower of Hellas remains unplucked. The Spartans' nose we have barely bloodied, and the Athenians, though we have driven them from their lands, remain an intact polis and a formidable one. Their navy is two hundred warships, by far the greatest in Hellas, and every vessel is manned by crack citizen crews. These may bear the Athenians anywhere in the world, where they may reestablish themselves undiminished, as potent a threat to Your Majesty's peace as ever. Nor have we depleted their manpower. Their hoplite army remains untouched, and their leaders enjoy the full respect and support of the city.
We delude ourselves to underestimate these men, whom His Majesty may not know but whom I do. Themistokles, Aristides, Xanthip-pus the son of Ariphron; these are names of proven greatness, fired and ardent to earn more.
As for the poverty of Greece, what Mardonius says cannot be controverted. There is neither gold nor treasure upon these hardscrabble shores, no rich lands nor fat flocks to plunder. But are these why we came? Are these the reason Your Majesty levied and marshaled this army, the mightiest the world has ever seen? No! Your Majesty came to bring these Greeks to their knees, to compel them to offer earth and water, and this, these last defiant cities have refused and yet refuse to do.
Put this fatigue-spawned dream from your mind, Your Majesty. It is a false dream, a phantasm.
Let the Greeks degrade themselves by resort to superstition. We must be men and commanders, exploiting oracles and portents when they suit the purposes of reason and dismissing them when they do not.
Consider the oracle which the Spartans were given, which all Hellas knows, and which they know we know. That either Sparta would lose a king in battle, which calamity had never in six hundred years befallen them, or the city herself would fall.
Well, they have lost a king. What will their seers make of this, Your Majesty? Clearly that the city now cannot fall.
If you retire now, Lord, the Greeks will say it was because you feared a dream and an oracle.
She drew up then, before His Majesty, and addressed these words directly to Him. Contrary to what our friend Mardonius says, His Majesty has not yet claimed His victory. It dangles before Him, a ripe fruit waiting to be plucked. If His Majesty retires now to palaced luxury and leaves this prize to be taken by others, even those whom He most honors and holds dearest to Him, the glory of this triumph is tarnished and defamed. Victory cannot simply be declared, it must be won. And won, if I may say so, in person.
Then, and only then, may His Majesty with honor take ship and return home.
The warrior queen finished and resumed her position upon her couch. Mardonius offered no rebuttal. His Majesty looked from one to the other.
It seems my women have become men, ana my men women.
His Majesty spoke not in rancor or disapprobation, but stretching His right hand across, He settled it with affection upon the shoulder of His friend and kinsman Mardonius, as if to reassure the general that His confidence in him remained steadfast and undiminished.
His Majesty then straightened and with forcefulness of voice and demeanor reassumed His kingly tone.
Tomorrow, He vowed, we will bum Athens to the ground and, following that, march upon the Peloponnese, there to overthrow the very foundation stones of Sparta, not ceasing until we have ground them, everlastingly, into dust.
His Majesty did not sleep that night. Instead He ordered the Greek Xeones summoned to Him at once, intending even at this advanced hour to interrogate the man personalty, seeking further intelligence of the Spartans, who now, more so even than the Athenians, had become the focus of His Majesty's fever and obsession. The warrioress Artemisia had along with Mardonius been dismissed and was at that moment taking her leave; upon hearing these orders of His Majesty she turned back and spoke with concern for Him.
Sire, please, for the sake of the army and of those who love you, I beg you preserve the Royal Person, for godly though Your Majesty's spirit may be, yet it is contained within a mortal vessel.
Get some sleep. Do not torment yourself with these cares, which are mere phantoms.
The general Mardonius seconded this with vehemence. Why distress yourself, Lord, with this tale told by a slave? What bearing can the story of obscure officers and their petty internecine wars have upon the events of supreme moment to which we now are committed? Trouble yourself no more with this whimsy woven by a savage, who hates you and Persia with every element of his being. His story is all lies anyway, if you ask me.
His Majesty smiled at these words of his general. On the contrary, my friend, I believe this fellow's tale is true in every regard and, though you may not yet grant it, very much to the point of matters with which we now grapple.''
His Majesty indicated His campaign throne, which stood in the lamplight beneath the pinnacle of the tent. Do you see that chair, my friends? No mortal can be lonelier or more isolated than He if ho sits upon it. You cannot appreciate this, Mardonius. None can who has not sat there.
Consider: whom can a king trust who comes into His hearing;* What man enters before Him but with some secret desire, passion, grievance or claim, which he employs all his artifice and guile to conceal? Who speaks the truth before a king? A man addresses Him either in fear for that which He may seize or in avarice for that which He may bestow. None comes before Him but as a suppliant. His heart's business the flatterer speaks not aloud, but all he obscures beneath the cloak of dissemblance and dissimulation.
Each voice vowing allegiance, each heart declaring love, the Royal Listener must probe and examine as if He were a vendor in a bazaar, seeking the subtle indices of betrayal and deceit.
How tiresome this becomes. A king's own wives whisper sweetly to Him in the darkness of the royal bedchamber. Do they love Him? How can He know, when He perceives their true passion spent in scheming and intriguing for their children's advantage or their own private gain. None speaks the truth whole to a king, not His own brother, not even you, my friend and kinsman.
Mardonius hastened to deny this, but His Majesty cut him short with a smile. Of all those who come before me, only one man, I believe, speaks without desire for private profit. That is this Greek. You do not understand him, Mardonius. His heart yearns for one thing only: to be reunited with his brothers-in-arms beneath the earth. Even his passion to tell their story is secondary, an obligation imposed upon him by one of his gods, which is to him a burden and a curse. He seeks nothing from me. No, my friends, the Greek's words do not trouble or distress.
They please. They restore.
His Majesty, standing then at the threshold of the pavilion, gestured past the guard of the Immortals to the watch fires glowing without.
Consider the crossing at which we now stand encamped, that site the Hellenes call the ThreeCornered Way. It would be noth-ing to us, mere dirt beneath our feet. Yet is not this humble plot given meaning, and even charm, to recall from the prisoner's tale that he, as a child, parted here from the maiden Diomache, his cousin whom he loved?
Artemisia exchanged a glance with Mardonius.
His Majesty yields to sentiment, the lady addressed her King, and fatuous sentiment at that.
At this moment the service portal of the pavilion parted and permission to enter was asked by the detention officers. The Greek was borne in, yet upon his litter, eyes cloth-bound as ever, by two subalterns of the Immortals preceded by Orontes, their captain.
Let us see the man's face, His Majesty commanded, and may his eyes behold ours.
Orontes obeyed. The cloth was removed.
The captive Xeones blinked several times in the lamplight, then looked for the first time upon His Majesty. So striking was the expression which then appeared upon the man's face that the captain remarked angrily upon it and demanded to know what arrogance possessed the fellow to stare so boldly at the Royal Person.
I have looked upon His Majesty's face before, the man replied.
Above the battle, as all the foe have.
No, Captain. Here, in this tent. On the night of the fifth day.
You are a liar! Orontes struck the man in anger. For the breach to which the captive referred had in fact occurred, on the penultimate eve of battle at the Hot Gates, when a night raid of the Spartans bore a handful of their warriors within a spear's thrust of the Royal Presence, inside this very pavilion, before the intruders were driven back by the Immortals and Egyptian marines swarming to His Majesty's defense.
I was here, the Greek responded calmly, and would have had my skull split apart by an axe, hurled at me by a noble, had it not struck first a ridgepole of the tent and embedded itself there.''
At this, the general Mardonius' face lost aft color. In the west portal of the chamber, precisely where the Spartan raid had penetrated, was lodged yet an axehead, driven so deep into the cedar that it could not be extracted without splitting the pole, and so had been left in place by the carpenters, sawn off at the shaft, with the pole repaired and rewound about it with cord.
The Hellene's gaze now; centered directly upon Mardonius. This lord here threw that axe. I recognise his face as well.
The general's expression, for the moment struck dumb, betrayed the truth of this.
His sword, the Greek continued, severed the wrist of a Spartiate warrior, at the moment of drawing back his spear to thrust at His Majesty.
His Majesty inquired of Mardonius if this indeed was true. The general confirmed that he had in fact inflicted such a wound upon an advancing Spartan, among numerous others delivered in those moments of confusion and peril.
That warrior, the man Xeones declared, urn Alexandras, the son Olympieus, of whom I spoke.
The boy who followed the Spartan army? Who swam the channel before Antirhion? Artemisia asked.
Grown to manhood, the Greek confirmed. Those officers who bore him from this tent protected by the shadows of their shields, those were the Knight Polynikes and my master, Dienekes.''
AH paused for several moments, absorbing this.
His Majesty spoke: These truly were the men who penetrated here, into this tent?
They and others, Lord. As His Majesty saw.
The general Mardonius received this intelligence with skepticism bordering on outrage. He accused the prisoner of fabricating this tale from snatches he had overheard from the cooks or medical personnel who attended him. The captive denied this respectfully but with vehemence.
Orontes, responding to Mardonius in his capacity as Commander of the Guard, proclaimed it inconceivable that the Greek could have acquired knowledge of these events in the manner the general suggested. The captain himself had personally overseen the prisoner's sequestration. No one, either of the commissariat or of the Royal Surgeon's staff, had been allowed alone with the man, even for a moment, without the immediate supervision of His Majesty's Immortals, and these were, as ail knew, without peer in scruple and attendance.
Then he has this tale from the rumor mill of the battle, Mardonius rejoined, from the Spartan warriors who did in fact breach His Majesty's line.
All attention now swung to the captive Xeones, who, quite undistressed by these accusations which could have produced his death upon the spot, regarded Mardonius with level gaze and addressed him without fear.
I might have learned of these events, lord, in the manner which you suggest. But how, sir, would I know to recognize you, of all these others, as the man who hurled the axe?
His Majesty had now crossed to the spot where the axehead was embedded and with His dagger cut through the enwrapping cord to expose the weapon. Upon the steel of the axehead, His Majesty identified the double-headed griffin of Ephesus, whose corps of armorers' privilege it was to provide all edged blades and lances for Mardonius and his commanders.
Tell me now, His Majesty addressed the general, that no god's hand is at work here.
His Majesty declared that He and His counselors had already from the captive's tale gleaned much that was as instructive as it was unanticipated. How much more of value may we yet learn?
With a gesture of warmth, His Majesty motioned the man Xeones closer to Him and had the fellow's still gravely ill form propped upon a settle.
Please, my friend, continue your tale. Tell it as you wish, in whatever manner the god instructs you.
I had watched the army marshal on the plain beneath Athena of the Brazen House perhaps fifty times over the previous nine years, in various strengths of call-up as it prepared to march out to one campaign or another. This one, the corps dispatched to the Hot Gates, was the slenderest ever. Not a two-thirds call-up as before Oenophyta, when nearly six thousand warriors, squires and their battle train had filled the plain, nor a half-mobilization, forty-five hundred, as before Achilleion, nor even a two-mora, twenty-five hundred, when Leonidas led the force to Antirhion which Alexandras and I had followed as boys.
Three hundred.
The meager tally seemed to rattle about the plain like peas in a jar. Just three dozen pack animals stood in the fore along the roadway. There were only eight waggons; the sacrificial herd was marshaled by two scared-looking goat boys. Supply trains had already been dispatched and dumps set up along the six-day route. In addition, it was anticipated, the allied cities would provide provisions along the way, as the Spartan forerunners picked up the various contingents which would complete the force and bring it to its full complement of four thousand.
An august silence pervaded the valedictory sacrifices performed by Leonidas in his role as chief priest, assisted by Olympieus and Megistias, the Theban seer who had come to Lakedaemon of his own volition, with his son, out of love not of his native city alone, but of all Hellas, to contribute without fee or reward his art in divination.
The entire army, all twelve lochoi, had been drawn up, not under arms because of the Karneian prohibition but yet in their scarlet cloaks, to witness the march-out. Each warrior of the Three Hundred stood garlanded, xiphos-armed with shield at the carry, scarlet cloak draped across his shoulders, while his squire stood at his side holding the spear until the sacrifices were completed.
It was the month, as I said, of Karneius, the new year having begun at midsummer as it does in the Greek calendar, and each man was due to receive his new cloak for the year, replacing the now-threadbare one he had worn for the previous four seasons. Leonidas ordered the issue discontinued for the Three Hundred. It would be an improvident use of the city's resources, he declared, to provide new garments for men who would have use of them for so brief a time.
As Medon had predicted, Dienekes was chosen as one of the Three Hundred. Medon himself was selected. At fifty-six he was the fourth oldest, behind only Leonidas himself, who was past sixty, Olympieus and Megistias the seer. Dienekes would command the enomotia from the Herakles regiment. The brothers and champions of Olympia, Alpheus and Maron, were likewise selected; they would join the platoon representing the Oleaster, the Wild Olive, whose position would be to the right of the Knights, in the center of the line. Fighting as a dyas, the paired pentathlete and wrestler towered invincible; their inclusion greatly heartened one and all. Aristodemos the envoy was also selected. But most startling and controversial was the election of Alexandros.
At twenty he would be the youngest line warrior and one of only a dozen, including his agogemate Ariston (of Polynikes' broken noses), without experience of battle. There is a proverb in Lakedaemon, the reed beside the staff, whose meaning is that a chain is made stronger by its possession of one unproven link. The tender hamstring that drives the wrestler to compensate with skill and cunning, the lisp that the orator extends his brilliance to overcome. The Three Hundred, Leonidas felt, would fight best not as a company of individual champions, but as a sort of army in miniature, of young and old, green and seasoned. Alexandros would join the platoon of the Herakles commanded by Dienekes; he and his mentor would fight as a dyas.
Alexandros and Olympieus were the only father and son selected for the Three Hundred.
Alexandras' infant boy, also named Olympieus, would be their survivor and maintain the line. It was a sight of extreme poignancy, there along the Aphetaid, the Going-Away Street, to watch Alexandras' bride, Agathe, only nineteen years old, hold up this babe for the final farewell.
Alexandros' mother, Paraleia, she who had interrogated me so masterfully after Antirhion, stood beside the girl beneath the same myrtle grove from which Alexandros and I had departed that night years ago to follow the army.
Good-byes were said on the march as the formation trooped solemnly past the rubble-walled assembly platform called the Forts, beneath the hero shrines of Lelex and Amphiareus, to the road's turn at the Running Course, above which the boys' platoons clustered at Axiopoinos, the Temple of Athena of Just Requital, Athena Tit for Tat. I watched Polynikes bid his three lads farewell; the eldest at eleven and nine stood already in the agoge. They straightened within their black cloaks with the gravest dignity; each would have cut off his right arm for the chance to march now with his father.
Dienekes paused before Arete on the roadside adjacent the Hellenion, whose porches stood bedecked in laurel with ribands of yellow and blue for the Karneia; she held out Rooster's boy, now named Idotychides. My master took each of his daughters in turn into his arms, lifting the younger two and kissing them with tenderness. Arete he embraced one time, setting his cheek against her neck, to smell the scent of her hair for the last time.
Two days previous to this gentle moment, the lady had summoned me in private, as she always did before a march-out. It is the Spartans' custom during the week preceding a departure for war for the Peers to pass a day neither in training nor drill, but at their ease upon the kleroi, the farmsteads each warrior holds under the laws of Lykurgus and from which he draws the produce which supports himself and his family as a citizen and a Peer. These county days, as they are called, comprise a homely tradition deriving, reason must surmise, from the warrior's natural wish to revisit prior to battle, and in a sense bid farewell to, the happy scenes of his childhood.
That and the more practical purpose, in the ancient days at least, of outfitting and provisioning himself from the kleros's stores. A county day is a fair, one of the rare occasions when a Peer and those who serve his land may congregate as fellows and stuff their bellies with a carefree heart.
In any event this was where we headed, to the farmstead called Daphneion, several mornings before the march-out to the Gates.
Two families of Messenian helots worked this land, twenty-three in all, including a pair of grandmothers, twins, so ancient they could not recall which of them was which, plus the only slightly less dotty stump-leg Karnerion, who had lost his tight foot in service as Dienekes' father's squire. This toothless gaffer could outswear the foulest-tongued sailor and presided at his own insistence, and to the delight of all, as master of ceremonies for the day.
My own wife and children served this farm as well. Neighbors visited from the adjoining landholdings. Prizes were awarded in whimsical categories; there was a country dance, outdoors on the threshing floor beside the laurel grove from which the farm derived its name, and various children's games were held, before the party settled in late afternoon to a communal feast beneath the trees, at which Dienekes himself and the lady Arete and their daughters did the serving. Gifts were exchanged, quarrels and grievances patched up, claims pressed and complaints aired. If a lad of the kleros sought betrothal to his sweetheart from the overhill farm, he might approach Dienekes now and claim his blessing.
Invariably two or three of the sturdier helot youths and men would be slated to accompany the army, as craftsmen or armorers, battle squires or javelineers. Far from resenting or seeking to shirk these perils, the young bucks reveled in the manly attention; their sweethearts clung to them throughout the day, and many a proposal of marriage was spawned in the wine-merry amorousness of these bright country afternoons.
By the time the merry party had put aside all desire for food and drink, as Homer says, more grain and fruit, wine and cakes and cheeses had been heaped at Dienekes' feet than he could carry into a hundred battles. He now retired to the courtyard table, with the elders of the farm, to conclude whatever details remained to set the affairs of the kleros in order before the march-out.
It was when the men had turned themselves to this business that the lady Arete motioned me to join her in private. We sat before a table in the farm kitchen. It was a cheerful spot, warm in the late sun that flooded through the courtyard doorway. The lad Idotychides, Rooster's boy, played outside with two other naked urchins, including my own son, Ska-mandridas. The lady's eyes rested for a moment, with sorrow it seemed, upon the roughhousing little fellows.
The gods remain always a jump ahead of us, don't they, Xeo?
This was the first hint I had received from her lips confirming that which none possessed the courage to ask: that the lady had indeed not foreseen the consequences of her action, that night of the krypteia, when she had saved the babe's life. She cleared a space upon the table. Into my care the lady placed, as ever, those articles of her husband's kit which it was a wife's responsibility to provide. The surgeon's packet, bound in the thick oxhide roll that doubled as a wrap for a splint or, bound flat atop the flesh, as seal for a puncture. The three curved needles of Egyptian gold, called by the Spartans fishhooks, with their spool of catgut twine and steel lancet, for use in the tailor's art of sewing flesh. The compresses of bleached linen, the tourniquet binders of leather, the copper dog bites, the needle-nosed grippers for extracting arrowheads or, more often, the shards and slivers that fly from the clash of steel upon iron and iron upon bronze.
Next, money. A cache of Aeginetan obols that, as all coin or currency, the warriors were forbidden to carry but which, discovered serendipitously within a squire's pack, would come in handy at some on-route market or beside the sutler's waggon, to procure forgotten necessaries or to purchase a treat to lift the heart.
Finally those articles of purely personal significance, the little surprises and charms, items of superstition, the private talismans of love. A girl's sketch in colored wax, a riband from a daughter's hair, a charm in amber carved by a child's untutored hand. Into my care the lady placed a packet of sweets and trifles, sesame cakes and candied figs. You may rifle your share, she said, smiling, but save a few for my husband.
There was always something for me. This day it was a pouch of coins of the Athenians, twenty in all, tetradrachms, nearly three months' pay for a skilled oarsman or hoplite of their army. I was astonished that the lady possessed such a sum, even of her own purse, and struck dumb at her extravagant generosity. These owls, as they were called from the image on their obverse, were good not just in the city of Athena but anywhere in Greece.
When you accompanied my husband on embassy to Athens last month, the lady broke my dumbstruck silence, did you find occasion to visit your cousin? Diomache. That is her name, isn't it?
I had and she knew it. This wish of mine, long-sought, had indeed at last been fulfilled. Dienekes had dispatched me upon the errand himself. Now I glimpsed a hint of the lady's pot-stirring. I asked if it was she, Arete, who had contrived it all.
We wives of Lakedaemon are forbidden fine gowns or jewelry or cosmetics. It would be heartless in the extreme, don't you think, to ban as well a little innocent intrigue?
She smiled at me, waiting.
Well? she asked.
Well, what?
My wife, Thereia, was gossiping with the other farm women, out in the courtyard. I squirmed.
My cousin is a married woman, lady. As I am a married man.
The lady's eyes threw sparks of mischief. You would not be the first husband bound by love to someone other than his wife. Nor she the first wife.
At once all teasing gaiety fled from the lady's glance. Her features became grave and shadowed, it seemed, with sorrow.
The gods played the same trick on my husband and me. She rose, indicating the door and the courtyard beyond. Come, let us take a walk.
The lady led barefoot up the slope to a shady spot beneath the oaks. In what country other than Lakedaemon would a noblewoman's soles be so thick with callus that they may tread upon the spiky leaves of oak and not feel their spiny barbs? You know, Xeo, that I was wife to my husband's brother before I was married to him.
This I did know, having learned it, as I said, from Dienekes himself.
Iatrokles was his name, I know you have heard the story. He was killed at Pellene, a hero's death, at thirty-one. He was the noblest of his generation, a Knight and a victor at Olympia, gifted by the gods with virtue and beauty much like Polynikes in this generation. He pursued me passionately, with such impetuousness that he called me from my father's house when I was still a girl. All this the Spartans know. But I will tell you something now which no one, except my husband, knows, The lady had reached a low bole of oak, a natural bench within the shade of the grove. She sat and indicated that I should take the place beside her.
Down there, she said, gesturing to the open space between two outbuildings and the track that led to the threshing floor. Right there where the path turns was where I first saw Dienekes. It was on a county day just like this. The occasion was Iatrokles' first march-out. He was twenty.
My father had brought me and my brother and sisters over from our own kleros with gifts of fruit and a yearling goat. The boys of the farm were playing, right there, when I came, holding my father's hand, over this knoll where you and I now sit.
The lady drew up. For a moment she searched my eyes, as if to make certain of their attention and understanding.
I saw Dienekes first from behind. Just his bare shoulders and the back of his head. I knew in an instant that I would love him and only him all my life.
Her expression grew sober before this mystery, the summons of Eros and the unknowable workings of the heart.
I remember waiting for him to turn, so I could see him, see his face. It was so odd. In a way it was like an arranged match, where you wait with your heart fluttering to behold the face you will and must love.
At last he turned. He was wrestling another boy. Even then, Xeo, Dienekes was unhandsome.
You could hardly believe he was his brother's brother. But to my eyes he appeared eueidestatas, the soul of beauty. The gods could not have crafted a face more open or touching to my heart. He was thirteen then. I was nine.
The lady paused for a moment, gazing solemnly down at the spot of which she spoke. The occasion did not present itself, she declared, throughout her whole girlhood when she could speak in private with Dienekes. She observed him often on the running courses and in the exercises with his agoge platoon. But never did one share a moment with the other. She had no idea if he even knew who she was.
She knew, however, that his brother had chosen her and had been speaking with the elders of her family.
I wept when my father told me I had been given to Iatrokles. I cursed myself for the heartlessness of my ingratitude. What more could a girl ask than this noble, virtuous man? But I could not master my own heart. I loved the brother of this man, this fine brave man I was to marry.
When Iatrokles was killed, I grieved inconsolably. But the cause of my distress was not what people thought. I feared that the gods had answered by his death the self-interested prayer of my heart. I waited for Dienekes to choose a new husband for me as was his obligation under the laws, and when he didn't, I went to him, shamelessly, in the dust of the palaistra, and compelled him to take me himself as his bride.
My husband embraced this love and returned it in kind, both of us over the still-warm bones of his brother. The delight was so keen between us, our secret joy in the marriage bed, that this love itself became a curse to us. My own guilt I could requite; it is easy for a woman because she can feel the new life growing inside her, that her husband has planted.
But when each child was bom and each a female, four daughters, and then! lost the gift to conceive, I felt, and my husband did too, that this was a curse from the gods for our passion.
The lady paused and glanced again down the slope. The boys, including my son and little Idotychides, had dashed out from the courtyard and now played their carefree sport directly below the site where we sat.
Then came the summons of the Three Hundred to Thermopylae. At last, I thought, I perceive the true perversity of the gods' plan. Without a son, my husband cannot be called. He will be denied this greatest of honors. But in my heart I didn't care. All that mattered was that he would live.
Perhaps for only another week or month, until the next battle. But still he would live. I would still hold him. He would still be mine.
Now Dienekes himself, his farm business completed within, emerged onto the flat below. There he joined playfully with the roughhousing boys, already obeying in their blood the instincts of battle and of war.
The gods make us love whom we will not, the lady declared, and disrequite whom we will.
They slay those who should live and spare those who deserve to die. They give with one hand and take with the other, answerable only to their own unknowable laws.
Dienekes had now spotted Arete, watching him from above. He lifted the boy Idotychides playfully and made the lad's little arm wave up the slope. Arete compelled her own to answer.
Now, inspired by blind impulse, she spoke toward me, I have saved the life of this boy, my brother's bastard's son, and lost my husband's in the process.
She spoke these words so softly and with such sorrow that I felt my own throat catch and the burning begin in my eyes.
The wives of other cities marvel at the women of Lakedaemon, the lady said. How, they ask, can these Spartan wives stand erect and unblinking as their husbands' broken bodies are borne home to a grave or, worse, interred beneath some foreign dirt with nothing save cold memory to clutch to their hearts? These women think we are made of stauncher stuff than they. I will tell you, Xeo. We are not.
Do they think we of Lakedaemon love our husbands less than they? Are our hearts made of stone and steel? Do they imagine that our grief is less because we choke it down in our guts?
She blinked once, dry-eyed, then turned her glance to mine.
The gods have played a game with you too, Xeo. But it may not be too late to steal a roll of the dice. This is why I have given you this pouch of 'owls.'
Already I knew what her heart intended.
You are not Spartan. Why should you bind yourself by her cruel laws? Haven't the gods stolen enough from you already? I begged her to speak of this no more.
This girl you love, I can have her brought here. Just ask it.
No! Please.
Then run. Get out tonight. Go there.
I replied at once that I could not.
My husband will find another to serve him. Let another die instead of you.
Please, lady. This would be dishonor.
I felt my cheek sting and realized the lady had struck me. Dishonor? She spat the word with revulsion and contempt.
Down the slope the boys and Dienekes had been joined by the other lads of the farm. A game of ball had started. The boys' cries of agon, of contention and competition, pealed brightly up the slope to where the lady sat.
One could feel only gratitude for that which had sprung so nobly from her heart: the wish to grant to me that clemency which she felt moira, fate, had denied her. To grant to me and her whom I loved a chance to slip the bonds she felt herself and her husband imprisoned in.
I could offer nothing save that which she already knew.! could not go. Besides, the gods would be there already. As ever, one jump ahead.
I saw her shoulders straighten then, as her will brought to heel the gallant but impossible impulse of her heart.
Your cousin will learn where your body lies, and with what honor you perished. By Helen and the Twins, I swear this.
The lady rose from her bench of oak. The interview was over. She had become again a Spartan.
Now here on the morn of the march-out I beheld upon her face that same austere mask. The lady released her husband's embrace and gathered her children to her, resuming that posture, erect and solemn, replicated by the line of other Spartan wives extending fore and rear beneath the oaks.
I saw Leonidas embrace his wife, Gorgo, Bright Eyes, their daughters, and his son, the boy Pleistarchus, who would one day take his place as king.
My own wife, Thereia, held me hard, grinding against me beneath her Messenian white robe, while she held our infants crooked in one arm. She would not be husbandless for long. Wait at least until I'm out of sight, I joked, and held my children, whom I hardly knew. Their mother was a good woman. I wish I could have loved her as she deserved.
The final sacrifices were over, omens taken and recorded. The Three Hundred formed up, each Peer with a single squire, in the long shadows cast by distant Parnon, with the entire army in witness upon the shield-side slope. Leonidas assumed his place before them, beside the stone altar, garlanded as they. The remainder of the whole city, old men and boys, wives and mothers, helots and craftsmen, stood drawn up upon the spear-side rise. It was not yet daybreak; the sun still had not peeked above Parnon's crest.
Death stands close upon us now, the king spoke. Can you feel him, brothers? I do. I am human and I fear him. My eyes cast about for a sight to fortify the heart for that moment when I come to look him in the face, Leonidas began softly, his voice carrying in the dawn stillness, heard with ease by all.
Shall I tell you where I find this strength, friends? In the eyes of our sons in scarlet before us, yes. And in the countenances of their comrades who will follow in battles to come.
But more than that, my heart finds courage from these, our women, who watch in tearless silence as we go.
He gestured to the assembled dames and ladies, singling out two matriarchs, Pyrrho and Alkmene, and citing them by name. How many times have these twain stood here in the chill shade of Parnon and watched those they love march out to war? Pyrrho, you have seen grandfathers and father troop away down the Aphetaid, never to return. Alkmene, your eyes have held themselves unweeping as husband and brothers have departed to their deaths. Now here you stand again, with no few others who have borne as much and more, watching sons and grandsons march off to hell.
This was true. The matriarch Pyrrho's son Doreion stood garlanded now among the Knights;
Alkmene's grandsons were the champions Alpheus and Maron.
Men's pain is lightly borne and swiftly over. Our wounds are of the flesh, which is nothing; women's is of the heart- sorrow unending, far more bitter to bear.
Leonidas gestured to the wives and mothers assembled along the still-shadowed slopes.
Learn from them, brothers, from their pain in childbirth which the gods have ordained immutable. Bear witness to that lesson they teach: nothing good in life comes but at a price.
Sweetest of all is liberty. This we have chosen and this we pay for. We have embraced the laws of Lykurgus, and they are stern laws. They have schooled us to scorn the life of leisure, which this rich land of ours would bestow upon us if we wished, and instead to enroll ourselves in the academy of discipline and sacrifice. Guided by these laws, our fathers for twenty generations have breathed the blessed air of freedom and have paid the bill in full when it was presented. We, their sons, can do no less.
Into each warrior's hand was placed by his squire a cup of wine, his own ritual chalice, presented to him on the day he became a Peer and brought forth only for ceremonies of the gravest solemnity. Leonidas held his own aloft with a prayer to Zeus All-Conquering and Helen and the Twins. He poured the libation.
In years six hundred, so the poets say, no Spartan woman has beheld the smoke of the enemy's fires.
Leonidas lifted both arms and straightened, garlanded, raising his countenance to the gods.
By Zeus and Eros, by Athena Protectress and Artemis Upright, by the Muses and all the gods and heroes who defend Lakedaemon and by the blood of my own flesh, I swear that our wives and daughters, our sisters and mothers, will not behold those fires now.
He drank, and the men followed him.
His Majesty is well familiar with the topography of the approaches, defiles and the compressed battle plain wherein his armies engaged the Spartans and their allies at the Hot Gates. I will pass over this, addressing instead the composition of the Greek forces and the state of discord and disorder which prevailed as these arrived and took station, preparatory to defending the pass.
When the Three Hundred-now reinforced by five hundred heavy infantry from Tegea and a matching number from Mantinea, along with two thousand combined from Orchomenos and the rest of Arkadia, Corinth, Phlius and Mycenae, plus seven hundred from Thespiae and four hundred from Thebes-arrived at Opountian Lokris, ten miles from the Hot Gates, there to be joined by a thousand heavy infantry from Phokis and Lokris, they found instead the entire countryside deserted.
Only a few boys and young men of the neighborhood remained, and these occupied themselves in looting the abandoned homes of their neighbors and appropriating whatever stores of wine they could disinter from their compatriots' caches. They took to their heels at the sight of the Spartans, but the rangers ran them down. The army and populace of Lokris, the pimply pillagers reported, had taken to the hills, while the locals' chieftains were scurrying north toward the Persians as fast as their spindly shanks would bear them. In fact, the urchins claimed, their headmen had already capitulated.
Leonidas was furious. It was determined, however, in a hasty and decidedly ungentle interrogation of these farmyard freebooters, that the Lokrians of Opus had gotten the day of assembly wrong. Apparently the month called Karneius in Sparta is named Lemendieon in Lokris. Further its start is counted backward from the full moon, rather than forward from the new. The Lokrians had expected the Spartans two days earlier and, when these failed to appear, determined that they had been left in the lurch. They bolted amid bitter oaths and maledictions, which the gales of rumor scattered swiftly into neighboring Phokis, in which country the Gates themselves are located and whose inhabitants were already in terror of being overrun. The Phokians had hightailed it too.
All along the march north, the allied column had encountered country tribes and villagers fleeing, streaming south along the military road, or what had now become a military road. Tattered clan groups fled before the Persian advance, bearing their pitiful possessions in shoulder sacks contrived from bedcovers or bundled cloaks, balancing their ragged parcels like water vessels atop their heads. Sunken-cheeked husbandmen wheeled handbarrows whose cargoes were more often flesh than furniture, children whose legs had given out from the tramp or bundled ancients hobbled with age. A few had oxcarts and pack asses. Pets and farm stock jostled underfoot, gaunt hounds cadging for a handout, doleful-looking swine being kicked along as if they knew they would be supper in a night or two. The main of the refugees were female; they trudged barefoot, shoes slung about their necks to save the leather.
When the women descried the allied column approaching, they vacated the road in terror, scrambling up the hillsides, clutching their infants and spilling possessions as they fled. There came always that moment when it broke upon these dames that the advancing warriors were their own countrymen. Then the alteration which overtook their hearts bordered upon the ecstatic. The women skittered back down the hardscrabble slopes, pressing tight about the column, some numb with wonder, others with tears coursing down their road-begrimed faces. Grandmothers crowded forward to kiss the young men's hands; farm matrons threw their arms about the necks of the warriors, embracing them in moments that were simultaneously poignant and preposterous. Are you Spartans? they inquired of the sun-blackened infantrymen, the Tegeates and Mycenaeans and Corinthians, Thebans, Philiasians and Arkadians, and many of these lied and said they were.
When the women heard that Leonidas in person led the column, many refused to believe it, so accustomed had they become to betrayal and abandonment. When the Spartan king was pointed out to them and they saw the corps of Knights about him and at last believed, many could not bear the relief. They buried their faces in their hands and sank upon the roadside, overcome.
As the allies beheld this scene repeated, eight, ten, a dozen times a day, a grim urgency took possession of their hearts. All haste must be made; the defenders must at all costs reach and fortify the pass before the arrival of the enemy. Unordered, each man lengthened stride. The pace of the column soon outstripped the capacity of the train to keep up. The waggons and pack asses were simply left behind, to catch up as best they could, their necessaries transferred to the marching men's backs. For myself, I had stripped shoeless and rolled my cloak into a shoulder pad; my master's shield I bore in its hide case, along with his greaves and breastplate weighing something over sixty-five pounds, plus both our bedding and field kit, my own weapons, three quivers of ironheads wrapped in oiled goatskin and sundry other necessaries and indispensables: fishhooks and catgut; bags of medicinal herbs, hellebore and foxglove, euphorbia and sorrel and marjoram and pine resin; arterial straps, bindings for the hand, compresses of linen, the bronze dogs to heat and jam into puncture wounds to cauterize the flesh, irons to do the same for surface lacerations; soap, footpads, moleskins, sewing kit; then the cooking gear, a spit, a pot, a handmill, flint and firesticks; grit-and-oil for polishing bronze, oilcloth fly for rain, the combination pick and shovel called from its shape a hyssax, the soldier's crude term for the female orifice. This in addition to rations: unmilled barley, onions and cheese, garlic, figs, smoked goat meat; plus money, charms, talismans.
My master himself bore the spare shield chassis with double bronze facings, both our shoes and strapping, rivets and instrument kit, his leather corselet, two ash and two cornelwood spears with spare ironheads, helmet, and three xiphe, one on his hip and the other two lashed to the fortypound rucksack stuffed with more rations and unmilled meal, two skins of wine and one of water, plus the goodie bag of sweetcakes prepared by Arete and his daughters, double-wrapped in oiled linen to keep the onion stink of the rucksack from invading it. All up and down the column, squire and man humped loads of two hundred to two hundred and twenty pounds between them.
The column had acquired a nonrostered volunteer. This was a roan-colored hunting bitch named Styx who belonged to Pereinthos, a Skirite ranger who was one of Leonidas' king's selections.
The dog had followed its master down to Sparta from the hills and now, having no home to return to, continued her attendance upon him. For an hour at a crack she would patrol the length of the column, all business, memorizing by scent the position of each member of the march, then returning to her Skirite master, who had now been nicknamed Hound, there to resume her tireless trot at his heel. There was no doubt that in the bitch's mind, all these men belonged to her. She was herding us, Dienekes observed, and doing a hell of a job.
With each passing mile, the countryside grew thinner. Everyone was gone. At last in the nation of the Phokians, nearing the Gates, the column entered country utterly denuded and abandoned. Leonidas dispatched runners into the mountain fastnesses to which the army of the locals had withdrawn, informing them in the name of the Hellenic Congress that the allies stood indeed upon the site and that it was their intention to defend the Phokians' and Lokrians' country whether these themselves showed their faces or not. The king's message was not inscribed upon the customary military dispatch roll, but scribbled on that kind of linen wrapper used to invite family and friends to a dance. The final sentence read: Come as you are.
The allies themselves reached the village of Alpenoi that afternoon, the sixth after the march-out from Lakedaemon, and Thermopylae itself half an hour later. Unlike the countryside, the battlefield, or what would become the battlefield, stood far from deserted. A number of denizens of Alpenoi and Anthela, the north-end village that fronts the stream called Phoenix, had erected makeshift commercial ventures. Several had barley and wheat bread baking. One fellow had set up a grogshop. A pair of enterprising trollops had even established a two-woman brothel in one of the abandoned bathhouses. This became known at once as the Sanctuary of Aphrodite Fallen, or the two-holer, depending upon who was seeking directions and who proffering them.
The Persians, the rangers reported, had not yet reached Trachis either by land or sea. The plain to the north lay yet unpopulated by the enemy camp. The fleet of the Empire, it was reported, had put out from Therma in Macedonia either yesterday or the day before. Their thousand warships were even now traversing the Magnesia coast, the advance elements expected to reach the landing beaches at Aphetae, eight miles north, within twenty-four hours. The land forces of the enemy had departed Therma ten days earlier; their columns were advancing, so fugitives from the north reported, via the coastal and inland routes, cutting through forests as they came. Their rangers were anticipated at the same time as the fleet.
Now Leonidas emerged to the fore.
Before the allied camps were even staked out, the king dispatched raiding parties into the country of Trachis, immediately north of the Gates. These were to torch every stalk of grain and capture or drive off every piece of livestock, down to hedgehogs and barn cats, which might make a meal for the enemy.
In the wake of these raiders, reconnaissance parties were sent out, surveyors and engineers from each allied detachment, with orders to proceed as far north as the landing beaches likely to be appropriated by the Persians. These men were to map the area, as best they could in the gathering darkness, concentrating upon the roads and trails available to the Persian in his advance to the Narrows. Although the allied force possessed no cavalry, Leonidas made certain to include skilled horsemen in this party; though afoot, they could best assess how enemy cavalry might operate. Could Xerxes get horsemen up the trail? How many? How fast? How could the allies best counter this?
Further the reconnaissance parties were to apprehend and detain any locals whose topographical knowledge could be of assistance to the allies. Leonidas wanted yard-by-yard intelligence of the immediate northern approaches and, most crucial recalling Tempe, an iron-clad assessment of the mountain defiles south and west, seeking any undiscovered track by which the Greek position could be outflanked and enveloped.
At this point a prodigy occurred which nearly broke the allies' will before they had even unshouldered their kits. An infantryman of the Thebans trod accidentally into a nest of baby snakes and received upon the bare ankle the full poison of half a dozen infant serpents, whose venom, all hunters know, is more to be feared than a full grown's because the young ones have not yet learned how to deal it out in doses, but instead inject it into the flesh in full measure. The infantryman died within the hour amid horrible sufferings, despite being bled white by the surgeons.
Megistias the seer was summoned while the stricken The-ban writhed yet in the throes. The remainder of the army, ordered by Leonidas to assess at once the extension and reinforcement of the ancient Phokian Wall across the Gates, nonetheless amid their labors loitered with cold dread as the snakebitten man's life, emblematic all felt of their own, ebbed rapidly and agonizingly.
It was Megistias' son, at last, who thought to inquire the man's name.
This was, his mates reported, Perses.
At once all omen-spawned gloom dispelled as Megistias stated the prodigy's meaning, which could not have been plainer: this man, ill-starred in his mother's election of name, represented the enemy, who had in invading Greece stepped into a Utter of serpents. Unfledged though these were and disunited, the fanged babes yet stood capable of delivering their venom into the foe's vital stream and bringing him low.
Night had fallen when this fortune-crossed fellow expired. Leonidas had him interred immediately with honor, then returned the men's hands at once to work. Orders were issued for every stonemason within the allied ranks to present himself, regardless of unit. Chisels, picks and levers were collected and more sent for from Alpenoi village and the surrounding countryside.
The party set forth down the track to Trachis. The masons were ordered to destroy as much of the trail as possible, and also to chisel into the stone in plainest view the following message:
Greeks conscripted by Xerxes:
If under compulsion you must fight us your brothers, fight badly.
Simultaneously work was begun on rebuilding the ancient Phokian Wall which blocked the Narrows. This fortification, when the allies arrived, was little more than a pile of rubble.
Leonidas demanded a proper battle wall.
A wry scene ensued as various engineers and draughtsmen of the allied militias assembled in solemn council to survey the site and propose architectural alternatives. Torches had been positioned to light the Narrows, diagrams were sketched in the dirt; one of the captains of the Corinthians produced an actual drawn-to-scale blueprint. Now the commanders began wrangling.
The wall should be erected right at the Narrows, blocking the pass. No, suggested another, better it should be set back fifty meters, creating a triangle of death between the cliffs and the battle wall. A third captain urged a setback distance of twice that, giving the allied infantry room to mass and maneuver. Meanwhile the troops loitered about, as Hellenes will, offering their own sage counsel and wisdom.
Leonidas simply picked up a boulder and marched to a spot. There he set the stone in place. He lifted a second and placed it beside the first. The men looked on dumbly as their commander in chief, whom all could see was well past sixty, stooped to seize a third boulder. Someone barked:
How long do you imbeciles intend to stand by, gaping? Will you wait all night while the king builds the wall himself?
With a cheer the troops fell to. Nor did Leonidas cease from his exertions when he saw other hands joined to labor, but continued alongside the men as the pile of stones began to rise into a legitimate fortress. Nothing fancy, brothers, the king guided the construction. For a wall of stone will not preserve Hellas, but a wall of men.
As he had done at every engagement at which it had been my privilege to observe him, the king stripped and worked alongside his warriors, shirking nothing, but pausing to address individuals, calling by name those he knew, committing to memory the names and even nicknames of others heretofore unknown to him, often clapping these new mates upon the back in the manner of a comrade and friend. It was astonishing with what celerity these intimate words, spoken only to one man or two, were relayed warrior-to-warrior down the line, filling the hearts of all with courage.
It was now the changing of the first watch.
Bring me the villain.
With these words Leonidas summoned an outlaw of the region who had fallen in with the column along the route and enlisted for pay to aid in reconnaissance. Two Skiritai brought the man forward. To my astonishment, I knew him.
This was the youth of my own country who called himself Sphaireus, Ball Player, the wild boy who had taken to the hills following my city's destruction and had kicked about a man's stuffed skull as his sign of outlaw princeship. Now this criminal advanced into the margins of the king's fire, no longer a smooth-cheeked boy but a scarred and bearded man grown.
I approached him. The fellow recognized me. He was delighted to resume our acquaintance and vastly amused at the fate which had brought us, two orphans of fire and sword, to this, the very epicenter of Hellas ' peril.
The outlaw stood in sizzling high spirits over the prospect of war. He would haunt its margins and prey upon the broken and the vanquished. War to him was big business; it was clear without words that he thought me a dunce for electing to serve, and for not a penny's pay or profit.
Whatever happened to that tasty bit of steam you used to tramp with? he asked me. What was her name-your cousin? Steam was the salacious slang of my country for a female of fair and tender years.
She's dead, I lied, and you will be too for the price of another word.
Easy, countryman! Back your oars. I'm only fanning the breeze.
The king's officers summoned the brigand away before he and I could speak further. Leonidas needed a buck whose soles knew how to grip the hardscrabble track of a goat trail, some stoutheart to scramble up the sheer three-thousand-foot face of Kallidromos which towered above the Harrows. He wanted to know what was up top and how dangerous it was to get there.
Once the enemy took possession of the Trachinian plain and the northern approaches, could the allies get a party, even a single man, across the shoulder of the mountain and into their rear?
Ball Player appeared decidedly unenthusiastic about his participation in this hazardous venture.
I'll go with him. This from the Skirite Hound, a mountaineer himself. Anything to get off building this miserable wall. Leonidas accepted this offer with alacrity. He instructed his paymaster to compensate the outlaw handsomely enough to get him to go, but poorly enough to make sure he came back.
Around midnight the Phokians and Lokrians of Opus began arriving from the mountains. The king welcomed the fresh allies warmly, making no mention of their near desertion but instead guiding them at once to that section of the camp which had been assigned to their use and in which hot broth and freshly baked loaves awaited them.
A terrific storm had sprung up, north along the coast. Bolts resounded furiously in the distance; though the sky above the Gates stood yet clear and brilliant, the men were getting spooked. They were tired. The six days' hump had taken the starch out of them; fears unspoken and demons unseen began to prey upon their hearts. Nor could the newly arrived Phokians and Lokrians fail to discern the slender, not to say suicidally small, numbers of the force which proposed to hold off the myriads of the enemy.
The native vendors, even the whores, had vanished, like rats evacuating to their holes presaging a quake.
There was a man among the loitering locals, a merchantman's mate, he said, who had sailed for years out of Sidon and Tyre. I chanced to be present, around a fire of the Arkadians, when this fellow began to fan the flames of terror. He had seen the Persian fleet firsthand and had the following tale to tell. I was on a grain galley out of Mytilene last year. We got taken by Phoenicians, part of the Great King's fleet. They confiscated our cargo. We had to trail them in under escort and unload it at one of his supply magazines. This was at Strymon on the Thracian coast. The sight I beheld there numbed the senses with awe.
More men began to cluster about the circle, listening gravely. The dump was big as a city. One thought, coming in, that a range of hills stood beyond it. But when you got close, the hills turned out to be salt meat, towering in hogsheads of brine, stacked to the heavens.
I saw weapons, brothers. Stands of arms by the tens of thousands. Grain and oil, bakers' tents the size of stadiums. Every article of war materiel the mind could imagine. Sling bullets. Lead sling bullets stacked a foot high, covering an acre. The trough of oats for the King's horses was a mile long. And in the middle of all rose one oilcloth-shrouded pyramid, big as a mountain. What in heaven could be under that? I asked the officer of marines guarding us. 'Come on,' he says, 'I'll show you.' Can you guess, my friends, what rose there, stacked to the sky beneath those covers?
Paper, the ship's mate declared.
None of the Arkadians grasped the significance.
Paper! the Trachinian repeated, as if to drum the meaning into his hearers' thick skulls. Paper for scribes to take inventory. Inventory of men. Horses. Arms. Grain. Orders for troops and more orders, papers for reports and requisitions, muster rolls and dispatches, courts-martial and decorations for valor. Paper to keep track of every supply the Great King is bringing, and every item of loot he plans on taking back. Paper to write down countries burned and cities sacked, prisoners taken, slaves in chains…
At this moment my master chanced to arrive at the gathering's margins. He discerned at once the terror graven upon the listeners' faces; without a word he pressed forward into the firelight. At the sight of a Spartiate officer among his listeners, the ship's mate redoubled his fervor. He was enjoying the current of dread his tale had spawned.
But the most fearsome remains yet to be told, brothers, the Trachinian continued. That same day, as our gaolers marched us to supper, we passed the Persian archers in their practice. Not the Olympian gods themselves could have assembled such myriads! I swear to you, mates, so numerous were the multitudes of bowmen that when they fired their volleys, the mass of arrows blocked out the sun!
The rumormonger's eyes burned with pleasure. He turned to my master, as if to savor the flame of dread his tale had ignited even in a Spartan. To his disappointment Dienekes regarded him with a cool, almost bored detachment.
Good, he said. Then we'll have our battle in the shade.
In the middle of the second watch came the first panic. I was still awake, securing my master's covered shield against the rain which threatened, when I heard the telltale rustle of bodies shifting, the alteration in the rhythm of men's voices. A terror-swept camp sounds completely different from a confident one. Dienekes rose out of a sound sleep, like a sheepdog sensing murmurs of disquiet among his fold. Mother of bitches, he grunted, it's starting already.
The first raiding parties had returned to camp. They had seen torches, cavalry brands of the Persians' mounted rangers, and had made their own prudent withdrawal before getting cut off.
You could see the foe plainly now, they reported, from the shoulder of the mountain, two miles or less down the trail. Some of the forward sentries had made sorties on their own as well, and these had now returned to camp to confirm the report. Beyond the shoulder of Kallidromos, upon the sprawling plain of Trachis, the advance units of the Persians were arriving.
Within minutes of the sighting of the enemy forerunners, Leonidas had the entire Spartan contingent on its feet and armed, with orders to the allies to marshal in succession and be ready to move forward. The remainder of that night, and all the next day, were consumed with ravaging in earnest the plain of Trachis and the hillsides above, penetrating along the coast as far north as the Spercheios and inland to the citadel and the Trachinian cliffs. Watch fires were set across the entire plain, not little rabbit-roasters as customary, but roaring bonfires, to create the impression of vast numbers of men. The allied units shouted insults and imprecations to one another across the darkness, trying to sound as cheerful and confident as possible. By morning the plain was blanketed end-to-end in fire smoke and sea fog, exactly as Leonidas wanted. I was among the final four parties, stoking bonfires as the murky dawn came up over the gulf. We could see the Persians, mounted reconnaissance units and marine archers of the foe's fast scout corvettes, upon the far bank of the Spercheios. We shouted insults and they shouted back.
The day passed, and another. Now the main-force units of the foe began streaming in. The plain commenced to fill with the enemy. AH Greek parties withdrew before the Median tide. The scouts could see the King's officers claiming the prime sites for His Majesty's pavilions and staking out the lushest pasturage for his horses.
They knew the Greeks were here, and the Greeks knew they were.
That night Leonidas summoned my master and the other enomotarchai, the platoon leaders, to the low knoll behind the Phokian Wall upon which he had established his command post. Here the king began to address the Spartan officers. Meanwhile the commanders from the other allied cities, also summoned to council, began arriving. The timing of this was as the king intended. He wanted the allied officers to overhear the words he spoke seemingly for Spartan ears alone.
Brothers and comrades, Leonidas addressed the Lake-daemonians clustered about him, it appears that the Persian, despite our impressive showmanship, remains unconvinced of the prudence of packing his kit and embarking for home. It looks like we're going to have to fight him, after all. Hear, then, what I expect from each of you.
You are the elect of Hellas, officers and commanders of the nation of Lakedaemon, chosen by the Isthmaian Congress to strike the first blow in defense of our homeland. Remember that our allies will take their cue from you. If you show fear, they will be afraid. If you project courage, they will match it in kind. Our deportment here must not differ from any other campaign. On the one hand, no extraordinary precautions; on the other, no unwonted recklessness. Above all, the little things. Maintain your men's training schedule without alteration. Omit no sacrifice to the gods. Continue your gymnastics and drills-at-arms. Take time to dress your hair, as always. If anything, take more time.
By now the allied officers had arrived at the council fire and were assuming their stations amid the already assembled Spartans. Leonidas continued as if to his own countrymen, but with an ear to the new arrivals as well. Remember that these our allies have not trained their whole lives for war, as we have. They are farmers and merchants, citizen-soldiers of their cities' militias.
Nonetheless they are not unmindful of valor or they would not be here. For the Phokians and Lokrians of Opus, this is their country; they fight to defend home and family. As for the men of the other cities, Thebans and Corinthians and Tegeates, Orchomenians and Arkadians, Phliasians, Thespians, Man-tineans and the men of Mycenae, these display to my mind even nobler andreia, for they come uncompelled, not to defend their own hearths, but all Greece.
He motioned the new arrivals forward.
Welcome, brothers. Since I find myself among allies, I am making a long-winded speech.
The officers settled in with an anxious chuckle. I am telling the Spartans, Leonidas resumed, what I now tell you. You are the commanders, your men will look to you and act as you do. Let no officer keep to himself or his brother officers, but circulate daylong among his men. Let them see you and see you unafraid. Where there is work to do, turn your hand to it first; the men will follow. Some of you, I see, have erected tents. Strike them at once. We will all sleep as I do, in the open. Keep your men busy. If there is no work, make it up, for when soldiers have time to talk, their talk turns to fear. Action, on the other hand, produces the appetite for more action.
Exercise campaign discipline at all times. Let no man heed nature's call without spear and shield at his side.
Remember that the Persian's most formidable weapons, his cavalry and his multitudes of archers and slingers, are rendered impotent here by the terrain. That is why we chose this site. The enemy can get no more than a dozen men at a time through the Narrows and mass no more than a thousand before the Wall. We are four thousand. We outnumber him four to one.
This produced the first genuine laughter. Leonidas sought to instill courage not by his words alone but by the calm and professional manner with which he spoke them. War is work, not mystery. The king confined his instructions to the practical, prescribing actions which could be taken physically, rather than seeking to produce a state of mind, which he knew would evaporate as soon as the commanders dispersed beyond the fortifying light of the king's fire.
Look to your grooming, gentlemen. Keep your hair, hands and feet clean. Eat, if you have to choke it down. Sleep, or pretend to. Don't let your men see you toss. If bad news comes, relay it first to those in grade above you, never directly to your men. Instruct your squires to buff each man's aspis to its most brilliant sheen. I want to see shields flashing like mirrors, for this sight strikes terror into the enemy. Leave time for your men to sharpen their spears, for he who whets his steel whets his courage.
As for your men's understandable anxiety concerning the immediate hours, tell them this: I anticipate action neither tonight nor tomorrow, nor even the day after. The Persian needs time to marshal his men, and the more myriads he is burdened with, the longer this will take. He must wait upon the arrival of his fleet. Beaching grounds are scarce and slender upon this inhospitable coast; it will take the Persian days to lay out roadsteads and secure at anchor his thousands of warships and transports.
Our own fleet, as you know, holds the strait at Artemis-ium. Breaking through will require of the enemy a full-scale sea battle; preparing for this will consume even more of his time. As for assaulting us here in the pass, the foe must re-connoiter our position, then deliberate how best to attack it. No doubt he will send emissaries first, seeking to achieve by diplomacy what he hesitates to hazard at the cost of blood. This you need not concern yourselves with, for all treating with the enemy will be done by me.
Here Leonidas bent to the earth and lifted a stone thrice the size of a man's fist. Believe me, comrades, when Xerxes addresses me, he might as well be talking to this.
He spat upon the rock and slung it away into the dark.
Another thing. You have all heard the oracle declaring that Sparta will either lose a king in battle or the city herself be extinguished. I have taken the omens and the god has answered that I am that king and that this site will be my grave. Be assured, however, that this foreknowledge will nowise render me reckless with other men's lives. I swear to you now, by all the gods and by the souls of my children, that I will do everything in my power to spare you and your men, as many as I possibly can, and still defend the pass effectively.
Finally this, brothers and allies. Wherever the fighting is bloodiest, you may expect to discover the Lakedaemonians in the forefront. But convey this, above all, to your men: let them not yield preeminence in valor to the Spartans, rather strive to outdo them. Remember, in warfare practice of arms counts for little. Courage tells all, and we Spartans have no monopoly on that. Lead your men with this in mind and all will be well.
It was the standing order of my master on campaign that he be woken two hours before dawn, an hour prior to the men of his platoon. He insisted that these never behold him prone upon the earth, but awake always to the sight of their enomotarch on his feet and armed.
This night Dienekes slept even less. I felt him stir and roused myself. Lie still, he commanded.
His hand pressed me back down. It's not even past second watch. He had dozed without removing his corselet and now creaked to his feet, all his scarred joints groaning, I could hear him crack the bones of his neck and hawk dry phlegm from the lungs he had seared at Oinoe, inhaling fire, which wound like the others had never truly healed.
Let me help you, sir.
Sleep. Don't make me tell you twice.
He snatched one of his spears from the stacked arms and shouldered his aspis by its sling cord.
He took his helmet, seating it by its nasal into the warpack he now slung across his shoulders. He gimped off on his bad ankle. He was making for Leonidas' cluster among the Knights, where the king would be awake and perhaps wanting company.
Across the cramped confines the camp slumbered. A waxing moon stood above the strait, the air unseasonably chill for summer, dank as it is by the sea and made more raw by the recent storms; you could hear the breakers clearly, combing in at the base of the cliffs. I glanced across at Alexandras, pillowed upon his shield beside the snoring form of Suicide. Watch fires had banked down; across the camp the sleeping warriors' forms had stilled into lumpy piles of cloaks and sleeping capes that looked more like sacks of discarded laundry than men.
Toward the Middle Gate, I could see the bathhouses of the spa. These were cheerful structures of unmilled lumber, their stone thresholds worn smooth by the tread of bathers and summer visitors dating from centuries. The oiled paths meandered prettily under the oaks, lit by the olivewood lamps of the spa. A burnished wood plaque hung beneath each lamp, a snatch of verse carved upon it. I recall one:
As at birth the soul, steps into the liquid body, So step you now, friend, into these baths, releasing flesh into soul, reunited, divine.
I remembered something my master had once said about battlefields. This was at Tritaea, when the army met the Achaians in a field of seedling barley. The climactic slaughter had taken place opposite a temple to which in time of peace the deranged and god-possessed were conveyed by their families, to pray and offer sacrifice to Demeter Merciful and Persephone. No surveyor marks out a tract and declares, 'Here we shall have a battle.' The ground is often consecrated to a peaceful purpose, frequently one of succor and compassion. The irony can get pretty thick sometimes.
And yet within Hellas' mountainous and topographically hostile confines, there existed those sites hospitable to war- Oenophyta, Tanagra, Koroneia, Marathon, Chaeronea, Leuk-tra-those plains and defiles upon and within which armies had clashed for generations.
This pass of the Hot Gates was such a site. Here in these precipitous straits, contending forces had slugged it out as far back as Jason and Herakles. Hill tribes had fought here, savage clans and seaborne raiders, migrating hordes, barbarians and invaders of the north and west. The tides of war and peace had alternated in this site for centuries, bathers and warriors, one come for the waters, the other for blood.
The battle wall had now been completed. One end abutted the sheer face of the cliff, with a stout tower flush to the stone, the other tailing off at an angle across the slope to the cliffs and the sea.
It was a good-looking wall. Two spear-lengths thick at the base and twice the height of a man.
The face toward the enemy had not been erected sheer in the manner of a city battlement, but left deliberately sloped, right up to the actual sallyports at the crest, where the final four feet rose vertical as a fortress. This was so the warriors of the allies could scamper rearward to safety if they had to, and not find themselves pinned and crushed against their own wall.
The rear face sloped up in stacked steps for the defenders to mount to the battlements, atop which had been anchored a stout timber palisade sheathed in hides which the standing watches could cast loose so that the tow arrows of the enemy would not set the palisade alight. The masonry was ragged stuff but sturdy. Towers stood at intervals, reinforcing redoubts right, left and center and secondary walls behind these. These strong-points had been built solid to the height of the primary wall, then stacked with heavy stones to a man's height beyond. These loose boulders could be tumbled, should necessity dictate, into the breaches of the lower sallyports. I could see the sentries now atop the Wall and the three ready platoons, two Arkadian and one Spartan, in full panoplia, at each redoubt.
Leonidas was in fact awake. His long steel-colored hair could be distinguished clearly beside the commanders' fire. Dienekes attended him there among a knot of officers. I could make out Dithyrambos, the Thespian captain; Leon-tiades, the Theban commander; Polynikes; the brothers Al-pheus and Maron, and several other Spartan Knights.
The sky had begun to lighten; I became aware of forms stirring beside me. Alexandras and Ariston had come awake as well and now roused themselves and took station beside me. These young warriors, like myself, found their gaze drawn irresistibly to the officers and champions surrounding the king. The veterans, all knew, would acquit themselves with honor. How will we do? Alexandras put into words the anxiety that loitered unspoken in his youthful mates' hearts.
Will we find the answer to Dienekes' question? Will we discover within ourselves 'the opposite of fear!?
Three days before the march-out from Sparta, my master had assembled the warriors and squires of his platoon and outfitted a hunt at his own expense. This was in the form of a farewell, not to each other, but to the hills of their native country. None spoke a word of the Gates or of the trials to come. It was a grand outing, blessed by the gods with several excellent kills including a fine boar brought down in its charge by Suicide and Ariston with the javelin and the foot-braced pike.
At dusk the hunters, beyond a dozen with twice that number of squires and helots serving as beaters, settled in high spirits about several fires among the hills above Therai. Phobos took a seat as well. As the other huntsmen made merry around their separate blazes, diverting themselves with lies of the chase and good-fellow jesting, Dienekes cleared space beside his own station for Alexandras and Ariston and bade them sit. I discerned then my master's subtle intent.
He was going to speak of fear, for these unblooded youths whom he knew despite their silence, or perhaps because of it, had begun in their hearts to dwell upon the trials to come.
All my life, Dienekes began, one question has haunted me. What is the opposite of fear?
Down the slope the boar flesh was coming ready; portions were being shared out to eager hands.
Suicide came up, with bowls for Dienekes, Alexandras and Ariston, and one apiece for himself, Ariston's squire Demades and me. He settled on the earth across from Dienekes, flanked by two of the hounds who had noses for the scraps and knew Suicide as a notorious soft touch. To call it aphobia, fearlessness, is without meaning. This is just a name, thesis expressed as antithesis.
To call the opposite of fear fearlessness is to say nothing. I want to know its true obverse, as day of night and heaven of earth.
Expressed as a positive, Ariston ventured.
Exactly! Dienekes met the young man's eyes in approval. He paused to study both youths' expressions. Would they listen? Did they care? Were they, like him, true students of this subject?
How does one conquer fear of death, that most primordial of terrors, which resides in our very blood, as in all life, beasts as well as men? He indicated the hounds flanking Suicide. Dogs in a pack find courage to take on a lion. Each hound knows his place. He fears the dog ranked above and feeds off the fear of the dog below. Fear conquers fear. This is how we Spartans do it, counterpoising to fear of death a greater fear: that of dishonor. Of exclusion from the pack.
Suicide took this moment to toss several scraps to the dogs. Furiously their jaws snapped these remnants from the turf, the stronger of the two seizing the lion's share.
Dienekes smiled darkly.
But is that courage? Is not acting out of fear of dishonor still, in essence, acting out of fear?
Alexandros asked what he was seeking.
Something nobler. A higher form of the mystery. Pure. Infallible.
He declared that in all other questions one may look for wisdom to the gods. But not in matters of courage. What have the immortals to teach us? They cannot die. Their spirits are not housed, as ours, in this. Here he indicated the body, the flesh. The factory of fear.
Dienekes glanced again to Suicide, then back to Alexandras, Ariston and me. You young men imagine that we veterans, with our long experience of war, have mastered fear. But we feel it as keenly as you. More keenly, for we have more intimate experience of it. Fear lives within us twenty-four hours a day, in our sinews and our bones. Do I speak the truth, my friend?
Suicide grinned darkly in reply.
My master grinned back. We cobble our courage together on the spot, of rags and remnants. The main we summon out of that which is base. Fear of disgracing the city, the king, the heroes of our lines. Fear of proving ourselves unworthy of our wives and children, our brothers, our comradesinarms. For myself I know all the tricks of the breath and of song, the pillars of the tetrathesis, the teachings of the phobo-logia. I know how to close with my man, how to convince myself that his terror is greater than my own. Perhaps it is. I employ care for the men-at-arms serving beneath me and seek to forget my own fear in concern for their survival. But it's always there.
The closest I've come is to act despite terror. But that's not it either. Not the kind of courage I'm talking about. Nor is beastlike fury or panic-spawned self-preservation. These are katalepsis, possession. A rat owns as much of them as a man.
He observed that often those who seek to overcome fear of death preach that the soul does not expire with the body. To my mind this is fatuousness. Wishful thinking. Others, barbarians primarily, say that when we die we pass on to paradise. I ask them all: if you really believe this, why not make away with yourself at once and speed the trip?
Achilles, Homer tells us, possessed true andreia. But did he? Scion of an immortal mother, dipped as a babe in the waters of Styx, knowing himself to be save his heel invulnerable? Cowards would be rarer than feathers on fish if we all knew that.
Alexandros inquired if any of the city, in Dienekes' opinion, possessed this true andreia.
Of all in Lakedaemon, our friend Polynikes comes closest. But even his valor I find unsatisfactory. He fights not out of fear of dishonor, but greed for glory. This may be noble, or at least unbase, but is it true andreia?
Ariston asked if this higher courage in fact existed.
It is no phantom, Dienekes declared with conviction. I have seen it. My brother Iatrokles possessed it in moments. When I beheld its grace upon him, I stood in awe. It radiated, sublime.
In those hours he fought not like a man but a god. Leonidas has it on occasion. Olympieus doesn't. I don't. None of us here does. He smiled. Do you know who owns it, this pure form of courage, more than any other I have known?
None around the fire answered.
My wife, Dienekes said. He turned to Alexandras. And your mother, the lady Paraleia. He smiled again. There is a clue here. The seat of this higher valor, I suspect, lies in that which is female. The words themselves for courage, andreia and aphobia, are female, whereas phobos and tromos, terror, are masculine. Perhaps the god we seek is not a god at all, but a goddess. I don't know.
You could see it did Dienekes good to speak of this. He thanked his listeners for sitting still for it. The Spartans have no patience for such inquiries of the salon. I remember asking my brother once, on campaign, a day when he had fought like an immortal. I was mad to know what he had felt in those moments, what was the essence experienced within? He looked at me as if I had taken leave of sanity. 'Less philosophy, Dienekes, and more virtue.'
He laughed. So much for that.
My master turned sidelong then, as if to draw this inquiry to a close. Yet some impulse drew him back, to Ariston, upon whose features stood that expression of one of youthful years nerving himself to venture speech before his elders. Spit it out, my friend, Dienekes urged him.
I was thinking of women's courage. I believe it is different from men's.
The youth hesitated. Perhaps, his expression clearly bespoke, it smacked of immodesty or presumptuousness to speculate upon matters of which he possessed no experience.
Dienekes pressed him nonetheless. Different, how?
Ariston glanced to Alexandras, who with a grin reinforced his friend's resolve. The youth took a breath and began: Man's courage, to give his life for his country, is great but unextraordinary. Is it not intrinsic to the nature of the male, beasts as well as men, to fight and to contend? It's what we were born to do, it's in our blood. Watch any boy. Before he can even speak, he reaches, impelled by instinct, for the staff and the sword-while his sisters unprompted shun these implements of contention and instead cuddle to their bosom the kitten and the doll.
What is more natural to a man than to fight, or a woman to love? Is this not the imperative of a mother's blood, to give and to nurture, above all the produce of her own womb, the children she has borne in pain? We know that a lioness or she-wolf will cast away her life without hesitation to preserve her cubs or pups. Women the same. Now consider, friends, that which we call women's courage:
What could be more contrary to female nature, to motherhood, than to stand unmoved and unmoving as her sons march off to death? Must not every sinew of the mother's flesh call out in agony and affront at such an outrage? Must not her heart seek to cry in its passion, 'No! Not my son! Spare him!' That women, from some source unknown to us, summon the will to conquer this their own deepest nature is, I believe, the reason we stand in awe of our mothers and sisters and wives. This, I believe, Dienekes, is the essence of women's courage and why it, as you suggested, is superior to men's.
My master acknowledged these observations with approval. At his side Alexandras shifted, however. You could see the young man was not satisfied.
What you say is true, Ariston. I had never thought of it in that way before. Yet something must be added. If women's victory were simply to stand dry-eyed as their sons march off to death, this would not alone be unnatural, but inhuman, grotesque and even monstrous. What elevates such an act to the stature of nobility is, I believe, that it is performed in the service of a higher and more selfless cause.
These women of whom we stand in awe donate their sons' lives to their country, to the people as a whole, that the nation may survive even as their own dear children perish. Like the mother whose story we have heard from childhood who, on learning that all five of her sons had been killed in the same battle, asked only, 'Was our nation victorious?' and, being told that it was, turned for home without a tear, saying only, 'Then I am happy.' Is it not this element-the nobility of setting the whole above the part-that moves us about women's sacrifice?
Such wisdom from the mouths of babes! Dienekes laughed and rapped both lads affectionately upon the shoulder. But you have not yet answered my question. What is the opposite of fear?
I will tell you a story, my young friends, but not here or now. At the Gates you shall hear it. A story of our king, Leonidas, and a secret he confided to Alexandras' mother, Paraleia. This tale will advance our inquiry into courage- and will tell as well how Leonidas came to select those he did for the Three Hundred. But for this hour we must put a period to our salon or the Spartans, overhearing, will declare us effeminate. And they will be right!
Now in camp at the Gates we three youths could see our enomotarch, responding to dawn's first glimmer, take leave of the king's council and return to his platoon, stripping his cloak to call the men to gymnastics. On our feet, then. Ariston sprung up, snapping Alexandras and me from our preoccupations. The opposite of fear must be work.
Drill-at-arms had barely begun when a sharp whistle from the Wall summoned every man to alert.
A herald of the enemy was advancing into view at the throat of the Narrows.
This messenger drew up at a distance, calling out a name in Greek, that of Alexandras' father, the polemarch Olympieus. When the herald was motioned forward, escorting a single officer of the enemy embassy and a boy, he cried further by name after three other Spartan officers, Aristodemos, Polynikes and Dienekes.
These four were summoned at once by the officer of the watch, he and all others in hearing astonished and by no means uncurious about the specificity of the enemy's request.
The sun was full up now; scores of allied infantrymen stood watching upon the Wall. Forward advanced the Persian embassy. Dienekes recognized its principal at once. This was the captain Ptammitechus, Tommie, the Egyptian marine we had encountered and exchanged gifts with four years previous at Rhodes. The boy, it turned out, was his son. The lad spoke excellent Attic Greek and served as interpreter.
A scene of warm reacquaintance ensued, with abundant clapping of backs and clasping of hands.
Surprise was expressed by the Spartans that the Egyptian was not with the fleet; he was, after all, a marine, a sea fighter. Tommie responded that he only, and his immediate platoon, had been detached to duty with the land armies, seconded to the Imperial Command at his own request for this specific purpose: to act as an informal ambassador to the Spartans, whose acquaintance he recalled with such warmth and whose welfare he wished above all to succor.
By now the crowd surrounding the marine had swelled to above a hundred. The Egyptian towered half a head over even the tallest Hellene, his tiara of pressed linen adding further to his stature. His smile flashed brilliant as ever. He bore a message, he declared, from King Xerxes himself, which he had been charged to deliver to the Spartans alone.
Olympieus, who had been senior envoy during the Rho-dian embassy, now assumed that position in this parley. He informed the Egyptian that no treating would be done on a nation-by-nation basis. It was one for all among the Greeks, and that was that. The marine's cheerful demeanor did not falter. At that moment the main body of Spartans, led by Alpheus and Maron, was running shield drills immediately before the Wall, working with and instructing two platoons of the Thespians. Tommie observed the brothers for a number of moments, impressed. I will alter my request, then, he said, smiling, to Olympieus. If you, sir, will escort me to your king, Leonidas, I will deliver my message to him as commander of the Hellenic allies as a whole.
My master was plainly fond of this personable fellow and delighted to see him again. Still wearing steel underpants? he inquired through the boy interpreter.
Tommie laughed and displayed, to the further amusement of the assembly, an undergarment of white Nile linen. Then, with a gesture friendly and informal, he seemed to set aside his role as envoy and speak, for the moment, man-to-man.
I pray that armor of mail need never be employed be-tween us, brothers. He indicated the camp, the Narrows, the sea, seeming to include the defense as a whole in the sweep of his arm.
Who knows how this may turn out? It may all blow over, as it did for your force of Ten Thousand at Tempe. But if I may speak as a friend, to you four only, I would urge you thus: do not let hunger for glory, nor your own pride in arms, blinder you to the reality your forces now confront.
Death alone awaits you here. The defenders cannot hope to stand, even for a day, in the face of the multitudes His Majesty brings against you. Nor will all the armies of Hellas prevail in the battles yet to come. Surely you know this, as does your king. He paused to let his son deliver the translation and to study the response upon the faces of the Spartans. I beg you hearken to this counsel, friends, offered from my own heart as one who bears the most profound respect for you as individuals and for your city and its wide and well-deserved fame. Accept the inevitable, and be ruled with honor and respect- You may stop there, friend, Aristodemos cut him off.
Polynikes put in with heat: If that's all you came to tell us, brother, stick it between the creases.
The Egyptian maintained his level and amiable demeanor. You have my word and His Majesty's upon it: if the Spartans will yield now and surrender their arms, none will exceed them in honor beneath the King's banner. No Persian foot will tread the soil of Lakedaemon now or forever, this His Majesty swears. Your country will be granted dominion over all Greece. Your forces will take their place as the foremost unit in His Majesty's army, with all the fortune and glory such prominence commands. Your nation has but to name its desires. His Majesty will grant them and, if I may claim to know his heart, will shower further gifts upon his new friends, in scale and costliness beyond imagining.
At this, the breath of every allied listener stoppered in his throat. Each eye stood fearfully upon the Spartans. If the Egyptian's offer was bona fide, and there was no reason to believe it wasn't, it meant deliverance for Lakedaemon. All she need do was forsake the Hellenic cause. What now would be these officers' response? Would they at once convey the envoy to their king? Leonidas' word would be tantamount to law, so preeminent stood his stature among the Peers and ephors.
Out of the blue, the fate of Hellas suddenly teetered upon the precipice. The allied listeners stood nailed to the site, awaiting breathlessly the response of these four warriors of Lakedaemon.
It seems to me, Olympieus addressed the Egyptian with barely a moment's hesitation, that if His Majesty truly wished to make the Spartans his friends, he would find them of far greater service with their arms than without.
Further, experience has taught us, Aristodemos added, that honor and glory are boons which cannot be granted by the pen but must be earned by the spear.
My glance scanned in this moment the faces of the allies. Tears stood in the eyes of not a few; others seemed so undone with relief that their knees threatened to give way beneath them. The Egyptian clearly discerned this. He smiled, gracious and patient, not abashed in the least.
Gentlemen, gentlemen. I trouble you with matters which should and must be debated, not here in the marketplace so to speak, but in private before your king. Please, if you will, conduct me to him.
He'll tell you the same, brother, Dienekes declared.
And in far cruder language, put in another Spartan among the crowd.
Tommie waited for the laughter to subside.
May I hear this response, then, from the king's own lips?
He'd have us whipped, Tommie, Dienekes put in with a smile.
He'd tear the hide off our backs, spoke the same man who had interposed a moment earlier, even to propose such a course of dishonor.
The Egyptian's eyes swung now to this speaker, whom he perceived to be an older Spartan, clad in tunic and homespun cloak, who now stepped into the second rank, at the shoulder of Aristodemos. For a moment the marine was taken aback to discover this graybeard, who clearly bore the weight of more than sixty summers, yet stood in infantryman's raiment among the other, far younger warriors.
Please, my friends, the Egyptian continued, do not respond out of pride or the passion of the moment but permit me to place before your king the wider consequences of such a decision. Let me set the Persian Majesty's ambitions in perspective.
Greece is just the jumping-off point. The Great King already rules all Asia; Europe now is his goat. From Hellas His Majesty's army moves on to conquer Sikelia and Italia, from there to Helvetia, Germania, Gallia, Iberia. With you on our side, what force can stand against us? We will advance in triumph to the Pillars of Herakles themselves and beyond, to the very walls of Oceanus!
Please, brothers, consider the alternatives. Stand now in pride of arms and be crushed, your country overrun, wives and children enslaved, the glory of Lakedaemon, not to say her very existence, effaced forever from the earth. Or elect, as I urge, the course of prudence. Assume with honor your rightful station in the forefront of the invincible tide of history. The lands you rule now will be as nothing beside the domains the Great King will bestow upon you. Join us, brothers. Conquer with us all the world! Xerxes son of Darius swears this: no nation or army will surpass you in honor among all His Majesty's forces! And if, my Spartan friends, the act of abandoning your Hellene brothers strikes you as dishonorable, King Xerxes extends his offer further, to all Greeks. All Hellenic allies, regardless of nation, will he set in freedom at your shoulder and honor second only to yourselves among his minions!
Neither Olympieus nor Aristodemos nor Dienekes nor Polynikes lifted voice in response. Instead the Egyptian saw them defer to the older man in the homespun cloak.
Among the Spartans any may speak, not just these ambassadors, as we are all accounted Peers and equals before the law. The elder now stepped forward. May I take the liberty to suggest, sir, an alternative course, which I feel certain will find favor, not among the Lakedaemonians alone, but with all the Greek allies?
Please do, responded the Egyptian.
All eyes centered upon the veteran.
Let Xerxes surrender to us, he proposed. We will not fail to match his generosity, but set him and his forces foremost among our allies and grant to him all the honors which he so munificently proposes to shower upon us.
A laugh burst from the Egyptian.
Please, gentlemen, we squander precious time. He turned away from the older man, not without a hint of impatience, and pressed his request again to Olympieus. Conduct me at once to your king.
No use, friend, answered Polynikes.
The king is a crusty old bugger, Dienekes added.
Indeed, put in the older man. He is a foul-tempered and irascible fellow, barely literate, in his cups most days before noon, they say.
A smile now spread across the features of the Egyptian. He glanced to my master and to Olympieus. I see, said Tommie.
His look returned to the older man, who, as the Egyptian now discerned, was none other than Leonidas himself.
Well then, venerable sir, Tommie addressed the Spartan king directly, dipping his brow in a gesture of respect, since it seems I am to be frustrated in my desire to speak in person with Leonidas, perhaps, in deference to the gray I behold in your beard and the many wounds my eyes espy upon your body, you yourself, sir, will accept this gift from Xerxes son of Darius in your king's stead.
From a pouch the Egyptian produced a double-handled goblet of gold, magnificent in craftsmanship and encrusted with precious gems. He declared that the engravings thereupon represented the hero Amphiktyon, to whom the precinct of Thermopylae was sacred, along with Herakles and Hyllus, his son, from whom the race of the Spartans, and Leonidas himself, was descended. The cup was so heavy that the Egyptian had to hold it out with both hands.
If I accept this generous gift, Leonidas addressed him, it must go into the war treasury of the allies.
As you wish. The Egyptian bowed.
Then convey the Hellenes' gratitude to your King. And tell him my offer will remain open, should God grant him the wisdom to embrace it.
Tommie passed the goblet to Aristodemos, who accepted it for the king. A moment passed, in which the Egyptian's eyes met first Olympieus', then settled gravely upon my master's. An expression of solemnity, sober to the point of sorrow, shrouded the marine's eyes. Clearly he discerned now the inevitability of that which he had sought with such charity and concern to avert.
If you fall in capture, he addressed the Spartans, call my name. I will exert every measure of influence to see that you are spared.
You do that, brother, Polynikes answered, hard as steel.
The Egyptian recoiled, stung. Dienekes stepped in swiftly, clasping the marine's hand warmly in his own.
Till we meet, Dienekes said.
Till then, Tommie replied.