Christian Cameron: Salamis

The priestess met my eye, not my daughter’s. ‘The principal role of women in revenge,’ she said, ‘is as convenient victims.’

‘I’ve known a woman or two to exact a bloody revenge,’ I said. ‘Heliodora, your father and I have renewed our oaths of non-aggression until the Medes are defeated. Please accept my oath that I mean you no harm.’

She smiled. ‘Oh, I like everything I hear about you, except killing our horses,’ she said. She tried to say this with dignity and becoming modesty, all the while trying not to give her attention to young Hector — or Hipponax. It was a pretty fair performance for so young a woman.

I decided to take pity on all of them. ‘Despoinai,’ I said to the two young women, ‘it would be rude of me not to introduce my son Hipponax and his inseparable warrior companion, Hector, son of Anarchos, both of whom serve me as marines. They fought quite well against the Persians.’

My son shot me a look of pure love.

Parenting. Much like military leadership. Certainly.

The next morning, a day behind Hermogenes and the phalanx, we crossed into Attica. We landed on the open beach where pilgrims going to the great mysteries landed, and there were still great crowds there — hundreds of families with their sheep or goats or oxen. And there were ships, two great Athenian grain freighters as big as temples, waiting to load the people and perhaps even the goats.

I purchased horses at the beach. It was a sudden inspiration, directly from Poseidon, no doubt. Many of the refugees waiting to take ship were prosperous people and, as I said, they brought all their animals, but there was no way that all the herds of Attica could fit into those ships, much less be fed on the grass of Salamis. I picked up six horses — all fine animals — for a song, and was blessed into the bargain by the gentleman who owned them. I think he really didn’t want to slit their throats. And I had armour and weapons and three men to move quickly. I promised him that he could have them all back at the end, if all went well.

He was right to fear the slaughtering knife for his animals, though. That’s just what a small body of hoplites was doing to any animal that could not be loaded, butchering them on the spot for meat, and burning the carcasses. Athens meant business: she was not leaving grain or animals to feed the Great King’s army. She was, in a terrible way, destroying herself to hurt her enemy.

But once we left the shore, Attica was a strange land indeed. It was empty. Not only were all the people gone, but so were most of the animals. As we took the road for Plataea over the mountains, I remember passing the tower at Oinoe where my brother died and seeing a cat sleeping in the sun on a wall. That cat was almost the only living thing I saw that day.

Plataea was already emptying by the time I arrived. We made the ride in one day and came in the dark. But Eugenios was there to take my exhausted mare and there were beds made up and sweet-smelling blankets and we collapsed into them, and in the morning there was warm milk heavy with honey and fresh bread.

But there wasn’t a hanging on any of the walls, and the chests that held all my spare armour and all my fine cups and plates, my bronze platters and some nice pieces of loot from my days of piracy — they were all gone. So were the better pieces of Athenian ware, like the krater with the painting of Achilles receiving his armour from his mother, and the kylix with Penelope weaving at her loom, from which our fresco painter took his model.

All gone.

Eugenios smiled in quiet triumph. ‘I sent a mule train to the isthmus under Idomeneus’s orders,’ he said. ‘The slaves packed as soon as your message came.’ He bowed his head. ‘I would like to come with you, lord, if you are going to fight the Persians.’

In fact, there were several dozen men who came that morning, slaves released from service, or sent by their masters. Plataeans are surprisingly generous — many men freed slaves to build the walls in Marathon year, you will recall, and now several of the richer men were freeing farm workers to help Athens. Slaves and servants have a world of their own — look around you, thugater — you think they only talk to you? And Eugenios, my steward, had organised it all.

But I never expected packing my house to be my real task. I had people for that, people trained by Jocasta. And in my very clean kitchen, the great lady of Athens looked me in the eye and said, ‘Antigonus died with the King of Sparta. We heard yesterday. Your sister needs you.’

So I took my new mare and road over the Asopus to Thespiae, and there I found Penelope. She had already cut away a great slice of her hair in mourning and her eyes were red with weeping. She didn’t say anything, certainly nothing accusatory.

She just stood in her house-yard with her arms around me while her slaves packed. She cried a little.

The first words she said were, ‘They mutilated his body.’

By then, we had all heard that the mighty King of Persia, King of Kings, reigning over kings, was a petty tyrant who had ordered the heads of the last five hundred hoplites to fight all hacked off, and their bodies cut up. I won’t even describe it. It was — atimnos. Dishonourable. Stupid, too. No Greek who heard of the mutilation of the King and his companions would ever forget it.

It is perhaps one of the curses of warfare that men do such stupid, horrible things and think themselves strong, when in fact, all they prove is that they are weak.

But it told us another story, too. That the Great King intended to mutilate us.

‘Come with me to Salamis,’ I said. ‘Come and help me take care of Euphonia.’

Penelope didn’t smile or laugh or make a joke. ‘I’ll be ready in the morning,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘I think people will need me at the isthmus,’ she said. ‘Your daughter is in good hands.’

‘There’s a rumour that there are Saka cavalry at Thebes.’

We both spat.

‘Come with me now,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to leave you for the Medes.’

She thought a moment, and then she nodded. With surprisingly little fuss she gathered two women and her children and their Thracian nurse and they all mounted horses. Ajax, one of my steadier men from former times and a near neighbour, gave me his handclaps that he’d see her goods safely to Corinth. The phalanx was marching all together, with a long column of baggage carts sandwiched in between, as we’d practised.

And I wasn’t going with them.

I took my sister and her people back to Plataea as the sun went down, the fifth day since we’d left the beaches at Artemisium. There was a watch on the walls of my town and the only people left in it were the freedmen coming with me to row, the rest of my sailors, all armed and having a bit of a feast, and the rearguard of the phalanx under Alcaeus and Bellerophon. They had a hundred men, more or less, to cover the rear of the town’s goods, which had left already.

They’d planned it all without me. Which was as well, because the roads from Thebes were choked with refugees, and Plataea’s gates were shut for the first time in many years.

I left Jocasta with Pen and went to my forge. Styges was there, loading the last of his tools for the baggage train. He was not going back to Salamis with me; many of the Epilektoi were going to the isthmus to be the core of the Plataean phalanx in the new League army. I did not need so many marines on my remaining ships.

He looked up when I came in. Darkness had already fallen and he had a dozen lamps lit to provide light, wasting oil that he would lose anyway, I suppose.

‘Eerie, isn’t it?’ he asked me. ‘So quiet.’

I nodded and pulled out my greaves. In the last fight at Artemisium, someone had put a spear point into my left greave. Or, just possibly, my own sauroter — the bronze point on the butt of a Greek spear — had penetrated the armour. It can happen, when you shift grips. Either way, I had a hole in the armour the size of the tip of my little finger and I needed it repaired.