Christian Cameron: Salamis

Well, I am not one of those fathers. I hope.

At any rate, there they were — big and small, tall and short, long-legged and short-legged, black-haired and brown-haired and red-haired — the height of fashion at the time, let me tell you — and golden-haired like Euphonia. They were beautiful in their coltish innocence, afire with the excitement of their exile and the adventure of the war, and in the rising sun, they looked like so many muses or naiads. Most wore a simple boy’s chitoniskos, worn off one shoulder and thus exposing one breast on a few of the older girls. In the dawn, preparing for their dance, they were all stretching like boys in a gymnasium. In fact, the women’s gymnasium at Brauron was a wonder throughout Attica, and perhaps until that moment I had never seen women as athletes. But closest to me was an older girl whose legs carried the same sort of muscle my legs wore when I could run two stades faster than all the other youths, and her arms showed the same ridges of muscle at biceps and triceps that any well-trained boy had.

My two boys were acting like clods, their mouths open, their teeth showing.

I leaned back on my stool and kicked Hipponax sharply in the shin even as I held my cup out to a young girl of perhaps ten years to have it refilled.

Let me add that if Hector and Hipponax had ever had a thought in their handsome heads about anything but war, I had assumed it was about each other. This is natural enough, especially in war — they were young and tough and together every minute. Perhaps I should have given it more thought. I suppose I assumed they were Achilles and Patrocles, or something like.

As it proved, they were just two boys who’d never seen a girl. Much less twenty girls all on the edge of womanhood, wearing an arm’s length of transparent cloth that revealed one breast, one shoulder, and most everything else, especially when a girl stretched a leg high in the air in a manner than no boy could manage, or did a handstand.

I’ll blush myself if I go on. These girls were young enough to be my daughters. If they were shameless, they were also utterly innocent. Their very shamelessness came of summers of high training with no men about to stare or pry.

Of course, the staring was not entirely one-sided, and one girl, crowned with a magnificent double braid of her own red-brown hair, seemed to need to stretch each of her legs repeatedly just a horse-length from Hipponax, who watched her with the attention he usually saved for an adversary in a ship fight.

‘It’s not polite to drool,’ I said quietly.

Hipponax didn’t seem to hear me.

Hector dug a thumb under his arm. Hipponax squirmed, but he and the girl seemed to have their eyes locked together. I think I actually saw the arrow of Eros’s little bow go into his eye. He was slain dead on the spot.

Hah! That was a lovely morning.

At any rate, the girls began to dance — none too soon, for the boys. And there was nothing lovesome or erotic to their dance — they leapt and crawled, they kicked and growled, little bears indeed. Some of the girls were quite good — to my delight, Euphonia was one of them, her movements pure and graceful, her back straight. Once in a while she’d spoil it by taking her lower lip between her teeth in concentration, but she was good.

I must have been grinning. The priestess leaned over. ‘She’s very good, although a little arrogant.’ She paused. ‘Have you found her a husband already?’ she asked.

Really, if the whole of the Persian fleet had rounded the promontory that instant, I wouldn’t have been more surprised. ‘No,’ I said.

Mother Thiale smiled. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘She has much spirit,’ she said. ‘Is she to be a priestess?’

‘In Plataea, Mother, most priestesses are wives,’ I said. ‘We are a small city. My mother was hereditary priestess of Hera.’

Mother Thiale looked non-committal. ‘Ah,’ she said.

The girl with the double braid wrapped around her head — a man’s hairstyle meant to pad a helmet — was clearly one of the dance leaders. She did a movement with her legs and hips, exactly as we do it in Pyrrhiche, her feet both performing a sliding turn in place, her hips turning as if to face a new partner — or a new opponent.

All the other girls followed suit. In this portion of the dance, the braided girl did each figure alone, and then the rest of them would copy her. She kicked, jumped, stretched. While she was dancing, she was beautiful. When the figure was done and all the girls took water, she was revealed as being very tall and heavily built — almost as well built as a man. Proportioned — still pretty. But her beauty had been in her dance.

And she drank her water with her eyes on Hipponax.

After they drank water, the dancers came together for one more dance. This was a hymn to the sun and another girl led it, this one smaller, blonde and very serious and grave. But if the first girl’s dancing had been beautiful, this girl’s dancing was divine, or at least direct from the goddess. Her sense of the timing in the music was superb — in fact, I’ve never seen a professional dancer who was her equal. It was as if she understood something in the music that the other girls didn’t hear.

My Euphonia danced well — her movements were crisp and to the music, and this time she didn’t chew on her lip. But she was merely a devotee of the Goddess of the Bears. For the duration of the dance, the blonde girl was the goddess herself, and her legs flashed and moved with a precision that only the very best warriors could match.

They trained well, at Brauron.

The two girls — the braided one and the smaller one — were, as it always proves, best friends. Summers of competition at everything had only made them closer. You could see in the way they stood together, and the way they drank the water from their black ceramic canteens, and giggled.

Hipponax and Hector watched them with something like the adoration that dogs have for their masters.

Euphonia bowed low to her teachers, got a pretty hug from the blonde dancer, and came over to us.

‘You are a very good dancer,’ I said. The first duty of every parent — provide accurate praise. Empty praise is worthless, but children are like soldiers — they need praise to enable their work.

In fact, if you ask me, training soldiers and oarsmen is the very best training for being a parent. Except, come to think of it, women do neither of these things and seem to be very good at mothering, so perhaps my wits are astray.

At any rate, she hugged both her brothers, and accepted their praise.

Hector was the bolder of the two. ‘Who is the blonde girl? The one who danced-’

Euphonia laughed. ‘Heliodora? She’s the best dancer they’ve ever had here.’ She paused. ‘At Brauron I mean. Pater, why is the fleet not fighting at Brauron? The Persians will destroy the temple.’

I suppose I smiled. ‘My little bear, Athens will be lucky if the allied fleet agrees to make its stand here and defend Salamis.’ I looked around at the bay in the growing September sunlight. ‘If we could lure the Persians into fighting inside the bay-’

‘Brauron has a rocky promontory on which all the Persian ships could wreck themselves.’ She all but bounced while she spoke.

‘Perhaps, with Poseidon’s help, they will.’ I tried to make light of it.

Euphonia caught sight of my left hand. I’d been hiding it inside my himation, and she caught me, as children do. She pulled it out.

‘Oh, Pater!’ she said.

Even the priestess winced.

I smiled. You learn, in time, how to play the hero, and how not to say, ‘Yes, it hurts as if all the Furies had stung me themselves, and it’s also clumsy for eating.’ Instead, you smile and say, ‘It’s nothing. I never even needed those fingers.’