But one girl stood out. She was not a beauty, but she stood square and straight like a young ash. She had a beautiful body, muscled like an athlete, firm breasts, broad hips and a narrow waist. And she talked like a man, straight at you, if you asked for wine or some such. When she played at jumping the fire — showing her muscled legs and leaping high enough to fly away into the smoke-filled dark — all the men wanted her, even those who usually preferred men. She had that spark — that in Briseis is a raging fire. I felt it too, though I was only a week from my love, and in that week I hated all women with equal fervour.
The girl moved among us, and we all admired her, and then Phrynichus leaped to his feet and seized a kithara that one of the boys had been playing, and he sang us a song.
How I wish I could remember it!
He called her Artemis’s daughter, of course, and he sang that her portion and her dowry was time, honour, the word-fame of man, and that her sons would conquer the world and be kings, and her daughters would sacrifice to the Muses. He sang of her in a parody of the elegies that men receive when they win games at Olympus or Nemea, and he praised her skill at jumping fires.
And he did all this while rhyming inside every line, so that his pentameters rolled like a marching army. We were spellbound.
The girl wept when it was done. ‘What have I to live for that will compare to this?’ she asked, and we all applauded her.
There were some good times.
I asked Phrynichus later if he had bedded her, and he looked at me as if I was a child and told me that grown men do not kiss and tell, which shows you that I still had a great deal to learn.
Another night, Phrynichus debated with Philocrates about the gods. Philocrates dared us to consider a world where there were no gods, and he suggested — through good argument and some sly inversion — that such a world would bear a remarkable resemblance to our own. Then Phrynichus rose and proposed that we consider a world where the gods did not believe in Philocrates. His satire was brilliant and so funny that I can’t remember a word of it, except that I threw up from too much wine and laughing so hard.
Phrynichus drank when he wasn’t using his head, and he and Philocrates and Idomeneus formed a drinking club whose members had to swear to be drunk every day as an offering to Dionysus. I tried to make fun of Philocrates for this display of piety, but he refused to be mocked — saying that Dionysus was the one god whose effects were palpable.
Just after the local feast of Hera, our navarch bestirred himself from his tent and ordered us to sea, to seize the island of Lade before the Persian fleet arrived. By now we received daily reports from merchant ships and outlying galleys — and the Lesbians had a dozen fast biremes and a pair of light sailing hemioliai on hand, and they did what scouting got done.
So on the morning after the feast of Hera, we rose, manned our ships — a scene of complete chaos, let me tell you — and sailed in a surprisingly orderly manner down the coast of Samos to Lade — the enemy squadron, led by Archilogos, slipping away ahead of us. We had so many ships that we filled the island. The Samians landed first, and they took all the good ground, so that by the time the Lesbians and Chians had landed, we, the extreme right of the line and the last in sailing order, were left with the rocks near the fort and nowhere else to camp.
I was leading Miltiades’ ships and Nearchos’s squadron, and I directed them to follow me to the beach opposite the island — the beach from which I’d launched my raid a year before. We were not sorry to be separated by half a stade of water from the excesses of Dionysius and the growing tensions of the camp.
Later, Aristides was listening to Phrynichus recite the Iliad, which always delighted him, and when he reached the scene where Diomedes takes the army forward and routs the Trojans, he turned to me and frowned.
‘We need to get to grips with the Medes before the fleet collapses,’ he said. ‘The Samians have refused to train any more. They’ve mutinied, and the Lesbians are just as bad.’
That night, Epaphroditos and a few of his warriors swam over to us, drank wine and complained of how mad our navarch had become.
‘We’re not pirates,’ Epaphroditos said. ‘The man’s notions of training are insane.’
Secretly, I suspected that all the Ionians could have used harder hands and stronger backs. But they were brave, and as far as I could see, this was one fight that would be settled through courage, not tactics.
‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘I hear the Persians are on the way. We need a rest.’
I talked with him half the night, and Phrynichus listened to every word he said as if he were Hector returned.
Dionysius declared that we should have games to propitiate the gods in preparation for the contest against the Persians. It was the most popular decision he’d made since he ordered us to Lade. Men were bored, restless and yet listless. I felt that the Ionians were dangerously lazy. We were on the edge of victory, and they wanted to behave like men who had already won.
The prospect of games didn’t excite me the way it had when I was younger. It makes me laugh now, to think that at twenty-three or twenty-four I imagined myself a hardened old man.
I had already triumphed in a set of military games, you’ll recall, back on Chios when the revolt was young. Five years before. So I decided not to compete in every event, or to strive to win the whole competition. But events decided otherwise.
Next morning, Phrynichus said that he wanted to see Miletus before we fought. I had business there, so I collected a heavy bag and a letter for Teucer and we walked across the mudflats into the city, slipping past the Persian archers in the last gloom of morning to have a cup of wine with Istes. He depressed me by showing me the siege mound, now all but level with the height of the wall. ‘Twenty days,’ he said.
‘Care to come with us?’ I asked, and Istes shook his head.
‘My place is here, with my brother,’ he said. ‘We will die here.’
‘Cheer up!’ I insisted. ‘Apollo will not let us fail.’ I could see the future so clearly that I was surprised other men worried so much. ‘We will destroy their fleet, and then we will liberate all of Asia.’
Istes had lines around his eyes that were not there a year ago, and pouches from sleepless nights. He looked twenty years older than me. And he drank constantly.
I glanced at Phrynichus. ‘This is the greatest swordsman in the Greek world,’ I said.
Istes grinned. ‘Someday, perhaps we can measure each other,’ he said. I agreed — it would be good to face such a gifted man. That is the admiration by competition that makes Greece great. ‘But I would rather stand beside you as we smite the Persians.’
‘Flattery will get you anywhere, Plataean,’ he said. ‘You think we’ll win this naval battle?’
‘I do,’ I said. We would win, I would take Briseis as my war bride and that would be that. My spear-won wealth would make a palace for her on my farm. That’s what I had decided — to have her and punish her as well.
Feel free to laugh.
‘I have to say that I’ve now fought the Persians every fucking day for a year,’ Istes said. ‘If you destroy every ship in their fleet — kill Datis, drown their navarchs — this war still won’t be over. They’re much, much tougher than that.’ He yawned. ‘But if you lose, Miletus falls — and the revolt is fucked.’
‘You are tired,’ I said.
‘You know how it feels after a fight?’ he asked me, one killer to another.
‘Of course,’ I allowed.
‘Imagine fighting every day,’ he said. ‘Every fucking day. I’ve been at it a year, and I’m starting to go mad. My brother is worse — he was never the fighter I am, and fear is getting into his gut.’
Of course, you are familiar with the character of Istes in the play. Phrynichus knew his business. He was a great man, and he knew greatness when he saw it.