Salamis

And just then he began a speech with the words, ‘In Athens …’

Now, friends, I love Athens, but many back then did not — aye, and many hate her today. Athens is not a mellow old nobleman like Sparta, but a brash, pushy vendor hawking sweets at the top of her lungs and willing to show a bit of breast to get you to buy. Let us be frank: there is a lot not to like.

So whenever Themistocles started a speech with the words, ‘In Athens’, he was busy making enemies.

Perhaps the problem, obvious to those of us from the small poleis, and invisible to the mighty, was that when Themistocles talked, he talked for his Athenian audience, and when Adeimantus talked, he talked for his Corinthian audience, and neither was actually speaking to the other.

‘Where is Cimon?’ I asked the navarch.

His eyes narrowed. ‘Not here,’ he said in his Laconian way. And then, ignoring Themistocles, he turned to me.

‘I am concerned that he has been rash,’ he said.

Speaking to Spartans is like visiting the oracles — you have to interpret what they say, because they use as few words as they can.

Eurybiades didn’t look at me, but he spoke carefully, as if I was a slightly slow but well-beloved child. ‘Cimon spoke of “commerce raiding”,’ he admitted.

First I’d heard of it. Commerce raiding always appeals to me.

In fact, if anyone had asked me — and no one had since a memorable night at the Olympics — I would have said that we should make a whole war of attacking their commerce. With the nearly four hundred ships we had on the beaches of Salamis and a few more coming in every day, we could have made it impossible for the Great King to even assemble a fleet.

Also, my rowers were eating my fortune every day, and my town was being sacked by the Persians.

‘Shall I go and fetch him home?’ I said as sweetly as possible.

Eurybiades had not been born yesterday, or even the day before. He looked at me levelly, the way my father used to when I said I could go to town by myself. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Anything was better than listening to Themistocles talk, or Adeimantus shout.

Dawn, and we were off the beach. I took only Lydia so as not to make a stir, and her hull was dry and clean from six days in the warm early autumn sun. A dry hull is, next to a good shipwright and good wood, the most important thing in a ship. I’d left Seckla in charge and he’d turned her over, stripped away all the repairs we’d made in the last year and replaced them with the new wood and professional shipwrights that Athens offered to all the Allies. Then he’d dried the hull for three days in the sun and only then caulked her tight again and coated the now dry hull with shining black pitch, finished with her original scarlet stripe along the oar-ports. Her sails were clean and dry and all her cordage was clean and recently coiled down.

Lydia was, as I have said before, a half-decked trireme with a standing mainmast. This is now popular in all the western parts of the Inner Sea but it was rarer then, favoured by pirates and by the cities of Magna Graecia, where I learned of it. The standing mainmast was braced by the deck and two strong beams, which meant more sail could be made in a stronger wind, the boom of the sail could be braced further round, and the ship itself could point a little closer to the wind. None of that was, to be honest, all that important, although it would have been had I wanted to sail outside the pillars of Heracles again. What mattered most was that the sails were always available, day and night, and that we could use them almost to the very point of battle.

The rig has bad points too. You can still lose your mast over the side when you ram. That’s a serious problem and a risk every time, because when you lay a seaborne ambush, that standing pole can give you away to a sharp-eyed lookout. On the other hand, our mast had a small basket like a bird’s nest, forty feet above the waves, where our lookout could stand. Perhaps worst for a sailor on the Inner Sea is that in the event of a big storm, you cannot simply bring your mast down on deck and a high wind puts an incredible pressure on even a bare pole.

Oarsmen love them, though. They don’t have to work so hard. The deck allowed me to have more marines and more deck crew as well as some archers — every pirate’s dream.

I mention all this now because, thanks to Seckla’s tireless work — well, and everyone else who stayed behind — our five ships were in a magnificent material state of readiness, and when I rowed away into the dawn the other ships were completing the same process. Many of the Athenian ships were doing the same, and even the Peloponnesian ships, a few of them anyway. Lydia was in as pretty a state as she’d ever been, at least since she was launched.

The other major factor in handling a warship besides her design, the quality of her wood, and how dry her hull is, is the men in the hull. As we rowed off the beach at Salamis, I think I had the best crew I had ever had. Listen to my ship list, thugater. I had Seckla and Leukas as helmsmen, both brilliant sailors, both able to command a ship. I had Onisandros as our oar-master, the best lungs in the fleet, and Brasidas commanding my marines.

And what marines! Idomeneus, another man who could command his own ship, and Styges; Sitalkes the Thracian and Alexandros, a brilliant hoplite in magnificent equipment, Hector my sometime hypaspist and Hipponax my son, and Achilles, my cousin. I’ll take a moment to say that Achilles had fought in the actions against the Saka, neither badly nor brilliantly. He tried to be a sullen loner, but Brasidas and Idomeneus wouldn’t let him. The Cretan and the Spartan were rivals, but only in the best way, and they competed to bring Achilles up to our standard.

I was short by two marines. Teucer, son of Teucer, was dead, and Antimenides, son of Alcaeus, was on the beach with the doctors, badly wounded.

Oh, and what of Idomeneus, you ask? On the beach of Eleusis, when they took him down from his horse, he woke, spat in the sand, and demanded water. He drank pints of it, and more that night at Salamis, and he was with us the next morning — with a headache like the hangover after the feast of Dionysus and no more. I have had my share of fortune in war, but I have never been more surprised to see a man survive a wound then Idomeneus in the fight at Leithos’s shrine.

But marines do not power a ship, my friends. That is down to oarsmen. I won’t name them all — I probably couldn’t, but that morning I knew all their names. They were a homogeneous body, had been together for more than a year without a pause, and although we had a few new men and a few awkward sods, everyone was in top shape and most men were well fed and believed in what we were doing.

Especially after we served out the Saka gold.

Leon was the oldest and had the biggest mouth. But he was a man who could row through the whole of a storm and still make a foul joke to the man on the next bench. Giorgos and Nicolas had rowed for me for years and both were capable of being officers when required — they commanded rowing divisions. Sikli, a leering monster from Sicily; Kineas, a handsome young man from Massalia who was tired of fishing and never wanted to go back; and Kassander — and a hundred and seventy more. They had made, every one of them, enough gold to buy a farm. More than seventy of them actually owned property in Plataea, a couple enough to qualify as hoplites.

But oarsmen and sailors do not easily come to wealth. They spend freely, on wine, on lotus flowers, on poppy juice and hemp seeds and women and men and jewellery and tattoos and cats and dogs and monkeys and pretty knives and any other blessed thing that enters their heads. Why?