Myron nodded. ‘You are still the polemarch,’ he said. ‘It would be good to have you here. There are new. . men in this city. And every time Athens sneezes, we catch cold. We live in. . difficult times.’
‘What new men?’ I asked, and Myron looked away.
‘We lost men at Marathon and before,’ he said. ‘Some of the slaves Athens sent us are good men, and some are not. And many Thebans have purchased land. Some of them are good men, and some are. . Thebans.’
I brought Styges to the building site. He and Hermogenes were not always the best of friends — not all of one’s favourite people can be made to love one another — but I reconciled them to the notion that it was my money going into the smithy. The tool shed was the size of a barn, and copied those I’d seen in Sicily and in Corinth — chimneys, hearths and bellows on the ground floor, lots of light, and space for ten men to work. In the second week, the new bellows came over the mountain from Athens — when you pay silver, you can get things in a miraculous hurry — and the new benches went in along the wall with a row of shuttered windows so that the whole shop smelled of fresh-sawn pine and oak. I had all the shutters painted bright red, and the doors, and I put the raven of the Corvaxae over the door in jet-black ironwork.
Heron was delighted. ‘A place that big will draw business from Thespiae and Thebes,’ he crowed. And he began to expand his own shop. Ironsmiths and bronzesmiths are not in competition for anything but eating knives, so it was fine that we were co-located.
Old Tiraeus laughed and watched the sheds being built. ‘This is the second time you’ve saved me,’ he said. ‘I can work the bronze, but I can’t make money.’
The truth was, Hermogenes was the same. A fine worker, and a gifted hand with the hammer — but not a man who could imagine what would sell, nor who could keep the bins stocked with ingots of bronze, or direct a dozen apprentices in pouring the sheet or pounding it out long before it was needed.
Styges was, though. On the battlefield and in the shop, he was a thinker. And so, while the new shutters went into the windows and the stucco dried on the outside and the two Athenian carpenters put their great pedal-powered bellows into the forge-fire hearths, I took my ‘associates’ out to dinner without Brasidas and his aristocratic notions. We sat and drank Plataean wine and ate oil on our bread and generally acted like the Boeotian bumpkins we really were.
I put Styges in charge of the shop, despite him being the youngest. Both older men frowned. But in the end, it was my money, and they agreed with no good grace despite the wine and the anchovies.
Men are men. You cannot tell a master smith that he should work for a younger man — even when Tiraeus himself admitted he lacked the skills to make and keep the silver.
At the end of the second week, the houses were done — rebuilt. One for Hermogenes and his wife, and one for Tiraeus and Styges, until one or both found a mate. I purchased them four slaves, and we all spent a day in the shop, playing with the bellows.
At the end of the second week, I sent for Empedocles, and that evening, riding home to Thespiae, I met a silversmith on the road. He was just come from a pilgrimage to Delphi. I didn’t know him, but he proved to be a cousin of Diokles and quite a young man.
The next morning, he showed up at the stone smithery, and by the end of the day, he had his tools laid out on a bench and was quickly using up his store of silver making trinkets for the pilgrims who came to the temple of Hera — mostly women, and prone to buy jewellery. But his presence made Styges excited, because now he had someone to work silver, he could make fancier armour.
Myron’s friend Timaeas offered me any of five lots for my own house, and I bought the house across from Myron’s. I spent the money from my tin on that house — new everything, from slaves to statues to household gods. It had two things few houses in Plataea had ever seen — an in-town stable for four horses, and a water trough with flowing water. The house was big and spacious — too big for one man and his small daughter, no matter how rich. But I had the walls painted by professionals, and I spent money — more money — on horses, on silver plates, on good pottery and grain storage and then on grain.
It was like playing house, with real money.
I tell all this, as if all I did was concern myself with buildings, but in the main, what I did was play with my daughter and get to know her, and write letters to Jocasta and to Cimon and to Phrynicus asking for help putting her into the summer dances at Brauron, and before the late flowers were past budding and the first barley crop was in, I had a letter from Jocasta, wife of Aristides, informing me that my daughter had a place in the New Moon as a Little Bear, and that her husband was to be put on trial.
He is too proud to ask your help — but I well remember what you did for Miltiades. Themistocles will stop at nothing to see my husband in exile, and I cannot bear it. Arimnestos, bring your daughter to the temple and come and see what can be done for Aristides, and I will be forever in your debt.
Jocasta
Unlike Gorgo, and the other Spartan women, who lived very much in public, it was almost unheard of for an Athenian woman to write a letter to a man — but Jocasta had a good head on her shoulders, and she had seized the excuse of my writing about my daughter (women’s business) to make her plea.
I knew that things must be desperate indeed.
Cimon’s answer came the very next day, and the tone of desperation was the same.
Of course we can arrange for your daughter to be placed at Brauron. But if you were to see fit to accompany her, you might find yourself requested to perform a miracle, as Aristides is threatened with ostracism.
I felt very wise, what with having made peace with Simon’s sons and having brought some of my prosperity home to Plataea. Three weeks after my arrival, I had every mason in the town at work; the roofer was working from dawn to dusk, there were whole convoys of donkeys bringing goods from Athens, Corinth and even hated Thebes, and the new smithy rang with the music of the hammer on the anvil. My oarsmen — as well as Brasidas and Alexandros — had been formally invested as citizens at my behest. I helped Brasidas purchase a farm and the slaves to run it — never was there a less interested farmer.
I thought that it was foolish of Themistocles to continue the quarrel with Aristides — just when we needed both men for the war with Persia. I was in a fine mood, and I prepared my daughter to travel over the mountain to Attica while preparing in my mind the speeches of reconciliation I planned for Athens.
On the summer feast of Herakles, old Empedocles came and blessed the new building and the whole forge, even including the silversmith in his prayers, and he kindled all our forge fires. He had a Theban journeyman with him, and the young man beamed at everything he saw and helped the old man with the rites.
Then I made a cup. It had been two years since I had worked, and yet the power of the god flowed through me and I made a fine cup — with a flat bottom and sloped sides, and silver rivets on the handle, and the image of a priest blessing an anvil. And Empedocles laughed and then cried and complained that he was an old man, and we all drank a great deal. But I made a second cup and gave it to my daughter, and she shook her head.
‘My uncle Andronicus can’t make anything like this,’ she said.
‘He’s an aristocrat,’ I said.
And the next day, while my new slaves we repacking my new donkeys in my new yard of my new house, yet another messenger came, from the Agiad King of Sparta.
The truth? I rather looked forward to taking the heralds to Susa.
You must know I’d never been. But I had been to Sardis and I knew enough Persian to get good service and good food. I knew enough Persian aristocrats to expect to have friends at the Great King’s court.