That night I ate with Paramanos and my people — and with Giorgios and Nicolas, returned from their pilgrimage. Next day I attended the Athenian assembly and voted against ostracism for Aristides.
We lost. Aristides was exiled for ten years.
His exile did not include forfeiture of any property — his wife could continue to live on the east slope of the acropolis and his managers could continue to run his farms. By Athenian standards, it was lenient, if you left out the crushing unfairness of it. The problem was that men like Aristides had had the habit of making themselves tyrants for more than a hundred years. Aristides had it all — money, good looks, a war record, and oratory skills. I suspect that, even if he had not been chosen as the secret ambassador, he would have had to go. Perhaps the secret mission to the Great King was a sop.
Frankly, Athenian politics always appals me. They punish the best men and raise fools.
Mind you, in the same assembly, I voted in favour of spending the year’s excess from the silver mines on building new triremes — the second or third year they’d done that. I must have been one of the few men in that assembly to vote that way — against ostracism, in favour of the fleet. Most Athenians saw these as conflicting interests, because they were too close to the problems.
Well.
Late that afternoon, Lydia swept into Piraeus with a hull full of hides and Ionian wine, and the next morning I had her laded with white Athenian leather, fine bronze wares and pottery. I arranged a farewell dinner with Phrynicus, and sailed away west, for Sparta.
I don’t remember anything about the sea voyage. I suspect it was fraught with the usual perils and probably had as many irritated rowers and magnificent dolphins as every other trip across the Aegean, but what I remember is Sparta itself.
I suspect that most people do not imagine Sparta as beautiful; Athens is beautiful — she has the acropolis and two hundred years of magnificent architecture. Plataea is beautiful because of Kitharon and because of the green fields that stretch away, the visible signs of Demeter’s blessing to man and Hera’s blessing to Green Plataea.
Sparta is also beautiful. Did she not give birth to Helen? And are not the women of Lacedaemon all Helen’s daughters? High up the vale, with mountains rising on either hand, the carpet of olive trees rolling across the valley — Sparta has a unique wonder.
But I cannot abide the helots. Or rather, the Spartans themselves. On every hand in Sparta, one sees them — and they are somehow more wretched than slaves in Athens or Plataea. Perhaps that is merely my own prejudice, but few helots are ever freed, and the enslavement is racial, not by chance or war-capture. Many have been slaves for so many generations that they think their state is natural — as do their masters. I admire Sparta for many things — but the enslavement of the helots casts a shadow, and that shadow, to me, is at the core of who they are.
I left Brasidas on the ship with Sekla. Spartans are less forgiving than other Greeks in matters of skin colour. I took only Alexandros and Hector, and we purchased horses by the beach at Gytheio where Lydia was selling her wares. When we came in stern first, there were a pair of Carthaginian triremes on the beach to trade, and two more over by the Migonion. But they wanted nothing more from us than to buy our goods, and there was not a sign of Dagon. I rode north to Sparta with no greater concern than to pick up my passengers and make haste before the autumn storms hit.
We entered the city on the main road, as well paved as the Panathenaic way, and rode past the temple of the Dioscuri, which was every bit as elegant as anything in Athens — the local stone lent itself to the remarkable quality of the Peloponnesian sunshine. It was high summer, and just before midday, when most Spartan citizens rested in the shade, and even slaves seemed to dart from shadow to shadow. The three of us wore straw hats with brims so wide we seemed to be in tents.
The agora was as busy as any in Greece — the goods unloaded on the beach at Gytheio were already on sale in the capital. In the agora, the midday sun was ignored — there were hundreds of men and women moving about, and long awnings. It was here that I saw the main difference between Sparta and Athens. Sparta has magnificent temples but too little shade, and Spartans are too proud to pretend to need a stoa. In fact, I saw mostly helots sitting under the old oak trees that ringed the agora. Citizens stood proudly in the sun, as if daring Helios to do his worst.
I wore a big hat.
We dismounted at the edge of the agora, and it was there that I got my first taste of helot life. An adolescent Spartiate — probably in the last years of the Agoge — demanded water from a helot woman, and when he didn’t get it fast enough, he said, ‘Obey, bitch,’ and struck her.
Instead of screaming for help, she cringed away and fetched him water.
Perhaps it was not a representative incident. Perhaps I misjudge them.
At any rate, we asked directions.
If I expected a palace for the two kings, I was wrong. The kings live well — they have the kind of staff one associates with the richest Athenians. But their homes are private houses, and Leonidas lived in a beautiful house with three wings around a courtyard with its own olive tree and a small fountain. The courtyard had three arcades of columns, one on each side, for shade. A wall and a set of barracks for slaves, and a small warehouse, took up the fourth side of the complex.
We were ushered in by a helot butler, and brought into the courtyard. There we were served a marvellous water, full of bubbles from some god-touched spring. The helots served Hector as freely as they served Alexandros and me.
Alexandros smiled at Hector. ‘I think you are in for an easy few days.’
I laughed. ‘Am I such a hard master? But perhaps we could send him to the Agoge.’
Another helot came in. ‘Masters, the Lady Gorgo wishes you to know that she will join you directly.’
Indeed, the lady herself followed hard on the slave’s message. She was dressed simply, in a long yellow chiton pinned in the Dorian manner. She wore a girdle of gold tied with a Herakles knot and wore a diadem in her hair.
‘Ah, Helen,’ I said. I said it lightly.
Her eyes crossed mine the way a man’s do when he is ready to draw a weapon.
‘In Sparta, no woman is ever compared to Helen,’ she said. She nodded agreeably. ‘Pardon me. Your words took me aback, and I should have nothing for you but praise. The king is at exercise and will join us soon, as will some of your other friends here.’ She nodded pleasantly enough to Alexandros and to young Hector.
I intervened to make introductions. ‘My lady, this is my captain of marines, Alexandros, a gentleman of Plataea, and this is my hypaspist, Hector, son of Anarchos, now also a citizen of Plataea.’
‘Ah, Green Plataea. I intend to make a pilgrimage to the temple of Hera in the spring.’ Gorgo smiled. ‘I love to travel. But I thought that you had another captain of marines?’
I was a little shocked that she should mention him. ‘I have several ships,’ I said.
By this time, slaves were appearing with nuts, honeyed almonds and wine. Gorgo led us, as if in a procession, through the courtyard to another wing and in under the portico to a tiled alcove not unlike the edge of the Athenian paleastra — stone benches like those athletes use. The benches lined two walls, so that quite a number of people could sit and converse — a very civilised notion.