I got it as our rowers pulled us out of the harbour into a cold, sunny winter day. There was rain on the northern horizon and storm heads out over the Aegean.
I chose a multitude of compromises. Megakles concurred. We put the bow due north — and sailed within sight of land, all the way around the great bow, as Greeks call it — the coast of Asia, and then the coast of Thrace, under the lee of magnificent Samothrace and then down the coast of Thessaly to Euboea and Athens. It is a very, very long way to sail and row compared to skipping from Lesvos to Skyros and then to the coast of Euboea, but it has the signal advantage that if a squall hits you, you might survive a swim to the shore. And every storm-tossed day, there’s at least the possibility of an anchorage or a beach.
With adverse winds, winter storms and fog, we were almost thirty days sailing home — and our rowers were as thin entering Athens as we had been coming down out of the hills on horseback. No fishing boats in winter means no one from whom to buy fish — no shepherds on the hillsides, no mutton on the fire.
We left Aristides on the coast of Euboea. I sent him to my house with Hector and Alexandros and a pair of marines.
We landed in Piraeus, and while Sekla sold our cargo, I rushed to Themistocles.
I think that what I remember best is that when I said Babylon was in revolt, he slammed his right fist into his left.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Now we have a chance.’
4
Corinth — 481 BCE
In which of the local glories of the past, divinely blessed Thebe, did you most delight your spirit? Was it when you raised to eminence the one seated beside Demeter of the clashing bronze cymbals, flowing-haired Dionysus? Or when you received, as a snow-shower of gold in the middle of the night, the greatest of the gods, when he stood in the doorway of Amphitryon, and then went in to the wife to beget Heracles? Or did you delight most in the shrewd counsels of Teiresias? Or in the wise horseman Iolaus? Or in the Sown Men, untiring with the spear?
After Athens, I returned to Plataea for the longest time I had spent there since my wife died.
In my heart, I was preparing my home for a bride again. And my bride was to be Briseis.
By now, some of you must wonder whether I am a complete fool, that I should seek this woman’s favour so often, and so often be turned away. But however brief our encounter in Artapherenes’ house in Sardis, I knew — I knew that the contract was signed.
And my house in Plataea was beautiful. The frescoes were done, and the house was stocked with grain and oil and full of light and life, because my daughter was there with her nurse Phoebe, a charming local girl, a priestess at the temple of Hera. Phoebe had made the mistake any girl can make, and had a baby without a father — but her milk had saved Euphonia, and as my daughter grew, Phoebe had, in some ways, matured with her.
I confess that, besides my daughter, her body slave and Phoebe, mine was a very masculine household. I had found a place to beach my ships in the Corinthian gulf — over by Thisbe — and with my brother-in-law I’d bought warehouses and barracks there. Because that put my oarsmen so close, and because they were — with Myron’s help — all Plataeans, I tended to have a dozen of them around at any given time — on errands, or simply seeing the city of which they were (miraculously, to many) now citizens.
Sekla — who had collected quite a bit of money over the preceding few years — purchased a house in Plataea that spring.
I unpacked my few treasures from Persia — some silk, which went into stores, and my lapis, and the cedarwood box from the Queen Mother. I had never opened it, and when I did, I convinced my new slave butler that I really was a man of consequence.
It was a two-eared cup, as tall as a man’s hand to the wrist, big enough to serve to ten guests at a drinking party, made of solid gold. On one side, a mounted man — a king, from his high crown — killed a lion with his bow. One the other side, a pair of winged lions were engraved surrounding an enormous emerald, the largest I’d ever seen, and beryls and other stones were set all the way around the rim — just below it, so that a man could comfortably drink from it. It was slightly bent, from where I’d fallen on it in the fight in the mountains, and I shocked my major-domo by taking it directly to the shop and truing the circle of the rim. My silversmith saved me from cracking the mounts that held the jewels — what does a bronzesmith know of such work? — and then we all marvelled over the quality of the workmanship. It was worth. . well, about as much as the whole town of Plataea.
I exaggerate. Perhaps only half as much.
It impressed Aristides. He looked at it for a long time, and even put it tentatively to his lips. And then he looked at me over the rim.
‘The hillside of Kitharon is more beautiful,’ he said.
I had Aristides as a long-term guest — I had returned from Susa to find him in one of my rooms with a pile of scrolls under his elbow, reading Anaxamander as if he, not I, was the owner. But he was an excellent guest, and — having run a rich household for many years — he was an endless fund of information.
Aristides, Sekla, Megakles, Leukas, Sittonax — who had a dozen tales to tell of his adventures in Asia; Hector and Nikeas and Alexandros — and all my local friends, such as Ajax and Gelon and Lysieus and the three smiths, who had made more money in one year than they had imagined possible — Tiraeus and Styges and Hermogenes, much recovered in his old self thanks to prosperity-they were all present. Wealth may not buy happiness, but it certainly beats poverty.
And I had truly begun to enjoy wealth.
We went through a great deal of wine as that winter gave way to spring, and the bitter rains gave way to warm sun. The sun dried the stones, and my gardener — a freedman from Sicily, of all places — provided me with jasmine and roses and a hundred other flowers and shrubs, as well as making my olive tree shine like Athena’s gift to my house. Aristides — as anxious for his wife to arrive as I was — helped me with every detail, and when the guest house was finished, we watched the fresco painter — and annoyed him mightily, so that he muttered at us every day.
My guest house was decorated with scenes from the Odyssey — the return of Odysseus, the loom of Penelope, and the moment at which Penelope takes her husband in her arms. My daughter loved them, and did her best to ‘help’ the artist, who might mock or curse me but was always bright and pleasant with her — even when her dirty handprints marred Penelope’s face.
Storm Cutter returned very profitably from Aegypt with the onset of spring, and Paramanos told Moire where to find us and he took a cargo for Corcyra and came right round to Thisbe. My African navarch announced himself by riding into my courtyard on one of the handsomest horses I’d ever seen — he had Ka behind him on another — and Jocasta, wife of Aristides, mounted on a third.
When I’d known him well, Moire hadn’t been much more fulsome than a man of Lacedeamon, but six more years among Greeks had broadened his vocabulary and his confidence. He sat easily on a kline with a cup of wine, and chatted with Aristides about Aegypt as if he were an Athenian gentleman of the bluest blood — but that was, in those days, how the explosion of sea trade was changing Athens. Navarchs and helmsmen were suddenly men of property and wealth, and merchants — Athenian, Metic or freedmen — were growing to be as wealthy as the old money — or wealthier.
In some ways, it didn’t seem right. I had taken an embassy to Susa and brought back almost nothing — I’d preserved some fabrics from India and Kwin, and one packet of spices — but while I’d spent my fortune on a failed embassy, Harpagos, Moire and Megakles and Sekla had made me a fortune moving goods from Athens to Aegypt and Asia. Our piratical triremes made poor merchantmen, but the sudden demand for luxury goods could make even a trireme’s voyage profitable. And the pause in the endless naval war between Athens and Aegina — according to Moire, the rumour in Athens was that Sparta had ordered Aegina to cease operations — made shipping safe, or at least safer than it had been in twenty years.