Adamenteis supported them. I suppose he’d intended to take me when I went to visit him.
Let me explain that men in Greece do not recognise the laws of other cities, so no man of Plataea cares a fig for the laws of Corinth, least of all me. I told the two magistrates to go about their business or I’d have them thumped by my marines. I was informed that I could not land or sell my cargoes.
This sort of thing happens. I sent Hipponax to Aristides and Hector to Gorgo and got my ships off the beach.
That should have been enough. It should have worked. Adamanteis should have, at the very least, put the interests of the League ahead of his own and let the matter go, but he did not, and by that action revealed himself, at least to me. I still think he took a bribe from the Great King. I know that other men dispute this.
But I say he was a traitor, and he was hosting the conference.
I lost six days in Adamanteis’s pettifogging labyrinth of accusations. Among other things, it became apparent — to me — that he had known I had the ship before I landed. A priest on Delos, perhaps? But my innate sense of self-preservation said that something was not right, and that this was the long arm of Xerxes reaching across the waves for me.
Neither Aristides nor Cimon would accept a word of it. They saw me as deluded, and while they worked tirelessly to rid me of the burden of accusations, they declined to accept that the Corinthian was an enemy.
So I didn’t hear any of the opening orations, and I missed it when the whole delegation of Thebes — a delegation of oligarchs that excluded some of the cities’ aristocrats — spoke against resistance. I missed the King of Sparta — Leonidas — giving what Themistocles insisted was the best speech he’d ever heard.
Instead, I took my ships along the isthmus, landed in the Peloponnesus at Hermione, and took a horse back with all my marines trailing away behind me in a cacophony of curses — most of them had never forked a horse before. I lost two more days riding through the Peloponnese — beautiful, but not for riding. We came down out of the mountains and I saw Corinth in the distance, and sent Hector ahead to see whether the way was clear.
Themistocles had bought a Corinthian ally — Diotus, who had had business dealings with me and was the proxenos for little Plataea, and he and Myron had done the best they could — they’d wrapped the accusations in wool, as we like to say in Plataea. So when I arrived, I had to put up almost a third of my profits from the voyage east as a bond, and then I was allowed to go about my business — which was to attend the conference.
One more detail to explain my frame of mind. I went to the great temple of Zeus to swear an oath to answer the charges against me, and there I saw Calisthenes — one of the mighty Alcmaeonidae of Athens. That was like a splash of icy water.
He smiled at me. I know that smile — I’ve smiled it at other men. He wanted me to know that he was involved in the charges against me.
I was concerned, to say the least.
With all that hanging over my head, I was a poor delegate — a week late, and I hadn’t made a sacrifice. The conference was actually held in the precinct of the temple complex where they held the games — the Isthmian games, I mean. And even though I’d missed eight days of talk, they were still talking.
The issue was not resistance. Greece had already chosen to resist. Thanks to the gods, men had used their heads and seen that we had to fight.
The issue was command. All were agreed that Sparta should lead the allied army. Why not? The Spartiates were the closest things to professional soldiers that we had. Spartan kings had more experience of planning major campaigns than anyone else. There really wasn’t much argument — the only man I could possibly have considered to put up against Leonidas was Aristides, and he wanted the Spartans to command.
So Leonidas would lead the field army.
But the naval component was another story. And we all knew that the navy was going to be important. The largest navy belonged to Athens, which, in fifteen years, had gone from a fairly small navy to the largest in the Aegean and perhaps in the whole of the eastern Mediterranean — except Persia, of course. That summer, Athens could put more than a hundred hulls in the water, and Aegina could scarcely muster seventy, and Corinth about fifty. Only Syracusa on Sicily had more.
And no one wanted Athens to have the command.
In vain did Themistocles politic. And let me add — Gorgo and Leonidas were unshakeable in supporting him. Leonidas wanted Themistocles to be the navarchos.
There were other candidates.
Gelon of Syracusa was one. He offered one hundred and twenty ships to the cause if he could be the commander on land and sea.
Adamanteis of Corinth was another, and he scarcely bothered to conceal his loathing of Athens — That upstart city, he said in a speech. It was an impious exaggeration — even in myth, Athens pre-dates Corinth, and in fact the evidence of your eyes will show you how long Athens has been a mighty citadel, but other men — our foes — agreed with him. Only a few decades before, Athens had been a minor city-state with a tyrant who could be bought and a small fleet and a small army. The new democracy had flooded her phalanx with new muscle and had made her rowers into citizens, and many of the oligarchs who ruled the cities of mainland Greece felt deeply threatened, no little bit by the growth of the very fleet that Athens swore to use for the common good.
After a day of it, all I could think of was the captains’ conferences before Lades. We had supposedly all been on the same side, for the same purposes, and the Samians had betrayed us. Here, we weren’t done with the conference and some men — the Corinthians and the men of Argos — were open in saying that they would prefer to see Athens destroyed than to see an Athenian command the allied fleet.
The problem — and it was a problem — was that there were not many compromise candidates. No one was going to accept an Aeginian in command. They had tried to Medise — that is, to support the Great King — at the time of Marathon, and they made no secret of their hatred for Athens. But they were the only other state with a navy large enough to train officers who could direct major sea operations.
Except Corinth. And Adamanteis wanted that command very badly. He fought tooth and nail in the discussions to arrange that a stinging message was sent to Gelon.
For myself, I could have served under Gelon. But the rumour was that the Great King was flinging Carthage at Syracusa to pin the great Syracusan fleet in place, and men worried that Gelon would sacrifice Greece to save Sicily, and of course they were right. I agreed with them — I knew that Artapherenes had gone to Carthage. But I thought that with one mighty fleet, we could probably control the whole of the sea.
At any rate, no one listened to me. Gelon was sent an icy message of refusal, and went back to fighting Carthage.
But Themistocles was no more willing to send the Athenian fleet to sea under a Corinthian than under an Aeginian. So the bickering continued, while the Persians built their second bridge and while their ships and lead elements of their armies moved into Thrace.
I could see it falling apart before my very eyes. The whole alliance — so promising a month before — was going to break up over the issue of the fleet. Half the cities present had no fleets and couldn’t imagine what it was all about.
About two weeks into the conference, I was sitting on the steps of the shrine of Herakles with two dozen men — really, the whole of the ‘Athenian’ faction. We were tired, and we sat drinking watered wine, our slaves and hypaspists gathered around us.
We’d come out of the temple still debating the command. Two of the representatives from Megara had come out — we were trying to dissuade them from their pro-Corinthian stance.