Athens supplied a hundred and twenty-five ships, of which eleven were in my squadron, and technically they were Plataean. I’d prefer to say that Athens supplied one hundred and sixteen including Paramanos, and Plataea supplied nine, but you may count us any way you like.
Corinth promised sixty ships and supplied forty; and two of them slipped away before the fleet sailed and never returned.
Chalcis in Thrace supplied no ships but manned another twenty hulls built by Athens.
Megara supplied twenty triremes.
Aegina, which had sixty ships, supplied eighteen, and those with inferior crews.
We had a dozen good ships from Sicyon and ten ships from Sparta, or at least led by Spartan officers, and another eight from Epidavros in the eastern Peloponnesus. There was one ship from Hermione and two from far-off Ithaca. Troezen, Styra and Ceos all sent ships. Not many, but what they had.
If you count your way through them, you’ll find that it was an Athenian fleet with a handful of allies, commanded by a Spartan and full of internal divisions. When Harpagos and I compared it to the Greek fleet at Lades — where we’d had Miltiades and a dozen other first-rate pirates I could name, where we’d had the elite of every Ionian Greek seagoing city — well, we were like to have wept.
But we didn’t.
We just talked carefully through what we’d do when the rout began. We worked out where we’d go, and where we’d land. We sent Giorgos back to Piraeus to commandeer one of our merchant tubs, fill it with water and food, and bring it round. Not to share, either. But to give us food and water to outdistance pursuit the first night after the fleet broke up.
We were by no means the only doomsayers. We were merely the most practical.
Well, except the Corinthians, some of whom gave up and sailed for home, and the Corcyrans, who never came.
Practicality, of course, never won anyone their freedom. Caution is seldom the virtue needed in extremis.
After three weeks on the beaches south of Euboea, Eurybiades ordered us to sea.
Poseidon, what a mess that was.
I had good officers and willing men. My ships came off the beach quickly and in good order, and my squadron formed as it rowed, so that we reached our place on the left of the line about an hour after we were ordered to sea.
There is a current off the point of Schinias, and my oarsmen were kept busy for the next two hours trying to keep us on-station against the flow of the sea. I pitied them, but it was excellent practice, and I tried not to interfere. Besides, I had a Dionysian comedy of epic proportions playing out to my right, seaward, as the great fleet of the allies crept off the beaches, rammed each other, and slunk to their places in line. It was a wonderful thing that we all spoke Greek, so that the curses, imprecations and rage of the helmsmen could be clearly communicated.
At my elbow, Sittonax fingered his beard and laughed. ‘Just imagine, brother, what it is like in the other fleet. Greeks and Persians and Aegyptians and Phoenicians all together, by all accounts!’
Harpagos, who was aboard by virtue of having jumped from his own transom to mine, shook his head in silence. I met his eye.
‘We’re doomed,’ he said, with Laconic brevity.
We ran up the coast of Euboea with a fair wind, but Eurybiades forbade us to sail, which was good officering but bad for his popularity. We rowed. We rowed in various formations, and none of them was very good, but it was our first day moving as a fleet.
Our scouts — Locrians, for the most part, and some Ionians who’d come over from Lesvos and Chios with pentekonters — had chosen us a set of beaches on the western shore of Euboea. Euboea is like a sea-girt extension of my homeland of Boeotia, with beautiful farmland and sandy beaches, too — as close to a paradise as Greece ever gets south of Thessaly. On the western shore, there are broad beaches, but on the eastern shore it is far rockier, and a ship is exposed to the eastern winds and summer storms. The channel between Boeotia and Euboea is so narrow that there’s a bridge — you may recall my father died there.
We camped, and the next day we passed the narrows two ships at a time. And camped again.
The Euboeans had been badly handled by the Persians in Marathon year, their two principal cities taken, most of their men of worth killed or sold as slaves, and while there had been talk of recolonising it from Thebes or Athens, no real moves had been made. It is an island half the size of Attica, occupied only by shepherds, and they had done nothing to prepare for the Persians. In fact, before we made our first camp and bought whole herds of sheep, I don’t think they were fully aware of the threat.
Immediately their assembly met and started to make demands of the allied fleet — a fleet to which they contributed not a single vessel.
We ate their mutton and prepared for sea. Eurybiades sent Cimon’s squadron of Athenians forward, all the way to Chalcis, to find the enemy. He didn’t send Themistocles. He and Themistocles sailed side by side, and camped together — a visible symbol of the amity of Athens and Sparta.
We met, from time to time, formally or informally, and the occasion that I remember was of the latter kind — I was having wine with Themistocles when the Spartan navarch was announced, and he came in, wearing a faded scarlet chiton and no sandals — a slave brought a stool, which he looked at with a certain hesitation, and then he sat on it.
‘Still nothing from the Medes,’ he said.
‘Where is Leonidas?’ Themistocles asked. He indicated that the Spartan should have wine.
Eurybiades took the cup, poured a libation, and drained it. ‘Delphi or close enough. The Thebans are late.’ He looked at me. ‘I’m sure that comes as a surprise.’ He smiled.
The slave poured him another fill of watered wine. Again he rose, poured a libation, and emptied the cup. ‘Good wine,’ he said to Themistocles.
‘I have an idea,’ Themistocles began, and Eurybiades smiled.
‘Another stratagem?’ he asked, with the fondness of a father for a son.
‘Without stratagems, what chance have we against the Great King?’ Themistocles leaned forward with his fingers steepled.
Eurybiades nodded. ‘I will try every trick and every deception that your fertile mind provides,’ he said. ‘But in the end, for all our planning, we will fight — ship to ship, man to man. There is no trick that will save us then.’
‘How will we defeat them, then?’ Themistocles asked. He put his face in his hands. ‘You saw the formations today!’
‘Pray to the immortal gods,’ Eurybiades said. ‘Every cup of wine I drink, I pray to Poseidon for a storm.’
I held up my cup. When the slave filled it, I rose, and poured a libation to Poseidon, shaker of the earth and master of horses. And then I drained the cup.
Eurybiades nodded. ‘Not by the hand of man alone will the Great King be bested,’ he said.
Themistocles made a face. But he rose, poured a libation, and drank. ‘I do not like to beg the gods.’
‘Beg?’ asked the Spartan. ‘I will fight to the last breath in my body, regardless of what the gods choose. I merely ask.’
Themistocles thought of something — opened his mouth, and thought better of it. So instead, he smiled his cunning smile. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘as you say, the wine is good.’
As a fleet, we were the worse for lacking Cimon, whose ships were truly the elite of our force. But by the fourth day, as we brought the northern tip of Euboea into sight, where Cape Artemesium with the temple of Artemis rises as a sea mark for navigators, our fleet could row, all together, in formation. We could form the wheel — not very well, but without disaster. And two hundred and fifty triremes is a very grand sight. I stood on my helmsman’s bench and named off the ships to Hector like a rhapsode reciting the ship list from the Iliad, and still my count only reached two hundred and fifty.