It was still winter when the Siren was fitted; but the trierarch, for reasons we were to learn, was eager to be gone. It was my father’s turn to stand at the dockside and see me off. “Well, Alexias,” he said, “if you could have given some of your time to the City’s business these last months, I could have done something for you; but let that pass. You have a decent record in the field and I have no fear that we shall be ashamed of you. Only keep your eyes open in Samos, and use your wits when you see how the land lies. Athens has been governed too long by the lot of the pebble, and counting fools’ heads. It is time for people of quality to show it.”
I had no time to ask the meaning of this oracle. My thoughts were aboard already. I smelt the hemp and pitch, the bodies of the rowers, the casks sweating salt fish and oil, and the cold brine of the winter sea. The gulls hung waiting, to feed upon our wake.
The Siren was a war-trireme, not a transport, and carried only her own fighting unit of fifteen men. We lived on the foredeck, under an oxhide awning, just above the first bank of the rowers; our action-station was the catwalk running outside the hull. A crew of twenty-five worked the ship, and there were three tiers of rowers, the lowest being slaves. Free men will not work down there; the oarholes are valved with leather to keep out the spray, and a rower sees nothing all day but the back of the man in front, and the second-bench rower’s feet on the rests either side. But when it rained and blew they were better off than we, huddled under our roof of skins. I had thought that even a winter voyage could not be harder than some of our hill bivouacks in the Guard. I had forgotten one is not sick on a horse. But the wind changed the second day out, and I was better.
Though we had kept it quiet, it had somehow got aboard that Lysis and I were lovers. After being in cavalry, where there is a certain feeling in these matters, I found it hard to put up with some of the vulgar notions you can meet with in an infantry unit. It may be that in those days I was too quick to take offence. Most of them were good enough fellows, as I learned in time; their talk came from habit, and from never having been made to define their terms.
We were carrying pay for some ships stationed at Sestos, which, the wind being fair, we made within six days. But in Sestos harbour we were fouled by an unhandy grain-ship; two or three rowers were hurt, and some planks staved in; we had to kick our heels about the Hellespont while repairs were done, and then were held up by weather. So it was some weeks before we made Samos, during which we got no news at all.
After killing time in a small colonial town, it was good to see the great city of Samos glowing between hills and blue water, into which the town thrust outward like a spur, with the harbour in the curve of it. Westward on the strand was the Temple of Here, the biggest of all Hellas. Eastward, the barley-terraces fell like a broad stairway to the sea. Across the strait, quite near, stood up the lofty coast of Ionia, violet-coloured, just as it is named.
The harbour was packed with ships. For the first time we saw the new navy of Athens, for most were sent here as soon as they came off the stocks. They made a fine sight, with their burnished beaks and ram-heads, their cheeks new-painted with vermilion, the trierarchs’ pennants at their sterns. Some were stripped for action, with the masts ashore, in case of a raid on the harbour, the Spartans being so near. Some were up for scraping on the beach, the sails spread out beside them, having their devices brightened with fresh dye. The curved water-front under the plane-trees was thronged with citizens and seamen and soldiers and merchants, sitting before the taverns, strolling up and down, or bargaining with the Phoenicians who had brought up their boats with the wares spread out in them.
The Athenian camp was by the shore where they beached the ships, between the town and the temple. It had been here so long that there were no tents; it was like a little town of wood, or daub and wattle, thatched with reed. We found our quarters, and set out to see the sights.
It would be tedious, in these days, to rehearse what we found. Any man about my age, or younger for that matter, knows some such picture. After weeks of intrigue, of move and counter-move, the city was on the brink of revolution. It was clear enough, after an hour or two, why my father had told me to use my wits. The Athenian army itself was split from top to bottom, the oligarchs intriguing with those of Samos, the democrats rallying to the citizens. But what gave to everything an extra stink of corruption was this, that the Samian oligarchs were not, for the most part, those who had been expelled before, but men who had been in the van of the democrat revolt. Some subtle nose had smelled out the rotten patch in the core, the men who had wanted, not freedom and justice, but only what some other man had.
What it meant to our own force, we got our first taste of next day, when the Spartan fleet was sighted making to pass the island. The trumpets sounded; the ships were stripped and hauled down the slipways; the benches manned; the weapons and shields stacked amidships; the cup stood ready on the poop for the libation. We only waited to sing the paean, and sail out. Lysis had not wasted our wait at the Hellespont, and already the marines had caught something of his spirit. We sang as we waited for the signal; the rowers caught it, and I even heard the slaves. But we waited till the singing died, and the men grew restless and weary; the Spartan fleet sailed on, past the temple and round the point, and we all went ashore to drink away our shame. It was not the enemy our generals were frightened of. It was one another. You heard it said openly, after, of this trierarch or that, that he might cover you in a fight, or he might sail across to the other side. Things hardly hinted at in Athens were taken for granted here.
Samos is an old and a noble city. Even its ancient tyrants hung gifts upon it, like jewels on a favourite slave. Now it was at the height of prosperity, the sculptors and masons and painters never idle, the streets growing like tendrils up the slopes of the hills, in flower with yellow marble, or pink, or green, carved and gilded in the light Ionic style. Yet one picked one’s way about as if in a foul quagmire, trusting no one. Even our own trierarch we were uncertain of: a pale thin-lipped man who at the Hellespont had been biting his nails over the delay, yet, when impatience was natural enough, had tried to hide it.
Over all this murk, there flickered like a marsh-fire the name of Alkibiades. He had come down to the coast from Tissaphernes’ palace, and was living just across the straits. The oligarchs were putting it about that if the democracy, which had unjustly exiled him, were put down in Athens, he would forgive us and would come back, with the Persians eating from his hand, to win the war for us. And this might well be true, for at Magnesia he feasted with a sword hung over him; if the Spartans got the mastery of Hellas, the Medes to keep in with them would certainly hand him over. He could be sure of his death in Sparta, as long as King Agis lived.
The oppression of the place was weighing on us, so that we were growing silent even with each other, when we had the good luck to meet with our old friend Agios, the pilot of the Paralos, which was stationed at the port. To him we knew we could speak freely; and he soon put a little solid ground under our feet, telling us that the seamen were sound democrats to a man. He could afford to speak for them, the Paralos being the crack galley, and he the senior pilot of the fleet.
Next day by arrangement we met him again. He took us to a certain tavern, with the sign of a golden tripod. It had a little whited courtyard behind it, shaded with a vine. Here at a table a tall lank man was sitting, dressed in a marine’s seagoing kilt and leather jerkin. He was lean but broad-chested, with a big firm mouth, and brown eyes that looked straight into one. Agios said, “Here are my friends, Thrasybulos.”