Cimon tells me he counted seven hundred and eleven ships. I have heard counts over a thousand and counts as few as five hundred and fifty, and I’m no help. But I tend to believe Cimon. He had the time, and the view.
The Persian fleet was very careful in its movements. It was odd that they outnumbered us at least two to one and yet they were behaving so cautiously. Of course, their Persian officers had no doubt spent days looking at the scrawled messages we’d left them, inviting the Ionians to come join us, or to betray their Persians in mid-battle. And they’d lost the last few encounters.
Late that afternoon, while I was practising on my own beach with Brasidas and Hipponax and Hector, Pericles and Anaxagoras — a well-trained man for all his quiet arrogance — a dozen ships came in from the south. They came up the Bay of Salamis in fine style and my daughter raced over with three of her friends, including Heliodora, to tell us there was a fleet coming. That created a stir, I promise you. With the Great King’s fleet closing all the passages to the north, an attack from the south loomed as a very real possibility and I ordered my hulls into the water. I ran — mostly not — up the headland and climbed the Brauron tower.
I didn’t know the ships. But there was something about them that appeared Greek; whether the slight outward slant of the cutwaters or the style of the rowing, but I was sure they were Peloponnesian ships. As they came closer, we could see that the lead ship displayed a dozen shields, all those of Spartiates, and men began to cheer.
I don’t usually cheer for Sparta, but more ships are always welcome, aren’t they?
But all the beaches to the north were packed. We had the Corinthians and the Spartans on the beaches to the south, and the only beach not covered in ships was the Brauron beach. I ran down like a boy and into the midst of another dance practice. I bowed low to the High Priestess, as if she was the Great King himself, and begged her permission for men and ships to land on her beach.
She made me wait long enough to let me know that she could refuse, and then she acquiesced graciously. Seckla was still close enough inshore to summon and I dropped my chiton — in front of a hundred virgins! — and swam out to him, and Leukas hauled me aboard and Lydia turned south.
We closed with the lead Spartan ship as quickly as the telling of it, and they all lay to, resting their oarsmen in the gruelling sun, and I leaped again — naked, damn it — onto the helm-deck of the lead ship.
There was Bulis, unchanged by the year we’d been apart. Until I saw him I assumed that he had died with his king. But there he was, and there was Sparthius in full armour. They both embraced me.
‘Naked!’ Bulis said — a long speech, for him.
We all laughed.
‘The beaches are crowded,’ I said. ‘I’ve found you a berth, just there by the headland with the two towers. Those are my ships on the other beach.’
Sparthius nodded. ‘Good. Very good.’
He motioned to the helmsman and orders were given.
I’d never been on a Spartan warship and it was interesting. There were fewer shouted orders than on one of my ships; everything seemed to happen with the gravity of ritual, and yet … everything happened. As an example, given the rather rough nature of the beaches at Salamis, sailors on the small foredeck — almost a castle — began raising a stone anchor and fitting it to a wooden stock in the bow. Then they fitted a pair of lighter stones to the anchor cable. It was a very seamanlike operation, but there were no orders given from the command deck, and the oar-master almost didn’t know the anchor was being prepared.
I was impressed, yet at the same time, I admit to having reservations. The cacophony of my command deck, with shouted orders repeated in all directions, meant that every crew station knew what was being done. In a storm, the helmsman still knew what was happening forward. But the Spartan way was very … intimidating.
Fancy that.
Regardless, we landed prettily, and I took my Spartiate friends to meet the High Priestess. I’m happy to say that Eugenios was waiting with a clean chiton and a fine himation — now that is service. I emerged from the waves like a king, or at least a well-waited on prince, and took my Spartans to their audience, where, of course, they behaved perfectly. It was delightful to see Sparthius, all his front teeth lost in some long-ago encounter, as big as a house and as dangerous as a lion, impressing this tiny but determined old woman with his perfect manners.
She, in turn, was delighted to meet them, and she did as much — or more — than any Athenian I had seen to convince these two men that she, at least, valued them and the alliance for which they stood, and when the trierarchs and helmsmen of the other ships came up to be blessed she spoke to each one, Spartan and Corinthian, with a light in her eye that made them smile. She really was a fine women and her dignity was not so immense that she could not laugh.
I heard that laugh, and another with her, and I turned and found myself looking at Lykon, son of Antinor, who had stood with me at my wedding, and who I accounted among my best friends. He had once been a man so handsome as to be pretty, and much whispered about, but a boar hunt on our mountain had gotten him a scar on his face that turned a feminine beauty into a masculine one.
I waited as he chatted with the High Priestess, and yet our eyes met and we both smiled and years fell away behind me. Lykon and I had been friends before the Medes landed at Marathon — when my lovely wife Euphonia still walked the earth. In fact, back when she was as young as Heliodora …
When he was done speaking to the priestess I swept him into a crushing embrace and he crushed me right back. And then another pair of arms encircled me, and I had to laugh through tears. Lykon’s nearly inseparable friend Philip, son of Sophokles. His grandfather had been a king in Thrace, but he was as Greek as me. At least as Greek — and much richer.
Actually, I wasn’t certain of that. Even with Athens in flames and Plataea the same, I was probably a fairly rich man. When you stop counting, you have reached some level.
Hippolyta was beaming at me and I bowed. But behind her was Aristides. I didn’t get to him in the press of men because Hippolyta took my hand. Hers was old and very delicate, but surprisingly strong.
‘Such lovely young men,’ she said. ‘Please make clear that they are to keep their distance from my girls.’
A bucket of cold water on our reunion. But Hippolyta was correct, of course, and I understood that I had made myself their guarantor in her eyes. So I collected the trierarchs and Bulis introduced me.
‘This is Arimnestos of Plataea. I have fought beside him.’
They were immediately silent. Hah! Praise indeed, eh?
I pointed out the young women of Brauron and how they were trained, and I managed to include the names of a few fathers — including my own. Men smiled, but not like wolves.
‘We will make arrangements,’ Bulis said. He nodded sharply.
Two thousand young oarsmen and hoplites in their physical prime. Somehow, they all kept their hands and their mouths to themselves and they went, unmolested, to bathe in the sea or perform their dances between the black hulls of the Greek ships. We all managed, somehow, as if the presence of so many beautiful maidens was an everyday occurrence. Perhaps it was, in Sparta. But it certainly kept our minds off the Persians.
The coming of Lykon and Aristides and Philip marked the end of my black days and the introduction of busy visiting among the ships. I had a symposium on the sand, with proper couches — kline — loaned by Brauron in exchange for all the spare bows I found in a few visits along the beaches. Aristides was there, and Cimon, and Aeschylus and Phrynicus too, and Philip and Lykon and Brasidas, Bulis and Sparthius. The Spartans almost spoiled my little party by bringing another young man, Callicrates, one of the most beautiful men I had ever seen, tall and heavily muscled. He was a little older than Anaxagoras. Pericles was too young for a symposium, but not too young to fight, and he didn’t miss an opportunity to mention that to his father or mother. Xanthippus, his father, refused the invitation for him, and declined to come himself, so we had an empty couch space and the beautiful Spartan lay down by the stolid Ionian.