The Wooden Walls of Thermopylae Read online

Spoken weakly, barely audible; I pushed the door closed behind me and walked across to the bed. The smell of the room was a cross between a sick room and a rich man’s brothel: fetid and cloyingly sweet. The room was too hot and she was covered in a sweat drenched sheet, hair plastered to the sides of her head.

  She’d lost weight, the confident beauty transformed to a wasted fever-wracked waif. It came to me that this was the fate that awaited her and all girls like her in this trade, and I was surprised at the thought. Not at its accuracy but that a man like me should be bothered by such a consideration: whatever happened to flute girls was part of the natural order.

  I sat at the foot of the bed, inches away from her feet. Neither of us spoke or moved. I don’t know what she felt but I felt foolish. What was I doing here when it was obvious the shop was closed and wasn’t going to open? And even if it did, I didn’t want the merchandise in this condition. The fetor of the room was affecting me: I began to sweat.

  Then she began to speak, faltering and broken.

  “Mandrocles, he hurt me so I still feel it. Why, all I tried to do was play well, give pleasure. The other wasn’t part of the contract but when he forced me I didn’t fight, just waited for it to end. So why did he do it, use that thing? It hurts.”

  In this moment, as Callias was enjoying the aristo charms of Elpinice and salivating over what would follow the marriage vows, I was perched on the edge of the bed of a ruined flute girl.

  “Mandrocles? Are you still there?”

  Where else was there for me to go? I moved up the bed and took the sweat-soaked, sheet-shrouded bundle in my arms. Her head flopped into my chest and she began to cry: softly at first then with greater energy as all the shit that the Gods load on us began to pour out of her, first as a trickle then a flood.

  I said nothing, just pushed the damp hair back from her forehead and gathered it into a mass behind her head and ran my fingers through it as she wept.

  I don’t know why, or perhaps I do. There is a blackness the Gods visit on us. I know I still carry some of it. She didn’t deserve it any more than Elpinice deserved to be pinned down under the grunting weight of Callias whenever he wanted her. I think maybe that just sitting there, stroking her hair, saying nothing, was the best I could do for her. I hope so because it was all I could come up with.

  After a while, just before the lamp guttered and died, she began to babble. A stream of words in no particular order. Gradually out of them the picture of a life emerged: struggle and disappointment mainly.

  But a discernible pattern – pure logos, as our philosophers would deem it if it were coming from one of themselves. Sometime before dawn, she cried herself out and drifted into sleep. She was cooler I think; maybe the flow of emotion carried some of the fever away with it.

  I settled her down and turned the sheet so the sweat-stained end was over her feet. My shoulders and back ached from supporting her in the same position. Strangely, inside my soul I felt better. I don’t know why; it makes no sense. I’d felt no lust there on the bed with her, I’d felt something but didn’t know what it was.

  I disentangled myself as gently as possible; she moaned softly, like a child, but didn’t wake. I readjusted the sheet and left the room, pulling the door closed gently behind me. Right outside the door I was surprised to see Demetrius.

  “Here, take these.”

  He handed me a cup of warm spiced wine and a honey cake.

  “You’ll need these if you’re going to spend the day howling for Themistocles with all the rest of his Demos riffraff.”

  He walked away and I sat in a chair on the porch as the light increased and the day began, dipping pieces of the honey cake in the wine. I could hear movement outside, footsteps and voices. Themistocles’s mobilisation was underway so there’d be no time for me to go home to sleep. When I finished there was no sign of Demetrius; maybe he was ashamed of his act of kindness. I dipped my head in a water butt and slipped out of the gate into the flow of grim-faced men heading for the Agora.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I’ve just had the boy Ephialties read that last bit back to me. It seemed to move him. To such an extent that for a moment I thought he was about to pass some comment. If he was, he thought the better of it and walked away. His reading surprised me too, did I really write that? Sometimes it feels it must have been written by someone else, but then the memory still feels genuine.

  I’ll bet it surprised you too, reader: not what you expect from my memoirs. All I can say is life changes you inside even more than it alters your appearance and behaviour. All of you, believe me, will often do one thing but intend another. Do it often enough and your life is pushed so far off course that it can never get back. Now I have time to think, I can weep with the best of them and Lyra, Lyra …

  No, that’s not for this parchment, not for you. You can make your own mistakes: which, believe me, you will.

  Anyway, back then the council didn’t convene in their present chamber. Back then, before the Persians razed our city to the ground, they gathered in the orchestra in the Agora the way the Gods intended. Themistocles’s timing was perfect: with the Spring Dionysia just around the corner the city of the Goddess was packed and expectation of excitement after a hard winter was high. The warm caress of early summer on that spring day was just good luck.

  But it wasn’t only timing that delivered for him that day, it was a stunt worthy of the Dionysia itself. The meeting of the five hundred was in many ways an artificial affair, much affected by the crowd, which grew as the day lengthened. Although always outnumbered by his opponents in every sacred council of the polis, it had been conceded by his enemies that in public gatherings his supporters would dominate.

  They had no constitutional role to play in affairs of the council but their presence couldn’t be ignored: fear speaks with its own language. Themistocles had spoken fear to his supporters and they now shouted well-orchestrated fear at the council.

  That there would be Ostracism was beyond doubt, but who would go? When the debate of the council eventually got started most of the opinions from the delegates, when collated, formed a panegyric to the character and leadership of Megacles. Themistocles barely rated a mention, but behind that silence lay the fact that he was the man to be ostracised in the view of the aristos.

  The case for Megacles was his birth and his family’s ancient roots. Themistocles’s questionable antecedents weren’t debated but they hovered in the ether above every compliment paid to Megacles.

  Themistocles himself was mute and made no attempt to influence proceedings, much to the dismay of his thousands of supporters who grew strangely silent. As the meeting drew towards closure, those of us watching became downcast: we’d long since ceased shouting insults at Megacles and his friends. We’d had nothing to cheer and become too dispirited to jeer. The mass of a crowd is like that: its mood can swing from one emotion to another rapidly. That’s why leading the Demos is so difficult: the democratic leader faces difficulties unknown to an oligarch.

  The crowd was showing signs of drifting away and that’s when Themistocles made his move. He asked to speak: address both the five hundred and the mass of the Demos. Such a request at this juncture of course fell outside the etiquette that regulated the five hundred in those days. But it would have taken a foolishly brave archon to veto the request. As the world knows, that day the Archon was neither of those things and later proved to be close to Themistocles.

  So he got his chance to turn the day around. Out of the crowd a block was produced as if from nowhere. He climbed on to it: the only man who’d thought of bringing his own rostrum. Towering above other men, he pushed back the folds of his robe, revealing his brawny arms complete with scars. This unaristocratic gesture brought him the first roar of approval before he’d even opened his mouth. I wasn’t too far off and swear I saw him choke back a grin. Then, fixing a look of dignity mixed with anger on his face, he began.

  “Worthy Athenian friends, men of the Demos who stood in t
he front line at Marathon and who will soon have to stand in the line again to defend the city of the Goddess against the Empire of the Great King.”

  Another great cheer: that’s the way to manipulate the Demos, make it think it’s better than it is. But it takes a leader touched by the Gods to do it, although Pericles, onion head, is possessed of the same ability. We settled back awaiting the denunciation of Megacles. It didn’t come, at least not in the way we expected.

  “Men of the Demos, I thank you for the love you have shown for the city of the Goddess in the sacrifice you have made in giving up a day’s work to stand and listen to the five hundred, knowing that while you stood, your women and children went hungry.”

  He employed a simple code in his appeals to the masses in which certain words attained an emotional significance beyond their ordinary meaning. Stand was one of the most frequent of these. In the Themistoclean logos, men stood in the front line so it always had a heroic connotation. The fact that being in the crowd meant you had to stand in no way diminished this. We were heroes, even the majority of us who’d been nowhere near Marathon.

  “Let me first congratulate the five hundred on the decision to proceed with the Ostracism. Let me agree with what they said about Megacles, son of Alcmaeon: it is true he is a high born aristocrat tied to his family and the old ways. I could say more, but that would be outside the spirit of this meeting.”

  We hadn’t expected that. Where was this going, men began to murmur.

  “No, I have something very different to tell you something that will determine the future of our polis. Something that would also benefit the gracious son of Alcmaeon and his noble friends. But I’m afraid I will have to keep you waiting a few days out of respect for the great Dionysia. You are aware that one of the heroes of Marathon, the poet Aeschylus is presenting a trilogy this year and I have the honour to be choregus.

  “But the morning after the Dionysian rites are concluded, I invite you to attend the Piraeus at sunrise. I promise to show you something to gladden your hearts and still your fears.”

  He jumped down from the block and, magus-like, disappeared. We milled around awhile, dissatisfied. This was his genius: whatever had been debated now meant nothing to what was to come. Those of us who thought about the nature of things, however, spread the message that we thought best read the entrails of his utterance: seek a message in the plays of Aeschylus and bring it with you to Piraeus.

  I found myself at the Piraeus next day for another reason. Back at the house there was no sign of Cimon; it was suggested he was revisiting the old estate at Brauron which it was rumoured Callias had bought and presented as a portion of Elpinice’s bride price. I was hurt that he had not taken me with him. So when Ariston suggested that as we had no duties we go fishing, I agreed.

  Rowing out into the bay, once passed the limit of where the great drain Eridanos dumps its human waste into the sea the waters were clear. The great rock of the Acropolis was sunlit above the city and there was silence on the breeze. We caught little and spoke less. Ariston was still mourning the Athene Nike whose crew were now drifting away to farms, workshops and for the lucky few onto other boats.

  “This’ll be as close as I come to the sea from now on, pissing about in a little row boat. Theodorus has a mind to try Syracuse; he thinks there’s demand for good seaman there.”

  “Will you go with him?”

  “Me? No, too old for that now, anyway who’d want an unlucky helmsman who broke his ship up on the Salamis shore?”

  I hadn’t any comfort to offer him and wondered if I should give Syracuse a try. Ariston swore as a fish wriggled away from the line and concluded conversation for the day.

  “So tomorrow at your poet friend’s play may be the last time the old crew get together.”

  We pulled back into Piraeus as darkness slipped its black cloak over the divided city.

  Next day we got to the play early; this was the first year the festival moved from the Agora to a site on the side of the great rock where some work had been done to expand a natural space. Some rude benches of natural stone were fashioned, which were supplemented by the planking seats of the old unstable scaffolding. Despite its thrown together appearance, the place held a type of magic.

  You don’t need me to tell of the significance of his trilogy that year: the first where he revolutionised the nature of the festival by introducing a second actor. You, like me, will know by heart the lines of his great ground-breaking play Ixion.

  But you won’t have been there to see and feel it. Feel the terrible shiver as the chorus burst through the entrance chanting and stamping in the rhythmic dance to the shrill of flute and reed. That day the Goddess spoke through him and spoke to us. You know the terrible fate great Zeus, cruel father of the Gods, inflicted on Ixion, binding him to a wheel on which he whirls in an eternity of torment.

  But in this play there was concealed another coded message: a message to the polis, a message to us who sat there spellbound in the presence of the Gods.

  Ixion spoke with the voice of Megacles; the actor had his mannerisms and speech pattern so well that it was hard to believe that Ixion wasn’t Megacles. So the impiety of Ixion was Megacles’s impiety.

  You don’t need me to remind you that Ixion was first punished for failing to provide what the Gods required: well, in the play, the parallel between that and Megacles’s opposition to the building of the fleet that Themistocles demanded was made clear. Sitting there hearing the very messenger of Zeus speaking from the stage straight to us, we saw this all too clearly.

  “Shafts of the ship building pine ablaze with fire

  Never the wine dark sea to touch

  Promise to Heaven’s thunder reneged

  Doom to the land. Doom to the line of Ixion

  Who would escape his sacred obligation.

  Through suffering comes learning

  You did not learn

  Learn now Athens

  Look to the sea

  For time, as time grows older, teaches all.”

  We never knew where his plays would take us: you could start on Olympus with the laws of stern unbending Zeus and end in the Athenian council chamber. But after this play, we knew where we would be going next day. We’d be at Piraeus by dawn and look to the sea.

  Dawn wasn’t what we expected: there was a thick sea fret so the massed Demos picked its way gingerly through the huge mason’s yard that Piraeus was in those days. The bay had changed beyond recognition in the previous years and Themistocles’s dream of a protected harbour was close to becoming a reality. So we gathered in the miasma of the sea cloud and the unwashed stink of the Demos. As we waited, the stench and crowd grew. I can’t remember how long we stood muttering. But I do remember the moment the sun burnt through.

  The fret dispersed in an instant to reveal Themistocles in the middle of his supporters standing like a magician on the quayside. There was some cheering; above us the temples on the acropolis, hitherto invisible, were struck by the sun and sparkled. Themistocles raised his arms then lowered them, demanding silence which gradually settled over us. I saw his brother, Lysias, and to my surprise Cimon, amongst those around him.

  But the greatest surprise and certainly the most shocking for any Alkmaionids present must have been the sight of the man standing at Themistocles’s right hand. Cleinias!

  Yes, the very same: the man who you will probably only remember today as the father of that uncontrollable whelp Alciabiades who onion head adopted and couldn’t keep in order.

  Back then he was infamous for being married to the untameable minx Deinomache, which of course made him the son in law of Megacles! How in Hades Themistocles had got him there was a mystery no one could work out and you could hear different attempts at answers all round Piraeus. Cleinias had the good manners to look embarrassed while Themistocles radiated delight. He let us drink in the drama of this alliance for a while, then again raised his arms for silence.

  When the harbour was quiet he made a
signal to some men behind him in response to which there was the harsh blare of horns. Then as the discordant noise dissipated he gestured seawards and a number of men scattered about the harbour, obviously planted by Themistocles, shouted.

  “Athenians, look towards the sea, for there lies your deliverance.”

  It was as if the Dionysia had become reality and we were all players. We looked to the sea. At first nothing. It wasn’t easy as scattered patches of haze still hung above the waters. Then someone shouted and, still obscured but just visible, there were two pinpricks. The sun rose, the sea cleared and we saw pulling hard towards us two triremes.

  As they drew closer it seemed to those of us amongst the crowd who’d crewed on triremes that there was something strange about these two, but we couldn’t agree on what.

  Until, until they were no more than fifty lengths away. Then we knew: the outrigger through which the Thranitai rowed had been pushed out to accommodate extra deck space. These new sleek killing machines could carry a larger complement of hoplites. What Themistocles had learned from our skirmish off the Peloponnese he’d put into practice. Within seconds the seamen in the crowd were explaining benefits of this new weapon and soon we were all cheering.

  But for a select few of us there was something way beyond this, so much so that whatever Themistocles was shouting out into the crowd we didn’t hear. We had eyes for one thing only: resurrection. Gleaming from the prow of the leading trireme, flashing in the son was a gleaming figure we knew and loved.

  Athene Nike. The Athene Nike reborn and coming for us. Even now, this memory fills my eyes with stinging tears. But let me tell you my tears were nothing compared to those of Ariston, Theodorus and other veterans. From wherever we stood in the crowd we forced ourselves through the mass of cheering Athenians until we came together on the quayside to receive our lady Goddess.

  This was something Themistocles had not anticipated; the press of sailors swarming round the triremes as they moored up disturbed his pitch, which was approaching its climax. But, as ever, he adapted.