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crone. Smitten by his beauty and deference, she decided to bestow the gift of eternal youth upon him.
    At the end of the ferry crossing, she presented him with an oval alabaster box containing magic salve.
    â€œIf you smear this on your lips, your chest, your penis, women will find you irresistible—and you will never grow old,” the goddess said.
    â€œThank you,” the ferryman said, suspecting her true identity despite her rags. She flashed her dazzling smile and disappeared.
    So I was given gifts of immortal song. And Phaon was given gifts of eternal youth and heartbreaking beauty. And all the while, the gods were laughing.
    I divide my childhood into before the war and after. The war caused us to flee Mytilene and move across the island to Eresus, my mother’s birthplace. My grandparents were the only stability I knew. I think of my grandmother with her smell of lavender and honey. I remember my grandfather, fierce in battle but with a special tenderness for me—the only granddaughter.
    My father, Scamandronymus, was a distant myth, always coming and going surrounded by men with bronze-tipped spears. When the war claimed him, his death and homecoming as cold ashes in a jar forced me to grow up far too quickly. A father who never grows old remains a legend to his daughter. For me he was forever young and handsome, more god to me than father. Whenever I thought of him, I flew back in time and became six years old again. I could see him picking me up in the air and whirling me around. “Little whirlwind,” he would call me. Little whirlwind I became.
    I knew he loved me better than my brothers. They were his legacy, but I was his delight. Some nights when I was little, I would wander the house in the dark middle of the night, hoping that my footsteps would wake him. (Like most warriors, he was a very light sleeper.) Then, when he woke and came to find me, I would throw my arms around his neck and ask him to carry me into the courtyard. There, beside the gurgling fountain, we had our deliriously private conversations.
    What did we talk about? I cannot remember much—except that once I asked him if he loved me better than my mother. Charaxus, Larichus, and Eurygius were younger than I, and boys. I knew he loved me more.
    â€œI love you differently ,” he said. “I love her with the fire of Aphrodite. But you I love with the nourishing love of Demeter, the intoxicating sweetness of Dionysus, and the warmth of the fires of Hestia. The love for a daughter is serene; for her mother it can be a torment.”
    This gave me pause. “And do you love me better than my brothers?”
    â€œNever will I tell,” he said, laughing. But his eyes said yes.
    During the years when the grapes were ruined, the barley fields blasted, we lived among slaves and grandparents in my family’s villa in the countryside. We were always in fear that the brutal Athenians would come to slaughter all the men and enslave the women and children. I knew from my earliest days that I could go from free to slave in one turn of fortune’s wheel. We were told that Athenians tipped their spears with sickness from rotting corpses, that they had no qualms about killing children—even pregnant women. We were told that nothing held them back from slaughter. They lacked our Aeolian sense of the beauty of life. They would stoop to anything for conquest. Or so our elders said. We had no reason to doubt this. Even children feel the uncertainty of war. They may not understand what adults understand, but they feel the insecurity in their very bones.
    I remember my brothers Larichus, Charaxus, and even the sickly littlest one Eurygius playing at being soldiers in the pine groves above the sea. I remember how they thrashed each other on the head with wooden swords as if they were Homer’s heroes. Little boys love war as much as little girls fear it. I was the oldest and the ringleader. I used to bring them to