The Wooden Walls of Thermopylae Read Free

caught a glimpse of the future that day looking down at the fleet preparing to set sail. Small compared with our modern fleet, reader, but exciting all the same.
    So I was caught up in the noise and bustle of embarkation and any worries about Themistocles’s words dispersed. It was a great adventure; but then that’s both the advantage and the drawback of youth, isn’t it? You go from one thing to another and embrace change like a lover.
    Cimon and Elpinice were on the harbour wall by the Athene Nike. He was wheedling Ariston into letting him stow away onboard and she was somewhere between woman and girl. A woman in appearance and dignity but still a girl in that her reaction to her father’s departure was so transparent. The sailors made a great fuss over Cimon, who had always been their favourite, but stayed well clear of Elpinice out of respect.
    So we grabbed a shared moment. Even back then she was wise way beyond her years and if she’d been born with the rights of a man, she’d have given Themistocles a run for his money like she did Pericles all those years later. Now looking back on the conversation, what obviously escaped me then seems clear: her analysis of the expedition was as clinical as Themistocles had been.
    “Do you find anything strange about this expedition, Mandrocles?”
    I was about to reply but there was another similarity between her and Themistocles: she didn’t want an answer either, merely a listener.
    “Because the men who he had to fight with to persuade them to fight the Persians are falling over themselves to see him off; look.”
    I followed where she pointed and saw them in a group clustered round the General: Megacles, Aristides, even Kallixenos, friend of the Persians who was lucky not to have been exiled after Marathon.
    She turned her gaze back towards me and muttered,
    “And yet his own brother Stesagoras who counselled against this has chosen not to be here I see.”
    She was right; there was no sign of him, which struck me as odd. But how could a girl like her, excluded from the affairs of men, know what was counselled when I didn’t?
    Miltiades broke away from the group of well-wisherscome to see him off and, ignoring the helping hands, leapt with the grace of a young warrior onto the deck. The crew erupted into a loud cheer. He turned and acknowledged it as his right as leader and I saw on his face that same expression of command and confidence that he wore at Marathon when he ordered the charge. Theodorus shouted to me from the deck.
    “Better jump too, Mandrocles, if you don’t want to be left behind.”
    I was about to but I felt a cool hand grip my arm and Elpinice said,
    “Keep your eyes on him, Mandrocles; I think he will need your luck. Now go well.”
    I turned and jumped down to the deck just in time to see the General lead the singing of the Paean and pour the libation. Then the Athene Nike was moving, pulling smoothly away from the harbour wall. Moving to the heartbeat of the stroke that Theodorus called. And I was truly alive in a way that only those of you who have served with the fleet can understand.
    But later, as I stood by the trierarch’s chair and watched the Piraeus recede into the distance, the melancholy that follows pulling out to start a new adventure set in. But this time it was more than just that. Something was troubling me, something that must have gnawed away deep inside since Themistocles had said,
    “It’s something the whole city will know once you’ve sailed.”
    Now out on the open sea with twilight approaching it came to me that this was no empty threat; Miltiades had no real friends in the city and certainly none he could trust. He’d been given the money and the fleet for this expedition because after his leadership at Marathon no one could refuse him. However, as with most things in this city, there was abig but. Some days before Aeschylus had filled me in as a warning when I told him I was sailing with the fleet, but I hadn’t