Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium)

by P. K. Lentz

  As righteous and justified as the crowd's anger was, disapproval of its behavior nagged at Demosthenes. The articles of their surrender had included a pledge against mistreatment. Vegetables could scarcely harm them, but still. It was like watching a man mistreat a dog, he realized, for that's what these Spartiates were: dogs harshly trained from birth to obey the needlessly complex chain of command bequeathed them by the founder, Lykurgos. Even before their capture, these Spartans had worn every day of their lives an even heavier yoke than the timbers under which they now marched, for what greater curse could one endure than to be a professional soldier, slave to the whims of kings and elders, and never just a free man and master of one's destiny?

  He pitied them, and both pity and duty urged action upon him, but was it worthwhile? Could he hope to win a generalship in the coming winter if the citizens present remembered him as the one who had sought to deny them what little revenge it was in their power to take? Would anyone vote for Demosthenes, the Spoiler of Fun?

  Some distance to his right, borne by his own chariot, Kleon held aloft as trophies the plumed helm of Epitadas and a punctured, lambda-blazoned hoplon as he addressed the crowd constantly with words Demosthenes was glad he could not make out.

  A realization spurred him to act: to think only of elections was to think like Kleon.

  Demosthenes stepped down from the slow-moving quadriga, turning the head of the startled charioteer, and wove a path through onlookers who cheered the act they did not yet understand. He marched through the crowd to a thick-bearded citizen sitting astride a serviceable brown mare, the reins of which were held by a slave on foot. Demosthenes offered the citizen a silver obol for use of his horse for the remainder of the procession, but the citizen refused payment and surrendered it for free—even if he made a point of mentioning his name, Kallias, three times.

  Mounting, Demosthenes rode against the languid current to rejoin the procession some distance back, where, coming up alongside the prisoners, he inserted himself between their third and fourth ranks and wheeled the horse forward. The Spartans' matted long hair was abuzz with insects and their already soiled chitons stained with marks from the same flying debris that now pelted Demosthenes. As they were forced to part to accommodate the horse, the prisoners gazed up at their mounted vanquisher with bitterness in their dark eyes. No doubt they anticipated some new humiliation.

  From their laughter, the people of Athens expected the same, but slowly they came to realize their error. The hail of mud and overripe fruit grew gradually thinner, the cheers and jeers died down, and a silent confusion settled over the crowd which Demosthenes did nothing to allay.

  Soon he was not the only Athenian in the rank of prisoners. At least eight men who were loyal to him joined in, even daring to go on foot among a humiliated enemy which gave no indication that it appreciated the gesture. Before long, none other than Nikias had fallen back on his white stallion to ride among the prisoners. With him came two more generals of the Board of Ten, the old man's political allies. Those additions served no practical purpose, for the air was by now free of missiles; but here was an opportunity for Nikias and his faction to show the sovereign demos which of the two returning 'Heroes of Pylos' had their endorsement. Perhaps Nikias sensed that if and when Demosthenes rejoined the Board of Ten, he might not be warlike Kleon's man after all, but a potential ally of theirs in pursuit of an honorable peace.

  The first glimpse of Athens on the ride up the Long Walls was, as ever, her soaring acropolis. Topping it, with its pediment gleaming burgundy and gold beneath the noonday sun, was the mighty temple to the Virgin Athena which Perikles had built. Demosthenes locked eyes on it and, as was the habit he shared with thousands of his countrymen, thanked that goddess aloud for having seen him safely home. The procession ended on the gentle slope of the Pnyx, the ancient hillside theater which was the seat of Athens' Assembly, and there the crowd swelled with those who, for any number of reasons, had not made the trek to Piraeus and back but had waited in the city instead. After the Spartans in their yokes were led away, it was time for speeches to be given in the shadow of the towering acropolis. Nikias, being the senior strategos, and this being an occasion of military significance, was invited first to mount the slab of white stone called the speaker's step. The old man spoke for a full ten minutes without ever mentioning the names Kleon or Demosthenes, and when at last he did speak them, the former seemed to stick in his throat.

  Even as Demosthenes gave the senior general the courtesy of his attention, he worked his way to the eastern fringes of crowd, the direction in which lay dense pine groves sacred to the nymphs. The nymphs' wood, he hoped, might offer sanctuary to a man wishing to escape unwelcome obligations. He was no bad citizen, of course, and would scarcely dream of shirking his duty to vote in an Assembly (not least because of the fine levied on those caught) but this was no Assembly. This gathering was more an excuse for making speeches to bend the will of the demos one way or the other.

  By the time the applause went up for Nikias, at least half of it forced, Demosthenes stood by the tree line where only a few pairs of eyes were positioned to observe his departure. He flashed the owners of those eyes a smile and a silencing gesture, and the young men smiled their agreement in return, gratified to be made co-conspirators by one of the day's heroes. When he was safely out of sight, Demosthenes spun on his heel in the grove's floor of dry needles and began walking a line for his home in the deme of Tyrmeidai. Behind him, Kleon's voice boomed over the hillside, which meant that in an hour or so, when the demagogue finally finished, the crowd would expect a speech from Demosthenes. It would be disappointed.

  He had barely begun the walk home when he heard a sudden crunch of hurried footfalls to his left and looked over in time to see a figure which might have been one of those nymphs to whom the wood was dedicated fall into step beside him on the trail.

  How Thalassia had managed to keep track of him in the Pynx, a place where no woman was allowed, remained a mystery. It was one she could keep for now. He had not seen his home in three months and would let nothing slow his return.

  II. ATHENS 2. Libation Bearers

  At some point in his flight, the laurel crown which had been set upon Demosthenes' head in Piraeus tumbled off. He left it where it fell as an offering to the whispering goddesses. Thalassia might have been one of those nymphs, a silent shade moving alongside him with no evidence of exertion. They shared no words during the swift passage through the wood, and soon entered onto streets which were mostly deserted on account of the very festivities they had fled. A few turns down residential streets, past houses painted in pale reds and yellows, their neatly kept rooftop terraces and flowering gardens empty but for fleeting glimpses of wives, daughters and slaves, brought them to the well-made wooden gate of Demosthenes' modest residence.

  He had scarcely put his hand on the gate's latch to enter its short colonnade of palms when a piercing shriek assaulted his ears. Out of the dwelling's main entrance burst a slight, pale figure with flowing hair of deepest red that tumbled in loose curls from beneath a silvered fillet. Dressed in her finest embroidered long chiton, Eurydike scrambled down the palm-lined path, clutching against her chest the house's ceremonial rhyton, a glossy black horn-shaped vessel painted with a scene of Odysseus skewering five suitors of Penelope. Its contents sloshed in time with the slap of her sandals on the flagstones.

  At the small marble cult statue of Zeus that stood just beyond the gate, she skidded to a halt. The two silver pins that fastened her garment over freckled shoulders heaved, and so did the full breasts between which the rhyton was pressed. The lips on Eurydike's likewise freckled face were twisted in barely suppressed laughter.

  Demosthenes could scant help but chuckle softly himself. He had purchased Eurydike two years prior to replace a male housekeeper loaned from his father Alkisthenes. He had gone to the slave markets intending to bring back another male, but red-haired Eurydike, just out of girlhood, had caught his eye. She alone
among the poor wretches on offer had a rag clutched between her teeth.

  “A beating if she drops it,” the slaver explained. “Foul mouth on that one! Since you've got the funds, I can't think why you'd want a Thratta anyway.” He laughed. “Those sheep-brains live in mud holes and eat straw, so what can they know about housekeeping, eh? Besides, like I say, this one's got a mouth on it. If she ain't using it to curse or spit at you, she's biting you, the little bugger.” He sounded as though he spoke from experience. “Bite your nutsack clean off, she will. No, come over here instead. I've got a fresh-faced little Arkadian for you. Good and docile.”

  “Let me hear her,” Demosthenes requested, for Eurydike's bright green eyes had captured his attention. Those eyes, along with her freckled skin, copper hair, and the bands of black pigment encircling each of her upper arms made her appearance typically tribal Thracian.

  Reluctantly, the slaver tugged the rag from Eurydike's mouth.

  “Choose me, lord!” she said urgently. “I swear I will be good to you!”

  With that, to the slaver's dismay, the deal was done, and Demosthenes walked off with a foul-mouthed barbarian girl in tow, having spent barely half the silver with which he had come prepared to part. Whenever Eurydike angered him, which was often enough, he could recall that day and his anger faded. He had been warned away but taken her anyway, out of spite and perhaps the love of a challenge.

  Today, behind the bounding Eurydike on the garden path leading to his home, making his approach in a more dignified manner, was Phormion, Demosthenes' paternal second cousin and the keeper of his home while he was away. Phormion bore a superficial resemblance to his elder cousin thanks to the sandy curls which crowned his head. His career, too, might have resembled his cousin's but for the fall in his youth which had left him lame in one leg. And so, although he was in his early twenties, Phormion hobbled up to the gate like a man three times that age, leaning on an Egyptian walking stick, a gift from Demosthenes, its ebony head carved in the likeness of a jackal.

  Reaching the gate, Phormion opened it while impatient Eurydike bounced on sandaled heels behind him, frothing the wine inside its horn-shaped flask. However eager she was to share fond words and an embrace with her master, etiquette dictated that a slave wait until after any citizens present had said their greetings.

  On the threshold, the cousins embraced. “You bring us great pride,” Phormion said. He produced in one hand, dangling from a leather thong, the iron key to the oikos. Even if the house's gate was rarely locked, its key was the symbol of its mastery. Handing it over, Phormion spoke formulaic words, “I gladly surrender back unto thee that which you charged me to protect.”

  By now Eurydike threatened to vibrate out of her speckled Thracian skin. Green eyes beaming, she raised the black rhyton in both hands and practically threw it into Demosthenes' arms. Accepting the horn, Demosthenes removed the cover at its tip and splashed wine onto the stone plinth atop which rested the thick-bearded marble bust of Zeus Herkeios, Zeus of the Courtyard. As he poured wine onto stone already well-stained purple by libations past, he spoke simple words of gratitude for his safe homecoming. When the rhyton was empty, he stoppered it and set it beside the bust.

  No sooner had he put it down than Eurydike lunged, flinging tattooed arms about his chest and burying her cheek in his chiton. Accepting her into his arms, Demosthenes told her, “How I have missed you, bright eyes.”

  Eurydike turned her face upward and asked excitedly, “Really?”

  “How could I not?” He bent his head and kissed her forehead at the center of the triangle formed by the two halves of her center-parted copper hair and the fillet of silver which secured them above her brows. Eurydike despised imprisoning her tumble of curls in fashionable plaits and braids, perhaps because they did not readily lend themselves to taming. A fillet and the occasional ribbon were the most she ever suffered.

  “I have a gift for you,” Demosthenes said, and the slave beamed still more.

  Her gift, hanging at his thigh by a short cord from the belt of his chiton, was the only spoil of Pylos he had carried on his person from the ships. Detaching Eurydike to get at it required more effort than detaching the gift.

  “A Spartan's iron dagger,” he announced when he had succeeded at both tasks and held the gift out by its plain rawhide scabbard.

  Squealing her gratitude, Eurydike took the handle, drew it and admired the blade with mouth agape. The knife was blunt, its edge even curled over in some places, for it had probably been put to every imaginable use by the besieged Lakedaemonians. But that didn't matter one bit to Eurydike. She knew as well as the giver that the item was not truly meant to be useful. It was a token of trust, for an armed slave was one with the power to cut her master's throat in the night.

  Tears welled in Eurydike's green eyes by the time Demosthenes shifted her to his left side, where she nestled under his arm, clutching her gift more tightly than she had the rhyton.

  “For you, cousin,” Demosthenes said to Phormion, who knew well why he had to come second and betrayed no offense, “a full Spartan panoply. It will be brought to your home. Alas, minus the shield,” he added disapprovingly. “Kleon intends to use those to line the Painted Stoa as testament to the victory which even now he claims as his own.”

  As was customary, Phormion tried twice to refuse the gift, but once the attempts were rebuffed, he accepted with obvious pleasure. Greetings over and gifts given, there was little more to be done to forestall a potentially fraught introduction. Up until now, Thalassia had stood a mute shadow in the street several paces away, drawing occasional flicked glances from Phormion and Eurydike. Now both sets of eyes locked upon her.

  Demosthenes waved an arm in her direction. “This is Thalassia. She is...”

  Conscience made him hesitate. How could he lie to his blood-kin and the pallake he trusted so deeply as to gift her a dagger? Surely, the charade was doomed to crumble. Perhaps this was all a mistake...

  “A spoil of the battle, my lord,” Thalassia finished for him with head bowed, hands demurely clasped in a pretense of humility that actually was convincing. “Your humble slave.”

  Demosthenes tightened his arm around Eurydike's shoulders, mostly to reassure the girl, but also to restrain her if need be. Indeed, she tensed. How could she not upon learning that the size of her master's household was to grow by half, and that worse still, the new addition was, by most standards, more desirable than she. Thracian slave girls, Thrattai, were commonplace in Athens, while women of Thalassia's more Persian tint were rarer and fetched a higher price.

  Eurydike's worries might have been eased then and there by simple reassurance that her master's bedchamber would remain her territory exclusively, but now seemed hardly an appropriate time. Eurydike knew, too, that neither was this a proper time for her to openly express her displeasure, and so she instead gave Thalassia a forced, bloodless smile of the kind in which another woman could not fail to detect stark warning: I will make your life hell!

  Phormion only said to his cousin with an approving smile, “Well done.”

  All four, two citizens and two slaves, started down along the palm-lined, stone-paved path to the house. Eurydike walked proudly, and no doubt pointedly, adhering to her master's hip.

  “I kept the hearth going the whole time you were gone,” she bragged. “Well, almost. And—” She went up on tiptoe, and Demosthenes bent his ear obligingly to her lips so she could whisper to him in her lilting accent of the northern plains, “I was very naughty with Alkibiades again. You will have to punish me.”

  The comment failed to shock Demosthenes, for it was rare to find a concubine in Athens who had not been molested by Alkibiades, and Eurydike was one of the playboy's favorites. Not only that, she was ever out to give her master reasons to redden various expanses of her freckled skin as prelude to other activities.

  When Demosthenes hushed her, Eurydike obligingly changed the subject. “Why is her name 'sea-thing'?” Her voice was over-loud a
nd laced with calculated derision.

  “Be kind,” Demosthenes scolded quietly. “You have nothing to fear from her.”

  Reassured, or at least feigning it, Eurydike set her cheek against his arm and fell silent.

  Demosthenes' home was modest by the standards of his social class. It consisted of two stories with plain, whitewashed walls and a flat roof which served as a terrace from which a quarter of Athens could be seen, not least the soaring, temple-crowned acropolis. They entered into the house's lower floor, which apart from a pantry, storage area, and private bath, consisted entirely of a single room, the megaron, with a round stone hearth at its heart. The room's floor was of hard lime plaster tinted deep red, while the walls and four supporting columns, also plastered, were plain white but for two simple stripes echoing the hue of the floor. Visitors to his home were ever pleading with him to let some artist they favored decorate the blank expanses with frescoes, as had become the fashion of late, but always Demosthenes resisted, joking that the Spartans, thick-skulled as they were, got some things right.

  The megaron was furnished with a low ebony dining table flanked by reclining couches. The inherited table was the room's lone extravagance, its edges gilt and legs carved to resemble bear claws. In a rear corner of the megaron, a well-built timber staircase ascended to the private quarters above, while at the room's center, its focal point, the hearth fire burned at a relative flicker. The radiant heat made the air inside the house over-warm and somewhat stifling. It was a typical state, for hearth fires burned even in the depth of summer, not only because it was deemed bad luck to let one die, but also to avoid the necessity of a trek to the nearest shrine of Hestia for a fresh spark. The priestesses charged only a bronze obol, but the little coins quickly added up if one wasn't careful. Eurydike visited Hestia's shrine rather too often, as evidenced by the frequency with which the clay coin-pot on the stone wall of the hearth needed replenishment.