Authors: Christian Cameron
My right hub clipped the doorpost hard enough that white plaster fell like a little shower of snow, and then we were through, still moving very fast.
There’s a thing you do, as a charioteer, to pick up your master: you pivot the chariot all the way around and rein in, all but scooping the man off his feet with the back deck of woven cords. The daimon was strong in me, and I now reined my offside leader and my back wheels skidded on the smooth marble.
It was almost perfect.
Unfortunately, the axle clipped a small, very elegant standing column.
And knocked it over. It took a long time to fall, and it broke into several sections and lay there, accusingly.
Archilogos – by the eternal irony of the gods, the master for whom I would have driven my chariot in combat, had the world ever gone that way – stood under the stoa of the courtyard and laughed very hard. He was beautifully dressed, and his ruddy curls bounced with his mirth. He tried to say something – and was off again in another paroxysm of laughter.
Behind me, my crowd of friends and about a thousand oarsmen approached the gate. They made a roar like the sea.
And then Briseis stepped out into the open.
It was not what she was wearing; it was not the magnificent gold earrings she had in her ears, the crown of a priestess on her head, the gold bracelet she wore or the gilded sandals that cradled her arched feet.
It was her eyes, which were only for me.
Somehow, in that moment, we were wed. Never before, not ever, anywhere, had those eyes been entirely intent on me and no one else – no ‘next thing’, no plot, no intrigue. Her brother was laughing, and as she passed him, her right hand reached out and viciously poked him in the side – a very sisterly act. Remember that they had not been together in many years.
He reached for her arm to respond in kind, and froze, aware that three hundred or more men were watching him.
They grinned at one another.
And then she reached out a hand, and the smell of musk and jasmine and mint embraced me. I took her hand and she rose into the chariot like Venus riding the dawn.
‘Please do not hit another column,’ she said very quietly. Her lips parted, and sound emerged, and it was all I could do not to stare at her for ever, or take her in front of all those people!
Instead, training and good breeding took hold, and I snapped the reins. My horses leapt forward and by luck – or the grace of Aphrodite – we sailed through the doorposts without blemish, although I was ashamed to note a long white gouge on the one as we passed. Men flattened themselves to be out of my way, and called out.
Oh, in those days, thugater, men and women said such things.
She swayed, and I put a hand around her waist. And the fingers of my left hand found that her chiton was open-pinned, not sewn down the side, and at the contact with the smooth skin of her hip, I almost lost my horses.
‘Drive the chariot, my husband,’ she said. ‘Drive me later, if you will.’
And she laughed, and all the happiness that a man could feel, that the gods allow, flooded me. By Zeus Sator, by all the gods who sit in Olympus, what more can we ask? Victory in war, and the woman you love …
The street cleared. I made the turn at the base of the hill and it was flat for two hundred paces until the promontory rose away with the temple of Poseidon sitting atop it, and I tightened my grip on her waist and snapped the reins and gave a shout – and my horses obeyed.
From a walk to a trot, trot straight to a gallop, and we tore along that stade of a street, scattering a few bystanders, and our clothes and hair billowed, dust rose in a cloud, and for the length of the time it takes a man to sing a hymn, we
were
gods. And then, as the horses began to take the rise in the road and I reined them in, perhaps not beautifully, but competently, and they slowed, so that they were shiny with sweat, composed and walking elegantly, as we entered the sacred precinct.
‘That is my answer,’ I said. And was rewarded with her smile, and her blush. Who knew she could blush like that?
And we walked up into the temple.
I had, of course, forgotten to bring a sword. But you need a sword for sacrifices, and I felt a fool until Eugenios stepped out of the crowd and put my own sword belt over my head as if the whole thing was planned.
I did not behead a bull. The chariot-driving had been as much adventure as I needed on my wedding day and I killed a ram fastidiously, raising the hem of my himation before the blood could flow.
But the auspices were brilliant, in birds of the air and in the livers of dead animals, and my sons made their kills and the smell of roasting fat rose to the gods. The sun on the pine trees all around the shrine – the last of the summer was ours for that day, and the scent of pines and the smell of cooking meat, the salt air, the spilled wine …
We did not short the gods. Libations were poured to many gods and many absent friends: Paramanos, Onisandros, Idomeneus, and many others. We prayed and then we ate, we drank and then we danced.
I won’t relate the whole. I could make it longer than the Battle of Salamis, for truly, it was better in every way. Weddings are about life, while battles are about death.
But I will say that the three brides, Iris and Heliodora and Briseis, danced together. And I confess that, for once, Briseis was not best. She was beautiful, and she was all I wanted, but the Brauron girls danced the dance of Artemis for the last time, and they were superb. And then we all danced together, men in the outside ring, women in the inside, and wine and the flash of limbs and the open sides of many a chiton began to work on me, so that passion became very like lust. I remember a woman, who looked very much like Gorgo but insisted that her name was Io, which made me laugh. She and Jocasta danced and talked and danced and talked. I saw the two of them with my bride at one point, and they all laughed together, and I worried.
I danced until my head was clear, and then I went and sat and I found myself with Cimon and Aristides, and Eugenios and Ka – a very eclectic group of couches indeed. I ate a barley roll, the white kind we call ‘of Lesvos’, and chased it with some wine.
‘You should take your bride to your house,’ Aristides said. He was watching his wife dance again. ‘Because if you do not, there will be Lapiths and Centaurs on this very grass.’
‘Indeed,’ Cimon said, ‘I just saw a lass with her back all pine needles, and I do not think she was napping.’
So I made my rounds, hugging Cleitus, embracing Agariste, who was, if not very drunk, certainly jolly, and Xanthippus, who suddenly, full of wine, began to propound to me a forward naval strategy – an attack on the Persians in Ionia.
His wife pulled him down on their couch.
And I kissed my new daughters-in-law, who watched me with downcast eyes, as my leaving would mean that they were to leave too.
We walked to the chariots and the noise increased so acutely that I knew we were in for a loud night.
There was a moment … again, just as she mounted the chariot … half a hush, and Briseis put her hand on my arm where it rested as if it had been there all my life. I thought she might admonish me like a wife – you know, that I was drunk and needed to drive slowly.
Instead, she smiled into my eyes. Her own were huge and deep. And in a voice suffused with emotion, she said, ‘You are now related to two of the three most powerful families in Athens, my love.’
‘So we are,’ I said.
I didn’t whip my horses to a gallop. I did move along briskly, however, purely to leave the more boisterous elements behind us, and I confess that I went down the hill a little too fast and almost missed the turn along the northern beach, but Poseidon stayed by me and I did not. And I let the horses run a few strides and then calmed them, my hand already searching in the folds of her Ionian chiton.
She leaned into me with her whole body. Until a women does this, no man knows what a kiss is. I was driving horses, but Briseis was always as mad as I, or madder. We kissed; the world went by in a blur, and only Eros, who protects lovers, kept us from a foolish death.
And then we rolled to a stop in front of ‘my’ house. I jumped down, and lifted her. Behind me there was shouting. Hundreds of men and many women were pouring down the hill, but the chariots had kept them back, and we had a stade or more head start.
I carried her across the threshold of my borrowed house. My hands were already on her pins.
I did not put her down until I crossed the garden. I carried her into the tiny house and past the table where Eugenios had set cakes and wine and, as I tore at her clothes, I said:
σφαίρῃ δηὖτέ με πορφυρέῃ
βάλλων χρυσοκόμης Ἔρως,
νήνι ποικιλοσαμβάλῳ
συμπαίζειν προκαλεῖται.
ἣ δ’ — 5 ἐστὶν γὰρ ἀπ’ εὐκτίτου
Λέσβου — τὴν μὲν ἐμὴν κόμην —
λευκὴ γάρ — καταμέμφεται,
πρὸς δ’ ἄλλην τινὰ χάσκει.
Golden-haired Eros once again
hurls his crimson ball at me:
he calls me to come out and play
with a girl in fancy sandals.
But she’s from civilised Lesvos:
she sneers at my hair because it’s grey …
I was quoting Anacreon. She rolled away from me on the bed and took off her magnificent sandals and threw them at me, laughing, and she reached between my legs and said, ‘I am, however, unlikely to turn in wonder for another girl.’ Then she was on me.
And it was she, not I, as the sound of copper pots and bronze ladles and wooden spoons beaten on iron kettle lids filled the garden outside our door, as voices suggested positions, and others asked how big I might be, and a few made ruder jokes at her expense – it was she, who, already astride me, gathered all our clothes, a fortune in dyed wool and linen, leaned back so that I could see every inch of her splendour in the moonlight, and cast the whole ball of Tyrian red and indigo blue, glinting with gold, straight out of our garden window to the crowd below.
They
roared.
They roared like oarsmen in the moment of victory and like hoplites in the last push at Marathon. And I looked up into her face, still crowned with Aphrodite’s golden tiara, still wearing her earrings and nothing else …
Ah … Good night, friends. The rest you will have to guess for yourselves.
You’ll make
me
blush if you demand more. Hah! Pour cool wine over the hot coals of lust and tomorrow night, the last night, I’ll tell you one more tale, how the men of Greece, free Greece, stood against the Medes and Persians and men of a hundred nations, spear against arrow as my friend Aeschylus has said, and fought until the dust and haze of Ares covered all. How the men of Plataea danced the dance of Ares one last time. And how close we came to losing everything. Indeed, many of us lost life, and others lost all they owned.
But leave me to remember the happiest night of my life. Because although I never promised you a happy story, some days it was as full of glory as sunrise over the ocean, and some nights, too. And if there is sadness to come … well, here’s to your mother, my dear, the love of my life.
Το τέλος
When I set out to write this novel, I thought that I knew a fair amount about warfare under oars and the Battle of Salamis. Today I completed the novel feeling considerably less sanguine. The Battles off of Artemisium and the Battle of Salamis were, almost inarguably, pivotal events for Greece, and quite possibly, despite hyperbole, for the whole history of the world. And I’m still not sure how many ships were engaged, how exactly the fighting went, or even, at Artemisium, who really won. I still can’t tell you the names of most of the ships engaged, where they beached, or what, exactly, the intentions of the commanders were.
That’s a little odd, as I find that the book I’ve written is more a fictional campaign history than a novel.
So I’d like to discuss the sources, some theories, and some of the evidence. And I’d like the reader – and I’m aware I have readers who read Ancient Greek and know these issues as well or better than I – I’d like all my readers to know that I did my due diligence, and if I didn’t agree with your favorite theory, I’ll bet I considered it.
First, a general caveat. When dealing with the dawn of the Classical era, we actually
know
very little. The lightest brush with the so-called ‘Hoplites and Heresies’ debate (and here a perusal of Josho Brouwers’ excellent synopsis in the bibliographical section of
Henchmen of Ares
will help you better than I can) will show every reader how contentious every aspect of warfare in this era really is. A perusal of the literature on ancient sexuality will get you the same confusion; ship construction is beginning to edge towards consensus as underwater archaeology disproves some theories, but there’s still lots of room for debate; dance and martial arts are both realms that appear open to the wildest speculation, and even as simple an (apparent) subject as the role of women in society is rent with quarrels whose real basis is in modern academia, not the ancient world. (But if you want to read my favourite book on the subject, which I regard as the best by far, try
Portrait of a Priestess
by Joan Breton Connelly.)
Second, a specific warning – I’m a novelist, and I really like to tell a good story. I’m pretty sure there really was an Arimnestos; I will bet he was at Artemisium, because the Plataeans were there. Quite frankly, it is unlikely he was at Salamis – more likely, he and the Plataeans, having evacuated their farms, were camped around Nemea or at the isthmus, or even at Troezen or Hermione. But I built him from the first to be one of those piratical captains that the Greeks had in plenty – Herodotus mentions several of them, and Miltiades as much as any – and those men had their own ships and crews. So in short – to make my story work, I have juggled some of my Plataean characters and sent them back to Salamis.
But that is all the juggling I have done a-purpose. Any other errors are errors, and I’ll apologize in advance, because I do make them. For example, until I wrote this book, I was unaware of the difference between the relatively open rowing frames in the latest trieres reconstructions and the slab-sided ships that I had seen in pictures and imagined. So in this book, rowers row in frames – and I ask readers to ‘edit’ their memories to include frames and so on in my other naval actions. Likewise, close attention to the appendix on mooring and anchoring in the magisterial S
eagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant
by Shelley Wachsmann has indicated to me that I didn’t know as much as I thought I did about anchors and their uses, and you’ll find that gets a little more detail this time.
Anyway, I’m sure I’ve made new errors. Be merciful.
On to the Battle of Salamis.
There are really only two primary sources on the battle – Herodotus, in the main, and the opening of Aeschylus’ play
Persians
. Of the two, Aeschylus was an eyewitness – he was
there.
He was, in fact, a hoplite, a veteran warrior who had fought at Marathon. As much as possible, I took his word as law. Of course, that wasn’t always easy. And Herodotus – frankly, this whole series is based on Herodotus, and next to the Iliad, Herodotus’
Histories
is one of my favorite books. I love the humanity that shines through his work, and it is my belief that he never wittingly lied or shaded the truth. Rather, in a very Husserlian way, he gave us the truth as he experienced it, and it is we moderns who struggle with his endless tales of omens, the vengeance of gods and men, and the eternal turning of a wheel of fate. He sure knew how to help a novelist though. Look at Queen Gorgo of Sparta!
I also used two secondary sources that I enjoyed – for different reasons, but I liked both. One was Barry Strauss’s T
he Battle of Salamis
which I read back in 2004 when it came out – when, in fact, I was writing the first draft of what became
Tyrant
. The other is John R. Hale’s wonderful
Lords of the Sea
, about the rise of Athenian sea power. Finally, I used the ‘Ancient Map Book’ as my bible on place names and distances, and I can promise you that I have been to most of the beaches on which Arimnestos lands – except Megalos. Never been there. It sounds wonderful, though.
The battle is a confusing welter from the first page – from the moment the Greek fleet leaves the beaches of Artemisium. Right away, the novelist is presented with a list of questions. Let me put one of them to you – because in it lies all the seeds of the confusion of the rest of the campaign.
When the Greeks knew that Leonidas was dead and the League Army at Thermopylae had failed – did they think they would fight again? Or did they only sail to Salamis together in a sort of route, preparatory to the fleet breaking up?
I realize this seems obvious, but if Herodotus is to be believed, the Corinthians and the Peloponnesians – and perhaps even the Spartans – were for going to the isthmus immediately, while the Athenians, at least, thought that a fight would be made in the plains of Boeotia and that the fleet should remain together. Why didn’t the allied fleet break up immediately?
Asking this question gave me one hint about the campaign that I play throughout – that Eurybiades really was in command, and not just a shadow-puppet for Themistocles to keep the Aeginians and the Corinthians happy. If you accept that Leonidas and the Spartans had the foresight to want an alliance to save Greece, Eurybiades seems likely to have been a member of their party. And that means that the Greeks left Artemisium with their high command still willing to fight. I can’t actually imagine that the Greek fleet that Aeschylus portrays on the morning of Salamis – a united fleet signing the paean and striking fear in the hearts of the Persians – was still wrangling the night before.
And yet – just to keep you in the picture of how this book developed – I was pretty deep in the book when I read Maurizio Arfaioli’s book on
The Black Bands of Giovanni
, a book about the early 16th-century wars in Italy that included an appendix on a pivotal naval fight between galleys (Capo D’Orso in 1528). I enjoyed it, but I also noted that the winning side was nonetheless rent with dissension almost to the moment of action. And that the winning commander betrayed his ‘side’ later. After some soul-searching, I decided to accept that both Herodotus and Aeschylus were right, or at least, that they probably described a situation that was very complex, as real life all too often is. The upshot was that I changed the book, and chose to follow both. And that led to the rather careful examination of the personalities and arguments of the leaders as portrayed. And to the making of Themistocles as a more ‘nuanced’ character.
As to the day of battle, I am relatively confident that Strauss et al are correct, and that Xerxes’ fleet intended to surround the Greek beaches to prevent flight – and to allow themselves to form a long line with a friendly coast at their backs, instead of being caught in a fight in the narrows by Psyttaleia. I am
still
unsure whether the Greek attack on Psyttaleia was pivotal to the battle, or merely made exciting by Herodotus to inflate hoplite vanities in the aftermath of a naval battle, and to make Aristides look good. But I chose the former, because, looking at the ‘terrain’ of the battle and the width of the channels, as I think they were in 480 BCE, possession of that island with archers would have been pivotal to the battle. And a brilliant commander might well have seen that if his left flank struck hard, he could turn the battle from a long-line fight to a choked fight in the narrows. That would, after all, have been sound strategy on land, and it is my perception that before the era of Phormio and true Athenian maritime greatness, fleet actions were viewed much as land battles where the losers drowned.
The aftermath of the battle is almost all my speculation, but again based firmly on Herodotus. Clearly the Greeks, who’d probably won at least one of the days at Artemisium, were not immediately aware that they’d finished Xerxes’ fleet. And likewise, lest we exaggerate, it is also very possible that Xerxes finished the day at Salamis with more battle-ready ships than the whole league fleet had possessed
before
the fight. But they were at the very end of the sailing season, and I suspect there are several untold stories – the Egyptians, for example, didn’t want to be there to start with and had the longest trip home; the Ionians might have been brave on the day of battle, but when they realized that they were the only fleet the Great King had left, it must have occurred to many of them, even the sailors of the Persian-backed tyrannies, that the day of judgment was at hand. To me, the steady defections recorded in Herodotus suggest deep fissures in the Persian fleet. Salamis was not a one-shot victory – it was the knock-out blow of a tough campaign, or so I see it.
And finally, as my brave Arimnestos runs across the sea to rescue his girl, let me remind you that contrary to Herodotus, many Athenians knew how to cross the sea to the coast of Asia. They’d been there in the Ionian revolt, and many of them had been to Egypt. While I love and trust Herodotus, in this I can only note that Greeks are great or terrible navigators as it seems to suit his story. I’m sure they had their share of both. Possibly Themistocles had a lot of trierarchs who had never been outside the harbours of Piraeus and Phaleron – but let’s give Arimnestos and his friends the benefit of some practice. I hope you have enjoyed that Arimnestos was not born a good navigator, and in fact has taken nineteen years at sea to develop the confidence and skill to do something as daring as what I’ve written.
Ah, and in the end, we have a wedding. Hermione is a beautiful, magical place, and the temple of Poseidon (probably) sits on a magnificent promontory that instantly evokes the late Archaic, and smells of pines and the sea to this day. My wife and I stayed in a wonderful house there, and I confess it had a fig tree. And our daughter, and some cats. We stayed there in the days after we re-enacted the Battle of Marathon in 2011, and I will not soon forget the sights and sounds of that trip, many of which are in this book, and a few of which will be in the next. In the meantime, on to
Marathon
2015!
If you’d like to see a few of these places for yourself, look at the Pen and Sword tour website at https://1phokion.wordpress.com/or just visit my author page on Facebook or my author site at www.hippeis.com and look in the ‘agora’. I enjoy answering reader questions and I usually respond, and I almost never bite. And if you’ve always wanted to be a hoplite – or a Persian, or a Scythian, or a slave, or almost any ancient person – well, try re-enacting. Contact me, or visit our http://www.boarstooth.net/ website, and we’ll find you a group. Maybe even ours!