A voyage in six chapters, for Eric, on his sixty-second birthday
It is the autumn of 405 BC. The Athenian fleet has been destroyed at Aegospotami, and Lysander's Spartan triremes are closing on every city that ever paid tribute to Athens. Among those cities is Byzantium, where a certain Athenian astronomer, attached to the fleet to keep its star tables, has been left behind.
His name is Eric. He knows the sky better than any man alive, he has read more about old wars than is entirely healthy, and he has an eye for a well-built wall. In the chapters that follow he will need all three.
Each chapter ends with a problem. Solve it and the ship moves on. If you are stuck, ask for a hint; the sea is patient. At the end there is a feast, and a poem.
Byzantium, on the night the city changes hands
The Spartan party entered by the landward gate at dusk; by full dark the Athenian garrison was under guard and the harbour chain was up. Eric, who had been on the roof of the customs house with his sighting rods, was simply not counted.
One small merchant galley remained at the quay, its Byzantine owner willing to sail for a price. But the chain across the harbour mouth is a hand's breadth of iron, and it drops only on a signal from the Spartan officer of the watch.
That officer left his leather strap on the customs house table. It is a Spartan message, written on a strip wound around a rod, then unwound: a scytale. Read straight, it is nonsense. Wound around a rod of the right girth, it tells you exactly when the chain falls.
Write the letters into rows of the right width and read down the columns. When does the chain fall? Enter the single word that answers it.
The message read HARBOR CHAIN FALLS AT MOONSET. The galley slips under the descending chain with a hand's breadth to spare.
The Propontis and the open Aegean, three nights out
The Byzantine owner is a coastal man. He steers by headlands, and now there are none. On the third night, with cloud to the south and a Spartan patrol somewhere behind, he asks the astronomer to take the helm.
Eric knows what the Phoenicians have known for centuries: that the sky wheels around a point that does not move, and that if you keep that point on your right shoulder you will sail west all night without a landmark. The Greeks steer by the Great Bear, which is bright but swings wide. The Phoenicians steer by the Little Bear, which stays close to the hub.
But in this year the hub is empty. No star sits on it. The nearest bright one is in the Little Bear, and he must find it.
Tap the star that lay nearest the celestial pole in Eric's lifetime. The chart shows the northern sky with the Great Bear at bottom, the Little Bear above, and the dragon between them.
Kochab. Around a century later Pytheas of Massalia would write that the pole had no star on it at all, only an empty space with three stars nearby making a square. Eric keeps Kochab on his right shoulder, and the galley runs west through the night.
A cove on the eastern side of Melos
They put in for water at Melos, the island Athens emptied twelve years ago. The men were killed, the women and children sold, and Athenian settlers moved into the houses. Now Lysander has thrown the settlers out in turn and told the surviving Melians they may come home.
Some have. At the spring above the cove Eric finds thirty of them, sunburnt, patient, and short of everything. An old woman who was sold at Piraeus in 416 and walked back across half the Aegean asks him, politely, who he is. When he says Athenian, nobody moves, and nobody speaks.
At length the old woman says that Melians have always tested strangers with a riddle, and that the answer will decide whether the water is his to take. She does not say what happens otherwise.
I have no hands, yet I push a hundred oars.
I have no mouth, yet I sing in the rigging all night.
Athens counted me among its allies, and I changed sides without a word.
I can bring you home, or scatter you like the Melians.
What am I?
The wind. The old woman nods, fills his jars herself, and gives him the one thing she has to spare: the name of a Sidonian merchant who took pity on her at the slave market, and who trades still on the Phoenician coast. Then the wind that is no one's friend turns south and east, and blows for eight days.
The harbour of Sidon, on the Phoenician coast, under Persian rule
The gale sets them down, nearly dismasted, on a coast Eric has read about but never seen: Phoenicia, the country of the purple dye and the cedar and the alphabet, whose cities pay tribute to the Great King and whose ships won Salamis for Persia and lost it.
A Greek galley in a Persian harbour in wartime is a problem for everyone. The harbour master wants to know whose ship it is and whose side. Eric's Byzantine owner, sensibly, has stopped speaking.
Eric asks for the merchant the Melian woman named. The harbour master smiles, hands him a potsherd with a line of Phoenician letters on it, and says that if the stranger can tell him which city the merchant's family came from, he will be believed. The Greeks, after all, borrowed these letters from the Phoenicians two centuries ago. A man who knows old things ought to be able to read them.
Eric remembers three things. The letters run from right to left. There are no vowels; the reader supplies them. And the Greek letters he learned as a child are the same signs, turned around and renamed.
If the letters above show as blank boxes, the scribe's copy reads: sade, dalet, nun.
| 𐤀 | aleph, a glottal stop, later the Greek alpha |
| 𐤁 | bet, the sound B |
| 𐤃 | dalet, the sound D |
| 𐤌 | mem, the sound M |
| 𐤍 | nun, the sound N |
| 𐤑 | sade, an emphatic S, which Greeks heard as S |
| 𐤓 | resh, the sound R |
| 𐤕 | taw, the sound T |
Which Phoenician city does the potsherd name? Add the vowels yourself.
Sidon. The harbour master, who is Sidonian to the bone, laughs and claps him on the shoulder. The merchant is found, the Melian woman's name is spoken, and the galley is refitted with cedar and given a cargo of purple to carry home as passage money. Eric looks up, once, at the great sea wall of the harbour and thinks that some later empire will build forts like this from Madras to Halifax, and none of them better.
The Saronic Gulf, within sight of the temple of Poseidon
Off Cape Sounion, with the white temple on its cliff and Piraeus a morning's row beyond, they fall in with what is left of the Athenian navy: eight triremes under a captain called Conon's cousin, refitted at Samos and trying to slip home. Eric's galley is taken under their wing.
Then, at dawn, twenty Peloponnesian triremes come around the cape. The Athenian captain has one gift to offer against those odds: the fleet's astronomer, who has, he says, read every account of every sea fight since Salamis, and could describe the trick Phormio played at Naupactus in his sleep.
Eric is asked, three times, what the fleet should do. The rowers are waiting.
Six Peloponnesian triremes are rammed or run aground, and the rest break off toward Aegina. The Athenians lose one ship and recover its crew. It is a very small victory in a war that is already lost, and it is the last one.
A house near the Cantharus harbour, the same evening
They had held the funeral in the winter. Everyone knew what Aegospotami meant for the men at Byzantium, and Eric's friends had said the words and poured the offering and gone home to grieve. Now a galley with a Phoenician sail and a cargo of purple comes alongside the quay, and the man on its deck is not dead at all.
There is a great deal of shouting. Then somebody remembers that there is a fish market forty paces away, and that the philosopher on the corner has been saying for years that the wise man eats no flesh, and that tonight, at least, he can be humoured.
Before the wine is mixed there is one last question, because it is Athens and there is always one last question.
"A trireme carries one hundred and seventy rowers on three levels," says the host, raising his cup. "Fifty-four thalamites low in the hull, fifty-four zygites on the middle bench, and on the top bench, in the open air, where the best men sit and see the sky, a certain number of thranites. Our friend has lived exactly that many years. How many?"
Sixty-two. The cups go up, and the dishes come out.
Triglē optē. The Athenian fish market's favourite, cooked as Archestratus recommends: quickly, with as little interference as possible.
Score each fish twice on each side and rub with salt and half the oil. Grill over hot coals or under a very hot broiler, 4 to 5 minutes a side, until the skin blisters. While the fish cooks, whisk the remaining oil with the vinegar, oregano and a pinch of salt. Lay the fish on a warm dish, pour the sauce over, and scatter the coriander. Serve with the barley cakes below.
Phakē. The everyday pot of the Athenian household, thick enough to eat with bread.
Warm the oil in a heavy pot and soften the onion and garlic without colouring them. Add the lentils, bay, cumin and water. Bring to a boil, then simmer gently, uncovered, for 35 to 45 minutes until the lentils are soft and the liquid has thickened. Salt at the end, never at the beginning. Finish each bowl with a thread of oil and a few drops of vinegar. Stir in a handful of chopped greens or leeks in the last ten minutes if you like.
Maza. The bread of most Greeks most of the time: barley, not wheat, and unleavened.
Mix the flour and salt, work in the oil, then add water gradually until you have a firm dough that holds together. Rest it 20 minutes. Divide into eight, flatten into cakes a finger thick, and bake at 200 C for 18 to 22 minutes until dry and lightly browned, or cook on a dry cast iron pan over medium heat, 6 minutes a side. Good with the lentils, the fish, and a dish of olives and sheep's cheese.
Plakous, or something near it. Sweet cakes of cheese, honey and sesame close every Athenian dinner in the comedies.
Beat the cheese with the honey, egg and salt until smooth, then fold in the flour to make a thick batter. Spread it about 2 cm deep in an oiled 20 cm round tin, scatter the sesame thickly, and bake at 180 C for 25 to 30 minutes until set and golden at the edges. Cool, cut in wedges, and pour warm honey over each piece. Dried figs on the side.
Sung by a hired poet at the end of the feast, as was customary, for a fee