As difficult as Damatria’s younger years had been, her maturity was a succession of personal triumphs. In business she was indomitable: when she set her sights on acquiring or altering a piece of property, nothing could stop her. The Equals were as innocent as children about matters of finance, caring only about keeping score in the ways Lacedaemonians had for centuries. They had no conception of how the world had changed-of how the pressures of population and political unrest were filling Greece with thousands of unemployed mercenaries. Power in the very near future would not be measured in terms of who could mobilize the most citizens, but of who spent most wisely within the rising empire of money. The small sack of foreign staters she had once begrudged herself had now grown into a treasure chest bursting with cash.
Her greatest competition in this came not from among the men, but from their wives. With the helots employed in the tasks left to wives of other cities, the good women of Sparta were free to sample many of the delights abjured by their dutiful husbands. As their spouses dined on bitter bread and pork blood, the wives grew plump on delicacies imported from the islands, Sicily, and beyond; while the men made do with tunics of crimson sackcloth, their women went around the markets in Egyptian linen and Persian silk. In their fortunate idleness, the wives had opportunity to learn much about the value of wealth.
Damatria managed to enlarge her holdings at the expense of her neighbors, as well as acquire other estates in Messenia and on the island of Cythera. Her moneylending interests at the port attracted applicants from as far as Samos, until she owned a piece of virtually every ship plying the Aegean from Gytheion to Asia. Her gamble on the production of wheat had paid off so handsomely that she was providing bread for half the messes in the city. She even tried her hand, in partnership with Isidas, at bankrolling a four-horse chariot team for the games of the 85th Olympiad; in a suspicious decision, her team was awarded second place after crossing the line dead even with a chariot sponsored by none other than one of the Olympic judges. Barring scandal, whatever she put her mind to seemed destined for success.
Yet as she grew wealthier Damatria grew less happy. With her husband under her strict control and his lover grown ugly under her burden, she had no enemies left to defeat. In the void that was left she had much time to consider the errors of her past ways-particularly the injustice she had done to her eldest son. For what had Antalcidas done to deserve the resentment she had heaped on him? With what, except the love of a devoted son, had he ever repaid her? Indeed, what was her rape next to the pain of a mother like poor Gyrtias, who had lost four sons not in glorious battle, but to disease? In the pit of the night, when she thought with fondness of the times when a small voice called out to her, she was filled with regret at how she had behaved. “If only you could come to me now, my dear baby!” she would say to her empty bedroom, her arms extended in the dark. But Antalcidas was gone then, on campaign beyond the mountains in Thyreatis, Doris, the Megarid, and the time when her self- reproach could mean anything to him was long past.
Epitadas broke her heart in his own way. The fact that she had showered him with advantages had the effect of teaching him to expect her devotion. In those times when she was of no use to him-which were increasingly frequent-he seemed to regard her with the respect due to a used napkin. When she spoke to him, his face showed his impatience; when she sent him gifts of food he was known to give them away to helots and dogs. Salvaging her pride, she came to him and demanded the deference befitting a mother of Spartiates. Epitadas laughed, embraced her in a way that was faintly mocking, and asked what gifts she had brought him.
And so, for different reasons, she could only rejoice at a distance at the success of her two sons. Thanks to her patronage, Epitadas was welcomed into the Spit Companions, and in the ensuing years became one of the most sought-after bachelors in the city. Antalcidas emerged as an able field commander in small engagements with Arcadians, Argives, and Phocians. He then surprised her by making a fine marriage with a Heraclid heiress named Andreia. This girl was too precious for her taste-all blond hair and girlish calves and a supercilious attitude-but Damatria cultivated her strenuously since their marriage in the hopes of another chance with Antalcidas. Iris oil from Ionia was a particular favorite of the girl’s. Damatria had just received another shipment of the stuff from Caria, packed in a darling little alabaster flask, when news reached the city that joined her to Andreia in a way she had not anticipated.
Under normal circumstances, measures were taken to assure that brothers did not serve in the same units of the Spartan army. They had lately ended up together, though, when soldiers were chosen by lot for a special garrison duty. Now it appeared that the brothers were on an island, and furthermore that their garrison would be there for some time. Damatria turned to Dorcis’ old shipping maps to check the location. Was it a big island like Zacynthus or Leukas? A mere rock like little Prote? She sent her chamberlain back to the agora for more details. He returned an hour later with bad news: the Lacedaemonians were blockaded by a large Athenian fleet, with no supplies or reinforcements getting through. The sound of the island’s name, Sphacteria, suggested to Damatria the course of a blunt knife tearing a throat.
IV
The Terror
1.
The island’s appearance varied with the hours. Late in the afternoon it was a featureless undulation, low- slung and stealthy like a surfacing submarine contoured to evade detection. With the morning light at his back, the observer faced a two-color composition of hardscrabble and scrub green that, even from far across the bay, looked pitted from numberless insults. A string of low pinnacles formed a jagged line off the south end, culminating in a flat-topped butte-Little Sphacteria-that seemed to follow its consort like a lifeboat. Both islands are great concretions of marine detritus, alternately squeezed and lifted, their bodies rent by fissures, dimpled by sinkholes, tortured by the sea.
The land bears scars of its own violent legacy. The western reaches of Messenia were once protected by three thousand foot limestone ramparts, including Sphacteria, more ancient than the gods. The wall was wracked along the fault lines that invested it, until it was finally breached. The soft, near-shore soils were then exposed to the assault of wind and water, resulting in the largest stretch of protected anchorage in Greece.
The surface calm still hides the conflict of titanic forces. The commerce of centuries, including Athenian triremes, Turkish galleys, and modern excursion boats, has plied these waters oblivious to the dramatic, earthquake-riven landscapes beneath. Less than a mile from Sphacteria’s west coast the sea floor plunges to seven hundred feet; a few dozen miles farther out lies an abyss deep enough that if Mount Blanc were dropped inside, its summit would be submerged a depth of one thousand feet.
On this particular day, inside a pointed archway punched through the mass of Little Sphacteria, the rising sun revealed the gleaming ram of a warship. A good pair of eyes might have seen the white tunics of the ship’s senior crew atop the rock, looking north at the prison they’d made for the Lacedaemonians. A few moments later another trireme of the Athenian fleet rounded the island. It was one of two vessels Demosthenes kept in constant orbit around Sphacteria, traveling in opposite directions, day and night, in all weather. The blockade had been underway for a week.
The trireme Terror arrived with Eurymedon’s rescue force from Zacynthus and alternated on blockade duty ever since. Over the eight hours of its watch it had circled the island in a counterclockwise direction, proceeding at a steady pace that brought it around twice. By the end of the last hour the rowers were tired: the blades of their oars no longer cleared the water by much on the backstroke, and the piper was forced to slow the cadence. The men were looking forward to a meal and a rest-though with the Peloponnesians in control of both the island and the mainland coast there was not much land for them to dry their hulls. The only safe spot was Demosthenes’ little stockade on the beach near the Sikia Channel. This had grown over the week into a busy little port, with more than fifty Athenian vessels lining up offshore, waiting their turns for their crews to pull out, eat, and snatch whatever sleep they could in the sand. The prolonged monotony took its toll: there were affirming murmurs all around when Patronices, the eldest of the oarsmen at fifty years old, spat from the starboard outrigger and grumbled, “I say
