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chased them off at first, rushing indignantly at the blandly feeding scavengers, who would retreat as far only as necessity dictated, then hop back to the banquet when the coast was clear. Piety demanded that we bury our fallen countrymen, but fear of enemy cavalry pushed us on. Sometimes bodies would be dragged into a ditch and a few pitiful handfuls of dirt cast over them, accompanied by a miserable prayer. The crows got so fat they could barely fly a foot off the ground.
    We did not go into the city, Diomache and I.
    We had been betrayed from within, she instructed me, speaking slowly as one would to a simpleton, to make sure I understood. Sold out by our own citizens, some faction seeking power, then they themselves had been double-crossed by the Argives. Astakos was a port, a poor one, but a western harbor nonetheless, which Argos had long coveted. Now she had it.
    We found Bruxieus on the morn of the second day. His slave brand had saved him. That, and his blindness, which the conquerors mocked even as he cursed and swung at them with his staff. “You’re free, old man!” Free to starve or beg from his belly’s necessity for the victor’s yoke.
    The rain came that evening. This, too, seems a constant coda to slaughter. What had been ash was now gray mud, and the stripped bodies which had not been reclaimed by sons and mothers now glistened a ghastly white, cleansed by the gods in their remorseless way.
    Our city no longer existed. Not alone the physical site, the citizens, the walls and farms. But the very spirit of our nation, the
polis
itself, that ideal of mind called Astakos that, yes, had been smaller than a
deme
of Athens or Corinth or Thebes, that, yes, had been poorer than Megara or Epidauros or Olympia, but that existed as a city nonetheless. Our city, my city. Now it was effaced utterly. We who called ourselves Astakiots were effaced with it. Without a city, who were we? What were we?
    A dislocation of the faculties seemed to unman all. No one could think. A numb shock possessed our hearts. Life had become like a play, a tragedy one had seen enacted on the stage—the fall of Ilium, the sack of Thebes. Only now it was real, performed by actors of flesh and blood, and those actors were ourselves.
    East of the Field of Ares, where the fallen in battle were buried, we came upon a man digging a grave for an infant. The baby, wrapped in the man’s cloak, lay like a grocer’s bundle at the edge of the pit. He asked me to hand it down to him. He was afraid the wolves would get it, he said, that’s why he had dug the hole so deep. He didn’t know the child’s name. A woman had handed it to him during the flight from the city. He had carried the babe for two days; on the third morning it died. Bruxieus wouldn’t let me hand the little body down; it was bad luck, he said, for a living young spirit to handle a dead one. He did it himself. We recognized the man now. He was a
mathematikos,
a tutor of arithmetic and geometry, from the city. His wife and daughter emerged from the woods; we realized they had been hiding till they knew we brought no harm. They had all lost their minds. Bruxieus had instructed Diomache and me in the signs. Madness was contagious, we must not linger.
    â€œWe needed Spartans,” the teacher declared, speaking softly behind his sad watery eyes. “Just fifty would have saved the city.”
    Bruxieus was nudging us to go.
    â€œSee how numb we are?” the man continued. “We glide about in a daze, disconnected from our reason. You’ll never see Spartans in such a state. This”—he gestured to the blackened landscape—“is their element. They move through these horrors with clear eyes and unshaken limbs. And they hate the Argives. They are their bitterest enemies.”
    Bruxieus pulled us away.
    â€œFifty of them!” the man still shouted, while his wife struggled to tug him back to the safety of the trees.