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far, far to the south and west, and when the storm blew itself out, we were a dismasted hulk riding the rollers, and there was another damaged ship under our lee. We could see she was a Carthaginian. We fell on that ship and took it, although in a strange, three-sided fight – the rowers were rising against the deck crew of Persians.
    It was Artaphernes’ own ship, and he was travelling from Tyre to Carthage to arrange for Carthaginian ships to help the Great King to make war on Athens. And I rescued him – I thought him a corpse.
    So did his wife, my Briseis, who threw herself into my arms.
    Blood dripped from my sword, and I stood with Helen in my arms on a ship I’d just taken by force of arms, and I thought myself the king of the world.
    How the gods must have laughed.
    Last night I told you of our lowest ebb. Because Artaphernes was not dead, and all that followed came from that fact. He was the Great King’s ambassador to the Carthaginians, and our years of guest-friendship – an exchange of lives going back to my youth, if you’ve been listening – required me to take him and my Persian friends, his bodyguards, and Briseis, my Helen reborn, to Carthage, though my enemy Dagon had sworn to my destruction in his mad way, and though by then Carthage had put quite a price on my head.
    Hah! My role in taking part of their tin fleet. I don’t regret it – the foundation of all our fortunes, thugater.
    At any rate, we ran Artaphernes – badly wounded – into Carthage, and escaped with our lives after a brilliant piece of boat handling and the god’s own luck. Possibly Lydia’s finest hour. And I saw Dagon.
    We ran along the coast of Africa and stopped at Sicily, and there I found my old sparring partner and hoplomachos Polymarchos. He was training an athlete for the Olympics and in a moment I made peace with the gods and took Polymarchos and his young man to Olympia, where we – my whole ship’s crew – watched the Olympics, spending the profits of our piracy in a fine style, and making a wicked profit off the wine we brought to sell. There, we played a role in bridging the distance between Athens and Sparta, and there I saw the depth of selfish greed that would cause some men – like Adeimantus of Corinth – to betray Greece and work only for his own ends. I hate his memory – I hope he rots in Hades – but he was scarcely alone, and when Queen Gorgo – here’s to the splendour of her, mind and body – when Queen Gorgo of Sparta called us ‘a conspiracy to save Greece’ she was not speaking poetically. Even the Spartans had their factions and it was at the Olympics that I discovered that Brasidas, my Spartan officer, was some sort of exiled criminal – or just possibly, a man who’d been betrayed by his country, and not the other way around.
    With only a little jiggling of the wheel of fate, we made sure Sparta won the chariot race and we left the Olympics richer by some drachmas and wiser by as much, as we’d had nights and nights to thrash out plans for the defence of Greece.
    So it was all the more daunting when King Leonidas and Queen Gorgo of Sparta asked me to take their ambassadors to the Great King, the king of Persia. That’s another complex tale; the old Spartan king had killed the Persian heralds, an act of gross impiety, and Leonidas sought to rid Sparta of that impiety. So he sent two messengers to far-off Persepolis, two hereditary heralds.
    And me.
    Well, and Aristides the Just of Athens, who was ostracised – exiled – for being too fair, too rigid, too much of a prig …
    I laugh. He was probably my closest friend – my mentor. A brilliant soldier – his finest hour will come soon – and a brilliant speaker, a man who was so incorruptible that ordinary men sometimes found him easy to hate. An aristocrat of the kind that makes men like me think there might be something to the notion of birth; a true hero.
    We went to the Great King by way of Tarsus, where I was mauled by a