Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Our father for years said with pride that parents live on in their children and that the dead man rises in his offspring. He said, whenever he watched Anacreon on the parade ground, that he was like the gods' medicine, applied with kind intention. He called him the pillar for our roof. Our mother always chided us to remember that we were rich; that heaven's grace had been poured over us.

We drained and washed his wound and packed it with the prescribed herbs. A surgeon bled him. We waited, sitting about as a family through long evenings like the crew of a galley in an onshore wind, sullen and becalmed.

But with him the gods' verdict was suffering followed by death. As if our natural condition were a world without mercy. Our hope dwindled for seven days and then was gone. We were left with our father on his knees and the greasy reek of our brother's infected clothing on a courtyard pyre. Our mother became like Queen Procne, who lost her son and then, transformed into a nightingale, forever sang his name. She went about laureled with misery.

Kynegeiros too went about like a blind man. But my feelings were like chalk drawings, and if my father had known he would have flogged me raw. I cut my hair to crown my brother's tomb. I helped pour the offering. But how could I make my prayers? What words could I pour into his absence? And from which brother did I want forgiveness?

My surviving brother seemed to know. He looked at me as if he understood that in my case, conceit and vanity would never abate. As if he could see now that I was Catastrophe, hand-reared at home.

Why did our family act like this? I asked my brother in frustration almost a year ago. Our parents had still not recovered. By then I understood the old saying that grief is a cold hearth.

Others had lives much more filled with grief. Families that had blow after blow rained upon their reeling heads. What was different about ours?

The question has always been an unwise one to ask.

Each night on this plain in front of the invader, sharing with me a sleeping palette damp and cold with dew, my brother lies awake despite his exhaustion, still grieving for our brother and still refusing me forgiveness for having been spared.

Poison sweet waters once and they're poisoned for good. I don't ask him for his thoughts. Calamity is my school, and in it I've learned when to speak and when to keep silent.

By the third watch, it feels as though I'm the only one awake. My cloak, when it covers my feet, doesn't cover my shoulders. Under the wood smoke I can smell marjoram and pine resin. In the distance there's some quiet sentry-stirring in the dark.

When I lie awake on my mat, I compose. I sing about discipline and a good heart, which is not the same as having had either. Though I made my debut at the city Dionysia festival at the age of twenty-two, I did not win the prize until fifteen years later.

Our family belongs to the eupatridae, heir of an aristocratic lineage extending back to the origins of Attica. My brother and I are old enough to remember the tyranny of Hippias and to have voted on Kleisthenes's democratic reforms. We're considered men of some moment, having had a foot in both worlds. My neighbors admire me for what they've seen during the festivals, and they admire my brother for what they know of his spirit. My children hold him up as their model for fiercely applied self-discipline. He doesn't disappoint them. This evening for his supper while I cooked he contented himself with the kind of hard flax seed loaf that's fit mostly for winter boot insulation.

“They'll fight tomorrow,” he says from out of the darkness beside me. When I ask him why, he reminds me that the Spartans will arrive the following day.

My brother is always right. Over the morning breakfast fires, we watch the invader's muster. Kynegeiros goes about the business of preparing without acknowledging what's before him. It's a mesmerizing sight and it fills the plain from the mountain to the sea. There doesn't seem to be enough earth to hold all of the activity. Dust kicked up floats slantwise across their ranks in the rear. Their line as it forms looks to have a frontage of about fifteen hundred men. The formations are at least ten to fifteen men deep. The Persians themselves, flanked by the Sakai, form the center. And this is without yet any sign of their cavalry.

Kynegeiros is still refusing to look, like a boy trying to impress me. Finally, we're sixteen together.