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corselet.
    â€œBe careful, my friend,” the marine responded with a mock-theatric gesture, “I have heard about you Greeks!”
    The Egyptian inquired of the Spartans why they wore their hair so long. Olympieus replied, quoting the lawmaker Lykurgus, “Because no other adornment makes a handsome man more comely or an ugly one more terrifying. And it’s free.”
    The marine next began teasing the Spartans about their notoriously short
xiphos
swords. He refused to believe that these were the actual weapons the Lakedaemonians carried into battle. They must be toys. How could such diminutive apple-corers possibly work harm to an enemy?
    â€œThe trick is”—Dienekes demonstrated, pressing himself chest-to-chest to the Egyptian Tommie—“to get nice and cozy.”
    When they parted, the Spartans presented the marines with two skins of Phalerian wine, the finest they had, a gift intended for the Rhodian consulate. The marines gave each Spartan a gold daric (a month’s pay for a Greek oarsman) and a sack apiece of fresh Nile pomegranates.
    The mission returned to Sparta unsuccessful. The Rhodians, as His Majesty knows, are Dorian Hellenes; they speak a dialect similar to the Lakedaemonians and call their gods by the same Doric-derived names. But their island had been since before the first Persian War a protectorate of the Empire. What option other than submission did the Rhodians possess, their nation lying as it does within the very shadow of the masts of the imperial fleet? The Spartan embassy had sought, against all expectation, to detach through ancient bonds of kinship some portion of the Rhodian navy from service to His Majesty. It found no takers.
    Nor had there been, our embassy learned upon its return to the mainland, from simultaneous missions dispatched to Crete, Cos, Chios, Lesbos, Samos, Naxos, Imbros, Samothrace, Thasos, Skyros, Mykonos, Paros, Tenos and Lemnos. Even Delos, birthplace of Apollo himself, had offered tokens of submission to the Persian.
    Phobos.
    This terror could be inhaled in the air of Andros, where we touched upon the voyage home. One felt it like a sweat on the skin at Keos and Hermione, where no harbor inn or beaching ground lacked for ship’s masters and oarsmen with terror-inspiring tales of the scale of mobilization in the East and eyewitness reports of the uncountable myriads of the enemy.
    Phobos.
    This stranger accompanied the embassy as it landed at Thyrea and began the dusty, two-day hump across Parnon to Lakedaemon. Trekking up the eastern massif, the envoys could see landsmen and city folk evacuating their possessions to the mountains. Boys drove asses laden with sacks of corn and barley, protected by the men of the family under arms. Soon the old ones and the children would follow. In the high country, clan groups were burying jars of wine and oil, building sheepfolds and carving crude shelters out of the cliffsides.
    Phobos.
    At the frontier fort of Karyai, our party fell in with an embassy from the Greek city of Plataea, a dozen men including a mounted escort, headed for Sparta. Their ambassador was the hero Arimnestos of Marathon. It was said that this gentleman, though well past fifty, had in that famous victory ten years past waded in full armor into the surf, slashing with his sword at the oars of the Persian triremes as they backed water, fleeing for their lives. The Spartans loved this sort of thing. They insisted on Arimnestos’ party joining ours for supper and accompanying us on the remaining march to the city itself.
    The Plataean shared his intelligence of the enemy. The Persian army, he reported, comprised of two million men drawn from every nation of the Empire, had assembled at the Great King’s capital, Susa, in the previous summer. The force had advanced to Sardis and wintered there. From this site, as the greenest lieutenant could not fail to project, the myriads would proceed north along the coast highways of