I now knelt within this man's power, pleading for mercy. I told him of his comrade Xeones' survival following the battle at Thermopylae, his resuscitation by the Royal Surgeon's staff and his dictation of the document by which I, its transcriber, had acquired knowledge of those names of the Spartans which I had, seeking pity, cried out.

By now a dozen other Spartiate warriors had clustered, encircling my kneeling form. As one, the} scorned the document un-seen and denounced me for a liar.

What fiction of Persian heroism is this you have concocted of your own fancy, scribe? one among them demanded. Some carpet of lies woven to flatter your King?

Others declared that they knew well the man Xeones, squire of Dienekes. How dare I cite his name, and that of his noble master, in craven endeavor to save my own skin?

Throughout this, the man Dekton called Rooster held silent. When the others' fury had at last spent itself, he put to me one question only, with Spartan brevity: where had the man Xeones last been seen?

His body dispatched with honor by the Persian captain Orontes to that temple of Athens called by the Hellenes Persephone of the Veil.

At this the Spartan Dekton elevated his hand in clemency This stranger speaks true. His comrade Xeones' ashes, he confirmed, had been restored to Sparta, delivered months prior to this dart's battle by a priestess of that very temple, Hearing this, all strength fled my knees. I sank upon the earth, overcome by the apprehension of my own and our army's annihilation and by the irony of discovering myself now before the Spartans in that selfsame posture which the man Xeones had been compelled to assume before the warriors of Asia, that of the vanquished and the enslaved.

The general Mardonius had perished in the battle at Plataea, and the captain Orontes as well.

Yet now the Spartans believed me, my life was spared.

I was held at Plataea in the custody of the Hellenic allies, treated with consideration and courtesy, for most of the following month, then assigned as a captive interpreter to the staff of the Allied Congress.

This document, in the end, preserved my life.

An aside, as to the battle. His Majesty may recall the name Aristodemos, the Spartan officer mentioned on several occasions by the man Xeones as an envoy and, later, as among the Three Hundred at the Hot Gates. This man alone among the Peers survived, having been evacuated due to field blindness prior to the final morning.

Upon this Aristodemos' return alive to Sparta, he was forced to endure at the hands of the citizenry such scorn as a coward or tresante, trembler, that, now at Plataea, discovering the opportunity to redeem himself, he displayed such spectacular heroism, excelling all upon the field, as to eradicate forever his former disgrace.

The Spartans, however, spurned Aristodemos for their prize of valor, awarding this to three other warriors, Posidonius, Philokyon and Amompharetus. The commanders adjudged Aristodemos' heroics reckless and unsound, striving in blood madness alone in front of the line, clearly seeking death before his comrades' eyes to expiate the infamy of his survived at Thermopylae. The valor of Posidonius, Philokyon and Amompharetus they reckoned superior, being that of men who wish to live yet still fight magnificently.

To return to my own lot. I was detained at Athens for two summers, serving in such capacities as translator and scribe as permitted me to witness firsthand the extraordinary and unprece-dented transformation there taking place.

The ruined city rose again. With astonishing celerity the wails and port were rebuilt, the buildings of assembly and commerce, the courts and magistracies, the houses and shops and markets and factories. A second conflagration now consumed all Hellas, in particular the city of Athena, and this was the blaze of boldness and self-assurance. The hand of heaven, it seemed, had set itself in benediction upon each man's shoulder, banishing all timorous-ness and irresolution. Overnight the Greeks had seized the stage of destiny. They had defeated the mightiest army and navy in History. What lesser undertaking could now daunt them? What enterprise could they not dare.

The Athenian fleet drove His Majesty's warships back to Asia, clearing the Aegean. Trade boomed. The treasure and commerce of the world flooded into Athens.

Yet massive as was this economic recrudescence, it paled alongside the effects of victory upon the individuals, the commons of the populace themselves. A dynamism of optimism and enterprise fired each man with belief in himself and his gods. Each citizen-warrior who had endured trial of arms in the phalanx, or pulled an oar under fire on the sea now deemed himself deserving of full inclusion in all affairs and discourse of the city.

That peculiar Hellenic form of government called democra-tia, rule of the people, hod plunged its roots deep, nurtured by the blood of war; now with victory the shoot burst forth into full flower. In the Assembly and the courts, the marketplace and the magistracies, the commons thrust themselves forward with vigor and confidence.

To the Greeks, victory was proof of the might and majesty of their gods. These deities, which to our more civilised understanding appear vain and passion-possessed, riddled with folly and so prey to humanlike faults and foibles as to be unworthy of being called divine, to the Greeks embodied and personified their belief in that which was, if grander tnan human in scale, yet human in spirit and essence. The Greeks' sculpture and athletics celebrated the human form, their literature and music human passion, their discourse and philosophy human reason.

In the flush of triumph the arts exploded. No man's home, however humble, reascended from the ashes without some crowning mural, statue or memorial in thanksgiving to the gods and to the valor of their own arms. Theater and the chorus throve. The tragedies of Aeschylus and Phrynichus drew hordes to the precincts of the theatron, where noble and common, citizen and foreigner, took their stations, attending in rapt and often transported awe to works whose stature, the Greeks professed, would endure forever.

In the fall of my second year of captivity I was repatriated upon receipt of His Majesty's ransom, along with a number of other officers of the Empire, and returned to Asia.

Restored to His Majesty's service, I reassumed my responsibilities recording the affairs of the Empire. Chance, or perhaps the hand of God Ahura Mazda, found me toward the close of the following summer in the port city of Sidon, there assigned to assist in the interrogation of a ship's master of Aegina, a Greek whose galley had been driven by storm to Egypt and there been captured by Phoenician warships of His Majesty's fleet. Examining this officer's logs, I came upon an entry indicating a sea passage, the summer previous, from EpidaurusLimera, a port of Lakedaemon, to Thermopylae.

At my urging, His Majesty's officers pressed their interrogation upon this point. The Aeginetan captain declared that his vessel had been among those employed to convey a parry of Spartan officers and envoys to the dedication of a monument to the memory of the Three Hundred.

Also on board, the captain stated, was a party of Spartan women, the wives and relations of a number of the fallen.

No commerce was permitted, the captain reported, between himself and his officers and these gentlewomen. I questioned the man strenuously, but could determine neither by evidence nor by surmise if among these were included the ladies Arete and Paraleia, or the wives of any of the warriors mentioned in the papers of the man Xeones.

His vessel beached at the mouth of the Spercheios, the captain stated, at the eastern terminus of the very plain where His Majesty's army had encamped during the assault upon the Hot Gates.