Quite a crowd for an old man’s ravings. But this is the best of tales since Troy – with sorrow and joy, men and women, heroes and traitors and men, like Themistocles, who were both. May you never see such times, thugater. The first night, I told you of my youth and how I went to Calchus the priest to be educated as a gentleman, and instead learned to be a spear fighter. Because Calchus was no empty windbag, but a Killer of Men, who had stood his place many times in the storm of bronze. And veterans came from all over Greece to hang their shields for a time at our shrine and talk to Calchus, and he sent them away whole, or better men, at least. Except that the worst of them, the Hero called for, and the priest would kill them on the precinct walls and send their shades shrieking to feed the old Hero, or serve him in Hades. Mind you, friends, Leithos wasn’t some angry old god demanding blood sacrifice, but Plataea’s hero from the Trojan War.
