Having that flesh out there to be pawed showed her why women commonly covered it. Exposing her legs to the eyes of men felt shockingly immodest. She almost smashed him in the face with her shield. “We have ourselves such a fine and lovely goddess here.” He patted Phye on a bared thigh, between the top of her greave and the bottom of the linen tunic she wore under the corselet. “Of course it will.” Peisistratos was all but capering with glee.
#Hoplite shield torch driver
“It’s going to work,” the driver said without looking over his shoulder. “Isn’t that something?” She raised her voice as the chariot clattered by: “Hurrah for Peisistratos! Good old Peisistratos!” “Why, maybe it is.” The woman tossed her head to show she thought he was right. “It is Athena, just as those fellows who went by the other day said it would be.” “There! You see?” the man said, pointing at Phye. The gods ordain that he should rule once more in Athens!”
“The gods love Peisistratos!” she cried in a loud voice. She couldn’t feel it, either, but she heard his nails rasp on the corselet. A river of sweat was pouring down her face. Phye envied them their cool, simple mantles and cloaks. Her neck ached.Ī couple of people-a man with a graying beard and a younger woman who might have been his daughter or his wife-stood by the side of the track, staring at the oncoming chariot. And of course she stared straight ahead the cheekpieces and noseguard on the helmet gave her no other choice. One of her greaves had rubbed a raw spot on the side of her leg. The shield she carried might have been made of lead, not wood and bronze. Mashed against hard, unyielding metal, her breasts ached worse than they did just before her courses started. That corselet would have been small for a man her size. The bell corselet they’d put on Phye gleamed they’d polished the bronze till you could use it for a mirror. They knew what it was like.īut they didn’t know everything there was to know. They’d really fought in hoplite’s panoply, not just worn it on what was essentially a parade.
Peisistratos and the driver both laughed. She stared straight ahead, chin held high. She struck the pose in which he’d coached her: back straight so she looked even taller than she was (the Corinthian helmet she wore, with the red-dyed horsehair plume nodding above it, added to the effect), right arm out straight with the spear grounded on the floorboards of the chariot (like an old man’s stick, it helped her keep her balance, but not enough), shield held in tight against her breast (that took some of the weight off her poor arm-but, again, not enough). “It will be all right, dear,” he said, grinning at her like a clever monkey. She was almost big enough to make two of the tyrannos, but he was agile and she wasn’t. Peisistratos, who rode in the car with her, steadied her so she didn’t fall. Before they’d given it to her, they’d painted Athena’s owl over whatever design it had borne before.Īnother rock, another jolt. The shield still had the olive-oil smell of fresh paint. She couldn’t grab for the rail of the car, not with a hoplite’s spear in one hand and a heavy round shield on the other arm. Even so, the chariot jounced and pitched and swayed as it rattled down the rutted dirt track from the country village of Paiania to Athens.Įvery time a wheel jolted over a rock, Phye feared she’d be pitched out on her head. The driver held the horses to a trot hardly faster than a walk.
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