Wunderry Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad free right now.

Join Wunderry Plus in the Wundery app or on Apple Podcasts. The waves lapped up onto the beach. Their motion was gentle and continuous, the sound barely audible.

It was an idyllic spot.

The low hills on the opposite shore were visible through thin haze less than a mile distance,

and the waters of the narrow straits were a deep polished blue.

Bright sunlight flickered on the surface of the sea and shone on the rough sand of the narrow

beach.

It was people that made this place on the Hellas Pond, the narrow stretch of water separating Europe and Asia a living hell.

Those gentle waves carried a terrible cargo up onto the shore. Broken oars, bundles of cordage, round shields, spear shafts and javelins, the detritus

of two fleets grasping and clawing at one another in the shallow waters of the straits.

The waves stirred the corpses already lining the beach gaping wounds visible the flesh a pale and unnatural white

One his torso pierced by a spear thrust had been a soldier for decades fighting for Athens since his youth.

In the days before his final battle, he had thought back to the beginning of this long and

a cursed war 26 years before when he had marched into the territory of Megara under the command of the great

paracles, now long in the grave. Another, barely out of adolescence, hadn't been alive

at the beginning of the war. Until recently he had been a slave working at a

roasting hot industrial kiln. He had been offered his freedom and citizenship and

return for serving as a rower in the Athenian fleet. Thanks to the water that drowned him, those privileges were gone now.

That one over there, his arms still wrapped around to shattered timber, had been a skilled

flute player with hopes of marrying the daughter of a tavern keeper who lived near the Athenian

Agora. On and on the stories went, one attached to each body that washed up on the shore.

They were the people of Athens and its few remaining allies, sailors from Samos and dock workers from Lesbos and hoplites from Argos.

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