Agariste saw the man’s wife and children were calling his name, desperate for him to sit down and stop haranguing the crowd. Agariste actually saw the moment he made his decision. She recognised the same mulish expression from dealing with her own husband, the slight dip of the chin that meant he would meet the world with his head down and his shoulders squared. She wanted to call out in warning, but he was not her man.

‘Persia offered us peace !’ he shouted.

The noise of the crowd fell away at that. His words were no more than they had murmured a thousand times themselves over the previous weeks. Yet it was one thing to whisper it to a wife in the privacy of a marriage bed; another to shout it while a Persian army still burned the city they loved. They were made quiet by his daring, or his madness.

‘If we had accepted, would they be setting fires once more? No. I would be in my city, working for my living, with my children safe. Not here, in the bitter wind, without even food or water to fill our bellies, without a fire or a forge to keep us warm. Well, I voted to accept peace, because it doesn’t much matter to me who sits in splendour and wears gold. All I ever asked is that they stay out of my way. I don’t care if they are Persian, or Athenian! If our Assembly, our council, can’t protect us, what good are they? If we have no walls, why should I rebuild my house again from rubble?’

To Agariste’s shock, there was a noise of approval in the crowd around him. She looked at the stern faces of her two hoplites, her eldest son. They were watching as well, she realised. They all were. She swallowed nervously, hugging her daughter Eleni close. She did not know if she could ask the hoplites to intervene, to silence the man. Were there any rules at all, while a city burned a second time? Women knew war very differently to men. Soldiers and their sons imagined only victories, or glorious deaths on the battlefield. No one ever dreamed of running in terror, or being left a cripple. It was always women who had to make do in the aftermath, who had to make an accommodation and accept new men in their homes and beds.

Since the first invasion, Agariste had seen miserable young wives selling themselves, waiting on the streets for customers as the sun set. Their husbands had all been drowned, so they bartered all they had left that was of value. She bit her lip and waited, though rain dripped on her shoulder and she shivered in the cold.

‘I propose an offer, made by the people of Athens,’ the blacksmith went on. ‘A delegation to go to the general of the Persian forces and say, “We, the Athenians, accept your offer of peace.”’