‘I will secure the silver for you,’ Themistocles said. ‘I can take that burden, at least, while you are in grief. I will have it taken to the council building in the Agora …’

‘Where my father was held, in a cell. Where he died,’ Cimon snapped.

Themistocles bowed his head as if in prayer.

‘Yes. Though he did not weep or complain. He went like a man before his gods, Cimon. If you will permit it, may I speak at the funeral, to honour your father?’

The young man embraced him. Themistocles waited until the sobs subsided, the noise hidden in his robe.

‘Your father was a great Athenian,’ Themistocles said. ‘He would want to see you grown to thirty, with a wife and children of your own. Don’t make me bring you to trial. Do you understand? The laws bind us all. Your fate is your own.’

Cimon stood back, his eyes inflamed. Themistocles handed him a cloth and he rubbed his entire face with it, dabbing at sweat and tears. Cimon nodded to him and Themistocles patted him on the shoulder before going out.

The priest of Hades had begun a murmured conversation with his female counterpart. They stood stiffly in the presence of one of the names of Athens.

‘Themistocles,’ the priest of Hades said in greeting, bowing his head.

‘Father,’ Themistocles replied. He wondered how much they had heard.

Behind the representatives of the temples, Cimon’s mother waited. Themistocles saw a rather dowdy, middle-aged woman with not much waist. He saw she wore a black dress with a gold necklace that could have adorned the throat of a queen. The family wore its wealth openly. Themistocles wondered what part of it had come from Persian coffers.

‘Kuria,’ he said, bowing and giving her honour in her own home. ‘Your son asked me to secure the talents for the city treasury. I would like to make an accounting of every coin and arrange guards to have it all transported back.’

She waved a hand in the midst of her weeping, a cloth clutched to her face. There were no restrictions of dignity on the grieving of women. In fact, she had been unusually quiet, waiting for her son. Themistocles could not judge whether that meant true grief or something feigned.

‘Take it,’ she said, when he continued to wait for permission.

Such a sum could not be treated lightly, he knew. He really would need guards, perhaps a hundred hoplites in full armour. If he somehow lost fifty talents, he’d find the Assembly voting on his exile or death the following day, that was a certainty.

‘Thank you,’ he said. Athens needed every coin, after all. They had a fleet to build, a fleet that would crush the Persian ships when they came again.

He bowed to Cimon’s mother and backed from the room, following a slave to a cloister stacked with wooden crates near the front gate. House guards stood watch, stepping forward with spears levelled until his right to stand there had been confirmed.