Some slaves would always be caught in the red ropes. Neither they, nor women and children, nor the foreign metics had the right to vote, and so they were released, like smaller fish back into the ocean. Only voting males over eighteen remained. There were perhaps thirty thousand of those in Athens – three times the number that had stood at Marathon. From the ten tribes of the city, the Assembly appointed a council, with officials and magistrates – and the epistates, chairman for the day, chosen by lot. It was said that any man over the age of thirty could rule Athens for a day, if he truly wanted. In constant flux, the system was designed to make a tyrant impossible. Depending on his mood and the quality of arguments, Xanthippus both detested and loved it, for all its chaos and its earnestness.

A ram was sacrificed by the speaker’s stone, then carried, head down, by two sweating priests around the boundary, so that its blood trail marked a solemn line. Those within would make the laws that ruled them. Those without would obey those laws. They might allow no individual tyrants, but the judgments of the Assembly were cut into stone and displayed in the Agora. There, anyone could read them, metic, woman or slave, if they had knowledge of letters or a coin to have them read aloud.

‘Who is epistates today?’ Xanthippus murmured to his friend.

They both eyed the man climbing the steps to the speaker’s stone. The title was the one they both knew from the phalanx – ‘He who stands behind’. On the Pnyx, it was meant as a reminder that whoever led the city was also a servant of the people. This one was a stranger to them both and Epikleos shrugged.

‘Pandionis tribe have the chair this month. I don’t know them well. Leontis are due next, so I imagine we’ll see Themistocles busy as a bee then. I see he is on the stone today. No surprise after this news. Aristides too.’

‘There’ll be a clash, then. Those two cannot agree on the days of the week.’

The man on the speaker’s stone beamed out at the packed thousands of his people, gathered to hear the business of the day. Xanthippus raised his eyes for a moment.

‘I wonder sometimes if there isn’t a better way than this,’ he said out of the side of his mouth.

Epikleos turned to him, smiling sardonically. It was a conversation they’d had before – one that all men of Athens had when they were in their cups.

‘We’ve tried tyrants,’ Epikleos said. ‘Whenever a man of our class complains about the new rules, he always seems to imagine himself as the font of new laws. “Oh, the things I would do!” he says. It doesn’t work, Xan. Bad tyrants always follow good ones. That much power over other men … it does not bring out the best in us. A lad can hardly sit on a throne without demanding a dozen young wives in his personal harem! Why should we endure another tyrant, no matter how well-meaning? The people would revolt against it now. I tell you, Xan. We sent the last one into exile and we could just as easily have killed him. Hippias was a man out of time, without even the sense to know it.’