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Updated: June 8, 2025
With a piping breeze she could mock pursuit. In a calm she was fearfully handicapped. However, for a moment Hasdrubal congratulated himself he could slip away unnoticed. The distance was very great. Then his dark lips cursed. “Moloch consume me! If I see aright, we are chased.” Two vessels, in fact, seemed turning away from the rest. They were heading straight after the Bozra.
Three years ago the Parthians rode across the road from Bozra to Damascus, and fell upon a caravan laden, among other things, with the incoming tax-returns of a district over that way. They slew every creature taken, which the censors in Rome could have forgiven if the imperial treasure had been spared and forwarded.
So the Carthaginians ceased from troubling, but before the penteconter and the Bozra bore away to join the remaining fleet, another deed was done in sight of all three ships. For whilst Themistocles was with Cimon, Simonides and Sicinnus had taken Glaucon to the Nausicaä’s forecastle.
Glaucon could tell of many things he had heard and thought, of the conversation overheard the morning before Salamis, of what Phormio had related during the weary captivity in the hold of the Bozra. Themistocles pondered long. Yet for Glaucon when standing even on that calm pinnacle the trireme must creep over the deep too slowly.
For a moment the three captives stood blinking at the unfamiliar light, unconscious of the situation and their extremity, whilst Hasdrubal for the fortieth time measured the distance. The wind had strengthened a little. Let it strengthen a trifle more and the Bozra would hold her own.
He could not turn back. At the gray of morning with a few servants he quitted Trœzene, and hastened to join Aristeides and Pausanias in Bœotia. In the hold of the Bozra, where Hasdrubal had stowed his unwilling passengers, there crept just enough sunlight to make darkness visible.
In the morning some of the neighbours indeed wondered at Phormio’s closed door and the silence of the jangling voice of Lampaxo; but the fishmonger was after all an exile, and might have returned suddenly to Attica, now the Persians had retreated again to Bœotia, and before these surmises could change to misdoubting, the Bozra was bearing forth into the Ægean.
Then behind the Bozra sounded the rushing of foam around a ram, the bumping of fifty oars plying on the thole-pins. Into their sight shot the penteconter, the brass glistening on her prow, the white blades leaping in rhythm. Marines in armour stood on the forecastle. A few arrows pattered on the plankings of the Bozra. Her abject crew obeyed the demand to surrender.
Off Belbina the wind deserted them altogether, and Hasdrubal had been compelled to force his craft along by sweeps,—ponderous oars, worked by three men,—but his progress at best was slow. Off Cythnos the breeze had again arisen, but it was the Eurus from the southeast, worse than useless; the Bozra had been obliged to ride at anchor off the island for two days.
Why did those feet—so swift, so ready when he sped from Oropus—lift so heavily? As a flash it came over him what he had endured,—the slow agony on the Bozra, the bursting of the bands, the fight for life, the scene with Themistocles, the sleepless night on the trireme. Now he was running as the wild hare runs before the baying chase. Could it be that all this race was vain? “For Hellas!
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