Gates of Fire

The narrative returns to Xeones’s perspective. He now describes the muster of the Three Hundred, and the custom of the Spartans to spend the week before a campaign with their families.

During this rest week, Arete pulls Xeones aside and gives him the supplies he will need to tend to Dienekes during the campaign. Arete also gives Xeones a large sum of Athenian currency and asks him if he has seen Diomache. Xeones demurs, pointing out that both he and his cousin are married. Arete replies that he “would not be the first husband bound by love to someone other than his wife. Nor she the first wife” (287).

She then tells him how she had first been married to Iatrokles, Dienekes’s brother, but fell in love with Dienekes the first time she saw him. She wept when she was betrothed to Iatrokles but was filled with shame when her husband died in battle, worrying that the gods had picked him to die.

Following Iatrokles’s death and the appropriate mourning period, Arete and Dienekes married, but they both suspect that their lack of sons is the gods’ punishment.