He began preparing the argument on a Monday morning.
Not writing a letter — Sarpedon was still in Troy, the final clause of the passage terms document still requiring resolution before he could depart. There was no need for correspondence. What Lysander needed was clarity before he sat across from a man who had received a real offer and had trusted him enough to report it before reporting it to his king.
He wrote the argument out anyway.
Not to send — to find the form. He had learned that writing something forced a precision that thinking alone did not. You could hold a vague argument in your head for hours and believe it was clear. The moment you wrote it down you saw every place where it assumed something it had not established.
