Callias: A Tale of the Fall of Athens

by Alfred John Church

  CHAPTER XXIV.

  A THANKSGIVING.

  The worst severity of the winter was over when the army reachedTrapezus. The days were longer, for it was already half way between thewinter solstice and the spring equinox, and though the nights were stillbitterly cold, the sun was daily gaining power. Sometimes a breeze fromthe west gave to the air quite a feeling of spring. Still Callias wasvery thankful to find quarters in the city. He discovered but scarcelywith surprise, that as soon as he returned within the circle of Greekinfluence, the credentials furnished him by Hippocles made life muchsmoother for him. Trapezus was the very farthest outpost ofcivilization; it was at least nine hundred miles from Athens, yet thename of Hippocles seemed as well known and his credit as good as if ithad been the Piraeus itself. As soon as permission could be obtained toenter the town--for the people of Trapezus, though kind and evengenerous to the new arrivals, kept their gates jealously shut--Calliasmade his way to the house of a citizen who was, he was told, theprincipal merchant in the place. Nothing could have been warmer than thewelcome which he received, when he produced the slip of parchment towhich Hippocles had affixed his seal and signature.

  "All I have is at your disposal," cried Demochares; this was the name ofthe Trapezuntine merchant. "I cannot do too much for any friend ofHippocles. You will, of course, take up your quarters with me; and anyadvance that you may want,--unless," he added with a smile, "you havelearnt extravagance among the Persians, for we are not very rich here inTrapezus--any advance within reason you have only to ask for."

  The young Athenian ventured to borrow fifty gold pieces, astonishing hisnew friend by the moderation of his demand. He knew that some of hiscomrades, mercenaries who had not received an _obolus_ of pay forseveral months, must be very badly off, and he was glad to make a slightreturn for many little services that he had received, and acts ofkindness and good fellowship that had been done for him on the march. Asfor hospitality, he begged to be allowed to postpone his answer till hecould consult his general.

  "I don't like to leave you, sir," he said when he broached the subjectto Xenophon after their evening meal. "Why should I have the comforts ofa house, lie soft, and feed well, while you are sleeping on the ground,and getting or not getting a meal, as good luck or bad luck will haveit?"

  "My dear fellow," replied Xenophon, "there is no reason why you shouldnot take the good the gods provide you. You are not one of us; you neverhave been. You came as a volunteer, and a volunteer you have remained.You are perfectly free to do as you please. Besides, if you wantanything more to satisfy you, you are attached to my command, and Iformally give you leave."

  Callias, accordingly, took up his quarters in the merchant's house.Never was guest more handsomely treated. Demochares and his family werenever wearied of his adventures, a story which has indeed interested theworld ever since, and which to these Greeks of Trapezus had a meaningwhich it had lost for us. Living as they did on the farthest boundariesof the Greater Greece, the Greece of the colonies, they were keenlyalive to all that could be known about the barbarian world with whichthey were brought in constant contact. The young Athenian, indeed, helda sort of levee which was thronged day after day with visitors young andold. All that he had to tell them about the Great King, on whosedominions they were in some sort trespassers, and about the unknowntribes who dwelt between the sea and the Persian capital, was eagerlylistened to. Pleasant as his sojourn was to himself, it was not withoutsome advantage to his old comrades. His host was an important person inTrapezus, holding indeed the chief magistracy for the year, and he hadmuch to do with the liberal present of oxen, corn, and wine which thetown voted to the army.

  A month passed in a sufficiently pleasant way. Meanwhile the army waspreparing to offer a solemn thanksgiving for the safe completion of themost perilous part of its journey. The vows made at the moment of itsgreatest danger were now to be paid, and paid, after the usual Greekfashion, in a way that would combine religion and festivity. There wasto be a sacrifice; the sacrifice was to be followed by a feast, and thefeast again by a celebration which was, of course, in a great measure anentertainment, but was also, in a way, a function of worship. Wrestlers,boxers, and runners not only amused the spectators and contended forglory and prizes, but were also supposed in some way to be doing honorto the gods.

  The sacrifice and the feast it is not necessary to describe. Necessarilythere was nothing very splendid or costly about them. The purses of thesoldiers were empty, though they had a good deal of property, chiefly inthe way of prisoners whom they had captured on the way, and whom theywould sell in the slave markets as the opportunity might come. Trapezus,however, and the friendly Colchian tribes in the neighborhood furnisheda fair supply of sheep and oxen to serve as victims, and a sufficientquantity of bread, wine, dried fruit and olive oil, this last being aluxury which the Greeks had greatly missed during their march, and whichthey highly appreciated. A few of the officers, the pious Xenophon amongthem, went to the expense of gilding the horns of the beasts which weretheir special offerings; but for the most part the arrangements were ofa plain and frugal kind.

  The games had at least the merit of affording a vast amount ofentertainment to a huge multitude of spectators. They were celebrated,it may be easily understood, under considerable difficulties, forTrapezus did not possess any regular race course, and the only rings forwrestling and boxing were within the walls, and therefore not availableon this occasion. By common consent the management of the affair washanded over to a certain Dracontius. He was a Spartan, and to theSpartans, who had been undisputed lords of Greece since the fall ofAthens, had been conceded a certain right of precedence on all suchoccasions as these. Dracontius, too, was a man of superior rank to hiscomrades. He belonged to one of the two royal houses of Sparta, but hadbeen banished from his country in consequence of an unlucky accident. Inone of the rough sports which the Spartan lads were accustomed topractice, sports which were commonly a more or less close mimicry ofwar, a blow of his dagger, dealt without evil intention but with acriminal carelessness, had been fatal to a companion. Hence, fromboyhood, he had been an exile; cut off from the more honorable career towhich he might have looked forward in the service of his country, he hadbeen content to enlist as a mercenary.

  Dracontius, accordingly, was made president of the games. The skins ofthe sacrificed animals were presented to him, as his fee, and he wasasked to lead the way to the racecourse where the contests were to beheld.

  "Race course!" cried the Spartan, with the _brusquerie_ which it was thefashion of his country to use, "Race course! What more do you want thanwhat we have here?"

  A murmur of astonishment ran through the army. Indeed there could havebeen nothing less like a race course than the ground on which they werestanding. It was the slope of a hill, a slope that sometimes becamealmost precipitous. Most of it was covered with brushwood and heather.Grass there was none, except here and there where it covered with atreacherously smooth surface some dangerous quagmire. Here and there,the limestone rock cropped up with jagged points.

  "But where shall we wrestle?" asked Timagenes, an Arcadian athlete, whohad won the prize for wrestling two or three years before at theLithurian games, and who naturally considered himself as an authorityon the subject.

  "Here of course," was the president's reply.

  "But how can a man wrestle on ground so hard and so rough?" asked theArcadian, who had no idea of practising his art except in a regularring.

  "Well enough," said Dracontius, "but those who are thrown will get worseknocks."

  The wrestler's face fell and he walked off amid a general laugh. Hiscomrades fancied, not without reason, that he was a great deal toocareful of his person.

  But if the ground, broken with rocks and overgrown with wood was notsuited to scientific wrestling, it certainly helped to make some of theother sports more than usually amusing. The first contest was a milerace for boys. Most of the competitors were lads who had been takenprisoners on the march, but a few Colchians ente
red for the prize, asdid also two or three boys of Trapezus, who had the reputation of beingparticularly fleet of foot. But the natives of the plain, still more theinhabitants of the town, found themselves entirely outpaced on thisnovel race course by the young mountaineers. A Carduchian came in first,and was presented with his liberty, his master being compensated out ofthe prize fund which had been subscribed by the army. As soon as heunderstood that he was free, he set out at full speed in the directionof his home. A true mountaineer, he sickened for his native hills, andin the hope of seeing them again was ready to brave alone the perilswhich an army had scarcely survived.

  A foot race for men followed, but the distance to be traversed was,according to the common custom of the great games, only two hundredyards. There were as many as sixty competitors; but curiously enough,they were to a man Cretans. Another foot race, this time for men inheavy armor, was next run. The president had a Spartan's admiration forall exercises that had a real bearing on military training, and the raceof the heavy armed was unquestionably one of these. It was won by agigantic Arcadian, an AEtolian whose diminutive stature made a curiouscontrast to his competitor, coming in close behind him.

  Next came the great event of the day, the "Contest of the FiveExercises," or "Pentathlon." The five were leaping, wrestling, running,quoit-throwing, and javelin-throwing. The competitor who won mostsuccesses had the prize adjudged to him.[73] Callias had been trainedfor some time at home with the intention of becoming a competitor atOlympia; but various causes had hindered him from carrying out hispurpose, and, of course, he was now wholly out of practice. He wassitting quietly among the spectators when he felt a hand upon hisshoulder and looking up, saw his general standing by.

  "Stand up for the honor of Athens," said Xenophon, "don't let the men ofthe Island[74] carry everything before them."

  "But I am not in training," said Callias.

  "You are in as good training, I fancy," replied the general, "as are anyof these; better I should say, to judge from the way in which they havebeen eating and drinking since the retreat was ended. Besides, it isonly the boxers who absolutely require anything very severe in that way.And you have youth."

  Callias still made objections, but yielded when his general made thematter a personal favor.

  The competitors were five in number, the winner of the foot-race, thetall Arcadian and his diminutive rival from AEtolia, two Achaeans, andCallias.

  The first contest was leaping at the bar. Here the Arcadian's long legsserved him well. He was a singularly ungainly fellow, and threw himselfover the bar, if I may be allowed the expression, in a lump. Every timethe bar was raised, he managed just to clear it, though the spectatorscould not understand how his clumsy legs, which seemed sprawlingeverywhere, managed to avoid touching it. Still they did manage it, andwhen he had cleared four cubits short of a palm, which may be translatedinto the English measure of five feet nine inches, his rivals had to ownthemselves beaten. Callias, who came second, declared that he had beenbalked by the infamous playing of the flute player, whose musicaccording to the custom followed at Olympia, accompanied the jumping."The wretch," he declared to the friends who condoled with him on theloss of what they had put down to him for a certainty, "the wretchplayed a false note just as I was at my last trial. If I had not heardhim do the same at least half-a-dozen times before, I should have saidthat he did it on purpose."

  If chance or fraud had been against him in this trial, in the next hewas decidedly favored by fortune. This was the foot race. The coursewas, as usual, round a post fixed about a hundred yards from thestarting point, and home again. Whenever a turn has to be made, acertain advantage falls to the competitor who has the inner place, andwhen, as in this case, the distance is short, the advantage isconsiderable. The places were determined by lot. The innermost fell tothe Arcadian; Callias came next to him; fortunately for him, his mostdangerous competitor, the Cretan who had won the foot race, had theoutermost, _i. e._, the worst station. The Arcadian jumped away with alead, and for fifty yards managed, thanks to the long strides which hislong legs enabled him to take, to keep in front; but the effort was soonspent; by the time that the turning point was reached, Callias hadgained enough upon him to attempt the dangerous manoeuvre of takinghis ground. If it had not been for this, he must have been beaten, forthe fleet-footed Cretan, weighted though he was by his disadvantageousplace, ran a dead heat with him.

  In the quoit-throwing, the Arcadian's strength and stature brought himto the front again. With us quoit-playing is a trial of skill as well asof strength. The quoit is thrown at a mark, and the player who contrivesto go nearest to this mark, without touching it (for to touch itcommonly ends in disaster) wins. At the same time the throw does notcount unless the quoit either sticks into the ground or lies flat uponit with the right side uppermost. In the Greek game there were norequirements of this kind. The quoit was a huge mass of metal withnotches by which it could be conveniently grasped, or, sometimes, a holein the middle through which a leather strap or wooden handle could beput. He who threw it farthest was the winner. Some little knack wasrequired, as is indeed the case in every feat of strength, and, as hasbeen said before, stature was the chief qualification. The Arcadianhurled the quoit, a mass of iron weighing ten pounds, to the vastdistance of forty-two feet. None of his rivals came near him. As he hadnow won two events out of three, and his gigantic height and weightwould make him, to say the least, a formidable opponent in thewrestling, he was a favorite for the prize. His Arcadian countrymen, whoformed, as has been said, a large proportion of the army, were in highhope, and staked sums that were far beyond their means on his success.

  The quoit-throwing was followed by hurling the javelin at a mark. Herethe Arcadian was hopelessly distanced, for here skill was as much wantedas strength had been in the preceding trial. He threw the javelin indeedwith prodigious force, but threw it wholly wide of the mark. Indeed,when he was performing, the near neighborhood of the mark would havebeen the safest place to stand. The spectators were more than once indanger of their lives, so at random and at the same time so vigorouswere his strokes. The first mark was a post rudely fashioned into thefigure of a man. To hit the head was the best aim that could be made; tohit a space marked out upon the body and roughly representing the heartwas the next; the third in merit was a blow that fell on some other partof the body. The legs counted for nothing. Callias and the Cretan scoredprecisely the same. The Athenian hit the head twice, scoring six for thetwo blows. The third time his javelin missed altogether. The Cretan, onthe other hand, in his three strokes hit the third, second, and thefirst places successively, scoring for them one, two, and threerespectively. Further trials of skill were now given. A wand about threefingers wide was set up at a distance of twelve yards. The Cretan'sjavelin pierced it, making it, as may be supposed, an exceedinglydifficult thing for a rival to equal, much more to surpass theperformance. But Callias was equal to the occasion. Amid tumultuousapplause from the spectators, for his courtesy and carriage had made hima great favorite, he hurled his javelin with such accuracy that he splitthat which was already sticking in the mark. Again the Cretan and hewere pronounced to have made a tie.

  The two Achaeans and the AEtolian did creditably, scoring five each. Asthey had failed in four out of the five contests, the prize was clearlyout of their reach, and they stood out of the last competition, thewrestling.

  And now came the last and deciding struggle. Here again fortunedecidedly favored the Athenian. The president, following the rule alwaysobserved at Olympia, ordered three lots marked A, B, and C, andrepresenting respectively Callias, the Arcadian, and the Cretan, to beput into an urn. The two first drawn were to contend in the first heat,the third was to have what is technically called a "bye." The "bye" fellto the lot of Callias, and with it, it need hardly be said, the notinconsiderable advantage of coming fresh to contend with a rival who hadundergone the fatigue of a previous struggle.

  The issue of the contest between the Arcadian and the Cretan was notlong in do
ubt. The latter was an agile fellow, who would have had avery good chance with "light-weights," to use again a technical term, ifthe competitors had been so classed, as indeed they are by the customsof the modern wrestling ring. But against his gigantic opponent he hadscarcely a chance. In the first bout the Arcadian lifted his antagonistclean from the ground, and threw him down at full length without moreado. The second was more equal. The Cretan struck his antagonist's leftankle so sharply with his foot that the giant fell, but he could notloose the other's hold, and fell also, scoring only the advantage ofbeing the uppermost. If there had been a tie in the other two bouts thismight have sufficed to give him the victory, or the president might haveordered a fresh trial. But the third bout was decisive. It was in fact arepetition of the first, only, if possible, still more decisive. TheCretan was again lifted from the ground, before he had the chance ofpractising any of his devices, and again hurled at full length upon theground. This time he was stunned, and carried insensible from the groundby his companions.

  A brief interval was now allowed. It was thought unfair that theArcadian should be called upon to engage a fresh antagonist without somechance of resting himself. But what was meant for an advantage turnedout to be exactly the contrary. The man was not particularly tired, buthe was exceedingly thirsty, and he had not learnt the habit ofself-control. Regardless of the remonstrance of his companions, heindulged himself with a huge goblet of wine and water. So imprudent washe indeed that he put less water than was usual in the mixture, andslightly confused his brain by the potency of the draught. When he cameforth to meet his antagonist, he had not only damaged his wind but hadmade his footing somewhat unsteady. Three bouts, as before, were fought.The Arcadian first tried the simple tactics which had been successfulwith the Cretan. He did his best to lift the Athenian from the ground,and Callias had all he could do to prevent it. But his weight and hisstrength, which he made the most of by his coolness, stood him in goodstead. After a fierce struggle both fell together, and fell in such away that the president declared that neither had gained any advantage.Practically, however, the victory was decided in favor of Callias. TheArcadian's strength was impaired, and he was so scant of breath that hecould not use what was left to him. And he had little skill to fall backupon, whereas his antagonist had been the favorite pupil of one of thebest trainers in Athens. In the second bout Callias struck the Arcadianon the right foot with his own left; in the third he simply reversed thedevice, striking the left with his right. In both he contrived to freehimself when his opponent fell. Thus the fifth contest ended for him inan unquestioned victory.

  The prize of victory was an ox and a purse of twenty-five gold pieces,for soldiers who fought for pay would not have relished the barren honorof a wreath of wild olive with which the Olympian judges were accustomedto reward the victors. Callias won golden opinions from his comrades bythe liberality with which he disposed of his gains. The ox he presentedto the company to which he had been attached; the money he divided, insuch proportion as seemed right, among the unsuccessful competitors.

  One more contest remained, and it turned out to be the mostentertaining of them all. This was a horse race. The competitors were tomake their way from the hill-top to the shore and back again. Theheadlong, break-neck speed at which they galloped down, and the slow andpainful effort by which they crawled back again, were witnessed withinextinguishable laughter by the assembled crowds. Xenophon himself tooka part in this sport, and gained great favor not only by hiscondescension but by his skillful riding. He did not win indeed, for theanimal which he rode was hopelessly inferior, but his performance didnot discredit the land which claimed by the bounty of the god of the seato have been the birthplace of the horse.[75] The piety of Xenophonalways ready to show itself, did not fail to improve the occasion of hisyoung friend's success.

  "You have gained the prize," he said in a tone of the deepestearnestness, "nor did you fail to deserve it. Prize it the more becauseit is manifest that the gods favor you. Youth and strength pass away,but piety you can cherish always, and cherishing piety, you have alsothe favor of the gods."

  FOOTNOTES:

  [73] According to some accounts no competitor was crowned unless he wassuccessful in all. But victory in five exercises so dissimilar couldseldom, if ever, have been gained. Quoit-throwing, for instance,corresponding to our "putting the stone," required lofty stature andgreat muscular strength, and would very seldom be the specialty of avery fleet runner.

  [74] The Island of Pelops or Peloponnesus.

  [75] The legend was that Poseidon and Athene contended together for thehonor of being the patron Deity of Attica. This was to be adjudged tothe Power which should present it with the most useful gift. Poseidonstruck the ground with his trident, and produced the horse; Athene badethe olive spring forth, and was judged to have surpassed her rival.Reference is made to this legend in the most beautiful of the choralodes of Sophocles, the "Praise of Colonas" in the second of the twoplays in the Story of Oedipus.