The Road to Sardis

by Stephanie Plowman

  Therefore when Callistratus, intelligent, young and in magnificent condition, turned up, they leaped at him. Off he went down to Piraeus, and I cried myself to sleep night after night.

  Some months later Grandfather came to Athens before going on a mission to Tenedos. I said rapturously he might meet Callistratus in the islands, for the Paralus, in which Callistratus served, had been sent to that part of the world. But Grandfather, I learned later, when he asked Euripides if I might stay with him, added, ‘I hope I shan’t meet the poor fellow, because he’ll ask me is there news of Plataea, and I shall have to say, all we can do is go on hoping.’

  ‘Hoping for what?’ asked Euripides abruptly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Grandfather in a low voice, ‘but have you thought of this? After Callistratus’ party broke out, there were just over a couple of hundred men left on their feet in Plataea. Bad as the Spartan swine may be at conducting a siege, surely if they’d made any real attempt to storm the place after half the garrison had left, they could have taken it? Why haven’t they done it? That’s why I say, “Go on hoping.” I don’t know what’s holding them back, but I think sometimes they don’t really want Plataea to fall.’

  Grandfather was an honest man. Grandfather, moreover, was reasoning as if old King Archidamus were still alive, whereas now we, and the garrison of Plataea, had Agis to deal with.

  Grandfather actually met Callistratus in the islands, but Paralus was on her way back to Athens when Thucydides came across to Salamis on an evening later in the summer, and as darkness fell, sought out the house where I was staying and remained with Euripides, talking far into the night.

  Next morning the sound of the swallows twittering under the eaves awoke me, but Tecmessa was late in coming to find if I was stirring.

  She did not look so beautifully composed as usual; I noticed that, but I thought she must have slept late and had dressed in a great hurry. She said Euripides would like me to go for a walk along the shore with him. Immensely flattered by this, I gave her a morning hug more perfunctory than usual, then trotted off to share Euripides’ bread and wine and olives, chattering excitedly all the while about Callistratus’ return.

  I was still talking of this as we went out and sat near the sea, and Euripides said suddenly, and as harshly as his voice could ever sound, ‘Yes, we must give thought to Callistratus. Come here, Lycius.’

  Surprised, but obedient, I slipped down from my perch and scampered over to stand before him. In the slowly rising sun I could see his face more clearly, and I gave a sudden exclamation.

  ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Are you in pain?’ For his features were sharpened as my grandfather’s were when his old wound troubled him.

  He said, ‘Yes, I suppose I’m in pain, but mine isn’t anything like the pain Callistratus will feel—or you, too, my poor boy. Lycius, Plataea has fallen.’

  I stared out to sea. I knew I must nerve myself to ask a question, but I could only approach the subject indirectly.

  ‘Was my father still alive—when Plataea was taken?’ I asked carefully. ‘He—he was wounded when Callistratus got out.’

  ‘His wound hadn’t got much better,’ said Euripides slowly, ‘but he was still alive when the city surrendered.’

  I repeated that over to myself three or four times. ‘Was still alive,’ I kept saying in a dazed, senseless way. Finally I whispered stupidly, ‘Do you mean he’s dead now, Euripides?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Euripides quietly. ‘He’s dead now.’

  ‘The Spartans killed him? Killed a wounded man?’

  ‘They killed every Athenian still alive.’

  I bit my knuckles savagely to keep myself from crying out. It would, in a way, have been easier to ask him to tell me the story of what had happened, but I felt I must fumble at the truth myself. He seemed to understand, and sat quite silent until I said carefully, ‘Who brought the news?’

  ‘Thucydides—you remember him.’

  ‘Yes, my uncle’s friend. He came to ask Callistratus how he and his friends got out. Did he learn what—what has happened now from—other Plataeans?’

  ‘No,’ said Euripides in a thin, tired voice, ‘he couldn’t do that. You see, except for those who’d escaped with Callistratus, or earlier, there are no Plataeans now.’

  He turned suddenly to me. ‘No one could understand why the Spartans didn’t storm the place months ago—it’s been at their mercy ever since Callistratus’ party left. Only a Spartan could follow such a line of thought. The Plataeans had to surrender so that the Spartans could claim that Plataea had willingly joined them. Then they felt quite happy about two things—Plataea had “voluntarily” joined them, so that the city wasn’t a prize of war, and they wouldn’t have to return it after a general peace settlement. Also, they felt they could proceed to butcher what was left of their “faithless allies”—’

  I burst into a storm of tears. ‘Why don’t the gods strike them dead? The old king asked the gods to witness theirs was the rightful cause when they came up against Plataea—I saw him! Why did the gods let them do this, Euripides?’

  Euripides, his arm round me, said, ‘If the gods do evil, if the gods sanction evil, they are not gods.’

  I said, sobbing, ‘I can’t talk any more, can’t ask questions. Tell me what happened—I’ll listen. And tell me everything—I must know everything, I’m not a baby now, but—Oh, I wish I were older! I wish I were old enough to kill Spartans!’

  I shall try to retell the story as he told it to me, as if I myself knew none of the men and women concerned. How the end had come when the last crust was eaten, and those of the garrison who had not already died of starvation were too weak to man the walls. The Spartans knew how defenceless the place had become, knew that nine-tenths of the defenders could not even stand, but they would not attack. They meant to wipe out the place, but were afraid to do it without a ‘legal’ excuse.

  When a peace is made, one of the chief terms is usually that towns taken by force of arms are to be returned. Also, to massacre prisoners of war taken in a war between two states is regarded as an atrocity. Spartans, however, never bother their heads about the extermination of subject peoples, or faithless allies.

  So they sent a herald asking the gaunt Plataean survivors to make a voluntary surrender.

  ‘No man shall be punished without a just cause,’ they said.

  So Plataea surrendered, and as far as starving folk very close to death can feel, they were not afraid. They had not offended the Spartans; they had defended their city against a treacherous attack from Thebes. For a few days after the surrender, they may have hoped a little.

  Then five men came from Sparta to ‘judge’ the prisoners on the spot.

  The ‘trial’ took place outside the fallen city. The Spartan ‘judges’ took their seats in the presence of the entire blockading army—that meant not only Spartans, but Thebans, whose rage and hatred against the men who had frustrated their treacherous attack nearly four and a half years before had increased rather than dwindled in the months that had followed.

  They dragged out about two hundred Plataeans, twenty-five Athenians. The so-called ‘trial’ was simple enough; it consisted only of one question—‘Have you during the present war rendered any service to the Spartans or to their allies?’

  If the captives had preserved any illusions, this mockery of a question would have shown them that there was no hope left. It could be answered in only one way—more, it was framed in such a manner as to cut out any reference to events preceding the general war, immediate events such as the Theban night attack, more distant events such as Marathon, and the battle fought outside Plataea itself. The Plataeans knew at once that their destruction had been decided upon, yet they determined to go down fighting. Astymachus, the strongest of those who survived, asked permission to speak before returning an answer to the deadly question. The Thebans opposed furiously: the Spartans, presumably still bent on giving some semblance of legality to what they proposed to do, granted
the request.

  I have never ceased to wonder at the bearing of Callistratus’ father in this, the last hour of his life. He was wounded, nearly dead from starvation; surrendered Plataea lay behind him, the triumphant Spartans and Thebans stood before him, stamping impatiently, waiting for the order to make an end of their prisoners.

  Above all, let it never be forgotten that while the Thebans were still hotly opposing his right to speak, he had seen, herded from his doomed city like droves of cattle, the women who had been in Plataea, that his own wife and child were in that stumbling, pitiful procession, that, as he spoke, his eyes may have rested on his wife’s beautiful doomed head with the trailing hair. I have often wondered if, while his tongue spoke eloquently enough, God knows, his heart cried out those dreadful prophetic words of Hector to Andromache:

  ‘Ah, may the earth lie deep on my dead body before I hear the screams you utter as they drag you off!’

  Astymachus said aloud that when the Plataeans had surrendered their city to the Spartans, they had trusted them. They had expected fair treatment, and not this bloody question, so formed that a truthful answer meant self-condemnation. All that he could do now, and no matter at what cost, was to speak out, even though he knew that in order to gratify Thebes, the verdict of the trial had already been decided in advance. He spoke of the shining record of his city, of the part it had played in the struggle against Persia, when it had been the only Boeotian state to fight for Hellas. He reminded his wolf-eyed judges that at the time of the great earthquake in Sparta, Plataea had sent a third of her citizens to help the stricken state. As for Plataean loyalty to Athens, the Spartans themselves had told Plataea to seek an Athenian alliance when the little city had sought Spartan help against Theban oppression and the Spartans had felt they lived at too great a distance to help effectively. And how, in the present war, could Plataea desert Athens, who had helped her in the past? That would have been dishonourable.

  He spoke with calm disdain of the contrasting record of Thebes, the ally of the Persians who had threatened all Hellas with slavery, the Persians who had destroyed an earlier Plataea after Thermopylae. The Plataeans had not surrendered their city to the Thebans; they would have preferred to perish of starvation. They had surrendered to the Spartans, trusting their honour.

  It would be thought a terrible thing if Sparta should desert Plataea, that the city whose name the great Spartans of the past had inscribed on the Victory tripod at Delphi should now be wiped off the map of Hellas a second time—again at the urging of the Thebans.

  So the Plataeans, who had given their all, and more than their all for Hellas, were now rejected, and left alone with no one to help them. Yet in the name of the gods, who in the past had seen Plataeans and Spartans fighting shield to shield, and for the sake of Plataea’s good service to Hellas, let the Spartans think well before carrying out the promise they had made to Thebes.

  ‘Our lives,’ he said, ‘may be taken in a short moment, but it will be long before the atrocity of that crime is forgotten.’

  You may ask, ‘Why so much grief and rage over Astymachus? Should not your own father’s fate trouble you more?’

  No, though I loved my father. For though his own life ended there outside Plataea, all was not ending for him. His city remained proud and great; he might hope to be avenged. And he did not see his wife and child bound, helpless, dragged off by a grinning enemy. I know a little of what slavery can mean. As Homer said, it robs a man of half his manhood. And how much worse for a woman!

  The five ‘judges’ called up the Plataean prisoners individually, and asked each one the mocking, bloody question with which they had begun proceedings—‘Have you in the present war helped the Spartans or their allies?’ Each replying, ‘No’, was taken away and butchered.

  It was only at the last moment that Astymachus showed the slightest hint of weakness. He was the first to be led past the line of captured women, all weeping save one, his wife. She stood dry-eyed, watching him go to his death, but their little child whom she held was too young for such horrors. When she saw her father she cried and called to him, and held out her hands. They say Astymachus stumbled then, so that the guards leading him off dragged him up roughly. He said fiercely, ‘It was not fear that made me stumble! It was the sight of my wife and—’

  They laughed and said, ‘Forget about your wife. You’ll be more use to the crows than to her now.’

  That was their parting.

  He said two other things before they killed him. He said that he knew why the Spartans were killing the Plataeans—only in butchery could the Thebans wipe out the bitter memory of the failure of their night attack four and a half years before. But why kill the twenty-five Athenian prisoners? His captors grinned and said he’d been so touching about the Plataeans loving Athenians, he couldn’t want them to break up a beautiful friendship, could he? But he made one final attempt. He said that one of the Athenian prisoners—and he described my father—was Polystratus, who had won the chariot race in the Olympics. Public opinion, said Astymachus, wryly, would probably be far more enraged by the death of one Olympic champion than by the wiping out of Plataea. Thus, in the last moment of his life, he attempted to save that of his friend.

  My father, however, chose not to live while his comrades tasted death, and their families worse than death. Apparently Astymachus’ words had some effect, for the Spartans came staring about the little handful of Athenian prisoners, and asked my father if he were Polystratus, who had won the chariot race in the Olympics. It was easy to guess what they intended; it was easy enough to say, and not so untrue in a poor, wounded wretch, a skeleton barely covered with skin, ‘He died. Polystratus who won the Olympic chariot race died at the beginning of the siege.’

  So they killed him too.

  And the women and children—Callistratus’ mother and baby sister among them—became slaves, and the town and territory of Plataea was handed over to the Thebans, who did their best to blot out all memory of her.

  It was a glorious afternoon when we heard that Paralus was expected in Athens that evening. The sun flooded down dazzlingly on the sea, and the water in turn seemed to drink up the blinding light. And I abruptly panicked. I clutched at Euripides’ hand and whispered, ‘Please can I not see him until tomorrow? I can’t be brave—yet. Not today. I’ll be brave tomorrow, though. But if I saw him tonight, I’d cry.’

  Euripides said he understood. In any case Callistratus would not get across until quite late, long after my usual bedtime. So I was a coward and took refuge in my bed and closed my eyes and pretended to Tecmessa I was asleep. I lay awake, hating myself, and when it was time for Callistratus to come I knew I could not go on hiding from him. So I got up and put on my tunic and crept along the corridor. I could hear Euripides’ voice, very low, and that brought me up short. We must have a strange visitor; the voice replying to Euripides I had never heard before. What dreadful luck that at this particular moment we should have a caller, I thought; how could Euripides get on with his appalling task until he was alone with Callistratus?

  And then I realised that he was alone with Callistratus; that the slow, hard voice I had not recognised at first was Callistratus’ own.

  ‘So,’ he was saying expressionlessly, ‘one of the older Spartans thought it was quite a good speech, that in a better world should have had more effect, and because he was rather worried because old Archidamus wouldn’t have approved of what—what his countrymen were about, he tried to salve his conscience by setting down what happened, so that at least the people they were destroying had—had dignity. And he saw that the record was passed on!’

  Euripides broke in. I could not catch what he said, but I heard what Callistratus was saying in that unnatural toneless voice.

  ‘They were lucky, those Trojan women. The last night in Troy before the city fell, they thought they’d won. They slept safe; if only for a few hours they were happy. Oh, God, how did my mother feel the night before Plataea fell, knowing they must sur
render the next day—knowing it was the last time my father—’ And then came the sound of dreadful dry sobbing. At that I fled to my room, sobbing myself.

  I lay awake for hours, and then at last I heard Euripides’ step and another that I could identify only because they turned in at Callistratus’ door.

  Euripides went away. I gave him a few minutes to get clear, then I slipped cautiously out of bed, got my thickest cloak from the chest, opened the door, and tip-toed along the dark corridor to Callistratus’ room. The door was closed; I listened intently, could hear nothing. Was he asleep at last? But if he were asleep, for how long? And if dreadful dreams aroused him, he must not be alone. Childishly I vowed that even if I were not much good, I would be better than no one at all. I wrapped my cloak about me, and curled up outside his door; I could not bear to think of him lying awake in his misery quite alone, staring into darkness.

  But for all my high resolve I was only ten, it was past midnight, and I had wept enough for myself as well as for Callistratus that day. I drifted off to sleep.

  I awoke because someone was lifting me up. I struggled violently, but had enough sense not to cry out loud. But, ‘Oh, please let me stay!’ I whispered, thinking it was Euripides who had returned. ‘I must stay near Callistratus! I don’t want him to be alone!’

  ‘It’s Callistratus here,’ came the low voice. I recognised it with a sudden wild leap of the heart; it was desperately tired, but the awful tonelessness had gone. ‘I’ve been a selfish brute, thinking only of myself, but I came to my senses and remembered your father, and I was coming along to your room to see if you had cried yourself to sleep, and I found you in a heap across my threshold.’

  ‘Callistratus, the moment I’m old enough you’ll teach me how to fight, won’t you? We’ll kill the people who’ve killed our fathers and hurt your mother, won’t we?’