The Road to Sardis

by Stephanie Plowman

  His voice died away. I said, ‘If you’re thinking of borrowing money from him . . .’

  He gave a shout of laughter. ‘From Alcisthenes? That would be the day! No, I was thinking your family haven’t done badly out of dowries, have they?’

  ‘You can afford to talk!’

  ‘That’s all I can afford—to talk! All Hipparete’s money went long ago,’ he said, but without much concern, and next moment he was telling me that, penniless as he was, he had come back from Sicily with not one magnificent team of thoroughbreds, but half a dozen. I could not help staring at this; he said; ‘Well, I’ve had no time to get ready for this year’s Olympics, but I’m making sure of the next, and Euripides will write the Victory Ode for me.’

  But this time I did not merely stare—I exclaimed, ‘He wouldn’t write a line for you!’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said casually, ‘the idea took him aback for the moment, but he’ll come round to it.’

  ‘And even if he doesn’t, you’ll say he has,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a method that saves argument and trouble,’ he agreed.

  ‘But how did you see Euripides?’

  ‘To find out where you were, of course—I cunningly chose to make enquiries at your home at a moment when your Grandfather was out, but the slaves wouldn’t talk, so I thought you might have been packed off to Salamis to Euripides’ care.’

  ‘You didn’t interrupt him when he was working.

  ‘‘No, I didn’t—when I found his cave he was out, pacing up and down the seashore seeking inspiration, I suppose, so I waited.’

  ‘I hope,’ I said ironically, ‘you didn’t have to waste too much time?’

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t a waste of time!’ said Alcibiades. ‘He’d left some stuff lying about, so I read it.’

  ‘How could you?’

  ‘What in the devil’s wrong with that? He wants his plays performed, doesn’t he? Then why should he object to me reading what I did?’

  ‘He did object, then? I’m glad!’

  ‘The man’s a fool,’ said Alcibiades, unheeding. ‘After all, I told him I liked what I’d been reading, even showed him I’d been sufficiently impressed to copy one speech down in my tablets.’

  ‘What speech?’

  ‘I’ll read it to you, if you like.’

  The play was performed years later. I was not in Athens to see it, but I know that the actor who took the part, trained though his voice might be, never spoke the words as my cousin did then:

  ‘I would go to where the stars and sun arise, to the depths of the earth, if such I could, so that I might possess the greatest of the gods, Power. That is the Good, Mother, and I will not surrender it to another, but keep it for myself. To let the greater go and take the less is the part of a coward.’

  Nor could any actor ever look as he looked in the dark, shabby little farm living-room. I did not want to be impressed, but I stood dumb, almost gaping, until he broke the silence by saying, very complacently, ‘The part might have been written for me.’

  ‘You had no business to poke about his papers—it’s one thing to have his plays performed one day, and another to have people like you reading the speeches when he’s just sketching them out.’ Then I saw him grinning at me and broke off bitterly with, ‘Oh, but what’s the use!’

  After that I sat in silence until he finished his wine; then I asked with what politeness I could muster why he had come in search of me. To carry me off to see his new purchases, of course, he replied. They had recovered from the voyage, and were showing a most remarkable turn of speed. He was so favourably impressed he was thinking of getting another team next Spring.

  Inwardly gnashing my teeth because he always made me seem such a prig, I said I could not leave the farm without Grandfather’s permission; in any case I had to get the olives in—and now, if he would excuse me, I had better return to it. It was kind of him to have given the invitation . . .

  ‘I didn’t really think you’d accept,’ grinned Alcibiades, ‘but I love to see that invincible good breeding conquering all other emotions—the well-bred little voice uttering all the correct sentiments. Your grim Plataean’s trained you well. How long’s he away for?’

  I said I did not know.

  ‘I heard someone saying in a barber’s shop that he was in the wilds of Phrygia,’ yawned Alcibiades. ‘What a hell of a place to go to. If you ever hear I’m in Phrygia, you’ll know the end of the world has come!’ He went off chanting, ‘I would go to where the stars and sun arise.’

  More prosaically, I went back to my olive gathering.

  We managed to get in the harvest just in time; soon the clouds collected on the mountains and the rains began. It meant an end to all comfortable, sunny out-door life. Down came the shepherds from the mountain pastures, out came my uncle from the City with the news that Grandfather said I could go back into Athens for the worst of the winter.

  Then the Spring was back with us. The early white anemones had bloomed and died, the mauve and purple were withering, and the late scarlet were carpeting the open spaces in the foothills with their brilliance when Callistratus returned. Grandfather had been taking me round our estates, telling me about the various crops—we grew corn and vegetables at Eleusis, cabbages, lentils, peas, onions; had, through constant tending and improvement of the soil and careful irrigation, acclimatised cucumbers and the Egyptian pumpkin. We grew roses too—people were always wanting flowers for wreaths for religious ceremonies or private parties. On Parnes we had acre after acre of pasture, little for cattle, of course, mostly for sheep. We also had hive after hive of bees on those sun-scented flowery slopes—there were as a matter of fact, so many hives on those hills that the distance between them had to be regulated. Athenian honey was prized even more highly than Athenian wool.

  ‘Yes,’ remarked Grandfather, on the day we concluded our tour, ‘some time in the future, boy, you’ll have acres enough to keep you occupied. Not that it matters whether you have a couple of acres here in Attica or a couple of hundred, you still have to keep using your wits about the same two things—the nature of the soil, the scarcity of water.’

  No need for him to tell me that; the summer was only partly advanced and already the streams had dwindled and died; just below us was a dried-up river bed looking, because of the wealth of oleanders blossoming there, like a neglected private garden, and the places where even the oleanders could not flourish, appeared like an unusually rough road—any unwary stranger might make that mistake. An unwary stranger had, for leading his tired horse through the flowering thickets was—

  ‘It’s Callistratus!’ I said. I wanted to shout it, but my treacherous voice broke. ‘Sir! It’s Callistratus. He’s remembered my birthday, he’s come back in time! May I . . .’

  ‘Go to him?’ said Grandfather in a low furious voice. ‘No, you may not! I wish I could think he has good news, but I doubt it, so the poor devil’s not going to have you rushing down on him without warning. We’ll call to him, and go forward slowly—your Grandfather’s an old man, remember—and give him time to put a good face on things as he picks his way up to us.

  But as we moved forward, he added in a low voice, ‘It might be just as well, though, if the pair of you went over to Salamis.’

  He had been away for about a year; for me he had been absent for an entire aching lifetime of desolation.

  In Salamis next day Callistratus talked of his hopeless journey. He had gone from town to town in Asia, sick at heart to hear the inevitable reaction to his queries—‘Trying to trace a beautiful girl-child sold into slavery half a dozen years ago? That’s a task for eternity!’

  ‘They were right, of course,’ commented Callistratus after a moment. ‘It’s a task for the damned in hell.’

  Euripides was watching him under lowered lids. ‘Will you go again?’ he asked.

  ‘If any scrap of information should ever come. Why do you ask, sir?’

  ‘It might,’ said Euripides carefully, ‘be kinder—to her�
��to let the whole thing rest; six years have passed. She may have forgotten—what she was. If so . . .’

  ‘She won’t have forgotten. And I know as well as if I’d been with them when they were separated that Mother would tell her to remember her city, and she would comfort her by saying that I would come for her. She would always be waiting for me, you know, when I came down from the walls; she’d know the time, and my step—she’d be waiting with her arms outstretched, and I’d pick her up and kiss her—her little warm neck always smelled so sweet, especially the last time I kissed her, before the breakout—’ He got up suddenly. ‘I hope she’s dead,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear to think of her still hoping I’ll come—like some cheap Perseus. She couldn’t know, could she, that I was searching everywhere?’

  It was a little later that Euripides, to change the conversation, asked me how my agricultural education was progressing; I found I was talking with some passion of my silvery olives and the contented droning of the bees on the flowery slopes—I missed the sea, I said, the smell of it and the sound of it, but I loved the freshness of sunrise, the cool mornings with the birds swooping and twittering about the house. Enthusiasm, in fact, carried me away so much that I broke off in confusion when I found Euripides had taken writing tablets in his hand.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I stammered. ‘I’ve talked too long—I’ve interrupted your work.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘you’ve helped me. Didn’t you know who the hero of my next play is to be? A boy of just your age, who loves the country too.’

  The play was called Ion; there is glorious poetry in it, but I have avoided reading it in the last years, so that I may shirk the question, Was I really like that once?

  Some of the strain had left Callistratus’ face. He even managed to smile. ‘What reward does he get for his help?’ he queried, and Euripides said, ‘He can have a foretaste of his birthday present, if he likes—I’ll have polished it up a little by the proper day, of course.’

  In incredulous delight, I stammered, ‘You’ve written some poetry for my birthday present, Euripides?’

  ‘Just as you’ve been talking,’ said Euripides. ‘Callistratus, read it aloud, will you? Then I can get a better idea of it.’

  He handed over the tablets on which he had been scribbling, and Callistratus began to read:

  ‘In Salamis, filled with the foaming

  Of billows, and murmur of bees,

  Old Telamon stayed from his roaming,

  Long ago, on a throne of the seas,

  Looking out on the hills olive-laden

  Enchanted, where first from the earth

  The grey-gleaming fruit of the Maiden

  Athena had birth—’

  After a moment he asked, ‘You don’t need to alter it, surely?’

  I said, ‘It’s wonderful, Euripides, too wonderful for me alone. Won’t you ever use it in a play?’

  He smiled and said he was glad I liked it, said he would, with my permission, use it whenever he wrote a play especially for the City.

  Callistratus was looking less drawn, and the war was over, he would not have to go away again, and Euripides had written a special poem for my birthday; as we went home that evening with the hills already sleeping about us, and the quiet so deep that even the splashing waves made only the tiniest sound, I don’t think I have ever been so happy.

  There is one more episode of my boyhood that I remember with great vividness; it gave me nightmares at the time—God knows what my reactions would have been if I had known what would happen before another five years had passed.

  I was seventeen—soon I should be eighteen. That meant military training for two years, a year of which would be spent at the back of beyond in some place like Phyle. Feverishly I was using the last days of my freedom to visit those favourite spots which soon would be as inaccessible to me as Elysium itself; Callistratus spent most of his time with the cavalry now, having been elected phylarch*—but he was back in Athens on some kind of business which the Board of Generals told him could not be decided for a day or two, during which period, they said genially, he might as well enjoy a little unofficial leave.

  So we paid our respects to the brilliant white temple at Sunium, and then we thought we might as well explore the surrounding countryside. Very few people ever did; one could not blame them since it is all very rough and hilly in that neighbourhood and thickly wooded—for hours we saw nothing but timid, startled hares. The trees were alive with doves, though; after a time their moaning got on my nerves, and I suggested we began to make our way back to Athens.

  ‘Afraid we’ll meet Pan?’ queried Callistratus.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It sounds as if he’s coming along now.’

  We had just reached a winding of the road; from around the next bend came the clip-clop of hooves—horse’s though, not goat’s.

  And a few minutes later, when the rider came in sight, I gave a snort of laughter. ‘Anyone less like Pan!’ I whispered to Callistratus.

  For it was Nicias, drooping in the saddle. I had never before seen him outside the City; in this wild countryside he looked sicklier than ever.

  He hailed us in a voice sounding even more cracked than usual in his ecstasy of relief and asked us to bear him company on a journey it was essential he should make. As the man looked at death’s door, Callistratus suggested he should about turn and head straight back to Athens; no, said Nicias in something approaching a shriek, this journey he must make! Apparently his personal soothsayer had informed him that morning that his private investments were likely to take a nasty knock in the near future; at this dreadful prophecy, notwithstanding the fact that his kidneys were giving him particular trouble at present, he knew he must get out to Laurium, because he had signed a new contract with Sosias only a month ago.

  Callistratus’ eyes met mine. We knew who Sosias was—a Thracian working the silver-mines at Laurium to whom Nicias let out slaves. Grandfather had been in a rage about it when the news of the contract leaked out. It was un-Athenian, he said. Nobody knew what went on in the depths of the mines, hidden away by the wildness and the inaccessibility of the district, but he’d take his dying oath these slaves weren’t being treated as Athenian slaves—Athenian slaves being generally acknowledged to be the best treated in Greece, with plenty of holidays—no holidays for these poor devils, said Grandfather grimly, they’d work their full 360 days a year, and work them in the poisonous atmosphere of narrow shafts and galleries.

  It was a terrible contract; Nicias the Pious let out 1,000 slaves to Sosias at the rate of an obol a day, Sosias being bound to restore to Nicias the same in number—that was all we knew, but it was enough. And the yearly rent paid for each slave was about half the full price paid for him in the market, so that if the poor wretch lived for three years, Nicias would make a profit of fifty per cent on his outlay. No need for Grandfather to point out that mining profits must be immense if prospectors were willing to pay so much for slave gangs.

  Simultaneously Callistratus and I said that of course we would turn round and escort Nicias.

  So we accompanied him on his journey to Laurium, in actual miles not far from Sunium, in atmosphere worlds and centuries away. For a time we went on climbing and descending steep heights, with views of the sun and the islands from the tops, but then we passed from the familiar scenes; not a single flower, soon not a single sprig of vegetation was to be seen, it was all killed, all blighted by the black fumes of smelting. At last we were in the middle of mountains, staring at furnaces and, beyond them, to the dark mouths of underground galleries and passages going for miles into the bowels of the earth.

  We were only thirty miles from the City; we might as well have been at the doors of Hell.

  Sosias joined us, red-haired, like most Thracians—like most Thracians too, he was a burly fellow, with savage, almost wolfish features. Nicias’ yellowed eyeballs, however, glistened with appreciation as he greeted the mine owner. ‘Rough in his manner, no doubt,’
he murmured to us, ‘but a most competent fellow.’

  I said Grandfather had remarked only the other day that whoever ran the silver mines must make an enormous profit; Nicias beamed more widely than I had ever seen him—to his mind, of course, one could talk of making a profit only in a tone of breathless admiration. ‘D’you hear that, Sosias?’ he cried in his cracked voice. ‘This young gentleman’s grandfather, whom he’s quoting, is Alcisthenes the Eupatrid, no less!’

  Sosias showed more wolfish teeth than ever. Of course he had heard of Alcisthenes the Eupatrid, he said. Privately resolving he would hear even more of him in the future, I asked if we might see over his—er—establishment? Of course, of course, said Sosias, just what he’d meant to suggest. He would show us over himself, but—

  Callistratus said naturally he would want to confer with Nicias, to reassure Nicias; Sosias whistled up a subordinate—and we inspected the mines.

  From those mines, the silver mines of Laurium, came the owl-stamped silver coinage of the City, the best, the finest coinage in the world. I look at one of these silver coins, and what do I remember? How the actual mining of the silver was done underground by slaves. Fittingly, for those in Hell, they worked always in semi-darkness, their only light that of small clay lamps for which tiny niches were made in the wall. These lamps, remaining alight for ten hours, marked the length of the daily shift. Yes, each shift did ten hours’ work; five hewers, followed by twenty or twenty-five carriers, went one after the other to the face of the workings. Most of the time, of course, they had to crawl through galleries between two to three feet wide, two to three feet high, and always they had to dig on their knees, their stomachs, their backs. The owner spoke of ventilation by airshafts, but how could one speak of ventilation when the heat was so cruel, and the stench of the huddled bodies and the smoking lamps made the air unbreathable.

  They worked in chains, almost naked. They were branded as brute beasts are branded, by their master’s stamp, Nicias’ stamp. That was all I could say to him when we came back up from Hell and found him standing in the dazzling sunlight.