I had to give the warning, but I didn’t think for a moment that he would pay any attention. His sun stood glittering at high noon again—most of Athens thought him capable of working miracles, and he was inclined to agree with them.
He never seemed to realise how dangerous such admiration could be. People expected him to work miracles—if the miracles didn’t occur, they would turn against him.
And he also under-estimated enemies outside Athens. In particular, Agis.
Agis had been at Decelea for some years now. Apart from its strategic advantage, Decelea also offers a magnificent view of the sea—and the grain ships sailing south to Piraeus from the Black Sea. Agis realised soon enough that possession of Decelea might hit us hard, but it would not starve us into surrender as long as the corn fleets kept sailing into port. He had been nagging at his government for some time to take decisive action to block the route, and they sent a few ships and a general, Clearchus, but the really great Spartan effort came at the time of my cousin’s triumphant return. Agis had not liked that at all. Now that Alcibiades meant Athens again, the ruin of both was essential.
The old King of Persia had a domineering wife and two sons. The Queen doted on the younger son, saw to it that her husband spoiled and indulged him as much as she did. From the time he entered his teens, young Cyrus had been encouraged to believe that he would prove as much a world-conqueror as his namesake had been. It had come to him as a rude shock to discover one day that Persia had been beaten in the past, and bundled out of territory she had claimed as her own. The Athenians had done it, people told him. Athenian fleets had controlled Persian waters for the past seventy years.
So young Cyrus, after that shrewd blow to his not inconsiderable pride, loathed Athens.
When he was about sixteen, he began demanding power—real power. His mother took his part, and just at the time that Alcibiades came back to Athens, Cyrus came down to the coast of Ionia. He had been given complete control of all the coastal provinces, and his mother had seen to it that he could use the Persian Treasury as if it were his own.
Agis persuaded the Spartans to send Lysander to take charge of their operations off Ionia.
My description of Lysander must remain inadequate; I have only seen him when he was not trying to charm. When he had to coax instead of cracking the whip, I have been told he could adopt a kind of bluff good-humour which, however, never reached his eyes.
Lysander was clever. Cyrus was used to everyone Persian going down to his all-conquering charm, but had enough intelligence to realise that Spartans might be different. As indeed, they were. All he could cajole out of most of them were looks like so many emetics. But Lysander was different. Gruffly and awkwardly that simple soldier confided that usually he had no use for anyone born outside the valley of the Eurotas, but—well, it seemed there might be exceptional cases . . . After that he could get anything he wanted from Cyrus—in particular, ships and money.
That is what they should have been thinking of in Athens—instead of my cousin. That is what he should have been thinking of. His return home was of no importance compared with the fact that Cyrus had come down to the coast, and Lysander had gone to Ionia.
Eventually he sailed again from Athens—with everyone expecting him to perform miracles. He would need to perform them, with Cyrus building fleets for Lysander, and Athens never knowing if she could pay her crews.
News, of course, came to us only fitfully off the western coast, though I learned more when Conon sent me off to Cyprus. The chief Greek city in Cyprus is Salamis—a very different place in many ways from my dear island of the same name, but they both produce good men. Evagoras, Prince of Salamis, was a close friend of Conon; if it comes to that, Athens herself has never had a better friend. Cyprus was well-situated to get quick information about what was happening in Persia, and Conon, not liking any more than I did Lysander’s beautiful friendship with Cyrus, thought Evagoras might have some useful facts to pass on.
So at the beginning of the following year I was in Cyprus. I didn’t do much good there; I had just arrived when I went down with a sickness that threatened to carry me off on a journey even further afield. The doctors did not give a name to it, except to say that it was no doubt a legacy of the stone quarries. At one time they gave me up altogether; a rumour reached Athens that I was actually dead.
But I was still alive, though in so weak a state that they kept all disturbing news from me when Grandfather arrived.
Yes, Grandfather himself, very old now, but still spearstraight, came to Cyprus with the first spring sailing. He believed I was dead, and had come to claim my ashes. As he said matter-of-factly, the bodies of his two sons had never had proper burial, and he was determined that one member of the family should receive correct treatment. His greeting to me was characteristic: ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it looks as if you’ll be doing for me what I thought I’d be doing for you—after all!’
I was too weak to do more than smile faintly at him; even if I had had a voice, I could not have talked—because there was too much to talk about. Too much had happened in the seven years since we had parted. We had written, of course, but letters are not enough—and do not prepare you for physical changes. His back was still straight, and his head high, but something inside him had broken.
I had expected him to rage about Alcibiades’ return, but he was surprisingly reticent as to this. In fact, his only mention of my cousin in the first days was that he had received a handsome snub from Socrates, who had actually cut him dead in the street. ‘He tried to laugh it off, but it hurt, I think.’
‘It hurt Socrates to do it,’ I said after a moment.
Ten days more passed before we spoke of my cousin again; Evagoras’ doctor gave me a gruelling examination, and then, as he turned to go, gave Grandfather a significant look.
‘What’s the bad news?’ I asked, the moment the door closed behind him.
‘What in the devil do you mean?’
‘That expression on his face said so plainly, Yes, he’s fit enough to take it—now. To take what?’
Grandfather looked at me cautiously, and said, ‘He’s been defeated.’
My head jerked up from the pillow. ‘Alcibiades! I can’t believe it!’ My voice sounded as shrill as it had been twenty years before—probably as intelligent.
‘Not Alcibiades himself—his fleet. He’d left Samos with a few ships and sailed north to meet Thrasybulus’ squadron to get their news.’
He was finding it hard going; this could not have been an ordinary defeat. I asked, ‘Then who was left in command?’
Grandfather said, very slowly. ‘You’ve heard of Antiochus?’
‘That fellow who’s nearly always drunk? My God, he didn’t leave him in charge?’
Grandfather nodded. I began to babble much as I imagine I had babbled in delirium for days on end. ‘But he—he didn’t hold any kind of Athenian commission!’ I kept saying. ‘He was a—a drunken upstart with no standing at all! Who’d take orders from him?’
‘A couple of dozen did, more’s the pity. And again, more’s the pity, he disobeyed the orders Alcibiades had given him. Lysander was in Ephesus with ninety good ships; Alcibiades told Antiochus that he was not to fight him, but the moment his back was turned, Antiochus went off with two ships, to cruise across the harbour of Ephesus and bawl insults—he was drunker than usual—at Lysander. He didn’t think Lysander’d come out—Alcibiades hadn’t been able to tempt him out—but Lysander knew Alcibiades had gone off to the north, so out he came. The rest of the ships left at Samos tried to come to the rescue, and the result was a general engagement, the Spartan ships in line of battle, ours coming in anyhow, and with a drunken fool in command.’
‘How many ships did we lose?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘I hope that drunken swine didn’t escape.’
‘No, he was killed all right. This will be the end of your cousin all over again—with reason.’
‘He told the fool not
to fight. He can’t be blamed for that.’
‘By God, though, he can be blamed for his damned insolence in putting a sot like that in command! He’d been made the supreme commander—and that was how he used his responsibility. Still, he won’t have it to delegate much longer—that’s one thing we can be sure of!’
I did not sleep that night. I kept trying to answer the question why he had given command to a drunken fool—Antiochus wasn’t even his friend—he only amused Alcibiades by his lying stories and his fondness for the bottle. It was a mad piece of insolence demanding the retribution that had followed so swiftly. More, it was a childish piece of insolence—the kind of thing he had done twenty years before. And though I did not think for a moment that he had stopped being selfish, I had imagined he had stopped being childish. He had looked and sounded older when I’d seen him at Syracuse.
When I managed to doze a little, all I kept dreaming of was the bill of sale of his goods—‘Cabinet with folding doors—sofa with Milesian tapestry—alabaster box—’ Waking, I would wonder how much he had acquired in his brief stay in Athens to feature in another list. Another list was certain—his enemies would never let slip such a marvellous opportunity as this given them by the dead drunken fool.
But why had he been given the command?
I began to think of alternative choices. I recalled other names, other faces, and suddenly was heaving myself up on one elbow, peering into the darkness, seeing those faces all over again. He could not trust any of those—except for Antiochus. The ships’ crews had voted for his recall—the captains had not been so enthusiastic.
At midnight I was muttering feverishly, ‘If Conon had been there!’
Just before dawn, I whispered, ‘If I had been there . . .’
It was not mere conceit that told me that if I had been with him, he would have given the command to me. He would have trusted me—and I would have obeyed his orders. You could not fault him where pure fighting was concerned.
I should not have roused such resentment as Antiochus.
The inevitable news of deposition from command, fresh sentence of exile, that followed some days later did not shock. It had to be. Where was he now? Gone north, without waiting for the verdict. Now both Sparta and Athens were against him—and Sparta (meaning Lysander and Agis) was the deadlier enemy.
Grandfather watched me narrowly that day, was pleased by the calm way I listened to the news. Next morning he said with some deliberation, ‘Of course, he’s not the only famous Athenian in exile. There’s also an earlier object of—er—admiration of yours. And it’s self-exile in this case, though, by God, if I were exiling myself, it wouldn’t be to Macedonia.’
After a moment, I said, ‘Then it can’t be Socrates. He’d never go to Macedonia—he must have the right kind of people to talk to. A solitary kind of existence would be his idea of . . .’
My voice died away. ‘Euripides?’ I whispered.
Grandfather nodded.
‘But he—he’s well over seventy,’ I said stupidly. ‘Why should he leave Salamis which he loved so well, and . . .’
‘You can bear things just so long,’ said Grandfather, ‘and then something snaps inside you. If your willpower’s worn away by grief, hatred striking from outside . . .’
‘Who hated him?’
‘You young fool, can you remember a time when he was popular? And since Syracuse . . .’
‘Why should he be more unpopular since Syracuse? God help us all, he warned people against it, and—oh, surely it’s known how some of the Syracusans helped us because of his poetry?’
‘That’s known,’ said Grandfather, ‘but—well, you’ve been out of Athens for some years, so you don’t know the way people think now.’ His face twisted a little in sudden grief. ‘Bear in mind that those left are mostly old men, sons gone, grandsons gone. They can remember a time when the gods smiled on Athens, and now they’re thinking like Spartans—the gods are angry because men are unbelievers. It’s going to go on happening—driving Euripides into exile isn’t going to end it.’
‘But wasn’t there anyone to defend him?’ I asked fiercely.
Again Grandfather’s face twisted. ‘Do you think I didn’t try? But I’m growing old. Young men and young voices were needed to defend him—the young men who really loved his work. If Callistratus had been there—or you. You’re quite the young hero now, did you know?’
‘If I had been back in Athens, would it have made so much difference to him?’
‘Yes. Why did you delay coming back? Others returned.’
Looking away, I said, ‘In strange places I can forget people are dead. In Athens, I couldn’t.’
‘There were those of us who could not leave Athens.’
‘As God’s my judge, sir, I screwed up my courage to return—and then Alcibiades wrote saying he was going back for that hero’s welcome. I couldn’t bear to go to Athens where he lorded it, and others were dead—because of him.’
‘Well,’ said Grandfather, ‘what are you going to do now? These doctors say it will be months before you’re fit to travel—it’ll be winter before you’re well again, so the sailing season will be over.’
‘Then I’ll go with the first ship in the spring,’ I said.
Part Four
‘The end of this story’
405–401 b.c.
chorus: Many are the forms of what is
[unknown.
Much that the gods achieve is surprise.
What we look for does not come to pass.
God finds a way for what none foresaw.
Such was the end of this story.
Euripides: Helen
40
‘Dead like the rest’
Once my decision was made—rather, made for me—I acted swiftly enough. I said I would return alone, and Grandfather, after a long look at me, had nodded and said he would follow later.
My ship was the first to sail from Cyprus that year, and neared Sunium at a time of splendid sunset that turned the sea into molten gold from which islands and headlands rose a hazy purple.
Then Sunium was on one side of us, and Aegina on the other, both veiled now in deep shadow, and there was rocky Salamis, Salamis that would always mean to me a worn face and a low voice murmuring poetry against the surge of the summer sea, and the cry, infinitely free, of seabirds—and a deeper voice, and a younger face, and again I sat beside a funeral pyre outside Syracuse.
I cannot remember much about the actual docking at Piraeus, I cannot even remember where I obtained a horse, or if anyone, recognising me, spoke to me as I made my way through the jostling crowds of the port. It was only as I galloped along the road blanched by moonlight that I began to think for the first time what I should say to the household when I re-entered my home after so many years. The prospect terrified me. Then I came to the Piraeus Gate, with its sentries.
I had not really expected anyone to recognise me here; the City itself is garrisoned by boys and the older men; her fighting youth she sends—or used to send—on expeditions overseas. On the other hand, I had not realised I should be taken for a foreigner. The boys standing there on guard might have passed a strange face—but not a strange face and a strange accent. In seven years’ absence, I had lost my Athenian way of talking.
They immediately surrounded the stranger who came coolly galloping up out of the darkness, and absent-mindedly tried to pass them with no more than a hand half-lifted in salute. The stranger then foolishly lost his temper, and began to say in a low, furious voice—and in that very odd accent—that he had never before been stopped and called upon to give an account of himself; it was just as well that an older officer, coming up at the sound of the commotion, could, after an incredulous stare, identify Lycius, son of Polystratus.
That encounter left my nerves raw, not because I had not been recognised, but because the man who had known me once had looked at me with scarcely veiled pity. Then and there I came to the decision to keep away from people who had known
me until I got back from Macedonia, and had talked to Euripides. Longing for Euripides now obsessed me as thirst had obsessed the poor doomed wretches making for the river-bed—and I was equally crazy, I think. So that night I didn’t seek out my own home; I went to a part of the City I scarcely knew, to a scruffy inn I had never entered, and I took a room there. When they looked askance at me at the sound of my accent, I said—truly enough—that I came from Catana. The landlord was disposed to talk; I said I had just got over a bad sickness, and speedily sought my room, which was wretched enough, but at least possessed one blessed virtue in my eyes, in that it was completely characterless. It might have been any squalid room in any inferior inn; there was nothing to remind me that I was back in Athens. And here, helped somewhat by a skin of Naxian wine I had had the forethought to bring with me, I eventually fell asleep.
But at dawn next day I could not run away from consciousness of where I was; it was quite inescapable; light pitilessly showed me what I could avoid in darkness, for the window of my room was opposite the rock which of all rocks in the world is unmistakable, and suddenly I was clinging on to the window-ledge, and my body shook with dry sobs. I suppose that one day it will be old in years, but I cannot think that even when a thousand years have passed, and then another thousand, any man can ever think of our Acropolis as anything but immortal, and perfect, and therefore new, and as I saw the first rays of the rising sun glinting off the spear-tip of the Maiden, the dreams and longings I had bitterly suppressed for so many years rose up again, rose up, and were fulfilled. And then as the rays of the sun grew brighter, and all—rock, fortress, temples—shone purple, dark crimson, saffron, I went on weeping, perhaps in selfish joy because I myself was seeing it again, perhaps in selfless sorrow for those who could not stand beside me and see it with living eyes.
After a time I roused myself, and went in search of breakfast. The landlord told me that the Festival began that very morning; if I wanted to go, I’d reach the theatre before the first play, but only just. I did not tell him I wanted it to be that way; less time for people to recognise me.
The Road to Sardis Page 29
