The Road to Sardis

by Stephanie Plowman

  So I did not hurry unduly as I went round the Acropolis Hill to the theatre; in any case I was staring, half in bitter pain, half in incredulous joy, at sights I had thought I would never see again. It so happened that the innkeeper accompanied me; he was a good fellow, because he wanted to be at the theatre in good time (as he explained rather breathlessly, the steep steps leading up to the more distant seats took it out of a man of his weight) but my long silences and absent manner obviously made him think my illness had left me wandering in my wits from time to time, so he took charge of me, and now pointed out to the foreigner Cephisus and Colonus, Parnes, Pentelicus and Hymettus. And I nodded and remembered walking beside the river, Callistratus’ face dappled by the sun striking through the plane trees; I remembered nightingales singing full-throated in thickets deep in the green gloom of Colonus, and the three mountains of Athens welcomed me, welcomed me—

  So we came to the theatre, just in time, indeed, for we had scarcely reached our lofty perches before we rose for the offering to Dionysus, and the herald was calling the name of the author of the first play.

  If the first play was not his, it was at least the work of the the only other poet whose tragedy I wished to hear.

  ‘Sophocles, son of Sophilus, presents his tragedy . . .’

  I sat up alertly, resolved to memorise as much as I could for retelling in Macedonia, but if Euripides has heard of the play, it is because he and Sophocles have met on the further bank of the river. For as the echo of the herald’s ringing voice died away, the chorus began to file in—and they were ungarlanded, clad in black, in mourning.

  My heart seemed to stop beating. Sophocles dead! True, he was very old indeed, close on ninety, but you could not think of Sophocles as being dead; he, who could be so human, was also so god-like, so essential a part of Athens. To imagine the warm rays of the sun no longer shone on the Acropolis, the nightingales no longer sang in his own Colonus, that was like thinking Sophocles was dead.

  But Sophocles was not dead. The ranks of the black-robed chorus parted, and between them, very slowly, came aged splendour, in mourning too, Sophocles himself, his grey head bent.

  In a frenzy of anxiety and bewilderment, I seized the innkeeper’s arm. ‘What in God’s name has happened?’ I whispered.

  He smirked and said, ‘Isn’t that nice? Real nice, I call it! But typical. Anybody else would have said, “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” but Sophocles, being a gentleman—’

  ‘What’s he mourning?’ I muttered feverishly. ‘Who’s he mourning?’

  He gave a yelp, sat nursing his arm as he replied, ‘That old crank Euripides, of course. The news came yesterday.’

  I must have stumbled down the steps and out of the theatre like a blind thing; I can remember nothing of the affronted, angry faces turned to me as I blundered down, though I can still hear a series of indignant voices, voices in which, as I reached the lower rows, indignation turned to curiosity and once or twice, I think, welcome. ‘Lycius, son of Polystratus,’ they began to say. ‘Home from Syracuse.’

  But there was no one left now to make Athens home for me.

  I do not know when I changed direction, for I left the theatre with no idea in my mind than that of the wounded beast to run for the familiar hiding place, and I meant to go over to Salamis. But I went instead to Colonus, drawn there, half insensibly, by the thought of shade so deep that the nightingales sing there by day.

  I remembered my words to my grandfather, ‘But were there no friends to stand by him?’ and his reply, ‘Very few.’

  And those few, of course, were not men whose word would have much influence on popular opinion.

  Yet if I had been there, the gallant young hero from Catana, with the laurels of the rescue work still comparatively unwithered on my brow, I, basking furthermore in the applause that had greeted my rich dedication—they would have listened to me.

  But the gallant young hero had been too frightened to return to Athens—frightened because always he would be half-expecting to see his friend come swinging round the corner, frightened because every street in the City, every room in his home, would be haunted.

  Had there been no ghosts for Euripides too? Had he not loved Callistratus?

  My equipment I had left with my grandfather, but at my belt I had a little knife. It was there in my right hand when a voice cried my name, and next moment I was struggling fiercely with a big slave. I could have mastered him easily enough, but suddenly I stopped struggling, for the man who had called to me was close now, and I recognised him. He held out his hand, and I gave him my knife like a child; I said stupidly, ‘Did you follow me, Sophocles?’

  ‘I recognised you,’ said Sophocles, ‘and as soon as I could, I followed you. If you’d gone to Salamis, I’d never have caught up with you; thank God you came to Colonus.’

  ‘I reached Athens yesterday, purposely didn’t go to my own home, didn’t want to meet people until I came back from Macedonia after seeing him.’ I looked at him with desperate eyes. ‘Sophocles, you would know better than my grandfather—what made him go to Macedonia? So barbaric a place . . .’

  ‘Yet perhaps no more foreign than his own Athens had become,’ said Sophocles. ‘More and more he and his fellow-citizens here were using the same words to speak a different language.’

  I looked with love at the fine old face—he was the most gracious being I have ever known—and, remembering his age, said in sudden remorse, ‘Why must we stand talking here when there’s a perfectly good flat rock over there among the laurels? Let us sit there, and please take my arm.’

  And when we were seated, I exclaimed in fresh remorse, ‘And I’ve spoiled your play for you, Sophocles! I was looking forward to seeing it too; will you forgive me, and tell me about it now?’

  Sophocles gave me his charming smile. ‘My dear boy,’ he said, ‘no setting could be more apt, for the play is Oedipus at Colonus, and the first scene shows an old man guided by a bare-footed girl coming to this very spot, my own dear Colonus of the green shade and the nightingales, where I was born, and where one would wish to die. It was, incidentally, horribly difficult to get any back-cloth painted in a way that adequately portrayed the place!’

  If Sophocles could not give you tranquillity, no man could. I smiled at him and teased him gently; ‘I hope you’re sorry now that you were revolutionary enough to invent stage scenery!’

  He smiled back and said, ‘I assure you I gave Antigone a good long speech describing Colonus, so that the enormities perpetrated by the scene-painter wouldn’t count too much!’

  I said, ‘You smile now, but I don’t think you smiled much in the writing of the play, Sophocles.’

  ‘No,’ he said gravely. ‘I did not. I have been troubled for many years by the story of Oedipus, the man savagely punished by the gods for crimes innocently committed, crimes, above all, to which they themselves had doomed him before his birth. What justice can there be in such a world? How can a man live in a world governed by such gods?’

  He raised his dark eyes, still luminous, and stared up at the distant Acropolis, clearly visible from Colonus.

  ‘Fifteen years ago,’ he continued, ‘after much pondering on the subject, I wrote my first play about Oedipus—the man unjustly struck down. Since that time I’ve thought frequently about the ending, with growing doubts.’

  ‘Why doubts?’ I asked. ‘It was magnificent—he wasn’t entirely finished—’

  ‘Not in the way most people understood it,’ said Sophocles. ‘What I meant was that, by becoming physically blind, mentally he became clear-eyed. For nearly fifteen years I thought of this, but I’m an old man, Lycius, at ninety a sustained effort of any kind is difficult. I don’t think I could have written the play—if it had not been for the exile of Euripides. When I heard he was going, anger gave me the strength to begin writing—of another man who was a blessing to the land that tried to cast him out.’

  I said, ‘Thank you.’ After a moment, as a nightingale began to sing fro
m a thicket behind us, I asked, ‘But why did he go, Sophocles? He had borne so much.’

  ‘One can bear with seeming indifference for year after year,’ said Sophocles, ‘yet one day, for no great or apparent reason, one’s endurance breaks. When you’re over seventy, even if you’re Euripides, you may want admiration and ease rather than coldness and suspicion—and there was the King of Macedonia sending most flattering invitations.’

  ‘But you yourself don’t believe he went off to be pampered and flattered?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Sophocles, all gravity now. ‘I don’t. Because I remember him when the news of Syracuse reached Athens.’

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked in a low voice.

  ‘He never referred directly to any personal feeling,’ Sophocles replied slowly, ‘but he said something once that with his permission, I used some time afterwards in my Philoctetes:

  ‘Dead like the rest, for this is true,

  War never picks the worst men for his victims,

  But only the best.’

  ‘He said that when he knew Callistratus was dead,’ I said, after a moment. ‘I read your Philoctetes before I left Sicily, and, do you know, I said to myself that you must have been in the company of Euripides when you wrote it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the sound of the sea, and birds crying, and the noise of wind and rain had crept into it—as in his own plays.’ I managed to smile. ‘You need never have invented scene-painting! But, tell me, why were you with him so often? Was he—ill?’

  ‘No,’ said Sophocles softly, ‘but we feared for him. One by one, or in tiny groups, the survivors began to straggle back. They would go over to see him, to tell him his poetry had saved them. Hardly a day would pass without the sound of a strange footfall outside his cave, another boy to stammer his gratitude. Only—’

  ‘Only—he was hoping for footfalls that were—not strange,’ I whispered.

  Sophocles said, ‘He would greet them kindly, rejoice in their safety, but there were hours when he would sit doing nothing but watch the opening to the cave, listening, but he never heard the footsteps, never saw the faces he longed to see more than any others in the world.’

  His wonderful eyes caught the look on my own face then, and he fell silent. After a moment I said in a voice I scarcely recognised, ‘I meant to do what you prevented me from doing because I thought that if I had returned two or three years ago, I could have defended him against those who slandered him; I know now that he needed my help against worse enemies.’

  Sophocles said, ‘When you are old, things shouldn’t hurt too much; age must always be a time of sadness, but not a time of tragedy—as it was with him. He grieved for Athens—how he grieved!—but he couldn’t warm his hands at recollections of the past, as I can, even now.’

  And then, out of the greatness of his heart, he began to comfort me. I did not know at the time how his serenity hid a bitter grief; only a few months before his elder son had claimed that he was wandering in his wits, too old, too feeble-minded to administer his property, the lie had run. Forced by his own son to prove his sanity in a law-court, Sophocles had stood and vindicated himself in the most triumphant way possible to man—he had recited part of that chorus he had just written, the chorus he recited to me now, describing the golden notes of the nightingale song pouring from the shady thickets about us, the glowing narcissus, still dew-sprinkled, about our feet, the saffron crocus gleaming there before us beside the clear waters of the slow-moving Cephisus.

  Blessed Sophocles! In that chorus he made the loving claim that the gods haunted Colonus; if they did, it was for his sake, for assuredly he was as dear to them as to his fellow-men.

  And then he said, very gently, ‘You will, I think, want to go over to Salamis now, but tell me first what more I can do for you.’

  ‘Let me take you back to Athens first,’ I said, ‘and tell me where I can get a copy of your play.’

  ‘I will give you one myself,’ he said, ‘and, yes, let us go back together.’

  On that return journey of over a mile, we talked little, but there was no need now to talk to him, merely to be with him was solace enough. And as he bade me farewell in his home in the City, and I, suddenly remembering his age, wondered with a fresh pang of horror and despair if this was to be our final parting, he knew my thoughts, of course, and, smiling, gently quoted the words of his old, weary Oedipus, awaiting the last summons of the gods:

  ‘Your father’s day is finished, children.

  All that was mine is gone, and you shall have

  No more the weary task of tending me.

  . . . You have had

  Love from me, children, none has loved you more.’

  So he had, a few hours before, taken his last leave of his beloved Athens. They have told me since that every man in the crowded theatre that day had known as much, that many tears were shed, but not bitter tears. Blessed Sophocles, indeed; assuredly the gods walked with you, and none more often than the god of healing.

  41

  Goat River

  The fever returned soon afterwards; Tecmessa had cried out when she had embraced me because I was so burning hot, and at midnight they thought I was done for. But devoted nursing pulled me through, though it was weeks before I was fit for active service again. By that time, all fit men were needed for active service, for a great deal had happened.

  Grandfather returned after a month, and did all he could to supply me with cheering news. He came in one day with a merchant newly returned from Macedonia, who had told him that Euripides had been held in the greatest honour there, that he had been given a magnificent tomb, with a fine inscription on it. I asked if Euripides had written any plays in exile; yes, said the trader, smirking, and it seemed as if he’d had a change of heart—‘He never believed in the gods, did he, but by all accounts this last thing of his is all about their power. Yes, I should think you’d be able to get hold of a copy, it’s been performed at the court in Macedonia—great success, I heard.’

  Grandfather got hold of a copy for me, and it was easy to see why the play delighted a half-barbaric court. The last play of Euripides is called The Bacchae; there is, indeed, a god in it, but no god so pitiless and cruel has ever been shown before. I wondered desolately what dreadful things the weary exile had seen in the northern forests.

  But soon there was no time for wonderment; all was action. While I had tossed with fever at Athens, Conon had been switched from the west to take over the command from which my cousin had been deposed. By the time he came to Samos, the crews there were of such quality and quantity that he could take to sea only seventy ships—and the Spartan fleet in those waters numbered a hundred more. The Spartan hundred and seventy, in fact, came upon him at sea, chased him to Mitylene, and captured thirty ships. Conon managed to beat off all assaults on the harbour, but knew that if the Spartans began a blockade, he would have no chance. He managed to get word to Athens.

  One favour at least the gods have granted me—that I should be in Athens at that time, to see the unfaltering resolution with which the people met the crisis. The precious metals in the temples were melted down, a new fleet was conjured up—God knows how—manned by resident aliens, slaves—but not me. They would not take me; I was not well enough yet, but when Agis again tried to take the City by a night attack they let me get up out of bed to command cavalry, because Agis had in Attica not only his own troops, but all the confederate forces. My experiences here were not significant—sufficient to say we drove them back—except that I was reminded sickeningly that Agis had done precisely this kind of thing to prevent the Second Syracusan Expedition sailing.

  Now the fleet, however, was making for the north-east, not the west—but, after all, the north-east was vital to us. If we lost control there, we would starve. Once we had finally seen Agis off, I wearily pulled off my helmet and sat in a muck sweat due half to past exertion, half to fear of the future, and wondered when we’d hear news of the next disaster.
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  The makeshift fleet, against all hope, won, sinking nearly seventy enemy ships. But then the commanders bungled their victory; they were lackadaisical in taking off the crews of ships damaged in the fighting, a storm blew up, and a dozen of our battered vessels sank with their hands. People forgot the enemy losses, the relief of Mitylene; the commanders at Arginusae, far from being congratulated, were condemned to death.

  New admirals were elected; God help us, we were scraping the barrel now, because one of these was Adeimantus, Alcibiades’ cousin and butt, and another was Tydeus, safely back from Catana at long last. The fat would have been in the fire had I been elected as his colleague, as some people wanted—a timely shoulder wound inflicted by one of Agis’ troops as we drove them back from the City walls had me laid up for a few days, and promised to have far gloomier results than turned out to be the case. In fact, by the beginning of the following year I was attending the Festival—odd to think that it was just then that Aristophanes wrote the funniest comedy even he ever produced. The Frogs is chiefly a competition between the shades of Euripides and Aeschylus, each trying to go one better than the other; the jokes about Euripides didn’t make me wretched—nothing could hurt him now.

  What did make me serious was the question put about my cousin—what should the City do with him? ‘Euripides’ forbade any dealings with a traitor—to some applause; ‘Aeschylus’ advised taking a risk—he was so magnificent a fighter. At this there was a very loud applause.

  With the spring came a message from Conon; I was wanted at Samos. I found him looking much older; to say the least, he had had a wearing time, and now he was doing the worrying for the whole fleet. He was the only commander with real experience—yet he was liable to be out-voted on any issue by those holding rank equal to his. If he had had the sole command given to my cousin, the whole story would have ended differently. He said I was to captain Paralus, the official despatch boat, and Ariston was to be my second-in-command.