The Road to Sardis

by Stephanie Plowman

  ‘I’ve seen you somewhere before,’ he blared.

  I said no, he hadn’t.

  My voice seemed to puzzle him; he went off scowling horribly.

  ‘You’ve done it now,’ said Socrates, coughing. ‘He’ll place you soon—he doesn’t know you, but he knows a relative of yours too well. Don’t forget he was the only exile not allowed to return to Athens.’

  Ariston hit out viciously with a pickaxe. ‘He can’t do anything to Lycius just because he’s Alcibiades’ cousin—and made a perfectly logical point,’ he argued.

  ‘Any man who can turn the Acropolis into a barracks is capable of anything,’ said Socrates.

  At sunset we were allowed to stop work; having refused Socrates’ invitation to go home with him, I was left to myself amid the crumbling walls and the thick white clouds of dust which still hung about me, the summer air being so still. I sat on a stone and wondered if he were right in thinking I was in some danger from Lysander. Lysander would soon find out who I was, and my connections on both sides would not endear me to him.

  I was not very frightened at the prospect. On the other hand I had sense enough to realise I might be in a cold sweat of fear the next day. That is the maddening thing about courage—it’s not constant, you can never argue, ‘I’m not scared now, so I shan’t be scared tomorrow.’

  I must have sat there in my cloud of dust brooding about courage for a good twenty minutes, and even without Socrates to prod me into prodigies of thought, I must have been pondering deeply enough, because it gave me quite a shock to realise firstly, that most of the dust had, at last, eddied away; secondly, that I was sharing what remained of it with an elderly man. He, however, seemed quite as oblivious of me as I had been of him until a moment before, being absorbed in a minute scrutiny of what, God help us, had been our day’s work. I wondered who he was; we had had to become inured to self-appointed Spartan overseers, and swaggering Corinthians gloating and oafish Thebans jeering, but this thin, tired face—the most intelligent I had ever seen, inhumanly intelligent almost, was not the face of a Spartan, or a Corinthian, or a Theban, unless a completely new breed of any of them had been invented overnight. Who he could be, why he was scrutinising our poor ruined Walls so closely, intrigued me so much I stopped being angry or bitter; driven by curiosity I went over to him and asked him bluntly why he was so interested—and as I asked the question I thought suddenly that at least his voice would answer the query I could not put.

  But it did not. His was a most odd accent—not Athenian, but exactly what kind of foreign pronunciation he used was beyond me; it sounded a little like the accent you heard in Ionia, yet there were overtones at times of the accent that still makes the hairs bristle on the back of my neck—the Syracusan way of talking. Most reminiscent of all, however, was what I might call a professional, rather than a regional way of speaking; there was an odd kind of pedantry in the way he talked, his choice of words; he reminded me uncommonly of my old schoolmaster.

  Why was he looking so intently at the ruined Walls? Because, he said gravely in that oddly accented voice, he had always had a theory that Themistocles had built them in the greatest haste—and here was the proof, the wild jumble of stones in the foundations, anything and everything—‘See,’ he said, tugging with thin old fingers, ‘dressed stone, undressed stone, they threw in everything ready to hand—even tombstones, look at this!’

  The old rage and bitterness had come back to me, prompting me to say, ‘And what could be more appropriate to the City’s condition than the contemplation of a shattered tombstone?’ But just as I was about to say it, I stopped myself. For another line of thought had been opened up for me by the very same word—I was back in another life, it seemed, with pale winter sunlight glinting through the bare boughs of leafless planes and poplars on the tombstones of the Cerameicus—I had seen this man before, three or four times, though at the moment I could recall vividly only that first meeting, brief because he had gone to write down the speech of Pericles.

  I said, ‘I beg your pardon! I believe I know you—you were the friend of my Uncle Demosthenes, and you talked to Canistratus after he’d escaped from Plataea. If I spoke harshly, it was because I—I thought you were another outsider coming to gloat over us.’

  He said, very quietly, ‘I talk oddly because of many years spent in exile. The amnesty has allowed me to return home—but never to gloat, believe that!’

  And, indeed, there was such pain in his dark eyes that for a moment I was at a loss. Laboriously I began to assemble what facts I knew about him, remembering how I had last seen him at the theatre, a few months before his exile. But his chief ambition was never to be a general, he wanted to be an historian—that was it, that was why he had come to examine the foundations of the dismantled Walls now. He had turned away again to look at them. I dared guess at his thoughts and wondered if he was seeing the Walls as they had been in the great days. But it was difficult to read his face now, for his expression had changed again; the humanity—the grief of the citizen looking on the ruins of his city—had given way to—no, I could not put a name to it, but then again memory stirred in me; Ariston saying weakly in Sicily, ‘That’s how a god would look at human suffering,’ and my own savage rejoinder, ‘The look of a good historian?’

  Back in the present I said, ‘You helped some of our people to escape in Sicily, didn’t you? Ariston was one of them—he described you.’

  Thucydides, son of Olorus, moved away from the shattered Walls and said in his schoolmasterish way, ‘As things are developing, the next Athenians who’ll be needing to escape are those here in Athens itself, and I gather your name is quite high on the list—you corrected Lysander rather publicly, didn’t you? I think the best idea is for you to revert to servile status for a few days. Let us sit together on this block of stone; voices carry after evening’s fallen. Frankly, I don’t think you should go back home tonight; old habits die hard, and though Lysander holds Athens in the palm of his hand, if he wants to get rid of someone, he’ll do it in the Spartan way—secret visits by night.’

  I said that if Lysander started massacring every Athenian who hinted we weren’t in good physical shape he would have his hands full. Thucydides said, ‘But it wasn’t what you said—didn’t you remind him of someone? He’ll find out who you are—and my guess is that you’d meet with a mysterious accident, not because you stood up to him, but because of the cousin you so strongly resemble—the cousin you brought into the camp at Goat River.’

  ‘How would he know that?’ I asked—only to answer myself. ‘Tydeus and Adeimantus would have told him.’

  ‘Lysander’s afraid of your cousin,’ said Thucydides. ‘Every Spartan’s afraid of your cousin, they’ll grow increasingly afraid as time passes, when people here may dare to hope for a miracle again—from the man from whom they’ve always expected miracles. Don’t you realise they’ll think you’re his agent here?’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘That’s precisely the way they’ll think—though perhaps not so quickly. When they get round to it though, I’ll be wiped out fast enough—so I’ll revert to servile status, as you advise. Not, to be honest, that I think there’s much to be said for staying alive as far as I myself am concerned—it’s merely that I want to spite Lysander.’

  I stayed in Thucydides’ home for eight days. If a home is shut up for twenty years it’s bound to have an unlived-in atmosphere. Even if we had been in the best of spirits, camping out in those stale chilly rooms would have been depressing, and in the particular circumstances he, of course, instead of being wild with excitement at his return from exile, was heartbroken at the state of the City to which he had returned. I gathered that, in a way, things were worse for him than for the rest of us, because the Spartans, like the Syracusans ten years before, made a fuss of him and expected him to gloat. Expecting Thucydides to gloat over the ruin of Athens! He said once, ‘There remains only one road to sanity, to think and talk of every disaster happening to us as if it had ha
ppened to our ancestors.’

  Feeling as he did, the constant loud self-congratulation of the destroyers of Athens was torture to him, yet he forced himself to go out and about, saying, if anyone queried his movements, that everything was material for his history. His real reason was shown clearly enough in the way he had saved me; Lysander or his hangers-on would discuss their plans before him. ‘There, Thucydides,’ Lysander would say, grinning, after giving orders of a certain kind. ‘Another of the swine who kept you out of Athens for years is going to feel very sorry for himself.’

  Only, if Thucydides could manage it, the swine—whoever he might be—had warning.

  I don’t know where the others took refuge; I was the only person he dared take into his home. An extra slave might escape notice, but a dozen would be both ostentatious and curious in the household of one so long an exile. Admittedly, he had owned gold mines in Thrace, but hadn’t had access to them for years. As a matter of fact, since the slaves he did have were Thracians and I had sufficient height to be a northerner, our original idea was that we would dye my hair red, and I would be a Thracian too. Tecmessa did the dyeing—she, I should explain, had been brought after dark to Thucydides’ house the day after I had arrived—but though the dye took nicely, both she and Thucydides, after one look, shook their heads decisively. ‘No!’ said Thucydides. ‘Too dangerous.’

  Tecmessa’s comment was more illuminating. ‘With your hair red, you’re the image of your cousin,’ she said. Then she began to wash out the dye as quickly as she could.

  For the first few days I was safe enough in Thucydides’ house. Athenian survivors of the siege were not going in for social activities; the Spartans, of course, simply didn’t know what a social activity outside a mess could be, and Thucydides’ slaves, Thracians, spoke little comprehensible Greek, and were as faithful as dogs. But then no place in Athens was safe, for the Spartans gave supreme power to Critias.

  Thucydides realised the danger from the first, though I did not, but, as he remarked, he had met Critias more recently than I had. He was my cousin’s age and had sought my cousin’s company, even though Alcibiades never paid the slightest attention to him, so that he had been accused with my cousin at the time of the Hermae mutilations. However, he had been lucky—he had never been formally charged. It was Athens’ bad luck that he had never been sent to Syracuse.

  I had vague memories of a sallow-faced fellow, with light eyes and a metallic voice, who had hung around Socrates, too, for a time, because this was also considered the smart thing to do. Not that Socrates had shown much more gratification than my cousin had done; Critias did not want to learn to think, he simply wanted facility in scoring off people. What had really finished the acquaintanceship was Critias’ atheism; there were no gods, he jeered, they were only an invention of governments to make subjects law-abiding.

  He had been exiled some years before Goat River—and it had been in Thessaly that Thucydides had met him, for only a matter of minutes it so happened, but for long enough to realise that pride and fury had turned him into something of a madman, raging murderously against the scum who had dared exile him from Athens. Thucydides, in fact, had been so unpleasantly struck by him that he had set down his impressions that very night, and the hurried scrawl he showed me now—’Resentful, bloodthirsty, part-insane, but cruel from policy as well as from inclination. His dream is to make himself master of Athens, and he will strike down any man who might challenge his position. Chief of them is Alcibiades.’

  ‘And those who’re connected with Alcibiades,’ commented Thucydides now, as he brought news that the Spartans had handed over the internal government of the City to thirty men, Critias being most prominent.

  ‘I can’t endanger you,’ I said. ‘They won’t stay on the Acropolis, as the Spartans do—they’ll come into your home. I’ll go down to Piraeus—my family have friends there—or to the country.’

  ‘You’ll be followed,’ said Thucydides. ‘No, I think it’s time I paid a visit to Thebes, taking a couple of slaves with me, of course.’

  Critias, though rather hurt that any historian would willingly absent himself from the spectacle of Critias making history, agreed easily enough to the visit. My idea is that, though Thucydides didn’t say much, even he could not hide the expression in his eyes all the time—and even a Critias could not have liked being looked at in that way. Later on, I think, he would have translated dislike into violent action, but in the first days of his return to Athens he was still posing a little, and since he talked so loudly about the wrongs of exiles, he could not very well add to their injuries—yet.

  Thucydides said that once we had reached Theban territory, I could go where I wished. I didn’t, of course, want to stay in Thebes—to get to the cursed place we had to pass what had been Plataea. In fact I stayed there for only three days before deciding I would make for Corinth, and, after that, for friendly Argos. Those three days were very odd ones; I walked about the streets in my slave’s clothes, but my thin face and haunted eyes must have given me away because one hulking Theban came up to me and muttered, ‘We fought on the wrong side—and we know it now,’ and when I looked at him in sick hatred he said hurriedly, ‘I hope the day will come when Thebans and Athenians will stand shield and shield together against the real enemy.’

  I could not reply. I wanted to kill him, shouting all the time as I choked the life out of his bull neck, ‘And I expect you were one of those who wanted us wiped off the face of the earth—and what about Plataea?’

  Luckily, he turned away in some embarrassment before I could start—and he was not the only one. A fellow I did believe was an elderly man, a shepherd down from Cithaeron to deal with some property matter. He said, ‘Those that voted to finish you, they were the people in power, not the ordinary folk, and if Sparta’s ever sorry she left one brick of Athens standing on another—well, she’ll have Thebes to reckon with.’

  ‘That’s just about all that’s left,’ I said, ‘one brick standing on another,’ and began to laugh. He took me into a wineshop and bought me a drink, told me that if ever I needed shelter to come to him. I said I would.

  Thucydides, when I reported all this in our lodging, said he was not surprised. He, too, had heard much the same as I.

  ‘Kill Hector by all means,’ I said, ‘but don’t drag the corpse about too much. I can’t stand much more of Thebes; I think I’ll go tomorrow.’

  Before I finally left, however, I had another unpleasant experience. I was on my way back to our lodgings after arranging for a guide, and saw before me strolling down the street a rather lumpish Theban in uniform and a lanky red-head who was armed, as it were, with a smug expression of invincible virtue. Well, I have no objection to virtue, even such self-conscious stuff aired in so precise a voice; what I did object to was the fact that the precise voice was undeniably Athenian.

  Still, being a humble slave, it was not for me to seize the redhead by the scruff of his long and scraggy neck and ask him what the devil he, an Athenian, meant by staring at a Theban as if he saw the gods walking the earth again; I might, however, ask a passer-by the name of his companion. Proxenus, I was told. That was his friend, the Athenian Xenophon with him—they were both very fond of philosophy. If Redhead had known what was passing in my brain, he would have needed all his philosophy to sustain the shock.

  I went back to Thucydides, to tell him I’d arranged about a guide, but instead began growling about Redhead. He said with a smile, ‘My dear fellow, you’ve just missed him; he came to see me.’

  ‘Did he, then! Why the honour, sir?’

  It was the only occasion I have ever seen Thucydides really amused. ‘He’s a young man in something of a dilemma,’ he said. ‘He can’t decide whether he’ll be a great historian or a great philosopher. He’s listened to Socrates a fair amount, but, for all his stout assertions that he understands Socrates as no one else does, I think he’s rather baffled. So he’s decided, since I’m in Thebes, to make my acquaintance and—’r />
  ‘And pick your brains, sir?’ I asked, glaring.

  ‘Not quite,’ said Thucydides precisely, ‘although he did hint more than once that I was ageing rapidly, and wouldn’t it be better that the pen should drop from my venerable grasp?’

  ‘Into his hot, greedy little paw? I wish I’d been here.’

  ‘I’m very glad you weren’t,’ retorted Thucydides. ‘His views on democracy are not yours. He believes the rule of the Thirty is the best thing that ever happened to Athens.’

  ‘What’s he doing here, then?’

  ‘He’s constantly coming here—he has a friend called Proxenus to whom he’s devoted. The odd thing is that though his conversation abounded in anecdotes of an autobiographical nature he never explained how this great friendship came about.’

  I suddenly laughed—and felt better than I had for days, for months. ‘You don’t like him, do you?’ I enquired respectfully.

  Thucydides said with sudden wrath, ‘I detest mock modesty, Lycius, and of that Xenophon’s the personification. For two hours I was subjected to interminable anecdotes, all about other people to start with, Xenophon himself lurking coyly at the side of the stage, and suddenly—invariably—an emergency would arise and he would take control.’

  ‘All the time? Surely there haven’t been enough emergencies in his short life to take up two hours?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Thucydides, ‘he also likes talking about his dreams.’

  ‘He sounds all kinds of an old woman,’ I said, then dismissed Xenophon from my thoughts. ‘Well, sir,’ I continued, ‘I’ve arranged about a guide.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘A nice old fellow—a shepherd who bought me a drink the other day. He’ll take me back with him to his pasture land—it’s so high it marches alongside Corinthian territory on the upper slopes of Cithaeron and he’ll pass me on to a Corinthian shepherd who’s a friend of his. I know it sounds like the beginning of the story of Oedipus—though in reverse—but I can’t think of a more unobtrusive method, can you?’