The Road to Sardis

by Stephanie Plowman

  Thucydides agreed. ‘It may sound legendary, but it’s also practical,’ he said. ‘When do you start?’

  ‘At dawn tomorrow, but I go to his lodgings tonight.’

  ‘Then I’ll start out for Athens this afternoon.’

  ‘This afternoon? Why not wait until tomorrow morning?’

  ‘My dear Lycius, I don’t find the atmosphere of Thebes any more congenial than you do; this newly manifested goodwill sticks in my throat.’

  ‘Then I’ll come part of the way with you,’ I said.

  ‘Not too far,’ he said warningly.

  ‘No, sir—just as far as where Plataea stood. I’ll be safe enough—no Spartans, however thickskinned, go there after dark.’

  It was only while we were riding up the long slope that I summoned the courage to ask him why he had risked so much for me—I knew, I said awkwardly, how much he’d helped our people in Sicily, but this had been so dangerous, so extraordinary—

  ‘Dangerous perhaps, but not extraordinary,’ came the oddly accented voice out of the gathering gloom. ‘Wasn’t your uncle my best friend? At the beginning of my soldiering, I served alongside him in Aetolia—and I was at no great distance from him—as far as mere miles go—at the end, in Sicily.’ In a sudden outburst of passionate grief, he exclaimed, ‘Think of it, there he lay, my best friend, in the prison at Syracuse, like a beast waiting for the butcher, no fear, no hope, only helpless patience. They told me he’d tried to commit suicide—you see, they thought I’d exult at Athenian misfortunes—and a jingle started going through my mind, a jingle from a comedy by Aristophanes.’

  ‘I know,’ I said under my breath. ‘I was remembering it too. So did he.’

  But, not hearing me, he hurried on. ‘I rarely, if ever, attended the comedies, you know, but in that particular year, twenty years ago, I did go. My friends urged me, because they were proposing me for general at the elections, and they thought the people would think me less of a cold fish if I turned up to see the comedies.’

  ‘I know,’ I said again. ‘My uncle took me, and we sat near you, and you—you rather apologised for your presence.’

  This time he heard me. ‘Yes, I remember now,’ he said. ‘You were—how old? Eleven? Twelve?’

  He said nothing for a time after that, and I did not choose to break the silence. At last he resumed, ‘That play, The Knights, was the last I ever saw in Athens, for the next year saw the beginning of my exile. Because it was my last visit to the theatre, no detail of it ever left my memory, and it haunted me—dreadfully—in that autumn nine years ago. So I did what I could, what I was to do later in the case of the slaves—I approached the Syracusan authorities as an historian, asking for permission to question Demosthenes before he was put to death. The request did not seem extraordinary to them; I don’t think they really believed in the historian pose at any time, but, by God, they believed in the gloating! So I saw your uncle again, Lycius. He was alive—just—but he recognised me and told me he had enough strength to use the knife I gave him. He spoke of you; he said he thought you’d got away—I didn’t dream any more than he did what had happened. If either of us had known, he’d have asked me to do what I could for you—and I’d have done it.’

  After that there seemed little to talk about. Each of us remained lost in thought—yet not uncompanionably so—until with a sense of shock, I realised I must soon take my leave. I said abruptly that I would send messages to Athens—if it were safe for him to receive them, of course—but he interrupted me in one of the saddest voices I have ever heard.

  ‘Let me know what happens,’ he said. ‘Tell me if there is anything I can do to help, but don’t send the message to Athens. I shall be going north—to Thessaly or Macedonia.”

  ‘Not staying in Athens?’ I stammered. ‘After so long?’

  He said in a return to his usual detached way, ‘I think the fact that it’s been so long is the real reason for my leaving. Didn’t you yourself tell me once that you and the other men who came back from Syracuse found Athens almost unendurable—after only a few years?’

  ‘We felt like fish out of water,’ I agreed.

  ‘I’ve come back after twenty,’ said Thucydides, and left it at that.

  45

  News out of Phrygia

  By the Cithaeron route I came eventually to Corinth. Even if I had known nothing of Corinth’s record towards Athens, I hope natural good taste would have made me loathe the place—all opulence and immoderate display.

  Why, then, did I stay for weeks in this unpleasant, money-mad city instead of going on to Argos? Not because Corinthians, knowing from my grey face that I was a survivor of the siege of Athens, came waddling up to me to say with uneasy malice, ‘Sparta proclaiming Greek freedom!’ No, I did not care—yet—for Corinthian reactions; let them sweat that extra fat off wondering in consternation exactly what they had conjured up from the Peloponnese. I stayed on in Corinth for one reason only—because from its towering mountain I could see the mountains of Arcadia and Parnassus, Helicon, and, on a clear day, our Acropolis and the Parthenon.

  I made the climb every day, fine weather or foul, and I never stopped being childish when I reached the summit. I would not let myself look at once towards—well, let us say familiar ground. I would stand looking instead to the mountains of the northern shore of the Gulf, to snow-capped Helicon and Parnassus, but at last I would let my eyes do what my heart bade them, and there was Aegina and Salamis, and there were the hills about Athens, and the great rock with the temple of the Maiden that was a barracks for Spartans—and I would always end by wishing I had died at Syracuse.

  Whenever smuggled letters came for me, I would save them to be read on the mountain top. It was there I heard that Thucydides had, indeed, quitted Athens, just in time to escape the worst terror of Critias’ rule. Critias was taking revenge for a hundred imagined slights—and he was also striking down anyone who might be a possible leader of opposition.

  Ariston got out of Athens by night, and eventually turned up at Corinth. He arrived one morning, exhausted, shocked, half-starved but above all, furiously angry. ‘I should have resented having my throat cut by Gylippus,’ he said murderously, ‘and I shouldn’t relish having it slit by Lysander’s gentle hands, but, by God, to be murdered by a spindle-shanked lunatic like Critias!’

  I said he was not to talk yet. He slept until mid-afternoon (but not easily, he struggled and muttered in nightmare after nightmare) then ate, and we climbed the citadel in the late afternoon and eventually stood at the top. Ariston looked down his nose and said, ‘Not as fine as the view from Sunium, but quite good as a bird’s eye view. That’s Argolis over there, I suppose—and Arcadia beyond—’

  ‘You’re looking in the wrong direction.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ he said after a moment. ‘That—that twinkling thing’s the Acropolis. Perhaps it would have been better if they’d turned it into sheep pasture after all. Better for holy Troy to be destroyed with clean fire than to have a Critias inflicted on her.’

  ‘He’s mad,’ I said. ‘You said so yourself. He can’t infect Athens.’

  ‘No,’ said Ariston, ‘but from the way he’s going on there soon won’t be anybody left who has brains or courage or breeding or money. The people, by respecting you, pass sentence of death on you. Possessing money’s just as dangerous—it’s not simply that Critias and his cronies want it for themselves, they have to lay hands on all they can. There’s that Spartan garrison to keep sweet. And then there’s another motive, and in a way it’s even worse than murder and theft.’

  I said I could not imagine anything worse. He dragged his eyes away from contemplation of the distant Acropolis and said energetically, ‘There is, you know! They’re trying to get decent people involved in what they’re doing; when they send their thugs to make an arrest they like to have with them a citizen or two of decent character—forced into it, of course, by threats that if they don’t co-operate, their own names will go down on Critias’ list. They kill
two birds with one stone this way—poor devils not very good at thinking things out will believe the decent fellows approve of what’s being done, and the decent fellows, knowing this, will think their only hope of safety rests with the Thirty now.’

  I begged his pardon, agreed it was the most damnable thing I had ever heard of. Apprehensively I asked if any of our friends had been implicated in this way.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They tried to get Socrates.’

  ‘Socrates!’ For a moment my heart stood still, then it began to pound with redoubled vigour. ‘But he’s an old man now,’ I said. ‘Why send an old man to make an arrest? It’s a—an atrocity!’

  Ariston laughed in my face. ‘Sorry!’ he said. ‘But if you’d lived in Athens for the past month or so, the word atrocity wouldn’t carry much weight. Old or not, he’s known throughout Greece—if the Thirty could get people to believe Socrates approved of his pupil’s carryings on—’

  ‘Pupil? Socrates threw him out of his class in double quick time!’

  ‘How many people know that? The Thirty sent for Socrates and four others, and told them they were to go off and arrest Leon of Salamis! They chose the one victim as deliberately as they chose the other, of course—Leon’s one of the most respected men in Athens.’

  ‘I know, his home wasn’t far from ours. What did Socrates do?’

  ‘He refused to go. The other four were frightened into making the arrest, but he turned on his heel and went home.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, the odd thing is, he’s still alive. Everybody expected him to be sharing the cup of hemlock with Leon, but he’s been left alone. There’s a young cousin of Critias nicknamed Plato—a fellow of about twenty-four with a rather bulging forehead—who’s with Socrates a lot these days. Most people think he got him off by begging for his life.’

  Two days later we learned that our property had been confiscated in our absence, and decrees of exile had also been passed against us. The news did not surprise us, but the way in which we were given it did. A fat, over-dressed citizen of Corinth sidled up to us and asked us to follow him into a shop that assuredly sold the most overpowering perfumes in Greece. We must have looked horribly out of place; however, when the shop’s owner swept forward to evict the intruding scarecrows, a frown from what was obviously his best customer checked him in midstride, and from the brief conversation that followed, he discreetly absented himself.

  The Corinthian said hurriedly, ‘You must leave the city quickly. Tomorrow it will be generally known that the Spartans have ordered their allies to hand back all refugees. Our government may decide to disobey, but I can’t be sure—we’re too close to Sparta.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ariston pleasantly, ‘being hell-bent on finishing us off, you left them a clear field, didn’t you?’

  ‘—not like Thebes, you’ll be safe enough in Thebes,’ rushed on the Corinthian, not heeding him.

  Here, to our amazement, he clapped his hands and an elderly man came in from the back regions where he’d been talking with the proprietor, and silently handed over a large bag of money. This—incredibly—his master pressed into my hand.

  ‘Stay with my man here,’ he said. ‘He’ll see about a disguise for you, get you out of the city at dusk. I’ll have horses waiting for you.’

  So we spent the last hours of our stay in Corinth incurring headaches from too many musky perfumes at too close quarters, Ariston furious because he felt himself insulted by the gift of money—all golden pieces too, I discovered. I told him not to be a fool; if a fat Corinthian wanted to salve his conscience in a way so advantageous to us, well and good, even if the reason was a mystery.

  I only learned that reason when, with the coming of darkness, we left Corinth. Our fat friend had returned, saying he would escort us until we were clear of Corinthian territory; no one, he implied, would dare challenge anyone lucky enough to be in his company. In a low voice he added something to his agent, who pushed his horse up alongside Ariston’s and proceeded to lead the way, chatting continuously. At the rear came his master and myself, his master suddenly abusing Lysander violently. There was, he said passionately, no limit to that scoundrel’s disgusting behaviour—imagine, he’d gone back to Sparta laden down with spoils—all gained by the joint exertions of the allies, who therefore should have shared in the proceeds.

  ‘Quite,’ I said gravely, omitting to remark that the spoils in question had come from Athens.

  ‘We and the Thebans put in formal claims; I was our delegate on this occasion. And do you know, my dear sir, the scoundrel turned on us and bawled at us as if we were a couple of his helots! Never in my life have I been addressed in such a way. “You pot-bellied old fool,” he said, “if I’m in a good mood when I erect my statue at Delphi, I’ll make mention of the names of the allies under my own, but honour’s the most you can hope for in the way of profit!” ’

  Which, I thought, explained the help being given us anything to hurt Lysander now.

  ‘No one’s a good word to say about the brute!’ continued the Corinthian vehemently.

  ‘Except Cyrus,’ I said, and laughed.

  ‘Cyrus!’ he said, in such a shocked voice that I reined in my horse, without knowing why.

  ‘Yes, Cyrus,’ I said in some astonishment. ‘He’ll do anything for Lysander didn’t you know?’

  It was too dark now to see his face; his shaking voice revealed something, but I was stupid.

  ‘Haven’t you heard then?’ he said in a whisper.

  ‘Heard what? Something to do with Cyrus? Something to do with Cyrus doing anything for Lysander? I don’t understand.’

  I understood even less of the extraordinary rigmarole that poured out then. Yes, he would have been prepared to help anyone Lysander didn’t like because Lysander had behaved so insufferably towards him, but he wouldn’t have taken such risks if his conscience hadn’t been troubled for some time now because he had rather overcharged. Granted the man was drunk, but one shouldn’t take advantage even of a drunken man to get him to pay such a price for horses.

  ‘You mean,’ I began, thinking my only connection with Corinth was through the grey thoroughbreds bought by my father thirty years before, possibly from this man, ‘that you cheated my father?’

  He gave a kind of stifled yelp. ‘I knew your father—yes!’ he said. ‘But never drunk! Who ever saw your father drunk? Besides, you’re not very much like your father, except in colouring—his isn’t the likeness that made me recognise you in the street, just after the news came in.’

  ‘What news?’ I demanded, grabbing his reins as well as my own. ‘All this talk of a likeness—is it something to do with my cousin, then?’

  ‘He said to me with that lisp of his when he paid over the money, “You old blackguard, if you’ve cheated me, I’ll see you’re haunted for the rest of your days.” I’ve often thought of it, and then, just when I’d heard the news, you came down from the mountain top, looking just like him; it gave my heart quite a turn, and when I recovered, I found out who you were and—’

  I was gripping his arm now. ‘What news?’ I muttered again.

  ‘He’s dead,’ he said. ‘I thought you knew.’

  ‘He can’t be,’ I whispered, more to myself than him. Impossible that my cousin should be dead. Impossible that I should hear of his death from a podgy, scared, superstitious Corinthian, middle-aged, breathless, with such a stupid voice. ‘There’s no style about it,’ I found myself thinking insanely. ‘The voice is wrong, the messenger’s wrong—you want a trained actor’s beautiful voice, and the lines should be written by Sophocles or Euripides.’

  They were both dead. Aristophanes had not written only about them in The Frogs. He had mentioned my cousin too. What had his Aeschylus ‘declaimed? That a lion’s whelp should not be brought up in the city, but if it were, people must learn to live with it. There’d been quite a lot of applause.

  I said with sudden calmness, ‘Lysander asked Cyrus to have him killed—that’s so, is
n’t it?—but the request had been passed on to Lysander from Critias because people in Athens were starting to whisper that Alcibiades would return and overthrow the Thirty.’

  Out of the darkness the voice that was all wrong for the lines it had to speak said he had heard that the common people of Athens had begun to murmur that if Alcibiades had been in Athens he would not let the Spartans swagger about on the Acropolis. If Alcibiades had been there, the swine would never have got into Athens because he had never been defeated, by land or by sea. Lysander, of course, feared for the Spartan hold on Asia Minor so long as he was alive.

  But I was not really listening. I was trying to convince myself that it should not have been such a shock—but for my stupidity I should have seen it coming only too clearly. Yet I had not, even when he had been expressly excluded by name from the list of exiles permitted to return—after all, I had said to myself, unless he was bent on suicide he would not want to return to Athens with a Spartan garrison on the Acropolis.

  In my crassness it had not occurred to me that it was not merely a question of Lysander and Critias not wanting him back in Athens—they did not want him in the land of the living at all.

  I suppose one of the reasons for my stupidity was the sheer inability—even now—to believe that he could be dead.

  Against the background of that awful shrill Corinthian voice going on and on, I tried to get a grip on myself. I wasn’t a fool simply because I couldn’t accept the fact of his death—I was a fool because I was not rejoicing in it. ‘More than any other man he was responsible for the sending of the Expedition to Sicily,’ I said carefully to myself, ‘and then, more than any man except Nicias he brought about its ruin. He brought Agis to Decelea. He caused the revolt in the Empire.’

  But as the Corinthian whined about a request from Critias to Lysander, an order from Lysander to the fawning Cyrus, I thought of a ringing laugh years before in a house of death, and a child peeping warily into a room brilliant with setting sun. I thought of my coming of age ceremony, and a secret meeting in Syracuse, and that last meeting just a year ago on the sunbaked bank of a sluggish river.