The Road to Sardis

by Stephanie Plowman

  In due course I arrived in Crete in a suitably bedraggled way, got passage on an Athenian-bound ship. I didn’t trumpet my ‘misfortunes’ abroad—I simply told them as a secret to a sailor whose face looked sympathetic. Sailors being a sentimental lot, the tale spread rapidly, went up from Piraeus before me like a forest fire. I had barely time to get home and bury my money in a safe spot before the visits of condolence began.

  I found that Ariston, who had reached Thessaly, had actually been approached by one of Cyrus’ agents. He had haughtily turned him down, but was willing to have second thoughts.

  We arranged to meet in Ephesus, and now, once again, I made preparations to leave Athens.

  49

  I come to Sardis

  And so I came to the last stage of my journey to Sardis. I had planned to spend the evening quietly at home, going aboard soon after dawn, but it did not turn out that way. In the afternoon I had gone down to Piraeus to have a last word with the captain of the ship in which I would sail; coming back along the quay, I collided with an oldish man who was wandering about in a stupefied way I would have put down to drunkenness if there had been any reek of wine about him. So I began asking him if he were well just as he began apologising for his stupidity, and then in the next breath he explained the reason for it.

  ‘I’ve been out of Athens for five years,’ he said. ‘At Samos, and other places. I knew, of course, what had happened, but . . .’

  ‘It’s not so bad now,’ I said, trying to cheer him. ‘People’s faces have filled out, and they’ve cleared up a lot of the mess here in Piraeus—we wrecked rather a lot of it, fighting our way in—but . . .’

  ‘So you were one of Thrasybulus’ followers?’ he said. ‘I’m honoured to know you. Will you tell me your name? Lycius, son of Polystratus? My pleasure is doubled; I know what you did in Sicily. What you must think of my weakness—’

  I told him I knew how he felt; I had seen them pulling down the Long Walls, but was never really prepared for the shock of the sea-approach. ‘And it’s not only the fact that the Walls have gone,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he muttered. ‘It’s the emptiness—ships gone, people gone—it’s half-dead. I keep seeing it as it used to be. It just—hit me.’

  I did not like the idea of the poor old fellow, in his state, being left alone; so I offered to go with him to his home. He accepted eagerly, and so, a little later, he was being greeted and I was being thanked by his elder brother, Timocles, a sturdy sixty-year-old straight out of a comedy by Aristophanes. They insisted I should dine with them and treated me to a feast—red mullet, quail, pears and almonds from Naxos; I ate heartily but Timocles’ brother had no appetite at all. Finally he began to say wretchedly that the contrast between the City now, and as he remembered her, was so great—then broke off helplessly.

  Timocles put down his winecup, his face twisting in sudden misery. ‘Yes,’ he said heavily. ‘Impossible to recognise her in these deserted streets, the empty harbour. We’re a ruined state now, brother—no navy, no colonies, no tribute—and,’ he ended in a whisper, ‘no hope.’

  ‘If the Long Walls were rebuilt, we could hope again,’ I said.

  ‘Go on hoping,’ said Timocles; ‘I’m glad young men can still hope. I can’t. I wish I could—hoping means thinking you’ve some kind of a future, but I can’t see any future for Athens. We can only sit remembering the past, and wondering why all this happened.’

  I drew a deep breath. ‘It happened because Pericles died too soon,’ I said. ‘It happened because the plague came, because Nicias commanded at Syracuse, because we lost at Goat River.’

  ‘I don’t see it like that,’ said Timocles slowly. ‘What you’ve mentioned are just the sores festering on the body of a sick man, signs that something’s desperately wrong, not the disease itself. And it’s not merely a question of why did we lose—why did the Spartans win?’

  ‘Because the swine sold out Ionia to the Persians!’ I said bitterly, but he countered gravely, ‘You can’t hate the Spartans more than I do, but I say they won because they’re religious fellows sticking to the old god-fearing ways. They don’t have young puppies swaggering around noisier than green laurel-wood on the fire, with no reverence for God and man because of the blasphemous rubbish put into their empty heads by an old rascal out to corrupt—’

  Feeling rather sick, I said, ‘Not Socrates?’

  But he didn’t hear me; he was storming on: ‘—destroying faith in our gods. You know as well as I do that when the gods are angry, they take revenge, and that’s what has happened to Athens, they’ve destroyed her because she’s allowed Socrates to go on spreading blasphemy year after year. Don’t try to persuade me that the pattern of it all isn’t damnably clear—the gods ruined us because we allowed this fellow to attack them—and, very fittingly, they saw to it that we were destroyed by his favourite pupils, one betraying us, then bringing the Spartans to Decelea and ruining our countryside, and the other, may his soul rot, bringing to the City the worst tyranny she’s ever known. Both of them got their ideas from that ugly old scoundrel—and what’s the latest news in the market-place today? That another of his dear boys, that red-headed fellow who survived the rest of Critias’ gang, more’s the pity, has gone off with a Theban, one of the swine who wanted to make sheep-pasture of the City, to fight for the dirty barbarian who gave the Spartans the money to build their fleets.’

  The astonishment on my face was startling enough to halt even his diatribe. ‘Xenophon has gone to fight for Cyrus?’ I asked.

  ‘He went yesterday. I’m not crying my eyes out because he’s gone, but it all adds up to—’

  I said carefully, ‘Sir, serving in Cyrus’ armies doesn’t always mean disloyalty to the City, I hope. The future I planned has been swallowed up in a shipwreck, my property outside the City was left a desert by the Spartans, so I myself may very well go to fight for Cyrus to get a little capital to start over again—and God knows I don’t love him or his Spartan friends!’

  Timocles turned on me then a face all kindliness, quick sympathy—all the feelings that had made up the man before defeat and starvation and suffering had driven them out to make room only for bitterness.

  ‘There was no need for Lycius, son of Polystratus, to tell any man that he loves Athens,’ he said gently.

  Red-faced, I thanked him, then returned to the subject of Socrates. ‘I don’t believe for a moment that Socrates advised Xenophon to do this,’ I said. ‘Remember how he’s served the City—he fought magnificently at Potidaea, and he wouldn’t carry out Critias’ orders during the tyranny—’

  He was listening to me now with great restraint and courtesy, but he was not to be shaken in his belief. The best proof of a man’s teaching was the kind of pupils he turned out, and—

  Here he discovered that we had run short of wine, and though I protested I, for one, wanted no more, he insisted on bustling away to bring back a special amphora. Once his back was turned, his brother said to me in a low voice, ‘You must pardon his bitterness if you can. He had three sons, and I’ve never known a prouder and fonder father. But one boy died in Sicily, another was killed by Critias, trying to get out of Athens to join Thrasybulus and the rest of you, and the third who did run after Socrates a great deal, went completely to the bad—bad beyond all hope of redemption.’

  ‘Socrates wasn’t responsible for that!’ I flashed.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ he said eagerly, ‘but my poor brother can’t think very clearly on the subject, and I, for one, can’t wholly blame him. But for heaven’s sake let’s change the subject before he comes back—what shall we talk about?’

  When Timocles returned, we were talking of the high price of farming implements, but even indignation at the thought of having to pay five drachmae for a sickle could not keep him for long from the subject that had become an obsession with him. His brother tried to soothe him with the thought that at least Socrates was an old man, Athens would not have to put up with him much longer
; he only succeeded in inciting Timocles to fresh fury. ‘Why in the devil should he be allowed to die peacefully in his own home, dirty as a pigsty though it is, when better men have died miserably far from home because of his teaching and pupils? And are we going to let him go on spreading his poison so that our grandsons will be ruined as their fathers were?’

  Yet when I gave up trying to reason with him, and rose to go, he said goodbye to me with real dignity, added in a low voice as he ushered me out that he’d count it a privilege if I’d let him help me in any way, that I mustn’t mind the ranting of an old man—hadn’t Euripides, whose work, which he’d once disliked very much, he was now beginning to appreciate, said that an old man was nothing but a voice and a shadow?

  But I was so afraid that instead of returning home I made my way there and then to the poky little house on the other side of the City, and, for a wonder, found Socrates in, and alone.

  ‘Why, Lycius,’ he said, smiling. ‘I haven’t seen much of you in the last few months.’

  I said rather sulkily I had got tired of falling over Xenophon. What was wrong with Xenophon, he wanted to know. I said a little of Xenophon went a very long way with me, because he was so pro-Spartan, and because he kept sneering in a gentlemanly way at democracy.

  ‘Well, he’s gone now,’ said Socrates in an uncharacteristically expressionless voice.

  ‘Socrates,’ I said, ‘do you approve of what he’s doing?’

  He was looking very old. He said, ‘I told him to go to Delphi to ask the advice of the god; the stupid fellow when he got there didn’t ask whether he should go or not—he merely asked which gods would best protect him.’

  ‘Trust him!’ I said. ‘Once he’s made up his powerful mind, no—wait a moment though. Had your voice spoken to make you tell him to go Delphi?’

  Socrates said with complete matter-of-factness, ‘I suddenly knew one evening—at about this time—that if he went I shouldn’t see him again.’

  Ordinarily, hearing this would not have depressed me at all; in the circumstances, however, it was not particularly cheerful hearing. I asked cautiously if it were the same kind of feeling he had had before the sailing of the Expedition to Syracuse; he shook his head. I took a deep breath and told him that I too was joining Xenophon.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I was told as much the other day. They said you were driven to it by lack of money.’

  I could not lie to Socrates. I said rather awkwardly that there were less selfish reasons too, but I could not talk of them. ‘Anyhow,’ I ended aggressively, because I felt wretched since I could not be altogether frank, ‘I’m not hurting anyone by going—save myself, perhaps.’

  ‘And who is Xenophon hurting?’

  ‘I don’t know what his excuse is for going off with a Theban to fight for Cyrus, but the action’s stinking in the nostrils of some people, and—oh, Socrates, won’t there ever be a time when your pupils aren’t getting you blamed for what they do?’

  ‘My dear boy, what exactly are you trying to say?’

  I burst out, ‘For God’s sake don’t forget the bitter old men, who can’t work for the future, who can only think of the past.’

  He said, ‘Do you think I never remember the past, Lycius?’

  ‘No, but you’ve made yourself do as Thucydides told me once one should do—you have taught yourself to think and talk of every disaster happening to us as if it had happened to our ancestors. I said to him that there’s no time like the time you have to endure yourself; that though you tried to think, “Be detached, this is historical,” your heart keeps crying, “No, it’s personal.” But he persisted that it’s the only way to keep sane, as he and you are sane, but others are a little mad, I think.’ And suddenly I shivered, and began to pour out my real cause for coming to him.

  He heard me out very quietly, and then he said, ‘I’m in no real danger, Lycius; you must believe that. If unwittingly I’ve made enemies, haven’t I friends, too? And though I daresay I’ve never followed a policy of peace at any price, admit I don’t court danger! Do you really think of me as a fanatic?’

  I met the friendly, ironical smile, and had to smile too; no, he was the least fanatical man in the world.

  ‘Yet do remember the unhappy old men looking for a scapegoat’, I said, but at that he stopped smiling. ‘No,’ he said gravely, ‘I can’t promise to do that. There are others who occupy all my thoughts.’

  ‘My generation?’ I asked wryly, adding, ‘What’s left of it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Socrates, very quietly, ‘I find you infinitely more important than the people who keep dwelling on the period before it all began. In a way you were helped by being born at that particular time, because you took for granted certain things older people found quite unbearable—Spartan armies in Attica were a kind of inevitable evil, just as, God pity us, you thought it a natural, normal state of affairs that people kept going away, getting killed. You never knew the aching misery of the contrast between peace and war. But there were dreadful disadvantages too. You boys, you boys of the generation that died at Syracuse, you, the very young, had always to be very old. No gradual growth from boyhood to manhood for you—you were forced from childhood overnight. What I always found so heartbreaking was that you were never very hopeful.’

  ‘We didn’t know what to hope for,’ I said, trying to think back. ‘I know people used to think us a pretty hardened lot—cocksure, too. If only they’d realised how much we’d have given for guidance, only it nearly always turned out that when you wanted advice the person you’d naturally turn to for help was away with the fleet, or keeping an eye on corn shipments at Sestos or on garrison duty at Oenoe.’ I grinned suddenly. ‘You know, although you did so much to make us think for ourselves, we’d have had to do it in any case, whether people like it or not!’ After a moment I added, ‘The uncertainty of everything was worst of all.’

  ‘Euripides knew that,’ Socrates asserted gravely, and he quoted from the Helen, which I never saw:

  ‘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.’

  He repeated it again in a whisper when, some hours later, he said goodbye to me at the quayside. We had sat up talking until dawn, and then Socrates had risen, to stand facing the light, and, hands lifted, had prayed.

  ‘O great and glorious Apollo, grant that no words spoken or heard this night may be harmful, and that each of us, going his separate way, may ever have thy shield before him.’

  After this there was little to say, although, as I embraced him before going aboard the ship, I begged him once again to be careful.

  ‘Lycius, I’m not important!’ he said, laughingly.

  ‘You’ve often called yourself a gadfly,’ I said. ‘A gadfly’s not very important, but a great beast can lash out at it. If you won’t consider yourself, think of others—your friends, the City that needs you.’

  He was still smiling. ‘I love you, Lycius, and I love Athens, but I’m not only a friend and a citizen—I’m also a servant, a soldier. And my duty to God must come first.’

  They were calling to me from the ship. I had to run for it—just as well, because otherwise the tough mercenary would have been bawling like a baby, partly from sheer exasperation, of course, but chiefly for other reasons. There he stood, the shortlegged, stocky figure, grotesquely ugly, the only link Athens still held with my childhood and youth. I could hear him calling farewell to me. It would not have been so bad saying goodbye in a crowd, but there were not many people about as yet. He looked old and tired and very alone.

  I too was tired, and the light as yet was not very good, and being near to weeping does not clear the sight. For a moment I could have sworn Euripides was there, though whether he was Socrates or merely stood behind him I do not know. It was the illusion of only a moment, but it shook me so badly th
at when, an hour or so later, I wrapped myself in my cloak in a quiet part of the deck to get some much-needed sleep, I had a recurrence of the old dream that has never ceased to torment me, the dream that I had returned, the dashing young hero, in time to swing opinion in Euripides’ favour. It was more muddled than usual, because I seemed to have got a large body of citizens together to harangue them on the subject, but I was not talking in my own voice, I was talking with Alcibiades’ lisp. Alcibiades did not need his own voice any longer, because he was lying dead before me dressed as a woman; but, no, he was not dead, he was laughing and saying he was dressed like this because he was acting in that comedy by Aristophanes attacking Socrates—

  ‘But his play where a man was disguised as a woman wasn’t The Clouds—in any case, they’re not reviving that, are they?’ I gabbled in panic. ‘It’s the nearest thing to a failure he ever had—’

  But already the chorus was filing out, chanting:

  ‘Oh, fool, fool, fool, how much I must have been,

  To cast away the gods for Socrates—’

  ‘It’s all wrong!’ I shouted at them. ‘In the first place, that’s not a chorus—it’s one of the speeches of the main character. In the second place, it comes at the end, not at the beginning. In the third, you’re not properly dressed—no garlands—’

  They were all in mourning.

  They went on chanting:

  ‘Come and destroy that filthy Chaerophon,

  And Socrates, for they’ve deceived us both.’

  Euripides was the leader of the chorus. He said, ‘Mine were the only plays he’d watch, he told me once. Didn’t the old fool ever notice the old men in my plays, old men made bitter by helplessness, rousing themselves to violent action to prove themselves more than mere voices and shadows?’