Achilles His Armour

by Peter Green

  The officer who had been dispatched with Archidamus’ orders now returned and said: ‘The camp is struck, sir. The army is ready to move. Shall I have your tent dismantled now?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Archidamus. ‘I am ready.’ He watched the officer marching away, his heavy studded boots making deep impressions in the soft ground. ‘I am ready,’ he repeated, almost to himself.

  An hour later the army had crossed the frontier.

  • • • • •

  Axiochus to Alcibiades: written in Athens.

  ‘I have felt for some time that I have been neglecting you in your exile. If you choose not to come back to Athens when you can, I have no doubt there is a good reason, which as usual I won’t inquire into. In any case, Athens is no place to be in at the moment. From the Piraeus to the Acropolis one can’t walk abroad without treading on some filthy countryman or his wife and brats. You’ve heard, I suppose, what Pericles has done. It’s sheer folly, of course. If your guardian had been anything but a sentimental idealist, he’d have drafted them abroad on active service or left them outside to shift for themselves. As it is, they’ve entirely paralysed the business of the City, and are doing nothing but stir up sedition against the Government. In this last, I must confess, I feel a certain sympathy with them.

  ‘Neither I nor any man of decent blood and breeding wanted this war. I don’t hold with vulgar imperialism. Expansion brings more responsibility than profit; and speaking for myself—you’re quite at liberty to call me an old reactionary if you like—I could wish to see the old days back again, when birth counted for more than money, and a civilised existence—for those who could appreciate it—more than power or glory. Pericles was at least a gentleman; but now he’s spread his pernicious ideas, every jumped-up tradesman thinks he can lead the State to victory and line his own pockets at the same time. However much I disapprove of the Olympian, to give him his due I don’t think he’s made anything personally out of his term of office. Though I shall be very surprised if someone doesn’t soon try to prove that he has. In particular, look out for a tanner called Cleon. If I had my way the fellow would have been jailed months ago.

  ‘He’s the centre of all the trouble. The devil of it is, that if Pericles dies—and he’s been looking dreadfully ill recently—the only man we have to put up against the tradesmen is Nicias.

  ‘Let us admit, then, that there’s no going back and the war has to be fought as well as it can be. No one’s satisfied even on that score. The Olympian seems to have lost his nerve completely. I never reckoned him a good general; but the events of this year are worse than I could have imagined.

  ‘Archidamus spent a surprising amount of time trying to capture Oenoe. That was a piece of luck for us. Most unexpected. It gave Pericles time to get his precious peasants inside the walls. Archidamus has been surprisingly dilatory over the whole campaign. But about the middle of May he brought his entire force almost under the walls of Athens. We could see the corn going up in flames, and hear their damned soldiers cutting down the olives. There was as near as not a riot in the City. Everyone was clamouring for the army to go out and fight. Even the army. The Olympian got them quiet somehow. He made one of his most plausible speeches. He said that trees would grow again after they’d been cut down, but not men. Someone in the crowd yelled out that a good olive took nearly as long to come to maturity as a man. But the Olympian won in the end.

  ‘Even so, everything was bearable compared to his latest effort. It happened only a day or two ago. You know the old custom of a public funeral for those who have fallen in the City’s service? He decided to have one this year. On what grounds I can’t think. It’s been the sort of season’s campaigning that one ought to keep quiet about rather than commemorate. I suppose that was why he devoted the bulk of his speech to a recital of all his most cherished ideals, everything he would like Athens to be, and which she mostly isn’t. It was a rather macabre occasion: chiefly because Pericles so obviously believed every word of what he was saying. As a speech it was magnificent, the best I ever remember him making. Did you ever hear the rumour, by the way, that Aspasia writes them for him? But to hear him going on about our versatility and manliness and addiction to the arts, while the army was snug inside the walls and you were kicking your heels outside Potidaea—the sheer unreality of it passed all belief. But everybody enjoyed themselves thoroughly, even the women, who were told at the end that their best virtue was to remain untalked of, whether for good or ill. Probably Aspasia having her little joke.

  ‘I still find time—in case this letter had led you to imagine me metamorphosed into a scholarly recluse—for more congenial amusements. There is always wine and a bed waiting for you whenever you come back.’ There was a postscript, scribbled across the foot of the roll: ‘Please destroy this when you have read it.’

  Now more than ever before Alcibiades longed to be back in Athens. For a time he stood in indecision. Then he shrugged his shoulders, picked up shield and spear, and walked out to relieve the night watch.

  Chapter 12

  All through the winter the swarming multitudes remained penned within the narrow walls of the City, living where and as they could. The rain drove down on their makeshift shelters, hissing and steaming in the braziers they lit to keep out the biting cold, till the air was thick with smoke and the stench of charcoal. Day after day the sky showed leaden and grey; the water scored channels through the alleys, and turned firm ground to a waste of mud. Clothes, bedding, the very supplies of corn became damp and mildewed; the gutters were choked with sodden filth and rubbish. Then with the coming of spring the rain ceased and the weather turned warmer, and a fine haze of steam rose from the earth and hung about the houses. In May, when what crops were left were struggling to fruition, Archidamus led his army across the Isthmus again. Skirting the walls of the city they turned south, burning and pillaging as they went; and the weary inhabitants watched them impotently from the watch-towers, as their glittering column drove a brown wedge of destruction across the plain. Then, within a week of their coming, without any warning, a deadlier enemy struck at the very heart of Athens.

  There had been epidemics of plague before, but this was different. It had started in the mountains of Ethiopia, so the rumour went: thence it had swept through Egypt, and had been brought from there to the Piraeus by sea. A surprised doctor, called to the bedside of a delirious sailor, had recognised the symptoms: the inflammation in the eyes, the hoarseness and sneezing, the fetid breath and sickness, the burning heat raging through the body. In fear and trembling he brought his news to the magistrates. The city must be evacuated at once, he told them. They dismissed him contemptuously. A week later both the sailor and he were dead; and of the magistrates who had interviewed him, two were desperately ill. It was too late now to take any action at all.

  The disease swept through the cramped hovels and crowded streets like a forest fire. Nearly all the surgeons died during the first onset from contact with infected cases; whole families perished alone in their houses for want of friends to venture near them, and lay for days unwept and unburied. Hysteria and depression gripped the survivors. For the first few days they crowded the temples in an attempt at intercession; but soon it became clear that pious and impious were doomed alike, and prayer was useless. The hand of Apollo, god of famine and plague, rested heavily on the City; and men remembered the old proverb which foretold that a Dorian war should come, and with it destruction. From that moment their mood changed; and the whole of Athens abandoned itself to a frantic and never-ending orgy. Drunkards stumbled among the dead, waving bottles and yelling bawdy songs; women surrendered to the first man they met in the street, neither knowing nor caring whether he were diseased or no. The vultures and buzzards that were normally to be seen circling above the Market or fighting over scraps of offal in the gutters had all vanished. The few that had pounced on these tainted bodies had died with them. All day and night the funeral pyres flared, and the mingled stench of burnt and decaying fle
sh hung like a pall over the city. The wind blew it to the Spartan camp, and deserters confirmed the fearful message it brought; and soon Archidamus, in fear for his men’s lives, moved on to the south, to the hill country around the silver-mines of Laurium.

  For days Pericles sat alone in his house, bereft alike of action and thought. This crowning blow seemed at first to have paralysed his faculties entirely. Of Aspasia he saw little. Regardless of decorum (though in this she had the example of the entire city before her) and of her own life, she spent day after day in the streets and encampments, comforting the dying and consoling their relatives, seeing that orphaned children were cared for and the many unclaimed bodies burnt and buried. For the sick neither she nor anyone could provide any help. At first Pericles had remonstrated with her for needlessly exposing herself. When she came in one evening, her hair loose, her face streaked with filth, her dress disordered and stained with sweat, he said:

  ‘What’s the use? These men are past saving. The disease must take its course. There’s nothing anyone can do: why should you throw away your own life?’

  She said wearily: ‘Because I feel responsible for what’s happening. I warned you months ago. I should have done more than warn. If these poor wretches had been left outside the walls, at least they would have had a chance to survive. Now they’re caught like rats in a trap.’

  ‘The people talk of the wrath of Dorian Apollo descending on us. I can almost believe such wild words now.’

  ‘Can you shuffle off the blame so easily? Is it a god who packed the City like a box, till disease and contagion were inevitable ‘

  ‘This could not have been foreseen,’ said Pericles.

  Aspasia wiped her forehead. ‘God knows I can’t find it in my heart to blame you,’ she said. ‘No man ever thinks of such things until they strike him. And then . . . he blames the gods.’ In the fading light she looked old and tired. ‘If you can’t do anything else, you must go on with the war. You must give the people something to think about, to hold on to.’ She took him by the sleeve and led him to the window. In the fading light the flames were beginning to spring up here and there, glowing fiercely close at hand, twinkling with illusory cheerfulness towards the Piraeus. Thick oily smoke climbed slowly into the sky. The evening breeze brought to their nostrils the stink of rotting flesh and burning bones. A low continuous wail of agony and sorrow murmured behind the crackling of the fires, broken intermittently by the high animal shriek of some wretched victim in his death throes. It seemed as if Athens were a sick beast, rent by spasm after uncontrollable spasm, spewing up its lifeblood as the poison gripped its entrails.

  ‘Are you going to sit idle here for ever?’ asked Aspasia fiercely. ‘There are still plenty of men and troops untouched. Get them out of Athens before they die too. And show some control in the City itself. Don’t you realise that all law and order has been abandoned? We might be barbarians from what I’ve seen in the last day or two. Bodies are lying about unburied. Slaves are breaking into wine-shops, drinking and looting. No woman is safe on the streets, and few of them care whether they’re safe or not.’

  Pericles stared out at the scene of desolation for a long time in silence. Then he said: ‘I shall go out and see for myself. It shall never be said that I failed in my duty. You are right to bring me to my senses. A commander cannot . . . allow himself personal emotions that affect his responsibilities. All that can be done will be done.’ With a gesture of decision he wrapped himself in a heavy cloak and called to a slave for a torch. When the boy brought it, white-faced and trembling, Pericles took it from him and said: ‘Get back to your quarters. I wish for no attendant. I am going out alone.’ Then, without a word to Aspasia, he stepped into the road and walked slowly and steadily towards the centre of the City.

  The loathsome stench made him heave involuntarily, and he held up a corner of his cloak to his nose. He passed a body sprawled in the gutter. It was defaced and swollen, and a cart had driven over it. The ribs were crushed in a broad red track where the wheel had passed. He could not tell whether it was a man or a woman. Further on a shriek of laughter greeted him, and a drunken woman, half-naked, pulled herself tipsily from under the man she was with—an equally drunken Thracian slave—and peered at the worn, horror-struck face beneath the torch.

  ‘It’s the Olympian himself . . .’ she croaked. ‘Come and join us, Olympian.’ Suddenly her voice changed. ‘I had two sons,’ she said, her eyes glazed and staring. ‘I brought them up to believe that Athens was the greatest city on earth . . . and Pericles the greatest man. Where are they now? I’ll tell you, Olympian. One of them’s dead at Potidaea, and the other’s here. Stinking for lack of a friend to bury him, along with my husband.’ Her voice rose to a shriek, and she tore at her breasts with her nails.

  ‘And this is what I bore children for. . . . Murderer! Murderer!’ She choked abruptly: a spasm shook her, her face turned green, and she began to vomit. Pericles turned away. All through this interlude the Thracian had behaved as if no one were there. As Pericles walked on, his grunting passion could be heard mingling with the woman’s hysterical sobs.

  Hardly of his own volition Pericles found himself at length in the Market. A party were dicing and drinking by the light of an enormous pyre on which several bodies were burning. In the shadowy arcades rose the sound of desperate love-making. As the General watched, two men unceremoniously slung yet another body on the flames to join those already there. He looked around. It was impossible to tell which of these contorted figures were alive or dead. A tattered creature stumbled past croaking for water. No one took any notice. With a bubbling scream the wretch flung himself into a cistern, crying out to be rid of the fire that was raging in his belly. He thrashed around in the water for a while, and then was still. Many of the men were soldiers. Pericles drew his cloak about him and passed through the King’s Colonnade towards the Council Chamber.

  ‘Endure, my heart,’ he said aloud: ‘a still worse thing have you endured.’

  He found Hagnon in his house, dining alone. He flung off his cloak and sat down. Hagnon stared at him, surprised.

  ‘Give me some wine,’ said Pericles. He drained a goblet at one draught, and refilled it himself.

  Hagnon said: ‘Are you well? We heard rumours that you were . . . sick. Your slaves wouldn’t let anyone visit you.’

  ‘On my orders. I wished to be alone. What has been done in my absence?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Why not?

  Hagnon looked at him thoughtfully. ‘To take action requires a session of the Council,’ he said. ‘You have had all meetings vetoed till further notice.’

  Pericles frowned. ‘There is a good deal that requires no Council meetings,’ he said. ‘The City has become thoroughly demoralised. I want a body of police organised—free men, not slaves: you can use the army if you want to—to see that all bodies are burnt as soon as they are dead, and disposed of outside the walls. All fresh cases of sickness are to be notified as soon as they occur. Extreme penalties are to be summarily administered to anyone—anyone, do you hear me?—found fouling the water supply, or drunk in the streets, or engaged . . . in public immoral conduct. Is that clear?’

  Hagnon stared at his wine. ‘Yes: quite clear,’ he said. ‘Am I to take it that a Council meeting will be called tomorrow?’

  ‘Certainly. I shall propose these measures in person. I have only myself to blame. It has become only too apparent that no one here except myself is capable of any sort of initiative.’

  Hagnon thought: It means nothing to him at all except an administrative problem. And yet—is he so insensitive? What has he been thinking for the last week? Aloud he said: ‘There are other things I think you should consider. Forgive me if I speak frankly. There has been considerable feeling against you. I know that in such an extremity people will talk wildly. But the populace is in an ugly mood. It is most dangerous when it is afraid; and at this moment it is very much afraid.’

  ‘I came here alone,’ s
aid Pericles quietly; ‘I think I know what the people are feeling.’

  ‘They blame you not only for the plague, but what produced it, as they maintain—this policy of keeping the whole population shut inside the walls. There has been talk of a public impeachment.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘Cleon is the prime mover behind it. I don’t think he will bring the charge himself. He has two associates whom I fancy he will brief when the time comes.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ asked Pericles.

  ‘Our agents’ reports are still coming in. All the latest news has been sent to you.’ Hagnon looked faintly surprised.

  ‘I have read none of it.’

  ‘Then you were probably unaware that the Spartan army has gone home. They were afraid of being infected, I am told. I would suggest that the most imperative thing at the moment is to take action now they are away.’ Was there a hint of irony in his voice? ‘An attack on the. Peloponnese would do much to relieve the state of mind prevailing in the City. There is a general belief that nothing is being done, or likely to be; that the Spartans will destroy the land while the plague destroys our men, and that the war will end without a battle having been fought.’

  ‘I am told that one of the symptoms of this disease is an incurable melancholy,’ said Pericles drily.

  ‘Even if that were all, isn’t it necessary to combat it? Do you imagine that pure logic can bring us victory? I beseech you, listen to me. Send this expedition. Take as many men on it as you can before they are infected.’