The Last of the Wine: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  Lysis and I looked after him with serious faces. The lyre seemed to both of us like the sword a dead man leaves on the field. Perhaps we should have known that open laughter would be less cruel to him than our pity. But we were young.

  10

  NEXT DAY WE HAD great trouble in meeting; for Lysis had not asked me to fix any time or place, not wishing, as he told me later, to seem like a man who does a small service and asks at once for a return. So he and I spent half the morning wandering about in different places; and no one knew enough yet to say, “Lysis was here just now, looking for you, and went that way.” But at last, when I had given up hope of him, and had gone to exercise, as I turned the post of the running-track I saw him watching at the other end. It was as if a great wind blew at my back and my heels grew wings. I scarcely knew that I touched the ground, and I finished so far ahead of the rest that everyone cheered me. I heard Lysis’ voice; and being breathless already, from running and from suddenly seeing him, now I felt as if my heart would burst my breast, and saw black in the sky. But it passed and I was able to speak when he greeted me.

  When I was dressed we walked into the streets together. He asked if it was true my grandfather had been a runner, and we talked about that, and about our parents, and such things. Presently I recognised across the street his brother-in-law Menexenos; who, when he saw us, lifted his brows, smiled broadly, and made to cross over. I saw Lysis shake his head at him; at which he raised his hand in greeting and passed on. Though Lysis quickly took up the conversation, I saw he had gone a little red. It had not come into my mind till then that he could possibly feel shyness too. We went walking from one street to another, pausing sometimes to watch, or seem to watch, a potter or a goldsmith working. At last he stopped and said, “But where were you going, Alexias?”—“I don’t know, Lysis,” I said. “I thought you were going somewhere.” At this we both laughed. He said, “Shall we walk to the Academy, then?” So we went there, talking all the way, for we were not yet easy enough to be silent together.

  On a grassy slope by the Kephissos, we sat down under a willow tree. The water smelled as it does in autumn, of black leaves. We had come to the end of our words, and waited for an omen, or I know not what. Just then I saw coming through the yellow poplars Charmides with a couple of friends. His salute we both returned; my heart sank when I saw him still approaching, for though he had always behaved like a gentleman, one cannot count on people at such times. Here I flattered myself absurdly; it must have been seldom he had less than two love-affairs on hand, to say nothing of women. At all events he came up smiling, and said in the pleasantest way, “This is too bad of you, Lysis; you are like the horse they bring in from the country after the bets are laid. Have you held off so long just for the pleasure of seeing all the rest of us make fools of ourselves? I don’t know how long it is now since I was doing my homage along with the other victims, and getting as usual only, ‘Thank you, Charmides, for your verses; I am sure they are excellent, if I were any judge of such things,’ when you passed along the colonnade without, it seemed, even looking over your shoulder. I don’t think Alexias stood watching you for more than a moment; but I, being one not quite blind to the signals of Eros, said to myself at once, ‘There goes the winner, if he would only enter the race.’”

  This was worse than Polymedes; I went hot and cold; but Lysis answered smiling with hardly a pause, “I see it’s I, Charmides, who you want to watch making a fool of myself. Thanks for the invitation, but the tumbler begs to be excused. Tell me, while we are talking of horses, is your black going to win next week or not?”

  Although Charmides had behaved better than I had thought was in him, he had left me dreading his departure more than I had his approach. He left with his friends almost immediately after. I picked up a handful of little stones, and began skimming them at the water. I can still remember their colours and shapes. “They won’t go far,” Lysis said, “this bank is too high.”—“I usually get them further.”—“I expect,” he said, “Menexenos is talking by this time, too.” I threw another stone, which went straight to the bottom. “Well,” he said, “we know now what they are saying. If it were displeasing to either of us, I think we should not be here together as we are. Or am I only speaking for myself?” I shook my head; then, taking courage from him, turned to him and said, “No.” He was silent for a moment; then he said, “As the gods hear me, Alexias, your good shall be mine, and your honour shall be like my own to me; and I will stand to it with my life.” I felt more than myself, and answered, “Don’t be afraid, Lysis, that while you are my friend I shall ever come to dishonour; for rather than be a shame to you I will die.” He put his right hand on mine and his left about my shoulders and said, “May it never be less than this with us.” With these words we kissed. The sun was sinking, and the shadows of the poplars were longer than the trees. After talking a little longer, we walked back to the City.

  As we went, I asked him what I had done in the past that had so much offended him. He asked what could ever have made me suppose such a thing, “for,” he said, “I have only loved you too much for my peace.”—“You were always avoiding me, yet I gave you no cause.”—“Is it really true,” he said, “that you noticed that for yourself; or did someone tell you to make mischief?”—“What makes you think, Lysis, my sight is so thick?”—“But when I spoke to you last spring, during the Dionysia, you ran from me in the street.”—“I was in trouble at home; I ran all the way to the mountain. I never supposed you would think of it again.”

  “The tale is still older than that,” he said. Then he told me that nearly two years before, on first seeing me in the palaestra, he had found himself possessed by the thought of me, and had planned to address me seriously as soon as he found a chance. But Sokrates had drawn it all out of him; and, instead of the sympathy he had hoped for, told him sharply that the love of young boys ought to be forbidden by law; the man, he said, was wasting his pains upon uncertainty, and ensuring they would be disappointed; for while the boy’s nature was still malleable, he was being moulded to vanity and folly, called upon to play a part he was not ready to understand. “If an athlete were to enter for a contest below his class, would he not be discredited in victory, and laughed at in defeat?” Relating it to me, Lysis added, “To this I could find nothing to say.” Indeed, Sokrates had known well where to touch him.

  He confessed that later, when he saw me so much courted, he had felt a good deal of bitterness. He had heard it said that I inclined to Charmides; and I was ashamed to ask him why he had not put it to proof. Remembering the silly extravagances of my following, I did not wonder he had thought such a scrimmage beneath him. Nor did I doubt he had heard them call me cold and disdainful; he who had been drawn to me before anyone had taken me up. “My heart was sore at it,” he said. “I could not forgive Sokrates for a time, and even avoided him; till, looking about me, I saw some of the people who had refused to take his medicine before, and what kind of men they were. So next day I went back again.”

  As he spoke he gave a great yawn. In apology, he said he had lain awake nearly all the night before, unable to sleep for happiness. I confessed that with me it had been the same.

  Next day he took me to his home, which was outside the walls near the Sacred Way, and presented me to his father. Demokrates was a man of about fifty-five, but looked older, his health, Lysis said, having troubled him for some time. His beard was long, and already almost white. He received me very courteously, commending my father’s courage in the field. Beyond this he showed a certain reserve; perhaps there had been some old difference between them, which he felt it would be petty to visit upon me.

  The house, though it was getting shabby in the way I was used to at home, was a big one, with some fine marble and bronze in it. Demokrates was said to have lived with much splendour in his youth; it was to this house, as I recalled, that Alkibiades had run away from his guardians when he was a lad, the first proof of his wildness to reach the City, though Perikles t
ried to hush it up.

  In the manner of men getting on in years whose circumstances have worsened, Demokrates ran on a good deal about the glories of the past. I saw Lysis listening patiently, like one who has resigned himself beforehand; but it was plain there was affection between them. “I lost two other sons,” his father said, “in childhood; but the gods relented with Lysis, making him a son as good to me as three. Now he is old enough not to have his head turned by it, I can say his boyhood was all I wished; and as a man he has not disappointed me. I only need to see him married, and a son of his bearing my name; and I can go when the gods are ready.”

  I don’t know whether Demokrates said this simply because sick men tend to be wrapped up in themselves, or purposely, to see whether I was the kind of youth to stand in a friend’s way out of petulance or jealousy. Thinking myself, as one does at that age, the centre of everything, I felt it became me not to fail in courage at the test; and answered as coolly as a Spartan that the son of Demokrates could choose a wife wherever he wished. When Lysis took me out to see the pleasure-garden, I felt as one does after a difficult sword-dance, when one has got out of the judge’s sight. Lysis stretched himself like a man who has just taken off his armour, laughed and said, “Father is in no such hurry to find me a wife as he pretends. One of my sisters was married last year, and there is still another who is fifteen already. By the time she is provided for, it will be a long while before I can afford to set up house, as he very well knows.”

  He told me that the bulk of their wealth in former years had come from their estates in Thrace, where they had bred chariot-horses and mules for riding; but he himself had never seen these lands, for they had been seized and laid waste in the war, and the stock carried off, before he became a man.

  Beyond the pleasure-garden were the fields of the flower-sellers, and even now in autumn the air was sweet. “One ought to marry,” Lysis said, “while one is still young enough to get strong sons; but there is time and to spare for that. When I want a woman’s company I have a very good girl, a little Corinthian. She doesn’t pretend to recite Anakreon and the lyric poets, like the fashionable companions; but she sings prettily, in a little clear voice like a bird’s, a thing I like in a woman.” He smiled to himself and said, “One has strange thoughts when one is lonely; there were times when I used to wish I were rich enough to keep Drosis entirely, as Perikles did Aspasia, so that she need never entertain anyone else. It wasn’t that I minded much her going to bed with other men, seeing that if she had not been a hetaira I should never have met her, nor would she have any more conversation than the kind of girl one takes for a wife. No; although it sounds foolish, I didn’t like to know that the behaviour she put on to please me, she would put off like a garment, and become a different being for another man. Well, she is good enough company in her way, but no Aspasia, poor little thing; and I don’t think such notions will trouble me any more.” To all this I listened respectfully, and at the end nodded and looked solemn, like a man who is knowledgeable in such matters. Lysis smiled and took my arm and we went to look at the horses.

  In the harness-room, where the yokes of old chariots gathered dust upon the walls, we played with a litter of boar-hound pups, and exchanged old secrets, as people do at such times for the pleasure of saying, “This I have told to no one but you.” He confided to me that though he had first known a woman when he was seventeen years old, he had never been in love with a youth at all, until he met me. He said it used to disturb him sometimes, when he read the poets, that he seemed incapable of that love which they praised as the noblest, and the inspirer of so many glorious deeds. “I did not know,” he said, “what I was waiting for. But the god knew.”

  I wished my father would return, so that I could present Lysis to him. Here was something of mine with which he could have no fault to find. They knew each other by sight, from their cavalry exercises, being fellow-tribesmen; Lysis remarked that as I was not very like him, he supposed it was my mother from whom I got my looks. I told him I thought so, but that she had died at my birth. He looked at me puzzled. “But,” he said, “since we have been together, I have heard you speak of your mother a score of times. Is she only your stepmother, then?”—“Yes, but it has never seemed so to me.”—“She was a widow, I expect, when your father married her?”—“No indeed, Lysis, she was not turned sixteen.” He heard me out smiling, and drawing his brows together. “You are full of mysteries for me, Alexias. Not that I could imagine your ever failing in courtesy to your father’s wife; but even to me you call her Mother, just as if she were really so. And now you tell me she is the same age as I am! You make me feel a hundred years old.” He spoke lightly; yet, I knew not why, his words distressed me. “But she is my mother, Lysis. If she is not … if she is not, then I never had one.” He saw I was troubled, and embracing me kindly said, “Why then, my dear, of course she is.”

  I stayed to supper with him; Demokrates retired early because of his sickness, so we were alone. Summer flowers were done, but we had crowns of cyclamen and ivy. The wine was good, but we drank it well-tempered, having no need to believe ourselves happier than we were. After eating we played at kottabos with the wine-lees, ringing them in the bowl, or throwing them down hard and never failing to find in the spillings the letters of each other’s name. There was an inlay in the floor of Athene fighting a Mede, and it began to look as if the blood had flowed pretty freely, which made us laugh, being in the mood to laugh at anything. Later, when the moon had come out, we walked in the garden, sharing a cloak.

  In all this time, Lysis never asked anything from me beyond a kiss. I understood him, that he wanted me to know he was in love from the soul, and not, as they say, with the love of the Agora. As for me, it seemed to me that nothing could have added to the joy I felt in his company; and I wished for nothing, except to possess whatever would increase his happiness, that I might give it him. I felt that another time would come, as one feels an air of summer while still in spring. We had no need of words to say such things. We talked of I know not what; of our childhood, and of times when we had happened to see each other at festivals, or in the palaestra, or at the Games. When it grew late he threw the last of his wine into the bowl, saying, “This for my Alexias,” and the bowl rang true. Then we drank to the Good Goddess in clear water; and he called for a torch and took me home.

  At the door he said, “All this happiness we owe to Sokrates. We ought not to stay away from him any longer. We will go tomorrow.”

  Next day we met early, and went together to find him. At his house, his son Lamprokles told us he was already gone out. I had met this boy before, and had never borne him any grudge for looking at me with resentment, as he always did. It was not to be expected that Sokrates should have bequeathed him much beauty; and in him his father’s ugliness had lost its strength, without gaining anything else. He had been apprenticed to a mason, not having wit enough, it seems, to learn the trade of sculptor which Sokrates had abandoned. The house was one of those poor ones so clean that the very threshold seems to curse your foot. As we spoke to the lad, we heard his mother, whose eye we had seen at the window, shout out to him not to stand gossiping, as if one do-nothing in the house were not enough. This was nothing fresh to us, for she could often be heard railing at Sokrates before one got near the door. We called her vixen and shrew among ourselves; yet one can see she might find it bitter that he taught for nothing, hearing him asked for by so many young men who could have paid. He had kept at his work till Kriton, learning what his savings were, offered to invest them so that for his plain life they would bring in enough. I spoke gently to the boy, being sorry for him; not only because of his mother, but because he seemed much less Sokrates’ son that Lysis was, or, I thought, even I.

  The Herm at the door was the work of Sokrates. At the time of the sacrilege, he had got out his old tools as an act of piety, to make a new head for the god. The work was what we call sincere, when we mean that an artist we like is not exactly a master; being
in the austere style of Pheidias’ day, it already looked a little out of date.

  We found Sokrates in the Lykeion gardens, already in conversation with five or six people, all as it happened old friends of his. Kriton was there, and Eryximachos, Agathon with his friend Pausanias, and one or two more. Sokrates saw us first, and gave a smiling nod without pausing in his talk. The others made room with the kind of easiness people have ready beforehand; only Agathon widened his blue eyes at us and gave us openly one of his sweet smiles.

  They had been conversing about the nature of truth. I don’t know in what form this subject had first arisen. Soon after we came, Sokrates said that truth could not be served as a slave serves a master, who gives no reason for his commands; we should seek her rather, he said, as a true lover seeks knowledge of the beloved, to learn entirely what he is and what he needs, not like base lovers seeking only to know what they can turn to gain. And so, from this, he began to speak of love.

  Love, he said, is not a god, for a god cannot want anything; but one of those great spirits who are messengers between gods and men. He does not visit fools, who are content with their low condition, but those who aware of their own need and desire, by embracing the beautiful and good, to beget goodness and beauty; for creation is man’s immortality and brings him nearest to the gods. All creatures, he said, cherish the children of their flesh; yet the noblest progeny of love are wisdom and glorious deeds, for mortal children die, but these live forever; and these are begotten not of the body but the soul. Mortal passion sinks us in mortal pleasure, so that the wings of the soul grow weak; and such lovers may rise to the good indeed, but not to the very best. But the winged soul rises from love to love, from the beautiful that is born and dies, to beauty is only a moving shadow flung upon a wall.