The Last of the Wine: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  The troop, as soon as they saw I took my share of hard work and night watches, were kind to our friendship. The usual jokes were made, but without any malice. Now the country was quiet, we used sometimes when the evening fire was lit to go for a walk together in the night. Once, coming back quietly over the grass, we heard young Gorgion, who had a salty tongue, accounting for our absence. Just afterwards, they saw us in the firelight. Of course we joined in the laughter. But next time we went we were a little constrained, knowing what they thought, but not quite willing to speak of it, out of modesty or for another cause. For I was not so young in war as not to have felt already how death touches love’s shoulder and says, “Make haste.”

  Our patrol ended at last, and another troop relieved us. The country was all quiet just then; we made our last camp near Cape Sounion. I doubt what the garrison at the fort there told us afterwards, that they could hear us round our fire half a mile away; but we were certainly cheerful. I remember that everyone was picked up in turn, head and heels, and slung on top of the others; at the end half the troop fell upon Lysis and, when we had overpowered him, slung him too. The next night we were to be quartered at Sounion, and that day was our own.

  Lysis and I rode off together along the coast, the blue sea beside us and the red rocky shore all broken into little bays. At one of these, after a long gallop, we drew rein; and looking at the clear blue water, threw our clothes off with one accord. The water was brisk at first and warm after, and we swam far out to sea, till we could see Poseidon’s temple at Sounion standing against the sky. Lysis was the faster, his wrestling having strengthened his shoulders and arms; but he waited for me, as I did in running for him. We rested on the water, then swam shoreward, and in shallow rock-pools tried laughing to catch fish in our hands. But as we walked out of the water afterwards, I felt a sharp pain in the side of my foot, and found it bleeding. I must have trodden on a broken shell or a potsherd, for the cut was deep. Lysis knelt and looked at it while I leaned on his shoulder. “This will give you trouble,” he said, “if you fill it with grit as you cross the beach. It might cost you a crown. Wash it well in the sea, and I will carry you over to a place where a horse can go.” For the beach was stony.

  I sat on a flat-topped rock, and trailed my foot in the sea. The water was clear, and the blood unrolled in it like smoke in a blue sky. I sat watching it till Lysis touched me on the shoulder and said, “Come.” I leaned back for him to take hold of me, and fastened my arms round his neck. But he did not carry me; nor did I let him go. We spoke without sound each other’s names. A gull screamed over us, an empty sound, to tell us we two were alone upon the shore.

  I said to my heart, “What mighty power hast thou been defying?” Truly love may be likened to the Sphinx of the Egyptians, with the face of a smiling god and a lion’s claws. When he had wounded me, all my longing was to leap into his darkness, and be consumed. I called on my soul, but it bled away from me like salt washed back into the ocean. My soul melted and fled; the wound in my foot, which the water had opened, streamed out scarlet over the wet rock.

  I lay between sea and sky, stricken by the Hunter; the fiery immortal hounds of Eros, slipped from the leash, dragged at my throat and at my vitals, to bring the quarry in. It seemed to me now that my soul was here, if it was anywhere; nothing remained to me of what I was, save this, that I remembered I had promised Sokrates a gift. He whom I loved knew my mind; perhaps it was his own. We were still, understanding each other.

  He let me go, and, kneeling beside the rock, covered the wound with his mouth till the bleeding stopped. We were silent, he kneeling in the water, and I lying like the sacrifice on the altar-stone, the blue sky burning my eyes. After a while he bent and rinsed his face and got up smiling. “The Thracians when they swear friendship mingle their blood, or drink it, I forget. Now we are really one.” He carried me over the shore to the horses, and tore his tunic and bound my foot. It healed cleanly, and I was running again in a couple of weeks.

  A little time after, when we were back in the City, I saw him for the first time with the Corinthian, Drosis, bidding her goodbye as he left her house. Several times, before the fighting began, he had invited me to supper with her to hear her sing. I had refused laughing, and telling him that as long as we did not meet, we could never doubt how all three of us would love each other. One does not need much knowledge of the world, to have heard that a man’s mistress usually likes his friend too little, or too much. I had never been troubled by the thought of her at all. Yet now that I saw her, looking just what I had imagined, a small downy girl, holding his hands, I felt grief and anger, and drew back into a porch so that he should not see me as he went.

  So I went off to find Sokrates; and though I listened only and did not speak, in a little while I mastered these thoughts and put them from me: for I saw that if I let them possess me, Lysis and I had exchanged the good not for the best, but for the worst.

  13

  MY MOTHER, WHEN RETURNING I rode into the courtyard, stood looking at me in silence. I was too young and thoughtless to consider what she might feel, at the sudden sight of a man wearing her father’s armour, upon her husband’s horse. I jumped down and embraced her laughing, and asking if she had mistaken me for a stranger. “I took you for a soldier,” she said, “and now I look at you it is true.” This pleased me, for I would not have had her think the armour was fallen on evil days. There was no use now in my ever thinking again of a suit by Pistias.

  Going out to the stables I found Korax, my father’s second horse, disgracefully neglected, with a thrush in one of his feet. I was calling indignantly for the groom, intending to give him the thrashing he would have had from my father (for the horse, which was old, looked finished now to me), when my mother told me he had run away. This was an old story now in the country, but that it had been happening in the City was news to me. She said that thousands of slaves had gone, and half the crafts and trades in the City had been crippled. The Spartans always let a slave through their lines, to encourage more to run, knowing how it damaged us. This was war, and we did the same by their Helots when we could.

  Meantime, thanks to them, our fortunes were half ruined. We had a little estate in Euboea, good corn-land, which would bring in something still, and a small property of rents in the City itself. We should have to sell old Korax, as soon as his foot was healed. My uncle Strymon came round to warn me against extravagance, with a face as long as his account-rolls. He had had a great fright when half a dozen of his slaves ran off, and had no peace till he had sold all the others.

  “It can’t be long now,” I said to Lysis, “before King Agis goes home again. He’s already stayed on the frontier longer than ever before.” Lysis shook his head. “The scouts have been up to Dekeleia again. Now, when as you say he is due to be going, he is strengthening the walls and digging-in.”

  At first I could hardly understand him. “What? How shall we grow anything, or get any harvest in?”—“Why grow what the Spartans will gather? We must beat our ploughshares into swords.”—“But why, Lysis? The Spartans never change their customs. They never did this before.”—“Do you think a Spartan had the wit to think of it? It took an Athenian for that. No one can ever say of Alkibiades that he doesn’t earn his keep.”

  I was slow to see beyond all this; then I said, “But Lysis, if Demosthenes has to stay here holding the Spartans, how will he get to Sicily?” Lysis laughed. We were walking through the City; he had a clean mantle, and sandals on his feet; but I felt for a moment we were back in the field. “How? How do you think? He will get there, my dear, by our holding them instead.”

  I had never thought it possible that Demosthenes would sail while the Spartans were in Attica. Nor had Demosthenes perhaps. We had begun the war in Sicily as a man who is doing well may begin a new house beyond his means. If all goes well, the show will raise his credit. We had grown into a habit of victory; glory was our capital, as much as ships and silver; and we had drawn pretty heavily on all thre
e.

  We had a week or two in the Munychia fort at Piraeus, on garrison duty. To most young men, who go there in peacetime after enrolling as ephebes, it comes as the first taste of soldiering; to us it was a rest-camp. Even so it has a feeling of its own, as you march past the galley-slips and in through the old arsenal, and see the scribbles your fathers left on the walls when they were ephebes themselves. We got plenty of leave, for by then we had earned it.

  One day we were in the Argive’s palaestra, watching the boys at exercise, when Lysis pointed and said, “That boy there is going to be something remarkable. I have noticed him before.”—“Do you think so?” I said. “He looks rather thickset to me.” Lysis laughed and said, “No, I mean as a wrestler.” I watched the boy, who had been matched with, or chosen for himself, someone much bigger. He looked about fifteen, but was powerful beyond his years. As he was getting a thigh-hold, he made a slip and nearly got thrown. In spite of this he won the bout; but Lysis said, “He has made that fault before and I can’t think how the trainer has missed it. The boy can’t at his age wrestle with men, so he never gets a proper match. Do me a favour, Alexias. Go after the boy and tell him with my compliments what he did wrong and how to correct it. If I speak to him myself, his tutor will faint with fright.” We made some joke or other about this, and laughed. Then he told me what to say.

  I followed the lad into the dressing-room, and found him scraping-down. He was certainly too square for beauty; by the time he was a man, if he went on wrestling, he would have no proportion at all. His brows were heavy and overhung, making his eyes very deep-set; but when he looked at me I was struck with them, for they were brilliant and fearless. I greeted him, and gave him Lysis’ advice. He listened most attentively, and at the end said, “Please thank Lysis for me. Tell him I am honoured by his taking this trouble, and assure him I shan’t forget what he says.” His voice was rather light for his build, but pleasant and well-trained. He went on, “And thank you too, Alexias, for bringing his message. I had begun to wonder whether all was well with you in the war, it is so long since we had the pleasure of seeing you.”

  He delivered this, though quite modestly, with a polish I had never seen in one so young. But what struck me much more was that as he spoke he raised his eyes to my face, admiring it, not at all impertinently, but with as much composure as if he had been thirty years old.

  It was certainly the first such compliment I had ever received from a boy a good two years younger; yet one could not take offence, much less laugh, for he was clearly a serious person. I noticed just then that his ears were bored, and guessed from this that he came from one of the very old noble families, some of whom at that time still wore the ancient adornments handed down since the Wars of Troy. The rings had been taken out, no doubt because they interfered with his wrestling. Putting down part of his self-possession to his birth, it was still rather remarkable. I confessed he had the advantage of me and asked his name. He said, “Aristokles, son of Ariston.”

  All this I related to Lysis, who was much tickled, and said he had thought he could safely send me among schoolboys without a rival trying to cut him out. But when I told him the name of the boy’s father, he frowned and said, “Well, in the matter of birth you could scarcely go higher. His father is descended from King Kodros and his mother from Solon; the divine seed of Poseidon on either hand. Indeed, if Attica were still a kingdom, I think his elder brother might be the heir. But his family thinks of its past too often for the City’s good; in fact they’re a nest of oligarchs, and this boy must be a nephew of our accomplished Kritias, who I daresay instructs him already in speech-making and the political arts. Ah, well, he can wrestle at least.”

  We said no more, for Kritias had become harder than usual to stomach. A young lad called Euthydemos had lately attached himself to Sokrates. He was only about sixteen, but of an aspiring mind, and prone to the absurdities it often runs into at that age; full of the things he meant to do, with no idea of how to set about them. I doubt if I could have had patience with him myself; but Sokrates had divined that under all his nonsense the lad was really in love with excellence, and took endless trouble with him, teasing him out of his pomposities, drawing him forth when he was shy, and putting something solid in the place of his airy notions. By the time I met him he was beginning to show some quality; but that was of no concern to Kritias.

  As he valued excellence less and less, he began to lose his skill in assuming it. This time he had scarcely stayed to go through any decent ceremony, or pretence of honourable attachment, before making his demands; and his crudeness had clearly shocked the lad, who, as I have said, was shy. Having made a bad start with him, Kritias was now resorting by turns to flattery, a disgusting importunity, and—what was much more dangerous to this kind of youth—the promise of distinguished introductions. I had the whole story from Phaedo, who loathed Kritias more than anyone, for reasons it had always seemed better not to ask.

  After Phaedo was free, he did not let Kritias drive him away from Sokrates. He stayed; but he used to stand looking as if his face were something he had dressed in. Dionysos wears such a pleasant mask in the play where he sends out King Pentheus to be torn by maenads. I said, “Sokrates ought to be told. I can see why no one has done it. It is bound to hurt him that someone who has been about him so long can turn out like this. But it’s better than his being deceived.”—“Yes,” said Phaedo. “I thought so too.”—“You told him? What did he say?”—“He said he had spoken to Kritias already. He asked him, it seems, why he chose to come like a beggar before one in whose eyes he wished to seem precious; and a beggar not for something noble, but for something base.”

  It amazed me after this that Kritias could so much as look at Euthydemos in Sokrates’ presence. And, in fact, he seldom did. But having suffered myself, I did not take long to perceive what was going on. The boy’s father had confidence in Sokrates, and used to send him without a tutor; and he was ashamed to say anything, as I had been before. It happened, soon after this, that the chance of war had released more of our circle than usual. Xenophon had just got back with his troop, looking as if he had been years in the field. Some of them had been cut off not long before and the Second killed; Xenophon had taken over, and done so well that the Hipparch had confirmed him in the rank. He must have been the youngest Second in the Guard. Phaedo was there. Agathon (who had been in action somewhere with the hoplites, and arrived drenched in scent to take off, he said, the smell of the camp) had come with Pausanias; Lysis with me; and Kritias had followed Euthydemos, At the time I am speaking of, Sokrates was talking to Xenophon about his promotion; but in the midst of it Euthydemos, whom Kritias had edged up to, flinched aside. And Sokrates broke off what he was saying, in the middle of a word.

  There was an extraordinary pause, made up of suspense on the part of those who knew the cause, and surprise among the rest. I saw Phaedo’s mask dissolve and his face appear through it, with slightly parted lips. Euthydemos, poor lad, who I suppose had long dreaded something like this, looked ready to die of shame; but we all had something else to attend to. An empty space had opened through the company, along which Sokrates and Kritias were staring at one another. I had often seen Sokrates pretend to be angry: he looked very droll, half comic and half terrifying. I had never seen him really angry before, and it was nothing to laugh at. Yet for all the force of mind in it, there was something too of a stocky old stone-mason cursing in the yard. If he had picked up a mallet and hurled it at Kritias’ head, I should not have been surprised until later. But he said, “Have you got swine-fever or what, Kritias, that you come scraping yourself on Euthydemos like a pig on a stone?”

  The silence that followed you may imagine, seeing that Sokrates had never rebuked the very youngest of us before others. Kritias was by a long way the eldest man there, the most influential, the richest and best born. If Zeus himself had thundered, and blasted him at our feet, I don’t think we young men would have gazed on his body with more solemn awe than now w
e did upon his face.

  He had grown yellow about the mouth, and looked suddenly thinner; but it was his eyes that held me. He was sick with rage; yet he was using it, as an instrument of his will. I said to myself, “He is trying to put Sokrates in fear.” The man in me was shocked and the boy stood gaping, as if at a house afire.

  I looked at Sokrates. His face was still red with anger but his anger had died. He stood like rock, and I felt a creeping in my hair. It was not what fear gives one, and I did not understand it for a long time afterwards, till one day I felt it in the theatre; there too it was a case of a brave man standing up to the logic of fate.

  Someone, I think, felt this more keenly than I did, for suddenly Agathon gave a little cracked laugh, and clapped his hand over his mouth. Kritias’ eyes opened out and narrowed again; then he turned on his heel, and walked away.

  “Tell me, Xenophon, now you are an officer yourself …” I think Sokrates alone of all the company remembered what we had been talking about before; even Xenophon stammered a little before he picked up the thread. But he steadied at once, and went on with the conversation as coolly as if it had been a march through enemy country, till the rest were ready to join in.

  Afterwards Lysis and I walked off rather silently. At last I said, “Lysis, Kritias would have killed him if he could. I saw his eyes.”—“It wasn’t pleasant,” he said. It was a way of his to talk things down when they disturbed him. “However, keep it in proportion; this is a civilised City. Sokrates takes no part in politics and doesn’t teach for fees. That’s as far as Kritias’ writ runs. I call it a good riddance.”

  I had just got in that evening, and was going to change, when Phaedo called, a thing he had never done unasked before. He stood in the courtyard and said, “Come walking with me.” I was going to ask him in to supper; then I looked again, and went out beside him into the evening. He led me very fast to the Pnyx, and climbed it. No one was about on the hill, but a few lovers, and children playing. We sat on the slab of the public rostrum, and looked across to the High City. The columns looked black against a thin green sky, and the lamps shone yellow in the shrines. There was a smell of dew on dust and on crushed leaves; the bats came out, and the grasshoppers. Phaedo, who had gone up the hill like a leopard on a leash, sat chin on hand. He would be old, I thought, before he would be pitied when he suffered as other men are pitied. One seemed to be looking at such a masterpiece as is only carved in the after calm. At last I said, “Beasts must bleed in silence; but the gods gave men speech.”