The Last of the Wine: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  We two were the only survivors of the Siren. Twenty-five Athenian ships were lost in the battle, the greater part of them with all hands.

  It was nearly a month before we got back to the City; for the island was a little place, where few but fishermen ever put in. At last we got a Lesbian ship, and made our way back from there. I got home to find the household in mourning for me, and my father with shaven head. He looked old and ill, and was so much moved at seeing me that I was confused by it, and hardly knew what to say. I suppose he may have blamed himself for my leaving home and going to sea. For my own part, time had taught me to see in it only the conjunction of planets and the hand of fate. My mother was much calmer, and said she had dreamed I was not dead. My sister Charis danced about us on her long legs, and complained of the beard I had grown on the island, and would not kiss me till I took it off.

  Later, when the house was quieter, and I had told my story, my father said the City was very angry with the generals, and had dismissed them from their command. They had written home various excuses, saying in one breath that the storm was too high for them to turn back for us, and, in the next, that they had told off two junior officers to do it. As one of these was Thrasybulos, and the other Theramenes, whom we had found perfectly reliable in the field, I guessed this must have been an afterthought when the fleet was safe in harbour. Probably half of us had gone down before they started out. Their choosing Thrasybulos as a scapegoat made me angrier than ever. I said, “When are they going to be tried?”

  “As soon,” my father said, “as they are all back. In the interests of justice, it had better be when the passion of the mob has cooled a little.” I said, “Let the mob save its pains, Father, and leave them to the men who got off the wrecks alive. We’re too few to make a mob. We’ll do them justice. I wish I had all their necks in one noose, and my hand on the rope.”—“You have changed, Alexias,” he said, looking at me. “When you were a child, I thought you too gentle to make a soldier.”—“I have seen a shipful of brave men betrayed since then. And on a won battlefield I threw away my arms.” And, my anger returning with the memory, I said, “If Alkibiades had been there, he would have laughed in their faces, and told them to get to the loom with the women; and he would have sailed alone. They can say what they like; but when he led us, we had a man.”

  My father sat silent, staring into the bowl of his wine-cup. Then he said, “Well, Alexias, what you have suffered I cannot make good to you; nor, I daresay, will the gods. But in the matter of armour, if I had been in the City when you enrolled as a citizen, you would have had a suit from me, like anyone else in our position. The estate is not what it was, but I can still take care of that, I am glad to say.” He went to the big press and opened it. There was a suit of armour hanging there, nearly new. “Take it,” he said, “to some reliable man, and get it made to fit. It is doing no good to anyone lying here.”

  It was a very good suit. He must have had it made when he felt his strength coming back again. I need not have complained so loudly of throwing away my arms, to a man who had been stripped of his by the enemy. “No, Father,” I said, “I can’t take this from you. I’ll manage some other way.”—“I daresay I forgot to tell you, Phoenix is dead. Let us admit that the time when we could afford new horseflesh is over; and marching is beyond me nowadays, I find. My shield is over there in the corner. Pick it up, and try it for weight.”

  I picked it up, and put my arm through the bands. It balanced well, and was just about the weight I was used to. I said, “Of course, Father, for me it’s on the heavy side. But it’s a pity to tamper with a good shield like this. Perhaps, if I exercise, I can manage it as it is.”

  23

  SOON AFTERWARDS, OUR RABBLE of generals got back to Athens; all but two who, making use of their skill in avoiding dirty weather, ran away to Ionia and never came home.

  Not since the day of the Herm-breaking had I seen such anger in the City. As it happened, the Feast of Families fell just before the trial. Instead of the usual garlands and best clothes, you saw everywhere the drowned men’s kindred, dressed in mourning, their heads shorn, reminding friends and neighbours not to forget the dead.

  Presently came the day of the trial. I walked to the Assembly with my father; when I had been civil to his friends, I slipped off to find Lysis, but got caught instead in a knot of citizens, kinsmen and friends of the drowned, who begged my account of the battle. I think it was only now, with strangers about me, that I really knew my own bitterness. I told them everything, both what I had seen, and anything I had heard from others.

  It was the same all over the Pnyx; people jostled to get near one of the survivors, for we were few. The herald could hardly get quiet when the speeches began.

  Nobody felt inclined by now to waste much time on these fellows. When the prosecution proposed that one hearing would do for all six of them, I cheered with the best. I felt warmed with the anger round me; everyone seemed my friend. Then the defence jumped up and made a fuss. It was true there was something in the constitution against collective trials on a capital charge, proper enough, in the ordinary way, to protect decent people; but we all felt this was different. There was a good deal of noise. Just when the defence had made itself heard again, there was a commotion near the rostrum, and a sailor ran up. You could tell at a glance what his trade was, and there was a pause.

  “You’ll excuse me, friends,” he said, using a sort of hail, I suppose the only way he knew to make his voice carry, “for putting myself forward; but I took my oath. I was bosun’s mate on the old Eleutheria. All I’ve got to say is, when she went down, I caught hold of a meal-bin, and it kept floating. There was a lot of my mates in the sea all about, and some of the marines, wounded mostly, and knew they couldn’t last long. I heard someone shout out, ‘Antandros,’ that’s my name, ‘Antandros, if you get home, tell them we did right by the City.’ And another says, ‘And tell them what we got for it. Drowned like dogs. You tell them, Antandros.’ And I took my oath, which a man ought to abide by. So you’ll pardon the liberty. Thank you.”

  He went running down from the rostrum; there was a moment’s silence, then a roar you could have heard at Eleusis. Someone shouted out that anyone who opposed the will of the people ought to be tried himself, along with the generals. We cheered our throats dry. It felt like giving the paean, or being drunk at the Dionysia, or like the last lap of the race when the crowd wants you to win. But not quite like.

  So it was put to the presiding senators, whether the trial was in order, and there could not be much doubt of what their verdict would be, if only for their health’s sake. But they seemed to be a long time about it; people began to whistle and call; till at length the crier stood up, and gave out that they could not agree.

  Where I was, we could not see them; but we made ourselves heard; especially when word was passed along that only one old man was standing out. We were asking only one life each from these cowards, who bore the guilt of hundreds; and they would die in more comfort than our friends in the rough autumn sea. People were asking each other who was this senile quibbler to set himself up a little jack-in-office chosen by lot for the day. “Has he ever carried a shield?” someone shouted; and I said, “I suppose he has no sons.”—“Who is it?” we called to those who were nearer. A voice shouted back, “Old crackpot Sokrates, son of Sophroniskos the sculptor.”

  As the shock of an icy stream to the drunkard stumbling and singing; as the alarm of battle to a man sweating in the bed of lust; so these words came to me. The noise and heat died in me, leaving me naked under the sky. I had been many, but now I was one; and to me, myself, grey-eyed Athene spoke from the High City, saying, “Alexias, son of Myron, I am justice, whom you have made a whore and a slave.”

  When I came back from the silence within me, and heard the noise going on just as before, I could not believe it. I had felt that everyone’s eyes must have been opened in the same moment as mine. I looked about me, but the faces were all as before, shouting
with their mouths open, all alike, like a sounder of hogs.

  I turned to the man beside me. He looked like a person of some schooling, a merchant perhaps. “We are wrong,” I said. “We ought not to overthrow the law.” He turned round and snapped at me, “What do you know about it, young man?”—“I was there,” I said. “My ship was sunk in the battle.”—“All the more shame to you,” he said, “for taking the fellow’s part. Have you no feeling for your shipmates?” Soon afterwards, the crier gave out that since only one senator opposed the motion, the others had passed it without him.

  I dropped a white pebble in the urn, and, as it left my hand, tried to think that it made me clean.

  Lysis overtook me on the slope below the Pnyx. Always my example in courage, it was he who spoke first.

  “You know,” he said, “how the wind comes down in those parts, from the hills of Ionia; blowing a gale, when a mile away it’s no more than a capful. It might even be true that the storm prevented them.” I said, “Alkibiades would have come.”—“Yes, if he had a pilot. The truth is, Alexias, our navigation’s not what it once was. Even in my few years I’ve seen a change. Alkibiades knew, and Antiochos. These new men are about the common run of captains now. One of them was wrecked himself. We have killed them as a child kicks the bench it bruised its shin on. What has become of us?”

  “I have done injustice,” I said. We were shouldered as we walked by men disputing, and justifying themselves; but some were laughing, and betting on a cockfight. After being a long time silent, he said, “Madness is sacred to the gods. They give it us at the proper season to purge our souls, as they give us strong herbs to clean out our bodies. At the Dionysia we are a little mad; but it leaves us clean, because we dedicated it to a god. This we offered to ourselves, and it had defiled us.”

  “Don’t talk so, Lysis. I’m sure you kept your head much better than I did.” He smiled, and quoted a certain phrase, recalling a personal matter between us. Then he said, “Am I getting old, to find myself always thinking, ‘Last year was better’?”—“Sometimes it seems to me, Lysis, that nothing has been the same since the Games.”—“We think so, my dear, because that was our concern. If you asked that potter over there, or that old soldier, or Kallippides the actor, each would name his own Isthmia, I daresay … It has been a long war, Alexias. Twenty-four years now. Even Troy was only ten.”

  We were crossing the Agora just then; he pointed to some women at a stall and said, “When that child there was born, it had lasted already as long as Troy, and now she is almost a woman.” His voice must have carried more than he meant, for the maiden looked up, and stared at him. He smiled at her, and she parted her lips in answer, her face lightening for a moment; she was in mourning, and looked peaked and pale. The woman with her, who did not seem like her mother, spoke sharply to her, though one could see she had only thought as a child does. I said to Lysis, “She must have lost her father in the battle.” He looked after her, over the heads of the crowd, and said, “Yes, and the last of her brothers too. There were three.”—“You knew them, then?”—“Oh, yes. I even know the child herself. She almost spoke to me, till she was reminded she is older now. She is Timasion’s daughter, who was trierarch of the Demokratia.”

  Meanwhile the child was being led away through the market. You could tell from their backs that the woman was scolding her still. Lysis said, “What will become of her, I wonder? That sour-faced bitch is the eldest son’s widow, I suppose. It’s a hard time of life to make such a change. She had a slapdash kind of upbringing; the mother, who is dead now, was usually sick, and little Thalia seemed to be always with her father or the young men. Up to last year, even, they no more thought of sending her out when I came than a hand-reared pup; you know how it is sometimes with a late-born child. One son was killed at Byzantium, and one here in Attica in a raid. Then Timasion and the last boy went out just now with the Athenian flotilla. That finished the family, except for this poor little remnant.”

  He walked on in thought. When presently I spoke to him he did not hear. “She was quite pretty,” he said, “before this happened; at least, she had a good little face. That woman will get her off her hands to the first offer, I suppose, no matter whom … They were good stock, Timasion and his sons. I knew them all.”

  “Lysis!” I said, staring at him. “What are you thinking of? She doesn’t look more than twelve years old.” He reckoned on his fingers. “Well, she was born three Olympics ago, the year Alkibiades won the chariot-race; so she must be rising thirteen, at any rate.” Then he laughed and said, “Why not? One can have patience in a good cause; there are plenty of women meanwhile. Look how much better a horse is, if you have him from a colt.” After a moment I said, “Well, then, why not, Lysis, if you think so?” I recalled all my anticipations, so different from this; and yet, as soon as one thought, it was exactly like him.

  “She will have a small portion, I suppose,” he said, “so that neither of us will be too much beholden to the other. My sister Niko will teach her the things she has probably not learned at home. I shall take a small house, not scrape to live in the big one. If things improve later, so much the better, it makes a woman respect one more than the other way.” He went running on like this; you would have thought he had had it in mind for weeks. “What month are we in?” he said. “I suppose we might as well have the wedding in Gamelion, like everyone else.”

  “You don’t mean,” I said staring, “this next Gamelion, do you?”—“How not? She can have everything ready in three months, surely?”—“I thought you meant just to get contracted to her now. She’s quite a baby.”—“Oh, I shall have to marry her at once, I can see that. It will be the only way of doing anything with her. As she is, whatever defects her upbringing had, she has got its virtues. They taught her good manners, courage, and to speak the truth, if they didn’t teach her embroidery. Why turn her over for a year to that pinch-lipped vixen, who will make her sly and prudish and mealy-mouthed, and full of old midwives’ nastiness? I wonder if Gamelion is soon enough.”

  Recalling the scene in the Agora, I saw what he meant. He said, “I could tell just how she felt when she saw me, as if she had come on a bit of furniture, or a dog, that brought back her home to her. I told her the story of Perseus when she was six years old.”—“What are you waiting for?” I said. “Get your winged boots, and unchain her before the dragon arrives.” He laughed and took my arm and said, “Bless you, Alexias, I think I will. I suppose today has set me thinking. Since this war began we have spent more than silver; more than blood even; something of our souls. Last time I went up to the High City, I thought even the Maiden herself looked tired. It’s time to think of making a son, to start out fresh for the next lap … I must get Niko to call.”

  Two days later he gave me his sister’s report. She had quite taken, he said, to the little Thalia, and did not think her really backward for her age. It was the shock of her loss, and homesickness, Niko said, that had driven her in upon her childhood. Niko reported the sister-in-law not quite such a shrew as Lysis called her; pointing out with some justice that no decent person in charge of a young girl would let her smile at men in the market. But she was a silly woman, set in her ways, and without much feeling, and trying to give the girl three years’ training in a month, had made her so nervous she could not pick up a distaff without breaking the thread. “She thinks the world of you, Lysis, and was going to repeat to me all the kind things she had heard her father say of you, only to give me pleasure, for she has a natural sweetness one feels at once. But she was called to order, and shown her own forwardness. I felt so sorry for the poor child; it hadn’t crossed her mind till then that my call concerned her, and not one word more could I get from her, you can be sure.”

  The head of the household was an ancient grandfather, deaf and so nearly blind that he took Lysis for a youth, because he had no beard. But at last things were settled, the dowry agreed on, and he went with his sister to see the girl.

  “At first,�
�� he said, “I couldn’t get her to look at me. Poor little creature, I never saw such a change. One used to hear her from the courtyard, singing about the house. But clever Niko got her sister-in-law upon the iniquities of slaves, which gave me a little time. I told her how well her father did in the battle; she can follow anything you like of that kind. Then I reminded her of our old acquaintance, and said she would find my house a little more like home. She started to look rather less wretched; but I could see that bitch had been at her, putting her in a panic; so I said, ‘Now you must listen to me, for you’ve known me longer than any of them. The snatching-up and running at the feast is a game we shall play to amuse the guests, who think it is the best part of a wedding. But the rest can wait,’ I said, ‘till we’ve time to make friends. That’s our first secret; now we’ll see how you keep it.’ She looked much better when we left, almost as I remember her.” Niko persuaded him, however, to wait for the turn of the year, and marry in Gamelion, as he had first planned. She said, sensibly enough, that Thalia would be turned fourteen by then, which was really the earliest he could take such a young girl to his house without people talking.

  He told me he did not mean to look for another ship; it would be a long time in any case before the fleet was up to strength. He would drill with his tribal regiment (which was mine too), settle down, and farm his land when the Spartans would let him.

  I too felt that my place was in the City. My father was not well; a tertian fever he had brought from Sicily often troubled him; when the bout was on he could not do business, or attend to the farm. Not only duty but inclination drew me; for I had been long out of the City; my wits were getting rusty with the sea, and smoked from the watchfire, and the schoolboys of yesterday were young men, making their voices heard in the colonnades.

  So I came back to philosophy, but differently; feeling it in myself, and in those I met in talk, a fever of the blood. I had come to it as a boy from wonder at the visible world; to know the causes of things; and to feel the sinews of my mind, as one feels one’s muscles in the palaestra. But now we searched the nature of the universe, and our own souls, more like physicians in time of sickness.