A SIGNIFICANT SILENCE
It was this lady Daphne [Grandfather resumed his narration] who arranged the marriage of her great-nephew Polemides to the maiden Phoebe.
You may find it queer, my grandson, when I relate that our client, throughout all recounting of the events of his life, not once made mention of his bride by name. In fact, save a solitary confession toward the terminus of his tale, he cited her existence only thrice, and that indirectly. Did this indicate a want of affection? On the contrary, I find this omission extremely significant, indicative in fact of precisely the opposite. Let me explain.
In those days, more so even than today, a man made reference to his spouse rarely. The greatest glory of a woman was modesty and reserve; the less said of her, for good or ill, the better. A wife's place was within chambers, her role the rearing of children and the management of the household.
A boy raised in that period, particularly one as Polemides, schooled beneath the stern aegis of the Lacedaemonians, was taught primarily to endure. The virtues were those of men; beauty, men's beauty. Remark the sculpture of that era. Only in recent seasons has the female form-and that only of goddesses-come to rival the male in currency of bronze and stone. A youth of that era was schooled to idealize the form of other men, not in a manner prurient or lascivious, but as a model of emulation. To behold in marble the peerless physiques of Achilles and Leonidas, to admire like perfection in one's comrades or elders, fired the youth to forge his own flesh in the image of that ideal, to embody inwardly the virtues such perfection of externals implied.
The spell cast over his contemporaries by Alcibiades derived in no small part, in my opinion, from this impetus. His beauty was remarked, for those of noble mind, as an intimation of some loftier perfection inhering within. Why else would the gods have made him look like that? Another of our master's disciples was the poet Aristocles, called Plato. His Theory of Forms arises from that selfsame interpretation. As the material manifestation of an individual horse embodies the particular and the transitory, Plato suggested, so must there exist within some higher realm the ideal form of Horse, universal and immutable, of which all corporeal horses "partake” or “participate in.” To this way of perceiving, a man of Alcibiades' spectacular beauty appeared little shy of the divine, his perfection in flesh approaching that ideal existent only upon loftier planes. This is why men followed him, I believe, and found it so reflexive to do so.
Thus to Polemides and those of our generation, his and mine, the male form alone embodied arete, excellence, and andreia, virtue.
How must our client have responded, informed by his father of the identity of his bride-to-be? If he were like me, I doubt he had in his life considered the female form of especial beauty. In the carnal sense, yes, but never idealized as the male. How unappealing did she appear to him, this maiden of next door whom he had doubtless known since she was a drizzle-nosed runt?
Yet there is a telling allusion in Polemides' tale. His wife, Phoebe, he stated at one point, when she was seventeen and already mother to their child, requested initiation into the Mysteries of Eleusis. At another point in his narrative Polemides expressed his distaste for this stuff, which he regarded as little more than superstition, and effeminate at that. Yet he not only permitted his bride this favor but accompanied her upon its exercise, making the pilgrimage by sea and completing the full initiation himself.
Why would he do this? What could his motive be, save to honor his spouse and forge with her a deeper union? We may at this point be forgiven a venture into imagination. Let us picture Polemides at twenty-two or — three, already a veteran of twelve years of Spartan discipline and two and a half more of war. He returns home, wounded; he recovers, sufficiently for his father and great-aunt to provide a bride. Perhaps his thoughts turn toward mortality; he may desire children, if only to cheer the advancing age of his father. The Plague has begun. His countrymen are perishing for cause unknown; no abatement is in sight. Nor does he find his male companions to hand; all are off to war. He is cooped within the city, in the apartments he shares with father, sister, perhaps cousins, aunts, and uncles.
Our young soldier accepts his bride. She is of good family, friend to his sister Merope; no doubt she is possessed of wit, skilled in music and the domestic arts. She comports herself with modesty, self-effacing as all daughters of breeding; we may surmise that she is not without physical charms. Incapacitated as he is, the young husband finds he must rely on his bride for company and converse, perhaps even such necessities as to be brought his meals, to read or mount the stairs.
He finds his bride kind and patient, shrewd in her application of their straitened resources. She is younger, her heart is gay. She makes him laugh. Here is a man, recall, who all his life has been drilled in hardship and self-denial, to whom the supreme virtue is the sacrifice of his life in war. It occurs to him with the shock of revelation that there is another oar in the boat. He is not alone.
Perhaps for the first time the steel of his heart relents. His wound makes him dizzy, in alarm he gropes for balance; to his astonishment he discovers his bride at his elbow, steadying him with a gentle hand. May we not envision her delivering to his bedside a favorite dish, setting flowers for him upon the sill, singing at his side in the evening?
He discovers her affection for his father, and the love this gentleman reciprocates. He hears the lass giggling with his sister in the kitchen. Does this make him smile? Despite the horrors without, the clan manages cheerful evenings at home in each other's company.
As for appetites of the flesh, our young Polemides has thus far slaked them only among the harridans of the whores' camp or in illicit liaison with women of the street. Now he finds himself in the marriage bed, beside his bride. She must be innocent. Her tender years inspire not the rough lust of the soldier, but the gentle passion of the husband. How do they discover their desire?
Haltingly perhaps; doubtless deficient in skill. Yet together, each for the first time with the other.
He speaks of this never, as any gentleman. But in his heart affection grows. He has never known another, save his family, to treat him with tenderness, to look out if he is comfortable, if his needs have been attended to. May we not fancy his soldier's heart softening? Might not the occasion arise when our Polemides draws up upon the private instant and recognizes perhaps for the first time that he is happy?
Now consider her, the lass Phoebe. How does she find her husband? No paragon for the sculptor's studio perhaps, but an athlete and soldier nonetheless; virile and disciplined, a young man of substance, beside whom she need never know fear. Unthinkable is it that he will abandon her. Should the worst come, he will die defending her and her children. Must not our bride, the Bright One, respond to this, beyond her schooling as an obedient wife, out of the uncoerced attachment of her heart?
And our bridegroom is vulnerable. He has been wounded, he knows fear. He needs her. While outside, the foundations of the firmament crack and crumble, within, a private cosmos conceives itself and grows. A child stirs within the bride's womb. With what joy must the couple, keenly aware of their own mortality, have responded? More than this one need not posit to imagine the pair, in the gentle darkness of their bedchamber, forging a union which the young husband, schooled to silence and close counsel, would not dream to disclose in words.
Perhaps I take license, my grandson. I may read into Polemides' state of mind overmuch of my own. This, however, is what my heart tells me of the man.
So were we all, of that generation. Like Polemides we, too, were taking brides. We, too, had children growing and upon the way.
Our steps should have been bearing us abroad in welcome to the spring; we should have been casting open portals to range with our darlings upon the vernal hills. Yet these stood shuttered to us now.
We were walled in, compassed by the armored corps of our enemies. We had asked for war and war had come. What none had foreseen, however, was the spectral henchman at his shoulder: the Plague.
Here advanced an invader more implacable than the myriads of Persia, more pitiless than the phalanxes of Lacedaemon. One could not treat with this enemy or buy it off for gold. It countenanced no quarter; tokens of submission could not induce it to draw back. It advanced in darkness and in daylight, and no sentry's cry could call the warning. Walls of stone could not keep it out. It answered to no gods, paid heed to no offerings. It took no day off, vacated upon no holiday. It did not sleep or pause for respite. And nothing could slake its appetite.
The Plague played no favorites. Its silent scythe cut down the illustrious and the obscure, the just alongside the wicked. Daily about us we perceived its mounting toll. In the gymnasium the comrade's cubicle, within which no hand hung street clothes more.
The vendor's shuttered stall, the theater patron's vacant seat. By day we inhaled the stink of the crematoria; at night the wagons of the dead rumbled beyond our gates. In sleep we heard the groan of their tread; their terror invaded even our dreams. In her self-legislated immurement Athens reeled beneath the scourge, soundless and invisible, to whose ravagement none stood invulnerable or immune.
VIII
PROGNOSIS: DEATH
In those days as you know, Jason [Polemides resumed], there existed few formal curricula in medicine; an individual could simply call himself a doctor and offer his services for hire. More frequently a private person found himself recruited, so to say, by his own facility for succor. This was the case with my father. He had the gift. Stricken friends sent for him. He made them well.
From his years upon the land my father had acquired expertise of herbs and kataplasmata, poultices and purges, splints, bindings, even surgery, all the folk-derived veterinary usages the husbandman learns seeking to keep his stock sound and thriving.
More beneficial stood his manner of proffering comfort. One simply felt better in his presence. My father revered the gods in the simple, straightforward manner of his age. He believed; his friends believed in him; it worked. Soon their friends were calling too. In this manner Nicolaus of Acharnae, bereft of the income of his estate, found himself competent to support his new household in the city. He chucked his farmer's boots and hung out the physician's shingle.
With the rise of the Plague my father's services became much in demand. My sister Meri took upon herself the role of nurse, accompanying him on his rounds. I was in the city then too. I had married and had a young son. Often I, too, traveled with my father and sister, more to provide security under arms in the remote precincts they were called to than to assist in any medical capacity.
I detested the sick. I was afraid of them. I could not but feel that they had drawn their distress upon themselves by their own delinquent actions, concealed from mortals but known to the gods.
And I dreaded contagion. I stood in awe of my father's and sister's intrepidity to enter these dwellings of the doomed. I recall one midnight, summoned to some shantytown quarter, a hive of tent cloth and wicker, where ventilation stood nonexistent and the vapors of the dying loitered noxiously, stinking to heaven. The madness of the street-spawned Theseus religion stood at its zenith then. The lane was plastered with crimson bull's horns.
Every wall read Proseisin: “He is coming.” The tenement itself teemed with immigrants, ancients and babes, those foreigners who had flocked to the city in her decades of abundance and now in her affliction remained marooned, dying like flies. Not all the gold of Persia could have induced me to enter that hellhole. Yet in they trooped, my father and sister, armed only with a hidesack of herbs and that handful of inadequate instruments of physic-the listening stick, the lancet, and the speculum.
Let me show you something, Jason. It is my father's casebook; I have kept it all these years.
Female, 30, fever, nausea, abdominal convulsions.
Prescriptives: foxglove and valerian, purge of strychnine in wine. Prognosis: poor.
Infant, 6 months, fever, abdominal convulsions.
Prescriptives: tea of willow bark, astringent of comfrey and hellebore in beeswax suppository. Prognosis: poor.
In the margins my father notes his fees. Those circled are the ones who paid. One may scan twenty and thirty cases without finding a mark. But skip down. The months pass.
Economy now informs the notes.
Male, 50. Plague. Death.
Child, 2. Plague. Death.
I was twenty-three then. I was not ready to die, or to stand idly by while those I loved succumbed. Yet what could one do? The helplessness ate your guts. My mother's father took his own life, yet uninfected by the scourge; the patriarch could not endure to outlive yet another generation of those he loved. My father and I bore his bones away in a child's phaeton, out through that gate called Lionheart heretofore, now the Gate of Tears, to our tomb in the country. Half a hundred parties of the bereaved trekked with us; the queue stretched to the Anaceum. The Spartans, the season's ravagement completed, had withdrawn, save the odd cavalry patrol. One tracked us along the Acharnae Road. Their lieutenant called to us to see reason and seek peace. “This is not war,” he cried, his knight's heart outraged at such horrors visited upon children and women. “It is hell.”
For myself I had witnessed little of the nobility of war so eloquently advertised by this officer's countrymen, my schoolmasters. In Aetolia we burned villages and poisoned wells.
In Acarnania our blades were employed to slaughter sheep, not staying even to strip the beasts of hide or fleece, but dumping them throat-slit into the sea. The only real battle I had seen was at Mytilene under Laches, the ablest amphibious commander of the war, save only the Spartan Brasidas and Alcibiades.
The latter had won his second prize of valor, in the raid on the Spartan harbor at Gytheium, and was to collect another at Delium, saving the life of your master Socrates, this time as a cavalryman-all in all a “triple,” on land, sea, and horseback. By then, too, he had entered his first chariot at Olympia, though his driver had spilled and failed to finish.
I saw none of Alcibiades during those days. The Plague had hit his household hard. In addition to Pericles, whom rumors reported stricken, he had lost his mother, Deinomache, an infant daughter of his wife Hipparete, and both sons of his lover Cleonice, who herself had perished not long after. His cousins, Pericles' sons Paralus and Xanthippus, had fallen, and Amycla, the Spartan nurse who had remained loyal, even when her country called her home.
Without the walls awaited war; within, pestilence. Now arose a third scourge: one's own countrymen, made desperate by the first two. The poor cracked first. Driven by want, they took to plundering the homes of those of middling wealth, which stood vulnerable owing to their banishment of watchmen and stewards, all save the most trustworthy, who themselves took to crime to pay a physician or an undertaker, which professions amounted to the same thing. What good was money if you would not live to spend it? A gentleman would perish, bequeathing his treasure to his sons; these, anticipating their own imminent extinction, ran through their patrimony as fast as their fists could scatter it, abetted by every species of parasite and bloodsucker, seeking the juice as it spilled. You saw it, Jason. Disease would carry off a man's wife and children; bereft of hope, he sets his own flat alight, then lingers in numb katalepsis, nor disclaims his offense to the brigadiers hastening onto the scene as the blaze consumes the tenancies of his neighbors. Near the Leocorium I saw a man hacked to pieces for this felony. Others set fires purely out of malice. After dark, flame-spotting became a spectator sport.
My brother served then with the infantry under Nicias in Megara; he and others shuttled regularly with dispatches. Again and again he urged me to get out. Enlist as a marine, take oars on a freighter, anything to vacate this antechamber of hell, the besieged city. He had sent his wife Theonoe and their babes to her kinsmen in the north; my own bride and child remained in Athens.
“They're dead already,” Lion addressed me with passion. “Their graves are dug. Father and Meri too, and us with them if we're mad enough to stay.” This
upon an evening when he and I drank alone, not for pleasure, but shamelessly, to render ourselves insensate.
“Listen to me, brother. You're not one of those pious nincompoops who see this scourge as a curse from heaven. You're a soldier. You know one does not make camp in a swamp or drink downstream from a shithouse. Look around you, man! We're kenneled like rats, ten crammed in space for two, the very air we breathe contaminated as a terminal ward.”
This was how one spoke then. You remember, Jason. One tolled the truth with the candor of the condemned. Civility rode the greased sluice into the gutter, succeeded by scruple and self-restraint. Why obey the laws when you were already sentenced to death? Why honor the gods when their worst was nothing beside what you already bore? As for the future, to turn to it with hope was madness, to contemplate it with dread only made your present plight more unbearable. What object was served by virtue? To conduct oneself with patience and thrift was folly; heedlessness and pursuit of pleasure, common sense. To defer desire was absurd; to succor the afflicted, the fastest way to bring on your own end.
Despair begat boldness, slow death the courting of extinction.
Gangs roamed the streets, armed with paving stones and wagon staves, weapons they could cast aside or claim harmless when the constables collared them, which they never did. These thugs scrawled insults on the public halls, defacing even the sanctuaries of the dead, and none stood up to them. With each act of insolence uncondemned, this scum grew more brazen. They hunted foreigners, the weaker the better, and beat them with a barbarity unprecedented. More than once my father and sister, hastening to one in need, were compelled to tend some fellow bludgeoned in the gutter and left to die. The white robe of the sisters of mercy lent protection on their rounds, yet there arose those who donned this garment to gain access to a home, to ransack it even as the occupants cried out to them, dying. I saw one female stoned on the very threshold she had plundered, the mob making off with the villainess's loot while her blood yet ran upon the pavement. Arms had been outlawed, and all firebrands, even courtesy torches to light one's way home. The penalty was death for those caught bearing firesticks and tinder.
Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War Page 6
