“God has put a price on your liberty. The price is your vigilance, your sleepless guard, lest it be taken from you. Prizes will be, and are, offered to you in this, your city, for your obedience, for your subservience, for your acceptance of a life that is really a death. If you accept, for a momentary flattery, for a few drachmas in your hands, for a shameful peace, you will be accursed before God Who detests the coward—the true traitor to his humanity, the man without dignity and pride in his being before the God Who made him. He has committed the absolute treason against all that lives, all that has endurance and magnificence and truth.
“Many of you here know their abominable names, but they are not present! They lie among their sleek women, and dine in luxury and count their money and bejewel themselves and breed fine horses for the Games, and build palaces for their pleasure. They tell you that their hearts bleed for you, that they would have you kings among men, that with their help you will ride in chariots and walk on marble and never know hunger or pain again. They lie! A man is born to labor and to rejoice in his labor, for he who does not serve is condemned to death, not by men, but by God and nature. To serve God and country, in whatever fashion God ordains, is the highest servitude and the highest freedom.
“Men of Athens! Sons of the laws of Solon! We Greeks, for the first time in known history, have brought a dream to mankind, the dream of liberty, of law which all men, rulers and the ruled, must obey, of just rewards for just service, of freedom of speech and freedom to write, of judges and juries, of punishments to fit the crime, of order not imposed but self-imposed, of the power to vote and the power to seek redress under a dispassionate government, even against that very government, of equal taxation instead of the tribute other rulers exact of their helpless people, of the right to protest and dissent, of the right to demand justice if oppressed or reviled or harmed or defamed, and, above all, to be free in your persons, your property, your houses, your opinions.
“Of all these your enemies would deprive you and me. They would silence our voices. They would drive justice from her altars. They would make of our country but a vast prison camp where all would labor and none would be rewarded and none, ever again, be men!”
No one shifted or stirred and now only a few revealed malignant and cunning faces. Before that countenance turned upon them, before that eloquence, the majority were deeply moved.
Then Pericles took the hand of Aspasia and looked at her, and suddenly he was weeping and the tears ran down his face, and never had they seen this before and a great sigh rose from the assemblage.
Pericles drew Aspasia to his side and put his arm about her.
“Behold this woman, whom I love, as you know I love her. She is a symbol to you, in the vicious accusations brought against her, of what awaits us if our enemies prevail. They sought her death, not because she has done any wrong, but because she is innocent and fearless and will not bend before tyranny and lies. But more than that, they would kill her because I love her. They would take from me—as they would take from you—all that we hold dear, out of their hatred for us. They would set the rabble on us, the avaricious rabble who would seize the fruits of our labors, who would stain the glory of our fathers with their envious spittle, the envious rabble which has no honor and no soul and no manhood but only greed and spite and malice and bottomless bellies. They would do this in order to crush you and silence you and overcome you with terror, for a rabble armed is more frightful than an army with banners and bloody spears. They would give the rabble arms for your destruction, to subjugate you.
“It is your choice: to stand on your feet as men, or crouch on your knees as slaves. The dream of Solon can endure, or it can die. It is your choice, for now you appear at the bar of history and God is your Judge.”
The silence remained, even though the white walls seemed still to vibrate with the power of Pericles’ voice. Every man looked at him, and looked at Aspasia at his side, and saw his tears and the resolute set of his mouth and the force of his eyes, which challenged them, not with rage or contempt, but with their mutual brotherhood.
At last the King Archon spoke. “Before this jury of equal men, I exonerate Aspasia of Miletus of all the accusations brought against her. Speak then, if any man wishes to speak.”
But the jury did not speak and the King Archon appeared to examine each face and though a number were still malignant their tongues were silent. The King Archon then said to Aspasia, “Go, then, in peace, absolved of any charges.”
Pericles bowed to the King Archon and Aspasia bent her head. Pericles took Aspasia’s hand and walked through the voiceless assemblage with her and the guards opened the bronze door wide so that the sun burst in and covered the two with light.
PROLOGUE
“The past is only prologue.” SOCRATES
The Great Plague came to Athens and overwhelmed the already demoralized citizens. It struck down in particular the women of child-bearing age and the young, and equally decimated the middle-aged and old. A multitude of voices rose that the gods were avenging the insult to their dignity imposed on them by Pericles and his friends, and “that infamous harlot, Aspasia of Miletus.” Few paid heed to the fact that Pericles’ two sons, Paralus and Xanthippus, died of it, without being fully reconciled to their father, that his friends were well one day and conversing with him, and dead the next.
The clamor against him rose even higher when, from the walls of Athens, the Athenians could see their enemies pillaging their countryside. The best of the navy had been destroyed. It did no good for Pericles to recall to the government that they had permitted Sparta to grow so strong that she had been able to attack, with her allies, and gain tremendous victories. “Did I not warn you that we must increase our armaments?” he demanded of the Assembly. “But you talked of peace’ and a more benevolent attitude towards Sparta, who has always hated us. Can you come to terms with a nation which is determined to destroy you and rule the whole of Greece? We were a prosperous people, we of Athens, and became fat and complacent and scorned those who warned us of the approaching conflict. There is no substitute for the military and the navy in this dangerous world filled with ambitious men. There is no substitute for liberty, which so many of you have ridiculed. Human nature never changes. Therefore, those who desire peace must resolutely prepare for war, horrifying though war is. Only a strong man can resist his enemy. Placating that enemy, assuring him that your intentions are peaceful and that you desire only trade, is a signal to him to attack.
“But when I warned you, endlessly, you shouted to me that I wished to be a king, have absolute power over you, that I was a dictator and a tyrant and a despot. I did not want a strong army and navy, you said, because I feared for Athens. No, you said, I wished to have a powerful military so I could turn it on you!”
“We want peace!” the people cried. “Our sons are dying in the prison camps and the quarries of Syracuse!”
Pericles was himself stricken by the plague, but recovered under the devoted care of Aspasia. But despite his recovery his spirit seemed to have been overcome by somberness and his physical condition never became stalwart again. It was as if something had died in him, as it had died in Athens: the will to resist. Athens’ great navies were almost totally destroyed, her armies put to flight, while the Spartans, a disciplined and gloomy and warlike people, proclaimed that they had driven Athens from the sea and from the land. It was no matter to Sparta that she had, herself, suffered huge losses of men and arms and ships. Only victory had been her dream, and power, whereas Athens had desired only prosperity and trade and commerce. Now Persia, never forgetting her defeat by Athens, allied herself with Sparta. The internal enemies of Pericles suddenly rose triumphantly in Athens and betrayed her, saying that “the experiment in general freedom has failed,” and that it was now time for an oligarchy to seize power. They opened negotiations with Sparta, particularly the rich haters of liberty, Antiphon, Peisander and Phrynichus. That they were defeated later and crushed by Alcibiades and The
ramenes, who established the Constitution of Five Thousand, and continued the struggle with Sparta, meant nothing to Pericles then.
For he had died of exhaustion and the debility brought on him by the plague, and of, said his devoted kinsman Alcibiades with bitterness, a broken heart “inflicted on him by an ungrateful people.”
Alcibiades said, “The glory of Greece was not the glory of the whole city-state. It was the glory of a handful of great men, though their fellows were sleeplessly at war with those heroes and murdered or exiled them. Athens heaped infamy upon Pericles, and only at the very last was he permitted to inscribe the name of his son, Pericles, in the public records of fraternity. If the name of Athens survives the ages it will not be because all Athenians were men of grandeur, patriotic men, artists and scientists and philosophers, and men of extraordinary stature. Only a few labored and loved, and were hated for these qualities. They were not of us. They were visitations of the gods. And we did them to death.”
An immense numbness came to Aspasia, mercifully, when Pericles had died, sighing, in her arms, one hot midnight. It did not lift. She gave up her school and immured herself in her house, with her son, Pericles, until he was called to active service in the war. Then she was alone, seeing few if any of her friends.
It is only the foolish who say that one can live on happy memories, she would mourn to herself, dry-eyed because she could not weep and had not wept even when Pericles had died. Her grief was too deep, too immutable.
It is better to have lived a life of sadness and pain, unalleviated by joy or peace or happiness, she would think. For then one approaches death with relief and gratitude. But joyful memories of a love that has gone, of arms once filled, of gardens which no longer bloom, is a torment worse than any torments in Hades. Ah, if I could have the memory of my love blotted from my mind it might be possible for me to endure with some measure of equanimity, and think of tomorrow. But now I am desolate and memory is the curse of Hecate. Would that I had never lived!
Her only dim consolation—and it did not always console her—was when she looked up at the white and gold glory of the acropolis at sunset or dawn and could contemplate the ineffable majesty of temples and terraces and friezes and columns and colonnades. It was the crown of Athens and it seemed to her that it was deathless and that men would always remember what stood there and bow their heads in wonder and reverence.
Pericles had been entombed near the Academia. But to Aspasia he walked under sun and moon with his friends in the colonnades, Pheidias, Anaxagoras, and all the others who had made Athens glorious, and they were eternally young and their faces eternally illuminated, and, as they walked and conversed they would sometimes pause to look down upon their city and bless her and love her again.
“Ah, my beloved, my dearest one, my love and my god,” she would murmur aloud, lifting her arms to the glory above her. “Wait for me. Forget me not.”
There were occasions when she felt a gentle comfort, and promise.
Table of Contents
Title
Publisher
Booklist
Description
Reviews
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Prologue
Glory and the Lightning Page 69