For Eleanor Graham
but for whom there would have been
no writing
Thanks are due to the following: the estate of the late Professor Gilbert Murray and George Allen and Unwin Ltd for permission to quote from Professor Murray’s translations of The Trojan Women and The Bacchae by Euripides, from Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, and from The Persians by Aeschylus; the University of Chicago Press for permission to quote from the translation of Helen and Rhesus by Euripides appearing in Complete Greek Tragedies by Grene and Lattimore; and to Witter Bynner and the University of Chicago Press for permission to quote from the former’s translation of Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides.
Prologue
Time to Remember at Sardis
Cyrus led us up from Ephesus to Sardis months ago, too many months ago, because in this enforced idleness, you tend to remember what brought you here. You look across at the fellow sharing your supper and you wonder if he might not be the very man who burned your home and so sent you here to the camp outside Sardis. Or you remember he said something the other night about an elder brother, killed a dozen years ago on a raid; a dozen years ago you were in action against one of their raiding parties, and his brother might have been the man you cut down amid the blackened tree stumps in what had been an olive grove. And then you stop discussing the rumours, which are growing wilder and wilder as the spring sun grows hotter and hotter, and your eyes meet, and one or other of you gets up, making some excuse about wanting an early night.
But sleep will take a long time to come.
As sleep will not come to me tonight—though not because of a conversation with a Hellene, but because I was sent into the Persian part of the city, with a message for Cyrus.
I spoke with Cyrus himself, and he did his best to be affable, because I am one of the Greek mercenaries he thinks are going to win him a throne. He was not to know that as I looked at him in his diadem and purple robe and gold bracelets, my only thought was, ‘I wish to God I could have got as close as this to you six years ago—to choke the life out of you.’
If Cyrus had died six years ago, Athens would not have been defeated.
No, that visit to the palace did me no good. Ghosts were crowding thick about me as I came away—the brilliant ghost of one exile who came a decade ago to this capital of the Persian province of Lydia, the ghost of another exile, preceding the other by several years, passing through Sardis on a hopeless search for a child. I could see them both, the one striding masterfully through the gaudy courtiers, the other riding in desperate haste through the crooked streets, knowing all the time that he was too late, half a dozen years too late. And while my mind saw these, my heart heard the voice of another ghost. I stood there amid all the silk and soft light and perfumed closeness of Cyrus’ palace, and I longed for the fresh air of Hellas, clear and young as it flows about Olympus’ divine peak soaring to the skies, or the shining brilliance of the air of my own city, and I heard a voice talking of his countrymen—and mine—’Walking with delicate feet through the most luminous ether’, and then came the undying pain of knowing that Euripides, like my cousin, and like Callistratus, was lost to me for ever, lost with so much else, in that earthquake of war, when the ground rocked under our feet and the foundations of assured life collapsed.
So my thoughts have come round more or less in full circle, for of course you can never escape the war for long. Into any conversation it comes grinning like the skeletons Egyptians have at their feasts; each one of the ten thousand of us is here because of it in one way or another; some because it destroyed our property and livelihood, others because, when a war goes on for nearly thirty years, a generation grows up that has never known any occupation but fighting. Your only trade is war, and most of your conversation is war.
So you have the sudden silences falling when men from a dozen different states talk together, and, if you are an Athenian, you go away, to wrap yourself in your cloak in the bitter silence of defeat.
I have noticed that we few Athenians are the people flinching away most from any reference to past history; I said to Ariston a few days ago that mentally we are so thin-skinned we might very well be without a skin altogether. He said briefly, ‘Well, haven’t our minds been flayed?’
It is true that only one other state suffered more than we did—while no other state fell so swiftly Icarus-like, from soaring power to utter destruction.
Because we were defeated so utterly, because night fell so soon after our bright noontide—dazzling as the sun beating down on the ripples at Salamis—there will always be those to say that, like Icarus, we were destroyed because of our presumption, because we strove to rise too high, too close to the sun.
Ninety years ago we were nothing, a petty city that had just rid itself of its tyrants, no more. Except that we had gained freedom. Freedom is an idea that is generally considered out of date now. Talk of Freedom leaves a sour taste in most mouths. But Freedom made us, insignificant as we were, stand up to the Persian Empire, and smash their punitive expedition at Marathon, unaided except for the help sent by Plataea. How could we do it? Because Liberty and Equality, Herodotus said in his history, are brave, spirit-stirring things. And, remembering Marathon, how can any man say we did wrong in choosing Freedom! It cannot be that we did wrong! It cannot be!
And ten years later the Athenian democracy again saved all Hellas at Salamis, when we smashed the forces of the Great King, and after his armies were driven out of Europe the Athenian fleet went up and down the islands, to the Asian mainland itself, restoring freedom to the Greek colonies the barbarians had conquered and enslaved. High tide, high summer for Athens. Nothing was impossible for us then. And a man called Pericles—my kinsman—tried to create heaven on earth and set it up there on the Acropolis, and Pheidias peopled it with images of the gods and Aeschylus cried that Athenians were pupils of a wisdom higher than their own.
Did our people never understand that such glory was a fragile thing, for Sparta would fear it, without really knowing why, while Corinth would be jealous, and Thebes had always hated us—and so war was inevitable?
It was an exile in Syracuse twenty years later who explained to a beaten slave that this war would prove to be one of two things—the end of something great, or the beginning of something greater.
But I must not think of Syracuse. If I see the very name on a map, there is the cold and the sickness and the tearing pain at the heart, and the old foolish incredulity that Syracuse, where so much happened, should be marked just the same as other towns, and if I hear the name . . .
I heard it the day I arrived in Ephesus. Two Ephesians, comfortable- looking, elderly, stood in the market-place discussing the Expedition to Syracuse—from a literary point of view. ‘I consider it the best piece of descriptive writing in his whole History,’ said one, while the other said you could always trust Thucydides to be meticulously accurate in all details.
Yes, his details are accurate enough . . .
When the war began, ‘killed’ to me was simply a word cropping up frequently in the Iliad—it was something that happened to people, but people living long ago, so it didn’t have much real meaning. If it had any, it was something noble and heroic—and vague.
There is nothing noble or heroic or vague about death in battle. It is undignified, messy and uncompromising. Only children and Spartans think otherwise—and Spartans are stupid, unpleasant schoolboys who have never grown up.
And I am serving under a Spartan now. What do they think of me, my dead, whom I can never keep wholly from my thoughts, even at noonday, and who press forward about me as the shadows lengthen until, with complete darkness, I can believe they sit here with me about the dying fire, whispering, ‘Why have you come to
Sardis, Lycius?’
Night after night this happens, and I cannot answer them. All I can be sure of is the time when my journey here began—a night in early spring thirty years ago, when Thebes sent her army tramping seven miles through the mud in a surprise attack on Plataea, so setting me, with many others, on the first stage of the long road which was to bring me here to Sardis.
Part One
‘How Fortunate’
431–415 b.c.
creusa: . . . And Athens is my native land.
ion: A famous city and a noble race! How fortunate you are!
Euripides: Ion
1
The Journey Begins
When the long journey to Sardis began that chill, wet dawn in early spring, I was just six years old.
I was roused, along with every other member of the household, by a frantic beating on the door, and the wild barking of our dogs. People were rushing about; somewhere a woman screamed. A few minutes later I heard my father’s unmistakable step outside. At that I jumped out of bed, struggled into my tunic and scurried along to the scene of the disturbance, prepared to hurl myself joyfully against the serried ranks of all Sparta, if need be. But when the great bolts were drawn back, out of the bleak, wet, early dawn reeled a solitary man, a man, moreover, known to my father, who gave an incredulous shout of, ‘Astymachus!’ while the stranger, stammering with weariness, said, ‘Polystratus, thank God you’re here. Lend me a horse to get me to Athens as soon as I can. There’s been black treachery. The Thebans attacked us at midnight.’
‘They’ve taken Plataea?’ If I had heard only the voice, had not seen the face, I should never have guessed it was my father speaking.
‘Not yet. Their advance party took us by surprise, were there in the market-place before we could realise what had happened, but when we rallied, we fought back—women, children, everybody, from the streets and roofs—and they ran. They came to what they thought was one of the main gates, bolted through—found it was a store house.’
A faint smile lit the tired face for a moment, and my father smiled grimly as he replied, ‘Typically thickheaded! So that was the end of them?’
Astymachus said, ‘That would have been what the treacherous swine deserved, but I thought it better to urge taking them alive and using them as hostages. A bare majority backed me—’ And then his voice quickened.
‘But they were only the advance party,’ he said urgently. ‘The main army was delayed because the river’s in flood—we got that much from the prisoners. And God knows how many are in the main force, or if they’re outside. We sent off a messenger to Athens as soon as the trouble started, but of course he didn’t know any details; when we knew exactly what was intended, I was told to follow him up, let Athens know how great the danger is. I came by Eleutherae. A cavalry patrol stopped me outside the fort, and your boy Theron was the officer. He told me you were here, and that while they’d gladly give me a cavalry remount, I’d be better off coming here to borrow one of your horses. It was lucky he told me—my horse went lame five minutes before I reached your farm.’
‘Have one of the grey Corinthian thoroughbreds,’ said my father promptly. ‘I’ll ride the other and come with you. Drink this wine while the grooms get them saddled.’
He filled a cup, handed it to Astymachus, hurried out calling orders. I stood there, all eyes, in the dim greyness and then, moved by the misery and fear on the tired face in the tiny circle of lamplight, I stole forward and said earnestly, ‘No one could get to Athens as quickly as you will, sir, because the greys are the horses Father used in the last Olympics when he won the chariot race.’
He started, came back from his thoughts which were miles away, over the dark pass on the bleak slopes of Cithaeron, looked down in some surprise, and then some of the strain left his face and he smiled for the second time that night—and this time there was no grimness in it—and said, ‘I know, I cheered him on to win. You must be—wait a moment—yes, Lycius, a little younger than my second son.’
‘Did your son my age see the fighting?’ I enquired eagerly.
He laughed outright. ‘See? He took part in it. He threw tiles from the roof with the best of them and brought down one great six-footer with a clang they ought to have heard all the way back in Thebes ‘
Pangs of jealousy transfixed me, but before I could make any unworthy comment, my father had returned, seized me by the scruff of the neck, exclaiming, ‘The boy’s as inquisitive as a house-weasel!’ and consigned me to the first slave he saw. I was being slapped by an indignant Tecmessa before being hustled back to bed, when hoofbeats rapidly receding into the distance announced that Father and his friend were on their way to Athens. I forgave Tecmessa the slapping and told her in a lordly way that when the Thebans came to us I would protect her.
‘You throw tiles at them,’ I explained patronisingly, ‘and the big ones fall down with an awful bang.’
For once she didn’t tell me to stop my chatter. Instead she left me with the lamp still burning, and came back in a few moments with my mother. Father had gone off in such a hurry that the women had had no chance to find out what had really happened, and now, while the flame of the lamp grew dimmer as the grey light grew stronger, they sat pale-faced listening to my childish version of what had brought Astymachus hammering on our door.
‘God knows what the end will be,’ said my mother, crying. But there were no doubts in my mind.
‘There’ll be a war!’ I said ecstatically, only to start sulking in the next moment because the war would, of course, be over before I was old enough to take part in it.
Six days later my grandfather, Alcisthenes, clattered up with the news that Father had gone back to Plataea with his friend. ‘We’ve sent a force there to evacuate the women and children and the old folk and to help gather in the harvest as soon as it’s ripe. I told Astymachus his own family could go to our little house on Salamis.’
Poor mother, always terrified of Grandfather, plucked up her courage to ask when we might expect my father back.
‘Back?’ demanded my grandfather, furiously. ‘Only when the war’s over, woman! He’s commanding the contingent we’ve sent to help garrison Plataea—didn’t you gather that?’
My mother began to cry. My grandfather gave a gesture of irritation, and strode out. I raced after him.
‘Grandfather,’ I piped up, ‘if you say “when the war’s over”, do you mean it’s begun?’
He halted his swinging stride and looked grimly down at me.
‘My God!’ he said in disgust. ‘It sounds as if you’ve started being one of those hair-splitting philosophers already! Well, you don’t get it from your father’s side of the family, d’you hear? It comes from your mother’s side, and if I ever find you aping that good-for-nothing cousin of yours, I’ll break your neck.’
Because I had been spoiled by my mother and Tecmessa and all the women of the household, I was not really scared by the tall, trim, hard-faced old man who affected most people like a Gorgon. I smiled confidingly and said I had never met this cousin of mine that everybody talked about, and I didn’t mean to annoy by asking if the war had begun. What I really wanted to know was whether the Spartans had joined in.
‘Not yet,’ said my grandfather, bending down and scooping me up in a long arm, ‘but they will, Lycius, they will. Now that Thebes has made the first move, Sparta’ll be in Attica before the spring’s far gone. D’you know what that means, boy?’
‘I fight them,’ I said, ‘I throw tiles from the roof, and—’
‘You do not,’ said my grandfather incisively. ‘No one fights them. You pack up your traps and you go off into Athens.’
Frankly, I didn’t believe him, but before I could do more than grin incredulously, the arrival of my brother, Theron, created a diversion. He had come to say that the evacuation of the Plataean non-combatants was complete, and that the Plataean crops had been safely gathered within the city walls—none too soon, either, because a Theban army had been sig
hted the day after the last of the harvest was reaped, and was now ravaging the Plataean fields. Theron, who had been on reconnaissance, said that had been a sickening sight.
My grandfather said grimly, ‘No use going white round the gills at the sight of a burning Plataean cottage, boy—be prepared for the same to happen to your own home.’
2
Evacuation
When for us the long trudge along a crowded road commenced, I wasn’t frightened; I was merely a hot and maddeningly wilful brat, wretched because I had to leave the farm, and out to make everybody else’s life a misery because of it. Why on earth the poor souls, faced with the bleak necessity of evacuation, did not abandon me with the piglets and other uncontrollable squealing little animals, I do not know, especially when I bawled that I wasn’t going into Athens, I was going to stay on the farm.
‘And then the Spartans will kill you!’ said Tecmessa grimly.
‘I’d like to see them try!’ I said, scowling in the midst of my tears. That, at least, brought a brief smile to the worried-looking faces around me, even if Tecmessa snapped, ‘Oh no, you wouldn’t!’ and pushed me ungently up into the cart.
And of course she was right. When I did, frequently, see Spartans trying to kill me, I didn’t like it at all.
Mother was already sitting in the cart, but I would not sit on her knee, no, I sullenly sat on the jolting floor, and then was furious because I could not see over the side. I whined about it, and Tecmessa said sharply it was my own fault, and Mother, pacific as ever, said there was nothing to see, only many poor people who were leaving their homes and going into Athens like us. I didn’t really believe her; people meant noise, I thought, and I couldn’t hear a crowd of people chattering. It was my first meeting with the chill silence of a heavy-hearted multitude.
After a time we gave a lift to two very old people, a husband and wife. The old woman was so exhausted, she simply leaned back with her eyes closed, but her husband kept talking to himself angrily, bitterly, grievingly about the farm he was leaving behind. Even I was touched by his misery. I leaned forward, and, touching his gnarled old hand, said stoutly, ‘It’ll be over soon, you’ll see!’ echoing what Tecmessa had said to me during the worst wretchedness I had ever known—toothache. But he looked at me with bleak old eyes and said, ‘A month’ll be too long for me! Do you know what they’ll do? They’ll cut down the vines and olives! And I’m close on eighty—d’you know what that means, young shaver? It means I’m finished. D’you know how long an olive has to grow to bear a full crop? Sixteen to eighteen years, and even then it’s not at its best. You have to wait forty to sixty years for that. My father planted my olives close on fifty years ago, starting afresh after the Persians had burned our farm. He said I’d get the benefit of ’em, and just when they’re coming to their best, these long-haired swine’ll do just what the Persians did. Cut down the olives—cut down the olives—it’s always the country folk who suffer.’
The Road to Sardis Page 1