‘You lived in Corinth?’ Alexanor asked.
‘Corinth and Athens and Megara. My fathers were always being exiled.’ He smiled. ‘I loved Corinth. Aratos freed her from the Macedonians, and now he’s sold her back …’ Philopoemen shook his head.
They were climbing down the ridge on the Saronic Gulf side, and as they passed the crest they could suddenly see all the shipping on the beach, and their own small round ship on the last stade of the Diolkos.
‘And Athens?’ Alexanor asked.
‘I was there for school. I went to the Academy for a while. I enjoyed fighting in the palaestra and I loved the theatre, but I found the Academy to be too …’ He paused. ‘It’s hard to say. Everyone was richer than me.’
‘You do not seem to me to suffer from any deficit of wealth,’ Alexanor said.
‘I agree, and that’s why I found them remarkable. Rich, and full of themselves, teachers and students alike.’ He shrugged. ‘One day, a young woman took me to the Painted Stoa to listen to Chrysippus. I never went back to the Academy.’ He smiled.
‘And the young woman?’ Alexanor asked before he thought.
‘She’s dead now,’ Philopoemen said, his face suddenly set.
They walked to the ship in silence.
Their little vessel was not one of Poseidon’s beauties racing across the waves: it stank of newly tanned leather in the sunlight, and in fact it took hours for four sweating slaves with long oars to work the ship off the beach and out into the wind, and even then Philopoemen and his entire retinue had to take turns at the oars. The ship was a fat tub of a small merchant, pierced for six oars a side, fully laden and heavy as a lead ball.
But they had a beautiful day and a calm night, and they got the mainsail up and left it there, wafting slowly along, with a ripple under the forefoot of the little vessel, and morning saw Aegina off the bow and the great bay of Salamis opening to the north. Before the evening swell began to change the currents in the channel of Salamis, they were past the Dog Island and into the harbour of Piraeus. The little ship tied up to a pier in the military harbour and the captain paid a fee, or a bribe, to unload his passengers and their horses right there. Alexanor heard him swear by Poseidon that only the passengers would unload, and then watched as the whip-crane on the mast unloaded the horses, their baggage, and then a dozen bales of newly tanned leather which was taken away instantly by longshoremen, big men who could carry heavy loads.
‘You have our olive oil for Aegina?’ Philopoemen asked, and the captain nodded.
‘Yes, sir. I will deliver it tomorrow and be back the day after. Our people are raising a cargo for Mytilene.’
The captain was a small man, a freedman. Only then did Alexanor fully realise that Philopoemen owned the ship, and the cargo.
Philopoemen slapped the captain on the shoulder.
‘Good man.’ To Alexanor, he said, ‘Might as well turn a profit while I’m on this errand. I have friends in Athens. I hope they can find me twenty Thracians.’
‘Soldiers?’
‘Slaves. I’ll buy them and free them for service. It’s expensive, but it builds loyalty quickly, I promise.’ Philopoemen smiled a crooked smile. ‘I’ll probably need a week.’
‘My … father … rents estates along the coast,’ Alexanor said. ‘If we are here for long, I will visit them.’
‘For your father?’
‘I’ve been thinking about him …’ Alexanor admitted.
Philopoemen nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I think you have at least five days. But I’d rather hoped to show you Athens.’
Alexanor waved to Leon, who was leading out their pack animals.
‘Then I’ll meet you … where?’
‘The Painted Stoa? I tend to end up there, whenever I visit,’ Philopoemen admitted. ‘You know Athens at all?’
‘Not at all,’ Alexanor admitted.
‘Well, hurry about your business and I’ll show you around. It is a magnificent city, even if you find their monuments a little tasteless.’
Alexanor thought the last comment remarkable as he rode north between the decaying Long Walls, looking at the distant Acropolis and the gleaming, ethereal figure of Athena Nike and the noble perfection of the Parthenon. But he led Leon out of one of the east gates, riding under the new artillery towers and into the brilliant sunlight.
They had to ask directions frequently, but afternoon found them on a plain of olive groves and barley fields. Alexanor found his father’s factor in a shed, watching a smith rebuild a broken cart, and the man took him around the farms with a confidence that impressed him. The next day, the factor took him to the other set of farms down by the fortress at Sounion, and Alexanor wrote his father a long letter praising the man’s industry. He was preparing to send it from Piraeus, but the factor told him there was a Rhodian warship in the harbour at Sounion.
‘The choir is warming up,’ the ship’s captain said to him. His name was Menestaeos, and his brother Orestes had been Alexanor’s commanding officer. ‘We’re heading for another war. You should come home.’
Alexanor shook his head. ‘I have a mission for my temple. And then I’m for Crete. Please tell my father that I’ve been promoted to high priest.’
The captain, an older man, nodded. ‘Good for you, lad. Never doubted you’d succeed, whatever you turned your hand to. But … people talk, and the talk is you’re serving Macedon.’
Alexanor smiled thinly. ‘Yes. So it would appear.’ He shrugged. ‘The talk used to be that I was a coward.’
Menestaeos frowned. ‘No one ever believed that shit, Alexanor. We need lads like you.’ He looked as if he was going to say more, but then shook his head.
Alexanor nodded. ‘I do what I can,’ he said. ‘Send my greetings to my father.’
The Rhodian captain had to accept this.
‘Well, I’ll see your pater in a dozen days,’ he said. ‘I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear from you.’ He smiled, and even added a small bow, as if Alexanor was a man of consequence.
‘Will he, though?’ Alexanor asked the air.
Alexanor thought that he was prepared for Athens, but he was not. Rhodes was a great city, with high walls, a determined garrison, modern weapons, and a fine navy. It had magnificent temples and had once been dominated by the Colossus, one of the most remarkable statues of the ancient world.
Nothing on Rhodes was to the scale of Athens. Athens had thirty temples as grand as the grandest temple of Rhodes; but it wasn’t temples that struck the priest with awe. It was the agora and the stoae; the public buildings, gleaming white and edged in blue and gold and bright vermillion; the remarkable profusion of first-rate statues, which seemed to be everywhere, so that the streets and the agora seemed to teem, confusingly, with unmoving people. The Kerameikos, which he walked past, was so crammed with marble stelae that it appeared that the ground had indeed been sown with marble dragons’ teeth. The agora itself was beautiful, well laid out and cool, filled with goods from every quarter of the world – Persian spices, eastern cottons, barbarian bronzes, Spanish swords – in deeply shaded porticos and well-roofed rows of columns.
‘It’s like a forest of marble,’ Leon said.
‘And this a hundred years after the fall of her empire,’ Alexanor said, awestruck.
Leon nodded. ‘She is still very great.’
Alexanor made his way to the so-called Painted Stoa, which was as beautiful as the other stoae and didn’t seem any more painted, at least from the outside, but once in under the mighty colonnade, Alexanor and Leon were surrounded by magnificent paintings of Athens’s greatness – colourful and enduring, untouched by sun or smoke. Here, Theseus defied the Minotaur; there, Arimnestos of Plataea thrust his spear into a Persian officer at Marathon. A cavalry battle swept across the great arch at the end of the stoa, and battle scenes, scenes of gods and men and women attracted the eye in every direction.
‘This is where the poor Stoics meet?’ Alexanor breathed. ‘It is not plain or dull. It’s beaut
iful.’
‘Beauty is a weapon,’ said a voice. ‘We can use it, like any other. Even we poor Stoics.’
Alexanor turned and saw that, in entering, he had missed a dozen young men clustered under one of the columns. They stood around a man of medium stature who radiated both charisma and intelligence. He was beginning to lose his hair on top in front, and his eyebrows were as bushy as olive trees in spring. In fact, Alexanor thought that he looked almost like a parody of a philosopher, drawn by the hands of the gods, except for the man’s obvious intelligence, and his smile.
‘A weapon?’ Alexanor asked.
The philosopher nodded. ‘Every man must struggle against the world – to survive, to be himself, to achieve anything, to lead an excellent life. We are very nearly slaves to our basest, animal selves – the urge to sex, the urge to violence, the charm of the irrational. We must struggle to force ourselves to be more than animals. Beauty is one of the great weapons in our hands. Beauty reminds us of awe, and a world full of things greater than we ourselves. Understanding of the greatness of other men’s achievements can serve the same purpose, to remind us not to lose our way. The stoa shows us both.’
He spoke directly, even though he stood twenty feet away, and his words echoed through the stoa.
One of the men standing by the philosopher was Philopoemen. He smiled.
‘Master Chrysippus, this is my particular friend Alexanor son of Philokles, of Rhodes, a priest of Apollo and Asklepios. And his freedman and fellow initiate, Leon of Arkadia.’
The philosopher was famous enough that Alexanor blushed not to have known him, and he stepped forward with his hand extended. The other man took it in both of his, a clasp of human warmth that seemed at odds with the Stoic doctrine of emotional distance.
‘Any friend of our Achilles is welcome here,’ Chrysippus said. ‘And you, Leon. We know no social distinction, and we count slaves and freedmen as our equals. After all, we are all slaves to our bodies, a harsher master than any.’
Leon smiled crookedly. ‘I’m not sure I’d agree,’ he said.
Chrysippus paused. ‘Speak frankly, brother,’ he said.
Leon shrugged. ‘I know these urges of which you just spoke. Indeed, as a doctor, I see when men eat to excess, or suffer from diseases caused by extreme behaviour. But … these are things that they themselves have willed. I have been beaten by a harsh master. It is another thing entirely.’
Alexanor looked at his freedman in astonishment. He’d never heard the man speak so many sentences all together.
Chrysippus looked at him thoughtfully, as if preparing his counter-arguments. But then he surprised them both with a shake of his head.
‘I think you are correct,’ he said simply.
Alexanor frowned. ‘Just like that?’
Chrysippus shrugged. ‘Leon is right. I have no lived experience of slavery – I should be careful what I say.’ Cautiously, he went on, ‘Yet, let me say in response that I have known men and women to lead excellent lives as slaves, to strive every day to overcome the limitations of their conditions, whereas other men, even rich, powerful men, fall to the tyranny of their bodies. You, yourself, brother – were you better for being beaten, or worse?’
‘Far worse, I assure you,’ Leon said, and his delivery was such that every man present laughed.
‘And yet here you are, a free man, in the Painted Stoa in Athens, wearing a good robe, living, I sense, an excellent life.’ Chrysippus nodded, as if indicating that Leon should dispute.
But it was Philopoemen who spoke.
‘Chrysippus, I dote on your every word, and when you are gone, I’ll suggest you be deified, but in this … Imagine our friend Phila were here. What would she say? And surely a man, or woman, who is brutalised daily, has almost no chance to meditate, to think, to rationalise?’
Chrysippus nodded.
‘You may be right. Zeno maintained it, but we didn’t actually admit slaves …’ He smiled. ‘In fact, we may perhaps be guilty of saying an empty and untrue thing, merely to make a point, like Sophists.’ He nodded. ‘I will consider this.’
‘And that’s what makes him a great man,’ Philopoemen said as they walked through the agora an hour later. ‘He admits when he’s wrong, he makes no pretence of being infallible, and we constantly examine our own principles and those of the founders, instead of enshrining them as some sort of received, godlike wisdom, the way they do at the Academy with Plato and Aristotle.’
‘He was impressive. I could see immediately how he would win the argument …’
Leon nodded. ‘I expected him to argue that even the punishment of my worst master was merely pain inflicted on me by my body,’ he said. ‘Outward pain that affected the outward body.’
Philopoemen smiled. ‘Yes. And that is, probably, a valid argument. But Stoics are practical, and we seek to understand the world, not to win arguments.’ He shrugged. ‘It is readily apparent that a slave who is regularly beaten, humiliated, raped, even, is experiencing a different order of tyranny than a man who drinks too much.’ He looked at Leon. ‘But it is a useful simile, when you want to shock a new student into some understanding of the reality of the human condition.’
‘Useful for rich, free men,’ Leon said. ‘Possibly offensive to slaves.’
‘Understood,’ Philopoemen said. ‘You have taught me, or reminded me, of something important, Leon.’
The Achaean took them out of the agora and out through the Dipylon gates. They discussed the new heavy torsion engines on the towers.
‘Macedon is threatening Athens,’ Philopoemen said. ‘Athens no longer has a mighty fleet. She has to take precautions.’
‘By Apollo, I heard enough rhetoric against Athens at Pella,’ Alexanor admitted.
He was looking at the graves of famous Athenians along the sides of the road – the magnificent tombs were often very moving.
‘Here Athens commemorates defeat,’ Philopoemen said. ‘There is something refreshingly honest about Athens having monuments that admit to failure, like this one.’
‘What is it?’ Leon asked.
‘It’s the tomb of the citizens killed in a famous military disaster, when Athens attempted to defeat Thebes in the time of Pericles, or close to it.’ Philopoemen glanced back at it.
He led them to the Academy Gymnasium, amid the tall pines.
‘The grove of Academe,’ he said. ‘Even the Spartans were too cultured to destroy it. May it grow forever.’
He led them up the marble steps and through the portico into the palaestra. Men were wrestling on the sand; two were boxing.
Twenty or thirty young men sat among the columns, most of them stripped for athletics. Young or old, they all appeared very fit. Philopoemen was looking for someone, even as he took them on a tour, describing the columns, the statues, and how Socrates, the Athenian war hero, had started young men on the study of philosophy among the columns of the palaestra.
‘Socrates was a war hero?’ Alexanor asked. ‘I suppose I imagine him as an old Sophist or debater, like your Chrysippus.’
‘How shall I answer you?’ Philopoemen said. ‘Chrysippus is no Sophist, although I wouldn’t mention his name here! And he, too, has held a spear. But Socrates – he stood alone against the Thebans at Delium. He held his ground, and slew a dozen Theban hoplites, and other men fell in around him, until a rearguard was formed and shamed the hippeis, the cavalry of Athens, into coming back and rescuing them. And he was no general, nor even a front-ranker – he was too poor. He was in the third rank when the phalanx broke. Here they say he was the best spear in Athens – that he practised constantly – and it was his fame as a hoplite and as a warrior that allowed him the freedom to speak his mind on political matters.’
Leon shook his head. ‘I have never heard this!’
Philopoemen nodded. ‘Plato wanted his Socrates to be a mature aristocrat, not a penniless swordsman.’ He pointed. ‘There’s our friend.’
Lykortas, whom Alexanor had last seen mounting
a horse at Epidauros two years before, lay on the smooth marble, his head propped on the base of a column. He was reading from a five-fold wax tablet he held up to his face. He was still naked, covered in sweat, and wearing boxing straps.
‘You will ruin your eyes,’ Alexanor said.
‘Already ruined,’ Lykortas said, leaping to his feet with every sign of pleasure. ‘Phila said you were coming. I hope you will let me be your host, sir, as you saved my life.’
Alexanor was looking around. The palaestra was the finest of its kind he’d seen, except perhaps the smooth sand at Epidauros; the level of physical training he saw around him was remarkable. Men were lifting stones and pulling at heavy Scythian bows.
‘I think I’d like to take some exercise here,’ he said. ‘If only to say that I’d been on the sands of the famous palaestra.’
Lykortas smiled. ‘I’m sure some gentleman will oblige you, sir,’ he said.
‘I will,’ said Philopoemen. ‘I saw you in action in Corinth. I want to try you at pankration.’
Alexanor looked at the young giant, who was half a head taller. He smiled.
‘Of course,’ he said easily.
A slave led them to one of the changing rooms, and the two men stripped.
One of the Gymnasium officers came and introduced himself. He was polite to Lykortas and civil to Philopoemen, but when Leon was introduced, he shook his head.
‘No freedman can exercise here,’ he said. ‘There are places for such as you in the city.’
Alexanor frowned. ‘Why, exactly?’ he asked.
The man shrugged. ‘The taint of slavery is never lost. Besides, this place is for citizens. You foreigners are welcome because of Lykortas, but only because you are gentlemen.’
‘My friend,’ Philopoemen said, in the act of folding his chiton, ‘you have reminded me why I left this place and went to learn in the Stoa. Alexanor, I am sorry. We will have to have a bout another day.’
Alexanor was also dressing. ‘I am completely of your mind, brother,’ he said.
The officer shrugged. ‘Your loss, foreigner.’
Outside, Lykortas was profuse in apology, and Philopoemen shrugged.
The New Achilles Page 19