by Mary Renault
“What?” I said, laughing and taking it back again. “Is my speech thick, or have you heard me talking nonsense? Or am I one of those who lose their looks at the third cup?”—“You deserve yes to that.”—“Drink up yourself, you are taller and need more to fill you. All the earth is drinking and growing beautiful, so why not we? It is to feel as I do now, that men plant the vine and press the vintage. Not only you, Lysis, look beautiful to me as always, but the whole world is beautiful. For what else was wine given us by the god?”
“Leave it so, then,” he said, “and don’t spoil it with more.”
“One more, for us to pledge each other. Have you thought, Lysis, that now my life is yours? But for you, tonight I should be who knows where? A shadow, shivering out there in the rain, or flitting about on the shores of Styx, squeaking ‘Lysis! Lysis’ in a little bat-voice too high to hear.”
“Stop,” he said. “No more, Alexias. Death comes soon enough to divide friends.”
“Here’s to life, then. You gave it me. This lamplight; the scent of flowers and rain; the wine, the garlands; your company best of all. Don’t you want me to praise your gift? I only need one thing to make me the happiest of all mankind; something to give you in return. But what would be enough?”
“I told you,” he said, “that one more would be too many.”
“I was only fooling. See, I’m as sober as you are; soberer I daresay. Tell me this, Lysis; where do you think the soul goes, when we die?”
“Who has come back to tell us? Perhaps, as Pythagoras taught, into the womb again. Into a philosopher if we have deserved it, or a woman if we were weak; or a beast or bird if we failed altogether to be men. It would be pleasant to think so, because it would be just. But I think we sleep, and never awaken.”
His sadness reached me through the wine-fumes, and I reproached myself. “Sokrates says not. He has always held the soul is immortal.”—“His may be. One can’t doubt it is made of harder and clearer stuff than other men’s, less easy to disperse.” He roused himself and smiled. “Or perhaps the gods mean to deify him, and set him in the heavens as a constellation.”—“He’d laugh at that. And draw you in the dust the Constellation of Sokrates, with two little stars for the eyes, and five or six big ones for the mouth.”—“Or reprove me for being disrespectful to the gods … One can’t tell him everything; he doesn’t understand the weakness of ordinary men.”—“No,” I said. “He has the heart of a lion; nothing frightens him, nothing tempts him aside. Seeing the good and doing it is all one to him.” And I was going on to add, “But he says it comes by daily practice, like victory at the Games.” Then I remembered, and instead of speaking lifted my cup to drink.
Presently I said, “I daresay he knows he is one to himself, and doesn’t look to others to be what he is.”—“He isn’t a man for compromise.”—“Not with himself. But he is kindly. He has learned not to expect too much.” Lysis said, “I should think Alkibiades taught him that.” He got up from his couch, and walking away stood out at the terrace.
I followed and stood beside him. “Don’t be angry with me tonight, Lysis. What is it?”—“Nothing. I have been angry with you too often without a cause. Look, the rain is over.”
A white new moon had come out of the clouds, and there were one or two stars. The garden air was fresh in our faces; behind us the supper-room smelled of bruised flowers, lamp-smoke and spilled wine. “I provoked you without cause too,” I said, “or with the same cause. There is more rain to fall; don’t you feel it, Lysis?”—“It has been a long drought,” he said.—“Too long. If the earth doesn’t drink deep, we shall have great storms, and fires upon the mountains.”—
“Well, if you had had your way, we should have been out on Pentelikon tonight.”—“I suppose,” I said, “we should have found some cave to creep into, wide enough for two.”
A laden leaf spilled its water, pattering in the vine. “It is late,” he said. “I will call a torch for you.”—“Late? It must be an hour short of midnight still. Are you treating me like a child now, because I lost my spear?”—He cried out, “Don’t you understand?” and then after a moment, below his breath, “I saw death reach out for you; and I had no philosophy.”
“You did well enough with a boar-spear,” I said, trying to make him smile. “At war we have each seen the other brushed by death, and at night have joined in the singing.”—“Shall I sing now? Singing is easy. I saw you dead, and beyond it nothing. Only toil for a burned harvest, with spring and summer lost. And now I have told you, though I never let wine loosen my tongue before. Have you heard enough? You had better be going.”
He turned from me, and walked towards the doorway, to call the slave. But running I overtook him, and caught him back by the arm.
My garland had slipped back on my hair as I ran; he put up his hand to it, and it fell behind me. I could hear the vine shedding its last heavy drops upon the terrace; the croak of a frog at the cistern beyond; and my own heart beating.
I said, “I am here.”
20
IT WAS THE WINTER after this that Lysis and I took to the sea, and sailed to the island of Samos.
Each had his reasons to leave the City. Lysis’ father died, carried off by a winter chill; and Lysis, who had sheltered him for years from the cares of a sinking estate, now could not bear to stint his tomb. He was laid among the trophies of his chariot-races; and when it was over, Lysis could afford to keep a horse no longer, unless he applied to the cavalry levy fund, which he was too proud to do.
My father grew stronger; he might yet want Phoenix back, and I did not care to wait for his asking. These days he and I walked softly, as men do in a house cracked by an earthquake.
He was now very thick with a set of oligarchs, who had the name of being rather more than homesick for the past. They came together without gaiety, like men with a common purpose; often I found the supper-room closed on them, and the slaves shut out; there was a feel in it all I did not like, over and above the presence of Kritias. If, as some said, there were men in the City who would let in the Spartans if they might hold office under them, it seemed to me they might be such as these. At my age, I might well have felt it within my rights to take it up with him; but we did not speak of serious matters any more. If he rebuked me, it was in passing for trivial things: for not growing my beard, or for sitting in the scent-shop, which indeed I only used if I found friends there already, and why does one walk in the City except to meet and talk? It was true, however, that when Lysis was not free, sometimes I would spend my time with unprofitable people, rather than go home.
Lysis was uneasy at it, yet had no Heart to blame me. We had our own life to live, which was no one else’s concern. But where both are restless, it will appear in this also; there was a certain wildness in us at this time, which broke out sometimes in violent joy, and sometimes in recklessness; in extravagant pranks at drinking-parties, or over-boldness in the field.
Sokrates never spoke of it. Indeed, I don’t think the cause was a secret from him long. Love is a boaster at heart, who cannot hide the stolen horse without giving a glimpse of the bridle. No one could have been kinder in those days than he. Without a word spoken, simply from being with him, I understood this: that while we had supposed we were doing something for him, it was he who, out of affection for us, had thought to give us some of his riches; and now he was gentle to us, as to friends who have suffered a loss.
This we knew, but did not feel it, then, within ourselves. What had defeated us was something beyond; and this, which had come after, seemed to us now a consolation and a joy. We did our duties to the gods, and were faithful together, and held each other’s honour dear. Only from this time on I found the visions of my youth grew fewer, and faded, and turned to memory. But I have been told that this is the necessary effect of years.
So things were drifting, when on a certain day I visited Asklepios, son of Apollo.
One could not go to Epidauros, because of the war; and indeed that would
have been making too much of it. So I went to the little shrine in the cave, in the rocks of the High City, just below the walls. I went at evening. A fading sunlight fell on the pillars of the porch, but it was dark inside; the dripping of the holy spring sounded solemn and loud. The priest took the honey-cake I had brought, and gave it to the sacred snake in his little pit. He uncoiled himself, and accepted it; and the priest asked me why I had come. He was a dark man, thin, with long fingers; while I talked he felt my skin, and pulled my eyelids back from my eyes. I said, “It is my desire, at the next Olympic Games, to enter for the men’s long-race.”—“Thank the god, then, for good health,” he said, “and if you want a dietary, consult your trainer. This place is for the sick.” I was going away when he stopped me and said, “Wait. What is it?”
“Nothing much,” I said. “I ought not to have troubled Apollo. A runner’s wind is a small matter to him. But sometimes, running the last lap, or at the finish, when I am short of breath, I have felt a pain like a knife thrust into me. Sometimes it strikes me in the breast, and sometimes in the left arm; and sometimes with the pain the light of the sun turns black. But it passes, after the race.”
“When did this begin with you?” he said.—“At the Isthmus a little. But lately I ran across country a good way, up in the mountains; and since then, even at practice the pain will come.”—“I see. Go, then, to the Agora. Salute the Altar of the Twelve, and come back here quickly, not staying to speak with anyone.”
The run was nothing; but the climb at the end made me pant, and feel the pain a little. He put his hands on my neck and wrists, then laid the side of his head against my breast. His beard tickled me, but I knew it would be unseemly to laugh. He brought me a cup and said, “Drink this, and sleep; and when you wake, remember what dream the god has sent you.”
I took the draught, which was bitter, and lay down on a pallet in the porch. There was a man sleeping on another pallet, and the rest were empty. I fell asleep at the time of lamp-lighting. On awaking I smelt myrrh, and found the priest at his morning prayer, for it was near sunrise. The man on the other bed was still sleeping. I felt drowsy, and heavy in the head, and strange. Soon the priest came from the altar, and asked me if the god had sent me a dream.
“Yes,” I said, “and a lucky one. I dreamed that something cold touched my brow, and I opened my eyes upon this place; and the god appeared to me. He was as one sees him in the temple, but a little older; about thirty years old, shaved clean like an athlete. He had a white chlamys on his shoulder, and his bow at his back. He stood over there.”—“Yes,” said the priest. “What then?”—“And then,” I said, “the god himself held out to me the olive crown, with the ribbons of Olympia.” The priest nodded, and stroked his beard. “In which hand was the god grasping it? In the left or the right?” Then I remembered, and said, “In neither. He drew an arrow from his quiver, and on the point of the arrow he hung the crown; and so he held it out to me.”
“Wait,” he said, and threw incense on the altar, and looked at the smoke. The sacred water fell into the hollow of the rock with a heavy dripping, and the dry coils of the snake stirred in his pit of sand. The morning was misty, and rather cold. The priest came back to me, with the garland on his head. “Thus says Apollo. ‘Son of Myron, I have been your friend till now. Even the olive of Olympia I will not refuse you, if you ask it with all your will. But do not ask; for with the crown comes the arrow, swiftly, out of the open sky.’” And he looked at me, to see I had understood. I considered it a while in silence, then I asked him why this should be. He said, “Your heart is too great for your body, Alexias. That is the message of the god.”
The sun was up. I walked round the rocks, and climbed to the High City, and looked towards the tall blue hills of Lakedaimon, beyond which Olympia lay. I thought how after the very last Games, when the long-race winner returned to his own city, they had thought the town gates too mean for him, and breached the walls to bear him through. When I first heard the tale of Ladas the Spartan, who fell dead with the olive still fresh in his crown, I thought man could scarcely look for a happier end. But since then I had been at the Isthmus; and now it seemed to me more fit for a gentleman to spend himself as Harmodios and Aristogeiton did, for the City’s freedom and the honour of one’s friend. Yet, as I walked home, my mind felt bare, its familiar furnishing gone. So long I had dreamed of Olympia: the green fields by the pebbled river, Kronos’ Hill with its solemn oakwoods, the stadium at its foot; and the statues of the victors lining the walks, from the time of the heroes till yesterday. When the sculptor in the palaestra had asked me to pose for him, I think I had said in my heart, “There is time enough.”
This, then, is why I ceased to run the long-race. The time is coming, I daresay, when I shall pay the price for my old crowns; since I turned fifty, after a climb or a hard ride, I have felt again the arrow of Far-Shooting Apollo prick my breast. So I set things down while I remember them.
It was soon after this that we fell in with an Athenian of the Samos squadron, attached to one of the ships as a hoplite of marines. We were all easy with wine, so he asked us cheerfully why good fellows like us should starve ourselves to feed horses, when we could be living like gentlemen in the finest city of the islands, and seeing action worth a man’s while against the ships of the Spartan league, which were based on Miletos just across the straits.
“There’s no better station than Samos,” he said. “The Samians will do anything for an Athenian, since they threw out their oligarchs, and our men that were in harbour fought on the democrat side. You can have what you like, or whom. And, by the way, they need every democrat they can get there, for there’s trouble blowing up.”
This last we discounted; for only a fool, as Lysis said, will dash straight into politics in a strange city. But the rest seemed good to us. He told us of a new ship, the Siren, which was fitting at Piraeus, with her complement not made up. The trierarch, wanting a lieutenant of marines, was glad to get a man with Lysis’ record; and as we were fellow-tribesmen, it was easy to get me posted aboard. I was still a little under age for foreign service; but in war one can generally get leave to do more than one need, particularly if it is a case of helping out lovers.
It was still winter when the Siren was fitted; but the trierarch, for reasons we were to learn, was eager to be gone. It was my father’s turn to stand at the dockside and see me off. “Well, Alexias,” he said, “if you could have given some of your time to the City’s business these last months, I could have done something for you; but let that pass. You have a decent record in the field and I have no fear that we shall be ashamed of you. Only keep your eyes open in Samos, and use your wits when you see how the land lies. Athens has been governed too long by the lot of the pebble, and counting fools’ heads. It is time for people of quality to show it.”
I had no time to ask the meaning of this oracle. My thoughts were aboard already. I smelt the hemp and pitch, the bodies of the rowers, the casks sweating salt fish and oil, and the cold brine of the winter sea. The gulls hung waiting, to feed upon our wake.
The Siren was a war-trireme, not a transport, and carried only her own fighting unit of fifteen men. We lived on the foredeck, under an oxhide awning, just above the first bank of the rowers; our action-station was the catwalk running outside the hull. A crew of twenty-five worked the ship, and there were three tiers of rowers, the lowest being slaves. Free men will not work down there; the oarholes are valved with leather to keep out the spray, and a rower sees nothing all day but the back of the man in front, and the second-bench rower’s feet on the rests either side. But when it rained and blew they were better off than we, huddled under our roof of skins. I had thought that even a winter voyage could not be harder than some of our hill bivouacks in the Guard. I had forgotten one is not sick on a horse. But the wind changed the second day out, and I was better.
Though we had kept it quiet, it had somehow got aboard that Lysis and I were lovers. After being in cavalry, where there is a cer
tain feeling in these matters, I found it hard to put up with some of the vulgar notions you can meet with in an infantry unit. It may be that in those days I was too quick to take offence. Most of them were good enough fellows, as I learned in time; their talk came from habit, and from never having been made to define their terms.
We were carrying pay for some ships stationed at Sestos, which, the wind being fair, we made within six days. But in Sestos harbour we were fouled by an unhandy grain-ship; two or three rowers were hurt, and some planks staved in; we had to kick our heels about the Hellespont while repairs were done, and then were held up by weather. So it was some weeks before we made Samos, during which we got no news at all.
After killing time in a small colonial town, it was good to see the great city of Samos glowing between hills and blue water, into which the town thrust outward like a spur, with the harbour in the curve of it. Westward on the strand was the Temple of Here, the biggest of all Hellas. Eastward, the barley-terraces fell like a broad stairway to the sea. Across the strait, quite near, stood up the lofty coast of Ionia, violet-coloured, just as it is named.
The harbour was packed with ships. For the first time we saw the new navy of Athens, for most were sent here as soon as they came off the stocks. They made a fine sight, with their burnished beaks and ram-heads, their cheeks new-painted with vermilion, the trierarchs’ pennants at their sterns. Some were stripped for action, with the masts ashore, in case of a raid on the harbour, the Spartans being so near. Some were up for scraping on the beach, the sails spread out beside them, having their devices brightened with fresh dye. The curved water-front under the plane-trees was thronged with citizens and seamen and soldiers and merchants, sitting before the taverns, strolling up and down, or bargaining with the Phoenicians who had brought up their boats with the wares spread out in them.
The Athenian camp was by the shore where they beached the ships, between the town and the temple. It had been here so long that there were no tents; it was like a little town of wood, or daub and wattle, thatched with reed. We found our quarters, and set out to see the sights.