The traditional moment of possession came when the bride, hair dressed like a new recruit, wearing a man’s work shirt, waited in the groom’s bed to be “taken.” On this wedding night the newlyweds, who were already more than familiar, did more mocking than lovemaking. By the light of the handmaid’s torches, Antalcidas watched Andreia turn buttock to him. “Elder, teach me,” she begged in the piping voice of a schoolboy; he, sharing the joke, replied in the orotund style of Zeuxippos, “What a fine, tight ring!” The eavesdroppers outside, whose presence was as traditional as the wedding dress and sesame cakes, were very confused by what they heard.
With Andreia’s arrival the Kynosoura farmhouse at last came to life. The gifts from Damatria and Zeuxippos came out of storage and were carefully placed; the bride’s trousseau required three men to lift it to her women’s quarters upstairs. When he left for the summer invasion there was a thick carpet of bear’s foot growing outside the door. On his return it had all been replaced by a kitchen garden of basil, marjoram, mustard, and woody thyme, fringed with beds of chamomile, pennyroyal, sage, and other medicinal herbs he did not recognize. After weeks invested in chopping and burning the fields of Attica, he dropped his spear and fell to his knees in his own yard, admiring each tender shoot raised by her hand. She came out to greet him with the fragrance of mint leaves on her breath and a new fullness around her hips. He asked the question with his eyes, and she answered by grasping her breasts through her chiton and saying to him, in a voice pregnant with happiness, that her breasts had begun to fill.
Their first child was born during the second winter of the war. Andreia suffered through the delivery, but was rewarded with a daughter who did not cry at the world but arrived instead with a look of quiet astonishment. Ramphias consoled Antalcidas for the misfortune of siring a girl; the new father, charmed by the glow of reddish down on her smooth head, was delighted. A daughter, he knew, could never earn citizenship and so could not be sanctioned with betrayal of her grandfather’s helotry. Provided she married respectably, her descendants would be forever safe from his shame.
In their happiness, they called her Melitta—a name unheard of among the women of Laconia. It was only the beginning of their exceptionalism. In a thousand ways, from the way Andreia chose to grow her hair long, to the scrolls of foreign writings they collected, to their pledge to permit Doulos to educate Melitta in the classics, they sought to find new ways to be Spartan.
“Let this house be an island of philosophy in a complacent sea!” Andreia declaimed to the hills, with her hand in his and their daughter at her side. It was a metaphor that would come to seem prescient to him when, years later, on another island miles to the west, loneliness and boredom drove him to savor the memory again.
7.
A few weeks after Antalcidas and Doulos left for Attica, Andreia received a guest at their house. Damatria came over the hill from her estate without attendants, dressed in a simple linen chiton with her hair bound in woolen fillets, like a farmgirl. She carried a flat harvesting basket, and in the basket was a bouquet of wildflowers. Despite her humble getup there was nothing common about her: Damatria’s gray-frosted hair had been washed and arranged with a dresser’s skill, and she traveled in a cloud of imported perfume. Andreia recognized her only by sight, never having spoken to her mother-in-law in person. Antalcidas had long ago pointed her out from their upper story window, concealing his bitterness under a curious tone, as if he was indicating some rare kind of bird. Andreia detected the anger beneath his jauntiness, and the sadness beneath the anger.
“Hello. I am your mother,” Damatria said.
“I know who you are.”
“If that’s so, then you might offer a couch to your elder.”
Andreia took the flowers and hosted her elder guest the way a good Lacedaemonian wife ought. Damatria looked around at what had become of the little farmhouse at the edge of her domain: Andreia had turned it into a modest but fine home, with furniture un-scuffed and beaten floor meticulously swept. A subtle bubbling sound emanated from the iron cauldron on the hearth. Through an open door to the husband’s parlor, Damatria could see a small girl, no more than a toddler, lying asleep at an odd angle on the drinking couch.
“My husband is gone,” Andreia hastened, reddening.
“No need to explain,” replied Damatria. “I used to let my boys sleep in the men’s rooms in my time. It’s better than running up the stairs to check on them.”
Her reassurance was kind, but Andreia’s embarrassment only deepened. She had no idea why this lady had come; courtesy was expected in such instances, yet she could not shake a nagging sense of disloyalty to her husband.
“Can I offer you something? Water? Something to eat?”
Damatria was staring at her now. “You are fair, aren’t you? Fair but pretty. The young men love that.”
“Do you like almonds? They’re last year’s, I’m afraid.”
The other smiled. Rising, she wandered to the hearth and snatched up a rag to lift the hot lid of the cookpot.
“Barley soup?”
“With narthex.”
“Dried?”
“Fresh. They sprout early on the south-facing slope.”
Damatria stirred the mixture and tested its scent. “You used a vinegar fish sauce. Try an oil-based; the soup comes out thicker, and the men get so sick of vinegar from the mess.”
Andreia tried to look her most demure, eyes down. “I have tried it—he doesn’t like the oil.”
Lips tightening, Damatria replaced the lid. Was the girl trying to make her feel guilty, telling her something she might have known about her own son? No, look at her: she’s never had a devious thought in her life. Did he choose her as some kind of living reproof against his mother?
“There must be something I can show you that you don’t know yet. Do you use asafoetida?”
“I’ve only heard of it.”
“There must be some growing around here. . . . Shall we look?”
The girl hesitated, looking toward the parlor.
“Your little one should be all right,” said Damatria. “We shouldn’t be gone long.”
“No, I’ll take her.”
And so they went out beyond the kitchen garden, Andreia with Melitta clinging to her side, Damatria in her faux-peasant costume. It was a cool day for early summer, with high, serrated clouds above and a hint of vernal green lingering in the foothills. As Damatria showed Andreia how to recognize the resin-bearing plants, she glanced at the girl asleep with her face buried against her mother’s neck. The sight filled her with a vague warmth; forgetting her age, she momentarily contemplated becoming a mother again. It wouldn’t be by Dorcis, of course, who had grown comfortably flaccid in his paralysis. He was Erinna’s husband now in every sense but the legal one.
Melitta stirred, yawning. As the child turned away from the warmth of Andreia’s neck, Damatria, trembling, got her first good look at her features. The face she dreaded was reflected there, but—thankfully—it was softened by Andreia’s delicacy and the tenderness of early girlhood. If she unfocused her eyes, she might even obscure the resemblance. Could she spend half a lifetime looking with her eyes crossed at her granddaughter?
“You take the stems here,” she was saying, “and pound them to render the resin, except you shouldn’t use a wooden mallet, unless you want it to forever smell of garlic. . . .”
Back at the house the women stood side by side at the cook table. Though Damatria knew more about the preparation of asafoetida, her proficiency in the kitchen suffered from dependence on servants. Andreia, meanwhile, undertook the lesson with the confidence of knowing virtually everything else. Before long the younger woman had matched the elder’s skill; she had been at her pounding for some time before she realized that Damatria had withdrawn some distance away to watch her.
“What? Am I doing it right?”
“Does he know?” Damatria’s eyes flitted down to the slight hunch in Andreia’s abdomen.
&nb
sp; Andreia took a few more swings of the mallet, brushed her hair out of her eyes with her wrist. “No. He left before I was sure.”
“He’ll be pleased it’s a boy.”
Andreia smiled. “How can you know that?”
“From how it lies in you. Remember, I’ve borne a few sons in my time.”
The other, not knowing whether to believe Damatria’s judgment or, more deeply, her intentions, said nothing. Damatria approached again and leaned forward, pausing only to say, “Congratulations are due.” Then she delivered a kiss on Andreia’s cheek that burned with such ambiguity that she felt it for hours to come.
VI
The Squeezing Place
1.
The hill the Athenians called “the Squeezing Place” had a fine view of what was at stake in the deliberations there. Below the rock-cut dais, the Assembly of citizens packed shoulder to shoulder onto the sloping ground; when the speakers took the rostrum, the west face of the Acropolis stood on their right, the blue and dusty outlines of its temples looming against the ascending sun. To the left spread the smoky quarter of the marketplace, whose stallfronts and urinals were the usual venues for political discussion when the Assembly was not in weekly session. Under normal circumstances the city constables would have to literally rope the populace to the hill—a ship’s hawser, covered with red paint, was stretched across the square and swept in the direction of the meeting place. Anyone marked with the paint was liable for a fine if they did not turn up for their civic duty. Wise idlers learned to avoid the market altogether on Assembly days.
This morning, under dawn’s indigo skies, some twenty thousand male citizens—a fair majority of the public eligible to vote—were gathered into the confines of the sacred precinct. No one this time was filing up the slope late, and no one was smeared with red paint. In the seventh year of a conflict unprecedented in its bitterness, a war that divided the public down the middle, few wanted to miss the day’s debate. It was rumored that the Lacedaemonians had at last come to discuss peace.
In the best of times the crowd sorted itself in a patchwork of political affiliations. People from the interior of Attica separated themselves from the coastal people; rich citizens stood apart from poor ones, who were further divided into those who worked the land and those in the trades. Controversy over the war accounted for another division between those who wanted a negotiated peace and those who didn’t. The Acharnians, a nation unto themselves, formed the core of the militant bloc on the far right of the crowd.
Along the edges of the throng was perhaps the greatest concentration of genius yet known to history—Socrates, the father of philosophy, absently picking his nose; Alcibiades, the prodigy, silk-clad and hung-over; Nicias, the reluctant general, quietly hopeful for peace; the historian Thucydides, angrily scribbling notes; the dramatists Sophocles and Euripides; Aristophanes, the comedian, enjoying the spectacle of Socrates’ slovenliness. All were there; all had their views. But it would be the fools who would speak loudest that day.
The proceedings began with an invocation and sacrifice to the city gods on the altar behind the rostrum. Blood from the pigs was collected in clay pots, which were carried to the corners of the enclosure. As the crier promised the collective wrath of Athena-the-Protectoress, and of Aglauros, Hestia, Enyo, Ares Enyalios, Thallo, Auxo, Hegemone, and Herakles against anyone who spoke crookedly, the blood was poured in a ring around the assembled.
The solemnities were conducted above the buzz of conversation among the citizens, the chat of the magistrates in their front row seats, and the hawking of the bread- and cheese-sellers as they rushed to complete their sales before the blood circle was closed. The crimson trio of Spartan emissaries, grim-faced, grasping their staffs in identically diffident fashion, sat silent, making strict observance even to the rites of their enemies.
The preliminaries done, a banner of plain white was run up the staff at the crest of the hill. With this sign, the excluded part of the city’s population—that is, most of it—was made aware that debate was underway. The president of the Assembly asked the crier to recite the agenda, which had only one item that day: to hear the Lacedaemonians plead their case before the people. The motion to hear the emissaries passed by a show of hands. The herald, with the speaker’s myrtle-leaf crown on his head, rose to invite the Spartans to make their presentation.
All private chatter ceased as Isidas, son of Agesidas took the rostrum. There was a pause as he took the wreath from the herald and set it cautiously on his head, as if afraid to muss his dressed locks. The sprinkling of laughter was heard in the crowd—Lacedaemonians were well known for their vanity. Like a teacher before a class of unruly children, Isidas stood stone-faced, his staff planted on the platform, until the crowd settled. When his angular features at last cracked to speak, his voice was like the clatter of an old drum tumbling down an endless, boulder-strewn slope.
“O Athenians, we are not ones to address crowds. Those of our city, being more or less of one mind in matters as fundamental as war, have no need of such skills. Our craft is soldiering, and as such we are used to speaking plainly. We were sent here by our elders to be nothing other but plainspoken, and to give you the soldiers’ truth. Having been nominated to speak for my colleagues, I will say nothing more than what I must. My language will be simple, and the argument, by your standards, unadorned. I will not take much of your time.”
At this, Cleon, son of Cleaenetus, jerked his upper torso backward, as if struck bodily by the speaker’s absurdity. He was, as usual, in the front of the standing crowd, his bullish face marked by great, half-moon circles under his eyes. The feature made him seem perpetually exhausted, but he was in fact one of the most energetic men in Athens. As the emissary spoke, his eyes never stopped moving, flashing knowing glances at his friends, observing the mood of the crowd, regarding the Spartan up and down like some freakish spawn of Pan from the deepest backwoods of Arcadia.
“If nothing else,” Isidas went on, “we can agree together that this is an important moment in the course of the war. The truce arranged by our commanders in Pylos has held for two weeks. By its terms, the Lacedaemonians have agreed not to attack the illegal fortification your army has built in our territory. We have also restored to you, on a provisional basis, all warships that have been captured in actions around the Peloponnese. For his part, your general Demosthenes has undertaken no assault on our men on the island, and has allowed the delivery of such food, such as milled grain, as may not be stockpiled by the garrison. Apart from whatever we accomplish by this embassy, by hewing to this agreement both sides have shown themselves capable of restraint. It is our hope that the opportunity presented by these acts will not be wasted.”
Isidas’ eyes fell briefly on Nicias, son of Niceratus, who was seated on a bench before the arm of the Assembly dominated by the peace party. The latter returned his gaze, but only briefly, for his enemy Cleon employed sycophants who urged prosecutions on the basis of gestures as minor as a look. In any case, Nicias was not known for meeting the eyes of others: though he was one of city’s most talented generals, a leading citizen and natural heir to noble Pericles, he had little of his predecessor’s highborn bearing.
Since the war he had dwindled to just a gray-haired wisp of a man, his skin a cadaverous green, his gaze fugitive. The dolefulness of his temperament was legendary: several years earlier, after he returned from victory over the Megarians on the island of Minoa, Nicias moped his camp as if his father had died. After plague struck the city, he spent a considerable amount of his own wealth to rededicate the island of Delos to divine Apollo, assembling a fleet of gold-encrusted boats for the procession to the island, and raising a palm tree of solid bronze in honor of the god. Yet even as he led the splendid choruses over the water, witnesses reported that Nicias seemed spent, as if weighed down by the burden of his own benefaction. There was a similar look on his face that morning, as all the hopes of the peace party fell on his shoulders.
Isidas continued, �
��I have promised to speak plainly, and so I will: the goddess Fortune has done you a great favor with the entrapment of our sons. Even for men such as ourselves, who spend their lives making war, the goddess has much to do with the success of our efforts. It has been a hard lesson for us to learn this time, for we have had more than our share of her blessings in the past.
“Yet you Athenians have a decision in store that will be equally difficult: you must decide what to do with your good fortune. Yes, there will be voices among you that will urge all kinds of extravagant demands, to force a settlement favorable to yourselves that they imagine will be permanent. They will say that the Lacedaemonians are desperate, and that instead of accepting a just peace, you should take this opportunity to reach for something more. These men look at what is obvious to the rest of us—that the mighty one day may be laid low the next—and take a lesson that is directly opposite the truth. I don’t say this because I presume to lecture you on such things; I only say what even a simple soldier may understand.
“Other voices, perhaps not as seductive, certainly not as loud, will tell you that your gains must by necessity be fleeting. For this reason, this is the best possible moment to accept our invitation, and to make the kind of peace between us that will assure our joint hegemony. For when Athens and Lacedaemon work in accord, what state in Greece may stand against us?
“You may trust our word, for there is no more compelling debt than that of generosity owed an adversary who has put aside his own temporary advantage. So much the more, now that the contest has reached this point, where the end cannot be known to either of us, and no offense done by either side that yet makes peace impossible. And even as you make your advantage permanent in a more creditable form, think of the glory that will attend your name when you claim the gratitude of the Greeks for ending this war. What a lesson it would be, for the city some think the most grasping to pause here, on this precipice we all find ourselves, and redeem her reputation for wisdom!
The Isle of Stone Page 19