by Anthology
“How about the Macedonians?”
“Aiboi! Thorne like my friend Antipatros are good fellows, but most are as lack-witted as a Persian grandee. And now tell me of Patal . . . what is your city’s name?”
Presently Alexander and his friends came in. They seemed taken aback at seeing me closeted with their master. I put on a brisk smile and said: “Rejoice, my friends!” as if nothing untoward had happened. The boys glowered and whispered among themselves, but did not attempt any more disturbance at that time.
When they gathered for their lecture next morning, Aristotle told them: “I am too busy with the gentleman from India to waste time pounding unwanted wisdom into your miserable little thouls. Go shoot some rabbitth or catch some fish for dinner, but in any cathe begone!”
The boys grinned. Alexander said: “It seems the barbarian has his uses after all. I hope you stay with us forever, good barbarian!”
After they had gone, Antipatros came in to say good-by to Aristotle. He asked me with gruff good will how I was doing and went out to ride back to Pella.
The weeks passed unnoticed and the flowers of spring came out while I visited Aristotle. Day after day we strolled about the Precinct of the Nymphs, talking, or sat indoors when it rained. Sometimes the boys followed us, listening; at other times we talked alone. They played a couple of practical jokes on me, but, by pretending to be amused when I was really furious, I avoided serious trouble with them.
I learned that Aristotle had a wife and a little daughter in another part of the big house, but he never let me meet the lady. I only caught glimpses of them from a distance.
I carefully shifted the subject of our daily discourse from the marvels of India to the more basic questions of science. We argued over the nature of matter and the shape of the solar system. I gave out that the Indians were well on the road to the modem concepts—modem in my world, that is—of astronomy, physics, and so forth. I told of the discoveries of those eminent Pataliputran philosophers: Kopemikos in astronomy, Neuton in physics, Darben in evolution, and Mendeles in genetics. (I forgot; these names mean nothing to you, though an educated man of my world would recognize them at once through their Greek disguise.)
Always I stressed method: the need for experiment and invention and for checking each theory back against the facts. Though an opinionated and argumentative man, Aristotle had a mind like a sponge, eagerly absorbing any new fact, surmise, or opinion, whether he agreed with it or not.
I tried to find a workable compromise between what I knew science could do on one hand and the limits of Aristotle’s credulity on the other. Therefore I said nothing about flying machines, guns, buildings a thousand feet high, and other technical wonders of my world. Nevertheless, I caught Aristotle looking at me sharply out of those small black eyes one day.
“Do you doubt me, Aristoteles?” I said.
“N-no, no,” he said thoughtfully. “But it does theem to me that, were your Indian inventors as wonderful as you make out, they would have fabricated you wings like those of Daidalos in the legend. Then you could have flown to Makedonia directly, without the trials of crothing Persia by camel.”
“That has been tried, but men’s muscles do not have enough strength in proportion to their weight.”
“Ahem. Did you bring anything from India to show the thkills of your people?” I grinned, for I had been hoping for such a question. “I did fetch a few small devices,” said I, reaching into my tunic and bringing out the magnifying glass. I demonstrated its use.
Aristotle shook his head. “Why did you not show me this before? It would have quieted my doubtth.”
“People have met with misfortune by trying too suddenly to change the ideas of those around them. Like your teacher’s teacher, Sokrates.”
“That is true, true. What other devices did you bring?”
I had intended to show my devices at intervals, gradually, but Aristotle was so insistent on seeing them all that I gave in to him before he got angry. The little telescope was not powerful enough to show the moons of Jupiter or the rings of Saturn, but it showed enough to convince Aristotle of its power. If he could not see these astronomical phenomena himself, he was almost willing to take my word that they could be seen with the larger telescopes we had in India.
One day a light-armed soldier galloped up to us in the midst of our discussions in the Precinct of Nymphs. Ignoring the rest of us, the fellow said to Alexander: “Hail, O Prince! The king, your father, will be here before sunset.”
Everybody rushed around cleaning up the place. We were all lined up in front of the big house when King Philip and his entourage arrived on horseback with a jingle and a clatter, in crested helmets and flowing mantles. I knew Philip by his one eye. He was a big powerful man, much scarred, with a thick curly black beard going gray. He dismounted, embraced his son, gave Aristotle a brief greeting, and said to Alexander:
“How would you like to attend a siege?”
Alexander whooped.
“Thrace is subdued,” said the king, “but Byzantion and Perinthos have declared against me, thanks to Athenian intrigue. I shall give the Perintheans something to think about besides the bribes of the Great King. It is time you smelled blood, youngster; would you like to come?”
“Yes, yes! Can my friends come too?”
“If they like and their fathers let them.”
“O King!” said Aristotle.
“What is it, spindle-shanks?”
“I trust thith ith not the end of the prince’s education. He has much yet to learn.”
“No, no; I will send him back when the town falls. But he nears the age when he must learn by doing, not merely by listening to your rarefied wisdom. Who is this?” Philip turned his one eye on me.
“Zandras of India, a barbarian philothopher.”
Philip grinned in a friendly way and clapped me on the shoulder. “Rejoice! Come to Pella and tell my generals about India. Who knows? A Macedonian foot may tread there yet.”
“It would be more to the point to find out about Persia,” said one of Philip’s officers, a handsome fellow with a reddish-brown beard. “This man must have just come through there. How about it, man? Is the bloody Artaxerxes still solid on his throne?”
“I know little of such matters,” I said, my heart beginning to pound at the threat of exposure. “I skirted the northernmost parts of the Great King’s dominions and saw little of the big cities. I know nothing of their politics.”
“Is that so?” said Redbeard, giving me a queer look. “We must talk of this again.”
They all trooped into the big house, where the cook and the serving-wenches were scurrying about. During dinner I found myself between Nearchos, Alexander’s little Cretan friend, and a man-at-arms who spoke no Attic. So I did not get much conversation, nor could I follow much of the chatter that went on among the group at the head of the tables. I gathered that they were discussing politics. I asked Nearchos who the generals were.
“The big one at the king’s right is the Parmenion,” he said, “and the one with the red beard is the Attalos.”
When the food was taken away and the drinking had begun, Attalos came over to me. The man-at-arms gave him his place. Attalos had drunk a lot of wine already, but if it made him a little unsteady it did not divert him.
“How did you come through the Great King’s domain?” he asked. “What route did you follow?”
“I told you, to the north,” I said.
“Then you must have gone through Orchoe.”
“I—” I began, then stopped. Attalos might be laying a trap for me. What if I said “yes” and Orchoe was really in the south? Or suppose he had been there and knew all about the place? Many Greeks and Macedonians served the Great King as mercenaries.
“I passed through many places whose names I never got straight,” I said. “I do not remember if Orchoe was among them.”
Attalos gave me a sinister smile through his beard. “Your journey will profit you little, if you
cannot remember where you have been. Come, tell me if you heard of unrest among the northern provinces.”
I evaded the question, taking a long pull on my wine to cover my hesitation. I did this again and again until Attalos said: “Very well, perhaps you are really as ignorant of Persia as you profess. Then tell me about India.”
“What about it?” I hiccuped; the wine was beginning to affect me, too.
“As a soldier, I should like to know of the Indian art of war. What is this about training elephants to fight?”
“Oh, we do much better than that.”
“How so?”
“We have found that the flesh-and-blood elephant, despite its size, is an untrustworthy war-beast because it often takes fright and stampedes back through its own troops. So the philosophers of Pataliputra make artificial elephants of steel with rapid-fire catapults on their backs.”
I was thinking in a confused way of the armored war-vehicles of my own world.
I don’t know what made me tell Attalos such ridiculous lies. Partly it was to keep him of the subject of Persia.
Partly it was a natural antipathy between us. According to history, Attalos was not a bad man, though at times a reckless and foolish one. But it annoyed me that he thought he could pump me by subtle questions, when he was about as subtle as a ton of bricks. His voice and manner said as plainly as words: I am a shrewd, sharp fellow; watch out for me, everybody. He was the kind of man who, if told to spy on the enemy, would don an obviously false beard, wrap himself in a long black cloak, and go slinking about the enemy’s places in broad daylight, leering and winking and attracting as much attention as possible. No doubt, too, he had prejudiced me against him by his alarming curiosity about my past.
But the main cause for my rash behavior was the strong wine I had drunk. In my own world I drank very little and so was not used to these carousals.
Attalos was all eyes and ears at my tale of mechanical elephants. “You do not say!”
“Yes, and we do even better than that. If the enemy’s ground forces resist the charge of our iron elephants, we send flying chariots, drawn by gryphons, to drop darts on the foe from above.” It seemed to me that never had my imagination been so brilliant.
Attalos gave an audible gasp. “What else?”
“Well . . . ah . . . we also have a powerful navy, you know, which controls the lower Ganges and the adjacent ocean. Our ships move by machinery, without oars or sails.”
“Do the other Indians have these marvels, too?”
“Some, but none is so advanced as the Pataliputrans. When we are outnumbered on the sea, we have a force of tame Tritons who swim under the enemy’s ships and bore holes in their bottoms.”
Attalos frowned. “Tell me, barbarian, how it is that, with such mighty instruments of war, the Palalal . . . the Patapata . . . the people of your city have not conquered the whole world?”
I gave a shout of drunken laughter and slapped Attalos on the back. “We have, old boy, we have! You Macedonians have just not yet found out that you are our subjects!”
Attalos digested this, then scowled blackly. “I think you have been making a fool of me! Of me! By Herakles, I ought—”
He rose and swung a fist back to clout me. I jerked an arm up to guard my face.
There came a roar of “Attalos!” from the head of the table. King Philip had been watching us.
Attalos dropped his fist, muttered something like “Flying chariots and tame Tritons, forsooth!” and stumbled back to his own crowd.
This man, I remembered, did not have a happy future in store. He was destined to marry his niece to Philip, whose first wife Olympias would have the girl and her baby killed after Philip’s assassination. Soon afterwards, Attalos would be murdered by Alexander’s orders. It was on the tip of my tongue to give him a veiled warning, but I forebore. I had attracted enough hostile attention already.
Later, when the drinking got heavy, Aristotle came over and shooed his boys off to bed. He said to me: “Let uth walk outthide to clear our heads, Zandras, and then go to bed, too. These Makedones drink like thponges. I cannot keep up with them.”
Outside, he said: “The Attalos thinkth you are a Persian thpy.”
“A spy? Me? In Hera’s name, why?” Silently I cursed my folly in making an enemy without any need. Would I never learn to deal with this human species?
Aristotle said: “He thays nobody could path through a country and remain as ignorant of it as you theem to be. Ergo, you know more of the Persian Empire than you pretend, but wish uth to think you have nothing to do with it. And why should you do that, unleth you are yourthelf a Persian? And being a Persian, why should you hide the fact unleth you are on thome hostile mission?”
“A Persian might fear anti-Persian prejudice among the Hellenes. Not that I am one,” I hastily added.
“He need not. Many Persians live in Hellas without molestation. Take Artabazos and his sons, who live in Pella, refugees from their own king.”
Then the obvious alibi came to me, long after it should have. “The fact is I went even farther north than I said. I went around the northern ends of the Caspian and Euxine Seas, and so did not cross the Great King’s domains save through the Bactrian deserts.”
“You did? Then why did you not thay tho? If that is true, you have thettled one of our hottest geographical dithputes: whether the Cathpian is a closed thea or a bay of the Northern Ocean.”
“I feared nobody would believe me.”
“I am not sure what to believe, Zandras. You are a thtrange man. I do not think you are a Persian, for no Persian was ever a philothopher. It is good for you that you are not.”
“Why?”
“Because I hate Persia!” he hissed.
“You do?”
“Yeth. I could list the wrongs done by the Great Kings, but it ith enough that they theized my beloved father-in-law by treachery and tortured and crucified him. People like Isokrates talk of uniting the Hellenes to conquer Persia, and Philippos may try it if he lives. I hope he does. However,” he went on in a different tone, “I hope he does it without dragging the cities of Hellas into it, for the repositories of civilization have no busineth getting into a brawl between tyrants.”
“In India,” said I sententiously, “we are taught that a man’s nationality means nothing and his personal qualities everything. Men of all nations come good, bad, and indifferent.”
Aristotle shrugged. “I have known virtuouth Persians, too, but that monstrouth, bloated empire . . . No thtate can be truly civilized with more than a few thousand citizens.”
There was no use telling him that large states, however monstrous and bloated he thought them, would be a permanent feature of the landscape from then on. I was trying to reform, not Aristotle’s narrow view of international affairs, but his scientific methodology.
Next morning King Philip and his men and Aristotle’s six pupils galloped off towards Pella, followed by a train of baggage mules and the boys’ personal slaves. Aristotle said:
“Let uth hope no chance thlingthtone dashes out Alexandras’ brains before he has a chance to show his mettle. The boy has talent, and may go far, though managing him is like trying to plow with a wild bull. Now, let uth take up the question of atoms again, my dear Zandras, about which you have been talking thuch utter rubbish. First, you must admit that if a thing exists, partth of it must also exist. Therefore there is no thuch thing as an indivisible particle . . .”
Three days later, while we were still hammering at the question of atoms, we looked up at the clatter of hoofs. Here came Attalos and a whole troop of horsemen. Beside Attalos rode a tall swarthy man with a long gray beard. This man’s appearance startled me into thinking he must be another time-traveler from my own time, for he wore a hat, coat, and pants. The mere sight of these familiar garments filled me with homesickness for my own world, however much I hated it when I lived in it.
Actually, the man’s garb was not that of one from my world. The hat was a cylin
drical felt cap with ear flaps. The coat was a brown knee-length garment with trousers to match. Over the coat the man wore a yellow vest embroidered with faded red and blue flowers. The whole outfit looked old and threadbare, with patches showing. He was a big craggy-looking fellow, with a great hooked nose, wide cheek bones, and deep-set eyes under bushy beetling brows.
They all dismounted, and a couple of grooms went around collecting the bridles to keep the horses from running off. The soldiers leaned on their spears, with their bronze bucklers slung on their backs, in a circle around us. These spears were the ordinary six-foot jabbing pikes of the Greek hoplite, not the twelve- or fifteen-foot sarissai of the phalanx.
Attalos said: “I should like to ask your guest some more philosophical questions, O Aristoteles.”
“Athk away.”
Attalos turned, not to me, but to the tall graybeard. He said something I did not catch, and then the man in trousers spoke to me in a language I did not know.
“I do not understand,” I said.
The graybeard spoke again, in what sounded like a different tongue. He did this several times, using a different-sounding speech each time, but each time I had to confess ignorance.
“Now you see,” said Attalos. “He pretends not to know Persian, Median, Armenian, or Aramaic. He could not have traversed the Great King’s dominions from east to west without learning at least one of these.”
“Who are you, my dear sir?” I asked Graybeard.
The old man gave me a small dignified smile and spoke in Attic with a guttural accent. “I am Artavazda, or Artabazos as the Hellenes say, once governor of Phrygia but now a poor pensioner of King Philippos.”
This, then, was the eminent Persian refugee of whom Aristotle had spoken.
“I warrant he does not even speak Indian,” said Attalos.
“Certainly,” I said, and started off in English: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth . . .”