by Tom Holt
He handed me the bottle and I’m afraid I drank it all, without thinking where we would get any more. But Callicrates didn’t say anything, although I expect he was thirsty too. Then he opened his knapsack and handed me a piece of wheat bread, white and still quite soft, as good as cake.
Callicrates smiled when he saw how much I was enjoying it, and he said that where he had been they ate wheat bread as a matter of course and imported all their wine from Judaea.
I hope I haven’t given you the impression that Callicrates was a coward, because he wasn’t. He had made up his mind to go into the house, which not many men would have done, and the only reason he did it was for my sake. You see, he knew that if there was a lawsuit about property someone would have to give evidence about how everyone had died, and I was too young to take the oath. So he screwed his face even more tightly into his cloak, took a deep breath, and plunged in. He wouldn’t let me come with him, and I was secretly relieved, since I no longer felt that the people in the house had anything to do with me. He was gone about five minutes and then came back, shivering all over as if he had been out in the snow in nothing but a tunic.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen everything I need to see. Let’s go to my father’s house.’
That sounded like an excellent suggestion, since I liked Philodemus; you may remember that he was the one who arranged for me to meet Cratinus, and he knew a lot of people and was always quoting from plays. He was a small, jolly man and I thought it would be more fun living with him than with my grandfather, who had never really liked me very much.
‘Callicrates,’ I said, ‘did you really have to go in there?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘like I told you.’
‘There won’t really be a lawsuit, will there?’ I said. ‘I thought that was only when people did something wrong, like stealing.’
He grinned, and the cloak fell off his face. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said. And he was right, too, as it turned out. There was the most almighty lawsuit, and if he hadn’t gone into the house we would have lost, because of some legal presumption or other.
Whatever else I may forget, such as my name and where I live, I shall always remember that walk through the City. Everywhere we went, the streets were either totally deserted or frantic with activity; and where there were people, they all seemed to have bodies with them. There were bodies in handcarts, or on the backs of mules, or slung over men’s shoulders like sacks, so that it looked for all the world like the grapes being brought down for the vintage. Some were taking them to be properly burnt (there was no space to bury anyone, not even the smallest child) but they had to hurry, because if anyone saw a pyre burning and no one watching he would pitch the body he was carrying on to it and go away as quickly as he could. Others were actually digging shallow trenches in the streets to bury their dead; in fact there was a lot of trouble about it later on, when people started scraping up these trenches to recover the coins that the relatives had left in the corpses’ mouths for the Ferryman, and the whole plague nearly started all over again. Then there were many people who dumped dead bodies in the water-tanks and cisterns, partly because they reckoned that water would wash away the infection but mostly because by that stage they couldn’t care less; and only a complete idiot left the door of his stable open, or even his house; because if he did he would be sure to find two or three corpses there when he came home, neatly stacked like faggots of wood. Really, it was like watching a gang of thieves desperately getting rid of stolen property when the Constables arrive.
Naturally I wanted to stop and watch, since I felt that if ever I wanted to try my hand at a Tragedy or a Poem this would make the most wonderful set piece; the plague in the Greek camp at Troy, for instance, or the pestilence at Thebes at the start of an Oedipus. But Callicrates just wanted to get away as quickly as he possibly could, and he virtually pulled my arms out of their sockets in his haste to get home.
‘For God’s sake, stop dawdling, can’t you?’ he said several times. ‘You may be immune, but I’m not.’
And so I had to let all those marvellous details go to waste and scamper along at his heels, like a dog who can smell hares in the corn but has to keep up with his master. Eventually we reached Philodemus’ house, which was mercifully clear of infection, and I was just able to eat a huge bowl of porridge with sausage sliced up in it and drink a cup of wine and honey before falling fast asleep.
Apparently I slept for the best part of a day and a night, and while I was asleep Philodemus and Callicrates took out the cart, fetched the bodies out of my grandfather’s house, and cremated them honourably. Of course my grandfather himself was saturated with water from the trough and wouldn’t burn, so they had to dry him in the sun like goat’s meat for a journey; but they didn’t tell me that until several years later. They performed all the proper rites, however, mixing the ashes with honey and wine and milk and burying them in an urn with all the right invocations, and I’m very grateful for that, since properly speaking it was my job. When they got back, both Philodemus and Callicrates washed themselves very thoroughly and even burnt the clothes they had been wearing when they handled the bodies; Philodemus had got it into his head that the plague was somehow directly connected with all the dirt and squalor that went with having the whole of Attica cooped up inside the City walls. But Philodemus always did have a thing about cleanliness, even to the extent of having all the household refuse put into jars and dumped in the next street.
So I came to live with Philodemus and Callicrates, which I suppose was the greatest benefit I derived from the plague. I say the greatest, since of course with so many of our family dead I was the heir to a considerable amount of property. It’s true what they say, after all; men die, but land goes on for ever, and in those days people were only just starting to realise that land could be bought and sold. As a result of the heavy mortality among my kinsmen (most of whom, I confess, I had never even heard of) I stood to inherit a considerable holding.
Of course, there were endless lawsuits. About the only human activity not interrupted by the plague was litigation; indeed, with so many deaths the probate Courts were almost as busy as the political and treason Courts, and the litigants themselves never seemed to fall ill. Some of them were survivors like myself, laying claim to family estates, but even the others seemed to stay clear of the disease, at least while their case was being heard. Cratinus said that all the hot air and garlic fumes released in Court kept away the infection, and that Hades was in no hurry to crowd his nice orderly palace with noisy Athenian litigants, all shouting and calling each other names; he preferred to take quiet, honest men who would be a credit to his establishment. Cratinus, incidentally, went everywhere throughout the City visiting sick friends, helping them to laugh their way through the final agonising stages of the disease, and then burying them when even his jokes could keep them alive no longer. He claimed that his preservation was due to the prophylactic effects of cheap wine, but I prefer to think that Dionysus was looking after him too.
Philodemus conducted all my lawsuits for me, and although we lost some things we should have kept — I particularly regret five acres of vines down in the plains near Eleusis — I ended up with a personal estate of no less than sixty acres. Over half this land was hill-country and so no use for anything except scenic effect — although the land had been in our family since Theseus was a boy, apparently none of my ancestors had ever got around to removing the stones from the ground — and so my estate was in fact not nearly so impressive as it sounds; but it was easily enough to elevate me into the Cavalry class, ‘and with a little bit over in case of bad harvests’, as Philodemus put it. He was, for an Athenian, an almost divinely honest man, and apart from a few fields in Phyle and my grandfather’s stake in the silver mines he handed all my property over to me when I was old enough to take charge of it, with a written account and record of the expenses of maintenance and repair to justify his use of the income. Yet he was no more than comfortably off himse
lf, and paid for my keep while I was in his house entirely from his own resources, as if I had been his own son, so I never had the heart to sue him for the return of the stake in the mines.
The plague did not abate for two years, and learned men (like that little general) say that it killed one man in three. It spread from the City to our men in the army and the fleet, but somehow we never managed to pass it on to the Spartans; and it nearly brought the war to a premature end. But after a while the people in the City became resigned to it — it is quite remarkable what city dwellers will put up with, so long as they feel that everyone else is having just as horrible a time as they are — and carried on their lives as best they could. They redesigned the economy of the City slightly to accommodate their changed patterns of living, so that more people got out of agriculture altogether and started to specialise in the urban industries, like sitting on juries, metalwork and burglary. In fact, quite a substantial number of men caught the plague from breaking into infected houses, which caused considerable amusement to their neighbours.
One thing I must mention is the prophecy, because it was the one great topic of discussion wherever people still met to talk. As soon as the plague became widespread, someone or other dug up an ancient oracle, which had actually been carved on stone in the time of the celebrated Solon. It went: ‘The Spartans come bringing war, and hateful Death in the vanguard.’
Most people took this as a reference to the plague, since in Solon’s time the word Death was commonly used as a synonym for plague, particularly in poetry; but some grammarians and learned teachers disputed the reading for sound philological reasons which have slipped my memory, and amended the line as follows:
‘The Spartans come bringing war, and hateful Dearth in the vanguard.’
This, they said, meant that there would soon be a famine, compared to which the plague would be about as serious as a bad cold; and of course this caused great anxiety and panic-buying of food. Those who accepted the original reading replied by saying that the learned scholars were all in the pay of the corn-dealers, who were the ones who had started the plague by catching it themselves in the first place, and that something ought to be done about what was plainly a conspiracy. The City was soon divided into two rival camps, the Dearth-men and the Death-men (we were Death-men, I remember, except for a cousin of mine called Isocles who had a share in a grain ship) and these two factions took to going round the streets after dark burning each other’s houses. This went on for a long time and ended up with a full-scale riot in the Market Square, during which several silversmiths’ stalls and a butcher’s shop were looted.
CHAPTER THREE
Not so long ago I went to the Theatre—I think it was the second day of the Lenaea — after staying up late the night before with some friends. I was so tired that I fell asleep towards the end of the first of the three Tragedies and only woke up half-way through the second. I believe the first one was a play about Oedipus, and the second was some nonsense about Odysseus; I can’t remember terribly well, to be honest with you. Anyway, when I woke up, to start with I thought we were still in the Oedipus play (it didn’t seem to matter terribly much — it was that sort of play) and when I realised that it wasn’t I was totally unable to work out what was going on.
Eventually I came to the conclusion that it was something to do with Perseus and the Gorgon, and it was on that basis that I followed it through to the final exit of the Chorus. In fact it was several weeks before someone happened to mention what the second play that day had been about, and at first I didn’t believe him.
Bearing this unfortunate experience in mind, I feel that I ought at this stage in my story to clarify exactly what is going on, just in case any of my readers has got it into his head that this book of mine is set in the middle of the Persian Wars or the dictatorship of Pisistratus. You see, I cannot in all conscience assume that you know the background to this story, even if you are an Athenian; after all, it is a well-known fact that we Athenians are not particularly good at history, and the only way we can be sure when something happened or who did what two or three generations ago is by asking a foreigner. I suppose this is because we Athenians make all the history in Greece, and just as you generally find that a weaver’s own cloak is threadbare and worn and a potter’s house is full of chipped and unglazed crockery, so we Athenians are most disdainful of our own principal export and take no great interest in it.
Now, of course, I am faced with the problem of where to start. For example, I would be perfectly happy to take you right back to the Heroic past, when the Gods walked undisguised among men and Athena competed with Poseidon as to who should be Athens’ patron deity. After all, that sort of thing is extremely easy to do — I could fill a whole roll with it and never have to stop and think once — but I suspect that you would lose interest fairly quickly and start worrying about getting your winter barley in or manuring your vines. On balance, I think the best place for me to start would be just after the end of the Great Patriotic War, when all the Greeks were united against the Persian invaders and the world was a very different place.
Even before the war we Athenians had not been able to grow enough food in Attica to feed ourselves, and when the Persians broke into Attica, destroyed the City and dug up or burned all our vines and olive trees, we were all in a rather desperate situation. As you well know, it takes five years at the very least for a vine to become sufficiently established to yield harvestable grapes, while an olive tree can easily take twenty years or more to come to maturity. The Athenian economy was based on the export of wine and oil, in return for imported grain; our only other exportable commodity was silver, and the silver mines were all owned by the State and leased out to rich men, so there was no way that that source of income could be used to feed the people.
The one thing we did have was warships. You see, shortly before the Persians invaded, a man called Themistocles was put in charge of our long-running feud with the island of Aegina, and he had used the revenues from the silver mines to build and fit out the biggest and best fleet of warships in the whole of Greece. It was this fleet that we used to evacuate the City when the Persians came, and to defeat the Persians conclusively at the battle of Salamis.
The important thing to bear in mind about a warship is that it takes a considerable number of people to man it and make it work, and all these people have to be paid or they will get out of the warship and go away. In fact, a warship (or fleet of warships) is probably the most efficient way of providing gainful employment for men with no particular skills that has yet been devised by the human brain, and Themistocles realised this. On the one hand, he had a city full of people unable to make a living off their land, and on the other hand he had a harbour crammed with redundant battleships which had recently proved themselves capable of making mincemeat out of the most powerful navy in the world.
At the time, Athens was still part of the Anti-Persian League, the confederacy of Greek cities hastily formed to resist the invaders. By all accounts it was a wonderful thing while it lasted, for it was the first time in the history of the world when the Greeks had not all been at war with each other. Having driven the Great King out of Greece, the League was obviously redundant, and there was no reason why it should not be dissolved so that everyone could go back to cutting each other’s throats, as their fathers and grandfathers had done. But for some reason the League continued to exist.
Now the best theory I have heard is that most of the cities of Greece were in roughly the same situation as Athens; their economies were in ruins because of the war, and nobody wanted to go home and face the mess. They greatly preferred drawing regular pay for fighting the Persians, and if the Persians had all gone back to Persia the only thing to be done was to follow them there. So they did; and for a while they had a perfectly splendid time sacking cities and looting treasuries. But then some of the Greeks, particularly those who lived on the islands in the Aegean and on the coast of Asia Minor, thought that it was high time they wen
t home and started farming again, on the principle that sooner or later the supply of Persians would run out and they might as well get back to work before the soil had got completely out of hand.
By this stage, Themistocles had had his Great Idea, and so the Athenians pretended to be terribly upset at this defection by their allies, and spoke very eloquently at League meetings about avenging the fallen heroes and the desecrated temples of Athens. The islanders were profoundly embarrassed and didn’t know what to say; and then the Athenians, with a great show of relenting and making concessions, said that they quite understood, and as a special favour they, the Athenians, would carry on the Great Crusade on behalf of all the Greeks, until the Persian menace had been wiped off the face of the earth and the anger of the Gods had been fully appeased. All the islanders had to do was contribute a small sum of money each year towards general expenses, as a gesture of solidarity; we would provide the ships and the men, and the loot would be shared out equally at the end of each campaigning season.
Naturally enough the islanders thought this was eminently reasonable; either the Athenians would wipe out the Persians or the Persians would wipe out the Athenians, and either way the world would be rid of a nuisance. So they swore a great many oaths and undertook to pay a small contribution each year into the League treasury. The hat was taken round, and the Athenians used the money to build more ships and fill them with Athenian crews, until nearly every adult Athenian who disliked the idea of hard work was adequately provided for. Shortly afterwards, however, when the islanders began to notice that the Athenians hadn’t been near the Persians for some considerable time and the Great Crusade seemed to have lapsed, they stopped paying the small contribution and declared that the matter was closed.