Of Merchants & Heros

by Paul Waters

  He had spoken, uttering these words before half the government of the city. His large, jowly mouth set firm; but for a moment I saw a flash of doubt in his eyes. It was too late. The words were out.

  Everyone had heard them, and even now those at the back were repeating them to the others. No retraction was possible.

  I saw the beginnings of a smile form on the Archon’s thin lips. He glanced aside, and coughed, bringing up a concealing hand. I realized he had got what he wanted: he had roused Pomponius into a frenzy of grandiose booming anger. He had led him on, like a muleteer dangling a carrot.

  There was no more time to urge him to reconsider. He intended to march out of the city and confront Philip at his camp. When I tried to speak again he waved me silent, and hurried off to his rooms, saying he must dress for the meeting.

  I waited in the courtyard with the others. Presently he emerged, got up in a heavy, embroidered woollen robe edged with purple, clasped with an elaborate brooch of gold torque-work studded with lapis, with a gilded olive-spray perched upon his large balding head.

  I noticed one or two of the Greeks exchange glances. Athenians, as a rule, do not care for ostentation, thinking it vulgar. I stared at him. He looked like some rich Sicilian merchant on his way to a late-night drinking party.

  Soon after, we set out, taking the street towards Dipylon Gate.

  The Archon, who had been rather silent, came up, and in a lowered voice said perhaps, after all, it would be better if he himself were not present at this meeting with Philip: there was, he felt, too much bad feeling between Macedonians and Athenians . . . he should have thought of it earlier . . . he did not wish to jeopardize success . .

  ‘—Yes, yes, as you wish,’ said Pomponius, not really listening.

  The Archon dropped back, leaving Pomponius, and a few members of the Roman legation – and me – to exit through the city gate.

  We took the path to the complex of buildings known as the gymnasion of Kynosarges. I knew it well, having walked there often with Menexenos. There was a dense shading wood of cypresses and low pines, and, in the middle, a temple of Herakles. It was here the Macedonians had made their camp.

  As we approached, I could see the troops’ bivouacs suspended among the trees. Smoke from cooking fires curled up into a clear sky.

  They had raided the smallholdings, and the air was pungent with the tang of roasting meat.

  When we were perhaps two-thirds of the way to the camp there arose a stirring, and moments later a band of uniformed men rode out on horseback.

  ‘Let them approach,’ said Pomponius, extending his arm in a gesture for us to halt.

  We waited.

  The front rider was a middle-aged man clad in a short cavalryman’s tunic and a gilded cuirass. He dismounted a few paces off, removed his plumed helmet of scarlet horsehair, and strode the rest of the way on foot. He had a proud, handsome face, and dark, intelligent eyes. I knew it had been a sign of respect for him to dismount and remove his headgear. He could easily have ridden right up to us and addressed us from his horse.

  Pomponius peered at him, narrowing his eyes against the sharp sunlight. Then he proceeded to make an embarrassing show of looking this way and that across the empty open ground, like a buffoon at the theatre who has lost his mule, before he said, ‘Where is Philip? I do not see Philip.’

  The Macedonian officer stiffened.

  ‘The King is elsewhere,’ he replied. ‘I am here in his place. My name is Philokles. I am senior commander here.’

  ‘—I don’t care who you are,’ Pomponius interrupted. ‘I am the Roman ambassador to Athens, and I sent word that I wished to speak to Philip. Now go and summon him.’

  If I had been anywhere else, I think I should have turned and gaped. Instead I stood rigid, like a soldier on parade. Pomponius never took much trouble with his Greek, and I believe, at first, the Macedonian thought he had misheard. For a brief moment he looked into the ambassador’s face with a searching look of surprise, and his eyes strayed up to the large gilded olive-spray perched upon his head. Then his face set firm, and in a different, harder voice he said, ‘King Philip is elsewhere, as I have told you. So say what you wish to say, or go back to the city.’

  Pomponius glared. By now the sun was well up in the sky, and on the dusty road where we stood there was no shade. His fleshy face was growing crimson, and little beads of black-coloured sweat had begun to form where his dyed, carefully arranged hair met his neck and ears.

  He glanced behind him at the junior legates and at me, with a face that said, ‘What now?’ Then he turned back, and in a voice quivering with outrage he spluttered, ‘This is wholly unacceptable. I demand that you withdraw.’

  Philokles looked him square in the face. ‘Why are you here, Roman? Our business is with the Athenians, who declared war on us.

  Are they too afraid even to venture from behind their walls? What are you? Their herald? Have you come to tell us they surrender?’

  Pomponius hesitated. I think only then did it occur to him that the Archon had pushed him into an impossible position. By now he was sweating heavily. His face was blood-red, though I could not tell whether this was from the heat or his anger. Beside me the junior legates exchanged glances, wondering whether to interrupt. If Philip was not there, Pomponius had an excuse to withdraw and reconsider. But before anyone could step up and whisper in his ear, urging him to do this, he had resumed speaking.

  ‘Well if Philip will not come, then you can tell him this: in the name of the Senate and People of Rome, I forbid him to make war on Athens or any Greek city. I order him to withdraw immediately from Attika; and I demand compensation for the injuries done to the Athenians.’

  Then he swung round, said ‘Come along’ to the rest of us, and strode off ahead, back to the Dipylon Gate, where the Athenians were watching from the walls, his heavy purple-edged cloak billowing behind him.

  We did not have long to wait before Philip gave us his answer.

  NINE

  FIRST THE GROVE AROUND Kynosarges and the temple of Herakles went up in flames. Next was the turn of the Lykeion. We watched from the walls as the pines flared against the sky, engulfing everything – the colonnades from where I had watched Menexenos and his friends practise for the games; the bath-house, the public rooms with their lecture rooms and sculptures and fine paintings; even the sacred grove around Wolf-Apollo, which everyone thought would be spared out of reverence for the gods.

  But the Lykeion was only the beginning. Next the Macedonians turned their attention to the Akademy, a place renowned throughout all Greece for its learning and excellence. I saw grown men with tears streaming down their faces as they watched helpless as fire raged through the school and library and tended gardens. There was nothing of military advantage to be gained by such destruction. It was, they said, the accumulated wisdom of all humanity they were destroying.

  Next, Philip divided his army, leaving Philokles outside the walls of Athens to keep us penned in there, while he marched on Piraeus.

  I thought of the neglected Long Walls, by which the Athenians might have moved in safety between the city and the port. Now they stood in ruins. Piraeus, though so close, had to look to its own defence as best it could.

  Yet, by the favour of some god, and the stubbornness of its small garrison, Piraeus held. Frustrated, Philip took out his anger on the surrounding countryside, setting fire to everything that would burn, and tearing down every temple and shrine and object of beauty or veneration he found. From the walls we watched the smoke rise all over Attika as fields and farms were put to the torch.

  When, finally, there was nothing left to destroy or steal, and nothing for the army to feed on, the Macedonians withdrew, back the way they had come, northwards over the passes to Boiotia. On the day afterwards, I rode out with Menexenos and his father to see what had become of the farm.

  The road beyond the city was strewn with shards. Even the dead had not been spared Philip’s wrath. The shards were the r
emains of funeral vases, which had stood over the tombs that lined the road.

  The tombs, too, had been smashed; human bones lay over the scorched earth, spilled from their broken sarcophagi. In the rural demes the little rustic temples with their wooden posts and straw roofs had been set alight. The images of the gods lay toppled.

  Kleinias was not a man to make a display of his emotion. But as we came upon some new piece of wanton destruction he would shake his head, or comment on whose wasted land we were passing.

  At one point, when we were beyond Hymettos, Menexenos said, ‘Father, go back to the city. We can do this another day.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It must be faced.’

  Mount Paneion appeared in the distance, and we turned down the track that led to the farmstead. Even from here I could see the blackened terraces on the slopes, where the vineyard had been.

  Presently we began to pass grotesque, charred stumps in the fire- scorched fields. They were the carcasses of sheep. What the Macedonians had not eaten, or carried off, they had slaughtered, then burnt along with the crops.

  Near the house the olive grove, the patient work of generations, had been hacked down and set alight. But by then we could see what they had done to the house itself. The walls still stood. But the roof was gone, and the windows were like eyeless sockets, black with soot.

  For a while Kleinias just sat on his horse and stared, like a man who has fallen into a waking dream. Then he dismounted. I thought he would fall, but he leant on the horse to steady himself.

  ‘They have taken your grey colt,’ he said in a strange, slow voice, as if that were the only thing amiss among the devastation.

  ‘Yes, Father, the colt is gone; but we shall get another.’

  He nodded, and repeated, ‘We shall get another.’

  Menexenos caught my eye, with a look that said, ‘We must get him away from this.’ But already, with sudden purpose, Kleinias had struck out towards the house.

  The antique tables with their delicate marquetry, the fine chests, the couches inlaid with ivory and silver, were burned to dust. Here and there in the charcoal I saw the stump of a fluted chair-leg, or some scrap of cushion that the fire had somehow missed. Through the soles of my boots I could feel the heat still, coming up from the flags.

  When I looked up, Kleinias was staring at the ledge. It took me a moment to realize what had been there. Then, with an odd cry, he went stumbling across the room and fell to his knees, and began rummaging in the debris.

  ‘Leave it Father,’ said Menexenos, stepping up. ‘Let us go.’

  But Kleinias did not seem to hear. He raised his hand and stared at what he held there. It was a shard of pot, red on black. Even from where I stood, I could see the painted image. It was the head of a diskos-thrower, crowned with a victory wreath.

  Then Kleinias spoke, and his voice was strange and weak and distant. ‘It is enough,’ he whispered. ‘A man can endure only so many defeats.’

  It seemed then that his strength left him, and he would have fallen prone in the black dust if Menexenos had not rushed forward and caught him.

  ‘No, Father,’ he cried, stricken, ‘it will be well again; I will make it well again. Come now, back to the city. There is nothing for us here.’

  Between us we got him outside once more. His arm was shaking.

  He blinked at the sunlight with empty eyes. A cold finger of fear and horror crept down my backbone, at the sight of such nobility brought low. It was as if his very soul had been extinguished.

  We got him back to the city, but he was not the same man who had left it earlier that day.

  All the way back, Menexenos kept talking to him: simple reassuring words. But his father did not respond, or even seem to hear. He just stared into the distance, swaying with the movement of the horse.

  I could have wept to see their pain, but weeping would do no good, and so I just spoke occasionally, and took care of small things, and made sure Kleinias did not fall.

  I had no words that would do justice to his grief, and eventually I gave myself up to my own thoughts, recalling to mind what Titus had once said, that a man has nothing unless he can defend it; that without that, no precious or beautiful or beloved thing is secure, for there are always men who will destroy what some other man has built.

  Athens had once been the proud leader of all Greece. Now she had let herself fall to this. And it was not by fate; nor was it by the passing of time. It was by listening too long to the voices of fools.

  And here was the true taste of defeat, bitter to the tongue, like the tang of the acrid smoke that hung over the blackened fields.

  When at last the high-city showed in the distance through the haze, untouched by the destruction, Kleinias seemed to draw himself together by some act of will. I remembered that his wife, Menexenos’s mother, would be waiting at home for the news. He had to face her.

  By the time we walked back through the courtyard door and she came hurrying from the women’s rooms – a thing I had never seen her do before – he had regained a semblance of his old composure.

  He took her delicate hand and said, ‘We shall make good, Menexenos is sure of it. And in the meantime we have the town- house, where we can stay until the farm is right again.’

  I saw her eyes dart to his face. She must have realized. She was, after all, no fool. But she said nothing, at least in my hearing, and quickly led him inside.

  In the city, the mood turned from shock to rage. Up on the Pnyx, the people complained of what they had lost, and cried with one furious voice that someone should have warned them.

  The chief Archon, who knew his way with crowds, put forward a motion to have the Strategos impeached. This was done to raucous acclaim. Then decrees were passed, one after another, repealing every honour ever granted to any Macedonian, whatever his virtues.

  In the agora and streets, and on the high-city, honorific statues were torn down, and grateful inscriptions chiselled off. The Archon, with a politician’s skill, knew that so long as the Demos’s fury was directed at Philip, it was directed away from him.

  One day, returning from the Pnyx, Kleinias found me stripped to the waist in the outer courtyard, practising my sword-work. He sat down on the bench beneath the fig tree, and watched me. I finished off, and setting my sword aside asked him if he was well, and if I could send for the slave, or fetch him something.

  All this he declined with a shake of his head. Then he said, ‘Listen now to what we have descended to. Today our wise rulers have decreed that if any citizen by word or deed honours King Philip, then anyone may lawfully put that man to death, without trial or recourse to law.’ He gave a sudden, harsh laugh. ‘Thus the brave Demos wages war – with their tongues.’

  It was a relief of sorts when, soon after, the time of the Panathenaia came, for it seemed to me that a frenzy of anger and hatred had taken hold in the city.

  It was the hot summer month the Athenians call Hekatombaion.

  Up on the high-city the sacrifices were made, and the prayers were spoken, according to the ancient rituals. Then the men and boys who had been selected to compete processed down from the hill and through the agora; and the citizens, distracted for a while from their futile revenge, watched and cheered.

  The stadium, which lay outside the walls, on the banks of the Ilissos, had been spared by the Macedonians. This was not from piety or shame however, but because the massive close-laid ashlars could not easily be broken, nor was there anything that would burn or could be carried off.

  I went each day, and from the terraces watched the contests, with Kleinias at my side.

  I had thought, at first, that he would not come. I had even heard his wife’s voice from the women’s quarters, trying to persuade him to stay at home. But he seemed driven by a fierce determination, and insisted on seeing everything.

  As I expected, Menexenos came first in the diskos-throw, outstripping his nearest rival by fifteen paces. When the judges announced the winner, he smiled up to u
s, and raised his hand.

  Naked against the backdrop of white marble and fire-scorched earth, he reminded me of the depiction on the black-glazed trophy vase.

  But this was something I kept to myself.

  I glanced at Kleinias. His face was absent and immobile. He had said nothing to me, and I could not tell what he was thinking.

  After the javelin-throw the judges spent some time measuring the places where the spears had fallen. Finally they announced that Menexenos had won by a handspan. But he stumbled in the long jump, and though he did his best to right himself as he leapt, the weights were off balance, and in the end a heavily built black-haired youth from the deme of Acharnai came first.

  Next day came the foot races: the short sprint for the pentathlon, and the separate running races – the long-race and the two-stade sprint around the post. Of these, Menexenos ran only in the sprint, and this he won.

  One finds, as a rule, that there is a type who takes best to running, another to boxing, and another still to wrestling. But in the pentathlon, where strength as well as speed count, there is no one type: one year it may be a runner who wins; another year a wrestler who has excelled at the javelin and diskos. It was not, in short, a contest where one could tell the victor by looking – though this did not silence the touts behind the stadium, who claimed to have a hundred ways to predict the outcome.

  Last of all was the contest I cared least for: the wrestling. Why this should be, when I had made such a study of war and killing, I cannot tell. Perhaps it was because of what I had seen in the palaistra at Tarentum. But there seemed to me something brutish and unnecessary about it; and though Menexenos had said there once had been a particular excellence to it, I found it hard to see.

  I had hoped he would be up against one of the lighter-built runners; but I think, already, I had guessed who it would be, and was not surprised, after the lots had been drawn, when the thickset youth from Acharnai stepped out.