Sunset of the Gods

by Steve White

  “If possible,” Landry said diffidently, “we’d like to meet him, having heard so much about him.”

  “Hmm. Yes, I think that could be arranged. I’ll see what I can do. But for now, you’re welcome to stay here tonight.”

  As they got up, murmuring their thanks, Jason spoke up, hoping his interest sounded only casual. “Oh, by the way, we’ve heard certain odd rumors on our journey. Have there been any incidents of . . . well, of people claiming to have seen manifestations of the gods?”

  Themistocles gave him a look which he could not interpret. It was never easy to know just how literally the people of pre-scientific societies really took their gods. One of the few things of which the Classical Greeks were intolerant was atheism . . . strictly speaking, asebia, or failure to worship the gods. It was the crime for which Socrates would be sentenced to drink hemlock eight decades from now. But what was the real gravamen of the offense: impiety, or a dereliction of civic duty? Jason knew he had to tread very warily.

  “No, not that I’ve heard of,” said Themistocles after a pause. “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, only curious,” said Jason hastily. They made their exit as soon as was gracefully possible.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  This was not their Acropolis.

  The serene perfection of the Parthenon, the inspired eccentricity of the Erechtheum, and all the rest lay half a century and more in the future, when Pericles would loot the treasury of the League of Delos—Athens’s subordinate “allies”—to build them, replacing the temples the Persians had burned in 480 b.c. Now, ten years before that, even those earlier temples were for the most part nonexistent.

  Seven centuries earlier, the five-hundred-foot-high crag had been the citadel of a semi-barbaric Bronze Age king like those of Jason’s recent acquaintance. That age-old megaron had long since vanished, for starting three generations ago, the Eupatrid clans had cluttered the summit with private building projects, competing with each other in the efflorescence of gaudily painted statuary, culminating with the large, flamboyant “Bluebeard Temple” reared by the supremely rarefied Eupatrid family of the Alcmaeonids for its own glorification and the overshadowing of its rivals, the Boutads (who hadn’t become “authentic” yet). But even such monuments to aristocratic self-importance had not robbed these precincts of their sacredness, for here was the olive tree, believed to be immortal, that Athena herself had granted to the city, besting Poseidon in the matter of gifts and winning the Athenians’ special worship. (Jason wondered if some Teloi power-struggle lay behind the legend). And the old, shabby temple of Athena Polias held an archaic olive-wood statue of the goddess believed to be a self-portrait, fallen from the sky.

  Jason and his companions shouldn’t have been seeing any of this, as the crest of the Acropolis was supposedly barred to all but native-born Athenians. But it was becoming more and more apparent that a lot of exclusionary legislation was honored more in the breach than in the observance, in this state without a nit-picking bureaucracy. And besides, they were friends of Themistocles. So Landry had gotten his wish and they now walked among all the schlock that would eventually be swept away by Persian fire or Athenian urban renewal or both. Jason dutifully recorded it all through his implant simply by looking at it, knowing how interested Rutherford would be.

  As far as he was concerned, the most edifying thing about the Acropolis at this stage of its history was the view from it. To the west was Mount Aigaleos, scene of the unexplained sighting that still rankled in Jason’s mind. To the south was the bay of Phalerum, Athens’s port whose inadequacy was such an insistent bee in Themistocles’s entirely metaphorical bonnet. To the northeast was the marble-quarry-scarred Mount Pentelikon, beyond which lay the beach and horse-breeding plains of Marathon. Two roads led there, one to the north and one to the south of the mountain—roads which were going to acquire a vital strategic significance in the next few weeks.

  Closer than any of these things—almost directly below to the southeast, in fact, within the city itself—was what looked like an unfinished construction site. Which, in fact, was precisely what it was: the longest-unfinished construction site in history.

  When Pisistratus had taken power as tyrant in 560 b.c., all the competitive building on the Acropolis had come to an end; grands projets were only to be for the glorification of the tyranny. And his sons and successors, Hippias and Hipparchus, had had a perfect opportunity, given that the Athenians had been so remiss as to neglect to raise a temple to Zeus, the king of the gods. In a precinct traditionally sacred to Zeus, they had begun work on a temple of truly Pharaonic grandiosity. It had been uncompleted in 510 b.c. when the tyranny had been overthrown and Hippias sent into exile. Afterwards, the new democracy had neither finished it nor torn it down. Instead, they had simply left it standing, half-finished, as a mute testament to the tyrants’ megalomaniacal folly. And so it would stand until the second century a.d., when the Roman Emperor Hadrian would deign to complete it.

  Jason, who had known Zeus personally, tried to imagine just how that second, generation Teloi would have taken all this.

  He touched Landry’s shoulder. “Let’s go, Bryan. It’s time to meet Miltiades down in the Agora.” The historian reluctantly complied.

  The four of them turned away, toward the gates, past the immense bronze four-horse chariot placed by the democracy in this one-time aristocratic showcase as a monument to its victories over those who had tried to strangle it in its cradle. They proceeded on down the great ramp and through the crumbling old wall that still marked the outline of the Bronze Age lower town. There they turned right and followed the Panathenaic Way, past the temple enclosure of the Eleusinium on their right, from which the procession to Eleusis for the Mysteries would depart in October. After the next intersection, on the left, was the fountain-house where the women of Athens came in the morning to collect water—one of the tyrants’ more useful projects. Then, beyond that, the Agora opened out to their left.

  It had been called the Square of Pisistratus, after the tyrant who had cleared it. Like the fountain-house, and unlike the temple of Zeus, this was something the democracy could use. In fact, it had needed such a gathering-place for its public business. So the detritus of the tyranny had been cleared away and replaced by public buildings like the Bouleuterion where the boule that prepared the agenda for the popular assembly met, and the circular Tholos where its members ate at public expense. Emphasizing the political change was the bronze statue of two men, heroically nude, with drawn swords—Aristogiton and Harmodius, “the tyrannicides,” who had killed Hippias’s brother and co-tyrant Hipparchus, and died for it.

  As they passed that statue, in the center of the Agora, Landry provided an amused elucidation. “They were homosexual lovers. Hipparchus took a shine to Harmodius and tried to use his political power to have his way with him. Eventually he pushed the two of them just a little too far. They decided their only way out was to murder him.”

  “And for this they put up a statue of you in this city?” Mondrago wondered.

  “Well, the new democracy needed all the heroes it could get,” Landry explained. Jason, who had visited the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, recalled the word spin.

  They continued on, through the noisy merchants’ stalls. The shady plane trees that featured in so many artists’ impressions of the Agora still lay in the future, waiting to be planted after the Persians’ retreat in 480 b.c. Jason would have welcomed them, on this sunny late-July afternoon. He paused for an instant under a merchant’s striped awning and looked at the crowd. There was a subtle difference from what one would expect in such a marketplace—an unmistakable undercurrent of tension. This was, unmistakably, a city under threat.

  One head stood above the general run. The man’s exceptional height was the first thing that attracted Jason’s attention. What held his eyes was that, unlike most of the people who made up the Agora’s sweaty, dusty, entirely ordinary bustle, this man looked the way Classical Greeks
were supposed to look, complete with the straight, high-bridged nose and regular features. The longer Jason looked, though, there was something about him that wasn’t specifically Greek at all, but was ethnically unidentifiable. Unlike most mature men in this setting, he had no beard, and in fact looked like he had very little facial hair to grow.

  Jason took all this in as the man passed them in the opposite direction, headed toward the Panathenaic Way. He thought the man’s eyes—large, golden-brown—met his own for a fraction of a second, but he couldn’t be sure. Then he felt a tug on the shoulder of his chiton.

  “Jason,” said Chantal, in as close to a whisper as she could come and still make herself heard. “That tall man who just passed us—I saw something under his himation. I just got a quick glimpse . . . but it was something that didn’t belong in this time.”

  “Huh?” Jason stared at her. “What was it?”

  “I don’t know. I probably wouldn’t have been able to identify it even if I’d seen it for longer than a fraction of a second. But it was some kind of . . . device. And it had an unmistakable high-technology look.”

  “Chantal, this is impossible! We’re the only time travellers in the here and now—and even if we weren’t, nobody is ever allowed to bring advanced equipment. And while that man may look a little out of the ordinary, there’s no possibility that he’s a Teloi. You must have imagined something.”

  Chantal took on a look of quiet stubbornness. “You once told me that I’m very observant. You might as well take advantage of that quality.” A trace of bitterness entered her voice. “It’s the only thing about me that’s been any use so far.”

  Jason chewed his lower lip and looked behind them. The man’s wavy dark-gold head could still be seen above the generality. He reached a decision and turned to Mondrago.

  “Alexandre, follow that man. Don’t reveal yourself, and don’t take any action. Just find out where he’s going, then come back and report. We’ll be over there near the Tholos.”

  “Right.” Mondrago set out, blending into the throng. The rest of them continued toward the Kolonus Agoraeus, the low hill bordering the Agora on the west, with a small temple of Hephaestus at its top and the civic buildings grouped at its foot. To their left was the Heliaia, or law court: simply a walled enclosure where the enormous juries of Athens—typically five hundred and one members—could gather. Just to the left of the Tholos, a street struck off to the southwest, passing another walled quadrangle: the Strategion, headquarters of the Athenian army.

  Landry was staring raptly at a small building—a workshop of some kind, it seemed—tucked into an angle of a low wall across the street from the Tholos, near a stone that marked the boundary of the Agora. “What is it?” Jason asked him.

  Landry seemed to come out of a trance. “Oh . . . sorry. But that building there . . . I don’t know who’s occupying it now, but a couple of generations from now it will be the house and shop of Simon the shoemaker.” Seeing that this meant nothing to Jason, he elaborated. “It’s the place Socrates will use for discussions with his pupils—like Plato and Xenophon.”

  “Oh,” was all Jason said. Inwardly, he was experiencing an increasingly frequent tingle: a sense of just exactly where he was, and what it meant . . . and what would have been lost had the men of Athens not stood firm at Marathon.

  Up the street from the Strategion came a group of men, as Jason had been told to expect around this time of day: the strategoi, the annually elected generals of the ten tribes, who advised the War-Archon. Jason recognized the latter from descriptions he’d heard. Callimachus was older than most of the strategoi, a dignified, strongly built gentleman, bald and with a neat gray beard, wearing a worried expression that looked to be chronic. Themistocles walked behind him.

  At Callimachus’ side, and talking to him with quiet intensity, was one of the few strategoi of his own age. This was a man of middle size, lean and wiry, obviously very well preserved for his age, which Jason knew to be about sixty. He still had all his hair, and it was still mostly a very dark auburn, darker than the still visible reddish shade of his graying beard.

  The group began to break up, with Callimachus shuffling off as though stooped under the burden of his responsibilities. Jason wondered if he remembered how to smile. Themistocles led the man who had been expostulating to Callimachus to meet them.

  “These are the nobles from Macedon I mentioned, Miltiades.” He performed introductions, then excused himself. Jason explained that “Alexander” was currently indisposed.

  “I would be, too, if I shared the name of that lickspittle king!” Miltiades gave a patently bogus glare, then laughed. He showed no sign of being scandalized at the presence of a woman in the group, which Jason had hoped would be the case given his background in the wild and wooly frontier of Thrace, where he had married Hegesipyle, the daughter of the Thracian King Olorus. He asked them a series of rapid-fire questions concerning the current state of affairs in those parts, which they were able to answer as they had answered Themistocles.

  “We hope we have been of assistance to you, strategos,” Jason said afterwards. “And we are grateful to you for taking the time to talk to us. We know how much you have had to concern you, ever since . . . well, the news from Naxos and Delos.”

  “Yes,” said Miltiades grimly. He swept his hand in a gesture that took in the Agora crowd. “Can’t you feel the suspense as we wait to hear where Datis and his fleet will strike next? And just think: the whole thing could have been avoided if only the Ionians had listened to me twenty-three years ago!”

  “You mean,” Landry queried, “the matter of the Great King’s bridge of boats across the Danube?”

  “Yes! Darius, puffed up from his conquests in India, had led his great cumbersome army into Scythia. Of course he couldn’t catch the Scythian horsemen, who harried him so mercilessly he was lucky to escape.” (Ancestors of the Cossacks, thought Jason, remembering what he knew of Darius’s invasion of the Ukraine in 513 b.c.) “He’d ordered his subject Greek tyrants—including me—to build that bridge, and await his return before the horrible winter of that land set in. I proposed to the others that we destroy the bridge and leave him stranded north of the river, to either freeze or be feathered with Scythian arrows. We would have been free! But that crawling toad Histaeus, tyrant of Miletus, persuaded the others that my plan was too bold, too risky. So the bridge remained, and the tyrants welcomed back their master.”

  “Including you,” Landry ventured.

  “Of course. Do you take me for a fool? Yes, I groveled with the best of them. But later I joined the rebellion Histaeus instigated through his nephew Aristagoras.” Miltiades’s scowl lightened as though at a pleasant recollection. “The only good outcome was what happened to Histaeus after the rebellion had been crushed. He had the effrontery to demand that the Persian satrap send him to Susa to appeal to his old friend the Great King! The satrap complied—by sending his head there, pickled and packed in salt.”

  “There was one other good outcome,” Landry demurred. “You yourself escaped.”

  “Yes—twice. First from the Persians, and then from the Athenian Assembly after arriving here! This, even though after capturing the islands of Lemnos and Imbros from the Persians I gave them to Athens! I have Themistocles to thank for my acquittal. I’ll never forget that, even though he and I don’t agree on everything.”

  “Like the fact that you persuaded the Assembly to execute the Persian emissaries who came demanding submission last year,” Chantal suggested diffidently. “He mentioned that he had reservations about that.” Even Miltiades looked slightly taken aback at a woman speaking up unbidden, but after a slight pause he continued.

  “A lot of people discovered that they have reservations, after the fact. They said the person of an ambassador is sacred, and that we’d brought down the disfavor of the gods on ourselves.” Miltiades’s scowl was back at full intensity. “They just don’t understand. In a city like this, so traditionally riven by the feuds
of aristocratic cliques, so uncertain of its new democracy that hasn’t had time to acquire habitual loyalties. . . .” Miltiades seemed to have difficulty putting it into words. In this land with so few rivers worthy of the name, there was no metaphor of burning bridges. “We needed to make our rejection irrevocable, by taking a dramatic step that left us with no alternative but to resist. Besides which, as a practical matter, it aligned us unbreakably with Sparta, which had killed the emissaries without even the formality of a trial.”

  Jason was silent, remembering the twentieth-century debate over the pros and cons of the Allies’ “unconditional surrender” policy in World War II—a debate which hadn’t entirely died down among historians even in the twenty-fourth century. Miltiades had argued the Athenians into something like a mirror image of that: unconditional defiance.

  “Can Sparta truly be relied on?” asked Landry, probing again for an historical insight.

  “If Cleomenes were still alive, I’d be sure of it,” said Miltiades, referring to one of the Spartan kings, of whom there were always two. “Yes, I know, he was an enemy of the democracy in its earlier days—tried to force us to take Hippias back as tyrant! But . . . well. . . .” Fifth-century b.c. Ionic Greek also didn’t have anything about politics making strange bedfellows. “Lately, he was as staunch an enemy of Persia as any. And four years ago he did us all a favor by crushing Argos, which was threatening to stab us all in the back by joining the Persians at the Battle of Sepeia.” Miltiades chuckled. “He attacked them by surprise on the third night of a seven-day truce. When someone asked him about it, he said he’d sworn to the truce for seven days but hadn’t said anything about nights! And then when the Argive survivors retreated into the sacred grove of Argos, he ordered his helots to pile brush around the grove and burn it.”