The Last of the Wine

by Mary Renault

  As soon as Sokrates had gone, he strode over and grasped my hand, asking how I was and if Lysis was with me. I've scarcely seen you, Plato, I said, since the Games. But I can see I ought to say Aristokles now. — None of my friends do. If you were not still one, Alexias, I should be very sorry.

  We walked off together talking. The old-time formality which had sat on him oddly as a boy, now fitted him like good armour. I use the comparison purposely; he is a man, I think, easily wounded, but very unwilling to have it known. People meeting him first in manhood seldom suspect it, for he is very well able now to give blow for blow. You would have taken him for at least as old as I; I had seen that most of the young men about Sokrates were afraid of him.

  I asked if he was still wrestling. He said, No, except for a friendly bout. The Isthmus cured me of that ambition. One exercises to be a whole man, not a creature bred like a plough-ox to do one thing. He had grown much taller, and this with the change of exercise had greatly improved him; he was big, but not out of balance for his build. It was one reason for my not having known him. In any case, he said, the Twins claim one now oftener than the palaestra. On his arm was a spear-thrust hardly healed; since Euboea fell, the raids had got worse again.

  I did not ask him how he came to Sokrates: it seemed as silly as asking an eagle how it came to fly. It was he who opened the matter to me. At Corinth, he said, you listened so kindly to my youthful nonsense, that I probably told you I had notions of myself as a poet, and was writing a tragedy. — Yes, of course; upon Hippolytos. Did you finish it? — Indeed I did, and revised it again last year. I showed it to my uncle, who has often been generous in putting his good judgement at my service; he approved of it, and other friends were kind, so on their advice I decided to enter it for the Dionysia. I was so zealous about it that I got there before the bureau was opened for competitors, and stood waiting in the portico of the theatre, with my roll in my hand. Sokrates was standing there too; not in impatience, as I was, but lost in thought. I had heard of him from my uncle, who saw him often at one time, but parted company with him, I understand, upon a point of philosophy. I am speaking of course of my uncle Kritias.

  Recollecting myself, I said, Of course. But what about Sokrates?

  Seeing him there, oblivious of my presence, I took the occasion to look at him. What he was meditating on, I have never asked him. But as I gazed on his face, a strange, indeed a painful quickening seized me, like a child before the birth-cry. While I was still trying to understand myself, he came out of his meditation, and looked straight at me. He walked over, and asked me if I was entering a tragedy, and what the subject was. Then he asked me to read him some. You may be sure I obliged him very willingly. At the end I paused for praise, which I not so far been disappointed in; and, indeed, he praised it highly. Then he asked me the meaning of a simile. I had thought it clear to any lettered person, for one does not write for fools; but as I began to explain, I became aware all at once that I had meant very little by it, and the little was not very true. He asked, in the gentlest way, to hear some more; this time he said he was in full agreement, and told me why. But much more than his irony, his praise revealed me to myself; he had seen in the passage something so much beyond my own conception, that the whole work, thus regarded, fell to pieces in my hands. I had not the shamelessness to accept his praise. I told him he had opened my eyes; that I could not be satisfied with the work as it was, but should take it home and re-write it. We had now gone down from the portico and were walking together, and had come to the central meaning round which the play was framed: the dealing, I mean, of Theseus and Hippolytos with the gods, and the gods with one another. All morning we talked, and at the time of the noonday meal I went home. In the afternoon I read my tragedy again, and my other verse. Some of the lines were not unhappy, and the choruses did not limp in the foot. What would you say, Alexias, of an embroidered mantle made to clothe a god, whose image was still unshaped in the marble, scarcely the drill-holes made? I saw that to take pleasure in this stuff was to load my soul with chains, when wings had been offered me. So I called for a brazier, and burned it all. Whatever it was I said to him, he did not seem put out by it; so I suppose it was without offence. There met and wrestled in me love and envy of an excellence beyond my reach. For a moment, I think, I was a child at the music-class again, and jealous as a child. But presently I remembered some of the lessons Sokrates had taught me, and that I was a man. so I asked Plato if he remembered any of his burned play.

  I saw him hesitate. He was a poet after all, and not much above twenty. At last he said, Well, there was one passage he seemed not to think unsound. You must suppose Hippolytos has just died; the young men's chorus invokes Aphrodite, the author of his fate.

  He repeated it. I was long silent, my soul freed of its folly, humble before the Immortals. At last, afraid I had seemed uncivil, I spoke, but could only say, You burned this, and you kept no copy?

  When one offers to the gods, one brings a whole beast to the altar. If it was an image of what is not, then it was false and ought to be destroyed; and if of what is, then a little fire will not destroy it. It is nearly noon; won't you come home and eat with me?

  I was about to accept, when just as in old days the trumpet-call shuddered across the City. They are getting insolent, he said. Forgive me, Alexias; I shall look forward to it another day. He went off to arm himself, but not without pausing to say that the troops in Ionia had long taken the brunt of the war. His manners were always good, and I suppose he knew I had no horse now.

  I had other friends to see about the City. Phaedo, when I called on him, ran up and embraced me. I was glad of this not for my sake alone. Ever since he left Gurgos', I had never known him touch anyone of his own accord; I inferred some later happiness to have been his physician. But his chief love, I found, was still philosophy. It was evident his mind had increased in power and keenness; and, after a little talk, I learned that its whetstone had been Plato. Antagonism of ideas, mixed with respect, had drawn these two together. Perhaps in the real substance of their souls, they were not so very unlike. The higher the dream betrayed, the deeper the bitterness; if the man survives, he will be on guard against dreams as a shepherd watches for wolves. Phaedo said, He tells me that if I don't take care, I shall spend my life clearing the ground, and never come to build. I say, of course, that he's one to start building before the foundations have settled. He's certainly nimble at meeting an objection; still, I think he'll admit to you that I've cracked his logic here and there.

  My next visit was to Xenophon. He was as much changed as anyone, yet more than ever the same. It was as if I had been acquainted before with an outline sketch of him, which the artist was now filling in as he had always intended. He was every inch the old-style Athenian knight; soldierly, well-bred, the sort of cavalryman who breeds his own horse, schools and doctors it; who prides himself on being quick in war, and in talk at the supper-table, but says he has no time for politics, meaning that his politics are set and that's the end of it. Not being one to run after new fashions, he had grown his beard. It was a curly chestnut one, as dark as his hair; smartly clipped, with the upper lip shaved after the Spartan manner. He was quite as handsome a man as he had been a boy.

  He was pleased to see me, and congratulated me on having seen so much action. He himself was not long back in the City, the poorer for his ransom-money; he had been taken prisoner by the Thebans, and kept some time in chains. When I commiserated with him, he said it would have been much worse but for a friend he had made there, a young Theban knight called Proxenos. Learning that they had both studied with Gorgias, this young man visited him in prison, talked philosophy with him, went surety for striking off his fetters, and did everything possible to ease his captivity. Since he had been ransomed, they still exchanged letters when they could. He spoke so warmly of Proxenos, that with almost anyone else I should have thought they were lovers; but you would be very rash to assume such a thing of Xenophon.

  Our ta
lk turning to Sokrates and his friends, I soon came naturally to speak of Plato. But I noticed at once a touch of frost upon the air. When I had time to observe and consider, I did not find this very hard to understand.

  I am sure it was not mere envy. Man or boy, I have never found in Xenophon anything mean or base. He was always a practical man, honourable, religious, with a set of fixed ethics, not wrong but circumscribed. Point out to such a man a clear and simple good, and he will follow it over the roughest country you like to show him. Sokrates had taken him as he found him, loving his good heart, and not teasing his mind with formal logic beyond what one needs to detect a lie, nor with sublimities he could not soar to. He loved Sokrates: and, loving too to be settled in his mind, he liked to think the Sokrates he knew was all the man. But within Sokrates' soul, I think, was a temple in a solitude, where no one had visited him from youth to age, save his daimon who warned him of evil, and the god he prayed to. Now a foot was on the threshold. Xenophon had decided long since that Sokrates thought divine speculations better let alone; when he found he had deceived himself, it grieved him.

  As for Plato, he was the last man to be insensible of dislike, or to turn it off easily. When Xenophon was there, he withdrew into his citadel, which looked like arrogance and partly was. I don't think his friendship with Phaedo went to help matters. Xenophon had always shown Phaedo courtesy, but that was as far as it went. His sense of propriety was strong; he could never quite get Phaedo's past out of his mind, nor feel quite easy in his presence. But Plato swept all this aside with the largeness of his royal blood; he preferred the aristocracy of minds. Moreover, as if these things were not enough, one never saw Xenophon paying court to a youth, nor Plato to a woman; and such extremes of nature tend naturally to discord.

  As the days passed, I saw my father was a happier man than before. Here and there I heard hard things said of Theramenes; that he had consented to a good deal of tyranny and violence in the beginning, and broke away to be on the winning side when he felt the turn of the wind. Some malicious person had nicknamed him Old Sock, meaning that he would fit on either foot. I knew from his table-talk that he valued his own shrewdness; but he had been good to me, and I did not believe his detractors. Of course the oligarch leaders had called him a traitor; but since these persons were mostly skulking at Dekeleia, joining the Spartan raids into Attica, their censure was nearly as good as praise.

  Lysis got out to his farm whenever he could. It was years since he had seen it, and the bailiff, though fairly honest, had had his own way too much. My father liked to see himself to what was left of ours. So I had time to walk with Sokrates, and to go about the City seeing what was new.

  One day I turned into the colonnade at Mikkos's palaestra to see if my old trainer was still there. But as I entered I heard cymbals, flute and lyre, and found the boys instead of exercising were practising a dance in honour of Apollo. It was nearing the time when the sacred ship goes to Delos to celebrate his birth. Having once danced for him myself, I stayed to watch. The senior boys seemed, as one always finds, much younger than those of my day. They had just come forward to rehearse their part of the dance, some of them carrying baskets, water-pitchers and so forth to represent the sacred objects, others green branches to wave as laurel boughs.

  Upon a clash of cymbals the first line fell back, and through it leaped the second line to lead the dance in turn; and in the centre, hidden from me till then, I saw a boy. So one begins, when one means to describe someone: but while I have looked at the paper, making ready to write, the shadow has moved upon the wall. For the sake of saying something, I will note his eyes, which were of a blue more like the night sky than the day, and his clear wide brows. Mention ought also to be made of a defect he had, that his hair was grey, almost to whiteness. Some fever he had suffered had left it so; this I learned later, I forget from whom.

  It was, as it seemed, a late rehearsal; for instead of the gymnasium flute-player they had the real musicians who would play for them before the god. As I looked at the face of the boy dancing, I saw it filled with the music. He was, perhaps, himself a player of some instrument, or a singer. One saw the other boys taking their time from him, for he was never off the beat, and when they danced in single file he was set to lead them. He was not, however, given any solo to perform, being perhaps not counted perfect enough in his body to please Apollo, because of his hair. But then, I thought, they should have kept him altogether away; for he being there, what god, or what man, could have eyes for any other?

  The small boys next came on and the elder ones stood back; but on the face of this lad I saw the same look, calm yet sparkling, as when he had been dancing himself. I think they had not rehearsed with the music before, and the dance came to him as a picture seen by daylight, after the light of lamps. When one of the others spoke to him, he did not hear at first; then he answered smiling, without moving his eyes, watching the dance.

  I stood gazing, leaning upon a column, I do not know how long, time having grown still for me, like a pool deeper than it is wide. Then during a pause for rest, one of the musicians moved as if to go; I awoke to the flux of things, knowing the practice must end soon and the boy be gone. Now for the first time I looked about the colonnade, in search of someone I knew; and, a short way along from me, I saw Plato standing alone. I greeted him, and talked a little about the dance. Then, as easily as I could, I asked him the name of this boy or that, starting with those who had danced the solos. He told me, where he knew; presently I said, And the grey-haired lad, the file-leader there, do you know his name? He answered, His name is Aster.

  His voice was quite low; yet the boy, who all this while had not once glanced my way, lifted his head upon his name, and turned towards us his sea-dark eyes. Upon this moment my memory hangs transfixed; I do not know if they smiled at one another. As, while the lightning leaps between sky and sea, the shape of cloud or wave is indistinguishable, so with their joy.

  Walking away through the City, I saw I had been foolish not to watch the dance through to the end, and have the memory. For one can bear more than one supposes; and in Thrace once, when an arrow broke in me and they cut down for the barb, from having fixed my eyes on a mere bird in a tree I can see every feather still. But I had walked too far to turn back. As the pines that girdle Lykabettos touched me with their shade, I wondered what had brought me there. Then, a little higher up the mountain, where the rock feeds nothing but a few small flowers, a voice in me said, Know yourself. And I perceived the truth, that one does not feel such grief for the loss of what one never had, however excellent; I grieved rather for what had once been mine. So I did not sit down upon the rocks as I had meant to do, but climbed to the peak of the mountain, where the little shrine stands against the sky. There, remembering what is due to the gods and to the soul through whose truth we know them, I lifted my hand to Zeus the Father, and vowed him an offering, because he had given Sokrates in due time his sons.

  After a while I thought I would go to the City and find him; he seemed always to know when one was fit to listen and not to speak. Then I saw from the mountain the road to Lysis' farm. He had not asked me for help; yet he was short-handed, and perhaps he had only thought I would rather see friends in the City. There was always the chance, too, of a stray band of Spartans getting through the Guard. I was ashamed that I had let him go alone. So I went down, and borrowed a horse from Xenophon, and rode out to do what he might need.

  22

  we saw Alkibiades proclaimed upon the Pnyx supreme leader of the Athenians, a place that only Perikles had held before him; we cheered him as he stood on the great stone rostrum, his bright hair crowned with a wreath of golden olive, looking over the City like a charioteer above his team. We saw the curse pronounced against him for impiety thrown on its lead tablet into the sea; and marched with him along the Sacred Way, escorting the Procession of the Mysteries to Eleusis in King Agis' teeth; the first time since Dekeleia fell that the City had dared to send it by land. We saw him receiv
ed into the great temple, like the Goddess's favourite son.

  Even his enemies joined in the paean of praise, lauding his victories so that the people, who never tired of gazing, would send him off to get more. It was said in those days that he need only have whistled, and Athens might have had a king again. Had he not come when we were beaten to our knees, and oppressed with tyrants, and made us the masters of the sea? But he left for Samos again before three months were up; and when people marvelled at his modesty, we who had come with him only laughed.

  We thought for our part that we could guess his mind. Nothing would content him now but to win the war. He was not moderate in any of his desires, but above all he liked to excel. It would be a sweet day for him when King Agis came suing for terms of surrender. The war had lasted twenty-three years now; he had been engaged in it, on one side or another, since he was a young ephebe, whom a sturdy hoplite, one Sokrates, had pulled out wounded from under the spears at Potidea, giving him back his life to use as he chose.

  So we said goodbye to friends and kindred, and made ready to sail. Once, before I left, I went back to Mikkos' school to watch the boys at exercise. But this time my old trainer was there, and kept me talking; so it was only for a moment that I saw the boy Aster standing with the javelin poised at his shoulder, aiming at the mark.