The Last of the Wine: A Novel

20

IT WAS THE WINTER after this that Lysis and I took to the sea, and sailed to the island of Samos.

Each had his reasons to leave the City. Lysis’ father died, carried off by a winter chill; and Lysis, who had sheltered him for years from the cares of a sinking estate, now could not bear to stint his tomb. He was laid among the trophies of his chariot-races; and when it was over, Lysis could afford to keep a horse no longer, unless he applied to the cavalry levy fund, which he was too proud to do.

My father grew stronger; he might yet want Phoenix back, and I did not care to wait for his asking. These days he and I walked softly, as men do in a house cracked by an earthquake.

He was now very thick with a set of oligarchs, who had the name of being rather more than homesick for the past. They came together without gaiety, like men with a common purpose; often I found the supper-room closed on them, and the slaves shut out; there was a feel in it all I did not like, over and above the presence of Kritias. If, as some said, there were men in the City who would let in the Spartans if they might hold office under them, it seemed to me they might be such as these. At my age, I might well have felt it within my rights to take it up with him; but we did not speak of serious matters any more. If he rebuked me, it was in passing for trivial things: for not growing my beard, or for sitting in the scent-shop, which indeed I only used if I found friends there already, and why does one walk in the City except to meet and talk? It was true, however, that when Lysis was not free, sometimes I would spend my time with unprofitable people, rather than go home.

Lysis was uneasy at it, yet had no Heart to blame me. We had our own life to live, which was no one else’s concern. But where both are restless, it will appear in this also; there was a certain wildness in us at this time, which broke out sometimes in violent joy, and sometimes in recklessness; in extravagant pranks at drinking-parties, or over-boldness in the field.

Sokrates never spoke of it. Indeed, I don’t think the cause was a secret from him long. Love is a boaster at heart, who cannot hide the stolen horse without giving a glimpse of the bridle. No one could have been kinder in those days than he. Without a word spoken, simply from being with him, I understood this: that while we had supposed we were doing something for him, it was he who, out of affection for us, had thought to give us some of his riches; and now he was gentle to us, as to friends who have suffered a loss.

This we knew, but did not feel it, then, within ourselves. What had defeated us was something beyond; and this, which had come after, seemed to us now a consolation and a joy. We did our duties to the gods, and were faithful together, and held each other’s honour dear. Only from this time on I found the visions of my youth grew fewer, and faded, and turned to memory. But I have been told that this is the necessary effect of years.

So things were drifting, when on a certain day I visited Asklepios, son of Apollo.

One could not go to Epidauros, because of the war; and indeed that would have been making too much of it. So I went to the little shrine in the cave, in the rocks of the High City, just below the walls. I went at evening. A fading sunlight fell on the pillars of the porch, but it was dark inside; the dripping of the holy spring sounded solemn and loud. The priest took the honey-cake I had brought, and gave it to the sacred snake in his little pit. He uncoiled himself, and accepted it; and the priest asked me why I had come. He was a dark man, thin, with long fingers; while I talked he felt my skin, and pulled my eyelids back from my eyes. I said, “It is my desire, at the next Olympic Games, to enter for the men’s long-race.”—“Thank the god, then, for good health,” he said, “and if you want a dietary, consult your trainer. This place is for the sick.” I was going away when he stopped me and said, “Wait. What is it?”

“Nothing much,” I said. “I ought not to have troubled Apollo. A runner’s wind is a small matter to him. But sometimes, running the last lap, or at the finish, when I am short of breath, I have felt a pain like a knife thrust into me. Sometimes it strikes me in the breast, and sometimes in the left arm; and sometimes with the pain the light of the sun turns black. But it passes, after the race.”

“When did this begin with you?” he said.—“At the Isthmus a little. But lately I ran across country a good way, up in the mountains; and since then, even at practice the pain will come.”—“I see. Go, then, to the Agora. Salute the Altar of the Twelve, and come back here quickly, not staying to speak with anyone.”

The run was nothing; but the climb at the end made me pant, and feel the pain a little. He put his hands on my neck and wrists, then laid the side of his head against my breast. His beard tickled me, but I knew it would be unseemly to laugh. He brought me a cup and said, “Drink this, and sleep; and when you wake, remember what dream the god has sent you.”

I took the draught, which was bitter, and lay down on a pallet in the porch. There was a man sleeping on another pallet, and the rest were empty. I fell asleep at the time of lamp-lighting. On awaking I smelt myrrh, and found the priest at his morning prayer, for it was near sunrise. The man on the other bed was still sleeping. I felt drowsy, and heavy in the head, and strange. Soon the priest came from the altar, and asked me if the god had sent me a dream.

“Yes,” I said, “and a lucky one. I dreamed that something cold touched my brow, and I opened my eyes upon this place; and the god appeared to me. He was as one sees him in the temple, but a little older; about thirty years old, shaved clean like an athlete. He had a white chlamys on his shoulder, and his bow at his back. He stood over there.”—“Yes,” said the priest. “What then?”—“And then,” I said, “the god himself held out to me the olive crown, with the ribbons of Olympia.” The priest nodded, and stroked his beard. “In which hand was the god grasping it? In the left or the right?” Then I remembered, and said, “In neither. He drew an arrow from his quiver, and on the point of the arrow he hung the crown; and so he held it out to me.”

“Wait,” he said, and threw incense on the altar, and looked at the smoke. The sacred water fell into the hollow of the rock with a heavy dripping, and the dry coils of the snake stirred in his pit of sand. The morning was misty, and rather cold. The priest came back to me, with the garland on his head. “Thus says Apollo. ‘Son of Myron, I have been your friend till now. Even the olive of Olympia I will not refuse you, if you ask it with all your will. But do not ask; for with the crown comes the arrow, swiftly, out of the open sky.’” And he looked at me, to see I had understood. I considered it a while in silence, then I asked him why this should be. He said, “Your heart is too great for your body, Alexias. That is the message of the god.”

The sun was up. I walked round the rocks, and climbed to the High City, and looked towards the tall blue hills of Lakedaimon, beyond which Olympia lay. I thought how after the very last Games, when the long-race winner returned to his own city, they had thought the town gates too mean for him, and breached the walls to bear him through. When I first heard the tale of Ladas the Spartan, who fell dead with the olive still fresh in his crown, I thought man could scarcely look for a happier end. But since then I had been at the Isthmus; and now it seemed to me more fit for a gentleman to spend himself as Harmodios and Aristogeiton did, for the City’s freedom and the honour of one’s friend. Yet, as I walked home, my mind felt bare, its familiar furnishing gone. So long I had dreamed of Olympia: the green fields by the pebbled river, Kronos’ Hill with its solemn oakwoods, the stadium at its foot; and the statues of the victors lining the walks, from the time of the heroes till yesterday. When the sculptor in the palaestra had asked me to pose for him, I think I had said in my heart, “There is time enough.”

This, then, is why I ceased to run the long-race. The time is coming, I daresay, when I shall pay the price for my old crowns; since I turned fifty, after a climb or a hard ride, I have felt again the arrow of Far-Shooting Apollo prick my breast. So I set things down while I remember them.

It was soon after this that we fell in with an Athenian of the Samos squadron, attached to one of the ships as a hoplite of marines. We were all easy with wine, so he asked us cheerfully why good fellows like us should starve ourselves to feed horses, when we could be living like gentlemen in the finest city of the islands, and seeing action worth a man’s while against the ships of the Spartan league, which were based on Miletos just across the straits.

“There’s no better station than Samos,” he said. “The Samians will do anything for an Athenian, since they threw out their oligarchs, and our men that were in harbour fought on the democrat side. You can have what you like, or whom. And, by the way, they need every democrat they can get there, for there’s trouble blowing up.”

This last we discounted; for only a fool, as Lysis said, will dash straight into politics in a strange city. But the rest seemed good to us. He told us of a new ship, the Siren, which was fitting at Piraeus, with her complement not made up. The trierarch, wanting a lieutenant of marines, was glad to get a man with Lysis’ record; and as we were fellow-tribesmen, it was easy to get me posted aboard. I was still a little under age for foreign service; but in war one can generally get leave to do more than one need, particularly if it is a case of helping out lovers.

It was still winter when the Siren was fitted; but the trierarch, for reasons we were to learn, was eager to be gone. It was my father’s turn to stand at the dockside and see me off. “Well, Alexias,” he said, “if you could have given some of your time to the City’s business these last months, I could have done something for you; but let that pass. You have a decent record in the field and I have no fear that we shall be ashamed of you. Only keep your eyes open in Samos, and use your wits when you see how the land lies. Athens has been governed too long by the lot of the pebble, and counting fools’ heads. It is time for people of quality to show it.”

I had no time to ask the meaning of this oracle. My thoughts were aboard already. I smelt the hemp and pitch, the bodies of the rowers, the casks sweating salt fish and oil, and the cold brine of the winter sea. The gulls hung waiting, to feed upon our wake.

The Siren was a war-trireme, not a transport, and carried only her own fighting unit of fifteen men. We lived on the foredeck, under an oxhide awning, just above the first bank of the rowers; our action-station was the catwalk running outside the hull. A crew of twenty-five worked the ship, and there were three tiers of rowers, the lowest being slaves. Free men will not work down there; the oarholes are valved with leather to keep out the spray, and a rower sees nothing all day but the back of the man in front, and the second-bench rower’s feet on the rests either side. But when it rained and blew they were better off than we, huddled under our roof of skins. I had thought that even a winter voyage could not be harder than some of our hill bivouacks in the Guard. I had forgotten one is not sick on a horse. But the wind changed the second day out, and I was better.

Though we had kept it quiet, it had somehow got aboard that Lysis and I were lovers. After being in cavalry, where there is a certain feeling in these matters, I found it hard to put up with some of the vulgar notions you can meet with in an infantry unit. It may be that in those days I was too quick to take offence. Most of them were good enough fellows, as I learned in time; their talk came from habit, and from never having been made to define their terms.

We were carrying pay for some ships stationed at Sestos, which, the wind being fair, we made within six days. But in Sestos harbour we were fouled by an unhandy grain-ship; two or three rowers were hurt, and some planks staved in; we had to kick our heels about the Hellespont while repairs were done, and then were held up by weather. So it was some weeks before we made Samos, during which we got no news at all.

After killing time in a small colonial town, it was good to see the great city of Samos glowing between hills and blue water, into which the town thrust outward like a spur, with the harbour in the curve of it. Westward on the strand was the Temple of Here, the biggest of all Hellas. Eastward, the barley-terraces fell like a broad stairway to the sea. Across the strait, quite near, stood up the lofty coast of Ionia, violet-coloured, just as it is named.

The harbour was packed with ships. For the first time we saw the new navy of Athens, for most were sent here as soon as they came off the stocks. They made a fine sight, with their burnished beaks and ram-heads, their cheeks new-painted with vermilion, the trierarchs’ pennants at their sterns. Some were stripped for action, with the masts ashore, in case of a raid on the harbour, the Spartans being so near. Some were up for scraping on the beach, the sails spread out beside them, having their devices brightened with fresh dye. The curved water-front under the plane-trees was thronged with citizens and seamen and soldiers and merchants, sitting before the taverns, strolling up and down, or bargaining with the Phoenicians who had brought up their boats with the wares spread out in them.

The Athenian camp was by the shore where they beached the ships, between the town and the temple. It had been here so long that there were no tents; it was like a little town of wood, or daub and wattle, thatched with reed. We found our quarters, and set out to see the sights.

It would be tedious, in these days, to rehearse what we found. Any man about my age, or younger for that matter, knows some such picture. After weeks of intrigue, of move and counter-move, the city was on the brink of revolution. It was clear enough, after an hour or two, why my father had told me to use my wits. The Athenian army itself was split from top to bottom, the oligarchs intriguing with those of Samos, the democrats rallying to the citizens. But what gave to everything an extra stink of corruption was this, that the Samian oligarchs were not, for the most part, those who had been expelled before, but men who had been in the van of the democrat revolt. Some subtle nose had smelled out the rotten patch in the core, the men who had wanted, not freedom and justice, but only what some other man had.

What it meant to our own force, we got our first taste of next day, when the Spartan fleet was sighted making to pass the island. The trumpets sounded; the ships were stripped and hauled down the slipways; the benches manned; the weapons and shields stacked amidships; the cup stood ready on the poop for the libation. We only waited to sing the paean, and sail out. Lysis had not wasted our wait at the Hellespont, and already the marines had caught something of his spirit. We sang as we waited for the signal; the rowers caught it, and I even heard the slaves. But we waited till the singing died, and the men grew restless and weary; the Spartan fleet sailed on, past the temple and round the point, and we all went ashore to drink away our shame. It was not the enemy our generals were frightened of. It was one another. You heard it said openly, after, of this trierarch or that, that he might cover you in a fight, or he might sail across to the other side. Things hardly hinted at in Athens were taken for granted here.

Samos is an old and a noble city. Even its ancient tyrants hung gifts upon it, like jewels on a favourite slave. Now it was at the height of prosperity, the sculptors and masons and painters never idle, the streets growing like tendrils up the slopes of the hills, in flower with yellow marble, or pink, or green, carved and gilded in the light Ionic style. Yet one picked one’s way about as if in a foul quagmire, trusting no one. Even our own trierarch we were uncertain of: a pale thin-lipped man who at the Hellespont had been biting his nails over the delay, yet, when impatience was natural enough, had tried to hide it.

Over all this murk, there flickered like a marsh-fire the name of Alkibiades. He had come down to the coast from Tissaphernes’ palace, and was living just across the straits. The oligarchs were putting it about that if the democracy, which had unjustly exiled him, were put down in Athens, he would forgive us and would come back, with the Persians eating from his hand, to win the war for us. And this might well be true, for at Magnesia he feasted with a sword hung over him; if the Spartans got the mastery of Hellas, the Medes to keep in with them would certainly hand him over. He could be sure of his death in Sparta, as long as King Agis lived.

The oppression of the place was weighing on us, so that we were growing silent even with each other, when we had the good luck to meet with our old friend Agios, the pilot of the Paralos, which was stationed at the port. To him we knew we could speak freely; and he soon put a little solid ground under our feet, telling us that the seamen were sound democrats to a man. He could afford to speak for them, the Paralos being the crack galley, and he the senior pilot of the fleet.

Next day by arrangement we met him again. He took us to a certain tavern, with the sign of a golden tripod. It had a little whited courtyard behind it, shaded with a vine. Here at a table a tall lank man was sitting, dressed in a marine’s seagoing kilt and leather jerkin. He was lean but broad-chested, with a big firm mouth, and brown eyes that looked straight into one. Agios said, “Here are my friends, Thrasybulos.”

This man had come to Samos as a simple hoplite, but being a natural leader had found his level; by now all the democrats looked to him. He had a bigness not of his body alone; you knew he would remember your face and name, and be concerned in your trouble.

Agios having told him we could be trusted, he spoke to us very frankly; saying our trierarch was deep in the plot, and that if fighting broke out, Lysis must be ready to take command. It was now certain that this Samian business was only the spearhead of a greater one. The Athenian oligarchs were using it to seize control of the Navy and presently of Athens itself. Then they would treat with Sparta for terms; how disgraceful was no matter, if they could grow fat on the carrion of their City. Athens would be only one more, then, of the Spartan vassals, crushed under such a rule as no Spartan would bear at home, to make the leaders servile and the people weak. We were to be sold to the Spartans, as long ago the tyrant Hippias would have sold us to the Medes.

But just now, he said, the traitors had had a blow they were still reeling under. Alkibiades had slipped off their hook.

Either (which was what he claimed) he had never meant to support them, and had only been probing the plot, or for reasons of his own he had changed his mind. After all, he had always been a democrat. At all events he was working for us now, and had given proof of it; taking his chance of a pardon when he had saved the City’s liberties. In Athens, he had been the biggest bait the oligarchs had had to fish with; only since his exile had his real genius in the field been fully known. “So,” said Thrasybulos, “don’t leave Samos at present, even for an hour. Unless I’m a fool, they mean to strike before this news breaks at home.”

Afterwards, as we went, we were both rather quiet. I was thinking that if my father had gone into this with open eyes, I should never hold up my head again. Even Lysis, I thought, would be touched by the disgrace. I looked at him, as he walked beside me shut in his own trouble: he was not the kind of soldier who shakes off lightly his faith to his commander. His thoughts were on his honour, and mine on him.

It had seemed to me, since I was nineteen, that the common exchanges of scent-shop and drinking party struck on my ear for the first time. “How are you, friend, after so long? And how is the beautiful So-and-So, whose praises you filled our ears with?”—“Why, time runs on, you know. He must be turned twenty by now, wherever he is.” When I laughed too loud, or drank too late, or took a foolish risk in battle, this was the spur that pricked me. Now on the threshold of manhood, when aspiration should have beckoned me onward, I thought only how I had put myself into the hand of time, and counted only the loss.

But time was busy in Samos with larger concerns than mine.

Next day, Lysis and I had walked out a little beyond the walls, to see the ruined castle of old Polykrates, the Samian tyrant: he who was so long fortunate that he dropped his great emerald in the sea, to break his luck lest the gods do it for him. But they sent it back in a fish’s belly, to let him know there is no running from fate; and now his walls are as the Medes left them. There was a sheepfold within them, and a scatter of little flowers. Spring was here; on the terraced fields below us, new barley bloomed the earth with green, and the black vine-stocks were budding. We were sunning ourselves with the lizards on the great warm stones, when of a sudden Lysis said, “How long have we been here? We ought to be going.”

“Why?” I said. “Everything’s quiet. It’s not often now we can get away together.”—“I feel a warning. Perhaps I saw some omen I did not regard.”—“A warning that you have had enough of my company? The omen is for me.”—“Be serious,” he said. “Something is happening; I feel it. We must go.”

We found the Agora full, but no more uncomfortable than it usually was. I was about to reproach Lysis with it, when I myself began to feel uneasy. For something to do, we were watching a silversmith, who was beating out on a fish-platter a border of shells; when Lysis, who had been looking out at the door, said, “By Herakles, I swear that’s Hyperbolos.”

I craned to look, half expecting to see a serpent covered in scales. He had been banished when I was quite a little boy, and I had never heard my father refer to him except as a kind of monster. I had forgotten that he had made his home in Samos. Now I saw him, he looked just like any other disreputable old demagogue, one who lives by denouncing and exposing while he is in credit, and, when he is out, by sycophancy and informations, with a little perjury thrown in. He had a pale face with a loose mouth and thin sandy beard, and spluttered as he talked, slapping his hand with a scroll he carried, as such men do, for show. Some friend was with him, listening with half an ear. Even from afar, the old rogue was stamped with the marks of invincible boredom. Which made it doubly odd that, now in Samos, he should have an audience.

Five or six men were gathered behind him. Some seemed like lumpish apprentices, the kind who, when the craftsman curses their slovenliness, would rather smash the work than do it better. There were also two older men, who seemed of their company but did not speak.

I saw one or two citizens glance at Hyperbolos and his following, and pass swiftly on. There was a statue beside him of some athlete, with two or three steps at the base. On one of these, as if from habit, he set his foot; and, feeling at home there, he began to orate. What it was about, I do not know. He turned then, and saw the men behind him. He was a pale man, but he did not go paler. I saw him go red. He went straight up the steps till he stood on the highest, and started to address the people.

Lysis and I looked at each other. He threw his arm round me and patted my shoulder; then he said, “Let us hear this.”

We left the shop and crossed over. Whenever I think I have summed up a man, I remind myself of Hyperbolos. He gave that day, I suppose, the performance of his life. He was the vilest speaker I ever heard: vulgar, ignorant, not seeking to teach his hearers, but rather to stir in men as vulgar as himself the irrational excesses to which such people are prone; a whore among orators. Yet, when he denounced the men who were putting the City in fear, there was a kind of flame in him. He was a man so ignoble that if he remembered anything of the nature of excellence, I should think it was only so that he could taunt someone with the lack of it. He lived in spite and hate. And now he only invoked the good in the name of hatred; yet for a moment nobility glanced back at him, and made him brave. It was like seeing some mangy cur, who for years has lived on scraps and filth about the market, raising his hackles at a pack of wolves.

He was leaning out, wagging his finger at the crowd, dragging out some phrase word by word before a peroration, when one of the young men jumped up the steps, grabbed him by the leg, and tumbled him over. There was a laugh, for he had looked absurd going down with his mouth still open.

At the natural sight of someone speaking in the Agora, a number of people had come up. While Lysis and I were trying to see over them, we heard a sound from the foot of the statue, between a cry and a grunt. Then there was a shout, and the feet of men running away. The crowd began to work and seethe about, some people trying to get out and others to press forward.

I saw Lysis’ hand feeling his belt. Even in Samos, one could not walk the streets wearing a sword like a barbarian. But we both had Spartan daggers, which had been approved ornaments in the Guard. Every Athenian carried something, even if only a hunting-knife.

Suddenly the crowd gave way before our shoulders, and we found ourselves at the statue. Here no one disputed our place; there was a little space quite empty of people, except for Hyperbolos, who lay with his thin beard pointing to heaven, and the food-stains on his mantle mixed with blood. His mouth was wide open, with a kind of grin on it, as if he had just exposed someone beyond shadow of doubt.

As we stepped forward, everyone else seemed to fall back in relief, like people saying, “Pray help yourself, the affair is yours.” But just then the crowd parted on the other side.

Some of the men who pushed through I had seen following Hyperbolos before. One pointed at the body without speaking. His face and his thumb said, “Take this dirt to the midden.” None of the crowd moved; but a little man said, “It was murder. The magistrates ought to see him.” At this one of the youths turned quickly and spat in his face. They stepped towards the body.

I felt Lysis’ fingers grip my arm, and he was gone from my side. Running after, I saw him bestriding the mean little corpse, his dagger in his hand. The youth who had spat, about whom was nothing Homeric, was looking at him, much put out. I drew my own dagger, and leaped in to cover his back. Then I could see him no longer; only the encircling faces: some frightened, some making themselves dull so as not to understand, some awaking to battle-joy and friendship; and the faces of the men who had come for the body, as they dragged out the long knives from under their arms.

I never doubted we were in as much danger as ever in war, and of an uglier death. Yet, strangely, I had not to force up my courage; I was in such spirits that I could have cheered aloud, or sung. The truth is, I think, that I felt myself enacting the kind of scene every schoolboy dreams of, when he first hears the ballad of Aristogeiton and Harmodios. My head was full of great words; like a boy, I saw our bodies lying together on a hero’s bier, but did not imagine myself dying. I stood there feeling Lysis’ shoulder, and looking, I don’t doubt, as if I had been requested to strike the pose of a Liberator. I was so carried away that I shouted “Death to the tyrants!” at the top of my voice.

Next moment, I felt Lysis take the shock of someone springing at him, and saw two of the youth making for me. Then I forgot heroics; it was war again, and standing to it unhorsed when your spear is gone. In the confusion around, I heard some voice shout, “Death to the tyrants!” but I could only see the two men I was fighting, till one of them was pulled off me from behind. The press closed in again; I felt a limb of the corpse tangle my feet and cursed it as I fought. I heard Lysis’ voice; we put our shoulders side by side and backed up the steps till we felt the statue-base behind us. Now we could see there was fighting all round. Lysis threw back his head and shouted, “Siren! Siren!” Then we heard the Athenian paean across the square, and voices crying, “Paralos!”

The seamen came racing up the square to us, and the oligarchs made off. A few timid citizens had run indoors, but most joined up with us, cheering Lysis and me as leaders, because they saw us on the steps. It was just like a happy ending to my dream. People were still taking up the cry of “Death to the tyrants!” But now I heard a different note in it. There was a huddle of men in the corner of the square; and as I looked, a face rose up from the midst, with blood on it, and the eyes wide, staring about. Someone was being mobbed there. This is a thing that you do not see in war; it was like filth flung on my exultation.

I pulled at Lysis’ arm, and pointed. He saw, and calling for silence, spoke to the crowd. He said this was a great day for Samos, for her enemies had declared themselves. But the work was hardly begun; we must go forward with proper discipline, and seize the armoury. All traitors would be tried when the city was secure, and meanwhile we must attack only those who resisted us, for we could not put injustice down by doing it ourselves. Then he said that Samians and Athenians, as long as they loved justice, would be friends together; and this got them cheering. It was a very good speech for someone who had only just got his breath back after such a fight. The Samians picked him up and carried him some way shoulder-high; and for no reason, in the way of crowds, they did the same with me. Being now high enough to look, I craned over to see if the man they had been mobbing was on his feet again. But he was still lying there.

That was the start, as we saw it, of the fight in Samos. There were, however, other beginnings; for the oligarchs had struck all over the town, choosing for their first victims such people as Hyperbolos, who were generally disliked or despised, and whom they thought no one would strike a blow for, so that they might get off to a good start under pretext of cleaning up the city. In some places this succeeded; but in others people knew what it meant; so already battle was flaring up all over, like fire in thatch with a high wind blowing.

As everyone knows, the oligarchs were beaten everywhere, and the democrats left masters of the town.

That night, when we had left our comrades, Lysis and I sat together in his little reed hut near the shore. We were weary with battle, but still too stirred to rest; we dressed our wounds, which were nothing much, and ate, for we were hungry, having had no time before. On stools at the scrubbed wooden table we sat over our wine. The sea sounded on the shore; outside the stars twinkled above, the watchfires and harbour lights below; on the table between us stood a shallow clay lamp which had just been lit. Lysis sat chin on fist, looking at the flame. Presently he said, “Why are you a democrat, Alexias?”

If I had now to answer truly for the youth who sat at the table, I might say perhaps, “Because of my father, or of the Rhodian woman. Because I love you.” But of course I replied that I thought democracy more just.

He said, “Undeceive yourself, my dear; it can be as unjust as anything else. Take Alkibiades, who, by the way, I suppose will soon be commanding us.” I stared, the thought coming home to me for the first time. “Get used to it,” he said. “He may seem shop-soiled; so he is; but it is arguable how much loyalty a man owes to a City which has outlawed him unjustly. Whatever else he has done in his time, he no more broke the Herms than you and I did … Tell me, is it better for all the citizens to be unjust, or only a few?”—“A few surely, Lysis.”—“Is it better to suffer evil, or to do it?”—“Sokrates says to do it is worse.”—“Then an unjust democracy must be worse than an unjust oligarchy, mustn’t it?” I thought it over. “What is democracy, Lysis?”—“It is what it says, the rule of the people. It is as good as the people are, or as bad.”

He turned the wine-cup in his hand. The black of his eyes, which had been wide open, grew small from looking at the flame, and the iris pleated, like grey and brown silk catching the light.

“They held an Epitaphion at Athens,” he said, “in the first year of the war, in honour of the fallen. The ashes and the offerings were carried in state along the Sacred Way, with an empty bier for the bodies that were lost. It was only a few months before your birth; perhaps your mother carried you in the procession. I was seven years old. I stood with my father in the Street of Tombs; it was cold, and I wanted to run off and play. I stared at the high wooden rostrum they had built for Perikles, waiting for him to climb it, as children wait for a show. When he appeared, I admired his dignity and his fine helmet; and the first sound of his voice struck a kind of thrill upon my ear. But soon I grew tired of standing with cold hands and feet, and doing nothing; I thought it would never end; the weeping of the women had disturbed me, and now the people listened in so deep a silence that I was oppressed by it. I stood staring at the gravestone of a lad carved with his horse; I can see it to this day. I was glad when it was over, and if you had asked me a year later to quote the speech of Perikles, I doubt if I could have fished you up a dozen words. So before I left, I looked it up in the archives. And there were the thoughts that I had supposed I owed to no one. While I read, I still could not remember hearing Perikles say these things. My soul seemed to remember them, as Sokrates says we remember music and mathematics, from the days when we were unborn and pure.”

I told him I had heard of the speech but never read it; and he quoted me as much of it as he could remember. Since then I have read it many times. But since I never knew Perikles, to me it is always Lysis who is speaking; I see not the tomb and the rostrum, but the lamps of Samos through a doorway, his shadow thrown big upon the wall, the piled armour shining beside the pallet, the black glossy wine-cup, and his hand, with an old ring of plaited gold on it, touching the stem.

“Men are not born equal in themselves,” he said to me after, “so I think it beneath a man to postulate that they are. If I thought myself as good as Sokrates I should be a fool; and if, not really believing it, I asked you to make me happy by assuring me of it, you would rightly despise me. So why should I insult my fellow-citizens by treating them as fools and cowards? A man who thinks himself as good as everyone else will be at no pains to grow better. On the other hand, I might think myself as good as Sokrates, and even persuade other fools to agree with me; but under a democracy, Sokrates is there in the Agora to prove me wrong. I want a City where I can find my equals and respect my betters, whoever they are; and where no one can tell me to swallow a lie because it is expedient, or some other man’s will.”

Then the day’s weariness came down on us, and we slept. And next day, the Paralos set out to bring the good news to Athens, her prow garlanded, the rowers singing at the oar. When we had cheered them away, I went to the temple and offered a kid to Zeus, for saving my father in his own despite.

We had no more trouble with the oligarchs, whose only care now was to hide their traces and save their skins. After the Paralos sailed, we spent a very peaceful week; I mean to say that it was peaceful in Samos. I cannot say quite the same for myself; for within the next two days Lysis remarked to me, in the easy way he had at such times, that he had met a girl in the town who had taken his fancy, and was going that night to visit her. This was the first time it had happened, that I knew of, since things had changed between us; and I was surprised to find how much I minded it. You might almost have thought, from my vexation, that he had been caught by some youth who could seriously engage him. It was absurd, considering his fidelity.

I was oiling the straps of his armour and mine (leather perishes quickly in sea air) and I kept busy at it, to hide my thoughts. But he noticed I had got rather quiet, and asked whether I would like to come too, for he was sure his girl could find another one for me. I thanked him, and said I would come another night. He stood combing his hair into curl, and whistling to himself; then he looked round, and sitting down by me, urged me very kindly to come. He said among other things that I was my father’s only son, and should have one day to marry; and I should not know whom to choose, or how to make the best of her, if I had not got myself used to women first. I told him I liked them well enough, but not tonight. The truth was that his encouragement had rather missed its mark, reminding me that it would be he, in the natural course of things, who would get married first. People I knew seemed to take this lightly enough; I had seen them acting groomsman to their friends with perfect cheerfulness; it distressed me to think myself more given to extremes, and less capable of reason, than other men. Indeed, when I look back, I cannot understand myself at this time of my life.

When he had gone, I went out walking; for the god, having marked me down for punishment, spared neither my mind nor body, and I could not stay in bed. There was a young moon in the sky; I went up by the footpath to Polykrates’ castle, and sat looking out to sea. The place smelled of sheep, for the flock was in the fold; there was a smell too of thyme, and of green things in spring. I complained to the god that he was unjust to me, who had never insulted nor defied him; but with face averted he accused me, reminding me of my former unkindness to Lysis, who had shown nothing but kindness to me; and of how, long before that, I had cared nothing for Polymedes, or for a dozen others whose names, even, I had not kept in mind. He said too that by my own will I had become his bondsman; and that since he was the giver of more joy to men than any other deity, it was natural his chastisements should give more pain. So I acknowledged his justice, and at last went home; and when Lysis came back, I pretended to be sleeping.

As it turned out, he found the girl more pleasing than he had expected, and went back to her several nights running. I suffered at the time. Yet it has left less mark upon my mind than wounds which seemed slighter at first, where someone of small consequence has failed me in loyalty or honour. As the mould is broken and falls to dust, while the statue of bronze endures, I cannot call the pain to life again; yet remember like yesterday the scents of night, the Galaxy hanging like spray in the deep sky, the cresset burning on an anchored ship, and the cry of a waking lamb answered by the night-jar.

I don’t know how long all this would have gone on. The thing was getting a hold on me that was past all sense, and Lysis had even asked me whether I was ill. But serious matters broke in on us, and blew such follies away.

The trierarch of the Paralos arrived alone, in a trader from Aegina. The ship had reached Athens to find the oligarchs already in control. Made desperate by the loss of Alkibiades, they had not dared to await results in Samos, but moved at once. They had falsely reported the coup successful and Alkibiades on the way; and getting power on the strength of this, had stopped all payment for public office and dismissed the Senate. Between hired bullies and informers they were keeping the people down, and their own moderates quiet by promising an electoral roll of gentlemen, which was to come out shortly.

When they knew what news the Paralos brought, they dared not let the City hear it. They turned the whole crew off the ship of honour, where it was their right to serve, transferred them to a troopship just leaving port, and imprisoned those who refused to go. The trierarch, by luck, had seen what was happening from the dock, and slipping off among the shipping had escaped to bring back word. He added that any soldier had only to look at the new fort they were building on the harbour, to see what it was for: to hold the grain-store against the citizens, and made a bridgehead for the Spartans to land.

You might have supposed this news would have flung all Samos from triumph to despair. But our blood still glowed with victory, our souls with our just cause; we were like the men of Marathon when they marched straight off the field to take their stand before the City, knowing the gods were with them.

The day after we got the news, Athenians and Samians together, soldiers and seamen and citizens, trooped up together to their hilltop acropolis. There we took an oath of fellowship, to defend each other’s liberties, pursue the war, and make no terms with our enemies, at home or abroad. It is a great open field up there, girt with an ancient wall; larks flew up singing when we raised the hymn to Zeus, and the smoke of the offering rose straight to heaven.

I have never felt less like an exile. It was we who were the City now, a free Athens beyond the sea. We carried her sword too and her armour; it was the Navy, not the government at home, which levied the island tribute to finance the war. The sun shone; the sea like hammered silver flashed below us; we felt we were making a new thing on the earth.

Afterwards, down in the city, every Athenian found himself pulled into a Samian house and set in the guest’s chair, while they brought out the best wine and spiced figs and anything they had. I told the story of my life, or a good part of it, at three Samian hearths that evening; and when Lysis and I met in camp we were neither of us quite sober. But we were happy, and full of faith. He had forgotten all about the girl; and, what was more remarkable, so had I.

It was a warm spring evening; one smelt the sea, and supper cooking on pinewood fires, and the scent of flowers upon the hillside; we sat in the doorway of our hut in the late sun, greeting friends as they passed. And we opened a wine-jar, to drink to our enterprise, “for,” said Lysis, “half sober is neither here nor there.” But our minds only sparked brighter with the wine; we settled the affairs of all Athens and Samos between us, and went on to win the war.

Presently the trierarch of the Paralos came by, and stopped to drink with us; and Lysis offered him some courtesy on the loss of his ship. He laughed and said, “Don’t pity me, but the trierarch who’s commanding her now. I know those lads. The net won’t hold the dolphin. I’ll lay you five to one that the first chance they get in open water, they clap him in irons and run for Samos.” (I may add that he won his bet.)

It still put him in a rage, he said, to remember what he had seen in Athens. But now the dark tale was lightened by our hopes. “When Alkibiades takes command here,” he said, “they can’t last long. They have lost the moderates, you know, already. Theramenes and his party are only biding their time. They came in on the promise of a limited franchise, a principle I don’t hold with but still a principle. Now they know they have got a tyranny, they won’t bear it longer than they need.”

I listened silent, ashamed that this stranger should do my father more justice than I had done. Many things came back to me, from my first years. When I came back from the mountains, I had found in my room the silver I had put down for Sostias, wrapped in a cloth.

“But,” said the trierarch, “I almost forgot what I came here first to tell you, that an Army Assembly is fixed for tomorrow; you will hear the herald very soon. Half the ships in the fleet are in the same state as yours, the trierarch fled to Miletos, and the First Officer carrying on. The new promotions are going by vote. If I were as sure of a ship as you are, Lysis, I’d sleep well tonight.”

I looked at Lysis, my contentment crowned. He put it aside, from modesty; but the trierarch said, “Your pilot was heard to say of you, ‘He knows a ship’s not steered from the same end as a horse.’ And that’s a paean, from a pilot.” Which was true enough; for between the soldier who fights a ship, and the seaman who sails her, is a contention as old as Troy.

He went away, and we heard the herald; then we filled and drank, not naming the good news for fear of tempting the gods. The evening sun glowed like bronze upon the reed thatch of the roofs; here and there men were singing about the fires. I said in my heart, “Such things as these are the pleasures of manhood. We must do the work of the season, as Hesiod says.”

Lysis caught my eye above the wine-cup. “To beautiful Alexias,” he said, and jerked the lees out of the doorway. They made an alpha in the dust; he could do it, from practice, three times out of four. He yawned, and smiled, and said, “It is getting late.”

But we sat a little longer; for as the sun sank, the moon had risen. Her light had mixed with the afterglow, and the hill behind the city was the colour of the skins of lions. I thought, “Change is the sum of the universe, and what is of nature ought not to be feared. But one gives it hostages, and lays one’s grief upon the gods. Sokrates is free, and would have taught me freedom. But I have yoked the immortal horse that draws the chariot with a horse of earth; and when the one falls, both are entangled in the traces.” And I thought of Sokrates, and saw the logic of my case.

Lysis said to me, “Those are long thoughts to keep unshared.”

“I was thinking,” I said, “of time, and change, and that a man must go with them as with a river, conforming to what is. And yet at last, if we are never so obedient, or if we call defiance, the last change is still to death.”—“The last?” he said, and smiled. “Never state an opinion like something proved. Today we have lived as if it were not so; and we have felt that it was good.” His face was calm in the brightening moonlight; it came to me that in the use of his courage, and the faith of his cause, and in the exaltation of our vow upon the hilltop, he had found himself again.

We sat in thought. I turned my eyes from the mountains, to find his turned to me. He laid his hand on mine. “Nothing will change, Alexias. No, that is false; there is change wherever there is life, and already we are not the two who met in Taureas’ palaestra. But what kind of fool would plant an apple-slip, to cut it down at the season when the fruit is setting? Flowers you can get every year, but only with time the tree that shades your doorway and grows into the house with each year’s sun and rain.”

Indeed he was too good for me. Often it has seemed to me that it was only he who made me a man.

Helios had plunged his red hair in the waves of the sea, and the songs were dying round the watch-fires. It was growing cold, and we went within; for, as the men of Homer said when a long day was behind them, it is well to yield to the night.