The Last of the Wine: A Novel

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OUR HOUSE STOOD IN the Inner Kerameikos, not far from the Dipylon Gate. The courtyard had a little colonnade of painted columns, a fig-tree and a vine. At the back were the stables, where my father kept his two horses and a mule; it was easy to climb on the stable roof, and thence to the roof of the house.

The roof had a border of acanthus tiles, and was not very steep. If one straddled the ridge, one could see right over the City wall, past the gate-towers of the Dipylon to the Sacred Way, where it curves towards Eleusis between its gardens and its tombs. In summertime, I could pick out the funeral stele of my uncle Alexias and his friend, by a white oleander that grew there. Then I would turn south, to where the High City stands like a great stone altar against the sky, and search between the winged roofs of the temples for the point of gold, where tall Athene of the Vanguard lifts her spear to the ships at sea.

But I liked best to look north at the range of Parnes, snow-topped, or scorched brown in summer, or grey and green in spring, and watch for the Spartans coming over. Until I was six, they came nearly every year. They came over the pass at Dekeleia, and as a rule some horseman brought word of their coming; but sometimes the first thing we knew in the City was the smoke on the hills, where they were burning a farm.

Our own place is in the foothills, beyond Acharnai. Our family has been there, as they say, since the grasshoppers came. The slope above the valley is terraced for vines, but the best crop is the olives, and the barley from the olive-fields. There was one grove nearly as old, I think, as the earth itself. The trunks were as thick as three men’s bodies, and all knotted and gnarled. Athene herself was reputed to have planted them, when she gave the olive as a gift to the land. Two or three of them are standing still. We sacrificed there at every harvest-time; that is, when there was a harvest.

I used to be sent to the farm early each spring, to get the country air, and fetched back when it was time for the Spartans to come. But once, when I was four or five, they came early, and we had a great scramble to get away. I remember sitting in the cart, with the women slaves and the household gear, my father riding beside us and the slave pricking the oxen on; the cart-wheels jolting, and all of us coughing with the smoke of the burning fields. Everything was burned that year, all but the house walls, and the sacred olive-grove, which they piously spared.

Being too young to understand serious things, I used to look forward, when they had gone, to seeing what they had been up to. One year a troop of them had been quartered in the farmhouse; and those who could write had inscribed the names of their friends, with various tributes to their beauty and virtue, all over the walls. I recall my father rubbing angrily at the charcoal and saying, “Get this ignorant scrawl whited over. The boy will never learn to spell, or to make his letters properly, with this in front of him.” One of the Spartans had left his comb behind. I thought it a treasure; but my father said in disgust that it was filthy, and threw it away.

For my own part, I don’t think I knew what trouble meant till I turned six. My grandmother, who had taken charge of me whenever my father was at war, died then. My grandfather Philokles (a tall old man with a beautiful beard, always just combed, and white almost to blueness, in whose image I see the god Poseidon to this day) was growing infirm and could not do with me; so my father engaged a nurse, a free woman from Rhodes.

She was slim and swarthy, with a strain of Egypt in her. Presently I grew to know, without quite knowing what it meant, that she was my father’s concubine. Not that he ever failed in propriety before me; but sometimes I used to hear things said by the slaves, who had their own reasons to hate her.

If I had been a little older, I might have consoled myself, when her hand lay heavy on me, with the thought that my father would soon be weary of her. She had no such graces as he could have found in a hetaira of very moderate accomplishment, and in those days he could afford the best. But to me she seemed as lasting a part of my home as the porch or the well. She herself began to guess, I think, that when I was old enough to go to school with a pedagogue he would take the occasion to be rid of her; so any progress I made was a signal for her anger.

Seeking some company, I had got a stray kitten from a slave; which presently finding, she wrung its neck before me. While trying to get it from her, I bit her arm; and it was then she told me, after her own fashion, the tale of my birth, which she had heard from the slaves. So, when she beat me, I never thought of telling my father, or asking his help. While he, seeing me grow daily more sly and sullen in my ways, paler and duller in the face, must I daresay have wondered, sometimes, if first thoughts would not have been best.

In the evenings, when he came in dressed for supper, I used to look at him and wonder how it felt to be beautiful. He was more than six feet tall, grey-eyed, brown-skinned, and golden-haired; made like those big Apollos Pheidias’ workshop used to turn out, in the days before the statuaries began carving their Apollos soft. As for me, I was one of those who grow late, and still small for my age; it was clear already that I should favour the men of my mother’s family, who are dark-haired, with blue eyes, and who tend to be runners and jumpers, rather than wrestlers and pankratiasts. The Rhodian had left me in no doubt that I was the runt of a good kennel; and no one else had told me otherwise.

It pleased me, however, to see him in his best blue mantle with the gold border, his brown chest and left shoulder bare, bathed and combed and rubbed down with sweet oil, his hair dressed into a garland and his beard short-pointed. It meant a supper-party: going by myself unwashed to bed while the Rhodian was busy in the kitchen, I would lie listening to the flutes and laughter, to the ring of the bronze bowl when they played kottabos, the rise and fall of voices in talk, or someone singing to the lyre. Sometimes, if a dancer or a juggler had been hired, I used to climb the roof, and look in across the courtyard.

Once he gave a party to which the god Hermes came. So at least I first believed; not only because the young man seemed too tall and beautiful not to be a god, and had the air of one accustomed to worship, but because he was so exactly like a Herm outside one of the rich new houses, that his head looked to have been the model, as in fact it had. I was only shaken from my awe when he walked out and made water in the courtyard, which made me almost sure he was a man. Then someone inside called out, “Alkibiades! Where are you?” and he went back into the supper-room.

My father, having at this time concerns of his own, seldom brought me into remembrance. But sometimes he would call to mind that he had a son, and set himself to do his duty by me. There was, for example, the day when our steward caught me stealing corn to throw to the doves, and took it away from me, for corn was scarce that year. With the kind of manners I had learned from my nurse, I stamped my foot at him, and said he had no right to forbid me, being only a slave. At this my father, who had overheard, stepped into the room. He sent out the man with a civil word, and called me to him. “Alexias,” he said, “my shield is over there in the corner. Pick it up, and bring it to me.”

I went over to where the shield was leaning on the wall; and, getting hold of it by the rim, began to roll it along, finding it too heavy for me to lift. “That is not the way,” he said. “Put your arm through the bands, and carry it as I do.”

I put my arm through one of the bands, and managed to stand it upright, but I could not lift it; it was nearly as tall as I. He said, “Surely you can hold it up? Do you know that when I fight on foot I have not only that to carry, but a spear too?”—“But,” I said, “Father, I am not a man.”

“Put it back in the corner, then,” he said, “and come here.” I obeyed him.

“And now,” he said, “pay attention to me. When you are man enough to carry a shield, you will learn how it happens that men are sold into slavery, and their children born in it. Till then, it is enough for you to know that Amasis and the rest are slaves, not through any merit of yours, but by the destiny of heaven. You will refrain from hubris, which the gods hate, and behave yourself like a gentleman. And if you forget this, I myself will beat you.”

Such signs of interest in my father were hateful to the Rhodian; she began to see both buck and kid slipping through her broken net. As soon as she could she found occasion to turn a small fault of mine into a great one, and make me look a liar when I denied it. But she over-reached herself a little. My father said it was high time I went to school, and sent me forthwith.

He went on campaign soon after, so she did not go for a couple of months. I have lived in hard days and taken my share of them, but those are nearly the worst that I remember. How I should have borne it, I do not know, if it had not been for a friend I made at school, at a time when I had grown silent and furtive, and had no friends at all.

I arrived one morning to find the music-class laughing and nudging each other, and giving the master a new name, the Old Man’s Teacher. And, in fact, there in the classroom on one of the benches sat a man who, being about forty-five with a grizzled beard, looked certainly rather old to be studying the first thing children learn. I could see at once that I, who was always alone, was the one who would be made a fool of by having to share his bench; so I pretended not to mind, and sat there of my own accord. He nodded to me, and I stared at him in wonder. At first, this was simply because he was the ugliest man I had seen; and then it was because I thought I recognised him, for he was the image of the Silenos painted on the big wine-mixer at home, with his snub nose, wide thick mouth, bulging eyes, strong shoulders and big head. He had seemed friendly, so sidling up the bench to him, I asked softly if Silenos was his name. He turned to answer me; and I felt a kind of shock, as if a bright light had been shone upon my heart; for he did not look as most people do at children, half thinking of something else. After telling me what his name was, he asked me how he ought to tune his lyre.

I was pleased to show off my little knowledge; and, feeling already at home with him, asked why an old man like him wanted to come to school. He replied, not at all put out, that it was much more disgraceful for an old man not to learn what could make him better, than for boys, since he had had time to know the worth of it; “and besides,” he said, “a god came to me lately in a dream, and told me to make music. But whether with the hands or in the soul, he did not say; so you can see I ought not to neglect either.” I wanted to hear more of his dream, and tell him one of my own; but he said, “The master is coming.”

I was so curious that next day, instead of creeping to school, I ran, so as to be early and talk with him. He was only just in time for the lesson; but he must have noticed me looking out for him, and next day came a little earlier. I was at an age when children are full of questions; at home my father seldom had time to answer them, the Rhodian would not and the slaves could not. I brought them all to my neighbour at the music-class, and he never failed to give me answers that made sense, so that some of the other boys, who had mocked our friendship, began craning to listen. Sometimes, when I asked what makes the sun warm, or why the stars do not fall down on the earth, he would say he did not know, and that no one knew except the gods. But if anything frightened one, he had always a good reason not to be afraid.

One day I noticed a bird’s nest in a tall tree near the school. When my friend arrived, I told him I was going to climb up after lessons, to see if there were any eggs. I did not think he was listening, for that morning he had seemed occupied with his thoughts while I ran on; when suddenly he stared at me intently, so that I was startled, and said, “No, child; I forbid you to do it.”—“Why?” I asked; for with him it came naturally to ask a reason. He told me that since he was a child as young as I, whenever he or his friends were about to do what would come to no good, something had made a sign to him, and had never told him wrong. And again he forbade me. I was overawed, feeling for the first time the force of his nature, and never dreamed of disobeying him. Not long afterwards, the branch with the nest on it fell to the ground, being rotten all through.

Though he never played as well as I did, his fingers not being so supple, he learned his notes quickly, and the master had no more to teach him. I missed him greatly when he left. It may be that I had thought, “Here is a father who would not think me a disgrace to him (for he is ugly himself) but would love me, and would not want to throw me away on the mountain.” I do not know. Whoever came to Sokrates, no matter by what absurd chance, felt afterwards that he had been directed by a god.

Not long after this my father married his second wife, Arete, the daughter of Archagoras.