The Ten Thousand

BOOK TWO

He arrived at Krissa beneath snow-peaked Parnassus,

Where a foothill turns to face the west: A cliff overhangs it

From above, a rugged hollow glade lies hidden beneath:

There the lord Phoebus Apollo resolved to build his glorious temple.

– HOMERIC HYMN

BLOODY BATTLE AND homecoming embrace, lightning-studded skies and Arcadian pastures, riddles, mirrors, smoke, illusion, the love of a woman, the wrath of the gods. Life is drama, a tragedy and comedy both, and we the actors. A trite observation, one decidedly inspired by some other man's muses. Yet for all the horrors and triumphs of the stage, I have found that the arts of Dionysus offer little to compare with the struggles and achievements, the lives and deaths of real men, or at least men of thought and action, men who renounce the apathy and ignorance of those who pass through life as if they were mere temporary visitors, gawking occasionally but for the most part simply following the meaty desires of their bellies and loins. Sophocles said as much when he wrote a few years ago,

Numberless are the world's wonders, but none more wonderful than man.

His is the power to cross the storm-driven seas…

His are speech and wind-swift thought…

But there is little that can be recited on the stage that can match any true story of men who have sought to rise above base passivity, men who have taken their lives into their own hands, shaping other men and their surroundings into something more amenable to their own desires, and in the process irrevocably changing their world. Men truly live just as passionately as in the great dramas. They die just as brutally; they love just as fiercely. But in the real world they do not wear plaster masks that are hung on the wall at the end of a performance. Men's actions endure beyond their faces and names, and their effects are not finite and temporary, but encompass their descendants and the descendants of their fellow protagonists in widening yet ever fainter rings for all eternity. How odd that we seek through drama to depict, or to escape from, our own world, the infinite variety and cosmic timelessness of which puts even that of the gods to shame.

My pen rambles and the impatient Muses urge me to move on with my tale.