The Ten Thousand

CHAPTER THREE

THIS, OF COURSE, is the dramatic climax of my tale, the point at which, had it been a drama enacted on the stage, the audience would be settling back into their seats, hoarse from cheering, wiping the tears from their eyes, while the play concluded with some feeble spoken epilogue recited by the story's narrator, or a closing hymn chanted by the chorus. If the gods had any sense of proportion or balance, or even artistic awareness, this is what they would have permitted, and indeed the feeble epilogue will be coming soon enough, for those readers who would not feel my reminiscing to be complete without it; but the gods had one further plot twist in mind.

There is a dramatic device often used in our Greek plays, which I consider as being a sign of intellectual laziness, or perhaps excessive piety, on the part of the playwright, and it very well may be that the two are the same thing. Just when the protagonist's circumstances appear to be as dire as can be imagined, with no possible way to escape his impending doom, an actor representing a benevolent and all-powerful deity is lowered by ropes and pulleys from the top of the stage. He then proceeds to emit lightning bolts to destroy the enemy, or cast a spell to reconcile the young lovers, or perform whatever other sorcery may be required to enable the drama to be satisfactorily resolved and to tie up all loose ends in the remaining moments. We refer to this as a "mechanical god," a means of putting back to rights all that is unresolved, in a way not otherwise humanly possible.

To my knowledge, no playwright has yet considered the opposite phenomenon of, shall we call it, a "mechanical Nemesis," though language and Greek dramatic tradition fail me here. The image I mean to convey is one of a grubby, smirking little satyr that clambers unannounced from where it has been lurking beneath the stage floorboards and proceeds to immediately undo all satisfactory outcomes that have been rendered. In the final minutes of the play, he throws into chaos all instances of victory, reconciliation, and happy endings that were on the verge of being so painstakingly wrought. But in the drama of human life, is not this phenomenon more common than the former? Is it not truly a more realistic example of the actual behavior and performance of the gods, either through clumsy blundering or willful spite? It is no wonder, therefore, that I have lost faith in the benevolence of our guardian deities.

The Wheel of Fate turned. Just as a cat tortures and plays with a mouse before finishing him off, so the gods toyed with us. The deity often takes pleasure in making the small great and the great small.

For months we had sacrificed to the gods daily, in entreaty, in thanksgiving, for guidance. Down to our last starving goat we had sacrificed to the gods. Libations of water had been poured in the absence of wine, stale bread crumbled in the absence of animals. Never had Xenophon neglected his duties to Zeus and Apollo, in fact he had insisted on their faithful exercise, even in the face of Chirisophus' clear exasperation. Never was there a more faithful or exacting acolyte to the gods, until the day of our arrival at the summit of the mountain. But there, in our excitement at finally arriving within view of the sea, in the troops' ecstatic promotion of Xenophon from mere general to hero, we innocently, though apparently not forgivably, forgot to sacrifice to the gods in thanksgiving.

In return, they sent us honey.

A great deal of honey, hundreds of hives of the stuff, heaps of the sweetest, stickiest, most nourishing and delicious gobs of golden dew we had ever tasted, which we looted from an enormous apiary in the mountains after easily routing the last hill tribe standing between us and the sea, the Colchians. The fact that it was stolen made it even sweeter, and the famished men hooted and danced like children as they tore into the lightly constructed hives, ripping them with their spears, driving the bees away with blackly smoking pine-pitch torches, ignoring the feeble stings of the few brave little insects who remained behind to defend their property. The men, already near delirium from their awareness of the nearby sea, gorged on the stuff. They wandered among the hives in blissful content with honey smeared on their faces and hands, congealing in their hair, tossing handfuls of honey mass and sticky comb at each other out of pure mischief after they were sated. Their pleasure was so pure, their delight after the suffering they had endured over the winter so innocent, that none of the officers had the heart to even attempt to maintain discipline, and in fact were hard pressed themselves to keep from jokingly smearing a wad of the bounty into their fellow captains' faces out of sheer delight.

There is an old story of the Thessalian King Knopos, who was advised by his priestess Enodia to select the largest and finest bull, and then drug it with her potion. The maddened bull escaped and was captured by the enemy, who accepted it as a good omen, sacrificed it and ate it in a feast. Upon consuming the drugs, they went mad and were slaughtered by Knopos' troops in a brutal attack. Whether the Colchians had poisoned our honey in their retreat in the manner of that ancient king, or whether the starving bellies of our troops were simply unaccustomed to the richness of this dessert, within hours all who ate of it fell violently ill, leaving their senses, puking and retching, an astringent greenish diarrhea running uncontrollably down their legs. Men who merely tasted the honey appeared as if they were drunk. Those who ate a great deal ranted like madmen, raving and feverish, lying about in heaps and sometimes even dying, recalling the days of the plague in Athens. Men rolled on the ground in pain, their bellies distended, their faces contorted and their swollen tongues turning blue as they bit their own flesh in agony. The stickiness on their hands and faces, which they had not even had time to wash off before being stricken, collected dirt and leaves from the ground, as well as the filth being ejected from their bodies. As they lay in agony, their eyes pooled in horror and disbelief at the realization that after months of bravery and hardship, the seemingly invincible Greek warriors could be brought to defeat and collapse by such innocent sweetness.

Not a man, Xenophon and the other officers included, could stand on his feet, and it is a wonder that the Colchians did not return and slaughter us all in our wretchedness. Indeed, many of the troops would have thanked them for putting them out of their misery. The fact that the Colchians did not return is perhaps the truest proof that they had not, in fact, knowingly poisoned the honey, and I should probably be thankful to the gods for that, though I cannot help but think that if I were to praise the deities for such an empty gift, I would only be encouraging them in their puerile games. Had I seen such a scene as this in a play in Athens, I would have scoffed at the playwright's clumsy and heavy-handed treatment of irony, bringing the most valiant and long-suffering fighters on earth to their knees by a pleasure as innocent as a mouthful of honey. No doubt the audience, too, would have been offended at the author's apparent insult of the gods. The fact that this was no mere stage drama made the deities' betrayal all the more damning.

Most of us recovered within a day or two, and stumbling to our feet as if dazed and drugged, we staggered back into formation, burying the dead and attempting to regain our threadbare dignity. Asteria, however, a lover of honey since childhood, had gorged on the substance, and when I was finally able to locate her among the miserably retching groups of Rhodians, I found her lying unconscious, scarcely breathing, her bile-encrusted lips turning blue with cold and her bare legs under the short tunic caked with the filth in which she had been lying untended. Weak and trembling as I was, I struggled to pick her up and was startled to find that her body felt as light and fragile as a bundle of dry twigs, bereft of any muscle or fat after the long march and the purging of the last two days. All remaining softness had disappeared from her limbs and torso, and her feverish face was hollow with huge, darkly circled, watery eyes, which had rolled back into her head with only the whites showing beneath the bluish lids. I carried Asteria's body in my arms along the path down the last range of coastal foothills, and I felt certain that my own life had ended.