Glory and the Lightning (33 page)

There was still the matter of Damos, who had betrayed his friendship.

Kurda stood before his master, waiting, watching the changeful expressions on Al Taliph’s face, the arching and falling of his eyebrows as he thought, the red blood in his cheeks, the tightening of his mouth, then the loosening, then the paling of his color.

Al Taliph became aware of the eunuch waiting before him. He said, “Send to me Serah, and the men, who have not yet left for Syria.”

Kurda almost ran, in relief, from the room. He heard nothing for a considerable time and then Al Taliph sent for him.

“I have a task for you, Kurda,” he said, and his voice was smooth and calm. “But first let me present you with this purse, in token of my gratitude.”

Kurda was overwhelmed with elation and love and kissed Al Taliph’s hand. “Command me anything, lord!” he cried.

“You must go to Damascus, and you must contrive to have a man murdered quietly—Damos of Damascus. Do not do it yourself. Hire assassins. Do not return until the mission is accomplished.”

“To hear is to obey you, lord!” cried Kurda, joyfully, and ran to prepare himself for the journey and to plot Damos’ death so dexterously that he, Kurda, would never be suspected of the conspiracy.

Then Al Taliph went to Miletus and sought out the aged Thargelia. She received him with every graciousness and every evidence of pleasure. She said to him at once, “But why have you not brought my daughter, my loved Aspasia, to visit one who has such affection for her? Tell me, lord, how she fares in your house. Has she borne you children?”

Al Taliph regarded her with eyes like the points of daggers. He was sick with disappointment and the loss of his hope. He said, “Has she not written to you, Thargelia, you who loved and cherished her so much?”

“I have had no word from her, Al Taliph, since she left for your house, nor have I written her myself. Why do you gaze at me so strangely? Is not Aspasia well?” Her simulation of alarm and dread was excellent and he was deceived.

“She is well,” he said to Thargelia and took his departure, refusing her offer to let him examine the young maidens in her house.

When he returned, after several months, he found Kurda at home. Kurda said nothing but only mutely nodded, with grinning satisfaction. Al Taliph gave him another purse.

Then he delivered himself up to despair for a long time.

PART TWO

Pericles

“Above all men, he was the most just.”

ZENO OF ELEA

CHAPTER 1

After Zeno of Elea had seen Pericles, son of Xanthippus and Agariste, Xanthippus visited Zeno at his house. Concluding warm greetings, Xanthippus said, “My son’s mother, who is interested in appearance, which she insists is the first door to power, complains that Pericles’ skull rises too high above his brow and features.”

“Does a great man mourn if he is not accepted by the acclamations of inferiors, the obscure, the unimportant? No. He rejoices, for what is commonly accepted is execrable and degrading and of little worth. A tumbler, an athlete, a jokester, a buffoon, a pugilist, a songster or an actor is applauded by the low multitude, whose appetites are the appetites of the barnyard. Who would wish to be applauded by such?”

“You are implying that my son is not of the mundane world?” said Xanthippus, with humor.

“Lord,” said Zeno with dignity, “I was never mistaken in a pupil. Had I not looked into the calm, direct and radiant eyes of your son and had not seen what I have seen, I should not have consented to tutor him. He has a stately presence, even at his young age, and stateliness is to be much admired. I consider him the handsomest of youths, though he is but twelve years old. There is manhood in his demeanor, authority in his glance. I predict a future for him which will surmount the future of lower men, and which will ring through the ages.”

“I implore the gods that he will be a great soldier,” said the father.

“You speak as a soldier,” said the teacher, and smiled with indulgence. “Your son, I believe, will be of military genius—I have observed him—but he will be the glory of his nation also. I have consulted the oracles at Delphi.”

“But that is superstition,” said the father, who was extremely superstitious though in many ways skeptical and pragmatic.

“It is said,” the teacher remarked, “that superstition is the child of experience. Who knows what controls the destiny and the affairs of men?”

The father thought, and stroked the fine white linen of his robe.

“You have mentioned ‘the glory of his nation.’ What is more glorious than a soldier?”

“It is said,” the teacher murmured, “that history is the shadow of great men. Or, of monstrous men. Military genius is admirable, for it preserves a nation in its physical aspect. But there is another genius: the flame of intellect. Your son will possess both. As I have said, I have consulted the oracles of Delphi, and I swear that Apollo answered me.”

The father was incredulous. “Apollo answered you, Zeno?”

The scholar averted his eyes, smiling, before the bright face of cynicism. “I believe so, or a reasonable power. I am not a hysterical woman, nor a man given to idiot dreams. I weigh. I ponder. But something in my soul informs me that your son is not of common cast, nor is he concerned with common aspirations.”

Zeno of Elea, hailed by fellow philosophers as the creator of dialectic—that is, he proved that disputation has for its end not personal victory but the establishment of truth—was a young slight man of short stature, with a thin, white and pointed face in which his black eyes were great orbs of scintillating light, dominating all his features and giving his expression an extraordinary vividness and arresting power. One forgot his other insignificant attributes, such as a constantly wrinkling white brow, stiff coarse black hair cropped short and tickling the tops of huge ears, a little tilted nose and a nervous and unquiet mouth—which wrongly suggested an instability of temperament—when those vital and intensely living eyes were turned to the speaker. It was then that the suddenly abashed observer became aware of a presence, of a glow beyond the lesser glow of other eyes, and a focusing of enormous and restless power. Many felt that his fragile flesh would be consumed in that incandescence at any moment, and that it could not contain the core of flame that turned within it. Because his manner was simple and often shy and he never disputed in a loud voice nor displayed arrogance—but was invariably kind, interested in the opinions of others, and courteous—there were some who said he was not wise at all but only echoed the greater genius of his master, friend and teacher, Parmenides, who knew how to despise lesser intellects and had a derisive tongue. Some even found his eyes perfervid and ridiculed their enormous dominance, feigning to believe them hysterical or womanish, or the symptom of some physical or mental malady. They imitated his soft voice, which was somewhat high and diffident when he encountered arrogant disputers. They ridiculed his childish and thin pale arms, and ignored the large and beautiful hands.

But the perceptive listened to him with awe and rose when he entered a room or stopped to speak in a colonnade to students, and felt, when he had departed, that for a moment or two they had stood in the presence of an irresistible force, and that the very air had vibrated. His simplicity, they believed, was the simplicity of marble lighted by the sun, or, again, the simplicity of fire.

He had a considerable patrimony but lived without ostentation in the suburbs of Athens, content with a little square white house over which grew vine leaves on a lattice. He had no slaves, and attended to his own wants, even to making his own goat cheese and baking his bread and drinking the resinous wine of his own grapes. This austere way of living was not affectation, nor disdain for luxury, nor even his innate simplicity. He had discovered that the fewer needs and wants a man possesses the more independent he is, and that those needs and wants hamper the mind and are the servants of a ravenous physical body and are artificial, and should not be cultivated lest the spirit starve. But he had a love for land and his small house stood near a grove of olive trees and fruit trees, and there were smooth red gravel paths bordered by the dark green of cypresses and many flowers in their season, and had a view of the purple sea. He cultivated all that grew under his tender hands and often asserted—to the risibility of envious men—that what wisdom he possessed he had acquired from listening to his trees and to the earth.

He accepted but few private pupils, and then only one at a time and only when he was convinced that the pupil had unusual qualities of mind and spirit. Otherwise he preferred to converse in the cool luminescence of colonnades with the pupils of other philosophers and teachers, at sunset, never disparaging their mentors but deftly and eloquently enlarging the thoughts of young men. He stood among them in his coarse white or gray long linen tunic, belted by a simple chain of silver, which he rubbed with his fingers in the nervous mannerism of a man whose reflections are vaster and swifter than his fleshly tongue. But politics bored him, except when a principle of philosophy—universal yet unique—was involved. As these occasions were rare he preferred to ignore politics and once said that politicians should be abolished, a remark not calculated to add to his reputation for wisdom.

He was known as the master of paradoxes, and delighted in uttering them. He was also in frequent danger of the pious and orthodox authorities and priests of Athens, for he often asserted that but One had existence and that belief in Many was in error. “Yes, yes, Zeus, if the Unknowable can be given a name, but only Zeus,” he would say, though he acknowledged that sublime poetry lived in the concept of Many, and that monotheism could not be truly comprehended by the finite minds of men. “If men cannot be simultaneously in ten thousand places, and have a universal awareness, then it is impossible for them to understand the omnipresence of Deity and omniscient consciousness, and instant and boundless cognisance.” So far the priests had not overly tormented or harassed him, for they thought him mad and of no importance.

Xanthippus had visited him one past shining evening in his silver-decorated litter carried by six grandly attired slaves. He had never met Zeno before, though he was aware of his fame, as he was a powerful politician as well as a notable soldier who had been a captain of a squadron which had annihilated part of Xerxes’ fleet at Mycale. An astute man, he was also aware that ostentation would not impress Zeno, but he was a man who loved luxury and the trappings of riches, and, as he had said humorously to his wife, Agariste, he was no pretentious hypocrite who visited a wise man on foot in dusty sandals. Zeno was inspecting his new olive trees when Xanthippus arrived, and he turned his head and mildly studied his visitor. He had seen Xanthippus at a distance on many occasions, and recognized him, and came to greet him without apology for his stained hands and the withered leaves on his narrow shoulders. There was soil on one of his sunken white cheeks. But nothing could diminish the black splendor of his eyes nor the sudden lucidity of his smile. Xanthippus was unaccountably touched and when he looked into those eyes he was moved as many men were moved.

So he alighted from his litter instead of reclining on his cushions and addressing Zeno through parted curtains. He held out his strong soldier’s hand, and Zeno took it with childlike guilelessness. Yet the shrewd politician and soldier understood that Zeno was no simpleton and possessed little vulnerability. He was armored in his virtue.

In his turn Zeno studied his visitor, and was surprised, as always, by the face of Xanthippus, which denied his professions and his valor and genius as a military man. Xanthippus was tall for a Greek, and his body had the litheness of an athlete and the suppleness, and a peculiar swiftness of movement; he implied implicit power and masculinity. His face, long and narrow and pale and smooth, had the contemptuous delicacy of a Persian aristocrat. (In truth, he admired the Persians whom he had defeated.) This gave his expression a subtle arrogance, which had made him a great favorite with women. He wore the pointed short black beard of the Persians, and his nose was thin and aquiline and his mouth sensual and red and full. But his eyes were the color of a Greek sky at noon, intensely and incredibly blue, if hard and clear. His eyebrows were black, as was his hair under the white hood of his robe, beginning too close at the inner corner of his eyes and then sweeping upwards the temples, giving him a cynical look that intimidated the less subtle.

“Greetings, Xanthippus, lord,” said Zeno.

“You know me, Zeno of Elea?” asked Xanthippus, with some surprise.

“I have seen you at a distance, Master,” replied the philosopher. He gestured towards his small white house, now smothered in the polished green of the spring grape vines. “May I offer you my own wine and cheese and bread and a portion of fruit?”

“I thank you,” said Xanthippus. He gave Zeno a sharp and piercing glance of curiosity. Zeno’s serenity and lack of tremulousness suggested that any explanation would inevitably come in good time from the other man and so needed but patience.

Xanthippus was accustomed to servility even from his equals, but Zeno was not servile. He stood aside to let Xanthippus precede him, but the soldier paused to look about him at the green land, the orchards, the groves, the high ground which permitted a view of the silver port of Piraeus, the acropolis with its crown of new low temples, and Athens, herself, white and rose-tinted in the first blush of sunset, and rising on her hills. Beyond lay the sea, flowing in aquamarine and streaks of running purple, and the ships at anchor, swaying in the breeze and the tide. Some were moving out to sea, and their white sails were full of blazing light. The soldier was not sentimental, though at secret heart he was a poet. As he gazed at the peace of the scene, and at Zeno’s burst of gardens surrounding his little house, and at the goats grazing nearby, and inhaled the scent of the innocently lewd spring earth and grass and flowering tree, he felt the pride and humility and exultation of being a Greek. It was no wonder to him—though he did not believe in the gods—that the gods frequently preferred the noble earth of Greece to Olympus. And, most certainly, the daughters of the earth. The sea wind was as warm and pure as silk, as fresh as linen washed in the sun.