The Last of the Wine (20 page)

Such was the messenger the gods sent to the Athenians, to tell us that our Army in Sicily had perished from the earth.

He had a shop in Piraeus, by the wharf where the traders come in from Italy. The colonists used to go there when they landed, to get polished up after the voyage. A ship was in, and one of the passengers sat down on the bench to wait his turn. And getting into talk with the men beside him, he said, “Last time I came to your City it was a time of festival; garlands in the streets, torches at night, and the wine flowing. Now I dread to see the friends I made then, for what can one say to people in such calamity? I thought the war a mistake myself, for living at Rhegium I know something of Sicily; I doubted if the Athenians would come off with much to show; but, by Herakles, if anyone had told me that all would be lost, two great armies, two fleets of ships, the good Nikias and the brave Demosthenes both dying as wretchedly as thieves; yet what are they after all beside so many brave men, all butchered, or, what is worse, enslaved …” At this all the people in the shop stopped him with an outcry, asking what he meant; and he looking about him in amazement said, “But has it not reached you here? Has no one heard? All Italy talks of nothing else.” So the barber had flung down his razor, and run all the way from Piraeus, and here he was. And Lysis and I believed him no more than the rest.

We saw him safe to the Prytaneion, for it is not good that Hellenes living under law should deal out punishment on hearsay in the street. We left him there and went away. I saw that Lysis’ cheeks were flushed along the bone, and his eyes bright with fever. “You have walked too long,” I said.—“It’s nothing, only that my wound is hot.” I made him come home, and bathed it with the infusion the doctor had ordered, and wrung out warm cloths and bound them on; while I worked my shoulder ached again, more than it had for days. All this time we were saying how the barber ought to be made an example of, for upsetting the City with false news. Yet it was as if our bodies knew the truth.

The archons were severe with the barber. Rumour was running like yeast, and he could not name his informant nor say where the man had gone. He was racked in the end, not being a citizen; this getting no sense out of him, they thought him punished enough, and let him go. About nine days later, another ship came from Italy; and the men she brought did not sit down at the barber’s first, although they needed it. They were fugitives from the Army in Sicily, who throwing away their shields had saved themselves in the woods. Then we knew that the barber had let us down lightly, compared with the truth.

When Demosthenes came out to the Army, he had been like a man after long absence visiting a friend. The family says, “He has been ailing this last year”; but the fresh eye sees death behind the chair. The Syracusans held both horns of the harbour, and the heights above; he had taken the bold line, and attacked the heights. For a while it had been anyone’s battle; but darkness fights for the man who knows the land. Even then, Nikias would have delayed, seeing a lifetime of honour about to close in disgrace; but Demosthenes, being sounder in body and nobler in mind, shamed him into decision. He agreed to go. With prudence and secrecy, everything was made ready; the Syracusans had no word of it; only a dark night was needed for the ships to flit away. It was the great moon of Athene’s feast-day. Here in Athens we had a cloudy night, but there she shone clear upon the sea and the rocky headlands; till at her zenith, her face was seen to grow less, and to be cut away, and at last all darkened, as if a great shield had been held before her.

You might have thought Nikias would have raised both hands to heaven, and vowed a hekatomb of oxen to Athene, who had cared for her people so well. For it happened on the night of her feast, when the prayers of all the Athenians were lifted up to her; and it has always seemed to me that to reject her gift, the shelter of her shield, was as great an impiety in its own way as that of Anaxagoras, who pretended that Helios is only a glowing stone. Yet Nikias would see nothing in the omen but calamity, and he carried so many with him that Demosthenes was over-ruled. They decided to wait another full course of the moon, before they sailed.

So they waited; and the Syracusans attacked the ships again, and sank many more than they could still afford to lose. While they were debating what to do, the enemy strung his own ships across the harbour mouth and linked them with a boom. Then they needed no divination to know they must break out, or die. They prepared for battle.

As if just wakened from a drugged sleep, Nikias worked like two men, seeing the ships made ready, exhorting the trierarchs and the soldiers. He recalled to them the famous words of Perikles, that they belonged to the freest people in the world; as if the Syracusans had been subjects of a tyrant, and not Hellenes themselves, resolved to be free or die. For two years they had seen the fate of Melos hanging over them. They manned their ships along the shore, and waited.

It was Demosthenes who led out our ships to break the boom. They fell on it with such courage that they stormed the boom-ships, and were even casting off the ropes and chains; but then the Syracusan fleet fell on them from behind.

They say two hundred ships fought that day in the Great Harbour. The water was choked with them, ramming and boarding, and drifting while grappled into ships already engaged, so that battles merged and joined in unutterable confusion; hoplites springing from deck to deck and, as they fought, being struck by javelins from their own ships; rudders crushed in the press, the lame ships fouling friend as well as foe; the din so great, and quarters so close, that men hardly knew if the orders they heard came from their own trierarch, or the enemy’s.

Meanwhile on shore the Athenians watched the battle, as helpless as if it were a game of dice, with their lives the stake. They swayed this way and that, crying out in triumph or gasping in despair as their own glimpse of the fight looked well or ill. But the Syracusans held four-fifths of the beaches; they could put in anywhere, if they were pressed; the Athenians had only the tiny strip Gylippos and his men had left them. They were trapped on all sides; the ships that were not sunk were driven back to land. At the sight of them returning, the waiting army gave one great groan of anguish, and stared from the sea strewn with wreckage and with dead, to the hostile land.

To the land they turned their faces at last, leaving the dead unburied; and as if the reproaches of the homeless shades were not enough, they had to abandon the wounded and the sick. It was that, or stay and die with them. They dragged themselves on the flanks, clung to their friends till they could neither walk nor crawl; and then lay pleading, or cursing, or calling out last messages; their voices hung above the Army along with the ravens and the kites. The walking remnant marched on over the stony land, empty, thirsty, harried by the enemy on either side, until the end. At the last they came to a steep-banked river. They poured down into it, to cross over and to drink; and the Syracusans closed in, before and behind. As the Athenians struggled in the water, stones and darts and arrows rained on them. The river was churned to mud and ran with the blood of the dying. But such was their thirst that those who could reach it lay in it and drank, till others trampled them and they drowned.

Demosthenes fell on his sword, but was taken alive to give the enemy the pleasure of killing him. Nikias too they put to death, no one knows how. Of the rank and file, many thousands perished on the spot; many were dragged off by Syracusan soldiers, to sell for gain. The rest were the common spoil of the State. The fugitives, hiding in the woods, saw them driven away like starved cattle, and knew no more.

They had gone out from the City with women wailing, and flowers strewn in the streets. But one may weep aloud when Adonis dies; for crying eases the heart, and the gods return.

In the silent streets, a man who saw his friends approaching would cross to the other side, lest speech be asked of him. Sometimes as you passed a house you could hear a woman weeping alone, a dull sound, moving as she dragged herself about her work. I had heard it at home, and fled at last into the City. Lysis and I drew together like animals in winter; for hours at a time we hardly spoke.

A night or two later, I walked to the Anakeion. The horses shifted and snorted, made uneasy by the quiet. Here and there by a watch-fire one or two men would be playing dice, to make the time pass. I came up behind the man I was looking for. He had thrown two sixes, but did not notice it till someone pushed his winnings at him. I touched his shoulder and said, “Xenophon.”

He looked round, and got up from the fire and came aside with me. I saw his eyes searching mine; but he said calmly, as if we had met by chance, “I’m glad to see you, Alexias. Are you able to ride now?”—“No; but I have news for you. Your father is dead.” I saw him give a long noiseless sigh, like a man from whom a burden has fallen. “Is it certain?” he said.—“I have talked to a man who saw him die. He fell at the storming of the heights, a month before the end. All those dead were buried, by the shore of the harbour, in a common grave.” He took my hand, which he had never done before. “Thank you, Alexias. Don’t go yet; I have some wine here.”

Often I had wondered what I could ever say to Xenophon by way of comfort if his father should fall. Thus the event makes fools of our expectations. He divided his wine with me, insisting as one does with the bringer of good tidings; as I was leaving he said, “And for yourself, Alexias? No news yet?”—“Not yet,” I said.—“I am sorry. But there is still time.” I heard nothing, however, though I questioned every survivor I could hear of.

So the Assembly was called, and the men went up the Pnyx. They did not stay very long. I waited for Lysis at the place we had appointed, a saddler’s shop in a street near by. The place smelt of old leather and horse-sweat. Hardly anything in the place was new, so few of the knights could afford it; it was all repair-work. The saddler was at the Assembly; I talked to the foreman, who was a metic, about horse-embrocation and swollen hocks. Our horses were lame half their time for lack of rest; my broken shoulder had been good for Phoenix at least. Then Lysis came in, looking better than he had since he was hurt. The saddler was with him; they were laughing together. He said to me, “All’s well. No surrender.” The saddler slapped the foreman on the shoulder and said, “Cheer up, Brygos. They won’t make a Helot of you yet.”

“Don’t rub your arm, Lysis,” I said. “You know that makes it worse.”—“It itches. It will mend now. I feel in myself that the poison is gone.”

Autumn drew on. The courtyard vines bore their few grapes, and on the hills of Attica the wasted vineyards bore weeds. The war slowed down again, as wars do when winter comes. We made our patrols; the Thebans came out sometimes and made little raids, lest we should feel at ease. Half the cavalry strength kept watch at the Anakeion; the rest, turn and turn about, went home. Sharp mornings began, when, as one pulls off one’s clothes and runs out to the palaestra, one sees steam coming up from the wrestlers. But most of my leave I was running. For the people of Corinth had sent us a herald, announcing the sacred truce of Poseidon, and inviting us to send competitors to the Isthmian Games. I did not tell Lysis my hopes, in case they came to nothing. The City, which would have to send all the entrants round by sea, would not choose many.

We went on patrol again in a fine spell of weather; frosty nights, silver mornings, and noons of gold. One evening we passed the farm where I had lain with my broken shoulder. While we were buying some cheese, the fanner’s wife beckoned me round a corner. With all that had happened, I had remembered her mostly for her bad nursing; but meeting again, it was another matter, and she lost no time in persuading me that what had been good with a sore shoulder would be better with a sound one. She was a fair-haired young woman, slim and firm; her face was tanned, but her body very white. The end of our conversation was that I should come back that night, if we made camp near enough, and meet her in the barn.

Being unable to keep anything long from Lysis, I had confessed my former adventure long ago. If he was ill pleased, he had not the pettiness to show it; but he said I ought not to go after married women, as if a husband had no rights. “It can happen to anyone,” he said, “in a case like that; but the fact remains that it is stealing. You would be ashamed to go off with another man’s horse, after all, so why make free with his other property? Next time you want a woman, you ought to pay for one.” I said, “But Lysis, he cares nothing for such things; he is long past it, and only wants a housekeeper; she told me so.” Seeing me bring out this old tale with such a serious face, he could not keep from laughing. But I did not care now, as you may suppose, to tell him where I was going. I had no watch that night, and slipped off as soon as he was asleep.

I knew, or thought I knew, a short way over the mountain; so I left my horse and my armour; but took a sword, which was sillier than taking nothing, as I should have known. Starting before moonrise I lost my way, and wandered some time before I found a landmark, a shoulder of broken rock. At the same time I heard voices and the sound of armour. The rock threw off echoes and confused the sound. Coming round it, I ran straight into a Theban hoplite. I had drawn my sword when two more seized me from behind. So I could not pass myself off as anything but what I was.

I thought they would kill me out of hand, but they took me round to their camp on the hillside. One does not understand, until one feels it, the difference between struggling with a friend in the palaestra, and being handled by an enemy. They were a small troop, twenty or thirty. Coming to the watchfire, where their officer sat, they pushed me forward roughly, so that I stumbled; having my hands bound I could not save myself, and fell hard. They all laughed at this. I got to my knees, then to my feet. My hair was singed, and my face bleeding. The officer was a stocky man, with a thick black beard and a bald head. They told him I was a spy they had found looking for the camp. He walked up to me, turned me round, and looked at my arms. My left was scarred in one or two places, which you do not find in a hoplite who carries a shield. “Frontier Guard?” he said. I made no answer. “Where’s your squadron?”—“I don’t know. My horse fell; I have been lost all day.” I hoped he would believe me, for I was afraid. He said, “Where’s your armour, then?” The man who had caught me said, “He carried a sword.”