Till that time, I had never found it weigh on me to be priest as well as king. Poseidon had been good to me, giving me the earthquake warning that the dogs and birds have, but, among men, only the blood of Pelops’ line. Him I listened to, and did for the other deities such duties as are prescribed. But now, to reconcile the rites of all these jealous goddesses was like a judgment where a wrong verdict may start a ten-years war. One night I dreamed that they all appeared to me, threw off their sacred robes, and stood there mother-naked; it was my fate to give a prize to the fairest, and be cursed by all the rest.
This dream so shook me that I got up in the night and poured oil and wine before Athene. Her shrine was dark. In the hand of the priestess I had roused from sleep, as she shivered in the midnight chill, the lamp-flame trembled. The face of the Mistress, in the helmet’s shadow, seemed to move like a proud shy girl’s who says without words, “Perhaps.” When I lay down in bed again, I slept sweetly; and next day when I met the priests and kings to plan the feast day, I got them easily to agree.
It seemed she liked her offerings. The feast and Games went through as if her hand were leading us all the way. The old men said that in all the tales of their own grandfathers, there had been no such splendor in the land. Luck touched us everywhere: fair weather and good crops; no new feuds starting; good omens at the sacrifice; at the Games, clean wins by men with few enemies. The people glowed, the youths and girls had a gloss of beauty, the singing was sweet and true. When I stood up to give the prize for wrestling, a great paean rose up from the people, so that one might have thought that they saw a god, and I said to my heart, “Remember you are mortal.”
I threw with my luck, and at that same feast made all Attica and Eleusis into one kingdom with one rule of law. Lords, craftsmen and peasants all agreed to have their causes tried in Athens; the priests acknowledged their gods in ours, adding, if they liked, the name they used at home. At last they understood that this was the end of war in Attica; that any man, unless he had killed with his own hand and paid no blood-price, could pass through his neighbor’s deme unarmed.
It was not long after this, that I rode out to Kolonos, to take the omens of Poseidon.
It is a pretty place, not far from the City, good for grapes and olives; young men in love go there to hear the nightingales. But the top is sacred to Poseidon Hippios; and even in those days, people let it alone. There was nothing to see, except broken boulders with a clump of fir trees; but if you stood at the top, below you was a round flattish dip, as if a great horsehoof had struck the ground, about as wide as a young boy can throw a stone.
It was a thousand years, I daresay, since the god had stamped there; scrub and thorn had grown over, the shrine was small, the priest sleepy and fat. But it had made me angry, last time I went, to see the place neglected, for the god was certainly present; when I stood on the crest, my nape shivered, and a ripple like a cat’s ran down me. I asked the priest if he could not feel it, and he said he could; I knew he lied but could not prove it. Earth-Shaker himself did that within the year. The shock was nothing much; but the priest’s house fell down, and killed him in his bed. The people of the deme were half dead with fright, and sent posthaste to me, begging me to make their peace with the god.
I drove out there in a three-horse chariot with a mounted guard. We had made our beasts fine, to honor the Horse Father; my team with red-plumed headstalls and braided tails, and all the rest beribboned. We brought the finest stallion of my herd, wreathed for the sacrifice. But the god had chosen otherwise.
As we drew near, I looked out for the people who had so besought my presence. The road was empty. The feel of the god’s wrath was heavy on the ground; I was on edge, and wondered if he had struck again. Amyntor was riding on to see, but I waved him back. I could hear over the slope voices shouting, and a woman’s wail. I was angry now, and wanted to see for myself what they were up to. So I stopped the column and walked up on foot, with only a guard of four.
As I got near, I heard the woman’s voice begging for pity, rising and falling with broken catches as she beat her breast. There were curses, and the thud of stones. Mounting the rise, I could see the village people stoning a man. He was crouching down, guarding his head with his hands; there was blood on his white hair. The woman, who was still young, was struggling to go to him, begging them to spare her father who had suffered enough. When they thrust her back, she gave a great cry, calling upon Poseidon. At that I stepped forth with a shout, and they turned round gaping, dropping their stones.
The woman came running to me, sobbing and stumbling over the broken clods between the vine-rows; her clothes were torn, and bloody from her scratching her breast as she wailed. She looked old before her time, as peasants do, and yet not like a peasant; the lines had been drawn by other cares. She hurled herself down and clasped my knees and kissed them. I could feel her tears.
I turned up her dust-smeared face, whose bones were noble, and asked what they accused her father of. But the village headman spoke first. This outlaw, he said, unclean before all gods, had touched Poseidon’s altar, trying when Earth-Shaker was already angry to bring death to them all. Meanwhile, hearing us speak, the man had risen to his knees. He held out his hands before him, seeking something, I suppose the girl. I saw that he was blind.
“You can go to him,” I told her, and held my hand up to keep the others back. She went over and raised him, and put his stick into his hand and led him up to me. He was bleeding, but had no bones broken yet; and I could see by the way he got himself along that he had been blind a good while. She muttered in his ear, telling him who I was. He turned his head my way; and a shiver went all through me; for that old man had a face like Fate itself. Beyond sorrow, beyond despair; with hope and fear forgotten as we forget the milk of infancy.
He came up prodding his stick at the ground before him, and leaning on the girl. He wore a short tunic, as for a journey; it was torn and bloody, and had been soiled and worn before; but the wool was fine and the borders patterned, the sort of work that takes a skilled woman a long time on the loom. His belt was soft tooled leather, and had been studded once with gold; you could see the holes. From there I looked to his sandals; but I did not see them. For I saw his feet. They were strong and knotted and had carried him many miles; but they were warped like the wood of a tree which has been spiked as a sapling, and grown about the scar. Then I knew who he was.
A cold gooseflesh stood up on all my limbs. My hand came up of itself, to make the sign against evil. His sunk and shrivelled eyelids moved a little, as if he saw.
I said to him, “You are Oedipus, who once was King of Thebes.”
He went down on one knee; there was a stiffness in his bending which was not of his joints alone. And for a moment I let him kneel, because I knew it would be courteous not to bid him rise but to touch and raise him; and I could not make my hands obey me.
When the people of Kolonos saw I did not move to him, it was as if I had opened a farm-gate to a pack of curs. Barking and baying they ran forward, picking up their stones again. You would have thought they danced upon their hind legs, for me to pick the old man up like a skinned carcass and throw him to their jaws.
I shouted, “Back!” My gorge rose at them, more than at what knelt before me. So I took him between my hands, and felt his lean flesh and old bones like any other’s, only a man in grief.
The woman had ceased her wailing and begun to weep, stifling it in her hands. He stood before me, his face tilted up a little, as if his mind’s eye saw a taller man. Now it was quiet, I could hear the growling of the people, muttering to each other that even the King should not tempt the gods.