But Menestheus … he is like a doctor who weeps over the sick, and gives them poison, persuading himself it will do them good. He has another man within him, whom he obeys, but whose face he has never seen.
Little by little, while I was gone, the power came into his hands. But I am not even sure he plotted for it; that is, the Menestheus whom Menestheus knew. He would say of himself that he taught men to be free, to trust in themselves, to hold up their heads before men and gods, to bear no wrongs. It may be he would truly have taught these things, if the whole man had desired them.
Did he want the people to love him? Yet he himself loved no man, for what in himself he was; a man was dead to Menestheus, unless he was a cause to fight for. But when at Menestheus’ urging he had embroiled himself with powerful enemies, where Menestheus had not strength to back him, and had increased his own wrongs sixfold, then he must hate six men where he had hated one before; so much the more would Menestheus love him, and take credit for having been his friend. In my own time, when I had a wild beast like Prokrustes to put down, I never moved till I could crush him quickly, and set his prisoners free. But Menestheus, if someone was oppressive, would threaten and bluster long before he could perform, so as to be praised for hating evil; then the man grew angry, and hurt all those in his power to hurt; and Menestheus had more wrongs to shout about. Men who did good in quiet, without anger, he thought were spiritless, or corrupt. Anger he understood; but he had no kindness for men before the wrong was done, which would have kept it undone.
All custom he hated, whether it had outlived its use or not. He hated all obedience, whether to good law or bad. He would root out all honor and reverence from the earth, to keep one man from getting a scruple more than his due. Maybe there was only hatred at his core, and whatever he had found around him, that he would have destroyed. For surely if it had been men that he loved, or justice, he could have built something on the ruins that he made?
Before, when I have tried to understand my enemies, it has been to plan against them. Why try now when it is finished, why not be content to curse? But while man is man he must look and think; if not forward, back. We are born asking why, and so we end. So the gods made us.
Would he have had me poisoned or stabbed in Athens, if he had dared? The Palace people showed that they loved me still; he might not have lived long after. Was it cunning, or some flaw of will, or the wish to think well of himself, that made him leave me alive to struggle with the chaos of the broken kingdoms, worse by far than they were in my father’s day? When I banished him for his bad stewardship, he even went, but not very far. You need not go far now, to leave the Attic kingdom.
Crete broke away two years ago and more; Idomeneus is King there. While I was sick, every man on the island knew that but I. Megara has found a prince of its ancient kindred; and they say that now when you cross the Isthmus, once more you need a guard of seventy spears. Only Eleusis keeps its Mystery, unchanged since Orpheus shaped it. A life is there that has grown beyond his or mine. It will take more than Menestheus, to put that out. More than darkness; a greater light.
The secrecy of my sickness has fought against me. A few of the Shore Folk heard something, wild ignorant folk who did not know where to sell it, but let it blow here and there like thistle-seed. Perhaps the old wise-woman spun it into one of her tales. The truth has mixed with the lie I put about; they are saying I went down into the earth to ravish a sacred priestess, and was cursed by the Goddess, and spent four years there in a magic chair my limbs had grown to; that my legs are wasted, and my left foot limps, because when at last I was pulled free the flesh was torn away. From all this they argue that the gods are no longer with me, and my luck is out. Even missing the sea-marks, one can still make port.
I saw young Akamas, whom I left in Euboia with a chief I trust. He will be safe enough there. The people of Athens do not hate him, but think him too much a Cretan, while Menestheus is of the ancient kin. I can hardly blame him for not having stopped Menestheus, who started his work when the lad was barely fifteen. He was so shocked by the change in me, that trying to hide it took up all his mind, and it was hard to find out what he thought. But he seems not to hate Menestheus, even to think of him as a man who has done his best. Year by year, as he has been growing up, his heritage has been shrinking; it seems his ambition too has been growing backwards. Of his mother, we did not speak.
He is happiest among the other lads in Euboia, dancing and riding and making love (he does not care for girls) and being as like as he can to all the rest. I can see a day when Menestheus leads forth the men of Athens to some foreign war he should have kept them clear of, with Akamas carrying a shield under his command; if he wins honor among his comrades, he will ask no more. Yet he is my son; and, as I have seen, a god has touched him. Some day, I believe, in Athens’ hour of need, the god will speak again, and give her back a king.
As for me, I cannot stand steady in a chariot now, nor grasp a shield; my left-hand fingers have never got back their grip. And I, who stood on the Rock of Athens and broke the northern hordes; who cleansed the Isthmus, and changed the customs of Eleusis; who killed Asterion Minotaur in the throne room of the Labyrinth, and carried the bounds of Attica as far as the Isle of Pelops: I will not sit down in the house of my fathers to hear young children say, “Was that Theseus once?”
Menestheus has sowed; let him do the reaping. Yet these are my people; and I tried to warn them, before I went away. Age after age, the tides have risen in the northland. They rose in my day; they will rise again. I know that they will rise. But my face has changed, and my voice; the people thought I was calling this evil down, as a curse upon the City. And thus I parted from Athens. Maybe the gods are just; but the man is gone who could have shown it me.
It was for Crete that I set sail. Idomeneus is a man I can understand. Being once secure in power, he will be noble; and I have never wronged him, for that to make me ashamed. If I had gone to my old Palace in the south, to end my days there, he would have been courteous and free, offering me the show of kingship as I did to his father once. To sit on a Cretan terrace, watching the darkening of the grapes; a man might do worse, who can do nothing better.
So I set out from Euboia. But a wind of fate blew me to Skyros.
It is a windy island, shaped like a bull’s brow; on one horn hangs the Citadel with a tall cliff under, for fear of such pirates as I have been. Not that Skyros has been the worse for me; it has a name for stony fields and half-filled grain jars, and I have never robbed the poor. King Lykomedes made me as welcome as if it were ten years back. As we sat over our wine, he told me he often puts out to sea himself upon adventure, when the last harvest has been poor. I had heard so, though our paths have never crossed. He is a man of the Shore Folk, dark-bearded, with shadowy eyes, one who does not tell all his mind. It is said of him that he was reared in the shrine at Naxos, and is the son of a priestess by the god.
Of this he did not speak. We swapped old sea-tales; and he told me he, like Pirithoos, was sent in his boyhood to the Kentaur hills. Old Handy, he says, is still alive in some high cave on Pelion; his people are fewer, but his school goes on. One of his boys, the King of Phlia’s heir, is a guest here now on Skyros; hidden to avoid some fate of an early death, which his priestess mother saw in omens. They chose an island to stop him from running away; for the death-fate carried an everlasting fame along with it, and the boy would have gone consenting.
As we sat in the window, Lykomedes showed him to me, climbing up the long stairs of the rock. Up he came, out of the evening shadow into the last kiss of the sun, as springy and brisk as noonday, his arm round a dark-haired friend. The god who sent him that blazing pride should not have added love to be burned upon it. His mother will lose her pains, for he carries his doom within him. He did not see me; and yet his eyes spoke to mine.