He confessed that later, when he saw me so much courted, he had felt a good deal of bitterness. He had heard it said that I inclined to Charmides; and I was ashamed to ask him why he had not put it to proof. Remembering the silly extravagances of my following, I did not wonder he had thought such a scrimmage beneath him. Nor did I doubt he had heard them call me cold and disdainful; he who had been drawn to me before anyone had taken me up. “My heart was sore at it,” he said. “I could not forgive Sokrates for a time, and even avoided him; till, looking about me, I saw some of the people who had refused to take his medicine before, and what kind of men they were. So next day I went back again.”
As he spoke he gave a great yawn. In apology, he said he had lain awake nearly all the night before, unable to sleep for happiness. I confessed that with me it had been the same.
Next day he took me to his home, which was outside the walls near the Sacred Way, and presented me to his father. Demokrates was a man of about fifty-five, but looked older, his health, Lysis said, having troubled him for some time. His beard was long, and already almost white. He received me very courteously, commending my father’s courage in the field. Beyond this he showed a certain reserve; perhaps there had been some old difference between them, which he felt it would be petty to visit upon me.
The house, though it was getting shabby in the way I was used to at home, was a big one, with some fine marble and bronze in it. Demokrates was said to have lived with much splendour in his youth; it was to this house, as I recalled, that Alkibiades had run away from his guardians when he was a lad, the first proof of his wildness to reach the City, though Perikles tried to hush it up.
In the manner of men getting on in years whose circumstances have worsened, Demokrates ran on a good deal about the glories of the past. I saw Lysis listening patiently, like one who has resigned himself beforehand; but it was plain there was affection between them. “I lost two other sons,” his father said, “in childhood; but the gods relented with Lysis, making him a son as good to me as three. Now he is old enough not to have his head turned by it, I can say his boyhood was all I wished; and as a man he has not disappointed me. I only need to see him married, and a son of his bearing my name; and I can go when the gods are ready.”
I don’t know whether Demokrates said this simply because sick men tend to be wrapped up in themselves, or purposely, to see whether I was the kind of youth to stand in a friend’s way out of petulance or jealousy. Thinking myself, as one does at that age, the centre of everything, I felt it became me not to fail in courage at the test; and answered as coolly as a Spartan that the son of Demokrates could choose a wife wherever he wished. When Lysis took me out to see the pleasure-garden, I felt as one does after a difficult sword-dance, when one has got out of the judge’s sight. Lysis stretched himself like a man who has just taken off his armour, laughed and said, “Father is in no such hurry to find me a wife as he pretends. One of my sisters was married last year, and there is still another who is fifteen already. By the time she is provided for, it will be a long while before I can afford to set up house, as he very well knows.”
He told me that the bulk of their wealth in former years had come from their estates in Thrace, where they had bred chariot-horses and mules for riding; but he himself had never seen these lands, for they had been seized and laid waste in the war, and the stock carried off, before he became a man.
Beyond the pleasure-garden were the fields of the flower-sellers, and even now in autumn the air was sweet. “One ought to marry,” Lysis said, “while one is still young enough to get strong sons; but there is time and to spare for that. When I want a woman’s company I have a very good girl, a little Corinthian. She doesn’t pretend to recite Anakreon and the lyric poets, like the fashionable companions; but she sings prettily, in a little clear voice like a bird’s, a thing I like in a woman.” He smiled to himself and said, “One has strange thoughts when one is lonely; there were times when I used to wish I were rich enough to keep Drosis entirely, as Perikles did Aspasia, so that she need never entertain anyone else. It wasn’t that I minded much her going to bed with other men, seeing that if she had not been a hetaira I should never have met her, nor would she have any more conversation than the kind of girl one takes for a wife. No; although it sounds foolish, I didn’t like to know that the behaviour she put on to please me, she would put off like a garment, and become a different being for another man. Well, she is good enough company in her way, but no Aspasia, poor little thing; and I don’t think such notions will trouble me any more.” To all this I listened respectfully, and at the end nodded and looked solemn, like a man who is knowledgeable in such matters. Lysis smiled and took my arm and we went to look at the horses.
In the harness-room, where the yokes of old chariots gathered dust upon the walls, we played with a litter of boar-hound pups, and exchanged old secrets, as people do at such times for the pleasure of saying, “This I have told to no one but you.” He confided to me that though he had first known a woman when he was seventeen years old, he had never been in love with a youth at all, until he met me. He said it used to disturb him sometimes, when he read the poets, that he seemed incapable of that love which they praised as the noblest, and the inspirer of so many glorious deeds. “I did not know,” he said, “what I was waiting for. But the god knew.”
I wished my father would return, so that I could present Lysis to him. Here was something of mine with which he could have no fault to find. They knew each other by sight, from their cavalry exercises, being fellow-tribesmen; Lysis remarked that as I was not very like him, he supposed it was my mother from whom I got my looks. I told him I thought so, but that she had died at my birth. He looked at me puzzled. “But,” he said, “since we have been together, I have heard you speak of your mother a score of times. Is she only your stepmother, then?”—“Yes, but it has never seemed so to me.”—“She was a widow, I expect, when your father married her?”—“No indeed, Lysis, she was not turned sixteen.” He heard me out smiling, and drawing his brows together. “You are full of mysteries for me, Alexias. Not that I could imagine your ever failing in courtesy to your father’s wife; but even to me you call her Mother, just as if she were really so. And now you tell me she is the same age as I am! You make me feel a hundred years old.” He spoke lightly; yet, I knew not why, his words distressed me. “But she is my mother, Lysis. If she is not … if she is not, then I never had one.” He saw I was troubled, and embracing me kindly said, “Why then, my dear, of course she is.”
I stayed to supper with him; Demokrates retired early because of his sickness, so we were alone. Summer flowers were done, but we had crowns of cyclamen and ivy. The wine was good, but we drank it well-tempered, having no need to believe ourselves happier than we were. After eating we played at kottabos with the wine-lees, ringing them in the bowl, or throwing them down hard and never failing to find in the spillings the letters of each other’s name. There was an inlay in the floor of Athene fighting a Mede, and it began to look as if the blood had flowed pretty freely, which made us laugh, being in the mood to laugh at anything. Later, when the moon had come out, we walked in the garden, sharing a cloak.