I wondered how he got away, and if they would beat him. He was hardly out of my mind all evening. Next day I was setting out to tell Lysis the story, when I met my uncle Strymon in the court. He told me in his weightiest manner that he had something to say to me; adding, when I would have led him to the living-room, that it was no fit matter for my mother’s ears. Now fairly mystified, I took him to the guest-room. After coughing, stroking his beard, and saying he felt responsible to my father, he began, “What you do behind closed doors, Alexias, I cannot control. Yet I am sorry to see debauchery in one so young, who lacks even the excuse of ugliness or deformity, which might have kept you from enjoying the pleasures of love in an honourable way.”
“Debauchery?” I said, staring at him as if he were mad. My last party had been a fortnight ago; Lysis had been there, and wishing to avoid anything that might disgust him, I had gone home nearly sober. “I assure you, sir, you have been misled.”—“Not unless my eyes mislead me; and I may say I have always been noted for excellent sight. To walk the public streets with a boy from Gurgos’s bath-house! Alkibiades himself was rarely so shameless. I assure you, at your age I hardly knew such people existed.”—“What boy?” I asked. But he saw my face change and said, “I see you understand me.”
“A slave does not choose his master,” I said, “and war is war.” I felt angry with the whole world, with Necessity and Fate. He was stroking his beard again, getting something ready. “And what shall we say of a man setting himself up to instruct the youth, who not only resorts to such creatures himself, but admits them among his pupils?” Anger almost choked me; but I mastered it, the better to deal with him. “I am to blame, sir, that as I have only talked philosophy with the youth, I forgot to ask him what he did. But I thank you for the information. How, sir, did you find it out?”
In the street, I daresay; but it did me good to see his face. At least he could see my teacher had sharpened my wits. But Lysis looked serious when I told him, and said that if my uncle thought ill of Sokrates, a pert answer would not make him think better. This was the first time he had ever reproved me. When he saw how I felt it, he soon relented.
He went out of his way after this to greet Phaedo kindly; but the boy grew silent in company, as Sokrates had found. He would talk, when we were alone, but always as across an invisible shield. He was waiting for me to find out what he was and turn against him, and I saw it. You may wonder indeed why I did not feel a distaste in spite of myself. But first love, like the light of dawn, sheds a kind of beauty wherever you look. Besides, though I knew what his life was, I knew it without understanding, as one knows of a country where one has not been. It only gave him a strangeness for me.
One day I met him early in the morning, walking out to the Academy. As we went up the Street of Tombs, we fell to talking of death; and Phaedo said he did not believe the soul survives it, whether in the underworld, or in a new body, or in the air. I replied that since I had loved Lysis, it seemed impossible to me that the soul should be extinguished. “The soul is a surfeit-dream,” he said, “of a man with food and drink in him and his lust fed. Let the body be hungry, or thirsty, or in desire, and what is his soul but the dog’s nose that leads it to flesh? The dog dies, and rots, and its nose smells nothing.” He spoke as if he hated me, and wished to leave me nothing that could give me joy. Yet I remembered I had failed Sokrates once, and Lysis had reproved me; and I paused to think. I said, “If you put a fat old man into the long-race, he will fall down dead. Does that prove it can’t be run? This, Phaedo, is why I think the soul outlives the body: I have seen how the body can be bought and sold, and not only that, but forced to what it hates and would never consent to; yet the soul can be free, and keep its courage, and defy its fate. So I believe in the soul.”
He was silent some time, walking so fast that the limp from his wound appeared. At last he said, “It seemed incredible that you could know.” I said I would never have intruded in the matter, except that the silence was putting a distance between us. “I can’t keep much from Lysis,” I said. “But you can rely on him not to talk, as you can on me.” He laughed shortly and said, “Don’t make a trouble of it. Kritias knows.”
A little later, finding he had never been out of the City, I took him walking in the pine-woods at the foot of Lykabettos. It was there he told me how he had been enslaved. After his city had been some months besieged, his father, who was a strategos, had raised a troop of volunteers to storm the Athenian siege-wall, a desperate enterprise which had almost succeeded. Phaedo, fighting at his father’s side, got a wound there, which did not heal well, because by then they were almost starving. The Athenians sent for more troops, and closed the gap; no food came in at all, and they could only throw themselves on the mercy of the enemy. Phaedo, who could not walk alone, lay on his bed, listening to the clamour as the gates were opened and the Athenians marched in. Presently he heard a great shrieking of women, and the death-cries of men. Soldiers ran in, dragged him from his bed to the Agora, and threw him down among a crowd of young lads and children, who had been herded into the sheep-pound. Just across the square was a pile of corpses newly killed, and still being added to; sticking out of the midst of it was his father’s head. There was an auctioneers’ rostrum in the Agora; here, where he could see well and be out of the dirt and mess, stood Philokrates the Athenian commander, directing the slaughter of the fighting men which the Athenians had ordered. It went on for some time. Phaedo did not come too late to see his lover brought in with bound hands, and run through the throat before his eyes. When it was time to lead off the women to the ships, Philokrates came down from the rostrum to choose a couple for himself. The rest were taken away to be sold. Thus Phaedo saw the last of his mother, a woman not long past thirty, and handsome still.
He had been brought to the Piraeus slave-market very sick with his wound; but Gurgos had taken a risk on him for the sake of his looks, and nursed him well. At first he had not understood what the place was, and thought he was to work as a bathman. When he knew, he refused food and drink, intending to die. “Then,” he said, “in the evening old Gurgos came and left a cup of wine beside me. The wine-jar had just been drawn up from the well, and the cup sweated with coolness. I was faint and thirsty; and I said to myself, ‘For whom am I doing this? I who have neither father nor friend to be dishonoured, who believe neither in men nor in any god? The birds and beasts live from hour to hour, and they live very well.’” He had learned the arts of his calling, and commanded a high price. But on a certain day, feeling his soul sickened and his mind in turmoil, he had locked the door as though someone was with him, and getting out by the window, had wandered about the City. There he had passed Sokrates talking, and had stayed to listen. “Is it true, Alexias, that there is an Athenian who lives in a cave and hates men?”—“Yes: Timon.”—“When I came to Sokrates I was much the same, I mean in my soul. I had taught myself to withdraw my mind from them, as the herdsman sits apart on a rock, to windward of the goats. I did not wish to share my rock with anyone; if one of my beasts aspired toward manhood, I had learned how to keep him in his place.”
I was eager he should meet Lysis; but at first Phaedo always found some reason to be gone. Presently, however, I got them acquainted, and it was plain each thought well of the other. Shortly after, Lysis being about to give a supper for Sokrates and his particular friends, I said, “It’s a pity Phaedo can’t come; Sokrates would like to see him.”—“Why not?” said Lysis at once. “A good thought of yours. I’ll go down beforehand and buy an evening of his time.” I asked to come too, but he said, “Are you serious? Your reputation would never recover from it. When boys of your age go to Gurgos’s, they don’t go to buy but to sell.”