I lay between sea and sky, stricken by the Hunter; the fiery immortal hounds of Eros, slipped from the leash, dragged at my throat and at my vitals, to bring the quarry in. It seemed to me now that my soul was here, if it was anywhere; nothing remained to me of what I was, save this, that I remembered I had promised Sokrates a gift. He whom I loved knew my mind; perhaps it was his own. We were still, understanding each other.
He let me go, and, kneeling beside the rock, covered the wound with his mouth till the bleeding stopped. We were silent, he kneeling in the water, and I lying like the sacrifice on the altar-stone, the blue sky burning my eyes. After a while he bent and rinsed his face and got up smiling. “The Thracians when they swear friendship mingle their blood, or drink it, I forget. Now we are really one.” He carried me over the shore to the horses, and tore his tunic and bound my foot. It healed cleanly, and I was running again in a couple of weeks.
A little time after, when we were back in the City, I saw him for the first time with the Corinthian, Drosis, bidding her goodbye as he left her house. Several times, before the fighting began, he had invited me to supper with her to hear her sing. I had refused laughing, and telling him that as long as we did not meet, we could never doubt how all three of us would love each other. One does not need much knowledge of the world, to have heard that a man’s mistress usually likes his friend too little, or too much. I had never been troubled by the thought of her at all. Yet now that I saw her, looking just what I had imagined, a small downy girl, holding his hands, I felt grief and anger, and drew back into a porch so that he should not see me as he went.
So I went off to find Sokrates; and though I listened only and did not speak, in a little while I mastered these thoughts and put them from me: for I saw that if I let them possess me, Lysis and I had exchanged the good not for the best, but for the worst.
13
MY MOTHER, WHEN RETURNING I rode into the courtyard, stood looking at me in silence. I was too young and thoughtless to consider what she might feel, at the sudden sight of a man wearing her father’s armour, upon her husband’s horse. I jumped down and embraced her laughing, and asking if she had mistaken me for a stranger. “I took you for a soldier,” she said, “and now I look at you it is true.” This pleased me, for I would not have had her think the armour was fallen on evil days. There was no use now in my ever thinking again of a suit by Pistias.
Going out to the stables I found Korax, my father’s second horse, disgracefully neglected, with a thrush in one of his feet. I was calling indignantly for the groom, intending to give him the thrashing he would have had from my father (for the horse, which was old, looked finished now to me), when my mother told me he had run away. This was an old story now in the country, but that it had been happening in the City was news to me. She said that thousands of slaves had gone, and half the crafts and trades in the City had been crippled. The Spartans always let a slave through their lines, to encourage more to run, knowing how it damaged us. This was war, and we did the same by their Helots when we could.
Meantime, thanks to them, our fortunes were half ruined. We had a little estate in Euboea, good corn-land, which would bring in something still, and a small property of rents in the City itself. We should have to sell old Korax, as soon as his foot was healed. My uncle Strymon came round to warn me against extravagance, with a face as long as his account-rolls. He had had a great fright when half a dozen of his slaves ran off, and had no peace till he had sold all the others.
“It can’t be long now,” I said to Lysis, “before King Agis goes home again. He’s already stayed on the frontier longer than ever before.” Lysis shook his head. “The scouts have been up to Dekeleia again. Now, when as you say he is due to be going, he is strengthening the walls and digging-in.”
At first I could hardly understand him. “What? How shall we grow anything, or get any harvest in?”—“Why grow what the Spartans will gather? We must beat our ploughshares into swords.”—“But why, Lysis? The Spartans never change their customs. They never did this before.”—“Do you think a Spartan had the wit to think of it? It took an Athenian for that. No one can ever say of Alkibiades that he doesn’t earn his keep.”
I was slow to see beyond all this; then I said, “But Lysis, if Demosthenes has to stay here holding the Spartans, how will he get to Sicily?” Lysis laughed. We were walking through the City; he had a clean mantle, and sandals on his feet; but I felt for a moment we were back in the field. “How? How do you think? He will get there, my dear, by our holding them instead.”
I had never thought it possible that Demosthenes would sail while the Spartans were in Attica. Nor had Demosthenes perhaps. We had begun the war in Sicily as a man who is doing well may begin a new house beyond his means. If all goes well, the show will raise his credit. We had grown into a habit of victory; glory was our capital, as much as ships and silver; and we had drawn pretty heavily on all three.
We had a week or two in the Munychia fort at Piraeus, on garrison duty. To most young men, who go there in peacetime after enrolling as ephebes, it comes as the first taste of soldiering; to us it was a rest-camp. Even so it has a feeling of its own, as you march past the galley-slips and in through the old arsenal, and see the scribbles your fathers left on the walls when they were ephebes themselves. We got plenty of leave, for by then we had earned it.
One day we were in the Argive’s palaestra, watching the boys at exercise, when Lysis pointed and said, “That boy there is going to be something remarkable. I have noticed him before.”—“Do you think so?” I said. “He looks rather thickset to me.” Lysis laughed and said, “No, I mean as a wrestler.” I watched the boy, who had been matched with, or chosen for himself, someone much bigger. He looked about fifteen, but was powerful beyond his years. As he was getting a thigh-hold, he made a slip and nearly got thrown. In spite of this he won the bout; but Lysis said, “He has made that fault before and I can’t think how the trainer has missed it. The boy can’t at his age wrestle with men, so he never gets a proper match. Do me a favour, Alexias. Go after the boy and tell him with my compliments what he did wrong and how to correct it. If I speak to him myself, his tutor will faint with fright.” We made some joke or other about this, and laughed. Then he told me what to say.
I followed the lad into the dressing-room, and found him scraping-down. He was certainly too square for beauty; by the time he was a man, if he went on wrestling, he would have no proportion at all. His brows were heavy and overhung, making his eyes very deep-set; but when he looked at me I was struck with them, for they were brilliant and fearless. I greeted him, and gave him Lysis’ advice. He listened most attentively, and at the end said, “Please thank Lysis for me. Tell him I am honoured by his taking this trouble, and assure him I shan’t forget what he says.” His voice was rather light for his build, but pleasant and well-trained. He went on, “And thank you too, Alexias, for bringing his message. I had begun to wonder whether all was well with you in the war, it is so long since we had the pleasure of seeing you.”
He delivered this, though quite modestly, with a polish I had never seen in one so young. But what struck me much more was that as he spoke he raised his eyes to my face, admiring it, not at all impertinently, but with as much composure as if he had been thirty years old.
It was certainly the first such compliment I had ever received from a boy a good two years younger; yet one could not take offence, much less laugh, for he was clearly a serious person. I noticed just then that his ears were bored, and guessed from this that he came from one of the very old noble families, some of whom at that time still wore the ancient adornments handed down since the Wars of Troy. The rings had been taken out, no doubt because they interfered with his wrestling. Putting down part of his self-possession to his birth, it was still rather remarkable. I confessed he had the advantage of me and asked his name. He said, “Aristokles, son of Ariston.”