I was half ready for the news, for it came after long delay, and the sound of victory flies fast. I don’t think there was great astonishment anywhere. People looked rather sullen, but everywhere one heard “When the Army is home again …” We thought of our farms; we had had enough of King Agis sitting on our skyline.
It was he, however, who lightened for us a weary evening at the Anakeion. I had been polishing my armour beside the fire; we had eaten, but were only half-full, for now the food had to come round by sea, rations were short. Xenophon had left his own fire and come to sit at ours; I shared my oil-flask with him, and we compared our wounds. One could always tell a cavalryman in the palaestra, by the way he was scarred about the arms and thighs and wherever the armour stops. Xenophon was trying to expound to me an invention of his, a long leather guard for the left arm and hand, which would not impede the reins like a shield. Suddenly a tremendous burst of laughter came from one of the other watchfires. Then it spread to the next, as if a flaming stick were being passed round to kindle it. We were getting up to satisfy our curiosity, when Gorgion arrived with the news. He was laughing so much that he nearly fell in the fire.
When he could speak, he said, “Do you want to know the true story of King Agis? Perhaps you thought he has been staying here because he hates us, and wants to do us harm. You were wrong, my friends. King Agis stays here out of family feeling, being united to us, you might say, by the most sacred ties. How proud he must be that he obeyed the omen, and left his new wife untumbled. If he hadn’t, he would just have fathered one Spartan more, instead of an Athenian.”
“An Athenian?” I said, not daring to believe what I saw coming, till I remembered the laughter. “Don’t tell me Alkibiades has been keeping King Agis’ bed warm for him all this time?”—“No one was using it. I daresay he used to feel chilly, after swimming in the Eurotas twice a day. Now we know why he never caught cold.”
A few years ago, when I was Xenophon’s guest at his place near Olympia, I happened in our talk to recall this occasion. He said he had always reckoned it a most shocking thing, a virtuous man’s piety being abused, and he could not conceive of anyone finding humour in it. People’s recollections differ after so long; but my own is that he laughed as loud as I did.
“Well,” I said, “he’s warmed the Eurotas for himself now, at all events. It must be blazing.”—“Yes, indeed. For the Spartan ladies, whose privilege it is to tell the City if a man drops his shield, aren’t as shy as ours; it’s no glory in them not to be talked about. When he gave her a boy, she boasted of it everywhere.”—“Tell us,” said Lysis, “how he proved his innocence.”—“The child’s his picture in little, they say. But he carried it off with his usual grace, and taught her to make a fool of him. He told all enquirers that he, for his part, had never been the helpless prey of Aphrodite. Noble ambition alone had moved him. He had wished to found a line of kings.” We gasped, and wiped our eyes. Someone said, “Say what you like, there will never be another like him.”
So we laughed, and shared the last of our wine, and fell to telling bawdy tales and then to sleep. I daresay I remember the night so well, because soon afterwards there came an end of laughter in the City.
15
WE WERE DRIVING THE Spartans off a farm near Marathon, when Phoenix stumbled and threw me. But for Lysis, I should have been speared on the ground; as it was I broke my collar-bone, and had to lie up at the farm. But I was in such fear for Phoenix, who had gone very lame, that I used to get up every day to see him; moreover the farmer was old, but his wife not. Like Sokrates, she made no charge for instructing the youth; but she undid the bandage Lysis had braced back my shoulder with, because it made me awkward. He rode over a few days later to see how I was mending, or I should be crooked to this day. I had to be carted back to the City, and the bone set again.
He was disabled himself, with a thrust in the arm he had got in beating the Spartans away from me. He had made light of it at the time, but now it had an angry humour in it, and had to be dressed every day. Most of us found that we did not heal so quickly as at first; the food was bad, and we were tired. This was the first time Lysis and I had been wounded together; so we thought it a holiday.
One day we were walking in the Agora, both feeling a little weak and sick; Lysis was feverish from his wound, and I had not long got on my feet again. We heard a great clamour from the other side, and went to see, not hurrying much, because it hurt us to be jostled in crowds. As it happened, however, the man who had caused the commotion was coming our way, and bringing it with him. He was a metic, a Phrygian, with a barber’s apron on. He was spreading his hands, calling on the gods to witness his truth, and demanding to be taken before the archons.
I remember the look of him welclass="underline" short, smooth and paunchy, with a ruby in his ear; and a black beard crimped to display his art. Having come some way in a hurry, he was sweating like a pig from his hair down into his beard; he looked the kind of little man who gets a roar in a comedy by pretending to have dirtied himself with fright. But no one was laughing, unless the gods were, as they sat above the clouds. They, it may be, were saying, “We sent you Perikles to counsel you, and was not that dignity enough for your City? We sent you omens and prodigies, and writing in the stars, and the gods in your streets were wounded for a sign; but you knew better, you Athenians. You would tread upon purple; you would be greater than Necessity and Fate. Very well; take this in your face.”
He came towards us, out of breath, with a brawl about him, as if he might have cut a customer he was shaving, or overcharged. Seeing us, he outran the men who were shouting at him, and panted, “Oh, sir, I can see you’re a gentleman, sir, and a soldier; speak to them, sir; the City’s given me a living these seven years, and what call would I have to leave my shop on a busy morning with a ship just in, and make up such a tale? I swear, sir, the man left me not an hour ago, and I came straight here, the gods be my witness. Stand by me, sir, you and the noble youth your friend, and take me to the archons, for people take liberties, sir, with a foreigner, though seven years I’ve …”
So Lysis turned to the people, and said they ought to leave the man to the law, whatever he had said, and anyone was welcome to come and see justice. Then they grew quieter, till an old man in leather, an armourer, said, “And how many more will he tell on the road? Stop his mouth with pitch, I say. It’s well enough for you, son of Demokrates, to keep your temper, but I’ve three sons with the Army, three sons, and how many more like me won’t close their eyes tonight for this liar’s tale? All to make himself somebody for a day, the foreign bastard, and cry up his stinking shop.” Then the noise broke out again worse than before; the little man ran in between Lysis and me, like a chicken under a hen’s wing, and we were forced to walk with him where he was going. He chattered in our ears, and the crowd shouted behind us, and called to others who shouted in their turn and joined the press. And the barber wheezed and panted out his tale, between the names of patrons who would put in a word for him, or sometimes broke it off to promise us a hair-trim or a shave for nothing.
Such was the messenger the gods sent to the Athenians, to tell us that our Army in Sicily had perished from the earth.
He had a shop in Piraeus, by the wharf where the traders come in from Italy. The colonists used to go there when they landed, to get polished up after the voyage. A ship was in, and one of the passengers sat down on the bench to wait his turn. And getting into talk with the men beside him, he said, “Last time I came to your City it was a time of festival; garlands in the streets, torches at night, and the wine flowing. Now I dread to see the friends I made then, for what can one say to people in such calamity? I thought the war a mistake myself, for living at Rhegium I know something of Sicily; I doubted if the Athenians would come off with much to show; but, by Herakles, if anyone had told me that all would be lost, two great armies, two fleets of ships, the good Nikias and the brave Demosthenes both dying as wretchedly as thieves; yet what are they after all beside so many brave men, all butchered, or, what is worse, enslaved …” At this all the people in the shop stopped him with an outcry, asking what he meant; and he looking about him in amazement said, “But has it not reached you here? Has no one heard? All Italy talks of nothing else.” So the barber had flung down his razor, and run all the way from Piraeus, and here he was. And Lysis and I believed him no more than the rest.