On reaching the City, I went in to shed my hunting leathers, and get clean. I dressed my hair, and put on my best mantle, with my worked sandals; coming to his house I found he had done the same. Soon after we had begun supper, the summer rain came down upon the City. It pattered on the terrace vine, and drummed the roof. The air grew soft, with scents of slaked dust and freshened leaves, and of drenched flowers from the market-fields beyond. We said we could hear the scorched hills we had come from, drinking their fill, and raised our cups in company. When the slave who waited had gone, we set the bronze bowl for kottabos, and threw for each other, calling toasts as we threw. Lysis made a better score and laughed at me; so I declared I would not accept the omen, and re-filled my cup to challenge him. This time I won; but he would not yield the victory; and so on, till the more my effort the worse my aim, and Lysis reaching to take my cup away, said, “My dear, you have had enough.”
“What?” I said, laughing and taking it back again. “Is my speech thick, or have you heard me talking nonsense? Or am I one of those who lose their looks at the third cup?”—“You deserve yes to that.”—“Drink up yourself, you are taller and need more to fill you. All the earth is drinking and growing beautiful, so why not we? It is to feel as I do now, that men plant the vine and press the vintage. Not only you, Lysis, look beautiful to me as always, but the whole world is beautiful. For what else was wine given us by the god?”
“Leave it so, then,” he said, “and don’t spoil it with more.”
“One more, for us to pledge each other. Have you thought, Lysis, that now my life is yours? But for you, tonight I should be who knows where? A shadow, shivering out there in the rain, or flitting about on the shores of Styx, squeaking ‘Lysis! Lysis’ in a little bat-voice too high to hear.”
“Stop,” he said. “No more, Alexias. Death comes soon enough to divide friends.”
“Here’s to life, then. You gave it me. This lamplight; the scent of flowers and rain; the wine, the garlands; your company best of all. Don’t you want me to praise your gift? I only need one thing to make me the happiest of all mankind; something to give you in return. But what would be enough?”
“I told you,” he said, “that one more would be too many.”
“I was only fooling. See, I’m as sober as you are; soberer I daresay. Tell me this, Lysis; where do you think the soul goes, when we die?”
“Who has come back to tell us? Perhaps, as Pythagoras taught, into the womb again. Into a philosopher if we have deserved it, or a woman if we were weak; or a beast or bird if we failed altogether to be men. It would be pleasant to think so, because it would be just. But I think we sleep, and never awaken.”
His sadness reached me through the wine-fumes, and I reproached myself. “Sokrates says not. He has always held the soul is immortal.”—“His may be. One can’t doubt it is made of harder and clearer stuff than other men’s, less easy to disperse.” He roused himself and smiled. “Or perhaps the gods mean to deify him, and set him in the heavens as a constellation.”—“He’d laugh at that. And draw you in the dust the Constellation of Sokrates, with two little stars for the eyes, and five or six big ones for the mouth.”—“Or reprove me for being disrespectful to the gods … One can’t tell him everything; he doesn’t understand the weakness of ordinary men.”—“No,” I said. “He has the heart of a lion; nothing frightens him, nothing tempts him aside. Seeing the good and doing it is all one to him.” And I was going on to add, “But he says it comes by daily practice, like victory at the Games.” Then I remembered, and instead of speaking lifted my cup to drink.
Presently I said, “I daresay he knows he is one to himself, and doesn’t look to others to be what he is.”—“He isn’t a man for compromise.”—“Not with himself. But he is kindly. He has learned not to expect too much.” Lysis said, “I should think Alkibiades taught him that.” He got up from his couch, and walking away stood out at the terrace.
I followed and stood beside him. “Don’t be angry with me tonight, Lysis. What is it?”—“Nothing. I have been angry with you too often without a cause. Look, the rain is over.”
A white new moon had come out of the clouds, and there were one or two stars. The garden air was fresh in our faces; behind us the supper-room smelled of bruised flowers, lamp-smoke and spilled wine. “I provoked you without cause too,” I said, “or with the same cause. There is more rain to fall; don’t you feel it, Lysis?”—“It has been a long drought,” he said.—“Too long. If the earth doesn’t drink deep, we shall have great storms, and fires upon the mountains.”—
“Well, if you had had your way, we should have been out on Pentelikon tonight.”—“I suppose,” I said, “we should have found some cave to creep into, wide enough for two.”
A laden leaf spilled its water, pattering in the vine. “It is late,” he said. “I will call a torch for you.”—“Late? It must be an hour short of midnight still. Are you treating me like a child now, because I lost my spear?”—He cried out, “Don’t you understand?” and then after a moment, below his breath, “I saw death reach out for you; and I had no philosophy.”
“You did well enough with a boar-spear,” I said, trying to make him smile. “At war we have each seen the other brushed by death, and at night have joined in the singing.”—“Shall I sing now? Singing is easy. I saw you dead, and beyond it nothing. Only toil for a burned harvest, with spring and summer lost. And now I have told you, though I never let wine loosen my tongue before. Have you heard enough? You had better be going.”
He turned from me, and walked towards the doorway, to call the slave. But running I overtook him, and caught him back by the arm.
My garland had slipped back on my hair as I ran; he put up his hand to it, and it fell behind me. I could hear the vine shedding its last heavy drops upon the terrace; the croak of a frog at the cistern beyond; and my own heart beating.
I said, “I am here.”
20
IT WAS THE WINTER after this that Lysis and I took to the sea, and sailed to the island of Samos.
Each had his reasons to leave the City. Lysis’ father died, carried off by a winter chill; and Lysis, who had sheltered him for years from the cares of a sinking estate, now could not bear to stint his tomb. He was laid among the trophies of his chariot-races; and when it was over, Lysis could afford to keep a horse no longer, unless he applied to the cavalry levy fund, which he was too proud to do.
My father grew stronger; he might yet want Phoenix back, and I did not care to wait for his asking. These days he and I walked softly, as men do in a house cracked by an earthquake.
He was now very thick with a set of oligarchs, who had the name of being rather more than homesick for the past. They came together without gaiety, like men with a common purpose; often I found the supper-room closed on them, and the slaves shut out; there was a feel in it all I did not like, over and above the presence of Kritias. If, as some said, there were men in the City who would let in the Spartans if they might hold office under them, it seemed to me they might be such as these. At my age, I might well have felt it within my rights to take it up with him; but we did not speak of serious matters any more. If he rebuked me, it was in passing for trivial things: for not growing my beard, or for sitting in the scent-shop, which indeed I only used if I found friends there already, and why does one walk in the City except to meet and talk? It was true, however, that when Lysis was not free, sometimes I would spend my time with unprofitable people, rather than go home.