It was a warm spring evening; one smelt the sea, and supper cooking on pinewood fires, and the scent of flowers upon the hillside; we sat in the doorway of our hut in the late sun, greeting friends as they passed. And we opened a wine-jar, to drink to our enterprise, “for,” said Lysis, “half sober is neither here nor there.” But our minds only sparked brighter with the wine; we settled the affairs of all Athens and Samos between us, and went on to win the war.
Presently the trierarch of the Paralos came by, and stopped to drink with us; and Lysis offered him some courtesy on the loss of his ship. He laughed and said, “Don’t pity me, but the trierarch who’s commanding her now. I know those lads. The net won’t hold the dolphin. I’ll lay you five to one that the first chance they get in open water, they clap him in irons and run for Samos.” (I may add that he won his bet.)
It still put him in a rage, he said, to remember what he had seen in Athens. But now the dark tale was lightened by our hopes. “When Alkibiades takes command here,” he said, “they can’t last long. They have lost the moderates, you know, already. Theramenes and his party are only biding their time. They came in on the promise of a limited franchise, a principle I don’t hold with but still a principle. Now they know they have got a tyranny, they won’t bear it longer than they need.”
I listened silent, ashamed that this stranger should do my father more justice than I had done. Many things came back to me, from my first years. When I came back from the mountains, I had found in my room the silver I had put down for Sostias, wrapped in a cloth.
“But,” said the trierarch, “I almost forgot what I came here first to tell you, that an Army Assembly is fixed for tomorrow; you will hear the herald very soon. Half the ships in the fleet are in the same state as yours, the trierarch fled to Miletos, and the First Officer carrying on. The new promotions are going by vote. If I were as sure of a ship as you are, Lysis, I’d sleep well tonight.”
I looked at Lysis, my contentment crowned. He put it aside, from modesty; but the trierarch said, “Your pilot was heard to say of you, ‘He knows a ship’s not steered from the same end as a horse.’ And that’s a paean, from a pilot.” Which was true enough; for between the soldier who fights a ship, and the seaman who sails her, is a contention as old as Troy.
He went away, and we heard the herald; then we filled and drank, not naming the good news for fear of tempting the gods. The evening sun glowed like bronze upon the reed thatch of the roofs; here and there men were singing about the fires. I said in my heart, “Such things as these are the pleasures of manhood. We must do the work of the season, as Hesiod says.”
Lysis caught my eye above the wine-cup. “To beautiful Alexias,” he said, and jerked the lees out of the doorway. They made an alpha in the dust; he could do it, from practice, three times out of four. He yawned, and smiled, and said, “It is getting late.”
But we sat a little longer; for as the sun sank, the moon had risen. Her light had mixed with the afterglow, and the hill behind the city was the colour of the skins of lions. I thought, “Change is the sum of the universe, and what is of nature ought not to be feared. But one gives it hostages, and lays one’s grief upon the gods. Sokrates is free, and would have taught me freedom. But I have yoked the immortal horse that draws the chariot with a horse of earth; and when the one falls, both are entangled in the traces.” And I thought of Sokrates, and saw the logic of my case.
Lysis said to me, “Those are long thoughts to keep unshared.”
“I was thinking,” I said, “of time, and change, and that a man must go with them as with a river, conforming to what is. And yet at last, if we are never so obedient, or if we call defiance, the last change is still to death.”—“The last?” he said, and smiled. “Never state an opinion like something proved. Today we have lived as if it were not so; and we have felt that it was good.” His face was calm in the brightening moonlight; it came to me that in the use of his courage, and the faith of his cause, and in the exaltation of our vow upon the hilltop, he had found himself again.
We sat in thought. I turned my eyes from the mountains, to find his turned to me. He laid his hand on mine. “Nothing will change, Alexias. No, that is false; there is change wherever there is life, and already we are not the two who met in Taureas’ palaestra. But what kind of fool would plant an apple-slip, to cut it down at the season when the fruit is setting? Flowers you can get every year, but only with time the tree that shades your doorway and grows into the house with each year’s sun and rain.”
Indeed he was too good for me. Often it has seemed to me that it was only he who made me a man.
Helios had plunged his red hair in the waves of the sea, and the songs were dying round the watch-fires. It was growing cold, and we went within; for, as the men of Homer said when a long day was behind them, it is well to yield to the night.
21
“WELCOME HOME, ALEXIAS,” SAID a young man in the Agora, who was quite strange to me. “Do you know you are staring about you like a colonist? Indeed you have been away too long, and it is good to see you.”
“Three years,” I said. “I know your face well, but …”—“My name,” he said smiling, “is what you may know better, for I’ve grown my beard since last we met. Euthydemos.”
We exclaimed, and laughed, and sat to talk on a bench outside a shop. He had grown into an excellent fellow, sound without his old solemnity; Sokrates always knew where to dig for gold. “I am keeping you,” he said, “from all your friends, but I must hear your news before the crowd sweeps you away. Alkibiades’ men all walk the City dusted with his glory; and so they should. How does it feel, to be hung so thick with crowns of victory?”—“It feels,” I said, “like having a good commander.”
He raised his brows, half smiling. “What, Alexias! Even you! You who distrusted vulgar idolatries, and disapproved of him, as I remember?” I laughed, and shrugged. The truth was, there was not a man of us in Samos but thought the sun rose in his eyes.
“No one knows him,” I said, “who hasn’t fought under him in war. He puts a shine on it. Here in the City they didn’t understand him as we in Samos do. He trusts us and we trust him, and that’s the secret of it.” At this Euthydemos laughed aloud, and said, “Great Zeus! He must have given you a philtre.”
I felt myself getting angry, which was absurd. “I’m not a politician, only a lieutenant of marines. I speak as I find. I’ve never seen him leave ship or man in the lurch in any action. Men who fight for him don’t die for nothing. He sees what each man is good for, and lets him know he has put a stake on it. There was a black squall, and night coming on, when he led out the fleet to take Byzantium; but we all set off singing against the thunder. No one stops to ask questions when he gives an order. He thinks fast. I was with him when he took Selymbria with thirty men.”
I told him the story. It is on the Propontis, and lies on low hills near the sea. We had sat down before it, and beached the ships, and at the time of lamplighting were at supper round the fires. The marines of the Siren, and of another ship, thirty all told, were on outpost between the camp and the town to guard against surprise; so we were eating with our armour on, and weapons beside us. We had just begun when Alkibiades came out through the tamarisks with his long light stride. “Good evening, Lysis. Can you spare me a place at the fire? Here’s something towards supper.” His slave put down a Chian wine-jar, and he settled himself among us. He was the best of company at such times; any troop he visited would be quoting him all next day; but tonight he was brisk, and told us no one was to turn in, but we must be ready to advance at midnight. He had got in touch with some democrats in the town, who had agreed to open the gates to him. The army was to steal up in the dark, ready to rush in, the signal being a torch held up on the wall.