“No,” I said. “Never a word.”
“Well, well. I am glad I met with you. To think of that; never a word. He thought his uprightness not worth boasting of, because it was his habit.”
I went on my way. I remembered the sheep-sickness; I had been still a shepherd. When the first few died, he had beaten me for letting them eat black hellebore. Later, when he knew the truth, he said, “Well, Sim, it seems you were not to blame.” I was angry that he said it so unwillingly, never counting the cost to his pride in saying it at all. This man had done him more justice. I had often been ashamed that he was known for a hard man; that he had never been known for a crooked one, I had not considered; just taken it for granted, as he had brought me up to do. All in all, I thought, I had best stop pitying myself over the choral prize. The judges had thought me the best, and I should be content to know it.
So I went to my mattress on the ship, with some bread and cheese bought on the way, and bedded down for the night. Some sailors were working late, shouting and hammering, so I lay awake. About midnight, I heard singing, coming along the waterside, and threw my blanket round me and went up on deck to look.
It was a komos of revelers, waving torches, and singing a skolion to which they dance-stepped along. They were not far away, and I could see Hipparchos leading them. He had one arm over the shoulders of the youth to whom he had given the painted wine-cup. They made a handsome group, like Dionysos with a young satyr.
The sound faded away; the sailors had turned in, and so did I. It had been a long day. As men count great events, nothing much had happened. The Delia had been celebrated; an old man had died in the way of nature, and his sons had put him on the pyre. Yet it had been a full day for me.
It is a strange thing to recall; but as I fell asleep, I was wondering how it might feel to be courted for one’s beauty. I expect Pythagoras would have told me that in some past life, as youth or woman, I had been cruel to my lovers, and had chosen to make amends. In my time I have talked with many philosophers, who have expounded to me the ways of the gods with men. Out of them all, Pythagoras’ belief seems to me the most just, supposing it is true. But then, if it is, and all these things befall us, unless we have the Sight we shall never know.
3
WE GAVE OUR FATHER the very best funeral the laws of Keos allow. No wailing, even by wife or daughter; one lamb and one goat to offer at the tomb; no incense. They measure even the libations of wine and oil. Had we had his body, his grave-clothes must have been as simple as in life, and his grave-wreath only of origan. We draped his urn with fillets of fine wool, and tied our hair into his mourning-wreath. (But for Midylos, Theas and I would have left our shearings forgotten on Rhenaia.) We put the urn on a bier hung with a linen cloth; and Theas and I carried it to the tomb in the silence the laws prescribe.
Later, to the scandal of half Iulis, we had a small carving done on his grave-stele, in the Athenian style, by an artist from that city. Of course he had never seen our father; but that is usual. He just asked his age and how he wore his hair and beard. He was done leaning on a staff, with Theas bidding him farewell. He, at least, was there to be copied.
To the very end of the rites, Theas was just what he had always been, the eldest son of Leoprepes. It was as though our father was still watching, as Homer tells it, on the hither shore of Styx, awaiting his rite of passage. After the offerings at the tomb came the funeral feast, given in the Kean style he would have approved. After that, if Patroklos’ ghost spoke truly to Achilles, Leoprepes son of Theasides, of Iulis, had made the crossing.
We went home, and slept; next morning the sun was shining, and the birds sang their spring songs. Our mother went briskly about the house, with well-water and hyssop. Theas rode into town, saying he had business there; and came back clean-shaved.
“I’d have as soon kept it up after that time in Samos,” he said quite coolly, “but the father would never have stood it. Athenian dandies—you know what he used to say.”
So that was how the sculptor did him on the grave-stele, standing with our father. He forgot to mention it, and once the outline was chiseled, it was too late to change. I kept quiet about it, and so did he.
Looking back, I can’t think why I was so surprised at the change in Theas. If I had been less taken up with myself, I could have expected it. I, the unwanted one, had long since had my freedom. Theas, the beloved, respected, cherished, had never been free at all. Now he was like a vine that bursts with green shoots in a single day of sun.
Not that he plunged into riot and revelry, like some heirs of strict fathers. That was never his style. But when next Laertes put to sea, with a cargo for Sidon and Naukratis, Theas was with him. He wanted to learn the trade of shipmaster; then he would hire a good pilot, and buy a ship.
Nowadays, men of good birth seem to think sea-trading beneath them. It was different when I was young. Laertes had inherited a big estate, grew his own grapes for wine and raisins, pressed his own olive oil, and pastured the flocks whose wool he sold. But he never gave up the sea till he was past sixty and his joints got stiff, though by then he was one of the chief men of Iulis. When Theas joined him, he was in his prime: had traded as far north as the Euxine, for furs and corn and Hyperborean amber; south down to Naukratis for faience and alabaster jars and ivory and incense; and bought purple in Tyre to sell in Athens. The Ionian ports were open to trade again under their Persian satraps; once more in Miletos you could get lapis and embroideries from Sardis. Laertes had started out, like many another landowner’s son, just selling his father’s spare produce; now he was richer from trade than land. For years, as I might have guessed, Theas had been dying with envy. It had never soured their friendship; Theas had been born without sourness in him; but I remembered, now, how he’d told me in my boyhood Laertes’ sailor tales, dwelling on the fights with pirates.
He finished all this business before he said a word; when he came back from Koressia harbor, he was like a boy again. Our mother was much dismayed; she had never thought, she cried, that he would be a wanderer. He replied that she had plenty of kin in Iulis, and Midylos close at hand. He was kind, but firm as rock.
When we were alone, I said to him, “Theas, what would you have done if Father had lived to fourscore?”
He looked a little surprised, either at my asking, or not having asked before. “I’m thirty-three. I was giving it two more years. Half a man’s life, and the best half, I reckon is all one owes.”
“That’s fair,” I said. “But I prophesy the best is still to come.” I was right in that. But I thought, too, that it would have destroyed our father; and that after all he had had a lucky death.
Remembering the knife Theas gave me when I left home, I went to Khalkis, whose swordsmiths were famous then as now, and bought him the best short sword that I could find. He was delighted with it; in after years he told me it served him well, though before they got to close quarters he had done pretty well with javelins. I expect that in all those years when he had exercised with them at home, he had dreamed of using them in battle. At any rate, before he was thirty-five—the age when he’d planned to claim his freedom—he had picked off the captain of a Cretan pirate, and sailed on to Naukratis with the captured ship, and his own cargo of Corinthian helmets for the Greek soldiers in Pharaoh’s pay.
As for me, I went back to my land in Euboia, now truly mine. No one could say my father had been a harsh landlord. He did not like my absences, but kept to his word and never told me so. If he grumbled at my accounts, it was not from avarice—he might do it in a good year—but because I had altered something on the farm. It was true that since old Phileas knew the work so well, I had begun to give him his head. His changes were for the better; the farm ran smoothly; he did not take free men in thrall for debt, or ill-treat the slaves; so, my mind at rest, I was free to walk out in the woods and hills and by the shore, following the rise and fall of words as one might chase a bright bird that teases one by flying out of view or perching in hidden branches, then of a sudden comes swooping in perfect plunge, its colors flashing, the whole curve of its path clear to enraptured eyes.