The Last of the Wine: A Novel

  I told him I had heard of the speech but never read it; and he quoted me as much of it as he could remember. Since then I have read it many times. But since I never knew Perikles, to me it is always Lysis who is speaking; I see not the tomb and the rostrum, but the lamps of Samos through a doorway, his shadow thrown big upon the wall, the piled armour shining beside the pallet, the black glossy wine-cup, and his hand, with an old ring of plaited gold on it, touching the stem.

  “Men are not born equal in themselves,” he said to me after, “so I think it beneath a man to postulate that they are. If I thought myself as good as Sokrates I should be a fool; and if, not really believing it, I asked you to make me happy by assuring me of it, you would rightly despise me. So why should I insult my fellow-citizens by treating them as fools and cowards? A man who thinks himself as good as everyone else will be at no pains to grow better. On the other hand, I might think myself as good as Sokrates, and even persuade other fools to agree with me; but under a democracy, Sokrates is there in the Agora to prove me wrong. I want a City where I can find my equals and respect my betters, whoever they are; and where no one can tell me to swallow a lie because it is expedient, or some other man’s will.”

  Then the day’s weariness came down on us, and we slept. And next day, the Paralos set out to bring the good news to Athens, her prow garlanded, the rowers singing at the oar. When we had cheered them away, I went to the temple and offered a kid to Zeus, for saving my father in his own despite.

  We had no more trouble with the oligarchs, whose only care now was to hide their traces and save their skins. After the Paralos sailed, we spent a very peaceful week; I mean to say that it was peaceful in Samos. I cannot say quite the same for myself; for within the next two days Lysis remarked to me, in the easy way he had at such times, that he had met a girl in the town who had taken his fancy, and was going that night to visit her. This was the first time it had happened, that I knew of, since things had changed between us; and I was surprised to find how much I minded it. You might almost have thought, from my vexation, that he had been caught by some youth who could seriously engage him. It was absurd, considering his fidelity.

  I was oiling the straps of his armour and mine (leather perishes quickly in sea air) and I kept busy at it, to hide my thoughts. But he noticed I had got rather quiet, and asked whether I would like to come too, for he was sure his girl could find another one for me. I thanked him, and said I would come another night. He stood combing his hair into curl, and whistling to himself; then he looked round, and sitting down by me, urged me very kindly to come. He said among other things that I was my father’s only son, and should have one day to marry; and I should not know whom to choose, or how to make the best of her, if I had not got myself used to women first. I told him I liked them well enough, but not tonight. The truth was that his encouragement had rather missed its mark, reminding me that it would be he, in the natural course of things, who would get married first. People I knew seemed to take this lightly enough; I had seen them acting groomsman to their friends with perfect cheerfulness; it distressed me to think myself more given to extremes, and less capable of reason, than other men. Indeed, when I look back, I cannot understand myself at this time of my life.

  When he had gone, I went out walking; for the god, having marked me down for punishment, spared neither my mind nor body, and I could not stay in bed. There was a young moon in the sky; I went up by the footpath to Polykrates’ castle, and sat looking out to sea. The place smelled of sheep, for the flock was in the fold; there was a smell too of thyme, and of green things in spring. I complained to the god that he was unjust to me, who had never insulted nor defied him; but with face averted he accused me, reminding me of my former unkindness to Lysis, who had shown nothing but kindness to me; and of how, long before that, I had cared nothing for Polymedes, or for a dozen others whose names, even, I had not kept in mind. He said too that by my own will I had become his bondsman; and that since he was the giver of more joy to men than any other deity, it was natural his chastisements should give more pain. So I acknowledged his justice, and at last went home; and when Lysis came back, I pretended to be sleeping.

  As it turned out, he found the girl more pleasing than he had expected, and went back to her several nights running. I suffered at the time. Yet it has left less mark upon my mind than wounds which seemed slighter at first, where someone of small consequence has failed me in loyalty or honour. As the mould is broken and falls to dust, while the statue of bronze endures, I cannot call the pain to life again; yet remember like yesterday the scents of night, the Galaxy hanging like spray in the deep sky, the cresset burning on an anchored ship, and the cry of a waking lamb answered by the night-jar.

  I don’t know how long all this would have gone on. The thing was getting a hold on me that was past all sense, and Lysis had even asked me whether I was ill. But serious matters broke in on us, and blew such follies away.

  The trierarch of the Paralos arrived alone, in a trader from Aegina. The ship had reached Athens to find the oligarchs already in control. Made desperate by the loss of Alkibiades, they had not dared to await results in Samos, but moved at once. They had falsely reported the coup successful and Alkibiades on the way; and getting power on the strength of this, had stopped all payment for public office and dismissed the Senate. Between hired bullies and informers they were keeping the people down, and their own moderates quiet by promising an electoral roll of gentlemen, which was to come out shortly.

  When they knew what news the Paralos brought, they dared not let the City hear it. They turned the whole crew off the ship of honour, where it was their right to serve, transferred them to a troopship just leaving port, and imprisoned those who refused to go. The trierarch, by luck, had seen what was happening from the dock, and slipping off among the shipping had escaped to bring back word. He added that any soldier had only to look at the new fort they were building on the harbour, to see what it was for: to hold the grain-store against the citizens, and made a bridgehead for the Spartans to land.

  You might have supposed this news would have flung all Samos from triumph to despair. But our blood still glowed with victory, our souls with our just cause; we were like the men of Marathon when they marched straight off the field to take their stand before the City, knowing the gods were with them.

  The day after we got the news, Athenians and Samians together, soldiers and seamen and citizens, trooped up together to their hilltop acropolis. There we took an oath of fellowship, to defend each other’s liberties, pursue the war, and make no terms with our enemies, at home or abroad. It is a great open field up there, girt with an ancient wall; larks flew up singing when we raised the hymn to Zeus, and the smoke of the offering rose straight to heaven.

  I have never felt less like an exile. It was we who were the City now, a free Athens beyond the sea. We carried her sword too and her armour; it was the Navy, not the government at home, which levied the island tribute to finance the war. The sun shone; the sea like hammered silver flashed below us; we felt we were making a new thing on the earth.

  Afterwards, down in the city, every Athenian found himself pulled into a Samian house and set in the guest’s chair, while they brought out the best wine and spiced figs and anything they had. I told the story of my life, or a good part of it, at three Samian hearths that evening; and when Lysis and I met in camp we were neither of us quite sober. But we were happy, and full of faith. He had forgotten all about the girl; and, what was more remarkable, so had I.

  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.

  “I’ve posted the Thracians over the hill,” he said. “We can do this business without them. Neither god nor man can hold a Thracian in a taken town; and I passed my word, if the City paid tribute, to shed no blood.” In necessity he killed without softness; but he killed without lust, and seemed always well pleased to get what he wanted without it. Whatever had moved him against Melos (I suppose he saw what the Athenians wanted) that one day, it seems, lasted him a lifetime.

  We finished supper, and were mixing the last round of wine. Below us the fires twinkled on the shore; a stade or so away, just out of bowshot, were the dark walls of the town. Night was falling. Of a sudden Lysis pointed and said, “Did you say midnight, Alkibiades
? What’s that?”

  The torch burned red above the gate-tower. We leaped to our feet dismayed. The army was half a mile away; most of them naked by this time, oiling and scraping-down, or mending their armour before the action. Our eyes all turned to Alkibiades. The prize was dangling, while he watched helpless with only thirty men in arms. I for one was simply waiting to hear him curse. I had heard great accounts of it.

  He stood with his large blue eyes fixed upon the torch, and his brows lifted. “These colonials,” he said. “People who turn up to a party while one is still dressing. Someone has gone white-livered, I suppose, and the rest daren’t wait. Pollis, run back to camp, fall in the men, and bring them up at the double. Company, stand to arms. Well, friends, there’s the signal, and here we go. Forward!”