The Flowers of Adonis Read online

  The Flowers of Adonis

  Rosemary Sutcliff

  © Rosemary Sutcliff 1969

  Rosemary Sutcliff has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 1969 by Hodder Paperbacks Ltd.

  This edition published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2014.

  Table of Contents

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  LIST OF CHARACTERS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Extract from Blood and Sand by Rosemary Sutcliff

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  In writing The Flowers Of Adonis, I have followed the historical accounts as closely as in me lies — allowing for the fact that no two historical accounts of the same events ever exactly tally. But being an historical novelist rather than a historian, I have felt free to “fill in the gaps” and tidy up a little here and there.

  I have provided a possible explanation for Antiochus’ insane foolhardiness when left in command of the Athenian Fleet, because Thucidides’ bald account is so unbelievable (unless one assumes that both Antiochus and Alkibiades were mentally defective) that any explanation seems more likely than none. I have departed from Xenophon in making Timandra the companion of Alkibiades’ escape from Sardis.

  Alkibiades himself is an enigma. Even allowing that no man is all black and all white, few men can ever have been more wildly and magnificently piebald. Like another strange and contradictory character Sir Walter Raleigh, he casts a glamour that comes clean down the centuries, a dazzle of personal magnetism that makes it hard to see the man behind it. I have tried to see. I have tried to fit the pieces together into a coherent whole; I don’t know whether I have been successful or not; but I do not think that I have anywhere falsified the portrait.

  I admit, before anyone accuses me of theft, that the lament for Adonis, which I have used in the first and last chapters of this book, is in fact a lament for Tammuz the Babylonian original of the same God, as anyone may see, who reads The Golden Bough.

  It remains only to thank Richard Nelson for his kindness in checking the naval side of my Peloponnesian War for mistakes; and to point out that any mistakes remaining in that department are therefore his and not mine!

  R. S.

  FOR RUPERT

  Cyrano: Si nouveau … mais oui … d’être sincere:

  La peur d’être raillé, toujours, au coeur me serre …

  Roxane: Raillé de quoi?

  Cyrano: Mais de … d’un élan! … Oui, mon coeur,

  Toujours, de mon esprit s’habille, par pudeur:

  Je pars pour décrocher l’étoile, et je m’arrête

  Par peur du ridicule, à cueillir la fleurette!

  Cyrano de Bergerac

  LIST OF CHARACTERS

  Athenians

  Kymon Timotheus Tekla

  Vasso Myrrhine Eudorus

  Gaulites Konon Theron

  Pericles Kxitias Arkadius

  Lamachus Nikias Nikomedes

  Socrates Antiochus Teucer

  Androcles Deicleides Demonsthenes

  Corylas Astur Cleomenes

  Hipparite Strombichides Phrynichus

  Paesander Charminius Thrassylus

  Ariston Thrasybulus Callias

  Theramenes Episthenes Telamon

  Cleontius Myron Tydius

  Thasos Menander Heraklides

  Adeimantus Dexippus

  Sicilians

  Archagorus Aristarchus Menaethius

  Pharysatis Basius Demetrios

  Alexandros

  Spartans

  Endius King Agis Lysander

  Gylippos Queen Timea Dionyssa

  King Pausanius Gorgo Eurynomae

  Panthea Leotichides Alkmenes

  Chalcidius Kalitikades Clearchus

  Persians

  Artaxerxes II Cyrus Tissaphernes

  Pharnobazus Megaus Sousamitras

  Bithynians

  Timandra Seitelkas

  Syrian

  Polytion

  Chersonese Thracian

  Seuthes Medacus

  1

  The Citizen

  If I had not fallen out of an olive tree and broken my leg when I was ten years old, or if it hadn’t been badly set so that it mended short, I should in all likelihood not be remembering now — unless the dead remember — the day that our Army sailed for Syracuse.

  Not being fit for soldiering, I had to stay behind and go on helping my father in the shop. But I was out in the street, close down by the Piraeus Gate with everyone else, to watch them go. More than five thousand heavy-armed hoplites beside the light spearmen, and the archers and slingers. They came, company by company, tribe by tribe, swinging along, the round shields clanging on their shoulders at every step: a bronze sound in the fading torchlight before dawn. The ground under our feet felt the tramp of their footsteps, like a great ragged pulse beating; one heart beating in all of us, those who went and those who stayed behind. The sun was up before the last companies went by, though the street was still full of shadows. And we began to see their faces …

  Some were seasoned fighting men, for the Council had called up several of the senior classes; but others were my own age; men who had been Ephebes doing their national service training only last year, and their faces under the curved bronze crests were alight and purposeful with Alkibiades’ dreams that they thought — that we all thought — were our own. Friends and kinsfolk hurried and jostled alongside the marching columns, as they would do all the way to the ships, carrying baskets of last moment provisions, calling out messages from others who could not come.

  They passed out through the Gate and away down the broad straight road between the Long Walls, to Piraeus and the waiting ships. And the dust cloud of early summer rose behind their rearmost ranks, hiding them from our sight. The throbbing in the ground died away, and we heard the cheering run on, rippling ahead of them down the Long Walls.

  Behind them, the street in the emptiness and early sunlight was splashed and spattered with blood!

  For the one instant, before the truth that my mind already knew could reach my body, the hair crawled on the back of my neck. Then the moment passed. It was the day when the women mourn for Adonis; when at every street corner one meets little companies of them carrying clay figurines of the dead God laid out as though for burial, in their midst; and all over the city, now here, now there, one hears them lamenting against the wail of the flutes. My own mother and Tekla my sister had loosened their hair and gone out to wail for him long before first light, with baskets of the little dark red roses, that are his flowers in the summer as the crimson anemones are his flowers in the waking spring, to scatter before his bier. Many such little mourning companies must have passed through the streets before the marching columns that morning; the scattered flowers, dark-bruised and smashed beneath the armies’ feet, were as though they left the street spattered with blood behind them.

  There was a sudden quiet; only the cheering growing fainter in the distance, and somewhere down a side street, still the thin wailing of the flutes.

  At his vanishing away she lifts up a lament,

  ‘Oh my child.’ At his vanishing away she lifts up a lament.

  Her
lament is for the herb that grows not in the bed,

  Her lament is for the corn that grows not in the ear —

  ‘It’s a pity the delay should have brought the fleet’s sailing to this particular day,’ said an old man beside me in the crowd.

  His younger companion laughed. ‘You and your omens! You’re as bad as our valiant General Nikias who goes back to bed for the day if a fly settles on his big toe, and consults his soothsayers every morning as to the meaning of his last night’s dreams.’

  But I thought the laughter sounded a little over-hearty.

  I am not one to trouble much about omens, either. But Athens is noticeably empty of men of my own generation, even today …

  *

  The fleet had been nearly ready to sail when the thing happened that delayed it for two days; an excitement was mounting in the city like the heat mounting in the body of a man with fever, who is wild with the exultation of it yet screams out at shadows. Maybe that was why it took such a nightmare hold on our most evil fears.

  A few dogs barked in the night, but that was all. Even now I cannot imagine how the work was done so silently; but in the morning, going out early to open the shop (we lived behind and over the shop, as I still do) I saw that the face of the guardian Herm before our door had been hacked to pieces, and the phallus on his column smashed away.

  I can remember now, standing before it like a fool, shaking and sick, and making the sign against ill-luck with my fingers, and wondering what we could have done to make the Gods so angry with our house.

  But it was not our house alone. Almost every Herm in the city had had the same treatment, even the ones that were made of stone.

  We purified the house with seawater and hyssop, and opened the shop very late. I do not think we have ever had so many customers, before or since, as we had that day. Not customers exactly, for many of them did not even make pretence of having come to buy; people always gather to the barbers or the armourers or the perfume shops to meet their friends and talk, as an alternative to the palaestra colonnades; and there was plenty to talk about in Athens at that time. For months past, the men who came to my father’s shop to buy iris perfume and oil of rosemary had been drawing each other maps of Sicily with their long walking sticks on the floor, and arguing endlessly about the coming campaign. Ever since the envoys had arrived from Segesta begging for help in the name of the old alliance, against Syracuse who had already swallowed up their neighbour-town Leontini and was well on the way to controlling all Sicily. And what could Athens do, in honour, when an old ally cried for aid? (We conveniently forgot Plataea and other occasions on which our honour had been less sensitive; but on those occasions, of course, it had not had Alkibiades’ dream to prick it on.)

  But today our customers had left their maps of Sicily, and talked startled-faced, as I suppose all Athens was talking, of nothing but the mutilated Herms.

  One of the first-comers, Eudorus, a small devout man, plump as a partridge and with a mouth pursed in perpetual disapproval, began telling everyone that it was a sign the Gods were against the Sicily campaign. ‘Socrates has been against the whole insane business from the first,’ he said.

  And another, sniffing rose oil from the inside of his wrist, said, ‘Since when have you been a follower of Socrates, Eudorus?’

  ‘I? My dear Gaulites, I’m not a green boy to go mooning after that creature; but there’s no denying he has an uncanny way of being right at times.’

  ‘Ah, that Daemon of his — Myself, I’d say more likely there were human hands responsible for last night’s work.’

  ‘The Corinthians,’ said a third man. ‘They’re generally at the bottom of anything unsavoury; and after all, Syracuse is a Corinthian colony.’

  Gaulites nodded to my father that he would take the rose oil. ‘Come to that, the Spartans would have good enough reason to try scaring us off the expedition; both Corinth and Syracuse are allies of theirs.’

  ‘But we are at truce with Sparta,’ Eudorus objected.

  ‘For the moment a somewhat brittle truce. A Syracuse that had gobbled up the rest of Sicily, wealth and manpower and all, would be in a good position to help Sparta break it.’

  The latest-comer, who had been standing unnoticed for the past few moments in the doorway, said, ‘This wasn’t foreign work. It was done by somebody who knows the city like their own afterdeck.’

  ‘Somebody! My dear Konon. It would have taken a couple of hundred men at least to get through last night’s work!’

  Konon, the young Trirarch of the Thetis, came forward and sat down on the cushioned bench. His square, heavy-browed face thoughtful, and he seemed to be studying his finger-nails as though he had never seen them before. ‘Every city has its traitors; its men who have their price,’ he said. ‘I dare say there might be two hundred to be found in Athens, given one man to set the thing moving.’

  ‘You’re all leaving out the Gods,’ Eudorus said fretfully. ‘That’s the trouble with the world today. I dare say I’m old-fashioned, but —’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Gaulites kindly, ‘it suits you, Eudorus dear.’

  My father looked round from replacing some flasks of rubbing oil. ‘If you’ll forgive me saying so, gentlemen, there’s something else you’re leaving out — Oh I admit I was shaken when I saw my own Herm this morning, but I’m wondering now if there’s need to look further than one God, and that one Dionysus. The young of today mix too little water with their wine, and they have no more respect for the Gods than they have for their own fathers. You’re right there, sir — especially those of them that have listened to Socrates.’

  That was meant for me, because I did not always agree with him about certain things; but one of the growing company pounced on quite another meaning that he read into my father’s words. ‘Well, we all know who that description fits.’

  For a silent moment they all looked at each other with raised brows. Then someone said, ‘He wouldn’t! Not with Syracuse at stake!’

  ‘Some people find playing with fire amusing,’ Gaulites said. ‘When most other forms of amusement have palled, with frequent usage. And we all know how he likes to give the city something to talk about.’

  ‘There’s a difference between cutting off his dog’s tail and committing sacrilege,’ Eudorus said primly.

  No one actually spoke Alkibiades’ name; but nevertheless, that was the first time I heard him connected with the mutilation of the Herms. Then my father saw me goggling, and bade me go down to the storeroom and check the new consignment of sesame oil; and when I came back, the unspoken name had come out into the open, and they were all talking about the scandalous things that Alkibiades had done since he could crawl.

  People always talked about Alkibiades, with love or loathing or laughter, or a kind of shocked delight. But this time I think they were talking to convince themselves that he was the kind of man who might have committed the outrage; because it was better for one’s peace of mind to believe that he and his friends and followers had done it in a drunken revel than to believe that the Gods or the Corinthians had done it.

  ‘There was that time he bit his opponent in a wrestling bout, and when the trainer called him to account for fighting like a woman, he said, “Not I, I fight like a lion!” He can’t have been more than ten or eleven.’

  ‘He was younger than that when I saw him myself playing knucklebones in the street, and a wagon came along, so he bade the wagoner pull up while he finished his throw. And when the man would not, and the other boys scattered out of the way, what does my young Lord do but lie down under the mules’ noses and dare the wagoner to drive over him!’

  Then they fell to talking about all the lovers he had had trailing after him for his beauty when he was a boy, and how shamefully he had treated them all. I only heard snatches of that, because my father kept me busy; but anyhow I know most of the stories by heart. They said how strange it was that the good and noble Cleinias should have had such a son, and Pericles, who reared him aft
er his father was killed at Coronaia, such a fosterling. Someone said with a snort, ‘Pericles may have virtually ruled Athens for fifteen years, but he could never control that young devil for a day.’

  ‘Nobody has ever been able to control him except Socrates.’

  ‘There you are then: a man who rejects the guidance of Pericles to follow at the heels of that creature with a face like a satyr’s mask, who has taught half the youth of Athens his own disrespect for the Gods —’

  In another moment they would be back to the mutilated Herms, but Konon the Trirarch, who had taken little part in the conversation, put in quietly, ‘They were old tenting companions on the Potidea campaign, you know.’

  ‘Oh yes, we all know that, and saved each others’ lives in the best tradition of true love — without even being lovers.’

  ‘That wasn’t for want of trying on Alkibiades’ part. Did you ever hear him tell the story of how he tried to seduce Socrates? I nearly laughed myself sick.’

  (‘Gods!’ I thought, ‘and they say women are the gossips!’)

  Konon got to his feet. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was at that dinner party too, but maybe you have forgotten. It was funny. It doesn’t seem so funny since they broke up.’ He strolled towards the doorway, then checked and looked back. ‘It’s odd, you know, we were talking just now about his lovers. Of them all, Socrates was the only one who was ever able to hold him to the best in himself — even strip the shine of other men’s flattery from him and make him look at himself naked for the good of his soul. That must have been extremely unpleasant for the likes of Alkibiades; and yet if he ever gave any man love in return for love, it was Socrates. Incidentally, Socrates seldom wastes his time on men not worth the expenditure.’

  He turned with a swirl of his light summer mantle and disappeared down the street.

  The others looked after him for a moment in silence. Then Eudorus said, ‘Really, that was in extremely bad taste.’