The Flowers of Adonis Read online

  ‘It was faulty logic, which is worse, since even Socrates had to admit himself beaten, and slip the leash and let him go his own wild way in the end.’

  ‘Socrates, for all his disrespect for the Gods, would never have countenanced this bad business with the Herms.’

  ‘We still don’t know it was Alkibiades.’

  ‘By the Dog! Who else could it have been?’

  And then they really were back where they had started; back to the damaged Herms.

  The Corinthians, the Gods, a drunken debauch with Alkibiades’ name generally cropping up somewhere. Other customers came and went, bringing the same theories over and over again, and stayed to argue them. But as the day went on, people seemed to be coming more and more to a new belief: that it was part of some plot to cause civil unrest and overthrow the government and bring in the Oligarchs again. I did not follow that line of reasoning myself, especially when, yet again, Alkibiades’ name started coming into it — His democratic sympathies were chief among the things that his own kind, the old ruling families, held against him.

  Then somebody said, ‘But he would not risk the Syracuse expedition — He dreamed it up himself.’

  And somebody else said, ‘He might think it worth exchanging for a Tyrant’s diadem.’

  We Athenians have been afraid of finding ourselves again bridled and bitted by a Tyrant, ever since Pisistratus. If Alkibiades was really playing for that, with or without the help of Corinth …

  But even then I did not understand the really dangerous thing: that most of the men who came into our shop that day — most of Athens — were afraid. It is when an animal is afraid that it turns vicious.

  That evening we heard that the Council had offered a reward, together with a promise of immunity, to anyone giving information about the mutilating of the Herms, or indeed of any other act of impiety that had lately taken place in the city.

  Nothing more was forthcoming about the Herms — not at that time — but suddenly the rumour was running wild through Athens, that a slave who had been overlooked and so remained in a room where he had no business to be, had sworn to a mock celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries after a riotous supper party in a private house. The slave was uninitiated and so free to speak, and gave an account of the whole ceremony, the Washing, the Invocation in the dark, and those other parts concerning the Showing of Demeter in the reaped ear of corn, of which the initiate may not speak. He gave place and time and names. The mock ceremony had been held at the house of one Polytion, a rich Syrian merchant, who had himself taken the part of the Herald, while the part of the Hight Priest had been played by Alkibiades, son of Cleinias.

  It was an almost perfect opportunity for his enemies. He was a man who burns too insufferably bright not to have enemies, and they were always alert for a chance to pull him down. The accusation broke on the very day that the fleet was ready for sea. Alkibiades was the youngest by far of the three appointed leaders, but the only one who counted for anything; and I remember thinking at the time it was odd that men should be prepared to wreck the Sicily expedition for the sake of ruining Alkibiades. I said as much to my father, but he told me I was only a boy and did not understand politics.

  True I did not understand politics; but it was three years since I had dedicated my boy’s long hair to Apollo, and I had the rights of a man and a citizen; and so I was on the Pnyx with the rest when Alkibiades stood up before the Council and the Citizens Assembly to deny the charges that had been made against him. I remember how his lazy blue gaze flickered over the Council then dropped them as a man might drop a dead mouse. It was little wonder, when one comes to think of it, that so many of his fellow nobles hated him, especially those such as Kritias, who had the itch for power themselves and knew that they looked small and mean when Alkibiades’ shadow fell across them. He demanded to stand his trial then and there while the fleet waited. He demanded that if they found him innocent, his innocence should be declared before the world, and his command restored to him without a fly-speck on the burnish of his name. He demanded death if he was found guilty, as a man demanding his rights. Then when he had said all that he wished to say (and he was one that could always sway a crowd with his tongue; even the lisp which made him pronounce his Rs as Ls, which any other orator might have found a disadvantage, was a distinction in him. I have sometimes thought that he could have carried off a short leg like mine and had half the young men of Athens limping, just as he had half of them lisping in those days) … but I’m wandering from the point; that’s because I’m growing old. When he had said all that he wished to say, and left his hearers feeling as though they had one skin less than when he started on them, he strolled down from the Speaker’s Rostrum and departed, trailing one corner of his big violet-coloured mantle through the dust behind him. He was not under arrest, so far, and so the Scythian archers of the police made no attempt to stop him.

  The Council sat constantly in the next three days; and news of their debates drifted out to us in the city. At first it was all confused and contradictory; then it began to seem as though they would put Alkibiades on trial as he demanded.

  I had a friend in the fleet, a rower in the Halkyone. Generally only resident aliens and the lowest class of citizens take to the rowing benches; but they get their half drachmas a day, and no equipment to find except their own leather rowing cushions; and his father, who was a merchant shopkeeper like mine, had suffered shipwreck and died in debt. While the fleet waited, some of the rowers were given dawn-to-dusk leave; and he came up from Piraeus to have another glimpse of his family, and then came on to me. We went out and sat under a white oleander among the tombs beyond the Dipylon Gate, with a handful of honey cakes between us. And we talked, as everybody was talking, of whether Alkibiades would get his trial, and if so, whether it would be rigged.

  Theron was quite determined that there would be no trial. ‘Not yet, anyway,’ he said.

  And I said, ‘I suppose the people would forgive him almost anything just now, with all our dreams hung round his shoulders. They’re frightened, of course, but I don’t believe they’re frightened enough to find him guilty.’

  ‘And an acquittal wouldn’t suit Kritias and his party. Also’, he took the grass stalk he had been chewing from between his teeth and squinted at it, ‘they do say that the Argives and the rest of the allied troops are threatening to desert and go home. They say they came to follow Alkibiades and they won’t fight if he doesn’t lead them.’

  I nodded. ‘I heard that, too. Theron, what does the fleet feel about it?’

  ‘I’m not the Admiral.’

  ‘You might have a better idea than the Admiral does.’

  ‘Well then, from where I sit, third bench starboard side Halkyone, I’d say the fleet was getting in a nasty temper with waiting. And, at a guess, the Army will be going much the way of the fleet.’ He lay back with his hands behind his head, looking up with narrowed eyes into the white-flowered sprays hanging low above us. ‘If they try Alkibiades now, I’d not be all that surprised if they have a mutiny on their hands.’

  ‘Then there’s not much they can do to him.’

  I remember he didn’t answer at once, just went on squinting up into the oleander sprays. Then he said, ‘Not just now, no.’

  When I asked him what he meant he wouldn’t explain, and showed signs of turning sour, as he always did if one pressed him with a question he didn’t want to answer. So I had to let it go, and we talked of other things until it was time for him to be getting back to the ship.

  Next day there was a surprise change, when certain orators began to get up in the Council and protest that now, with the expedition ready and waiting to sail, was not the moment to be trying one of its generals for blasphemy. No doubt, they said, Alkibiades had a perfectly good defence, so why not let him sail at once, in his original command; and doubtless the whole matter would be cleared up when he returned.

  Fool that I was, I thought the news was good; that when he returned triumph
ant everyone would have forgotten about the trial; and I could not really see why Alkibiades himself protested so furiously at the decision of the Council.

  As my father told me, I did not understand politics.

  *

  There was a clatter of horses’ hooves, and someone shouted, ‘It’s the Generals! Give them a cheer, lads!’

  It was two of the Generals. Old Lamachus, very grim and upright on his borrowed horse, his faded cloak hunched round him as though he were riding a night patrol. Poor old Lamachus, he was a good enough soldier once, so the men of my father’s generation used to say, and had a dash of the fire-eater about him still, but so ridiculously short of cash that he was like a character out of one of Aristophanes’ comedies! A General who indented for his own shoe leather! All Athens had rocked with laughter when the story got about! We gave him a cheer, all the same; especially the old soldiers in the crowd, and he put up his hand briefly in reply, but never looked to right or left of him. Then he was past, and his bitter-faced son Tydius riding with his staff officers behind him; and Nikias came clattering by, with his staff at his heels and his tame soothsayer riding beside him with the tripod and sacrificial knives. He must have just been sacrificing, for the wreath of golden laurel was still on his head. One could see over the top of it how bald he was getting, and his sickish look and yellow colour showed clear enough that his kidneys (which were as much public property as Lamachus’ boot leather) had turned sour again.

  ‘Not in good condition for leading an army,’ said the younger of my two neighbours in the crowd. ‘Ah well, he’s only there to keep the curb on Alkibiades.’

  Nikias looked so noble under the priestly wreath, that one forgot that he made his money as a contractor supplying the slaves to the Laurian silver mines, where the strongest sometimes last three years and the weaker as many months. So we cheered him too; and he was more gracious about it than Lamachus, bending a little to the left and right as he rode, and making again and again the same stately gesture of acknowledgment with one thin yellow hand.

  Then they had gone clattering by, their escorts behind them, and once again the street was empty, with its dark stain of trampled Adonis flowers. And again I heard from the side street, the women’s voices wailing against the flutes.

  Her lament is for a field where corn and herbs grow not,

  Her lament is for a thicket of reeds where no reeds grow,

  Her lament is for woods where the tamarisks grow not.

  And then, far up in the heart of the city where the street turns from the Panathenic Way, we heard the cheering. It came roaring towards us like the autumn spate down a dry river bed, and we heard the shining shout of Alkibiades’ name.

  It was so exactly like him to leave that stretch of empty, waiting street between himself and his fellow Generals, making of himself the final flowering of all that had gone before.

  He had no escort with him, save for a mounted groom to carry his shield; as though he would say, ‘Why should I need an escort? For splendour? I am Alkibiades, that is splendour enough! For safety? And you not my own people? My own city?’ It was one of the most superb pieces of arrogance, I think, that I have ever seen.

  There is no need to speak of the horse he rode; he always rode horses of his own breeding, and with Thessalian stallions he bred the finest horses in Attica. His chlamys, of the deep violet colour he so often wore, was flung back from one shoulder as though by accident, but no accident could have set the straight folds falling with such perfection. The sunlight splintered on the fine gold inlay of his thorax, and on his famous gilded shield, with its blazon of Eros wielding a thunderbolt, that the groom carried behind him. His helmet, with its high stallion crest of dark blue enamel, was the open kind, so that one could see his face as he looked about him. And we knew that it was for us that he cocked his golden beard and made his eyes wide and lazy-dancing, as a woman puts on her best chiton and her fairest face for the man she would rather please than any other.

  He was not smiling; indeed rather grave about the mouth, but with a kind of delight like a bloom upon him, and we knew, all of us crowded along the sides of the street, that it was us he delighted in, as we delighted in him.

  And I thought suddenly, ‘We’re in love with him; all Athens is in love with him, and he with us; but it isn’t a good love, not on either side — it isn’t trustworthy — like a tame leopard that plays with the dogs, and one day turns and tears you …’

  As he came opposite to where I stood, he turned his head, and just for a breath of time he looked full at me.

  It was not easy to be young, and to watch young men march away to the war that was to gather so much glory (I was still so near to being a boy that war seemed to me a fine and valiant thing) and that passing glance made it no easier. In that moment, if I could have known what waited for our troops in Sicily, I think that with Alkibiades’ blazing blue glance upon me, I would still have asked nothing more of life than to follow him.

  Then he was past, and the gold-dust fell from my eyes; and I saw again the empty street between its long hedges of craning people, and the bruise-dark stains of the trampled Adonis flowers. Men broke forward to follow him; some would run at his horse’s heels all the way to Piraeus.

  The younger of the two men beside me said, ‘The Gods help him if ever he betrays us.’

  And the old man said, ‘And may they help both him and us if ever we betray him.’

  In the empty street it was as though the sun had gone behind a cloud; and somewhere the women were still wailing for the dead Adonis.

  Oh my Enchanter and Priest! At his vanishing away she lifts up a lament.

  Like the lament that a house lifts up for its master, lifts she up a lament.

  Like the lament that a city lifts up for its Lord, lifts she up a lament.

  The lament for a herb that grows not in the bed,

  The lament for the corn that grows not in the ear …

  I knew it was time to be going home.

  2

  The Soldier

  I was on the young side for a lieutenant of marines, especially aboard the flagship (one of the flagships. Officially there were two more, each carrying an antique general on board, but in practice the Icarus was the only one that counted.) But it always used to be said that Alkibiades was a young man’s Commander; he promoted for skill at the job, not for seniority; so much so that some of our elders and betters didn’t like it.

  We were quartered in barracks behind the arsenal at Zea the main war harbour, but the increased fleet had meant heavy recruiting from the hoplites into the marines, and so we had spilled over on top of the first-year Ephebes in the Munychian Fort. Even so, it was close quarters. But at any rate, for us, there was no long march down from Athens that morning, only a few steep stades past the temple of Artemis and down through the main marketplace of Piraeus to the Great Harbour for embarkation. We had made the same march every morning, through the angry days of waiting; but now we knew that there would be no marching back to barracks, no more days spent in drill and weapon-practice and cleaning equipment that was clean already. No more evenings in the wine shops, telling each other what we would do to the Council and the Archons if they laid a finger on him. The orders had come at last; the wind was for Syracuse.

  It was the day of the Adonis, which was a pity. We had heard the flutes and the women wailing even before first light, and all up and down the narrow ways between Fort and Arsenal, where the shipwrights lived, among the warehouses of the foreign merchants, even along the water-front itself, the dead Adonis had passed, and the little red roses that the women scatter before his bier lay bright on the ground. We trampled on them as we marched. Some of my dozen didn’t like it much; sailors are notoriously a superstitious lot, and the marines catch it from them. One or two made the sign against ill-luck, when they thought I wasn’t looking. So I made them sing. There’s nothing like a good quick marching song for blowing away that kind of cobweb. Other companies took it up from us, and
we went swinging down from the market-place and along the quayside roaring at the tops of our voices. It was ‘Simaetha Sweet, come kiss me now’. Men very seldom sing of war when they are marching out to it. They sing about girls or drinking or beautiful boys; or rude catches about their officers. It’s the old men, remembering, who sing the soldier songs.

  The crowds were gathering already, lining the streets, hanging out of windows, fringing the flat roofs of warehouses. The gay ladies of the port had done with mourning for Adonis and bound up their hair again. A girl I’d rounded off several pleasant nights with leaned out from her doorway and pulled her veil half aside as we passed. I blew her a kiss; then we swung left-handed down towards the jetty where the Icarus’ boats lay ready for us, and the bright boys of Alkibiades’ staff already stood waiting for his coming.

  The store ships and big transports had sailed for the gathering at Korkyra, before the trouble about the Herms blew up; and only the fighting ships, brought round from Zea and Munychia remained; a hundred and twenty of them; the slim fierce triremes of the fleet, made fast alongside wharves and jetties or riding at single anchor out in the harbour. Their newly vermilioned flanks stained the water with their reflections; the painted masks of their bows, boars’ heads, dolphins’ heads, leopards’ heads, tossed a little in the swell lifting the bronze rams at times almost clear of the water, staring back at the sun with hard-painted eyes. The masts were already stepped, with the sails close furled at the yards; the rowers in their places.

  The boats took us out to the Icarus, and we took up our ceremonial positions on the foredeck, standing easy with probably a long wait before us. All the harbour was full of picket-boats ferrying men out to their ships. Around us, as we stood resting on our spears, was the ordered bustle of the flagship making ready for sea. The rowers waited, arms on knees, their oars lying inboard; the seamen were busy with the tackle; on the after-deck Antiochus, our sailing-master, stood talking to his second and the bo’s’n, and playing, in the way that he had, with one of the great silver and coral ornaments he wore, like any barbarian, in his ears.