The Last of the Wine (15 page)

I could not believe he was afraid of my seeing his style, for he stood and moved like a gentleman. Just then I noticed a deep wound in his leg, as if a spear had gone clean through. I apologised, and asked if it gave him much trouble. He looked at me strangely. “It’s nothing. I never feel it now.” Then he said slowly, “I got it in battle. But we lost.”

The scar was almost white, yet he seemed no older than I. He spoke a Doric Greek, with an accent of the islands. I asked him what battle it was he had fought in. But he stared in silence, his eyes like a winter midnight under his shining hair. I felt troubled and constrained; at last I said, “Where do you come from, Phaedo?”—“You should have asked before, Athenian. I come from Melos.”

I was about to hold out my hand to him, and say the war was over. But the words died upon my tongue. I knew why he could not go into the palaestra. Till now, it had only been a tale to me. It is the victor who can say, “The war is over,” and go home. Only death ends it, for a slave.

He was withdrawing already; I put out my hand to keep him, as bewildered as if I had seen the sun rising in the west. In everything I had found him my superior. I had not believed such things could be in the world. There was no time to think more, for I saw in his face that he suffered. I said, “Can we both be friends of Sokrates, and not of one another? And they say, ‘Fate is the master of all men.’”

His dark eyes paused, dwelling on mine. Young as he was, I felt not pleased by his gratitude, but honoured by his approval. “I am sorry, Alexias,” he said, “that we can’t wrestle; we might have matched up well. They used to say of me too that I was not bad for a runner.” He smiled at me; there is a beauty of the soul that works up through bitterness like a vein of marble through earth. “Be sure,” I exclaimed, “the gods will not suffer this forever.” He looked at me as an old man looks at a child. “I come to Sokrates not in the hope of understanding the gods, but that he may lend me, perhaps, his belief that they are good.”

“Tell me if you will,” I said, “what master do you work for?” His face grew dark. It grieved me to have offended him. I begged his pardon and said it was no matter. He looked up from the ground and said, “It wasn’t there that I met Sokrates.”—“No matter,” I said. “We shall meet tomorrow, or very soon?” He said, “I come when I can.”

I wondered how he got away, and if they would beat him. He was hardly out of my mind all evening. Next day I was setting out to tell Lysis the story, when I met my uncle Strymon in the court. He told me in his weightiest manner that he had something to say to me; adding, when I would have led him to the living-room, that it was no fit matter for my mother’s ears. Now fairly mystified, I took him to the guest-room. After coughing, stroking his beard, and saying he felt responsible to my father, he began, “What you do behind closed doors, Alexias, I cannot control. Yet I am sorry to see debauchery in one so young, who lacks even the excuse of ugliness or deformity, which might have kept you from enjoying the pleasures of love in an honourable way.”

“Debauchery?” I said, staring at him as if he were mad. My last party had been a fortnight ago; Lysis had been there, and wishing to avoid anything that might disgust him, I had gone home nearly sober. “I assure you, sir, you have been misled.”—“Not unless my eyes mislead me; and I may say I have always been noted for excellent sight. To walk the public streets with a boy from Gurgos’s bath-house! Alkibiades himself was rarely so shameless. I assure you, at your age I hardly knew such people existed.”—“What boy?” I asked. But he saw my face change and said, “I see you understand me.”

“A slave does not choose his master,” I said, “and war is war.” I felt angry with the whole world, with Necessity and Fate. He was stroking his beard again, getting something ready. “And what shall we say of a man setting himself up to instruct the youth, who not only resorts to such creatures himself, but admits them among his pupils?” Anger almost choked me; but I mastered it, the better to deal with him. “I am to blame, sir, that as I have only talked philosophy with the youth, I forgot to ask him what he did. But I thank you for the information. How, sir, did you find it out?”

In the street, I daresay; but it did me good to see his face. At least he could see my teacher had sharpened my wits. But Lysis looked serious when I told him, and said that if my uncle thought ill of Sokrates, a pert answer would not make him think better. This was the first time he had ever reproved me. When he saw how I felt it, he soon relented.

He went out of his way after this to greet Phaedo kindly; but the boy grew silent in company, as Sokrates had found. He would talk, when we were alone, but always as across an invisible shield. He was waiting for me to find out what he was and turn against him, and I saw it. You may wonder indeed why I did not feel a distaste in spite of myself. But first love, like the light of dawn, sheds a kind of beauty wherever you look. Besides, though I knew what his life was, I knew it without understanding, as one knows of a country where one has not been. It only gave him a strangeness for me.

One day I met him early in the morning, walking out to the Academy. As we went up the Street of Tombs, we fell to talking of death; and Phaedo said he did not believe the soul survives it, whether in the underworld, or in a new body, or in the air. I replied that since I had loved Lysis, it seemed impossible to me that the soul should be extinguished. “The soul is a surfeit-dream,” he said, “of a man with food and drink in him and his lust fed. Let the body be hungry, or thirsty, or in desire, and what is his soul but the dog’s nose that leads it to flesh? The dog dies, and rots, and its nose smells nothing.” He spoke as if he hated me, and wished to leave me nothing that could give me joy. Yet I remembered I had failed Sokrates once, and Lysis had reproved me; and I paused to think. I said, “If you put a fat old man into the long-race, he will fall down dead. Does that prove it can’t be run? This, Phaedo, is why I think the soul outlives the body: I have seen how the body can be bought and sold, and not only that, but forced to what it hates and would never consent to; yet the soul can be free, and keep its courage, and defy its fate. So I believe in the soul.”

He was silent some time, walking so fast that the limp from his wound appeared. At last he said, “It seemed incredible that you could know.” I said I would never have intruded in the matter, except that the silence was putting a distance between us. “I can’t keep much from Lysis,” I said. “But you can rely on him not to talk, as you can on me.” He laughed shortly and said, “Don’t make a trouble of it. Kritias knows.”

A little later, finding he had never been out of the City, I took him walking in the pine-woods at the foot of Lykabettos. It was there he told me how he had been enslaved. After his city had been some months besieged, his father, who was a strategos, had raised a troop of volunteers to storm the Athenian siege-wall, a desperate enterprise which had almost succeeded. Phaedo, fighting at his father’s side, got a wound there, which did not heal well, because by then they were almost starving. The Athenians sent for more troops, and closed the gap; no food came in at all, and they could only throw themselves on the mercy of the enemy. Phaedo, who could not walk alone, lay on his bed, listening to the clamour as the gates were opened and the Athenians marched in. Presently he heard a great shrieking of women, and the death-cries of men. Soldiers ran in, dragged him from his bed to the Agora, and threw him down among a crowd of young lads and children, who had been herded into the sheep-pound. Just across the square was a pile of corpses newly killed, and still being added to; sticking out of the midst of it was his father’s head. There was an auctioneers’ rostrum in the Agora; here, where he could see well and be out of the dirt and mess, stood Philokrates the Athenian commander, directing the slaughter of the fighting men which the Athenians had ordered. It went on for some time. Phaedo did not come too late to see his lover brought in with bound hands, and run through the throat before his eyes. When it was time to lead off the women to the ships, Philokrates came down from the rostrum to choose a couple for himself. The rest were taken away to be sold. Thus Phaedo saw the last of his mother, a woman not long past thirty, and handsome still.

He had been brought to the Piraeus slave-market very sick with his wound; but Gurgos had taken a risk on him for the sake of his looks, and nursed him well. At first he had not understood what the place was, and thought he was to work as a bathman. When he knew, he refused food and drink, intending to die. “Then,” he said, “in the evening old Gurgos came and left a cup of wine beside me. The wine-jar had just been drawn up from the well, and the cup sweated with coolness. I was faint and thirsty; and I said to myself, ‘For whom am I doing this? I who have neither father nor friend to be dishonoured, who believe neither in men nor in any god? The birds and beasts live from hour to hour, and they live very well.’” He had learned the arts of his calling, and commanded a high price. But on a certain day, feeling his soul sickened and his mind in turmoil, he had locked the door as though someone was with him, and getting out by the window, had wandered about the City. There he had passed Sokrates talking, and had stayed to listen. “Is it true, Alexias, that there is an Athenian who lives in a cave and hates men?”—“Yes: Timon.”—“When I came to Sokrates I was much the same, I mean in my soul. I had taught myself to withdraw my mind from them, as the herdsman sits apart on a rock, to windward of the goats. I did not wish to share my rock with anyone; if one of my beasts aspired toward manhood, I had learned how to keep him in his place.”

I was eager he should meet Lysis; but at first Phaedo always found some reason to be gone. Presently, however, I got them acquainted, and it was plain each thought well of the other. Shortly after, Lysis being about to give a supper for Sokrates and his particular friends, I said, “It’s a pity Phaedo can’t come; Sokrates would like to see him.”—“Why not?” said Lysis at once. “A good thought of yours. I’ll go down beforehand and buy an evening of his time.” I asked to come too, but he said, “Are you serious? Your reputation would never recover from it. When boys of your age go to Gurgos’s, they don’t go to buy but to sell.”

The party went well, and Phaedo seemed to enjoy it. When everyone had gone, and Lysis and I were yawning in the first light but still unwilling to part, I asked him what Gurgos’s place was like.

“Very fashionable. You are received first by Gurgos, who is a fat Phrygian with a dyed beard. He enquires your tastes, rubbing his hands; when you ask for Phaedo he bows himself in two, like a cloth-seller when you order purple. You are directed through the bath, where you find all those bodies that are never seen in the palaestra, and the boys who are free, making themselves useful till they are needed elsewhere. They are mostly slaves, so I suppose they could be worse off, but when a child of nine years or so came up ogling me, the pleasure I would have paid highest for would have been that of throwing Gurgos head first into the cauldron, to rinse his beard for him. The rooms are behind the baths. Phaedo has the apartment of honour; his name is over the door, together with his price. He had a customer when I got there. Phaedo’s clients are treated like gentlemen and not hurried; Gurgos’s strong man is at hand, lest some impatient person should try to break down the door. In due course I knocked, and Phaedo opened. All he had on was the paint on his face. I knew then I shouldn’t have come. The next moment, he slammed to the door. He was almost too quick for me; but being rather stronger I managed to hold it. ‘Next room,’ he said through the crack, ‘I’m engaged.’—‘Wait, Phaedo,’ I began. Suddenly he flung open the door, so that I nearly fell inside. He stood there laughing. He looked like something you might come upon in a dark wood. ‘Come in, Lysis,’ he said. ‘Honour the threshold. Who am I to turn away trade? Ever since Alexias sang me the hymn of your virtues, I’ve been expecting you here. What can I do for you?’ He added one or two remarks, compared with which Gurgos had talked like a schoolmaster. All the same, you can tell he was brought up a gentleman; he knows how to apologise and keep his dignity. It was my fault for going to his room. But I’ve never set foot inside a boys’ house before. I told him anyone who was ready to be angry for your sake was a friend of mine. I only wish I could afford to buy him out; it would be as good a dedication to the gods as one could make in a lifetime. But I had to pay two gold staters for one evening of him. To sell outright, Gurgos would want the price of a racehorse.”

They were good friends after this; but Lysis never spent long alone with Phaedo, who never seemed offended at it. I daresay he felt a compliment to himself, which he was too well-bred to hint at to me; and I daresay he was right. Even I myself felt something of his attraction; for Eros had certainly smiled upon his birth. But to him it had all become such a weariness and disgust as the oar is to the rower. I was as safe with him as with my father.

All his life was in his mind which Sokrates had awakened. I, who had followed the man for love of his nature, seemed to Phaedo only half a friend; he had no mercy on my softness. He would force me to the logic of the negative elenchos, attacking my dearest beliefs till, driven from my last ditch, I would say, “But Phaedo, we
know
it’s true.”—“Oh, no. We may have a true opinion, perhaps. Do you call that knowledge? We know what we have proved.” Once I lost my temper with him, and trying to hide it walked on in silence. Presently he said, “You look rather the worse for wear today, Alexias; has someone been knocking you about?”—“Of course not,” I said. “Lysis threw me at practise, and I got a few bruises, that’s all.”—“Does he call himself a friend, and treat you like that?” I drew breath for an angry answer; then I understood, and begged his pardon. “No harm done,” he said. “But I daresay I know as well as Lysis what a good guard is worth.”

I never heard him pity himself, or complain of what he was going back to. But in the meantime, a better friend than I had his cause in hand. Sokrates had told his story to Kriton; the man who, in their own youth, had urged him forth from his workshop to take his place among the philosophers. Kriton was rich; he offered at once to buy Phaedo out.