importunity had, however, recalled to our client’s mind the matriarch of his clan who had arranged this union, for whom the prisoner clearly felt profound affection and to whose memory his thoughts now returned. He recalled an interview in her apartments upon his return after these campaigns. “How odd,” he remarked. “I have not thought of that day in twenty years. Yet much of its content may have bearing upon our tale, and at this very juncture.” I held my tongue; after several moments Polemides began:
I didn’t get back to Athens for two and a half years after Potidaea, serving in one campaign and another. You know how it was. The wound that packed me home didn’t even come in action; I plunged from a scaffold and split my skull. I was blind with it for a while. Mydear comrades in hospital rifled every item of kit I owned except three silver tetradrachms I kept up my ass; they’d have got shield and breastplate too if I didn’t pillow my head on one with an elbow crooked round the other. The letters to my sister Meri that one crony wrote for me never made it back to Athens, so that when I tramped down the gangplank at Munychia, there was no one to greet me, and I couldn’t even pluck a spit to hire a jitney up to town. I hiked alone, humping arms and armor, while the flaming poker inside my skull threatened at every step to drop me faint.
The Plague had begun. I could not believe the alteration it had wrought. The Circuit Road, whose breadth at my departure twenty-six months earlier had yawned so amply that young bloods used to race horses on it at midnight, now stood narrowed to a wagon-width, shoulders solid with stalls and shanties butted flush to the Long Walls, the hovels of refugees driven in from the country. In town, alleys teemed with the dispossessed. Civility had fled. Even the sight of one as myself, a young soldier suffering, elicited neither a kind word nor a hand to help one up a curb. Upon familiar lanes one glimpsed only strangers, thumbing their few damp obols, borne not in purses, but, like bumpkins, in their cheeks.
In town again I rested a day, doted upon by my sweet sister. Meri had saved stone cherries for me, the year’s last, against this homecoming her heart feared might never come. Her love was like sunshine to me; I wished to bask all day. For Meri’s part, merely to look upon her brother was not enough. She must touch my face and hair and sit pressed to my side for hours. “I must be sure it’s really you.”
She and our father insisted that I visit, as soon as strength permitted, our aunt Daphne, in whose care I had passed my early years and who languished now alone and embattled, in her sixty-second winter. Meri sent a boy ahead and at the third noon I went over.
Daphne was really our great-aunt. She had been a celebrated beauty in her day. As a maiden she had led the basket girls of the Greater Panathenaea and borne to the Serpent of the Acropolis the sacred bowl of milk. Now five decades on, she yet set at the city’s service all she possessed. Uncoerced she had let her lower floors to a family of the countryside. These had in turn opened their doors to others in straits and these likewise, so that the court when I entered shocked me with themob of its tenants and the state of disrepair their privation had produced. Upstairs, however, my aunt’s sphere remained unaltered, including my own boy’s room exactly as I had left it. The old dame’s looks survived as well, and bidding me sit in that chamber which had been her fourth husband’s drawing room and now doubled as cupboard and kitchen, she yet projected the self-assurance of one to whom attention has been paid and who commands it still.
Had I seen the shanties in the streets? “By the gods, were I a man, Polemides, the Lacedaemonians would rue their insolence!”
My aunt always addressed me by my full name and always with the same tenor of disapproval. “What kind of a name is that to give an infant?
I didn’t get back to Athens for two and a half years after Potidaea, serving in one campaign and another. You know how it was. The wound that packed me home didn’t even come in action; I plunged from a scaffold and split my skull. I was blind with it for a while. Mydear comrades in hospital rifled every item of kit I owned except three silver tetradrachms I kept up my ass; they’d have got shield and breastplate too if I didn’t pillow my head on one with an elbow crooked round the other. The letters to my sister Meri that one crony wrote for me never made it back to Athens, so that when I tramped down the gangplank at Munychia, there was no one to greet me, and I couldn’t even pluck a spit to hire a jitney up to town. I hiked alone, humping arms and armor, while the flaming poker inside my skull threatened at every step to drop me faint.
The Plague had begun. I could not believe the alteration it had wrought. The Circuit Road, whose breadth at my departure twenty-six months earlier had yawned so amply that young bloods used to race horses on it at midnight, now stood narrowed to a wagon-width, shoulders solid with stalls and shanties butted flush to the Long Walls, the hovels of refugees driven in from the country. In town, alleys teemed with the dispossessed. Civility had fled. Even the sight of one as myself, a young soldier suffering, elicited neither a kind word nor a hand to help one up a curb. Upon familiar lanes one glimpsed only strangers, thumbing their few damp obols, borne not in purses, but, like bumpkins, in their cheeks.
In town again I rested a day, doted upon by my sweet sister. Meri had saved stone cherries for me, the year’s last, against this homecoming her heart feared might never come. Her love was like sunshine to me; I wished to bask all day. For Meri’s part, merely to look upon her brother was not enough. She must touch my face and hair and sit pressed to my side for hours. “I must be sure it’s really you.”
She and our father insisted that I visit, as soon as strength permitted, our aunt Daphne, in whose care I had passed my early years and who languished now alone and embattled, in her sixty-second winter. Meri sent a boy ahead and at the third noon I went over.
Daphne was really our great-aunt. She had been a celebrated beauty in her day. As a maiden she had led the basket girls of the Greater Panathenaea and borne to the Serpent of the Acropolis the sacred bowl of milk. Now five decades on, she yet set at the city’s service all she possessed. Uncoerced she had let her lower floors to a family of the countryside. These had in turn opened their doors to others in straits and these likewise, so that the court when I entered shocked me with themob of its tenants and the state of disrepair their privation had produced. Upstairs, however, my aunt’s sphere remained unaltered, including my own boy’s room exactly as I had left it. The old dame’s looks survived as well, and bidding me sit in that chamber which had been her fourth husband’s drawing room and now doubled as cupboard and kitchen, she yet projected the self-assurance of one to whom attention has been paid and who commands it still.
Had I seen the shanties in the streets? “By the gods, were I a man, Polemides, the Lacedaemonians would rue their insolence!”
My aunt always addressed me by my full name and always with the same tenor of disapproval. “What kind of a name is that to give an infant?
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