‘You’re wearing a blouse so I can’t see them. But the preserved fruit on this plate looks pleasant enough.’
‘Sir!’ Baucis slapped him playfully and went very pink. What a strange young man.
The slight awkwardness that usually attends the drink and nibbles phase of an evening was quickly mellowed by the cheek and cheerfulness of Arguros and the ready laughter of their hosts. Astrapos seemed to be of a gloomier disposition, and as they went to the table Philemon put a hand on his shoulder.
‘I hope you will forgive the inquisitiveness of a foolish old man, sir,’ he said, ‘but you seem a little distracted. Is there anything we can help you with?’
‘Oh, ignore him. He’s always down in the dumps,’ said Arguros. ‘That’s where he gets his clothes from, haha! But, in truth, there’s nothing wrong with him that a good meal won’t put right.’
Baucis met Philemon’s eyes for a brief instant. There was so little in the larder. A side of salted bacon that they had been saving for the midwinter feast, some preserved fruit and black bread, half a cabbage. They knew they would go hungry for a week if they fed so much as half the appetites of two such hearty men. But hospitality was a sacred thing and the needs of guests must always come first.
‘Another glass of that wine wouldn’t hurt,’ said Arguros.
‘Oh dear,’ said Philemon, looking at the jug, ‘I fear that there isn’t any more …’
‘Nonsense,’ said Arguros snatching it away, ‘plenty left.’ He filled his cup and then Astrapos’s too.
‘How strange,’ said Philemon. ‘I could have sworn the pitcher was only a quarter full.’
‘Where are your cups?’ asked Arguros.
‘Oh please, we don’t need any …’
‘Nonsense,’ Arguros leaned back in his chair and reached for two wooden beakers on the side-table behind him. ‘Now then … Let’s have a toast.’
Philemon and Baucis were amazed, not only that there was enough wine in the pitcher to fill their beakers to the brim, but that its quality was so much better than either of them remembered. In fact, unless they were dreaming, it was the most delicious wine they had ever tasted.
In something of a daze, Baucis wiped the table down with mint leaves.
‘Darling,’ Philemon whispered in her ear, ‘that goose that we were going to sacrifice to Hestia next month. It’s surely more important to feed our guests. Hestia will understand.’
Baucis agreed. ‘I’ll go out and wring its neck. See if you can get the fire hot enough to give it a fine roasting.’
The goose, however, would not be caught. No matter how carefully Baucis waited and pounced, it leapt honking from her grasp every time. She returned to the cottage in a state of agitated disappointment.
‘Gentlemen I am so very sorry,’ she said, and there were tears in her eyes. ‘I’m afraid your meal will be crude and disagreeable.’
‘Tush, lady,’ said Arguros, pouring more wine for everyone. ‘I’ve never partaken of a finer feast.’
‘Sir!’
‘It’s true. Tell them, father.’
Astrapos gave a grim smile. ‘We have been turned away from every house in Eumeneia. Some of the townspeople swore at us. Some spat at us. Some threw stones at us. Some set dogs on us. Yours was the last house we tried and you have shown us nothing but kindness and a spirit of xenia that I was beginning to fear was vanished from the world.’
‘Sir,’ said Baucis, feeling for Philemon’s hand under the table and squeezing it. ‘We can only apologize for the behaviour of our neighbours. Life is hard and they have not always been brought up to venerate the laws of hospitality as they should.’
‘There is no need to make excuses for them. I am angry,’ said Astrapos, and as he spoke a rumble of thunder could be heard.
Baucis looked across into the eyes of Astrapos and saw something that frightened her.
Arguros laughed. ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he said. ‘My father is not angry with you. He is pleased with you.’
‘Leave the cottage and climb the hill,’ said Astrapos, rising. ‘Do not look back. Whatever happens do not look back. You have earned your reward and your neighbours have earned their punishment.’
Philemon and Baucis stood, holding hands. They knew now that their visitors were something more than ordinary travellers.
‘There is no need to bow,’ said Arguros.
His father pointed to the door. ‘To the top of the hill.’
‘Remember,’ Arguros called after them, ‘no looking back.’
Hand in hand Philemon and Baucis walked up the hill.
‘You know who that young man was?’ said Philemon.
‘Hermes,’ said Baucis. ‘When he opened the door to let us go, I saw the snakes twined around his staff. They were alive!’
‘Then the man he called his father was … must have been …’
‘Zeus!’
‘Oh my goodness!’ Philemon paused on the hillside to catch his breath. ‘It’s getting so dark, my love. The sound of the thunder is getting closer. I wonder if …’
‘No darling, we mustn’t look back. We mustn’t.’
Disgusted by the hostility and shameless violations of the laws of hospitality shown to him by the townspeople of Eumeneia, Zeus had decided to do for this community what he had done back in the time of Deucalion and the Great Flood. The clouds gathered into a dense mass at his command, lightning flashed, thunder boomed and the rain began to fall.
By the time the elderly couple struggled to the top of the hill, torrents of water were gushing past them.
‘We can’t just stand here in the rain with our backs to the town,’ said Baucis.
‘I’ll look if you will.’
‘I love you Philemon, my husband.’
‘I love you Baucis, my wife.’
They turned and looked down. They were just in time to see the great flood inundating Eumeneia before Philemon was turned into an oak tree and Baucis into a linden.
For hundreds of years the two trees stood side by side, symbols of eternal love and humble kindness, their intertwining branches hung with the tokens left by admiring pilgrims.fn1
Phrygia and the Gordian Knot
The Greeks loved to mythologize the founders of towns and cities. Athena’s gift of the olive to the people of Athens and her raising of Erechtheus (the issue of Hephaestus and the semen-soaked fillet, you will recall) to be the founder of the city seems to have helped foster the Athenian sense of self. The story of Cadmus and the dragon’s teeth did the same for Thebans. Sometimes, as is the case with the founding of the city of Gordium, elements of the story can move from myth to legend to actual, identifiable history.
In Macedonia there lived a poor but ambitious peasant called GORDIAS. One day, as he laboured in his barren stony fields, an eagle landed on the pole of his oxcart and fixed him with a fierce glare.
‘I knew it!’ Gordias said to himself, ‘I have always felt that I was marked for greatness. This eagle proves it. I have a destiny.’
He raised his plough and drove the ox and cart many hundreds of miles towards the oracle of Zeus Sabazios.fn1 As Gordias lumbered along, the eagle gripped the pole fast with its talons, never flinching no matter how violently the cart bumped and swayed over the potholes and boulders.
On the way, Gordias encountered a young Telmissian girl endowed in equal measure with great prophetic powers and an alluring beauty that stirred his heart. She seemed to have been expecting him and urged that they make haste at once to Telmissus, where he should sacrifice his ox to Zeus Sabazios. Gordias, fired by the coming together of all his hopes, undertook to follow her advice so long as she agreed to marry him. She bowed her head in assent and they set off for the city.