I got my hands on it, then, coming to myself a little, said, “Will it bear two?”—“You can see it does.” It satisfied me at the time, being half-dazed, and used to believing what he said. I don’t think he did more than push it along, to help me forward.
We swam a long time, for days and nights it seemed to me. As weariness grew on me, my body forgot its lust to live; there was a heavy pain in my breast; and presently a time came when rest seemed the only thing beautiful and good. I was so dull of mind that I would have let go the oar, and slipped away without a word; yet at the last my soul stirred for a moment, and I said, “Goodbye, Lysis.” Then I let go. But I felt a great tug at my hair, and rose up again. “Hold on,” he said, “You fool, we’re close to land.” But I cared only to be still. “I can’t, Lysis. I’m finished. Let me go.”—“Hold on, curse you,” he said. “Do you call yourself a man?” I don’t remember all he said to me. Afterwards, when I lay in the shepherd’s house on the island, coming to myself, I felt my mind all bruises I could not quite account for, as a man might feel his body who had been beaten while half-stunned. I think he called me a coward. At all events, one way or another he convinced me that letting go would be like dying with a wound in the back. Later on at night, while we sat dressed in old blankets, drinking black bean soup by a driftwood fire, he began to apologise, but in rather general terms, hoping I had forgotten. So when I saw what he wanted, I said I had.
We two were the only survivors of the Siren. Twenty-five Athenian ships were lost in the battle, the greater part of them with all hands.
It was nearly a month before we got back to the City; for the island was a little place, where few but fishermen ever put in. At last we got a Lesbian ship, and made our way back from there. I got home to find the household in mourning for me, and my father with shaven head. He looked old and ill, and was so much moved at seeing me that I was confused by it, and hardly knew what to say. I suppose he may have blamed himself for my leaving home and going to sea. For my own part, time had taught me to see in it only the conjunction of planets and the hand of fate. My mother was much calmer, and said she had dreamed I was not dead. My sister Charis danced about us on her long legs, and complained of the beard I had grown on the island, and would not kiss me till I took it off.
Later, when the house was quieter, and I had told my story, my father said the City was very angry with the generals, and had dismissed them from their command. They had written home various excuses, saying in one breath that the storm was too high for them to turn back for us, and, in the next, that they had told off two junior officers to do it. As one of these was Thrasybulos, and the other Theramenes, whom we had found perfectly reliable in the field, I guessed this must have been an afterthought when the fleet was safe in harbour. Probably half of us had gone down before they started out. Their choosing Thrasybulos as a scapegoat made me angrier than ever. I said, “When are they going to be tried?”
“As soon,” my father said, “as they are all back. In the interests of justice, it had better be when the passion of the mob has cooled a little.” I said, “Let the mob save its pains, Father, and leave them to the men who got off the wrecks alive. We’re too few to make a mob. We’ll do them justice. I wish I had all their necks in one noose, and my hand on the rope.”—“You have changed, Alexias,” he said, looking at me. “When you were a child, I thought you too gentle to make a soldier.”—“I have seen a shipful of brave men betrayed since then. And on a won battlefield I threw away my arms.” And, my anger returning with the memory, I said, “If Alkibiades had been there, he would have laughed in their faces, and told them to get to the loom with the women; and he would have sailed alone. They can say what they like; but when he led us, we had a man.”
My father sat silent, staring into the bowl of his wine-cup. Then he said, “Well, Alexias, what you have suffered I cannot make good to you; nor, I daresay, will the gods. But in the matter of armour, if I had been in the City when you enrolled as a citizen, you would have had a suit from me, like anyone else in our position. The estate is not what it was, but I can still take care of that, I am glad to say.” He went to the big press and opened it. There was a suit of armour hanging there, nearly new. “Take it,” he said, “to some reliable man, and get it made to fit. It is doing no good to anyone lying here.”
It was a very good suit. He must have had it made when he felt his strength coming back again. I need not have complained so loudly of throwing away my arms, to a man who had been stripped of his by the enemy. “No, Father,” I said, “I can’t take this from you. I’ll manage some other way.”—“I daresay I forgot to tell you, Phoenix is dead. Let us admit that the time when we could afford new horseflesh is over; and marching is beyond me nowadays, I find. My shield is over there in the corner. Pick it up, and try it for weight.”
I picked it up, and put my arm through the bands. It balanced well, and was just about the weight I was used to. I said, “Of course, Father, for me it’s on the heavy side. But it’s a pity to tamper with a good shield like this. Perhaps, if I exercise, I can manage it as it is.”
23
SOON AFTERWARDS, OUR RABBLE of generals got back to Athens; all but two who, making use of their skill in avoiding dirty weather, ran away to Ionia and never came home.
Not since the day of the Herm-breaking had I seen such anger in the City. As it happened, the Feast of Families fell just before the trial. Instead of the usual garlands and best clothes, you saw everywhere the drowned men’s kindred, dressed in mourning, their heads shorn, reminding friends and neighbours not to forget the dead.
Presently came the day of the trial. I walked to the Assembly with my father; when I had been civil to his friends, I slipped off to find Lysis, but got caught instead in a knot of citizens, kinsmen and friends of the drowned, who begged my account of the battle. I think it was only now, with strangers about me, that I really knew my own bitterness. I told them everything, both what I had seen, and anything I had heard from others.
It was the same all over the Pnyx; people jostled to get near one of the survivors, for we were few. The herald could hardly get quiet when the speeches began.
Nobody felt inclined by now to waste much time on these fellows. When the prosecution proposed that one hearing would do for all six of them, I cheered with the best. I felt warmed with the anger round me; everyone seemed my friend. Then the defence jumped up and made a fuss. It was true there was something in the constitution against collective trials on a capital charge, proper enough, in the ordinary way, to protect decent people; but we all felt this was different. There was a good deal of noise. Just when the defence had made itself heard again, there was a commotion near the rostrum, and a sailor ran up. You could tell at a glance what his trade was, and there was a pause.