He passed me about this time in the street, and half-remembering me I suppose in some connection not pleasant to him, gazed, trying to place me. I don’t know whether he succeeded; but even the Spartans I had met in battle, seeing only my eyes through my helmet-slits, had looked at me more as man looks at man.
But having pronounced all these opinions, I ought to confess they are worth as much as if a man with fever were to judge of wine. On my last visit to the City, I had caught a sickness I had thought was cured. Now, the cause being near again, I learned it had been sleeping and growing in its sleep.
In this the god was kind to me, that from the start he never tormented me with hope. Nor did he poison his arrows; for what seemed at first sight to be beautiful and good, seems so to me until this day. Being now turned seventeen, he had left Mikkos’ school, and was often with Sokrates. There I avoided him, for many reasons; but where music was, he would not be far away. So my memories are set to the kithera, the syrinx, or to a concert of flutes, or clear voices singing; even now sometimes a chord or a descant can make me smell scented oil and bay-leaves, or grass and burning pitch, and torchlight flickers on the stillness of his listening eyes.
Only once I was in danger. In a night of early winter I had walked out on Lykabettos, when the peak stood black against thick-sown stars. Pausing for breath, a little below the summit, I saw on the terrace of the shrine his shape with lifted head, scanning the heaven. For he had the bent towards mathematics and astronomy, that one often finds in musicians. The belt of Orion was above him, and at his shoulder the sword.
I stood on the rocky pathway, between my will and my soul. I had taken the first step, and the second, upon the path, when I saw he was not alone. I was barefoot, so they had not heard me; I was able to get down into the woods again, where a few lamps shine between the pine-boughs, and a few stars. All in all, it is clear that the god took good care of me; and to show I am not ungrateful, on a certain day each year I bring him a pair of doves.
Lysis’ marriage was itself a good to me; for nothing could have given me any escape from myself just then, except the serious concerns of someone so dear. I could not intrude a grief he must have put down, if he had noticed it, to a kind of jealousy unworthy of a friend or a man. Being forced to lay it by, I could forget it sometimes and share his happiness. For he was just as happy, it seemed, as a man looking forward to a proper wedding night. I helped him find a little house in the Inner Kerameikos, not far from ours, and furnish it with some of his father’s things. He sold a bronze by Alkamenes to buy music and garlands for the feast. “I should like her to enjoy it,” he said. “After all, I daresay it’s the only wedding she’ll have.”
Xenophon confided to me his hearty approval of the match. “When I marry myself,” he said, “that is just about the age I shall look for; before they get their heads full of notions, and while there is still time to train them in orderly ways. I can’t endure things higgledy-piggledy, and nothing in its place. Order is the first half of a decent life.”
Then it seemed that one moment we were all saying, “Only a week, Lysis,” and the next it was the wedding morning.
There had been snow in the night. It lay on the roof-tops, under a bright pure sky, thin, hard and glistening; whiter than marble of Paros, whiter than our wedding robes. The lion-head rain spouts on the temple roofs had beards of crystal a cubit long; the red of baked clay looked dark and warm, and white plaster like curded cream. Helios shone far off and high, giving no heat from the pale heaven, only the flash of his silver hair. When we led the bridegroom to the house of the bride, the lyre-strings snapped with the cold, and the flutes went flat; but we covered it with our singing. Our breath rose in the frosty air in little clouds, in time with the song.
I can’t remember ever to have seen Lysis look better. His wedding mantle of white Milesian wool was trimmed with a border two spans deep of pure gold bullion, which his father and grandfather had been married in before him. We had brought him ribbons, of red, blue and gold, and crowned him with myrtle, and with the violets one finds by their scent in new-fallen snow. He strode up to the bride’s house, laughing and glowing with the cold. His tunic was pinned at the shoulder with a great brooch of antique goldwork from Mycenae, a gift to some ancestor from Agamemnon, as the story ran. His hair and his garland, and the ribbons on his arm, sparkled with snow-dust blown off the roofs. When we came into the guest-room, where the bride was sitting at the old man’s side, you could see her little face, framed in its veil of saffron, turn as you watched all into great eyes.
The women swept her up for kisses and whispers. She had good manners, as Lysis had said; but at every pause, as if her eyes had been let out of school they went slipping across. Once he saw it, and smiled straight across at her, and the women all sighed and murmured, “Charming!” Only the sister-in-law leaned forward, to hiss in her ear. She blushed crimson, and shrank up like a rose trying to grow backwards and fold itself away. I think there were tears in her eyes. For a moment I saw in Lysis’ face a look of such anger that I thought he was going to make a fool of himself and embarrass everyone. I twitched his mantle, to remind him where he was.
Then the feast was called, and they sat down together between the women and the men. He spoke to her smiling, but she answered in a dying whisper, and pushed her food about her plate. He mixed her wine for her and she drank when he told her to, like a child at the doctor’s; and, indeed, the medicine seemed to do her good.
The steward signalled me at the door; I went out and found the bridal car waiting. Everything was in order, the horns of the oxen, gilded, the wreaths and ribbons properly put on, and the canopy fixed. It was snowing again; not like meal as before, but like large feathers. They played us out, and shouted their nonsense; I clambered aboard, Lysis lifted up the bride to me and got in. We started off, he and I, and the girl between us. She shivered as the cold struck her; he pulled the sheepskins higher, and put his arm with a fold of his cloak about her shoulders. I felt a sudden rush of the past upon me; for a moment grief pierced me like a winter night; yet it came to me like an old grief, I had suffered it long since and now it was behind me. Everything is change; and you cannot step twice into the same river.
The cold was sweet and mild, not like the cold of the morning; it would thaw before dawn. Lysis said, “Well, Thalia, you were a very good girl, and I was proud of you.” She looked up at him. I could not see her face. He said, “This is my best friend Alexias.” Instead of murmuring a greeting into her lap, in the proper way, she lifted her veil, and smiled. Her eyes and her cheeks were bright in the torchlight. I had wondered before if it was wise of Lysis to give her a second cup of wine. “Oh, yes, Lysis,” she said, “you were right, he is more beautiful than Kleanor.”
It was the fresh air, I suppose, after the warmth inside. I saw Lysis blink for a moment; then he said cheerfully, “Yes, I always said so, didn’t I?” He caught my eye, asking me to be kind. I laughed and said, “Between you you’ll make me vain.”
She said to me, in the voice I suppose she had heard her mother use to visiting ladies, “I have heard Lysis speak of you often. Even before he went to sea, while I was still quite young. Whenever he called, my brother Neon would always ask how you were. Lysis would say, ‘How is Kleanor?’ or whoever his best friend was just then. But Neon always said to Lysis, ‘How is beautiful Alexias?’ and Lysis would say, ‘Still beautiful.’”