I looked at the book he held, and at his hand. You could nearly see the writing through it. “Phaedo, what are you doing here at all? Don’t you know the Spartans are repatriating the Melians, and offering them safe-conduct?” He smiled, and looked over his shoulder into the shop. Simon was sitting at his work-bench, a woman’s shoe in one hand and his awl in the other, listening to Sokrates, who was talking to Euthydemos with a piece of dressed hide in his hand. Phaedo said, “We have been defining fortitude. Now having defined it, we can’t determine whether it is good absolutely, or conditionally, or in part. But you will find, dear Alexias, if you come in, that Sokrates is comparing it to the process of tanning, and the end will be that, whether it is an absolute good or not, we shall go away with more than we had. Why should I starve in Melos, when the fare here is so good? Come and join us.” And putting his arm in mine, he led me inside.
Meantime the Spartan lines tightened about the City, and it was five drachmas a pint for oil. Everything but corn was on the open market; there was not enough to control. The poor began to expose their new-born infants, when the mothers had no milk. If one walked on the High City, there was always one crying somewhere in the rocks or the long grass below.
The rich had not felt it yet. Such people buy stores in bulk; what they lacked, they could pay for, besides their horses, asses and mules. Many were generous: Xenophon when he killed his favourite charger sent something to all his friends, and wrote us a most gentlemanly letter, making a joke of it, so that it would not shame us to send nothing back; Kriton, I believe, kept Sokrates’ whole family alive at one time, and Phaedo at another, as well as the pensioners and dependants he had supported from the first; Autolykos maintained some broken-down wrestler who had taught him as a boy. But none of this could alter the fact; once rich or poor had been a matter of purple or homespun, now it was becoming life or death.
So presently the City chose another envoy, to try again. It was Theramenes. He proposed himself for the mission. He had influence among the Spartans, he said, of a kind he could not disclose. People knew what he meant. He had not been one of the Four Hundred for nothing. However, he had come out on the right side in the end, and done more than most to save the City. If he could get us better terms now, good luck to him. My father was glad of this honour done to so old a friend, who had sent us a good cut of neck off a donkey only a week before.
So he set forth, and was seen upon the Sacred Way, riding with some Spartans towards Eleusis. The City waited. Three days ran into four, and a week into two; and a pint of oil cost eight drachmas.
At the end of the first week I killed the dogs. They had foraged for themselves at first, and had stopped coming to look at us at feeding-time. But now a rat sold for a drachma, and their ribs were showing; and, as my father said, if we left it longer there would be no meat on them at all. When I was whetting my hunting-knife, two of them came up wagging their tails, thinking we were off to get a hare. I meant to begin with the smallest, whom I liked the best, so that being the first he would feel no fear. But he had hidden himself, and from a dark corner looked up at me weeping. There was a little on the biggest to salt away. The others, when I had them skinned, were only good to stew; but we lived three days on them.
Already before this we had sold Kydilla. My father had bought her for my mother when they married; we would have freed her when we could feed her no longer, but it would only have been turning her off to starve. A mantle-maker bought her, for a quarter what she had cost when raw and untaught. She wept not only for herself, but at leaving my mother within a month or two of her time.
All this while there were the walls to man, lest the Spartans grow impatient and try a surprise. At about this time, one of Lysis’ men accused another of stealing food, and their swords came out. Lysis running in to part them got a cut in front of the thigh, nearly to the bone. When I called, it was always getting better, and did not hurt, and he would walk tomorrow. He was getting no more rent for his father’s house, it being outside the walls; now he was losing his army pay, and I thought he looked ill. But he said he had sold the great brooch of Agamemnon before the bottom fell out of the market, and that his brother-in-law had sent him something, and that little Thalia was proving a splendid manager, and that they did as well as the next.
The only thing the City was not short of was citizens; we had plenty of spare time between watches. One day I came upon my sister Charis with her dolls about her, giving them a meal of pebbles and beads. “Be good,” she was saying, “and eat up your soup, or you shan’t have any roast kid, or honey fritters.” Children grow fast at eight years old; there seemed nothing of her but legs and eyes. Next morning I said to my father, “I am going out to look for work.”
We were having breakfast at the time, a gill or two of wine in four parts of water. He put down his cup and said, “Work? What work?”—“Any work. Tanning, or mixing mortar, for all I care.” It was a frosty morning, and the cold made my temper short. “What do you mean?” he said. “A Eupatrid, of the seed of Erechtheus and of Ion child of Apollo, touting the tradesmen like a metic, asking for work? Before the day is out, some informer will be saying we are not citizens; it always happens. Let us keep some dignity at least.”—“Well, Father,” I said, “if our line is so good, we had better see it doesn’t end with us.”
In the end he let me go. Well begun is half done, they say. But at most of the shops I went to, I did not get as far as asking. Each had a waiting knot of men who had been master craftsmen themselves, in Sestos or Byzantium; ready, if they could not get journeyman’s work, to sweep the floors. They stood huddled in the cold, stamping their feet and slapping their arms, waiting for the shop to open; looking resentfully at one another, but never at me, because they took me for a customer.
In the Street of the Armourers, every shop with a forge going was full of stray people crowding in for warmth, and to get working-room they were turning them away. Each potter seemed to have a vase-painter mixing his clay for him. The tradesmen who had lost their slaves had all the help they needed, now they were doing no trade.
I passed through the Street of the Herm-Makers, and began to grow weary, yet was in no haste to go home. So I walked on into the quarter of the statuaries, hearing, as I passed the workshops, how many were silent. But presently catching the tap of mallet on chisel, I went in to watch, and be out of the cold wind.
It was the shop of Polykleitos the Younger, which used to be full in the mornings. Now there was only Polykleitos himself, and an apprentice carving the inscription on a pedestal. Polykleitos had set up on a wooden block the armature for a standing figure, and was bending it about. I greeted him, and congratulated him on being still able to work in bronze. A man had to be doing well to afford fuel for casting.
He was never talkative at work, and I was surprised that he seemed so pleased to see me. “Even in these days,” he said, “people who have vowed something to a god know better than to forget it. This is for a choragic trophy; Hermes inventing the lyre.” He put the armature aside, and reached for his drawing-board and crayon. “How would you stand to string a lyre, Alexias?”—“I’d sit to it,” I said, “like everyone else. But I suppose a god can do anything.” There was a lyre hanging on the wall; I reached for it, and, for something to do, began to put it in tune. “Won’t you sit down?” he said, and threw a blanket upon a block of Paros marble, to take off the chill. “If you care to play something it’s a pleasure.” I played a verse or two of some skolion or other; my fingers were too cold to make much of it. Glancing up I saw him busy with his crayon. One can tell when someone is looking through one’s clothes. I laughed and said, “Oh, no, Polykleitos, I’m not stripping for anyone this weather. Wait for your model, whom you pay to do it.”