She looked down at the cradle and said, “I don’t want a rich lady to have him. I want to keep him for company, Alexias, when you are out at work.”—“But he would have no mother here. You must be good, little one.” I feared she would cry again; but her tears were spent. I gathered up the child, and wrapped him in the linen from the cradle. She said, “That is not warm enough,” and made me take the wool. “We must give him something,” she said, “to know him by, when he is a man. Theseus had a sword.”—“I need my sword. But find him something quickly.” She came back with a branch of red coral which was her own, and hung it round his neck. “What shall we call him, Alexias? We haven’t given him any name.”—“He must go to his mother,” I said, “and she will name him.”
I walked across the Agora, with my brother on my arm, and stopped at a potter’s stall. As food grew dear, pots had grown cheap, and for two obols I got one big enough, round inside and with a wide mouth. Two obols was more than we could spare; but one must do what one can for one’s own flesh and blood, and there were stray dogs running about the City as bold as wolves. At the foot of the High City, in the empty ground where the stones of the tyrants’ fort lie scattered, I looked about me. Not very far away I could hear an infant crying among the rocks, but the sound was thin; if any knight’s wife was seeking an heir for her husband, my brother would not have a rival long. But if in these three months she had not chosen yet, I thought, she must be hard to please.
He had been quiet, lying in my arm; but now feeling the cold pot about him, he began to cry. It was a strong sound, for so young a baby. I saw him in my mind as a youth, tall like my father, with suitors seeking his favour; bearing a shield in battle, or crowned at the Games; then led with music to his wedding, and seeing his sons. “Go in peace,” I said to him; “bear no ill-will to me, for Necessity yields to no man: and do not complain of me to our mother, for her blood is on your head as well as mine. If the gods had not forbidden it, my brother, I would put you to sleep before I left you, for night comes on; this is an empty place, and the clouds look dark upon the mountains. But the blood of kindred is not to be washed away; and when a man has once felt the breath of the Honoured Ones upon his neck, he will not bid them across the threshold. So forgive me, and suffer what must be. The clouds are heavy; if the gods love you, before morning there will be snow.”
It was dark already. For a long time as I walked away I could hear him crying; then from high on the rocks, about the bastions of the citadel, a dog began howling, and I heard it no more.
We buried my mother in one of the gardens within the City, which had been turned over to this use since the siege began. I did not tell Lysis, thinking him too ill to be distressed with it; but he heard, and sent begging to let them have Charis to care for, and share whatever they had. He said this, though for two days now I had sent nothing, and they were living like the birds themselves. I sent the child, for she was falling into a melancholy. What we had left, I sent along with her; there was only myself left now, and I had my work to go back to.
I went back to Chremon’s next morning, feeling the wind cold on my neck, and thinking he would not be pleased to find I had cut off my hair, for, as I remembered, he had not finished the head. But that was no trouble; for when I stood in the doorway, I saw someone else stretched on the wooden dais, in the pose of Hyakinthos. I daresay he had only been waiting to find a model with the same build. Many no doubt who had thought themselves rich when the siege began, were not too proud now to pose for Chremon. I went away before he saw me, and took from him the pleasure of saying, “Not today.”
Two days after this, the envoys returned. I did not myself go out to meet them; though I did not feel as hungry as the day before, everything tired me; when I heard shouting in the street, I went to the door to ask what it was, and then lay down again. But as my father told me later, all the City that stood still on its feet came to meet them, and led them straight to the Pnyx to hear their news.
It was this; that the Spartans and their allies’ spokesmen had met all together, to vote upon our fate. Then had stood forward the Theban envoy, a man who, as it appeared later, spoke not so much for his own city as out of that pride in public office which makes a man think himself a god. “Serve them,” he said, “as they served the Melians, or the city of Mykalessos when they loosed the Thracians on it. Sell them into slavery, lay waste the City, and give the ground to sheep.” And this being said, the Corinthian supported it.
But if there is not much grace in Sparta, there is reverence for the past. When from time to time they are great, that is the core of their greatness. Curtly and bluntly, after their custom, they answered that Athens was part of Hellas; and they were not for enslaving the City that had turned the Medes. The debate was at a stand, when a man from Phokis stood up, and sang. It was the chorus of Euripides that begins,
Electra, Agamemnon’s child, I come
Unto thy desert home …
What the Spartans thought of it, no one knows; but after a long silence the allied spokesmen cast the vote for mercy.
So these were the terms they sent us, to lift the siege: Pull down a mile of your Long Walls; receive your exiles back into citizenship; hand over your ships; and as subject ally follow the rule of Sparta, leaving her to lead in peace and in war.
I am told one or two voices were still heard to cry out against surrender. As to the others, I am not the man to despise them. For if, the day before, Chremon had still had work for me, I cannot swear I would not have gone, without any pay, for the sake of a bowl of soup.
Lysander sailed across from Salamis; King Agis came within the gates he had watched so long; but for the first days I kept my bed, and my father cared for me as for a little child. He was good to me, setting aside his own grief; and in return, silly with weakness, I forgot he could not know, finding her absent, that Charis was alive. He went a full day thinking her dead, before I perceived his error. Even then he was not angry; but I saw tears stand in his eyes. Then it seemed to me that at last the Honoured Ones were appeased; and on the thought I slept.
We ate from the first day of surrender; for before the gates were open, people who had a little left were sending to their friends, now they knew their children would not starve. So on the third day, I got on my feet again, and walked out, and saw the ramparts of the High City covered with Spartans, pointing out to each other the mountains of their homes. I thought, “Thus it is to be the conquered,” but my mind was empty and light and I could feel nothing.
They were throwing down the Walls already. I heard the thud and crash of the falling stonework, mixed with the twitter of flutes. Who began it I don’t know; it was not very like the Spartans, and I should guess at the Corinthians; but they had collected all the flute-girls, those who were left, given them wine and a handful of food, and made them play. It was one of the first days of spring, when the light is hard and keen; the girls stood in the road, between the Walls, their faces painted awry, or sometimes, if they were Athenian born, striped red and black with tears; wearing their tawdry finery fit only for the lamplight, piping away; the foreign girls, and some others too, setting themselves to rights after their haste, and making eyes at the victors. And from time to time, as they played, there crashed down one of Themistokles’ great ashlars; and the Spartans cheered. “This truly,” I said to myself, “is defeat.” But it was as a dream to me.
So I walked to the house of Sokrates; but outside I met Euthydemos, who said, “He has gone up to the Temple of Erechtheus, to pray for the City.”