The darkness had reached its deepest. Birds were silent; a dog howled in fear; the woman’s weeping seemed to fill the earth and reach to the low heaven. I thought, “Lysander pardoned him. Nor did Kallibios do it; for Spartans, even where they hate, obey. It was a present to Kallibios, to get his favour. Athenians did this.”
Then I said in my heart, “Come, then, Lord Apollo, healer and destroyer, in your black anger, as you came to the tents at Troy, striding down from the crags of Olympos like the fall of night. I hear the quiver at your shoulder shake with your footfall, and its arrows rattle with the dry sound of death. Shoot, Lord of the Bow, and do not pause upon your aim; for wherever you strike the City, you will find a man for whom it is better to die than live.”
But the shadow passed from the face of the sun, and when we laid Autolykos in his tomb, already the birds were singing.
It seemed to me then that the soul of Athens lay prone now in the dust, and could fall no lower. But a few days later, I called at the house of Phaedo. He was out; but he had some new books, so I read and waited. At last his shadow fell on the doorway, and I rose to greet him.
He looked at me in passing, as if trying to remember who I was; then he walked on, and back again, up and down the room. His hands were clenched; I saw, for the first time in many years, the halt from his old wound catching his stride. After he had taken two or three turns, he began to speak. On the benches of a war-trireme I have heard nothing like it. While he was working at Gurgos’s, I don’t remember hearing him use any phrase that would not have passed at a decent supper-party. Now there came pouring out of him the silt and filth of the stews, till I thought he would never stop. After a time I did not listen, not because it offended me, but for fear of the news that was coming when he ceased. At last I put out my hand and stopped him in his walking, and said, “Who is dead, Phaedo?”—“The City is,” he said, “and stinking. But corpse-loving Kritias keeps his mother above ground. They have passed a law forbidding logic to be taught.”
“Logic?” I said. “Logic?” It made no sense to me; as if he had said there was a law against men. “Who can forbid logic? Logic is.”
“Look in the Agora. There is a notice in marble, making it a crime to teach the art of words.” He burst out laughing; like a face in a dark wood, as Lysis had once said. “Oh, yes, it’s true. Did I teach you anything new, Alexias, just now? Learn it, write it down, it is the speech of a slave. I am starting a school in Athens; be my first pupil, and I’ll take you free.” His laughter cracked; he threw himself down upon his work-bench at the table, and laid his head in his arms among the pens and scrolls.
Presently he sat up and said, “I am sorry to make a show of myself. In the siege, when one felt one’s strength drain out a little every day, one had more fortitude of soul. It seems the want of hope unmans one more than the want of food.”
I half forgot his news in his pain, for he was dear to me. “Why, Phaedo, should you grieve so much? If the gods have cursed us, what is it to you? We shed the blood of your kindred; and to you we did the greatest of all wrongs.” But he answered, “It was the City of my mind.”
“Go back to Melos,” I said, “and claim your father’s land from the Spartans. You will find more freedom there then here.”—“Yes,” he said, “I will go, why not? Not to Melos; nothing would bring me to see it again. To Megara perhaps, to study mathematics, and then to some Doric city to teach.” He stood up, and began sweeping his books together on the table. Then he smiled, and said, “Why do I talk? You know I shall never leave Athens while Sokrates is alive.”
I smiled back at him; and then, in the same moment, the same thought came to both of us, and our smiles stiffened on our lips.
When I called at Sokrates’ house, he was out; it was to be expected so late in the morning, yet I was afraid. As I turned away, Xenophon met me, and I saw my own fear in his eyes. We forgot the constraint of our last meeting. He drew me into a porch; even he had learned at last to drop his voice in the street. “This Government will never be worthy of itself, Alexias, while Kritias is in it. I voted against his election, I may say.”—“I don’t suppose he got many votes from Sokrates’ friends.”—“Except from Plato. One thing is certain, Kritias has never forgiven Sokrates in the matter of Euthydemos. This law is framed against Sokrates, personally. Any fool can see it.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “It is against the freedom of men’s minds, as Phaedo says. No tyranny is safe while men can reason.”—“Tyranny is not a word I care for,” he said stiffly. “I would rather say a principle is being misapplied.” And then looking suddenly as I had known him since boyhood, “If you don’t remember Kritias’ face that day, I do.”
At first it seemed absurd to me. I had seen the fair Euthydemos only lately; he had been drinking to the birth of his second son. It was natural that where Phaedo saw thought in chains, Xenophon should see one man’s revenge; he had the more personal mind; yet there are times when feeling sees more than intellect. I said, “You may well be right.” We looked at each other, not wanting to say, like fools or women, “What shall we do?”
“Phaedo tells me,” said I, “that a saying of Sokrates’ is running around the Agora: When hiring a herdsman, do we pay him to increase the flock, or make it fewer every day?”—“We shall delude ourselves, Alexias, if we expect him to study his safety before his argument.”—“Do we even desire it? He is Sokrates. And yet …”—“In a word,” said Xenophon, “we love him, and are only men.” We were silent again. Presently I said, “I’m sorry I was uncivil last time we met. You have done nothing contrary to your honour.”—“I don’t reproach you, since Autolykos died. I myself …” Then we saw Sokrates coming towards us.
In our joy at seeing him alive, we both went running, so that people stared, and he asked us what the matter was. “Nothing, Sokrates,” said Xenophon, “except that we are glad to see you well.” He looked just as always, cheerful and composed. “Why, Xenophon,” he said, “what a physician we have lost in you! One glance can tell you not only that my flesh and bones and organs are sound, but my immortal part too.” He was smiling, in his usual teasing way; yet my heart sank, and I thought, “He is preparing us to bear his death.”
Hiding my fear, I asked if he had seen the notice in the Agora. “No,” he said. “I have been spared the pains of reading it by a friend, who, lest I should offend through ignorance, was kind enough to send for me, and recite it to me himself. I think I may rely on his memory of it, since he is the man who drew it up.”
A dark flush rose from Xenophon’s beard to his brow; from a child he had been made to control his features, but this he had never overcome. “Are you telling us, Sokrates, that Kritias sent for you to threaten you?”—“Not everyone is privileged to have a law expounded to him by the lawgiver himself. It gave me the opportunity to ask him whether the art of words was being banned in so far as it produced false statements, or true. For if the latter, we must all refrain from speaking correctly, that is clear.”
His little bulging eyes laughed at us. Often he would recount to us blow by blow a set-to he had had in the palaestra or the shops with some opinionated passerby. Now he described to us this colloquy, in which ten to one he had talked his life away, in just the same style. “By the way, how old are you, Xenophon? And you, Alexias?”—“Twenty-six,” we both said.—“By the Dog, what has become of my memory? I must be getting old. For I have only just now been forbidden to converse with anyone under the age of thirty.” This was too much; we burst into wild and angry laughter. “That, at the end of our conversation, was how Kritias interpreted his new law to me. I am the subject of a special amendment; a singular honour.”