“Yes,” I said. “But I think he must be crazy. This was thirty years ago, and even if there were men back then prepared to help Hippias, their cause died with him. I’ll bet they’ve done their best to forget the past. I’ll bet they’ve been solid citizens these past three decades.”
“Logic says you must be right.” Callias looked thoughtful. “And yet, the scars from that time run deep. So very deep.”
Callias paused. He drank of the herbed wine, then set down his cup and leaned back. His slaves had placed his couch within the shade of flowery vines that grew across the courtyard. Two slaves had stood anxiously behind Callias during our conversation; one of these moved quickly to refill the cup. The concern they showed for their master was genuine, I was sure. Callias was known as a humane man.
“You wanted to know about Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and Leana,” he said.
“We found a blade within the corpse that bears those names.”
“Dear Gods!”
Callias stood without warning. Startled, I stood too. Callias said, in a determined tone of command, “I have something to show you. Leave your brother here. You, Nicolaos, come with me.”
I supposed he wanted merely to go to his office, but he led me out of the house and down the narrow, twisty streets of Athens to the agora. Callias said nothing on this walk, until he halted at the north end, at the Temple of Ares.
Around the temple were statues of the heroes Theseus and Heracles, a statue of Ares himself, and another of Apollo, who rather oddly had been portrayed in the act of doing up his long hair. Apollo always had been a vain god.
A host of lesser gods and demigods accompanied them. This open ground at the north of the agora was the city’s largest collection of statuary. Some were of marble, the latest were in bronze. All these works were as close to perfect as the hand of mortal man could make them, and painted to an appearance so lifelike that one almost expected them to walk away.
The temple and statues stood beside the Panathenaic Way. Thousands of people passed by every day: people in carts, people on foot, visitors to the city, all of them going about their business, most of them headed to the stalls of the agora. The noise of squabbling traders was loud in our ears.
Callias stopped beside two statues: a single work of two men who stood side by side; the right-hand figure a young man about the same age as me, and on the left a middle-aged man in the prime of life. They both wore expressions of excruciating nobility, and in each of their four hands they held a sword.
“The Tyrannicides,” I said at once. The statues had been there since before I was born.
“The Tyrannicides indeed,” said Callias. “Harmodius and Aristogeiton. I have met visitors to Athens who think the Tyrannicides must have been gods, so honored is their place among the statues. But they were not gods, Nico; they were mortals, and they were lovers. These two were determined to end the tyranny by assassination, but not for any noble intention. Democratic freedom, my dear Nicolaos, began with a lovers’ squabble. Harmodius was … how do I explain him? He was a simple man, and very, very beautiful.” Callias sighed. “That was the thing people always noticed first: his beauty.”
“You knew him,” I said; not a question but a statement.
“I knew them both. No, I knew them all, every man and woman who was a player in that time. Harmodius was a few years older than I. What we had in common was we’d both lost our fathers at an early age. It gave us something to talk about at the gymnasium.
“Hippias the tyrant had a brother, younger by a few years, named Hipparchus. Hipparchus, being the brother of the tyrant, thought he could do whatever he liked with impunity.”
“Uh oh.”
“The moment Hipparchus set eyes on Harmodius, it was lust at first sight. Hipparchus took to following Harmodius around like a lovesick puppy. But Harmodius already had a lover: Aristogeiton. Hipparchus was intensely jealous of their happiness.
“It so happened that this was the year of a Great Panathenaea. The officials in charge decided that the sister of Harmodius should be the maiden who led the formal procession to the Acropolis, where the ceremonies are held.”
I said, “That’s a position of high honor.”
“It is,” Callias said. “I suspect Hipparchus, the rejected lover, had a hand in arranging it, considering what happened next.”
“Yes?”
“The purity of the maiden is essential to the success of the ceremony. Hipparchus walked up, as it was about to begin, with all of Athens watching, and declared that the girl-the sister of Harmodius-was impure. It was tantamount to saying her own family had prostituted her.”
“Dear Gods!” I said, shocked. “If I had a sister and someone said that, I’d kill him.”
“Precisely. From the looks on their faces I could see the officials were as appalled as every other man and woman present, but after such an accusation, the officials had no choice but to order a change. Harmodius led away his sobbing sister.”
“That was when the conspiracy began,” I said with certainty.
“Of course. The insult to the family was mortal.”
“But everyone knows his attack went horribly wrong,” I said.
“Harmodius and his lover Aristogeiton gathered together other young men who wanted to end the tyranny. They formed a plot to assassinate both brothers in one rapid strike. Harmodius knifed Hipparchus to death but was killed in the attempt. Aristogeiton was captured. The other conspirators fled, leaving Hippias the tyrant unharmed. After that, Hippias was determined to destroy the other members of the plot; he realized-correctly! — that if he didn’t, they’d try again. Aristogeiton was tortured to force him to reveal the names. He never talked,” Callias said flatly. “Not even as they killed him.”
“What happened to the little sister of Harmodius?”
Callias shrugged. “With her brother Harmodius gone, and his lover Aristogeiton captured and under torture, she had no male protector left. I expect Hippias had her killed. Don’t look at me like that, Nicolaos! You know better than most men how these things work. Maybe family friends spirited the girl out of Athens. I like to think so. But the odds are her body lies in an unmarked grave outside the city walls.”
“Was the girl’s name Leana? That’s the name on the other side of the blade.”
Callias said, softly, “No, Leana was someone else again.” He refused to say another word, but led me by the arm away from the statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. He led me out of the agora and along the Panathenaic Way, which wound south and then twisted up to the Acropolis. Callias led me all the way to the top.
The Acropolis was a disaster area of fallen pillars and charred timbers. The temples had been burned to the ground when the Persians sacked the city twenty years before. The Athenians had resolved to leave the place as a ruin for the rest of time, in remembrance, though recently Pericles had talked of a rebuild, an idea with which I agreed completely. I wanted to build for the future, not dwell in the past.
But the Acropolis as it stood was a ruin. A ramshackle temple had been erected to house the cult statue of Athena, and here and there among the black, rotted beams and fallen masonry were a few small statues that had survived the destruction. Callias led me to one of these.
It was a statue of a lioness, made in marble. The paint had blistered and peeled in the fires of the sacking, giving it a wretched color that would have made the figure look pathetic, were it not for the open, snarling mouth.
“Read the plinth,” Callias instructed me.
I did. Etched into it was the name Leana.
“This is Leana?”
“This is her statue. Leana was the only woman member of the conspiracy against Hippias.”
Callias rested against a fallen pillar that lay beside the lioness. The color had left his face again, as it had just before he fainted.