Read an Excerpt
The Last of the Wine
A Novel
By Mary Renault OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1956 Mary Renault
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-3293-2
CHAPTER 1
When I was a young boy, if I was sick or in trouble, or had been beaten at school, I used to remember that on the day I was born my father had wanted to kill me.
You will say there is nothing out of the way in this. Yet I daresay it is less common than you might suppose; for as a rule, when a father decides to expose an infant, it is done and there the matter ends. And it is seldom a man can say, either of the Spartans or the plague, that he owes them life instead of death.
It was at the beginning of the Great War, when the Spartans were in Attica, burning the farms. There was a notion in those days that no other army could meet them on land and live; so we were holding only the City, and Piraeus, and the Long Walls between. This was the advice of Perikles. It is true that when I was born he was still alive, though already sick; which is no reason for foolish youths to ask me, as one did lately, whether I remember him.
The country people, whose farms were being burned, poured into the City, and lived like beasts wherever they could put up a few boards, or a roof of hide. They were even sleeping and cooking in the shrines, and in the colonnades of the wrestling schools. The Long Walls were lined with stinking huts all the way to the harbour. Somewhere thereabouts the plague began, and spread like fire in old heather. Some said the Spartans had called on Far-Shooting Apollo, some that they had contrived to poison the springs. Some of the women, I believe, blamed the country people for bringing in a curse; as if anyone could reasonably suppose that the gods would punish a state for treating its own citizens justly. But women, being ignorant of philosophy and logic, and fearing dream-diviners more than immortal Zeus, will always suppose that whatever causes them trouble must be wicked.
The plague thinned my family as it did every other. My mother's father, Damiskos, the Olympic runner, was buried with his old trophies and his olive crown. My father was among those who got the disease and survived; it left him for some time with a bloody flux, too sick for war; and when I was born he had only just recovered his strength.
On the day of my birth, my father's younger brother, Alexias, died in his twenty-fourth year. He, hearing that a youth called Philon, with whom he was in love, had been taken sick, went at once to him; meeting, I have been told, not only the slaves but the boy's own sister, running the other way. His father and mother had already perished; Alexias found the lad alone, lying in the basin of the courtyard fountain, where he had crawled to cool his fever. He had not called out to anyone to fetch his friend, not wishing to endanger him; but some passers-by, who had not cared to go very near, reported that they had seen Alexias carrying him indoors.
This reached my father after some time, while my mother was in labour with me. He sent over a reliable servant who had had the plague already; who, however, found both the young men dead. From the way they were lying, it seems that in the hour of Philon's death, Alexias had felt himself sicken; and, knowing the end, had taken hemlock, so that they should make the journey together. The cup was standing on the floor beside him; he had tipped out the dregs, and written PHILON with his finger, as one does after supper in the last of the wine.
Getting this news at night, my father set out with torches to fetch the bodies, so that he could mix their ashes in one urn, and have a fit memorial made. They were gone, having been thrown already on a common pyre in the street; but later, my grandfather had a stone set up for Alexias in the Street of Tombs, with a relief showing the friends clasping hands in farewell, and a cup beside them on a pedestal. Every year at the Feast of Families, we sacrificed for Alexias at the household altar, and the story is one of the first that I remember. My father used to say that all over the City, those who died in the plague were the beautiful and the good.
Alexias having died before the time of his marriage, my father now decided to name after him the child that was being born, if it should be a boy. My elder brother Philokles, who was two years old, had been a particularly fine strong child at his birth: but I, when held up by the midwife, was seen to be small, wizened and ugly; my mother having brought me forth nearly a month too soon, either through a weakness of her body or the foreknowledge of a god. My father decided at once that it would be unworthy of Alexias to name me after him; that I was the child of an unlucky time, marked with the gods' anger, and that it would be better not to rear me.
As it happened, however, I had been born while he was out searching for the bodies; and the midwife had handed me over to my mother to nurse. This annoyed my father; for she had taken a fancy to me after this, as women will, and being rather sick and feverish begged for my life with tears. He was still reasoning with her—for he was reluctant to snatch me from her by force—when the herald blew for the horsemen, because the Spartans had been sighted making for the City.
We were a fairly rich family in those days; my father kept two or three horses; he had therefore to arm, and muster with his squadron. He took leave of my mother, not withdrawing his orders; but, whether through haste or pity, he charged no one with carrying them out. There is never much rivalry for such work; so there the matter rested till some days later, when the Spartans withdrew and my father rode home.
He found the household in distraction. My brother Philokles was dead, and my mother breathing her last. From the first she had ordered me to be kept away from her; I had been left with a wet-nurse found by one of the slaves.
Returning with shorn hair from the funeral, he had me brought to him, and, finding the wet-nurse a decent woman, left me in her charge. He had been, I believe, fond of my mother; I daresay too he called to mind the uncertainty of life, and thought it less disgraceful to leave even me behind him, than to perish without offspring as if he had never been. In the end, finding I put on flesh and seemed stronger and better-looking, he named me Alexias, as he had first meant to do.
CHAPTER 2
Our house stood in the Inner Kerameikos, not far from the Dipylon Gate. The courtyard had a little colonnade of painted columns, a fig-tree and a vine. At the back were the stables, where my father kept his two horses and a mule; it was easy to climb on the stable roof, and thence to the roof of the house.
The roof had a border of acanthus tiles, and was not very steep. If one straddled the ridge, one could see right over the City wall, past the gate-towers of the Dipylon to the Sacred Way, where it curves towards Eleusis between its gardens and its tombs. In summertime, I could pick out the funeral stele of my uncle Alexias and his friend, by a white oleander that grew there. Then I would turn south, to where the High City stands like a great stone altar against the sky, and search between the winged roofs of the temples for the point of gold, where tall Athene of the Vanguard lifts her spear to the ships at sea.
But I liked best to look north at the range of Parnes, snow-topped, or scorched brown in summer, or grey and green in spring, and watch for the Spartans coming over. Until I was six, they came nearly every year. They came over the pass at Dekeleia, and as a rule some horseman brought word of their coming; but sometimes the first thing we knew in the City was the smoke on the hills, where they were burning a farm.
Our own place is in the foothills, beyond Acharnai. Our family has been there, as they say, since the grasshoppers came. The slope above the valley is terraced for vines, but the best crop is the olives, and the barley from the olive-fields. There was one grove nearly as old, I think, as the earth itself. The trunks were as thick as three men's bodies, and all knotted and gnarled. Athene herself was reputed to have planted them, when she gave the olive as a gift to the land. Two or three of them are standing still. We sacrificed there at every harvest-time; that is, when there was a harvest.
I used to be sent to the farm early each spring, to get the country air, and fetched back when it was time for the Spartans to come. But once, when I was four or five, they came early, and we had a great scramble to get away. I remember sitting in the cart, with the women slaves and the household gear, my father riding beside us and the slave pricking the oxen on; the cart-wheels jolting, and all of us coughing with the smoke of the burning fields. Everything was burned that year, all but the house walls, and the sacred olive-grove, which they piously spared.
Being too young to understand serious things, I used to look forward, when they had gone, to seeing what they had been up to. One year a troop of them had been quartered in the farmhouse; and those who could write had inscribed the names of their friends, with various tributes to their beauty and virtue, all over the walls. I recall my father rubbing angrily at the charcoal and saying, "Get this ignorant scrawl whited over. The boy will never learn to spell, or to make his letters properly, with this in front of him." One of the Spartans had left his comb behind. I thought it a treasure; but my father said in disgust that it was filthy, and threw it away.
For my own part, I don't think I knew what trouble meant till I turned six. My grandmother, who had taken charge of me whenever my father was at war, died then. My grandfather Philokles (a tall old man with a beautiful beard, always just combed, and white almost to blueness, in whose image I see the god Poseidon to this day) was growing infirm and could not do with me; so my father engaged a nurse, a free woman from Rhodes.
She was slim and swarthy, with a strain of Egypt in her. Presently I grew to know, without quite knowing what it meant, that she was my father's concubine. Not that he ever failed in propriety before me; but sometimes I used to hear things said by the slaves, who had their own reasons to hate her.
If I had been a little older, I might have consoled myself, when her hand lay heavy on me, with the thought that my father would soon be weary of her. She had no such graces as he could have found in a hetaira of very moderate accomplishment, and in those days he could afford the best. But to me she seemed as lasting a part of my home as the porch or the well. She herself began to guess, I think, that when I was old enough to go to school with a pedagogue he would take the occasion to be rid of her; so any progress I made was a signal for her anger.
Seeking some company, I had got a stray kitten from a slave; which presently finding, she wrung its neck before me. While trying to get it from her, I bit her arm; and it was then she told me, after her own fashion, the tale of my birth, which she had heard from the slaves. So, when she beat me, I never thought of telling my father, or asking his help. While he, seeing me grow daily more sly and sullen in my ways, paler and duller in the face, must I daresay have wondered, sometimes, if first thoughts would not have been best.
In the evenings, when he came in dressed for supper, I used to look at him and wonder how it felt to be beautiful. He was more than six feet tall, grey-eyed, brown-skinned, and golden-haired; made like those big Apollos Pheidias' workshop used to turn out, in the days before the statuaries began carving their Apollos soft. As for me, I was one of those who grow late, and still small for my age; it was clear already that I should favour the men of my mother's family, who are dark-haired, with blue eyes, and who tend to be runners and jumpers, rather than wrestlers and pankratiasts. The Rhodian had left me in no doubt that I was the runt of a good kennel; and no one else had told me otherwise.
It pleased me, however, to see him in his best blue mantle with the gold border, his brown chest and left shoulder bare, bathed and combed and rubbed down with sweet oil, his hair dressed into a garland and his beard short-pointed. It meant a supper-party: going by myself unwashed to bed while the Rhodian was busy in the kitchen, I would lie listening to the flutes and laughter, to the ring of the bronze bowl when they played kottabos, the rise and fall of voices in talk, or someone singing to the lyre. Sometimes, if a dancer or a juggler had been hired, I used to climb the roof, and look in across the courtyard.
Once he gave a party to which the god Hermes came. So at least I first believed; not only because the young man seemed too tall and beautiful not to be a god, and had the air of one accustomed to worship, but because he was so exactly like a Herm outside one of the rich new houses, that his head looked to have been the model, as in fact it had. I was only shaken from my awe when he walked out and made water in the courtyard, which made me almost sure he was a man. Then someone inside called out, "Alkibiades! Where are you?" and he went back into the supper-room.
My father, having at this time concerns of his own, seldom brought me into remembrance. But sometimes he would call to mind that he had a son, and set himself to do his duty by me. There was, for example, the day when our steward caught me stealing corn to throw to the doves, and took it away from me, for corn was scarce that year. With the kind of manners I had learned from my nurse, I stamped my foot at him, and said he had no right to forbid me, being only a slave. At this my father, who had overheard, stepped into the room. He sent out the man with a civil word, and called me to him. "Alexias," he said, "my shield is over there in the corner. Pick it up, and bring it to me."
I went over to where the shield was leaning on the wall; and, getting hold of it by the rim, began to roll it along, finding it too heavy for me to lift. "That is not the way," he said. "Put your arm through the bands, and carry it as I do."
I put my arm through one of the bands, and managed to stand it upright, but I could not lift it; it was nearly as tall as I. He said, "Surely you can hold it up? Do you know that when I fight on foot I have not only that to carry, but a spear too?"—"But," I said, "Father, I am not a man."
"Put it back in the corner, then," he said, "and come here." I obeyed him.
"And now," he said, "pay attention to me. When you are man enough to carry a shield, you will learn how it happens that men are sold into slavery, and their children born in it. Till then, it is enough for you to know that Amasis and the rest are slaves, not through any merit of yours, but by the destiny of heaven. You will refrain from hubris, which the gods hate, and behave yourself like a gentleman. And if you forget this, I myself will beat you."
Such signs of interest in my father were hateful to the Rhodian; she began to see both buck and kid slipping through her broken net. As soon as she could she found occasion to turn a small fault of mine into a great one, and make me look a liar when I denied it. But she over-reached herself a little. My father said it was high time I went to school, and sent me forthwith.
He went on campaign soon after, so she did not go for a couple of months. I have lived in hard days and taken my share of them, but those are nearly the worst that I remember. How I should have borne it, I do not know, if it had not been for a friend I made at school, at a time when I had grown silent and furtive, and had no friends at all.
I arrived one morning to find the music-class laughing and nudging each other, and giving the master a new name, the Old Man's Teacher. And, in fact, there in the classroom on one of the benches sat a man who, being about forty-five with a grizzled beard, looked certainly rather old to be studying the first thing children learn. I could see at once that I, who was always alone, was the one who would be made a fool of by having to share his bench; so I pretended not to mind, and sat there of my own accord. He nodded to me, and I stared at him in wonder. At first, this was simply because he was the ugliest man I had seen; and then it was because I thought I recognised him, for he was the image of the Silenos painted on the big wine-mixer at home, with his snub nose, wide thick mouth, bulging eyes, strong shoulders and big head. He had seemed friendly, so sidling up the bench to him, I asked softly if Silenos was his name. He turned to answer me; and I felt a kind of shock, as if a bright light had been shone upon my heart; for he did not look as most people do at children, half thinking of something else. After telling me what his name was, he asked me how he ought to tune his lyre.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault. Copyright © 1956 Mary Renault. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
