THE LAST OF THE GREEKS.
Most of Cleanor's fellow-passengers on board the _Nereid_--for this was
the name of the singularly un-nymphlike trading vessel that carried him
to Corinth--were a curious medley of races and occupations. Corinth was
the mart of the western world, and was frequented, for business or for
pleasure, by all its races. There were soothsayers from Egypt, who found
their customers all the more credulous because they boasted that they
believed in nothing; Syrian conjurors; Hebrew slave-dealers; a mixed
troop of commercial travellers; and a couple of grave-looking,
long-bearded men who, in spite of their philosophers' cloaks, were
perhaps the greediest, the most venal of all.
One passenger, however, was of a very different class. He was a
Syracusan noble, erect and vigorous notwithstanding his seventy years,
whose dignified bearing and refined features spoke plainly enough of
high breeding and culture. He was a descendant of Archias, the
Corinthian emigrant, who, some six centuries before, had founded the
colony of Syracuse, and he was coming, as he told Cleanor, in whom he
had discovered a congenial companion, on a religious mission. The tie
that bound a Greek colony to the mother city had a certain sanctity
about it. Sentiment there was, and the bond of mutual advantage; but
there was more, a feeling of filial reverence and duty, which was
expressed by appropriate solemnities.
"I am bringing," said Archias--he bore the same name as his far-away
ancestor--"the yearly offering from Syracuse the daughter to Corinth the
mother. I have done it now more than thirty times. But I feel a certain
foreboding that I shall not come on the same errand again. If that means
only that my own time is near, it is nothing. I have had my share of
life. The gods have dealt bountifully with me, and if they call me I
shall go without grumbling. But I can't help feeling that it is
something more than the trifle of my own life that is concerned, that
some evil is impending either over Syracuse or over Corinth. As for my
own city, I don't see where the trouble is to come from. We have long
since bowed our necks to the yoke, and we bear it without wincing. For
bearable it is, though it is heavy. But for Corinth I own that I have
many fears. She is restless, she is vain; she has ambitions to which
she is not equal. The gods help her and save her, or take me away before
my eyes see her ruin!"
As they were drawing near their journey's end Archias warmly invited his
young friend to make his home with him during his stay in Corinth.
"I have an apartment," he said, "reserved for me in the home of the
guest-friend of Syracuse. The city rents it for me, and makes me an
allowance for the expenses of my journey. I feel bound to accept it,
though, without at all wishing to boast of my wealth, I may say that I
don't need it. You must not think that you are burdening a poor
man--that is all. I can introduce you to everybody that is worth knowing
in Corinth, and, if you have any business on hand, shall doubtless be
able to help you. And it will be a pleasure, I assure you, to have a
companion who is not wearied with an old man's complaints of the new
times."
Cleanor thankfully accepted the invitation. When the _Nereid_ reached
the port of Corinth he found that the Syracusan's arrival had been
expected. A chariot was in waiting at the quay to convey them to the
city. At the apartment all preparations for the comfort of the guests
were complete--it was a standing order that a provision sufficient for
two should be made. First there was the bath,--more than usually
welcome after the somewhat squalid conditions of life on board the
merchantman,--and after the bath a meal, excellently cooked and
elegantly served.
The meal ended, Cleanor felt moved to become more confidential with his
new friend than he had hitherto been. Naturally he had been very
reserved, giving no reason for Archias to suppose that he had other
objects in his travels than amusement or instruction. But he felt that
it would be somewhat ungracious to maintain this attitude while he was
enjoying so kind and generous an hospitality. In a conversation that was
prolonged far into the night he opened up his mind with considerable
freedom. His precise schemes he did not mention; they were scarcely his
own secret; and he said nothing about Hasdrubal, feeling--for he had
studied history with intelligence and sympathy--that a Syracusan noble
would scarcely look with favour on anything that came from Carthage, the
oldest and bitterest enemy of his country. But he gave a general
description of his hope and aim, a common union of the world under the
leadership of the Greek race against the domination with which Rome was
threatening it.
The Syracusan listened with profound attention. "It has done me good,"
he said, "to hear you. I did not know that such enthusiasm was to be
found nowadays. The very word has gone out of fashion, I may say fallen
into disrepute. It used to mean inspiration, now it means madness. Our
young men care for nothing but sport, and even their sport has to be
done for them by others. They have chariots, but they hire men to drive
them; the cestus[13] and the wrestling ring are left to professional
athletes. The only game which they are not too languid to practise with
their own hands is the _kottabos_, and the _kottabos_[14] is not exactly
that for which our fathers valued all these things, a preparation for
war. I hate to discourage you, but I should be sorry to see you ruining
your life in some hopeless cause."
"But, if I may say so much with all respect, isn't this exactly what has
been said time after time? May there not be something better than you
think, than anybody would think, in these frivolous young fellows? Who
would have thought Alcibiades anything but a foolish fop, and yet what a
soldier he was when the time came!"
"Well, I hope that you are right," replied the old man; "only your
Alcibiades must make haste to show himself, or else it will be too late.
But it is not only this, the folly and frivolity of the youth, that
discourages me; it is the hopeless meanness and jealousy of the various
states. If I could raise from the dead the very best leader a Greek city
ever had, I should still despair. Now listen to the story that I have
to tell you. Don't think that I am a mere grumbler, who does his best to
discourage thoughts that are too high for him to understand; I speak
from a bitter experience. But you shall hear.
"I am just old enough to remember the storm and sack of my native city
by the Romans. I was but five years old, but even a child of five does
not forget when he sees, as I saw, his father and his elder brother
killed before his eyes. I should have been killed myself--for the
soldiers, who had suffered terribly in the siege, spared no one--but for
Marcellus himself.[15] He let the slave who waited on me carry me off to
his own hut. That worthy slave and his good wife kept me for five years
out of their scanty wages--he was a workman in the stone-quarries, and
she sold cakes to schoolboys in the streets--till I was ten years old.
Then interest was made with the Senate at Rome, and part of the family
property was given back to me. You will understand that I was very
restless at Syracuse, but I could not move till I was twenty-five, for
my father's will had fixed this age for my becoming my own master. It is
a custom in our family, and I was too dutiful to think of breaking it.
But the moment I became my own master I made haste to carry out a plan
which I had been long thinking of. The famous soldier of the time was
Philopoemen, the Arcadian. It was a privilege to serve under him as a
volunteer, and there were always ten times more applications than there
were places to fill. However, by great good luck, and partly, I may say,
through my having had the good fortune to win the foot-race at Olympia,
I was chosen. I landed here--it is more than forty-five years ago--and
made my way to his home in Arcadia. He had himself just come back from
Sparta, which he had brought over to the cause of Greece. Sparta, as I
dare say you know, has always cared much for herself, and very little
for anything or anybody else. I shall never forget what happened a few
days after my arrival. The Spartans, or, I should rather say, the
reforming party among the Spartans--for there never was a Greek city yet
but had two parties in it at the very least--felt greatly obliged to him
for what he had done, and determined to make him a present. Well, they
sent three of their chief citizens to offer it to him. They came, and
Philopoemen entertained them. Of course he knew nothing about the
object of their coming, and they said nothing about it. They seemed ill
at ease--that I could not help observing--though their host was all that
was courteous and agreeable; but speak they couldn't. There was
something about the man which positively forbade their mentioning such
a matter. The next day they went away, leaving their offer unspoken. But
as they could hardly go back to Sparta with this story, they put the
matter into the hands of an old friend to carry out.
"It seems an easy thing to get rid of a pocketful of gold, but this man
didn't find it so. Everything about Philopoemen was so simple, so
frugal, he seemed so absolutely above things of the kind, that it was
impossible to offer him money. The man went away without saying
anything. He came a second time, and it was the same thing all over
again. I don't say but what Philopoemen had now some inkling of what
was on hand. There was a twinkle in his eye, as if he was enjoying some
joke greatly. As for me, I was completely mystified. Then the three
Spartans came back again, and this time they forced themselves to speak,
and, of course, did it in the clumsiest, most brutal fashion. It was a
large sum, too, a hundred and twenty talents,[16] if I remember right.
"Philopoemen smiled. 'My friends,' he said, 'you would have laid out
this money very badly if I were to take it. Don't buy your friends; you
have them already. Buy your enemies.'
"And a good friend he showed himself. He wasn't in office then, and the
President of the League, having a difference with the Spartans in some
matter of no great importance, was all for using force.
"'Pray,' said Philopoemen to him, 'don't do anything of the kind. It
is sheer madness to quarrel with a great Greek state, when the Romans
are on the watch to take advantage of our divisions.'
"And when he found that speaking was of no use, he mounted his horse and
rode straight to Sparta--I was with him--to warn them of what was going
to be done. Sure enough, in the course of ten days or so, the President
comes with some five thousand men of his own and half a Roman legion;
but Sparta was ready. They had to go back again without doing any harm.
Some two months afterwards he was chosen President--for the eighth time
it was--very much against his will, for he had passed his seventieth
year, and was hoping to spend the rest of his days in peace. But it was
not to be. There was a revolution in Messene, one of the endless changes
which tempt one to think, against one's own conscience, that the steady,
fixed rule of an able, honest tyrant is the best kind of government that
a state can have. The Messenians, accordingly, renounced the League.
This might have been endured; but it was another matter when they
proceeded to seize a strong place outside their own borders.
Philopoemen was lying sick with fever at the time in Argos, but he
left his bed immediately, and was on horseback in less than an hour. I
was with him; indeed, I never left him of my own free will. Before
nightfall we had reached his home in Arcadia, four hundred furlongs was
the distance, and the roads about as rough and steep as you will find
anywhere in Greece. The next day he sent round the city calling for
volunteers. Some three hundred joined him--gentlemen, all of them, who
furnished their own arms, and rode their own horses. We had a smart
brush with the enemy, and got the better of them. But they were strongly
reinforced, and as we were now heavily overmatched, Philopoemen gave
the signal to fall back. His one thought now was to save the volunteers.
"'They are the heart's blood of the city,' he said to me, 'and they must
not be wasted.'
"He placed himself with a few troopers, who formed his body-guard, in
the rear, and protected their retreat. He was a famous swordsman, you
must know, and old as he was, there were very few who cared to come to
close quarters with him. But of course they had their darts, and he was
soon wounded in several places, as, indeed, we all were. And then on
some very rough ground his horse stumbled and threw him. He was an old
man, you see, and he had had two days of hard riding, and the fever
fit--which was of the ague kind, caught some years before when he was
campaigning in Crete--was coming upon him.
"'Save yourselves,' he said to us; 'your country will want you for many
years yet, but I am an old man.'
"However, he gave me leave to stay; the others he commanded on their
obedience to go. When the enemy came up he had fainted. They thought he
was dead, and began to strip him of his arms, but before they had
finished he came to himself. My blood boils to this day when I think how
they treated him. They bound his hands behind his back, and drove him
before them on foot as he was, half-dead with fatigue and sickness.
"That night we bivouacked in the open. Some of the troopers had a
feeling of pity or shame. One lent him his cloak to keep the cold off,
though he had to go without one himself; another shared his ration of
bread, dried meat, and rough wine with him. On the evening of the next
day we came to Messene town, and I must do the townsfolk the justice to
say that the sight was not at all to their liking. I heard many of them
cursing the man--Deinocrates was his name, and he was as ill-conditioned
a scoundrel as there was in Greece--who had given the orders for it to
be done. Still, no one had the courage to interfere, and Deinocrates
determined to finish matters before he was hindered; for he knew
perfectly well that the League would spare nothing to get back their
president.
He thrust him, therefore, into a dungeon that was called the Treasury,
a dreadful hole without a window or door, but having the entrance to it
blocked by a huge stone. "Deinocrates then held a hurried council with
some of his own party. They voted with one accord for death. What
followed I heard from the executioner himself, who was one of
Deinocrates' slaves. His story was this:
"'My master said to me, 'Take this cup'--I guessed from the look and the
smell that it was hemlock--'to the prisoner, and don't leave him till he
drinks it.' I went in--it wanted but a little time to midnight--and
found Philopoemen awake. 'Ah!' he said, when he saw me, 'your master
is a generous man, and sends me, I doubt not, a draught of one of his
richest vintages. But before I drink it, answer me, if you can, one
question. Have any prisoners been brought in?' I said that I had not
heard of any. 'None of the young horsemen that were with me?' I said
that I had not seen them. He smiled and said, 'You bring good tidings.
Things have not gone altogether ill with me.' Then he took the cup and
drank it up without another word. This done he lay down again. I watched
by him, but though I heard him breathing heavily he never moved. Just
before cock-crow I judged that he died, for it was then that breathing
ceased, and when I put my hand on his heart I could feel nothing.'
"That was the end of Philopoemen, 'the last of the Greeks', as I heard
an enemy, a Roman, call him. And what, my dear young friend, can Greece
do without Greeks?"
FOOTNOTES:
13: The ancient boxing-glove, a formidable construction fitted
to the hand, of leather thongs heavily loaded with lead.
14: This consisted in throwing wine out of a cup into a bowl
placed at some distance. The game was played in various ways.
15: Marcellus was the Roman general in command.
16: £27,000 in our money, reckoning by weight at five shillings
per ounce for silver. This would mean a great deal more in
purchasing power, not less than £100,000.