IN GREECE AGAIN
On landing at Miletus Charidemus found a letter from the king awaiting
him. After expressing his pleasure that he had been able to regain
services that were so valuable, and paying him the compliment of saying
that he considered the exchange had been very much to his own advantage,
Alexander continued, “I desire to see you so soon after you have regained
your liberty as you can contrive to come to me. You can journey either by
land or sea. In either case you have at your disposal all that you may
need. But I should advise that you come by sea, for I expect by the time
within which you can probably reach me to be not far from the coast of
Syria. The gods preserve you in the future as they have in the past!”
The officer in charge of the garrison of Miletus held very decidedly the
same opinion as the king. “You can understand,” he said, when Charidemus
went to report himself, “that the country is at present very unsettled.
When such an army as that we fought with at the Granīcus is broken up,
a great number of the men naturally become brigands. I do not doubt but
that every forest between here and Lycia is full of them. Even without
the brigands, the roads would hardly be safe. At present, you see, it is
all an enemy’s country, except where we have garrisons. No; you could
not travel without danger, unless I gave you all my garrison for an
escort. Of course there are risks by sea. In the first place, it is very
late for a voyage; and then there are Phœnician cruisers about. Still I
should strongly recommend this way of going; and, by good luck, I can
put the very fastest ship and the very best captain that we have at your
disposal. I will send for him, and you shall hear what he says.”
In about an hour’s time, accordingly, the captain presented himself, a
weather-beaten sailor, somewhat advanced in years, if one might judge
from his grizzled hair and beard, but as vigorous and alert as a youth.
He made light of the difficulty of the time of the year. “Give me a good
ship and a good crew, and I will sail at any time you please from one
equinox to the other; and let me say that you will not find a better ship
than the _Centaur_ between here and the Pillars of Hercules. As for the
crew, I can warrant them. I have trained them myself. And I am not much
afraid of Phœnician cruisers. Of course accidents may happen; but I know
that in a fair fight or a fair chase, the _Centaur_ and its crew can
hold their own against anything that ever came out of Tyre or Sidon. And
now, my good sir, when can you start? The sooner the better, I say, for
the Persians are busy just now in the north, and we may very well get to
our journey’s end without any trouble at all.”
Charidemus said that he had nothing to keep him in Miletus, and that
the speedier the start the better he would be pleased. Before sunrise
next morning, accordingly, the _Centaur_ was on its way, with a fresh
following breeze from the north that spared the rowers all trouble.
Halicarnassus was passed towards evening, and Rhodes the next day,
brilliant in the sunshine with which its patron, the sun-god, was said
always to favour it. The wind here began to fail them somewhat, as their
course became more easterly; but the sea was calm, and the rowers,
an admirably trained crew, who acknowledged no equals in the Western
Mediterranean, got over distances that would have seemed incredible to
their passenger had he not been an eye-witness of their accomplishment.
Pleusicles, the captain, was in high spirits, and brought out of the
store of his memory or his imagination yarn after yarn. He had begun
his seafaring life nearly forty years before under the Athenian admiral
Iphicrates—he was an Æginetan by birth—and had seen that commander’s
brilliant victory over the combined fleets of Sparta and Syracuse.[30] He
had been in every naval battle that had been fought since then; first
in the service of Athens, and then, either from some offence given or
from unpunctuality in the matter of payment, going over to Philip of
Macedon. Intervals of peace he had employed in commercial enterprises.
He knew the Mediterranean from end to end, from Tyre to the Pillars,
from Cyrene to Massilia. From Massilia, indeed, he had gone on his most
adventurous voyage. A Greek traveller, Pytheas by name, had engaged
him for an expedition which was to explore regions altogether unknown.
Pleusicles related how they had sailed through the Straits of Calpe[31]
into the immeasurable Ocean beyond, how they had with difficulty forced
their way through leagues of matted sea-weed, and had come after months
of difficult travel to an island in the northern sea, a land of much
rain and little sunshine, where on a narrow strip of open ground between
vast forests and the sea the natives cultivated some precarious crops
of corn.[32] Of so much Pleusicles had been himself an eye-witness:
but there were greater marvels of which he knew only by hearsay, a yet
remoter island surrounded by what was neither land nor sea nor air, but
a mixture of all, one huge jelly-fish, as it were, and a tribe with whom
amber, a rare and precious thing among the Greeks, was so abundant that
it was used as firewood.
On the third day the _Centaur_ reached Patara on the Lycian coast, and on
the next the Greek city of Phaselis. Here Charidemus found the king, who
was engaged in one of those literary episodes with which he was wont to
relieve his military life. The pride of Phaselis was its famous citizen,
Theodectes, poet and orator. He had been the pupil, or rather the friend,
of Aristotle. As such Alexander had known him when he himself had sat
at the feet of the great philosopher. Indeed, though there was as much
as twenty years difference between their ages, the prince and the poet
had themselves been friends. Theodectes had died the year before in the
very prime of life, and his fellow-citizens had exerted themselves to do
him all possible honour. They had given the commission for his statue to
Praxiteles, the first sculptor of the time, paying him a heavy fee of
two talents,[33] a sum which severely taxed their modest resources. The
statue had just then been set up. And now, by a piece of singular good
fortune, as they thought it, the townsfolk had the future conqueror of
Asia to inaugurate it. The king took a part in the sacrifice, crowned the
statue with garlands, was present with some of his principal officers
at the representation of a tragedy by the deceased author, and laughed
heartily at the concluding farce in which the story of the healing of
Cheiron, the Centaur, was ludicrously travestied.
[Illustration: APOLLO AND CHEIRON.]
Early the next day Charidemus was summoned to the royal presence. The
king greeted him with more than his usual kindness, and proceeded to
explain the business in which he proposed to employ him. “I am going
to send you,” he said, “first to Greece, and then home; I have not the
same reason,” he went on, with a smile, “that I had with Ptolemy and his
detachment, that they were newly married.[34] But for the next three
months or so there will be very little doing here, and you can be more
profitably employed elsewhere. First, you must go to Athens. You will be
in charge of an offering which I am sending to the goddess, three hundred
complete suits of armour from the spoils of the Granīcus. You should be
a _persona grata_ there. You are half an Argive, and the Argives have
always been on good terms with the Athenians. And then you speak good
Greek. If I were to send one of my worthy Macedonians they would laugh
at his accent; he might lose his temper, and all the grace of the affair
would be lost. That, then, is your mission, as far as the world sees it;
you will take sealed instructions about other matters which you will not
open till you have crossed the sea.... The offering is all ready; in
fact, it was lying shipped at Miletus when you landed there. But I wanted
to see you, and to be sure also that you received my instructions. These
you shall have at sunset. When you have received them, start back at
once.”
Punctually at sunset one of the royal pages brought a roll of parchment
sealed with the royal seal. Charidemus, who had been waiting on board the
_Centaur_ for it, gave a formal receipt for it, and within half an hour
was on his way westward. The good ship and her picked crew had better
opportunities for showing their mettle than had occurred on the eastward
journey. Things were easy enough as long as they were under the lee of
the Lycian coast; but at Rhodes a strong head wind encountered them; and
it was only after a hard struggle of at least twelve days, during which
even the bold Pleusicles thought more than once of turning back, that
they reached Miletus. By that time the weather had changed again; and
the voyage to Athens, though undertaken with fear and trembling by the
captains of the heavily-laden merchantmen that carried the armour, was
prosperous and uneventful.
Charidemus spent about a month in Athens, finding, as might have been
expected, a vast amount of things to interest, please, and astonish him.
Some of the impressions made upon him by what he saw and heard may be
gathered from extracts taken from letters which he wrote at this time to
his Theban friend.
“ ... The armour has been presented in the Temple of Athené Polias. A
more splendid spectacle I have never seen. They told me that it was
almost as fine as the great Panathenæa, the grand triennial festival
of which I dare say you have heard. The _Peplos_ was not there nor the
_Basket-bearers_[35]—I missed, you see, the chance of seeing the beauty,
though I saw the rank and fashion of Athens. But the magistrates were
there, in their robes of office, headed by the King Archon, and, behind
them a huge array of soldiers in complete armour, good enough to look
at, but poor stuff in a battle, I should fancy—indeed the Athenians have
long since done most of their fighting, I am told, by paid deputies.
The best of these troops was a battalion, several thousands strong, of
the ‘youths,’ as they called them. Students they are who do a little
soldiering by way of change after their books. They can march, and they
know their drill; and they are not pursy and fat, as are most of their
elders. Their armour and accoutrements are excellent. If their wits
are only as bright as their shields and their spear-points, they must
be clever fellows in the lecture-room. And the Temple itself! I simply
have not words to describe it and its splendours. And then there was
the great statue of the goddess outside the Temple; I had never seen it
close at hand, though I remember having had the point of the lance which
she holds in her hand and the crest of her helmet pointed out to me as I
was sailing along the coast. But the effect of the whole when one stands
by the pedestal is overpowering. Its magnificent stature—it is more
than forty cubits high[36]—its majestic face, its imposing attitude—she
is challenging the world, it would seem, on behalf of her favourite
city—all these things produce an impression that cannot be described.
It is made, you must understand, of bronze, and the simplicity of the
material impressed me more than the gorgeous ivory and gold of the Athené
Polias, as they call her. While I am talking about statues I must tell
you about one which I was allowed to see by special favour; it is made
of olive wood, and is of an age past all counting; the rudest shape that
can be imagined, but extraordinarily interesting. The keeper of the
Temple where it is (not the same as that of which I have been speaking,
but called, by way of distinction, the Old Temple) have a story that it
fell down from heaven. In the evening there was a great banquet in the
Town-hall, a very gorgeous affair, with delicacies brought from all the
four winds—pheasants from the Black Sea, and peacocks, and dolphins, and
I know not what in flesh, fish, and fowl. Of course the special Attic
dishes were prominent—honey, figs, and olives—and there were a great
choice of vintages. I was amazed at the abundance and luxury of the
entertainment, and could not help thinking that there was a great deal
of foolish waste. Far more interesting to me than the dishes and the
drinks were the guests. I do not mean the magistrates and generals, for
they had nothing particularly distinguished about them; I mean those who
have a permanent seat at the table. You must know that the Athenians have
an excellent custom of rewarding men who have done conspicuously good
service to the state by giving them such a seat. Of course I saw Phocion
there. I had seen him before in the king’s camp; and he has been very
civil and serviceable to me. I sat next to a veteran who was the oldest
of the public guests, and must have numbered fully a hundred years. What
a storehouse of recollections the old man’s mind was! Of recent things
and persons he knew nothing. When I was speaking of our king he stared
blankly at me. But he remembered the plague—his father and mother and all
his family died of it, he told me. His first campaign was in Sicily. He
had been taken prisoner and thrust into the stone quarries of Syracuse.
He could not bear to think, he told me, even now of the horrors of
the place. Then he had fought at Œgos-Potami,[37] and I know not where
else. His last service, I remember, was at Mantinea, where he was in
command of an Athenian contingent. He was seventy years old then, he
told me, but as vigorous, he boasted, as the youngest of them. He saw
your Epaminondas struck down, though he was not very near. And he was a
disciple of Socrates. ‘To think,’ he said, ‘that I should be dining here
at the State’s expense, and that he had the hemlock draught! I remember,’
he went on, ‘when he was put on his trial and had been found guilty, and
the president asked him to name his own penalty, he mentioned this very
honour that I enjoy. He deserved it much better, he said, for showing
his countrymen how foolish and ignorant they were, than if he had won a
victory at Olympia. What a stir of rage went through the assembly when he
said it! It quite settled the matter for the death penalty. And now here
am I and he—well he has his reward elsewhere, if what he always said is
true—and that I shall soon know.’ A most interesting old man is this, and
I must try to see him again.”
[Illustration: DEMOSTHENES.]
A week or two afterwards, he wrote again.
“I have seen Demosthenes. A young Athenian with whom I have become
acquainted introduced me to him. At first he was cold and distant. It
is no passport to his favour to be a Macedonian. Afterwards he became
sufficiently friendly, and we had much talk together. He is not as
hopeful as I am about the king’s undertaking. He thinks, indeed, that
it will succeed, though, very likely, in his heart he wishes that it
may not. But he does not expect much good from it. ‘So Greece, you
think,’ he said to me one day, ‘will conquer Persia. I doubt it. I don’t
doubt indeed that your Alexander will overrun Asia from one end to the
other. Philip was a great soldier, and his son is a greater, while your
Macedonians are the stuff out of which armies rightly so called are made.
Persia, on the other hand, is thoroughly rotten, and will fall almost
at a touch. But this is not the same thing as Greece conquering Persia.
No; Persia will conquer Greece; we shall be overwhelmed with a flood of
eastern vices and servilities. True Greece will perish, just as surely as
she would have perished had the bow triumphed over the spear at Marathon
or Platæa. But this will scarce be welcome to you,’ and he broke off.
Still what he said has set me thinking. Only I do believe that our king
is too thorough a Greek to be spoilt. But we shall see.
“I hoped to hear the great man speak, but was disappointed. He very
seldom speaks now. The fact is there are no politics in Athens; and
for the plaintiffs and defendants in civil causes the orators write
speeches, but do not deliver them. That the parties concerned have to
do themselves. I heard, it is true, a speech of Demosthenes, but it
was spoken by a very commonplace person, and, you will understand, was
made commonplace to suit him. Of course it would not do to put a piece
of eloquence into the mouth of some ordinary farmer or shipbuilder.
Everybody knows that the suitors do not write the speeches, but still the
proprieties have to be observed.
“The plaintiff in this case—his name was Ariston—had a very strange and
piteous story to tell. Unfortunately there was something about the man
that moved the court irresistibly to laughter. (The court, you must know,
is the strangest that the wit or folly of man ever devised—a regular mob
of thousands of men who shout and groan if anything displeases them,
and chatter or fall asleep if they are pleased to find the proceedings
dull.) Well, Ariston was an eminently respectable man; his hair and beard
carefully arranged without being in the least foppish, and his cloak and
tunic quite glossy; and the indignities of which he had to complain were
so out of keeping with all that he looked that it was almost impossible
not to be amused. His story was this, put briefly:
“Three years before (_i.e._, just before King Philip’s death) he had been
sent on outpost duty to the frontier. The sons of a certain Conon were
his neighbours in the bivouac, wild young fellows who began drinking
after the midday meal, and kept it up to nightfall. ‘Whereas,’ said he
in a dignified tone which raised a roar of laughter, ‘I conducted myself
there just as I do here.’ The young men played all sorts of drunken
tricks on Ariston and his messmates, till at last the latter complained
to the officer in command. The officer administered a severe reprimand,
which did, however, no manner of good, for that very night the ruffians
made an attack on Ariston’s tent, gave him and his friends a beating, and
indeed, but for the timely arrival of the officer in command, might have
killed them. Of course when the camp broke up there was not a little bad
blood between the parties to the quarrel. Still, Ariston did nothing more
than try his best to steer clear of these troublesome acquaintances. One
evening, however, as he was walking in the market-place with a friend,
one of Conon’s sons caught sight of him. The young fellow, who was tipsy,
ran and fetched his father, who was drinking with a number of friends
in a fuller’s shop. The party rushed out; one of them seized Ariston’s
friend and held him fast, while Conon, his son, and another man, caught
hold of Ariston himself, tore his cloak off his back, tripped him up,
and jumped upon him, as he lay in the mud, cutting his lip through, and
closing up both his eyes. So much hurt was he that he could not get up
or even speak. But he heard Conon crowing like a cock to celebrate his
victory, while his companions suggested that he should flap his wings,
by which they meant his elbows, which he was to strike against his sides.
Other things he heard, but they were so bad that he was positively
ashamed to repeat them to the court. At last some passers-by carried him
home, where there was a terrible outcry, his mother and her domestics
making as much ado as if he had been carried home dead. After this came
a long illness in which his life was despaired of. When he had told his
story he gravely controverted what he supposed would be Conon’s defence,
that this was a quarrel of hot-headed deep-drinking young men; that
both parties were gay young fellows who found a pleasure in roaming the
streets at night, and playing all kinds of pranks on passers-by, and
that the plaintiff had no business to complain, if he happened to get
the worst of it. He was no roisterer, Ariston said, with a solemnity
which convulsed the court. Indeed, the idea that such a paragon of
respectability should be anything of the kind was sufficiently amusing.
However, he won his cause, and got thirty minas damages, or will get them
if he can manage to make Conon pay, a thing which, the friend who took me
into court tells me, is more than doubtful.
“You see, my dear Charondas, that there are other people besides
philosophers in Athens. Indeed, from all that I could make out, though
clever and learned men come to the city from all parts, the Athenians
themselves seldom show any genius. As for those noisy, roistering young
fellows, there are numbers of them in the streets at night. I have seen
them myself, again and again, though they have never molested me. Indeed,
they keep far enough away from any one who is likely to give them a warm
reception. I cannot help thinking that, whatever Demosthenes may say,
they would be better employed if they were following our king.”