Worlds That Weren't Read online

  Aristokles knelt beside him, careless of the blood. “Who did this?” he asked, and then answered his own question: “Alkibiades.” No one contradicted him. He reached out and closed Kritias’ eyes. “My kinsman was, perhaps, not the best of men, but he did not deserve—this. He shall be avenged.” Unbroken voice or not, he sounded every bit a man.

  The Assembly never met to ratify Alkibiades’ peace with Sparta. His argument—to the degree that he bothered making an argument—was that the peace was so self-evidently good, it needed no formal approval. That subverted the Athenian constitution, but few people complained out loud. Kritias’ murder made another sort of argument, one prudent men could not ignore. So did the untimely demise of a young relative of his who might have thought his youth granted his outspokenness immunity.

  Over the years, the Athenians had called Sokrates a great many things. Few, though, had ever called him lacking in courage. A couple of weeks after Kritias died—and only a couple of days after Aristokles was laid to rest—Sokrates walked out across the agora from the safe, comfortable shade of the olive tree in front of Simon the shoemaker’s toward the statues of Harmodios and Aristogeiton in the heart of the market square. Several of his followers came along with him.

  Apollodoros tugged at his chiton. “You don’t have to do this,” he said in a choked voice, as if about to burst into tears.

  “No?” Sokrates looked around. “Men need to hear the truth. Men need to speak the truth. Do you see anyone else doing those things?” He kept walking.

  “But what will happen to you?” Apollodoros wailed.

  “What will happen to Athens?” Sokrates answered.

  He took his place where Kritias must have stood. Blood still stained the base of Aristogeiton’s statue. Blocky and foursquare, Sokrates stood and waited. The men and youths who listened to him formed the beginnings of an audience—and the Athenians recognized the attitude of a man about to make a speech. By ones and twos, they wandered over to hear what he had to say.

  “Men of Athens, I have always tried to do the good, so far as I could see what that was,” he began. “For I believe the good is most important to man: more important than ease, more important than wealth, more important even than peace. Our grandfathers could have had peace with Persia by giving the Great King’s envoys earth and water. Yet they saw that was not good, and they fought to stay free.

  “Now we have peace with Sparta. Is it good? Alkibiades says it is. Someone asked that question once before, and now that man is dead, as is his young kinsman who dared be outraged at an unjust death. We all know who arranged these things. I tell no secrets. And I tell no secrets when I say these murders were not good.”

  “You were the one who taught Alkibiades!” someone called.

  “I tried to teach him the good and the true, or rather to show him what was already in his mind, as it is in all our minds,” Sokrates replied. “Yet I must have failed, for what man, knowing the good, would willingly do evil? And the murder of Kritias, and especially that of young Aristokles, was evil. How can anyone doubt that?”

  “What do we do about it, then?” asked someone in the crowd—not one of Sokrates’ followers.

  “We are Athenians,” he replied. “If we are not a light for Hellas to follow, who is? We rule ourselves, and have for a century, since we cast out the last tyrants, the sons of Peisistratos.” He set his hand on the statue of Aristogeiton, reminding the men who listened why that statue stood here. “The sons of Peisistratos were the last tyrants before Alkibiades, I should say. We Athenians beat the Persians. We have beaten the Spartans. We—”

  “Alkibiades beat the Spartans!” somebody else yelled.

  “I was there, my good fellow. Were you?” Sokrates asked. Sudden silence answered him. Into it, he went on, “Yes, Alkibiades led us. But we Athenians triumphed. Peisistratos was a fine general, too, or so they say. Yet he was also a tyrant. Will any man deny that? Alkibiades the man has good qualities. We all know as much. Alkibiades the tyrant…What qualities can a tyrant have, save those of a tyrant?”

  “Do you say we should cast him out?” a man called.

  “I say we should do what is good, what is right. We are men. We know what that is,” Sokrates said. “We have known what the good is since before birth. If you need me to remind you of it, I will do that. It is why I stand here before you now.”

  “Alkibiades won’t like it,” another man predicted in a doleful voice.

  Sokrates shrugged broad shoulders. “I have not liked many of the things he has done. If he does not care for my deeds, I doubt I shall lose any sleep over that.”

  Bang! Bang! Bang! The pounding on the door woke Sokrates and Xanthippe at the same time. It was black as pitch inside their bedroom. “Stupid drunk,” Xanthippe grumbled when the racket went on and on. She pushed at her husband. “Go out there and tell the fool he’s trying to get into the wrong house.”

  “I don’t think he is,” Sokrates answered as he got out of bed.

  “What are you talking about?” Xanthippe demanded.

  “Something I said in the market square. I seem to have been wrong,” Sokrates said. “Here I am, losing sleep after all.”

  “You waste too much time in the agora.” Xanthippe shoved him again as the pounding got louder. “Now go give that drunk a piece of your mind.”

  “Whoever is out there, I do not think he is drunk.” But Sokrates pulled his chiton on over his head. He went out through the crowded little courtyard where Xanthippe grew herbs and up to the front door. As he unbarred it, the pounding stopped. He opened the door. Half a dozen large, burly men stood outside. Three carried torches. They all carried cudgels. “Hail, friends,” Sokrates said mildly. “What do you want that cannot keep till morning?”

  “Sokrates son of Sophroniskos?” one of the bruisers demanded.

  “That’s Sokrates, all right,” another one said, even as Sokrates dipped his head.

  “Got to be sure,” the first man said, and then, to Sokrates, “Come along with us.”

  “And if I don’t?” he asked.

  They all raised their bludgeons. “You will—one way or the other,” the leader said. “Your choice. Which is it?”

  “What does the idiot want, Sokrates?” Xanthippe shrilled from the back of the house.

  “Me,” he said, and went with the men into the night.

  Alkibiades yawned. Even to him, an experienced roisterer, staying up into the middle of the night felt strange and unnatural. Once the sun went down, most people went to bed and waited for morning. Most of the time, even roisterers did. The clay lamps that cast a faint, flickering yellow light over this bare little courtyard and filled it with the smell of burning olive oil were a far cry from Helios’ bright, warm, cheerful rays.

  A bat fluttered down, snatched a moth out of the air near a lamp, and disappeared again. “Hate those things,” muttered one of the men in the courtyard with Alkibiades. “They can’t be natural.”

  “People have said the same thing about me,” Alkibiades answered lightly. “I will say, though, that I’m prettier than a bat.” He preened. He might have had reason to be, but he was vain about his looks.

  His henchmen chuckled. The door to the house opened. “Here they are,” said the man who didn’t like bats. “About time, too.”

  In came Sokrates, in the midst of half a dozen ruffians. “Hail,” Alkibiades said. “I wish you hadn’t forced me to this.”

  Sokrates cocked his head to one side and studied him. He showed only curiosity, not fear, though he had to know what lay ahead for him. “How can one man force another to do anything?” he asked. “How, especially, can one man force another to do that which he knows not to be good?”

  “This is good—for me,” Alkibiades answered. “You have been making a nuisance of yourself in the agora.”

  “A nuisance?” Sokrates tossed his head. “I am sorry, but whoever told you these things is misinformed. I have spoken the truth and asked questions that might help othe
rs decide what is true.”

  Voice dry, Alkibiades said, “That constitutes being a nuisance, my dear. If you criticize me, what else are you but a nuisance?”

  “A truth-teller, as I said before,” Sokrates replied. “You must know this. We have discussed it often enough.” He sighed. “I think my daimon was wrong to bid me accompany you to Sicily. I have never known it to be wrong before, but how can you so lightly put aside what has been shown to be true?”

  “True, you showed me the gods cannot be as Homer and Hesiod imagined them,” Alkibiades said. “But you have drawn the wrong lesson from that. You say we should live as if the gods were there watching us, even though they are not.”

  “And so we should, for our own sake,” Sokrates said.

  “But if the gods are not, O best one, why not grab with both hands?” Alkibiades asked. “This being all I have, I intend to make the most of it. And if anyone should stand in the way…” He shrugged. “Too bad.”

  The henchman who didn’t like bats said, “Enough of this chatter. Give him the drug. It’s late. I want to go home.”

  Alkibiades held up a small black-glazed jar with three horizontal incised grooves showing the red clay beneath the glaze. “Hemlock,” he told Sokrates. “It’s fairly quick and fairly easy—and a lot less messy than what Kritias got.”

  “Generous of you,” Sokrates remarked. He stepped forward and reached out to take the jar. Alkibiades’ henchmen let him advance. Why not? If he’d swallow the poison without any fuss, so much the better.

  But, when he got within a couple of paces of Alkibiades, he shouted out, “Eleleu!” and flung himself at the younger man. The jar of hemlock smashed on the hard dirt of the courtyard. Alkibiades knew at once he was fighting for his life. Sokrates gave away twenty years, but his stocky, broad-shouldered frame seemed nothing but rock-hard muscle.

  He and Alkibiades rolled in the dirt, punching and cursing and gouging and kneeing and kicking each other. This was the pankration, the all-in fight of the Olympic and Panathenaic Games, without even the handful of rules the Games enforced. Alkibiades tucked his head down into his chest. The thumb that would have extracted one of his eyes scraped across his forehead instead.

  Back when he was a youth, he’d sunk his teeth into a foe who’d got a good wrestling hold on him. “You bite like a woman!” the other boy had cried.

  “No, like a lion!” he answered.

  He’d bitten then because he couldn’t stand to lose. He bit now to keep Sokrates from getting a meaty forearm under his chin and strangling him. Sokrates roared. His hot, salty blood filled Alkibiades’ mouth. Alkibiades dug an elbow into his belly, but it might have been made from the marble that had gone into the Parthenon.

  Shouting, Alkibiades’ henchmen ran up and started clubbing Sokrates. The only trouble was, they hit Alkibiades nearly as often. Then, suddenly, Sokrates groaned and went limp. Alkibiades scrambled away from him. The hilt of a knife stood in the older man’s back. The point, surely, had reached his heart.

  Sokrates’ eyes still held reason as he stared up at Alkibiades. He tried to say something, but only blood poured from his mouth. The hand he’d raised fell back. A stench filled the courtyard; his bowels had let go in death.

  “Pheu!” Alkibiades said, just starting to feel his aches and bruises. “He almost did for me there.”

  “Who would’ve thought the old blabbermouth could fight like that?” one of his followers marveled, surprise and respect in his voice.

  “He was a blabbermouth, sure enough.” Alkibiades bent down and closed the staring eyes. Gently, as a lover might, he kissed Sokrates on the cheek and on the tip of the snub nose. “He was a blabbermouth, yes, but oh, by the gods! he was a man.”

  Alkibiades and King Agis of Sparta stood side by side on the speakers’ platform in the Pnyx, the fan-shaped open area west of the agora where the Athenian Assembly convened. Since Alkibiades had taken the rule of Athens into his own hands, this wasn’t really a meeting of the Assembly. But, along with the theater of Dionysos, the Pnyx still made a convenient place to gather the citizens so he—and Agis—could speak to them.

  Along with the milling, chattering Athenians, several hundred Spartans who had come up from the Peloponnesos with Agis occupied a corner of the Pnyx. They stood out not only for their red cloaks and shaven upper lips: they stayed in place without movement or talk. Next to the voluble locals, they might almost have been statues.

  Nor were they the only Hellenes from other poleis here today. Thebes had sent a delegation to Athens. So had Corinth. So had the Thessalians, from the towns in the north of Hellas proper. And so had the half-wild Macedonians. Their envoys kept staring every which way, especially back toward the Akropolis. Nodding toward them, Alkibiades murmured to Agis, “They haven’t got anything like this up in their backwoods country.”

  “We have nothing like this, either,” Agis said. “I doubt whether so much luxury is a good thing.”

  “It hasn’t spoiled us or made us soft,” Alkibiades replied. As you have reason to know. He didn’t say that. It hung in the air nonetheless.

  “Yes,” Agis said laconically.

  What Alkibiades did say was, “We’ve spent enough time—too much time—fighting among ourselves. If Athens and Sparta agree, if the rest of Hellas—and even Macedonia—follows…”

  “Yes,” Agis said again. This time, he added, “That is why I have come. This job is worth doing, and Sparta cannot do it alone. Neither can Athens.”

  Getting a bit of your own back? Alkibiades wondered. It wasn’t as if Agis were wrong. Alkibiades gestured to a herald who stood on the platform with him and the Spartan. The man stepped up and called in a great voice, “People of Hellas, hear the words of Alkibiades, leader of Hellas, and of Agis, King of Sparta.”

  Leader sounded ever so much better than tyrant, even if they amounted to the same thing. Alkibiades took a step forward. He loved having thousands of pairs of eyes on him, where Agis seemed uncomfortable under that scrutiny. Agis, of course, was King because of his bloodline. Alkibiades had had to earn all the attention he’d got. He’d had to, and he’d done it.

  Now he said, “People of Hellas, you see before you Athenian and Spartan, with neither one quarreling over who should lead us Hellenes in his direction.” Of course we’re not quarreling, he thought. I’ve won. He wondered how well Agis understood that. Such worries, though, would have to wait for another time. He went on, “For too long, Hellenes have fought other Hellenes. And while we fought among ourselves, while we spent our own treasure and our own blood, who benefited? Who smiled? Who, by the gods, laughed?”

  A few of the men in the audience—the more clever, more alert ones—stirred, catching his drift. The rest stood there, waiting for him to explain. Sokrates would have understood. The gouge on Alkibiades’ forehead was only a pink scar now. Sokrates would have said I’m pointing the Athenians in a new direction so they don’t look my way. He would have been right, too. But now he’s dead, and not too many miss him. He wasn’t a nuisance only to me.

  Such musing swallowed no more than a couple of heartbeats. Aloud, Alkibiades continued, “In our grandfathers’ day, the Great Kings of Persia tried to conquer Hellas with soldiers, and found they could not. We have men in Athens still alive who fought at Marathon and Salamis and Plataia.”

  A handful of those ancient veterans stood in the crowd, white-bearded and bent and leaning on sticks like the last part of the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. Some of them cupped a hand behind an ear to follow him better. What they’d seen in their long lives!

  “Since then, though, Hellenes have battled other Hellenes and forgotten the common foe,” Alkibiades said. “Indeed, with all his gold Great King Dareios II has sought to buy mastery of Hellas, and has come closer to gaining it than Kyros and Xerxes did with their great swarms of men. For enmities among us suit Persia well. She gains from our disunion what she could not with spears and arrows.

  “A lifetime ago, Great King Xerxes
took Athens and burnt it. We have made it a finer polis, a grander polis, since, but our ashes are yet unavenged. Only when we Hellenes have burnt Persepolis to the ground can we say we are, at last, even with the Persians.”

  Some fellow from Halikarnassos had written a great long book about the struggles between Hellenes and Persians. The burning of Athens was the least of it; he’d traced the conflict back even before the days of the Trojan War. What was his name? Alkibiades couldn’t recall. It didn’t matter. People knew Athens had gone up in flames. The rest? Long ago and far away.

  Almost everyone in the Pnyx saw where he was going now. A low, excited murmur ran through the crowd. He continued, “We’ve shown one thing, and shown it plainly. Only Hellenes can beat other Hellenes. The Great King knows as much. That’s why he hires mercenaries from Hellas. But if all our poleis pull together, if all our poleis send hoplites and rowers and ships against Persia, not even those traitors can hope to hold us back.

  “Persia and the wealth of Persia will be ours. We will have new lands to rule, new lands to settle. We won’t have to expose unwanted infants anymore. They will have places where they can live. The Great King’s treasury will fall into our hands. Now we starve for silver. Once we beat the Persians, we’ll have our fill of gold.”

  No more low, excited murmur. Now the people in the Pnyx burst into cheers. Alkibiades watched the Spartans. They were shouting as loud as the Athenians. The idea of a war against Persia made them forget their usual reserve. The Thebans cheered, too, as did the men from the towns of Thessaly. During Xerxes’ invasion, they’d given the Persians earth and water in token of submission.

  And the Macedonians cheered more enthusiastically still, pounding one another and their neighbors on the back. Seeing that made Alkibiades smile. For one thing, the Macedonians had also yielded to the Persians. For another, he had no intention of using them to any great degree in his campaign against Persia. Their King, Perdikkas son of Alexandros, was a hill bandit who squabbled with other hill bandits nearby. Macedonia had always been like that. It always would be. Expecting it to amount to anything was a waste of time, a waste of hope.