The Acropolis of Athens rises as does no other citadel in the world. Had no workers in marble or bronze, no weavers of eloquence or song, dwelt beneath its shadow, it would stand the centre and cynosure of a remarkable landscape. It is “The Rock,” no other like unto it. Is it enough to say its ruddy limestone rises as a huge boulder one hundred and fifty feet above the plain, that its breadth is five hundred, its length one thousand? Numbers and measures can never disclose a soul,—and the Rock of Athens has all but a soul: a soul seems to glow through its adamant when the fire-footed morning steals over the long crest of Hymettus, and touches the citadel’s red bulk with unearthly brightness; a soul when the day falls to sleep in the arms of night as Helios sinks over the western hill by Daphni. Then the Rock seems to throb and burn with life again.
It is so bare that the hungry goats can hardly crop one spear of grass along its jagged slopes. It is so steep it scarce needs defence against an army. It is so commanding that he who stands on the westmost pinnacle can look across the windy hill of the Pnyx, across the brown plain-land and down to the sparkling blue sea with the busy havens of Peiræus and Phalerum, the scattered gray isles of the Ægean, and far away to the domelike crest of Acro-Corinthus. Let him turn to the right: below him nestles the gnarled hill of Areopagus, home of the Furies, the buzzing plaza of the Agora, the closely clustered city. Behind, there spread mountain, valley, plain,—here green, here brown, here golden,—with Pentelicus the Mighty rearing behind all, his summits fretted white, not with winter snows, but with lustrous marble. Look to the left: across the view passes the shaggy ridge of Hymettus, arid and scarred, as if wrought by the Titans, home only of goats and bees, of nymphs and satyrs.
That was almost the self-same vision in the dim past when the first savage clambered this “Citadel of Cecrops” and spoke, “Here is my dwelling-place.” This will be the vision until earth and ocean are no more. The human habitation changes, the temples rise and crumble; the red and gray rock, the crystalline air, the sapphire sea, come from the god, and these remain.
Glaucon and Hermione were come together to offer thanks to Athena for the glory of the Isthmus. The athlete had already mounted the citadel heading a myrtle-crowned procession to bear a formal thanksgiving, but his wife had not then been with him. Now they would go together, without pomp. They walked side by side. Nimble Chloë tripped behind with her mistress’s parasol. Old Manes bore the bloodless sacrifice, but Hermione said in her heart there came two too many.
Many a friendly eye, many a friendly word, followed as they crossed the Agora, where traffic was in its morning bustle. Glaucon answered every greeting with his winsome smile.
“All Athens seems our friend!” he said, as close by the Tyrannicides’ statues at the upper end of the plaza a grave councilman bowed and an old bread woman left her stall to bob a courtesy.
“Is your friend,” corrected Hermione, thinking only of her husband, “for I have won no pentathlon.”
“Ah, makaira, dearest and best,” he answered, looking not on the glorious citadel but on her face, “could I have won the parsley wreath had there been no better wreath awaiting me at Eleusis? And to-day I am gladdest of the glad. For the gods have sent me blessings beyond desert, I no longer fear their envy as once. I enjoy honour with all good men. I have no enemy in the world. I have the dearest of friends, Cimon, Themistocles—beyond all, Democrates. I am blessed in love beyond Peleus espoused to Thetis, or Anchises beloved of Aphrodite, for my golden Aphrodite lives not on Olympus, nor Paphos, nor comes on her doves from Cythera, but dwells—”
“Peace.” The hand laid on his mouth was small but firm. “Do not anger the goddess by likening me unto her. It is joy enough for me if I can look up at the sun and say, ‘I keep the love of Glaucon the Fortunate and the Good.’ ”
Walking thus in their golden dream, the two crossed the Agora, turned to the left from the Pnyx, and by crooked lanes went past the craggy rock of Areopagus, till before them rose a wooden palisade and a gate. Through this a steep path led upward to the citadel. Not to the Acropolis of fame. The buildings then upon the Rock in one short year would lie in heaps of fire-scarred ruin. Yet in that hour before Glaucon and Hermione a not unworthy temple rose, the old “House of Athena,” prototype of the later Parthenon. In the morning light it stood in beauty—a hundred Doric columns, a sculptured pediment, flashing with white marble and with tints of scarlet, blue, and gold. Below it, over the irregular plateau of the Rock, spread avenues of votive statues of gods and heroes in stone, bronze, or painted wood. Here and there were numerous shrines and small temples, and a giant altar for burning a hundred oxen. So hand in hand the twain went to the bronze portal of the Temple. The kindly old priest on guard smiled as he sprinkled them with the purifying salt water out of the brazen laver. The door closed behind them. For a moment they seemed to stand in the high temple in utter darkness. Then far above through the marble roof a softened light came creeping toward them. As from unfolding mist, the great calm face of the ancient goddess looked down with its unchanging smile. A red coal glowed on the tripod at her feet. Glaucon shook incense over the brazier. While it smoked, Hermione laid the crown of lilies between the knees of the half-seen image, then her husband lifted his hands and prayed aloud.
“Athena, Virgin, Queen, Deviser of Wisdom,—whatever be the name thou lovest best,—accept this offering and hear. Bless now us both. Give us to strive for the noblest, to speak the wise word, to love one another. Give us prosperity, but not unto pride. Bless all our friends; but if we have enemies, be thou their enemy also. And so shall we praise thee forever.”
This was all the prayer and worship. A little more meditation, then husband and wife went forth from the sacred cella. The panorama—rocks, plain, sea, and bending heavens—opened before them in glory. The light faded upon the purple breasts of the western mountains. Behind the Acropolis, Lycabettus’s pyramid glowed like a furnace. The marble on distant Pentelicus shone dazzlingly.
Glaucon stood on the easternmost pinnacle of the Rock, watching the landscape.
“Joy, makaira, joy,” he cried, “we possess one another. We dwell in ‘violet-crowned Athens’; for what else dare we to pray?”
But Hermione pointed less pleased toward the crest of Pentelicus.
“Behold it! How swiftly yonder gray cloud comes on a rushing wind! It will cover the brightness. The omen is bad.”
“Why bad, makaira?”
“The cloud is the Persian. He hangs to-day as a thunder-cloud above Athens and Hellas. Xerxes will come. And you—”
She pressed closer to her husband.
“Why speak of me?” he asked lightly.
“Xerxes brings war. War brings sorrow to women. It is not the hateful and old that the spears and the arrows love best.”
Half compelled by the omen, half by a sudden burst of unoccasioned fear, her eyes shone with tears; but her husband’s laugh rang clearly.
“Euge! dry your eyes, and look before you. King Æolus scatters the cloud upon his briskest winds. It breaks into a thousand bits. So shall Themistocles scatter the hordes of Xerxes. The Persian shadow shall come, shall go, and again we shall be happy in beautiful Athens.”
“Athena grant it!” prayed Hermione.
“We can trust the goddess,” returned Glaucon, not to be shaken from his happy mood. “And now that we have paid our vows to her, let us descend. Our friends are already waiting for us by the Pnyx before they go down to the harbours.”
As they went down the steep, Cimon and Democrates came running to join them, and in the brisk chatter that arose the omen of the cloud and fears of the Persian faded from Hermione’s mind.
It was a merry party such as often went down to the havens of Athens in the springtime and summer: a dozen gentlemen, old and young, for the most part married, and followed demurely by their wives with the latter’s maids, and many a stout Thracian slave tugging hampers of meat and drink. Laughter there was, admixed with wiser talk; friends walking by twos and threes, with Themistocles, as always, seeming to mingle with all and to surpass every one both in jests and in wisdom. So they fared down across the broad plain-land to the harbours, till the hill Munychia rose steep before them. A scramble over a rocky, ill-marked way led to the top; then before them broke a second view comparable almost to that from the Rock of Athena: at their feet lay the four blue havens of Athens, to the right Phaleron, closer at hand the land-locked bay of Munychia, beyond that Zea, beyond that still a broader sheet—Peiræus, the new war-harbour of Athens. They could look down on the brown roofs of the port-town, the forest of masts, the merchantman unloading lumber from the Euxine, the merchantman loading dried figs for Syria; but most of all on the numbers of long black hulls, some motionless on the placid harbour, some propped harmlessly on the shore. Hermione clouded as she saw them, and glanced away.
“I do not love your new fleet, Themistocles,” she said, frowning at the handsome statesman; “I do not love anything that tells so clearly of war. It mars the beauty.”
“Rather you should rejoice we have so fair a wooden wall against the Barbarian, dear lady,” answered he, quite at ease. “What can we do to hearten her, Democrates?”
“Were I only Zeus,” rejoined the orator, who never was far from his best friend’s wife, “I would cast two thunderbolts, one to destroy Xerxes, the second to blast Themistocles’s armada,—so would the Lady Hermione be satisfied.”
“I am sorry, then, you are not the Olympian,” said the woman, half smiling at the pleasantry. Cimon interrupted them. Some of the party had caught a sun-burned shepherd in among the rocks, a veritable Pan in his shaggy goat-skin. The bribe of two obols brought him out with his pipe. Four of the slave-boys fell to dancing. The party sat down upon the burnt grass,—eating, drinking, wreathing poppy-crowns, and watching the nimble slaves and the ships that crawled like ants in the haven and bay below. Thus passed the noon, and as the sun dropped toward craggy Salamis across the strait, the men of the party wandered down to the ports and found boats to take them out upon the bay.
The wind was a zephyr. The water spread blue and glassy. The sun was sinking as a ball of infinite light. Themistocles, Democrates, and Glaucon were in one skiff, the athlete at the oars. They glided past the scores of black triremes swinging lazily at anchor. Twice they pulled around the proudest of the fleet,—the Nausicaä, the gift of Hermippus to the state, a princely gift even in days when every Athenian put his all at the public service. She would be Themistocles’s flag-ship. The young men noted her fine lines, her heavy side timbers, the covered decks, an innovation in Athenian men-of-war, and Themistocles put a loving hand on the keen bronze beak as they swung around the prow.
“Here’s a tooth for the Persian king!” he was laughing, when a second skiff, rounding the trireme in an opposite direction, collided abruptly. A lurch, a few splinters was all the hurt, but as the boats parted Themistocles rose from his seat in the stern, staring curiously.
“Barbarians, by Athena’s owls, the knave at the oars is a sleek Syrian, and his master and the boy from the East too. What business around our war-fleet? Row after them, Glaucon; we’ll question—”
“Glaucon does no such folly,” spoke Democrates, instantly, from the bow; “if the harbour-watch doesn’t interfere with honest traders, what’s it to us?”
“As you like it.” Themistocles resumed his seat. “Yet it would do no harm. Now they row to another trireme. With what falcon eyes the master of the trio examines it! Something uncanny, I repeat.”
“To examine everything strange,” proclaimed Democrates, sententiously, “needs the life of a crow, who, they say, lives a thousand years, but I don’t see any black wings budding on Themistocles’s shoulders. Pull onward, Glaucon.”
“Whither?” demanded the rower.
“To Salamis,” ordered Themistocles. “Let us see the battle-place foretold by the oracle.”
“To Salamis or clear to Crete,” rejoined Glaucon, setting his strength upon the oars and making the skiff bound, “if we can find water deep enough to drown those gloomy looks that have sat on Democrates’s brows of late.”
“Not gloomy but serious,” said the young orator, with an attempt at lightness; “I have been preparing my oration against the contractor I’ve indicted for embezzling the public naval stores.”
“Destroy the man!” cried the rower.
“And yet I really pity him; he was under great temptation.”
“No excuses; the man who robs the city in days like these is worse than he who betrays fortresses in most wars.”
“I see you are a savage patriot, Glaucon,” said Themistocles, “despite your Adonis face. We are fairly upon the bay; our nearest eavesdroppers, yon fishermen, are a good five furlongs. Would you see something?” Glaucon rested on the oars, while the statesman fumbled in his breast. He drew out a papyrus sheet, which he passed to the rower, he in turn to Democrates.
“Look well, then, for I think no Persian spies are here. A month long have I wrought on this bit of papyrus. All my wisdom flowed out of my pen when I spread the ink. In short here is the ordering of the ships of the allied Greeks when we meet Xerxes in battle. Leonidas and our other chiefs gave me the task when we met at Corinth. To-day it is complete. Read it, for it is precious. Xerxes would give twenty talents for this one leaf from Egypt.”
The young men peered at the sheet curiously. The details and diagrams were few and easy to remember, the Athenian ships here, the Æginetan next, the Corinthian next, and so with the other allies. A few comments on the use of the light penteconters behind the heavy triremes. A few more comments on Xerxes’s probable naval tactics. Only the knowledge that Themistocles never committed himself in speech or writing without exhausting every expedient told the young men of the supreme importance of the paper. After due inspection the statesman replaced it in his breast.
“You two have seen this,” he announced, seemingly proud of his handiwork; “Leonidas shall see this, then Xerxes, and after that—” he laughed, but not in jest—“men will remember Themistocles, son of Neocles!”
The three lapsed into silence for a moment. The skiff was well out upon the sea. The shadows of the hills of Salamis and of Ægelaos, the opposing mountain of Attica, were spreading over them. Around the islet of Psyttaleia in the strait the brown fisher-boats were gliding. Beyond the strait opened the blue hill-girdled bay of Eleusis, now turning to fire in the evening sun. Everything was peaceful, silent, beautiful. Again Glaucon rested on his oars and let his eyes wander.
“How true is the word of Thales the Sage,” he spoke; “ ‘the world is the fairest of all fair things, because it is the work of God.’ It cannot be that, here, between these purple hills and the glistening sea, there will come that battle beside which the strife of Achilles and Hector before Troy shall pass as nothing!”
Themistocles shook his head.
“We do not know; we are dice in the high gods’ dice-boxes.
“ ‘Man all vainly shall scan the mind of the Prince of Olympus.’
“We can say nothing wiser than that. We can but use our Attic mother wit, and trust the rest to destiny. Let us be satisfied if we hope that destiny is not blind.”
They drifted many moments in silence.
“The sun sinks lower,” spoke Democrates, at length; “so back again to the havens.”
On the return Themistocles once more vowed he caught a glimpse of the skiff of the unknown foreigners, but Democrates called it mere phantasy. Hermione met them at the Peiræus, and the party wandered back through the gathering dusk to the city, where each little group went its way. Themistocles went to his own house, where he said he expected Sicinnus; Cimon and Democrates sought a tavern for an evening cup; Glaucon and Hermione hastened to their house in the Colonus suburb near the trickling Cephissus, where in the starlit night the tettix(4) in the black old olives by the stream made its monotonous music, where great fireflies gleamed, where Philomela the nightingale called, and the tall plane trees whispered softly to the pines. When Hermione fell asleep, she had forgotten about the coming of the Persian, and dreamed that Glaucon was Eros, she was Psyche, and that Zeus was giving her the wings of a butterfly and a crown of stars.
Democrates went home later. After the heady Pramnian at the tavern, he roved away with Cimon and others to serenade beneath the lattice of a lady—none too prudish—in the Ceramicus quarter. But the fair one was cruel that night, and her slaves repelled the minstrels with pails of hot water from an upper window. Democrates thereupon quitted the party. His head was very befogged, but he could not expel one idea from it—that Themistocles had revealed that day a priceless secret, that the statesman and Glaucon and he himself were the only men who shared it, and that it was believed that Glaucon had visited the Babylonish carpet-seller. Joined to this was an overpowering consciousness that Helen of Troy was not so lovely as Hermione of Eleusis. When he came to his lodgings, however, his wits cleared in a twinkling after he had read two letters. The first was short.
“Themistocles to Democrates:—This evening I begin to discover something. Sicinnus, who has been searching in Athens, is certain there is a Persian agent in the city. Seize him.—Chaire.”
The second was shorter. It came from Corinth.
“Socias the merchant to Democrates:—Tyrrhenian pirates have taken the ship. Lading and crew are utterly lost.—Chaire.”
