Of Merchants & Heros (26 page)

Some – those who will cling to any delusion of good news rather than face the truth – were taken in by this. But, as Kleinias said to me later, all that had been achieved was that men were dead who, but for this pointless action, would be taking bread that night with their friends and wives and children.

I washed the filth from my body, went to bed, and slept. At dawn the slave roused me from a deep sleep. A messenger had called: Pomponius wished to see me at once.

I went angrily. No doubt someone had told him I had fought with the Athenians, and he would have a lecture to deliver. I was in no mood for it. My body was sore, and it had taken me a long time to get to sleep. Antikles’s death had hit me hard. As I lay staring into the darkness, words of his had come back to me. He had said, only a few days before, that the man who lives each day fearing death dies a thousand times. Now he was gone. I had been his last pupil.

Pomponius’s opulent residence lay on the far side of the city, in the fashionable quarter near the precinct of Olympian Zeus.

It was still only first light when I arrived, but already there was a crowd of clients waiting in the courtyard. I recognized the chief Archon, standing with a group of magistrates from the Council, talking urgently with members of the Roman legation.

‘Ah, Marcus, there you are,’ cried Pomponius, emerging from under the portico.

He beckoned to the Archon – a thin bony-cheeked man with quick, prominent eyes. I remembered how Kleinias, who did not like him, had said he was a clever speaker in the assembly, with the common touch. Now he merely looked pale and startled.

Pomponius turned to me, and declaimed in a booming voice intended for everyone, ‘Well I imagine you have heard of yesterday’s battle. Philip knows a Roman legation is here. And yet he dares to attack, even while we are in the city. It is an outrage!’

‘It is contempt,’ chimed the Archon.

‘A deliberate insult,’ said the man next to him.

‘Deliberate,’ agreed Pomponius, whose vanity had clearly been stoked with a good deal of this before I arrived. ‘An affront to the whole legation . . . and to the Senate and People of Rome.’

All about us, voices rose in indignant complaint.

I said, ‘You sent for me, sir? The messenger said it was urgent.’

‘It is! I am going to speak to Philip myself. I am going to demand an explanation.’

‘You, sir?’

‘Well, all of us; not just me. You are a Roman, and a friend of Titus: I should like you to be with us. The more Romans the better . .

. and it would do no harm if Titus were to hear of this.’

I asked what he proposed to tell Philip.

‘Tell him? Why, that this must stop. What else? It must stop
immediately
. He must withdraw out of Attika. He must pay reparations.’

He puffed out his cheeks and searched the faces crowding round; and at this everyone began speaking at once, encouraging him, praising his wisdom.

When I could be heard again I said, ‘But what if he does not listen? It was Athens, after all, that declared war; not Philip.’

I had raised my voice to be heard over the din. Now, all of a sudden, there was silence.

I glanced round. The Archon, and magistrates, and clerks, and members of the legation, were staring at me. One might have supposed I had committed the grossest impropriety, or that they had not considered this question at all.

‘Not listen?’ exclaimed Pomponius, his heavy chin shaking as the words rolled off his tongue. And then – for the silence had continued, and everyone’s eyes were upon him – ‘Why, he would not dare – But if he does, then he may consider himself at war not only with Athens, but with Rome as well.’

He had spoken, uttering these words before half the government of the city. His large, jowly mouth set firm; but for a moment I saw a flash of doubt in his eyes. It was too late. The words were out.

Everyone had heard them, and even now those at the back were repeating them to the others. No retraction was possible.

I saw the beginnings of a smile form on the Archon’s thin lips. He glanced aside, and coughed, bringing up a concealing hand. I realized he had got what he wanted: he had roused Pomponius into a frenzy of grandiose booming anger. He had led him on, like a muleteer dangling a carrot.

There was no more time to urge him to reconsider. He intended to march out of the city and confront Philip at his camp. When I tried to speak again he waved me silent, and hurried off to his rooms, saying he must dress for the meeting.

I waited in the courtyard with the others. Presently he emerged, got up in a heavy, embroidered woollen robe edged with purple, clasped with an elaborate brooch of gold torque-work studded with lapis, with a gilded olive-spray perched upon his large balding head.

I noticed one or two of the Greeks exchange glances. Athenians, as a rule, do not care for ostentation, thinking it vulgar. I stared at him. He looked like some rich Sicilian merchant on his way to a late-night drinking party.

Soon after, we set out, taking the street towards Dipylon Gate.

The Archon, who had been rather silent, came up, and in a lowered voice said perhaps, after all, it would be better if he himself were not present at this meeting with Philip: there was, he felt, too much bad feeling between Macedonians and Athenians . . . he should have thought of it earlier . . . he did not wish to jeopardize success . .

‘—Yes, yes, as you wish,’ said Pomponius, not really listening.

The Archon dropped back, leaving Pomponius, and a few members of the Roman legation – and me – to exit through the city gate.

We took the path to the complex of buildings known as the gymnasion of Kynosarges. I knew it well, having walked there often with Menexenos. There was a dense shading wood of cypresses and low pines, and, in the middle, a temple of Herakles. It was here the Macedonians had made their camp.

As we approached, I could see the troops’ bivouacs suspended among the trees. Smoke from cooking fires curled up into a clear sky.

They had raided the smallholdings, and the air was pungent with the tang of roasting meat.

When we were perhaps two-thirds of the way to the camp there arose a stirring, and moments later a band of uniformed men rode out on horseback.

‘Let them approach,’ said Pomponius, extending his arm in a gesture for us to halt.

We waited.

The front rider was a middle-aged man clad in a short cavalryman’s tunic and a gilded cuirass. He dismounted a few paces off, removed his plumed helmet of scarlet horsehair, and strode the rest of the way on foot. He had a proud, handsome face, and dark, intelligent eyes. I knew it had been a sign of respect for him to dismount and remove his headgear. He could easily have ridden right up to us and addressed us from his horse.

Pomponius peered at him, narrowing his eyes against the sharp sunlight. Then he proceeded to make an embarrassing show of looking this way and that across the empty open ground, like a buffoon at the theatre who has lost his mule, before he said, ‘Where is Philip? I do not see Philip.’

The Macedonian officer stiffened.

‘The King is elsewhere,’ he replied. ‘I am here in his place. My name is Philokles. I am senior commander here.’

‘—I don’t care who you are,’ Pomponius interrupted. ‘I am the Roman ambassador to Athens, and I sent word that I wished to speak to Philip. Now go and summon him.’

If I had been anywhere else, I think I should have turned and gaped. Instead I stood rigid, like a soldier on parade. Pomponius never took much trouble with his Greek, and I believe, at first, the Macedonian thought he had misheard. For a brief moment he looked into the ambassador’s face with a searching look of surprise, and his eyes strayed up to the large gilded olive-spray perched upon his head. Then his face set firm, and in a different, harder voice he said, ‘King Philip is elsewhere, as I have told you. So say what you wish to say, or go back to the city.’

Pomponius glared. By now the sun was well up in the sky, and on the dusty road where we stood there was no shade. His fleshy face was growing crimson, and little beads of black-coloured sweat had begun to form where his dyed, carefully arranged hair met his neck and ears.

He glanced behind him at the junior legates and at me, with a face that said, ‘What now?’ Then he turned back, and in a voice quivering with outrage he spluttered, ‘This is wholly unacceptable. I demand that you withdraw.’

Philokles looked him square in the face. ‘Why are you here, Roman? Our business is with the Athenians, who declared war on us.

Are they too afraid even to venture from behind their walls? What are you? Their herald? Have you come to tell us they surrender?’

Pomponius hesitated. I think only then did it occur to him that the Archon had pushed him into an impossible position. By now he was sweating heavily. His face was blood-red, though I could not tell whether this was from the heat or his anger. Beside me the junior legates exchanged glances, wondering whether to interrupt. If Philip was not there, Pomponius had an excuse to withdraw and reconsider. But before anyone could step up and whisper in his ear, urging him to do this, he had resumed speaking.

‘Well if Philip will not come, then you can tell him this: in the name of the Senate and People of Rome, I forbid him to make war on Athens or any Greek city. I order him to withdraw immediately from Attika; and I demand compensation for the injuries done to the Athenians.’

Then he swung round, said ‘Come along’ to the rest of us, and strode off ahead, back to the Dipylon Gate, where the Athenians were watching from the walls, his heavy purple-edged cloak billowing behind him.

We did not have long to wait before Philip gave us his answer.

NINE

FIRST THE GROVE AROUND
Kynosarges and the temple of Herakles went up in flames. Next was the turn of the Lykeion. We watched from the walls as the pines flared against the sky, engulfing everything – the colonnades from where I had watched Menexenos and his friends practise for the games; the bath-house, the public rooms with their lecture rooms and sculptures and fine paintings; even the sacred grove around Wolf-Apollo, which everyone thought would be spared out of reverence for the gods.

But the Lykeion was only the beginning. Next the Macedonians turned their attention to the Akademy, a place renowned throughout all Greece for its learning and excellence. I saw grown men with tears streaming down their faces as they watched helpless as fire raged through the school and library and tended gardens. There was nothing of military advantage to be gained by such destruction. It was, they said, the accumulated wisdom of all humanity they were destroying.

Next, Philip divided his army, leaving Philokles outside the walls of Athens to keep us penned in there, while he marched on Piraeus.

I thought of the neglected Long Walls, by which the Athenians might have moved in safety between the city and the port. Now they stood in ruins. Piraeus, though so close, had to look to its own defence as best it could.

Yet, by the favour of some god, and the stubbornness of its small garrison, Piraeus held. Frustrated, Philip took out his anger on the surrounding countryside, setting fire to everything that would burn, and tearing down every temple and shrine and object of beauty or veneration he found. From the walls we watched the smoke rise all over Attika as fields and farms were put to the torch.

When, finally, there was nothing left to destroy or steal, and nothing for the army to feed on, the Macedonians withdrew, back the way they had come, northwards over the passes to Boiotia. On the day afterwards, I rode out with Menexenos and his father to see what had become of the farm.

The road beyond the city was strewn with shards. Even the dead had not been spared Philip’s wrath. The shards were the remains of funeral vases, which had stood over the tombs that lined the road.

The tombs, too, had been smashed; human bones lay over the scorched earth, spilled from their broken sarcophagi. In the rural demes the little rustic temples with their wooden posts and straw roofs had been set alight. The images of the gods lay toppled.

Kleinias was not a man to make a display of his emotion. But as we came upon some new piece of wanton destruction he would shake his head, or comment on whose wasted land we were passing.

At one point, when we were beyond Hymettos, Menexenos said, ‘Father, go back to the city. We can do this another day.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It must be faced.’

Mount Paneion appeared in the distance, and we turned down the track that led to the farmstead. Even from here I could see the blackened terraces on the slopes, where the vineyard had been.

Presently we began to pass grotesque, charred stumps in the fire- scorched fields. They were the carcasses of sheep. What the Macedonians had not eaten, or carried off, they had slaughtered, then burnt along with the crops.

Near the house the olive grove, the patient work of generations, had been hacked down and set alight. But by then we could see what they had done to the house itself. The walls still stood. But the roof was gone, and the windows were like eyeless sockets, black with soot.