Kallistratus; an autobiography ... With illustrations by M. Greiffenhagen

Preface

About four years ago I published a story called " The Thing that hath Been." Of those who read the story, some thought that I meant by writing it to attack the Church of England, to which I am strongly attached ; others that I meant to attack the system of public school education, which I think most salutary. In fact, I only intended to represent the youth of Socrates as I conceived it, placing him in English surroundings ; thus trying to explain the feelings which his countrymen entertained towards him — feehngs compounded of mistrust and dis like, not unmixed with admiration and wonder. I hope that of those who may read this book, no one will think that I have done anything else than simply put in the mouths of the characters those opinions which I thought that they would be likely to hold. The College, Dulwich, March 1897. V CONTENTS CHAP. FAQS

Prologue

I I. THE ORACLE ON THE RHONE 8 II. WAR RUMOURS 23 III. THE PEDLAR 40 IV. THE PASSAGE OP THE RHONE . . . . 50 V. TOWARDS ROME 66 VI. THE TREBIA . 81 VII. AFTER THE BATTLE 97 VIII. AT ROME 106 IX. SPIES 128 X. TRASIMENE 137 XI. COMMUNICATIONS 145 XII. CANNÆ 158 XIII. A MARCH ON ROME 183 XIV. IKETORIX IN ROME I90 XV. CAPUA 204 XVI. DESERTION 211 XVII. EMANCIPATION 220 XVIII. IN ATHENS 232 vu LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The Crowd rushed on Him, to take Him . frontispiece Kallinice took her Seat upon the Tripod to face p. 32 He drew his Sword, and shouted, " Upon Them, my Children " . „ KALLISTRATUS

PROLOGUE.

In the year 430 b.c. there was no city which drew the eyes of the world so completely towards it as Athens. It had been for several decades at the head of that confederacy which was formed to maintain the security of Greece against the Persians. Originally each member of the confederacy contributed yearly either money, ships, or men, for the national defence ; but in most cases, sooner or later, these contributions took the form of money alone ; and as, year by year, the Persians became less and less formidable, and the surplus of the fund rapidly increased, it was presently appropriated, by the great Athenian statesman Pericles, to adorn and strengthen the city of Athens itself. Temple after temple of the fairest proportions and most beautiful work manship, shrine after shrine, statue after statue, surpassing aU the efforts of later times, was set A KALLISTRATUS up within her walls; her riches increased, her citizens were multiplied, and lived a life of exquisite luxury and refinement.

They seemed to be the children of the blessed gods, and the city seemed to be favoured by the brightest and gentlest of the Immortals. At Athens was the ah most pure and clear, and the streams like sdver ; at Athens, according to the story, the Muses, the goddesses of all accompUshments, had given to the earth Harmony, theh yellow-haired daughter. Upon Athens the goddess of beauty had breathed her sweetest breath; and Athens was the home of PaUas Athene, the immortal queen of wisdom. The Athenians, rich and at ease, theh long hah crowned with roses, moved in an atmosphere of wit, wisdom, and beauty, the elect of the world. Theh Hfe was made bright by social festivals, costly, but at the same time elegant and tasteful. Nor was this luxury so extreme as to enervate either mind or body. There were no braver men, none more enterprising, and none more accomplished, than the Athenians.

But the imperial greatness of Athens soon disappeared, first before the attack of Sparta and her alUes ; so that in the year 404 B.C., after the campaigns of Lysander, at last the city itself was taken, and many monuments of its imperial great ness were destroyed. It is a fact, which even

PROLOGUE.

3 now grates upon the hearts of those who read, that to the sound of music made by Spartan lyres and fifes, the long walls of Athens were destroyed — those walls which connected the city itseU with the Phæus, its harbour, those walls which pro claimed its connection with the sea, and rendered its supremacy on the sea possible. When Sparta proved herself unworthy of the place to which her allies and her armies had raised her, when she showed that she could not govern dependencies, even govern them according to the idea of government which men then possessed, it was not Athens that shook her power ; it was Thebes, a city which at home and abroad had the worst record of all the Grecian states. Epaminondas, the great Theban, led his countrymen to vietory at Leuctra and Mantinea, and Athenians did little more than accept the new position.

But there was that about the Athenians which prevented them from passing into insignificance ; and presently, when PhiUp of Macedon, by his gold and soldierly cunning, attacked the liberties of Greece, Athens once again came to the front. She was no mean city stdl, and Demosthenes, her great citizen, became her champion in the struggle which she, and Greece under her guidance, made to resist the advance of the Macedonians. But the efforts of KALLISTRATUS Demosthenes were in vain ; that is, if they are to be judged by the common measure ; Philip grew in strength and prevailed. But the great orator cried to his fellow-citizens, in words which charm and nerve men even now, that no brave effort for freedom, no unselfish adherence to a righteous cause, can really be thrown away — can really, whatever be the issue, be described as simply vain ; and thus, though PhiUp prevaded, yet the honours remained with Demosthenes, who lost.

In the days of Alexander, the son of PhiUp, matters went worse stdl for Athens ; and, together with the whole of Grece, she now remained out side of the great issues of history. Men's eyes were fixed upon the East — upon Alexander, upon his gigantic exploits and wonderful personality. When he died the whole world was shocked, and Demades, the Athenian, said : " It cannot be that Alexander is dead. If he were, the whole world would stink of his carcass." Alexander died in 323 B.C., and his emphe was spht up into sections ; of the European section — namely, Mace donia — Athens became simply a part, and her political importance was overwhelmed for ever. How was it that the course of Athens was thus downward, that Sparta beat her, that Thebes went before her, that Macedon beat her, that she lost her influence and her independence ? The ex-

PROLOGUE.

5 planation of all this is not to be given by speaking of miUtary and political reverses, of Ægospotami, of Chæronea. It is to be found in the character of the Athenian people. They were not really able to govern dependencies, and they were not able to govern themselves. Able, eloquent, and accomphshed as they were, there lay deep in the heart of the people other forces which destroyed them. They worshipped beauty, and thus they lost theh admiration for strength. They ceased to be wdling to suffer hardships, and desired to spend easy, thoughtless lives, when their position as an imperial people could only be maintained by self-denial, by wisdom, and by the edge of the sword. Thus steadiness, earnestness, perseverance, and principle began to disappear from the national character ; and their Panhellenic feeUng, which had once made all Greece glow with admhation, eva porated into an academic luxury ; theh patriotism became merely a sentiment ; they governed, when they had dependencies to govern, in a selfish spirit ; they aHenated theh allies, they became fickle in theh political attachments, and both grasping and feeble in their policies.

Gradually the state lost its spirit. It could criticise, but it could not act. Its public men became corrupt, and accepted bribes from its enemies. The offenders were from time to time brought to trial, KALLISTRATUS for the old machinery— the laws of a wholesome time-^-was still existing. But though one or other citizen might be punished, yet the evd disposition remained a habit in the nation. Athenians began to bend before what was strong, not because it was in the right, but because it was strong ; they lost individuahty, and at last adapted themselves to the whims and ways of a master ; and this hardly two centuries after Marathon, not 150 years from the days of Pericles. And yet there was stiU about the Athenians something which no other people in the world possessed — the power to produce forms of beauty, and to admire them truly ; the power to charm, to spend leisure in a manner not rough or brutal, but polite.

And again they had a treasure better and more splendid than any material inheritance ; a treasure which was the heritage of every one of them, and of which no one could rob them — the great writings of theh great countrymen ; written in Greek, and so written as to make the under standing of the Greek tongue something always to be deshed. And thus, though Athens pohtically was dead, yet the Athenians Hved, and influenced mankind, sometimes corrupting theh simphcity by the vder appliances of civdisation, sometimes im posing upon their ignorance, sometimes amusing them and ennobling them by teaching them the

PROLOGUE.

7 lore which Greeks alone possessed. The exercise of this influence was not confined to those who visited Athens. For Athenians were in the early days of the third century before Christ to be met with in many places besides Athens. Political changes continually expelled from the city many eminent famihes. The world was beginning in a certain sense to be Athenian country ; and wherever men were, there Athenians could make theh way, alternately helping and amusing theh company, causing in those with whom they associated different feelings, sometimes of admiration, sometimes of awe, and sometimes of contempt.

Chapter I The Oracle On The Rhone

I am now a man quite old, and I shall soon be among those below. If I had known whither I am about to go, or whether I am about to go anywhere, I would have pondered chiefly on the future; but since aU this is uncertain, I regard the past, and remember it, pushing the future from my mind. And yet the past pains me — does any man love altogether to think of his past ? — and even that part of it on which I love to think, pains me, when I remember what I was, and see what I am. I am a shadow now, and once I was substance whom men noted; now I do nothing and say nothing noticed. I am indeed a grasshopper, like that which my ancestors wore in theh hah, but that they twittered not ; and I shall die unnoted and unmissed. I pined in my youth for fame, and for fame did what now I hate to remember ; and yet no post wdl tell throughout the world of me dead, no king nor city wdl sigh relieved, and no woman will weep.

Yet I have done what was notable, and more. I have seen more than most men see, and I have been a part of great matters. I bear very hardly this being nothing; and I am lonely too, and need company; therefore I will find it in the past ; I will bring up the shades of men, and teU of them and of me who am a shade ; and men shall speak of me in my age, as once they spoke of me in my youth. Thus I wdl sing of battles and state matters; and you, men of Athens, among whom I Hve, and who regard me not, who talk and flatter the stronger, you shall know that I am better than you, you shall know what I have seen, and wonder at me, because I helped to shake that which you flatter, even Rome. And you Romans, you Sulpicius, of the white toga and purple border, who do not even look at me — my name, who have done greater things than you, and come from greater men, my name shall go further than yours.

And, O city of Rome, despising my city and me, you shall know that I was a part of that which nearly destroyed you. Alas for me ! it pains me that you do not hate me or fear me. One man you hated and feared, and might me also perhaps, had things gone otherwise. It is a history that I shall tell, not a fancy. I shall not wander in the world, like Herodotus KALLISTRATUS 10 whom all men know, nor exchange city for city to find out truth, like the great Thucydides, whose names, Greek though they are, wdl last out the names of Claudius or Sempronius. I stay at home, and place together my history, the history of myseff. I have no scribe nor informer to help me ; but my memory alone, and my brother's tale, and my sister's tale, told to me by them who are now dead ; and thus I sit alone beside a cold hearth.

And I shaU have also a handmaiden, my fancy, who shall prompt me, and join for me piece to piece ; and thus will I make a new thing, a story of true things for men to read ; not to see, as on a stage, or to see with thought alone. I too wdl create, like Sophocles, and like Euripides, and like Plato ; and what I say wdl be truth, though fancy partly. Was Œdipus in the grove at Colonus ? Did Medea of Colchis in truth cry out the words that come from Stesippus' mouth ? Sat Socrates in truth beneath the plane-tree and bathed his feet ? In truth, I know not ; it seems as though he sat. And so what I write shaU stand, though some of it I saw not ; and so me also men wdl see, when I write ; and know me and my company, which was ; and I shall Hve, though dead. Therefore I will write, and write of war, and of a hero ; another as well as mysetf.

For he was a hero ; and my sphit quaded before his. Though I could think and plan when I was away from him, yet when I saw him I could not hold to what I thought and planned ; I became altogether under him, and his plan put mine away ; for his plan was the best; better than Mago's, better than Gisco's, better than Mutines' — the best ; and we knew that it was the best. When I saw him, if I was hungry or faint, Inoted it not ; I went where he bade me, and waited where he placed me. Neither could I lift my eyes to look on him, except in admiration and love ; for when I had other thoughts, I could not meet his eyes. As I think of him now, my heart warms, my breath pants. There never was a man like him, nor shaU be ; brave and glorious, unbroken in calamity; the centre of the world that was not Roman, and filling every Roman heart with hatred and fear ; the equal of an army, of a nation — matchless Hannibal.

Alas ! as I write, the spirit of loyalty and love stabs me cruelly when I think that I forsook and betrayed him. There are times when I think that what I did was right. But when I write of him, I am struck with shame, and gnawed with pain. He is dead; and he died with every plan foded, and every hope defeated ; and yet I would that I had stayed at his side, and had been happier so in the end. KALLISTRATUS I know not whether it was an evil day for me, and for my sister, when we saw him first. She saw him, and loved him with all her heart and soul, and seemed from that day onwards to have no eyes for man. All men who saw her laid them selves at her feet ; who would not, for her beauty was superb ? Even to the day of death her face and form were divine ; no Athene that Phidias saw and shaped was more a goddess than she.

No man who saw her did not try to see her again. And even he, whom the Romans say beat Hannibal, — beat him indeed ! so the armed man beats the naked, — even he, the favourite of the gods, whose name is spread throughout the world, so that I hate to think of it, he loved and followed her, so that she might, had she so chosen it, have ruled the world. But even to him here were the gods unkind ; his goddess would have none of him ; me and my brother she loved, as a sister loves ; and Hannibal she loved, as a lover loves, wddly and steaddy, so that to hear his voice made her face pale, and at the tidings of his death she died. Now I wdl write, and write of myself; for that is my purpose. I am an Athenian, Kalhstratus the Athenian ; but Athens saw I never until I was an old man ; worn and feeble I came to the places, the names of which I knew, where my fathers had Uved and done great things, for which some even of the Romans have respect, brutish though they are.

To be an Athenian is to be noble ; and I am an Athenian of Athenians. My grandfather in the fifth degree heard Pericles in the 'E/c/cX^tr/a, and placed in the urn pebbles which directed fleets and armies, and set up and pulled down cities. His son marched with Thrasybulus from Phylæ, and set up again the people, in the power which they betray. He sat also as juryman in that trial of which men yet speak, of that strange man whose name yet lives because he found a writer to describe him, as mine shall live by my own writing — I mean Socrates, who was partly a disgrace, and partly a glory to Athens ; he would have ruined an army, but yet he was a brave man. My ancestor condemned him, so my father said, but would not have made him drink the hemlock. The son of this ancestor of mine was taxiarch under Chabrias ; it seems always under, under, under, with my race ; and I had hoped to change this.

And again by some divine luck he was with Iphicrates at Corinth, when the Mora came gady on to destruction. He brought a Spartan shield to Athens, and himself carved on it that which Pericles said : " (ptXocrocpovfiev avev KALLISTRATUS /jLaXaiflas." These words were true then, but they are not true now. This Spartan shield Alexander the Macedonian took as a gift when he entered Athens ; where it is now, I know not. His son, my grandfather in the second degree, was at Chæ ronea; he marched out, and marched back — to an enslaved state. He rebelled against the Mace donians, and was expelled by the cursed Antigonus, who worked the last ruin of our city. Alas me ! had Athens been Athens, and the Athenians been men, then I had been a man now ; the first among Athenians, the capital of the world.

There was no man then at Athens, for I do not count a talker a man, to save the Athenian nation and our place. My great-grandfather was born in exde, at Nikaia, in the savage Ligurian land ; and from that time no more are the works of my kindred known. There were none there in Nikaia to know the worth of our race, and of the gifts we might have given to them. We Hved there, amusing and teaching and scorning our company, teaching them such arts as they cared to know, something of the shaping of weapons, and some thing of driU and of moving troops, and of navi gating the sea, and something also of cookery : but these barbarians despised us ; their bodies were strong, and ill fares it with exdes. Truly said Pericles, that only the prosperity of the whole brings prosperity to the individual. In another generation, KaUicles my grandfather and his family were again scattered, and moved towards Illyria.

But at last my own father, Kallistratus, with my mother and theh slave Strabo, one left of many, moved westward to MassiHa; and then presently inland, a five days' journey up the banks of the great river Rhone, where I and my brother KaUicles, and my sister Kalli nice, the eldest of us three, were born. I have heard all these things from my father, and he told me too how he chose a place of dwelling. My father was a man wise and strong, and there was no way of life in which he could not live, and living in it bear rule. He learned at MassiHa the ways and needs of the fiery yeUow-haired blue-eyed giants of the Rhone; he heard of all that they were from the merchants who travelled among them, and he made his plans, plans such as might have made a state, though all that came of them was the safety of one famdy.

My father could weave a myth according to fact and fancy ; he could see in that about him all that there was, even to the depth of men's souls ; and thus as he talked, all things of which he told us rose plain before us. Thus he taught the history of our race, and told us of Athens and its glories, of Troy and Marathon, and how the sea became the KALLISTRATUS Athenians' home, theh half of the world. He told us also of other nations, of Egypt and Persia ; and through all lands he led us in speech and thought ; whde we listened and laughed and cried. And he told us also of his own times and wanderings, and how they three, my father, my mother, and Strabo, coming from IUyria, entered upon their place on the bank of the river. He said, and I can see him now, and the chcle round him — him with his clear skin, dark eyes, and laughing lips, his whole face Hke a god's, and us sitting around him in our house, each on a stool, my sah and gentle mother, and KaUicles with his back bent, his halting leg drawn back, and my sah strong sister ; and withdrawn a Httle from us, seated on the lowest stool, but not from humdity (for that, Hke all else, was but a pretence with him), but for comfort's sake, Strabo, with his back on the wall, and his red face, glowing as the fire blaze shone on it, glowing Hke a red moon; only that the moon leers not nor grins, but looks sad always.

So we sat and Ustened, while my father spoke. " Ye see these wild rude men whose country this is ; and how they come to this shrine for all the wisdom that they have. Twenty years ago they had none of it ; they fished, and himted, and drank and quar relled, and killed, and had shrines, or a grove, but no deity within it. From the better world there came to them only sturdy pedlars with theh packs ; brave men, but teaching nothing. But, my sons, one evening, when old Alorcos, whom ye know, was fishing in the pools beneath the high western bank, he drove his boat hard by this hole of Verda ; and strange were the sounds which from that hole proceeded. Hark, my chddren ! " He lifted up his finger ; we Ustened to the sounds we well knew, living always near them ; gasping as of a giant breathing.

" No Gaul came here, even in the day, though the fishing is best here, and now it was evening. While he listened then in fear, from the hole three beings moved towards him, and stood stiU on the river's brink ; one was beautiful as Perse phone herself." Here my father looked away from me, and on my mother with eyes of love ; she rose and threw her arms around his neck, and said, " And one was as stately as Hermes the herald." My father laughed, and bowed his head. " And one," he said, with twinkling eye, as it fell upon Strabo, with his round belly and red nose, " and one was godlike also, or like a companion to a god — god's friend — that is Sdenus. Then did Persephone" — (My mother cried, "Avert it, holy goddess ") — call with a sweet voice and B KALLISTRATUS wave of her hand, pointing down to the net ; a great shoal of fish had swum into it.

Alorcos looked down, and seeing the fish, was afraid : he looked on each of the three beings, and, last of all, on great Silenus; then he could endure no more, but fled. Yet, next day at dawning, he came with others, and found us where he had seen us before. We gave him balsam for a wound which he had, and sent a net to the king. From that time we have been here, teaching and helping, and now we rule the king and the Ilergetan land, Athenians straight born. It is strange, my children." My father looked at me as he often looked when he was speaking ; for my brother was lame and misshapen, and kept himself behind ; but my sister loved him the more for it. From that time the glory of the shrine grew, and its splendour and its size. At first, my father said, the enclosure was separated from the glade of the forest only by a string, and the bowls for purification were wooden.

But presently in the place of the string a wall was budt, and at the gate were placed two brazen bowls. And when all was fully developed, I wdl tell you what those who consulted the god saw. As they entered the enclosure, before them there was a portico, resting on four pdlars ; through this they passed into a dark chamber of twenty feet in length and ten in breadth. At the end of it, there swung from the ceiling a lamp, throwing its light both dimly into the chamber, and showing also the holy cell behind it, which was budt round the hole of Verda. As in trembhng sdence each worshipper stood on the threshold of the chamber and caUed upon the god, my father in priestly robes ap peared under the lamp, and demanded what the worshipper needed of the god. The question was given, and the priest retired to the side, waving a pan, from which smoke and odour issued.

The suppliant laid his offering on an altar to the right, then my sister or my mother took her place upon the tripod under the image of the god, which was enthroned in a niche in the farther waU ; whde the priestess thus took her place, the cell was filled with a sound of thunder. Then my father, with a smoking pan in his hand, put the question ; there was again a noise of thunder ; the priestess stood upright, and told in a strange tone the god's message. Then, trembling, the suppliant retired. I tell it as I have seen it a hundred times, and as it seemed to him who came to the god. At the outer door my father was wont to meet the trembhng barbarian, and explain KALLISTRATUS 20 to him the message, with words in whieh the wisdom of a god really lay. It was said to me by Xenodocus the Stoic, that this was poor mummery — the acting of a lie, nothing else.

But I say that he thought wrongly of it. It is true that Strabo made the thunder, sitting in a chamber in the hole, and that my father made the oracle, knowing each man's business before he came, or learning it when he came. But what then ? It was as a stratagem in war ; but one that made alive instead of kdling. The Gauls were ruled by it, and were happy and righteous because of it ; and nought else would have served the turn. Wherefore, hold thy peace who talkest of Hes, or speak only those who never deceive; then I know I shall hear nothing against the oracle. And yet my sister misliked it ; from the first she partly mishked it, and never hked it better. She had a high heart, as high as Olympus, whither she should have gone ; for there are none on that peak above her ; and KaUicles misliked it as he grew towards his manhood.

I must write something of Kallieles, saying what was his nature. We were together in life sixteen years, tiU I had been seventeen years born ; and he loved me. I loved him partly, but I loved myself more. My heart grows soft in my age when I think of him. He gave me all he had without grudging; but I grudged him even the Uttle praise he won. Not in arms he won it, nor in council; he was smaU and crooked as the gods make few Greeks; and he cared not for state matters, re maining unknown and contented thereat. Yet one power he had. He could make lays and sing them sweetly. I did not love to hear him, though others did. I would I had loved better to hear him. But I thought then that in this world every man should be for himseU; and he for me, because he was crpoked, and younger than I. I am sorry now.