Part 22 (1/2)
FEBRUARY 2.--We have pa.s.sed safely through another country. The people were drawn out in order of battle when the luckiest thing happened, saving, I doubt not, many lives. One of the men came up to Xenophon and said: ”I think I know the language these people talk. I verily believe that it is my own.” And so it turned out to be. The man had been a slave in Athens. He explained to them that we did not wish to do them any harm, but simply wanted to get back to our own country. Since then it has been peaceful. The people--Macrones they call themselves--have been as helpful as possible, making roads for us, and supplying us with as good food as they possessed.
FEBRUARY 7.--Yesterday I really thought that after all that I had gone through, I was going to die of eating a mouthful of honey. We found a great store of this in one of the Colchian villages that we came to, and of course ate it freely. It was poisonous, at least to persons not used to it. I know that I was desperately ill and so were many of my comrades. Happily no one died. We reach Trapezus to-morrow. We are in Greece again. Thanks be to Zeus and all the G.o.ds!
FOOTNOTES:
[72] For convenience' sake I have translated the dates of the Attic year which Callias, of course, used with the corresponding days in our reckoning. October 27 would be the ”fifth day of the middle of Boedromia.” Each month was divided into three portions, often days each, respectively called beginning, middle, and ending. The days of the last were reckoned backwards. If this month had twenty-nine days only, the third division had nine.
CHAPTER XXIV.
A THANKSGIVING.
The worst severity of the winter was over when the army reached Trapezus. The days were longer, for it was already half way between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and though the nights were still bitterly cold, the sun was daily gaining power. Sometimes a breeze from the west gave to the air quite a feeling of spring. Still Callias was very thankful to find quarters in the city. He discovered but scarcely with surprise, that as soon as he returned within the circle of Greek influence, the credentials furnished him by Hippocles made life much smoother for him. Trapezus was the very farthest outpost of civilization; it was at least nine hundred miles from Athens, yet the name of Hippocles seemed as well known and his credit as good as if it had been the Piraeus itself. As soon as permission could be obtained to enter the town--for the people of Trapezus, though kind and even generous to the new arrivals, kept their gates jealously shut--Callias made his way to the house of a citizen who was, he was told, the princ.i.p.al merchant in the place. Nothing could have been warmer than the welcome which he received, when he produced the slip of parchment to which Hippocles had affixed his seal and signature.
”All I have is at your disposal,” cried Demochares; this was the name of the Trapezuntine merchant. ”I cannot do too much for any friend of Hippocles. You will, of course, take up your quarters with me; and any advance that you may want,--unless,” he added with a smile, ”you have learnt extravagance among the Persians, for we are not very rich here in Trapezus--any advance within reason you have only to ask for.”
The young Athenian ventured to borrow fifty gold pieces, astonis.h.i.+ng his new friend by the moderation of his demand. He knew that some of his comrades, mercenaries who had not received an _obolus_ of pay for several months, must be very badly off, and he was glad to make a slight return for many little services that he had received, and acts of kindness and good fellows.h.i.+p that had been done for him on the march. As for hospitality, he begged to be allowed to postpone his answer till he could consult his general.
”I don't like to leave you, sir,” he said when he broached the subject to Xenophon after their evening meal. ”Why should I have the comforts of a house, lie soft, and feed well, while you are sleeping on the ground, and getting or not getting a meal, as good luck or bad luck will have it?”
”My dear fellow,” replied Xenophon, ”there is no reason why you should not take the good the G.o.ds provide you. You are not one of us; you never have been. You came as a volunteer, and a volunteer you have remained.
You are perfectly free to do as you please. Besides, if you want anything more to satisfy you, you are attached to my command, and I formally give you leave.”
Callias, accordingly, took up his quarters in the merchant's house.
Never was guest more handsomely treated. Demochares and his family were never wearied of his adventures, a story which has indeed interested the world ever since, and which to these Greeks of Trapezus had a meaning which it had lost for us. Living as they did on the farthest boundaries of the Greater Greece, the Greece of the colonies, they were keenly alive to all that could be known about the barbarian world with which they were brought in constant contact. The young Athenian, indeed, held a sort of levee which was thronged day after day with visitors young and old. All that he had to tell them about the Great King, on whose dominions they were in some sort trespa.s.sers, and about the unknown tribes who dwelt between the sea and the Persian capital, was eagerly listened to. Pleasant as his sojourn was to himself, it was not without some advantage to his old comrades. His host was an important person in Trapezus, holding indeed the chief magistracy for the year, and he had much to do with the liberal present of oxen, corn, and wine which the town voted to the army.
A month pa.s.sed in a sufficiently pleasant way. Meanwhile the army was preparing to offer a solemn thanksgiving for the safe completion of the most perilous part of its journey. The vows made at the moment of its greatest danger were now to be paid, and paid, after the usual Greek fas.h.i.+on, in a way that would combine religion and festivity. There was to be a sacrifice; the sacrifice was to be followed by a feast, and the feast again by a celebration which was, of course, in a great measure an entertainment, but was also, in a way, a function of wors.h.i.+p. Wrestlers, boxers, and runners not only amused the spectators and contended for glory and prizes, but were also supposed in some way to be doing honor to the G.o.ds.
The sacrifice and the feast it is not necessary to describe. Necessarily there was nothing very splendid or costly about them. The purses of the soldiers were empty, though they had a good deal of property, chiefly in the way of prisoners whom they had captured on the way, and whom they would sell in the slave markets as the opportunity might come. Trapezus, however, and the friendly Colchian tribes in the neighborhood furnished a fair supply of sheep and oxen to serve as victims, and a sufficient quant.i.ty of bread, wine, dried fruit and olive oil, this last being a luxury which the Greeks had greatly missed during their march, and which they highly appreciated. A few of the officers, the pious Xenophon among them, went to the expense of gilding the horns of the beasts which were their special offerings; but for the most part the arrangements were of a plain and frugal kind.
The games had at least the merit of affording a vast amount of entertainment to a huge mult.i.tude of spectators. They were celebrated, it may be easily understood, under considerable difficulties, for Trapezus did not possess any regular race course, and the only rings for wrestling and boxing were within the walls, and therefore not available on this occasion. By common consent the management of the affair was handed over to a certain Dracontius. He was a Spartan, and to the Spartans, who had been undisputed lords of Greece since the fall of Athens, had been conceded a certain right of precedence on all such occasions as these. Dracontius, too, was a man of superior rank to his comrades. He belonged to one of the two royal houses of Sparta, but had been banished from his country in consequence of an unlucky accident. In one of the rough sports which the Spartan lads were accustomed to practice, sports which were commonly a more or less close mimicry of war, a blow of his dagger, dealt without evil intention but with a criminal carelessness, had been fatal to a companion. Hence, from boyhood, he had been an exile; cut off from the more honorable career to which he might have looked forward in the service of his country, he had been content to enlist as a mercenary.
Dracontius, accordingly, was made president of the games. The skins of the sacrificed animals were presented to him, as his fee, and he was asked to lead the way to the racecourse where the contests were to be held.
”Race course!” cried the Spartan, with the _brusquerie_ which it was the fas.h.i.+on of his country to use, ”Race course! What more do you want than what we have here?”
A murmur of astonishment ran through the army. Indeed there could have been nothing less like a race course than the ground on which they were standing. It was the slope of a hill, a slope that sometimes became almost precipitous. Most of it was covered with brushwood and heather.
Gra.s.s there was none, except here and there where it covered with a treacherously smooth surface some dangerous quagmire. Here and there, the limestone rock cropped up with jagged points.
”But where shall we wrestle?” asked Timagenes, an Arcadian athlete, who had won the prize for wrestling two or three years before at the Lithurian games, and who naturally considered himself as an authority on the subject.
”Here of course,” was the president's reply.
”But how can a man wrestle on ground so hard and so rough?” asked the Arcadian, who had no idea of practising his art except in a regular ring.
”Well enough,” said Dracontius, ”but those who are thrown will get worse knocks.”
The wrestler's face fell and he walked off amid a general laugh. His comrades fancied, not without reason, that he was a great deal too careful of his person.
But if the ground, broken with rocks and overgrown with wood was not suited to scientific wrestling, it certainly helped to make some of the other sports more than usually amusing. The first contest was a mile race for boys. Most of the compet.i.tors were lads who had been taken prisoners on the march, but a few Colchians entered for the prize, as did also two or three boys of Trapezus, who had the reputation of being particularly fleet of foot. But the natives of the plain, still more the inhabitants of the town, found themselves entirely outpaced on this novel race course by the young mountaineers. A Carduchian came in first, and was presented with his liberty, his master being compensated out of the prize fund which had been subscribed by the army. As soon as he understood that he was free, he set out at full speed in the direction of his home. A true mountaineer, he sickened for his native hills, and in the hope of seeing them again was ready to brave alone the perils which an army had scarcely survived.