Yet there is a telling allusion in Polemides' tale. His wife, Phoebe, he stated at one point, when she was seventeen and already mother to their child, requested initiation into the Mysteries of Eleusis. At another point in his narrative Polemides expressed his distaste for this stuff, which he regarded as little more than superstition, and effeminate at that. Yet he not only permitted his bride this favor but accompanied her upon its exercise, making the pilgrimage by sea and completing the full initiation himself.
Why would he do this? What could his motive be, save to honor his spouse and forge with her a deeper union? We may at this point be forgiven a venture into imagination. Let us picture Polemides at twenty-two or — three, already a veteran of twelve years of Spartan discipline and two and a half more of war. He returns home, wounded; he recovers, sufficiently for his father and great-aunt to provide a bride. Perhaps his thoughts turn toward mortality; he may desire children, if only to cheer the advancing age of his father. The Plague has begun. His countrymen are perishing for cause unknown; no abatement is in sight. Nor does he find his male companions to hand; all are off to war. He is cooped within the city, in the apartments he shares with father, sister, perhaps cousins, aunts, and uncles.
Our young soldier accepts his bride. She is of good family, friend to his sister Merope; no doubt she is possessed of wit, skilled in music and the domestic arts. She comports herself with modesty, self-effacing as all daughters of breeding; we may surmise that she is not without physical charms. Incapacitated as he is, the young husband finds he must rely on his bride for company and converse, perhaps even such necessities as to be brought his meals, to read or mount the stairs.
He finds his bride kind and patient, shrewd in her application of their straitened resources. She is younger, her heart is gay. She makes him laugh. Here is a man, recall, who all his life has been drilled in hardship and self- denial, to whom the supreme virtue is the sacrifice of his life in war. It occurs to him with the shock of revelation that there is another oar in the boat. He is not alone.
Perhaps for the first time the steel of his heart relents. His wound makes him dizzy, in alarm he gropes for balance; to his astonishment he discovers his bride at his elbow, steadying him with a gentle hand. May we not envision her delivering to his bedside a favorite dish, setting flowers for him upon the sill, singing at his side in the evening?
He discovers her affection for his father, and the love this gentleman reciprocates. He hears the lass giggling with his sister in the kitchen. Does this make him smile? Despite the horrors without, the clan manages cheerful evenings at home in each other's company.
As for appetites of the flesh, our young Polemides has thus far slaked them only among the harridans of the whores' camp or in illicit liaison with women of the street. Now he finds himself in the marriage bed, beside his bride. She must be innocent. Her tender years inspire not the rough lust of the soldier, but the gentle passion of the husband. How do they discover their desire?
Haltingly perhaps; doubtless deficient in skill. Yet together, each for the first time with the other.
He speaks of this never, as any gentleman. But in his heart affection grows. He has never known another, save his family, to treat him with tenderness, to look out if he is comfortable, if his needs have been attended to. May we not fancy his soldier's heart softening? Might not the occasion arise when our Polemides draws up upon the private instant and recognizes perhaps for the first time that he is happy?
Now consider her, the lass Phoebe. How does she find her husband? No paragon for the sculptor's studio perhaps, but an athlete and soldier nonetheless; virile and disciplined, a young man of substance, beside whom she need never know fear. Unthinkable is it that he will abandon her. Should the worst come, he will die defending her and her children. Must not our bride, the Bright One, respond to this, beyond her schooling as an obedient wife, out of the uncoerced attachment of her heart?
And our bridegroom is vulnerable. He has been wounded, he knows fear. He needs her. While outside, the foundations of the firmament crack and crumble, within, a private cosmos conceives itself and grows. A child stirs within the bride's womb. With what joy must the couple, keenly aware of their own mortality, have responded? More than this one need not posit to imagine the pair, in the gentle darkness of their bedchamber, forging a union which the young husband, schooled to silence and close counsel, would not dream to disclose in words.
Perhaps I take license, my grandson. I may read into Polemides' state of mind overmuch of my own. This, however, is what my heart tells me of the man.
So were we all, of that generation. Like Polemides we, too, were taking brides. We, too, had children growing and upon the way.
Our steps should have been bearing us abroad in welcome to the spring; we should have been casting open portals to range with our darlings upon the vernal hills. Yet these stood shuttered to us now.
We were walled in, compassed by the armored corps of our enemies. We had asked for war and war had come. What none had foreseen, however, was the spectral henchman at his shoulder: the Plague.
Here advanced an invader more implacable than the myriads of Persia, more pitiless than the phalanxes of Lacedaemon. One could not treat with this enemy or buy it off for gold. It countenanced no quarter; tokens of submission could not induce it to draw back. It advanced in darkness and in daylight, and no sentry's cry could call the warning. Walls of stone could not keep it out. It answered to no gods, paid heed to no offerings. It took no day off, vacated upon no holiday. It did not sleep or pause for respite. And nothing could slake its appetite.
The Plague played no favorites. Its silent scythe cut down the illustrious and the obscure, the just alongside the wicked. Daily about us we perceived its mounting toll. In the gymnasium the comrade's cubicle, within which no hand hung street clothes more.
The vendor's shuttered stall, the theater patron's vacant seat. By day we inhaled the stink of the crematoria; at night the wagons of the dead rumbled beyond our gates. In sleep we heard the groan of their tread; their terror invaded even our dreams. In her self-legislated immurement Athens reeled beneath the scourge, soundless and invisible, to whose ravagement none stood invulnerable or immune.
VIII
In those days as you know, Jason [Polemides resumed], there existed few formal curricula in medicine; an individual could simply call himself a doctor and offer his services for hire. More frequently a private person found himself recruited, so to say, by his own facility for succor. This was the case with my father. He had the gift. Stricken friends sent for him. He made them well.
From his years upon the land my father had acquired expertise of herbs and kataplasmata, poultices and purges, splints, bindings, even surgery, all the folk-derived veterinary usages the husbandman learns seeking to keep his stock sound and thriving.
More beneficial stood his manner of proffering comfort. One simply felt better in his presence. My father revered the gods in the simple, straightforward manner of his age. He believed; his friends believed in him; it worked. Soon their friends were calling too. In this manner Nicolaus of Acharnae, bereft of the income of his estate, found himself competent to support his new household in the city. He chucked his farmer's boots and hung out the physician's shingle.
With the rise of the Plague my father's services became much in demand. My sister Meri took upon herself the role of nurse, accompanying him on his rounds. I was in the city then too. I had married and had a young son. Often I, too, traveled with my father and sister, more to provide security under arms in the remote precincts they were called to than to assist in any medical capacity.
I detested the sick. I was afraid of them. I could not but feel that they had drawn their distress upon themselves by their own delinquent actions, concealed from mortals but known to the gods.
And I dreaded contagion. I stood in awe of my father's and sister's intrepidity to enter these dwellings of the doomed. I recall one midnight, summoned to some shantytown quarter, a hive of tent cloth and wicker, where ventilation stood nonexistent and the vapors of the dying loitered noxiously, stinking to heaven. The madness of the street-spawned Theseus religion stood at its zenith then. The lane was plastered with crimson bull's horns.
Every wall read Proseisin: “He is coming.” The tenement itself teemed with immigrants, ancients and babes, those foreigners who had flocked to the city in her decades of abundance and now in her affliction remained
