statue. Again, Nicephorus said nothing.
I got up and walked towards the nearest edge of the Acropolis. I could hear everyone else follow me over. I looked down to what had been the Temple of Hephaestus, though it was now a shell with a church built within it. I knew that this had once been close by the centre of Athens. Now, there was a huddle of silk weaving factories for about a hundred yards between it and the modern wall. I scanned the rest of the old centre. It made as little sense from above as it had from the ground. Perhaps if I spent a while in the residency library, looking at that mural, I might get some idea of what was down there. .
‘You are welcome to disagree, dear boy — your taste in art is perverse enough, I’m sure,’ Priscus broke in behind me. I only noticed that Theodore had continued his explanations as he halted for another stammer. ‘But I can’t say any of this compares with even the Church of the Apostles back home. Would you like to comment, by the way, on its conversion to a church?’ He turned and pointed back at the astonishing little Temple of Athena.
I might have taken this as an excuse to leave the edge of the Acropolis and walk right over to the temple. But the scuffle of the monks had passed through riot into a small pitched battle. Instead, I focused on the pediment. ‘I imagine it was damaged at some time in the past — perhaps in the barbarian attack of three hundred years ago?’
Priscus nodded.
‘That may be why the original roof is gone. The new roof is based on the inner wall, into which I can see windows have been cut for the church. That leaves the outer colonnade redundant. But I’m glad the architects had the good taste to leave it in place.’
‘You’re a clever boy — I’ll give you that!’ came the reply. ‘But let Uncle Priscus assure you the barbarians never got up here. There’s too little damage to indicate that. I’d blame fire or some other accident of time for the loss of the ancient roof.’ He turned and raised both arms at a couple of boys who’d crept up behind us.
One of them screamed softly and made a complex sign with his hands. A warning voice from within the crowd called them away.
Priscus watched complacently as everyone shuffled back another few feet. ‘I still don’t think much of these old buildings,’ he said. ‘Certainly, this one pales to nothing beside the Great Church in Constantinople. Even so, I’ll grant it all has a certain elegance for those who like that sort of thing. Didn’t some Roman general think so in ancient times?’
‘You are surely thinking of Sulla,’ I replied with a sly smile. I leaned against the warm stones of the boundary wall and looked at the Temple of Athena. If I ignored the dark figures still darting about under the portico, it had a nobility about its shape that no scowling mosaics of Christ could take away. ‘I’m surprised you could forget the man who set the precedent for every later reign of terror. Those who don’t compare your late father-in-law to Caligula often compare you to Sulla.’
Cheering by the moment, I smiled into the sneering face. ‘Yes,’ I went on, ‘it was Sulla. The Athenians had, with a regrettable want of common sense, backed Marius in the first of the civil wars that ended the Republic. So before he could get home for his big killing spree in Rome, Sulla rolled up here at the head of an army. Just before the city fell, the whole city assembly went out to beg for mercy. They wasted every trick of Greek eloquence on the old beast. Finally, they fell silent and pointed up here. Sulla followed their pointed fingers and stood silent for what everyone thought an age. Then he turned and, without looking at the scared assemblymen, walked off to his tent. “I spare the living for the sake of the dead,” was all he said before going in.’
‘Well said! Well said, my dear young fellow,’ Priscus jeered at me. ‘You’ve a talent for dramatic narration — such a pity you weren’t sent off to Hippopolis. But you have left something out. The real drama in the account is that Sulla’s engineers had already got part of the wall down, and the first wave of soldiers were through the breach and getting stuck into the customary massacre. It was a devil’s job to call them off. No one but Sulla could have done that.’ He stopped and flashed a nasty look at Martin. ‘Do you suppose the barbarians will show such taste and restraint when they push down the heaps of rubble that pass nowadays for the walls of Athens?’
I saw Martin jerk slightly as if he’d been prodded from behind. Nicephorus unfixed his gaze from the monks, who might now have succeeded in kicking someone to death.
Priscus leaned closer to me. ‘Shall we go somewhere a little more private?’ he whispered. ‘Even in Latin, what I have to say is not really for an audience.’
Chapter 25
There was a time when you could stand anywhere on the high end of the Acropolis and look down to Piraeus and the sea. Then the whole plateau was levelled to make a regular platform for the temples, and was surrounded by walls. After that, you had to go back into the Propylaea and through a side door to climb on to the roof of what had been the Temple of Victory for the sea to be visible. This was where, so legend said, King Aegeus had stood and waited for the return of his son Theseus from Crete; and from where, when Theseus had forgotten to show he’d not been eaten by the Minotaur by replacing black sails with white, the old man had jumped down and killed himself. That may have been two thousand years earlier. Now, I stood in much the same spot, with the nearest equivalent I’d yet seen to a man-devouring monster a few paces to my right. Groaning from a very gentle climb, Priscus had clutched hold of a sturdy but dead bush that had poked through the roof, and was trying his best not to look worn out.
‘I didn’t suppose tourism would be your motive for coming up here after me,’ I said.
Four miles away, the sea was a sparkling, blue carpet, broken here and there by dark islands. Just below me on the left was the theatre built by Herodes Atticus — a most generous benefactor, second only to Hadrian himself. If I looked right, there was the head and upper torso of yet another statue of Hadrian. This time, he was patting the head of his boy Antinous. An ancient city is a place of many layers. There’s a continuity of building from earliest times into the fairly recent past, and it takes much forgetting and a lot of squinting to see things as they must have appeared at any specific time in the past. Up here, though, I could almost think myself into better times, when Athens still mattered as other than a defensive point in a game that spanned the known world. Certainly, the shining sea, far off, and the deep blue of the sky were as they’d always been in Athens, and always would be.
I pulled myself back into the present and stared at the Governor’s letter that Priscus held in his free hand. ‘I’ll admit I came out before I’d bothered opening it,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose it’s a cheerful read.’
‘Cheerful, dear boy, would be an unfair description,’ came the reply. Priscus tightened his grip on the bush and reached inside his robe for a lead flask. Holding the letter under his arm, he pulled out the flask and handed it to me.
I unstoppered it and sniffed the contents. Most of it was wine. The rest was unlikely to kill me — Priscus was still expecting others to do his dirty work. I took a swig and passed it back. Whatever of it wasn’t wine hit me as if from behind almost before Priscus could take the flask and pour most of it down his throat. Heart racing, I tried not to fall off the roof, and waited for the pattern of colours behind my eyes to settle into a reasonable blur.
‘It’s an infusion of yellow bugs that are gathered from the slopes of a volcano somewhere to the east of China,’ he said. ‘Mix it with sea mandrake, and your balls will explode with lust.’ He fell silent, and joined me in peering into the distance.
At last, he let out a long and despairing sigh and cleared his throat. ‘We can forget about his numbers,’ he said. ‘They make no sense, even in terms of what the land will normally support. If I weren’t out of area, I’d have the useless toad scooped off his bed of alleged sickness and flogged round the walls of Corinth. But I won’t question the generality of the Governor’s information. There’s sod all to eat anywhere south of the Danube where a grain ship can’t be landed. In the occupied territories, every barbarian without a sword who’s still alive is a walking skeleton. Those who are armed have stopped gambling over what food can be had, and are cutting each other’s throats. It’s only because rainwater has blocked all the passes that they haven’t turned up here already.’
I looked away from the horizon and waited till I could focus on another part of the city wall. At some time in the distant past — it might have been in the great days of Athens, or after the first real incursion in the chaotic times before Diocletian had steadied the Empire — there had been a much more substantial wall, enclosing a larger space. I could now see where it had been from a few courses of dark stone, or from a gap in the ruins that stretched out beyond the present wall. I’d not have dismissed this as ‘heaps of rubble’. Then again, I had no military experience. The walls about Constantinople were so thick, you could drive two chariots side by side along the
