I wonder: does she know
if the city walls tumble
and the Spartans take the city,
what could happen to her?
The women and children enslaved,
the men (her beloved father)
put to the sword?
It could happen tomorrow.
And does she know
that on other islands,
it’s the Athenians, men like her father
helmeted in bronze,
who wage war,
and besiege the cities?
They say at Potidaea
the people inside the city walls
were so hungry
they ate the dead before they surrendered.
I don’t know for sure. I’m a bit squeamish.
I didn’t watch that part.
And then there’s plague.
If there’s a war,
there are armies on the move,
and that means disease. If you crowd too many people
inside the city walls,
there’s bound to be sickness. There was plague in Athens,
twenty-some years ago. A filthy business.
I didn’t watch that, either.
Plague is disgusting
and tedious, too.
It’s the same thing over and over.
One-fourth of the people died.
My point is, this miraculous city, Athens,
exists in the middle of war,
and Melisto knows that.
She still has all her baby teeth,
but she knows about war. She’s a warlike child,
always waging battles
against the greatest tyrant she knows: her mother.
Rhaskos is a year older,
his mother is gone,
and his life is hard. He knows that.
He searches for horses in the dust.
Are they luckless children, these two little Greeks?
Perhaps.
But neither is in any hurry to die.
It’s good to be alive, even in wartime,
even in slavery,
even long ago,
in Ελλαδα . . .
THIEF
After I made the first horse,
I wanted to make horses.
That’s all I wanted to do.
I cleared dirt patches. I yanked up weeds,
and plowed the soil with a rock.
I ground the dirt, loose and soft.
When no one was looking,
I’d set down my bucket,
pick up a stick,
and try to make a horse.
Whenever I cleaned the stalls,
I’d watch the horses
and feel my fingers twitch.
Wherever I went with my bucket,
I saw horses
afloat in the shimmering air.
When I drew them,
I couldn’t get the lines right. They were lopsided,
misshapen.
I muttered and scratched
scraped away the bad lines
and forgot to fill my bucket.
Georgios caught me at it one day.
He whacked the back of my head.
He called me slavish,
and said I was a thief,
playing mud pies like a baby
instead of working for the master.
If my eyes hadn’t filled with salt water,
I might have laughed.
He was a slave himself,
and all of us stole.
We stole because we needed things.
We stole to get back.
We prayed to Hermes, god of thieves,
so we wouldn’t get caught.
Demetrios — he was the slave who guarded the storeroom —
Demetrios was favored by the god. The master trusted him.
Who wouldn’t? Demetrios was frugal,
thin and grave, and his hands were always clean.
He was respectful, too, never raising his eyes.
But he was loyal to us, not the master.
There were nights when the master was away,
when he’d unlock the storeroom door.
Those nights, if we wanted a lump of cheese,
or a handful of olives,
or a little wine,
we could help ourselves.
By dawn the next morning,
Demetrios would have swept the storeroom
and rearranged the goods.
Demetrios could read and write,
and he knew how to keep
a straight face
and a false tally
better than any man alive.
Every other month or so,
he’d steal a water jug of ruddy wine,
and bring it to the stables
to share with Georgios.
Those were the nights when Georgios smiled.
Years later, I told Sokrates that I stole —
I mean, that I used to steal.
I was ashamed to tell him,
because everyone knew how virtuous he was.
He wouldn’t have stolen a crust if he were starving.
He said, “Did you know it was wrong to steal?”
I was tempted to lie, but he was my friend.
“I knew it was wrong,” I said.
He said, “Good.”
He said it was better to do wrong
knowing that it’s wrong
than to do wrong in ignorance,
by accident.
I thought that was crazy.
I talk to him sometimes,
not the way I talk to you,
but in my head. I ask him questions,
and I argue with him. He’d like that.
Sometimes I want to say,
Look, I know it was wrong to steal,
but have you ever thought about what was stolen from me?
He didn’t know how bitter it is to be a slave.
He couldn’t see that it was wrong
that I was a slave. He was the wisest man in Athens,
but he couldn’t see that I’d been wronged.
He always said:
“To suffer a wrong is nothing.
To do wrong harms the soul.”
It’s not always nothing to suffer a wrong.
As for doing wrong —
I guess I harmed my soul, those days,
because I stole. After my mother’s tunic fell apart,
winter came, and I’d have frozen to death
if I hadn’t stolen a cloak from Georgios.
He beat me, but he let me keep it.
I don’t steal now.
Even then, I didn’t steal much. But there was one thing I stole
over and over,
and I’m proud of it.
It wasn’t a thing,
so maybe it didn’t damage my soul.
I think it was good for my soul.
On moonlit nights,
I would visit the andron
and look at the painted horse.
I went six or seven times.
It was a risk. It was a thrill.
My heart would jump in my chest,
like a colt leaping. I’d hide in the courtyard
and listen till I knew
the whole house slept.
Then I’d climb into a window
and creep down the hall to the room
where the horse still pranced on the wall.
The full-moon nights were best, of course.
But the man who made that horse —
I remember how excited I was when I found this out —
had dug into the plaster with something sharp,
to make the horse’s outline.
Even when the moon was down,
I could find that horse in the dark.
I could stand on the couch
and trace the shape with my fingers.
One night
when the master was away
I decided to take a lamp.
There was always a light in the kitchen,
at the altar of Hestia.
I would borrow the lamp
and see the horse by lamplight.
I was risking a beating;
I was doing a thing
no one would imagine a slave would do.
If I were caught stealing a loaf, Georgios would understand.
He’d have me whipped, but he’d understand.
But to steal in at night,
to the best room in the house,
to see a horse?
He’d never understand that.
That made it even better.
Then came the night I was caught.
I am Hephaistos, the lame god:
foot twisted,
hip wrenched out of joint.
I am the ugly
