The Ghosts of Athens (Aelric) by Blake Richard

Author:Blake, Richard [Blake, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2012-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 32

I stood looking at the cenotaph of Euripides. Except that the continuous rains of the summer had left every plant an unautumnal green, the Piraeus road was now as I’d first imagined it. Giving up on the residency slaves, Martin and his wife had finally got all my fine clothes into order, and I’d come out to see the interpreter in one of my thinner tunics. Athens was far north of Alexandria, and the heat even of a good noonday in October didn’t compare. Despite the moderate freshness, though, I was happy to stand here hatless and without any cloak. Though not many, there were now passers-by. None recognised me, and the few looks I got were simple interest in the incongruous match of my colouring and the finest white silk.

‘Do you remember the game we used to play in Alexandria?’ I asked in Latin. ‘I mean the one where we’d stand ourselves in such and such a place, and try to imagine what it must have looked like at such and such a time in the past?’

He left off his nervous inspection of the few passers-by on the road and nodded.

‘Well,’ I went on with the artificial brightness of a man who needs to jolly someone out of total funk, ‘I tried to play it yesterday on the Acropolis. Then, worse luck, I had Priscus beside me, and it didn’t quite work. Here’s a fine place for the game, though – don’t you agree?’

I got another abstracted nod, and took this as an assent.

‘The monument would have gone up after the Spartans had been eased out and the Long Walls were being rebuilt. So far as I can tell, the city walls then would have been about a hundred yards back along the road, rather than their present quarter mile. If you looked back, you’d surely have seen scaffolding on some of the Acropolis buildings, and their marble, if still unpainted, would have shone much whiter than it does now. The crowd here must have included Plato. Xenophon too might have been here – or would he then have been in exile? I can’t remember the dates.’

Martin opened his mouth, and I waited for some authoritative correction. Instead, he fell back into glumness.

‘Everything back then would have been fresh,’ I pressed on. ‘All the words spoken would have been in a natural and unlaboured Greek – neither the gibberish of the modern locals, nor the stilted and almost paranoid Attic of the educated moderns. Wouldn’t it be a grand thing to speak a civilised language that was also natural? Try to imagine your Celtic or my English, but able to express all the subtleties of Greek. Native fluency in a perfect language: hardly surprising, wouldn’t you agree, that the ancients excel the moderns in all composition – indeed, in all thought?’

No answer.

‘What would have been most different, however, was the spirit of those gathered here.’

That got me one of Martin’s pained looks. He turned and, taking care not

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