"Mary Renault - Greece 4 - The Last Of The Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Renault Mary)

4



adoniswas dead. My mother put on her mourning veil and went out to weep for him, with a basket of
anemones to strew about his bier. Soon one met a procession at every corner, the dead god carried in
his garden, the women with hair unbound wailing against the flutes.

I have never met a man yet who liked this festival. That year it was a cold grey day, with heavy cloud.
The citizens crowded into the palaestra and the baths and any place where women cannot go, and
muttered gossip about omens and prodigies. Word came from the Agora that a man had just gone raving
mad there; he had leaped on the Altar of the Twelve, drawn a knife, and hacked off his genitals with it.
The altar was defiled and would have to be consecrated again.

In the High City, the temples were so thronged that those who came to sacrifice stood in lines to take
their turn. They came away like men who having touched the plague have just washed themselves, and
doubt if they have washed enough. In the midst of the temple, great Athene gazed down upon us all. Her
gold robes gleamed, her cloak worked with victories hung behind her; the soft light, creeping through the
thin marble of the roof-tiles, glowed on her face, so that the warm ivory seemed alive; one waited only
for her to raise her mighty arm and, pointing, say in a voice of clashing gold, There is the man. But she
kept her counsel.

Men were busier. A public award had now been offered to informers, and a board appointed to hear
them. Soon information was coming in not about the Herm-breaking, but about anyone who might be
supposed to have done, or said, or thought, something sacrilegious. My father said to anyone who would
listen that this was bribing scum to come to the top, and that Perikles would have sickened at it.
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Xenophon and I, to escape all this gloom in the City, spent our spare time at Piraeus. Here there was
always something new; a rich metic from Phrygia or Egypt might be building himself a house in the style of
his former city, or putting up a shrine to one of the gods whom one hardly knew in his foreign dress, with
even a dog's head perhaps or a fish's tail; or there would be a new shipment in the Emporion of carpets
from Babylon, Persian lapis, Scythian turquoises, or tin and amber from the wild Hyperborean places that
only Phoenicians know. Our silver owls were the only coinage, then, that was good all over the world.
You saw in the wide streets Nubians with plugs of ivory pulling their ears down to their shoulders;
long-haired Medes, in trousers and sequin bonnets; Egyptians with painted eyes, wearing only skirts of
stiff linen and collars of gems and beads. The air was heavy with the smells of foreign bodies, of spices
and hemp and pitch; strange tongues chattered like beast speaking to bird; one guessed at the meaning,
and watched the talking hands.

Alkibiades was denounced on the day when he stood up before the Assembly, to declare the fleet ready
for sailing.