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

was still wondering whether Lysis had thought me soft.

Meanwhile the City was on tiptoe, waiting to see Alkibiades brought to trial. The Argives and
Mantineans demonstrated: it was Alkibiades they had come to fight under, they said, and threatened to
march home. The seamen looked so ugly that the trierarchs feared a mutiny. Those who had been
pressing hardest for the trial, grew suddenly less loud; and other speakers came forth, by whom inspired
nobody knew. Claiming to be friends of the accused, they did not doubt that he could produce a good
defence when called upon, and moved he be allowed to set forth upon the war he had prepared so ably.
People waited to see him jump at this opportunity; but he sprang up before the Assembly, demanding
with passion and eloquence to be tried. No one knew what to make of it. In the end, the second motion
was carried.

The fleet sailed a few days later.

A friend of my father had a warehouse at Piraeus, and let us boys climb on the roof. We felt like gods
looking down upon a voyage of the heroes. All the storeships had gone on to the assembly at Korkyra;
only the bright, slim triremes were left in the bay. The breeze of early summer lifted their stern-pennants;
eagles and dragons, dolphins and boars and lions, tossed their heads as the beaks met the swell.

The cheering began in the City, like the sound of a distant landslide, and crept towards us between the
Long Walls. Then it roared through Piraeus; one could hear the music coming, and shield clashing on
corselet to the beat. Now you could see between the Walls the helmet-crests moving, a river of them, a
long snake bright with his new scales in springtime, bronze and gold, purple and red. Sparks of light
seemed to dance above it, the early sun catching the points of many thousand spears; the dust-cloud
shone like powdered gold.

On the roofs about us the foreigners were chattering together, marvelling at the beauty and might of the
army which the City could still send forth after so many years of war. Two Nubian slaves were making
their eyes white and saying Auh! Auh! We cheered till our throats ached. Xenophon's voice sounded
already almost like a man's.

The troops deployed upon the water-front and on the quays; they filed along gang-planks, or were
loaded into boats with their gunwales dipping, and ferried to the ships. Kinsmen and friends ran up for
last farewells. An old man would bless his son, a lad run to his father with some gift the mother had sent
after him; or two lovers might be parting, the youth being too young to go with his friend. That day not all
the tears had been left at home with the women. But to me it seemed the greatest of all festivals, better
than the Panathenaia in the Great Year. As the proverb tells us, war is sweet to the untried.

Noise sounded again between the walls. Someone shouted Long life to the Generals! We began to hear
horses and to see their dust.

Presently there passed below us Lamachos on his borrowed hack; tall and saturnine, greeting old
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soldiers when they cheered him, indifferent to the rest. Then Nikias, gravely splendid, his white hair
garlanded, fresh from the sacrifice, his soothsayer riding by him with the sacred tripod, knives and bowl.
The leaden tinge of skin that he always had only added dignity to him. People reminded each other as he