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

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It was at the beginning of the Great War, when the Spartans were in Attica, burning the farms. There
was a notion in those days that no other army could meet them on land and live; so we were holding only
the City, and Piraeus, and the Long Walls between. This was the advice of Perikles. It is true that when I
was born he was still alive, though already sick; which is no reason for foolish youths to ask me, as one
did lately, whether I remember him.

The country people, whose farms were being burned, poured into the City, and lived like beasts
wherever they could put up a few boards, or a roof of hide. They were even sleeping and cooking in the
shrines, and in the colonnades of the wrestling schools. The Long Walls were lined with stinking huts all
the way to the harbour. Somewhere thereabouts the plague began, and spread like fire in old heather.
Some said the Spartans had called on Far-Shooting Apollo, some that they had contrived to poison the
springs. Some of the women, I believe, blamed the country people for bringing in a curse; as if anyone
could reasonably suppose that the gods would punish a state for treating its own citizens justly. But
women, being ignorant of philosophy and logic, and fearing dream-diviners more than immortal Zeus, will
always suppose that whatever causes them trouble must be wicked.

The plague thinned my family as it did every other. My mother's father, Damiskos, the Olympic runner,
was buried with his old trophies and his olive crown. My father was among those who got the disease
and survived; it left him for some tune with a bloody flux, too sick for war; and when I was born he had
only just recovered his strength.

On the day of my birth, my father's younger brother, Alexias, died in his twenty-fourth year. He, hearing
that a youth called Philon, with whom he was in love, had been taken sick, went at once to him; meeting,
I have been told, not only the slaves but the boy's own sister, running the other way. His father and
mother had already perished; Alexias found the lad alone, lying in the basin of the courtyard fountain,
where he had crawled to cool his fever; he had not called out to anyone to fetch his friend, not wishing to
endanger him; but some passers-by, who had not cared to go very near, reported that they had seen
Alexias carrying him indoors.

This reached my father after some time, while my mother was in labour with me. He sent over a reliable
servant who had had the plague already; who, however, found both the young men dead. From the way
they were lying, it seems that in the hour of Philon's death, Alexias had felt himself sicken; and, knowing
the end, had taken hemlock, so that they should make the journey together. The cup was standing on the
floor beside him; he had tipped out the dregs, and written PHILON with his finger, as one does after
supper in the last of the wine.

Getting this news at night, my father set out with torches to fetch the bodies, so that he could mix their
ashes in one urn, and have a fit memorial made. They were gone, having been thrown already on a
common pyre in the street; but later, my grandfather had a stone set up for Alexias in the Street of
Tombs, with a relief showing the friends clasping hands in farewell, and a cup beside them on a pedestal.
Every year at the Feast of Families, we sacrificed for Alexias at the household altar, and the story is one
of the first that I remember. My father used to say that all over the City, those who died in the plague
were the beautiful and the good.