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

Alexias having died before the time of his marriage, my father now decided to name after him the child
that was being born, if it should be a boy. My elder brother Philokles, who was two years old, had been
a particularly fine strong child at his birth: but I, when held up by the midwife, was seen to be small,
wizened and ugly; my mother having brought me forth nearly a month too soon, either through a
weakness of her body or the foreknowledge of a god. My father decided at once that it would be
unworthy of Alexias to name me after him; that I was the child of an unlucky time, marked with the gods'
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anger, and that it would be better not to rear me.

As it happened, however, I had been born while he was out searching for the bodies; and the midwife
had handed me over to my mother to nurse. This annoyed my father; for she had taken a fancy to me
after this, as women will, and being rather sick and feverish begged for my life with tears. He was still
reasoning with her— for he was reluctant to snatch me from her by force— when the herald blew for the
horsemen, because the Spartans had been sighted making for the City.

We were a fairly rich family in those days; my father kept two or three horses; he had therefore to arm,
and muster with his squadron. He took leave of my mother, not withdrawing his orders; but, whether
through haste or pity, he charged no one with carrying them out. There is never much rivalry for such
work; so there the matter rested till some days later, when the Spartans withdrew and my father rode
home.

He found the household in distraction. My brother Philokles was dead, and my mother breathing her
last. From the first she had ordered me to be kept away from her; I had been left with a wet-nurse found
by one of the slaves.

Returning with shorn hair from the funeral, he had me brought to him, and, finding the wet-nurse a decent
woman, left me in her charge. He had been, I believe, fond of my mother; I daresay too he called to mind
the uncertainty of life, and thought it less disgraceful to leave even me behind him, than to perish without
offspring as if he had never been. In the end, finding I put on flesh and seemed stronger and
better-looking, he named me Alexias, as he had first meant to do.




2



ourhouse stood in the Inner Kerameikos, not far from the Dipylon Gate. The courtyard had a little
colonnade of painted columns, a fig-tree and a vine. At the back were the stables, where my father kept
his two horses and a mule; it was easy to climb on the stable roof, and thence to the roof of the house.

The roof had a border of acanthus tiles, and was not very steep. If one straddled the ridge, one could
see right over the City wall, past the gate-towers of the Dipylon to the Sacred Way, where it curves
towards Eleusis between its gardens and its tombs. In summertime, I could pick out the funeral stele of
my uncle Alexias and his friend, by a white oleander that grew there. Then I would turn south, to where