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

the High City stands like a great stone altar against the sky, and search between the winged roofs of the
temples for the point of gold, where tall Athene of the Vanguard lifts her spear to the ships at sea.

But I liked best to look north at the range of Parnes, snow-topped, or scorched brown in summer, or
grey and green in spring, and watch for the Spartans coming over. Until I was six, they came nearly every
year. They came over the pass at Dekeleia, and as a rule some horseman brought word of their coming;
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html




but sometimes the first thing we knew in the City was the smoke on the hills, where they were burning a
farm.

Our own place is in the foothills, beyond Acharnai. Our family has been there, as they say, since the
grasshoppers came. The slope above the valley is terraced for vines, but the best crop is the olives, and
the barley from the olive-fields. There was one grove nearly as old, I think, as the earth itself. The trunks
were as thick as three men's bodies, and all knotted and gnarled. Athene herself was reputed to have
planted them, when she gave the olive as a gift to the land. Two or three of them are standing still. We
sacrificed there at every harvest-time; that is, when there was a harvest.

I used to be sent to the farm early each spring, to get the country air, and fetched back when it was time
for the Spartans to come. But once, when I was four or five, they came early, and we had a great
scramble to get away. I remember sitting in the cart, with the women slaves and the household gear, my
father riding beside us and the slave pricking the oxen on; the cart-wheels jolting, and all of us coughing
with the smoke of the burning fields. Everything was burned that year, all but the house walls, and the
sacred olive-grove, which they piously spared.

Being too young to understand serious things, I used to look forward, when they had gone, to seeing
what they had been up to. One year a troop of them had been quartered in the farmhouse; and those
who could write had inscribed the names of their friends, with various tributes to their beauty and virtue,
all over the walls. I recall my father rubbing angrily at the charcoal and saying, Get this ignorant scrawl
whited over. The boy will never learn to spell, or to make his letters properly, with this in front of him.
One of the Spartans had left his comb behind. I thought it a treasure; but my father said in disgust that it
was filthy, and threw it away.

For my own part, I don't think I knew what trouble meant till I turned six. My grandmother, who had
taken charge of me whenever my father was at war, died then. My grandfather Philokles (a tall old man
with a beautiful beard, always just combed, and white almost to blueness, in whose image I see the god
Poseidon to this day) was growing infirm and could not do with me; so my father engaged a nurse, a free
woman from Rhodes.

She was slim and swarthy, with a strain of Egypt in her. Presently I grew to know, without quite knowing
what it meant, that she was my father's concubine. Not that he ever failed in propriety before me; but
sometimes I used to hear things said by the slaves, who had their own reasons to hate her.

If I had been a little older, I might have consoled myself, when her hand lay heavy on me, with the
thought that my father would soon be weary of her. She had no such graces as he could have found in a
hetaira of very moderate accomplishment, and in those days he could afford the best. But to me she
seemed as lasting a part of my home as the porch or the well. She herself began to guess, I think, that