The Ten Thousand

Xenophon and twenty riders went trotting up the hill, forcing aside the ranks ahead of us to pass, as the shouting and clanging ahead grew louder. Suddenly reaching the lip and climbing over onto the flat of the mountain top, we encountered a sight that burst the heart.

The entire army that had arrived thus far, perhaps two-thirds of the total, was in complete and utter disarray; some of the troops had gathered in circles and were kneeling in the mud, their arms encircling each other's shoulders, praying to the gods. Others were maniacally slamming their shields against those of their comrades, like boys playing at combat, or pounding with their fists on each other's shoulders, even ru

Men seized Xenophon and lifted him high onto their shoulders, laughing and bellowing his name in the chant they had cried when they had first acclaimed him general so long ago. They pummeled his back as he gazed proudly around at his warriors, a broad smile creasing his face and flashing through his thickly grown beard. I stood alone, watching in a daze, a mixture of ecstasy and ache, as the men that had been marching behind me continued to pour over the crest of the mountain to their own first, rapturous view of the sea. After a moment, however, I sensed a presence I had long given up hope of encountering again, and turning around I found that I was not alone, for Asteria stood silently facing me, her eyes hollow and tear-filled, her cheekbones prominent on her gaunt face, but with a gentleness to her expression that stopped my heart just as surely as if a goddess had appeared before me. I opened my arms and she stepped into them as if she belonged there and had never left.

I looked up and there, just visible in the smoky, distant haze, shimmering like the blade of a sword catching the light of the sun, was the narrow blue line of the sea. So true it is, that tears belong to joy and sorrow alike.

CHAPTER THREE

THIS, OF COURSE, is the dramatic climax of my tale, the point at which, had it been a drama enacted on the stage, the audience would be settling back into their seats, hoarse from cheering, wiping the tears from their eyes, while the play concluded with some feeble spoken epilogue recited by the story's narrator, or a closing hymn chanted by the chorus. If the gods had any sense of proportion or balance, or even artistic awareness, this is what they would have permitted, and indeed the feeble epilogue will be coming soon enough, for those readers who would not feel my reminiscing to be complete without it; but the gods had one further plot twist in mind.

There is a dramatic device often used in our Greek plays, which I consider as being a sign of intellectual laziness, or perhaps excessive piety, on the part of the playwright, and it very well may be that the two are the same thing. Just when the protagonist's circumstances appear to be as dire as can be imagined, with no possible way to escape his impending doom, an actor representing a benevolent and all-powerful deity is lowered by ropes and pulleys from the top of the stage. He then proceeds to emit lightning bolts to destroy the enemy, or cast a spell to reconcile the young lovers, or perform whatever other sorcery may be required to enable the drama to be satisfactorily resolved and to tie up all loose ends in the remaining moments. We refer to this as a "mechanical god," a means of putting back to rights all that is unresolved, in a way not otherwise humanly possible.

To my knowledge, no playwright has yet considered the opposite phenomenon of, shall we call it, a "mechanical Nemesis," though language and Greek dramatic tradition fail me here. The image I mean to convey is one of a grubby, smirking little satyr that clambers una

The Wheel of Fate turned. Just as a cat tortures and plays with a mouse before finishing him off, so the gods toyed with us. The deity often takes pleasure in making the small great and the great small.

For months we had sacrificed to the gods daily, in entreaty, in thanksgiving, for guidance. Down to our last starving goat we had sacrificed to the gods. Libations of water had been poured in the absence of wine, stale bread crumbled in the absence of animals. Never had Xenophon neglected his duties to Zeus and Apollo, in fact he had insisted on their faithful exercise, even in the face of Chirisophus' clear exasperation. Never was there a more faithful or exacting acolyte to the gods, until the day of our arrival at the summit of the mountain. But there, in our excitement at finally arriving within view of the sea, in the troops' ecstatic promotion of Xenophon from mere general to hero, we i

In return, they sent us honey.

A great deal of honey, hundreds of hives of the stuff, heaps of the sweetest, stickiest, most nourishing and delicious gobs of golden dew we had ever tasted, which we looted from an enormous apiary in the mountains after easily routing the last hill tribe standing between us and the sea, the Colchians. The fact that it was stolen made it even sweeter, and the famished men hooted and danced like children as they tore into the lightly constructed hives, ripping them with their spears, driving the bees away with blackly smoking pine-pitch torches, ignoring the feeble stings of the few brave little insects who remained behind to defend their property. The men, already near delirium from their awareness of the nearby sea, gorged on the stuff. They wandered among the hives in blissful content with honey smeared on their faces and hands, congealing in their hair, tossing handfuls of honey mass and sticky comb at each other out of pure mischief after they were sated. Their pleasure was so pure, their delight after the suffering they had endured over the winter so i

There is an old story of the Thessalian King Knopos, who was advised by his priestess Enodia to select the largest and finest bull, and then drug it with her potion. The maddened bull escaped and was captured by the enemy, who accepted it as a good omen, sacrificed it and ate it in a feast. Upon consuming the drugs, they went mad and were slaughtered by Knopos' troops in a brutal attack. Whether the Colchians had poisoned our honey in their retreat in the ma