A Victor of Salamis. William Stearns Davis
CHAPTER XXIX
[pg 21]
CHAPTER III
THE HAND OF PERSIA
The lad who sidled up to Democrates was all but a hunchback. His bare arms were grotesquely tattooed, clear sign that he was a Thracian. His eyes twinkled keenly, uneasily, as in token of an almost sinister intelligence. What he whispered to Democrates escaped the rest, but the latter began girding up his cloak.
“You leave us, philotate?” cried Glaucon. “Would I not have all my friends with me to-night, to fill me with fair thoughts for the morrow? Bid your ugly Bias keep away!”
“A greater friend than even Glaucon the Alcmæonid commands me hence,” said the orator, smiling.
“Declare his name.”
“Declare her name,” cried Simonides, viciously.
“Noble Cean, then I say I serve a most beautiful, high-born dame. Her name is Athens.”
“Curses on your public business,” lamented Glaucon. “But off with you, since your love is the love of us all.”
Democrates kissed the athlete on both cheeks. “I leave you to faithful guardians. Last night I dreamed of a garland of lilies, sure presage of a victory. So take courage.”
“Chaire! chaire!”1 called the rest; and Democrates left the tent to follow the slave-boy.
Evening was falling: the sea, rocks, fields, pine groves, [pg 22]were touched by the red glow dying behind Acro-Corinthus. Torches gleamed amid the trees where the multitudes were buying, selling, wagering, making merry. All Greece seemed to have sent its wares to be disposed of at the Isthmia. Democrates idled along, now glancing at the huckster who displayed his painted clay dolls and urged the sightseers to remember the little ones at home. A wine-seller thrust a sample cup of a choice vintage under the Athenian’s nose, and vainly adjured him to buy. Thessalian easy-chairs, pottery, slaves kidnapped from the Black Sea, occupied one booth after another. On a pulpit before a bellowing crowd a pair of marionettes were rolling their eyes and gesticulating, as a woman pulled the strings.
But there were more exalted entertainments. A rhapsodist stood on a pine stump chanting in excellent voice Alcæus’s hymn to Apollo. And more willingly the orator stopped on the edge of a throng of the better sort, which listened to a man of noble aspect reading in clear voice from his scroll.
“Æschylus of Athens,” whispered a bystander. “He reads choruses of certain tragedies he says he will perfect and produce much later.”
Democrates knew the great dramatist well, but what he read was new—a “Song of the Furies” calling a terrific curse upon the betrayer of friendship. “Some of his happiest lines,” meditated Democrates, walking away, to be held a moment by the crowd around Lamprus the master-harpist. But now, feeling that he had dallied long enough, the orator turned his back on the two female acrobats who were swinging on a trapeze and struck down a long, straight road which led toward the distant cone of Acro-Corinthus. First, however, he turned on Bias, who all the time had been accompanying, dog-fashion.
“You say he is waiting at Hegias’s inn?”
[pg 23]
“Yes, master. It’s by the temple of Bellerophon, just as you begin to enter the city.”
“Good! I don’t want to ask the way. Now catch this obol and be off.”
The boy snatched the flying coin and glided into the crowd.
Democrates walked briskly out of the glare of the torches, then halted to slip the hood of his cloak up about his face.
“The road is dark, but the wise man shuns accidents,” was his reflection, as he strode in the direction pointed by Bias.
The way was dark. No