Apollo and Cheiron.
Early the next day Charidemus was summoned to the royal presence. The king greeted him with more than his usual kindness, and proceeded to explain the business in which he proposed to employ him. “I am going to send you,” he said, “first to Greece, and then home; I have not the same reason,” he went on, with a smile, “that I had with Ptolemy and his detachment, that they were newly married.[34] But for the next three months or so there will be very little doing here, and you can be more profitably employed elsewhere. First, you must go to Athens. You will be in charge of an offering which I am sending to the goddess, three hundred complete suits of armour from the spoils of the Granīcus. You should be a persona grata there. You are half an Argive, and the Argives have always been on good terms with the Athenians. And then you speak good Greek. If I were to send one of my worthy Macedonians they would laugh at his accent; he might lose his temper, and all the grace of the affair would be lost. That, then, is your mission, as far as the world sees it; you will take sealed instructions about other matters which you will not open till you have crossed the sea.... The offering is all ready; in fact, it was lying shipped at Miletus when you landed there. But I wanted to see you, and to be sure also that you received my instructions. These you shall have at sunset. When you have received them, start back at once.”
Punctually at sunset one of the royal pages brought a roll of parchment sealed with the royal seal. Charidemus, who had been waiting on board the Centaur for it, gave a formal receipt for it, and within half an hour was on his way westward. The good ship and her picked crew had better opportunities for showing their mettle than had occurred on the eastward journey. Things were easy enough as long as they were under the lee of the Lycian coast; but at Rhodes a strong head wind encountered them; and it was only after a hard struggle of at least twelve days, during which even the bold Pleusicles thought more than once of turning back, that they reached Miletus. By that time the weather had changed again; and the voyage to Athens, though undertaken with fear and trembling by the captains of the heavily-laden merchantmen that carried the armour, was prosperous and uneventful.
Charidemus spent about a month in Athens, finding, as might have been expected, a vast amount of things to interest, please, and astonish him. Some of the impressions made upon him by what he saw and heard may be gathered from extracts taken from letters which he wrote at this time to his Theban friend.
“ ... The armour has been presented in the Temple of Athené Polias. A more splendid spectacle I have never seen. They told me that it was almost as fine as the great Panathenæa, the grand triennial festival of which I dare say you have heard. The Peplos was not there nor the Basket-bearers[35]—I missed, you see, the chance of seeing the beauty, though I saw the rank and fashion of Athens. But the magistrates were there, in their robes of office, headed by the King Archon, and, behind them a huge array of soldiers in complete armour, good enough to look at, but poor stuff in a battle, I should fancy—indeed the Athenians have long since done most of their fighting, I am told, by paid deputies. The best of these troops was a battalion, several thousands strong, of the ‘youths,’ as they called them. Students they are who do a little soldiering by way of change after their books. They can march, and they know their drill; and they are not pursy and fat, as are most of their elders. Their armour and accoutrements are excellent. If their wits are only as bright as their shields and their spear-points, they must be clever fellows in the lecture-room. And the Temple itself! I simply have not words to describe it and its splendours. And then there was the great statue of the goddess outside the Temple; I had never seen it close at hand, though I remember having had the point of the lance which she holds in her hand and the crest of her helmet pointed out to me as I was sailing along the coast. But the effect of the whole when one stands by the pedestal is overpowering. Its magnificent stature—it is more than forty cubits high[36]—its majestic face, its imposing attitude—she is challenging the world, it would seem, on behalf of her favourite city—all these things produce an impression that cannot be described. It is made, you must understand, of bronze, and the simplicity of the material impressed me more than the gorgeous ivory and gold of the Athené Polias, as they call her. While I am talking about statues I must tell you about one which I was allowed to see by special favour; it is made of olive wood, and is of an age past all counting; the rudest shape that can be imagined, but extraordinarily interesting. The keeper of the Temple where it is (not the same as that of which I have been speaking, but called, by way of distinction, the Old Temple) have a story that it fell down from heaven. In the evening there was a great banquet in the Town-hall, a very gorgeous affair, with delicacies brought from all the four winds—pheasants from the Black Sea, and peacocks, and dolphins, and I know not what in flesh, fish, and fowl. Of course the special Attic dishes were prominent—honey, figs, and olives—and there were a great choice of vintages. I was amazed at the abundance and luxury of the entertainment, and could not help thinking that there was a great deal of foolish waste. Far more interesting to me than the dishes and the drinks were the guests. I do not mean the magistrates and generals, for they had nothing particularly distinguished about them; I mean those who have a permanent seat at the table. You must know that the Athenians have an excellent custom of rewarding men who have done conspicuously good service to the state by giving them such a seat. Of course I saw Phocion there. I had seen him before in the king’s camp; and he has been very civil and serviceable to me. I sat next to a veteran who was the oldest of the public guests, and must have numbered fully a hundred years. What a storehouse of recollections the old man’s mind was! Of recent things and persons he knew nothing. When I was speaking of our king he stared blankly at me. But he remembered the plague—his father and mother and all his family died of it, he told me. His first campaign was in Sicily. He had been taken prisoner and thrust into the stone quarries of Syracuse. He could not bear to think, he told me, even now of the horrors of the place. Then he had fought at Œgos-Potami,[37] and I know not where else. His last service, I remember, was at Mantinea, where he was in command of an Athenian contingent. He was seventy years old then, he told me, but as vigorous, he boasted, as the youngest of them. He saw your Epaminondas struck down, though he was not very near. And he was a disciple of Socrates. ‘To think,’ he said, ‘that I should be dining here at the State’s expense, and that he had the hemlock draught! I remember,’ he went on, ‘when he was put on his trial and had been found guilty, and the president asked him to name his own penalty, he mentioned this very honour that I enjoy. He deserved it much better, he said, for showing his countrymen how foolish and ignorant they were, than if he had won a victory at Olympia. What a stir of rage went through the assembly when he said it! It quite settled the matter for the death penalty. And now here am I and he—well he has his reward elsewhere, if what he always said is true—and that I shall soon know.’ A most interesting old man is this, and I must try to see him again.”
Demosthenes.
A week or two afterwards, he wrote again.