“What!” cried their chief, “do your women fight?”
“Of course,” said the General whom he addressed, “of course they fight, and very pretty soldiers they make.”
“Women soldiers!” gasped the man.
“Why,” said his host, “did you not know that it was the women who routed the Great King, and drove him out of our camp?”
CHAPTER XXVI.
INVALIDED.
Callias found it very hard to sit out the banquet and the entertainment that followed it. He had felt a headache before sitting, or to speak more correctly, lying down, and this grew so bad during the evening that he gladly took the earliest opportunity of leaving. The fact was that he had been ailing for some days; the excitement of the games had carried him through the labors of the day, but he suffered doubly from the reaction, and before nightfall he was seriously ill.
And now he found the advantage of having followed Xenophon’s advice and taken up his quarters in the town. Had he been reduced to such nursing and attendance as the camp could have supplied, his chances of moving would have been small indeed. At the house of Demochares, on the contrary, he had everything in his favor, an exceptionally good nurse, and an exceptionally skillful physician. In those days neither branch of the healing art, for nursing has certainly as much to do with healing as physicking, was very successfully cultivated. Women nursed the sick, indeed, often with kindness and devotion, for woman’s nature was substantially the same then as it is now, but they did it in a blind and ignorant fashion. As for the practice of medicine it was a mass of curious superstitions and prejudices, leavened here and there with a few grains of experience, and, if the practitioner happened to have that inestimable quality, of good sense. Of systems there was only the beginning. The great physician Hippocrates had indeed acquired a vast reputation, and was beginning to influence the opinion of the faculty throughout Greece; but the medical profession has always been slow to adopt new ideas—what profession, indeed, has not?—the means of communication, too, were very limited, and as yet his teaching had had but little effect.
But Callias happened to be exceedingly fortunate both in his nurse and in his doctor. The house of Demochares was kept by his sister, a widow, who after her husband’s death had returned to her old home, and had devoted herself to a life of kindness and charity. The young Athenian had won her heart, not only by his sunny temper and gracious manners, but by his resemblance to a son of her own whose early death—he had been slain in a skirmish with the barbarian neighbors of Trapezus—had been the second great sorrow of her life. His illness called forth her tenderest sympathies, and nothing could have exceeded the devotion with which she ministered to her patient.