Callias: A Tale of the Fall of Athens

by Alfred John Church

The sacrifice and the feast it is not necessary to describe. Necessarily there was nothing very splendid or costly about them. The purses of the soldiers were empty, though they had a good deal of property, chiefly in the way of prisoners whom they had captured on the way, and whom they would sell in the slave markets as the opportunity might come. Trapezus, however, and the friendly Colchian tribes in the neighborhood furnished a fair supply of sheep and oxen to serve as victims, and a sufficient quantity of bread, wine, dried fruit and olive oil, this last being a luxury which the Greeks had greatly missed during their march, and which they highly appreciated. A few of the officers, the pious Xenophon among them, went to the expense of gilding the horns of the beasts which were their special offerings; but for the most part the arrangements were of a plain and frugal kind.

The games had at least the merit of affording a vast amount of entertainment to a huge multitude of spectators. They were celebrated, it may be easily understood, under considerable difficulties, for Trapezus did not possess any regular race course, and the only rings for wrestling and boxing were within the walls, and therefore not available on this occasion. By common consent the management of the affair was handed over to a certain Dracontius. He was a Spartan, and to the Spartans, who had been undisputed lords of Greece since the fall of Athens, had been conceded a certain right of precedence on all such occasions as these. Dracontius, too, was a man of superior rank to his comrades. He belonged to one of the two royal houses of Sparta, but had been banished from his country in consequence of an unlucky accident. In one of the rough sports which the Spartan lads were accustomed to practice, sports which were commonly a more or less close mimicry of war, a blow of his dagger, dealt without evil intention but with a criminal carelessness, had been fatal to a companion. Hence, from boyhood, he had been an exile; cut off from the more honorable career to which he might have looked forward in the service of his country, he had been content to enlist as a mercenary.

Dracontius, accordingly, was made president of the games. The skins of the sacrificed animals were presented to him, as his fee, and he was asked to lead the way to the racecourse where the contests were to be held.

“Race course!” cried the Spartan, with the brusquerie which it was the fashion of his country to use, “Race course! What more do you want than what we have here?”

A murmur of astonishment ran through the army. Indeed there could have been nothing less like a race course than the ground on which they were standing. It was the slope of a hill, a slope that sometimes became almost precipitous. Most of it was covered with brushwood and heather. Grass there was none, except here and there where it covered with a treacherously smooth surface some dangerous quagmire. Here and there, the limestone rock cropped up with jagged points.

“But where shall we wrestle?” asked Timagenes, an Arcadian athlete, who had won the prize for wrestling two or three years before at the Lithurian games, and who naturally considered himself as an authority on the subject.

“Here of course,” was the president’s reply.

“But how can a man wrestle on ground so hard and so rough?” asked the Arcadian, who had no idea of practising his art except in a regular ring.

“Well enough,” said Dracontius, “but those who are thrown will get worse knocks.”

The wrestler’s face fell and he walked off amid a general laugh. His comrades fancied, not without reason, that he was a great deal too careful of his person.