to be that truth is so utterly the worthiest thing to seek, nor that it is only of one kind. All the same, I think I have been a goodish pupil in that sense. By the way, Sphaeros, I have not told Agiatis about this one thing. It would have hurt her unnecessarily, though I think she would have understood my reasons. And she has been over-much hurt already.’
He looked hard at Sphaeros, who nodded and went out. He was tired and would have liked to rest and think it all out, but Hippitas was waiting for him, and insisted that he should go over at once to see Tarrik of Marob and stop him from doing anything stupid.
Tarrik, however, had calmed down quite satisfactorily. His men had taken several fine horses with gilt saddles and scalloped and painted bridles, and now they were playing dice for them. Tarrik himself was eating pickled octopus, which he seemed to like very much, and a Spartiate captain—the son of one of the ephors—was sitting beside him. Sphaeros thought they must be talking about women. Berris was not there. When Sphaeros came in, Tarrik looked up, quite pleased, and shouted to them to bring another plate and olives; his Spartan friend grinned and said: ‘Well, how’s the philosopher cock and all the philosopher chickabiddies?’ Smiling, Sphaeros avoided answering him, refused a helping of octopus which in any case he did not much care for, and asked Tarrik if he was still angry. Tarrik shook his head: ‘My mind is back in its right place. They can say what they like now. But there was an hour or two when I didn’t do my teacher much credit!’ A quick spurt of laughter bubbled out of Sphaeros. He said: ‘My pupils are always so kind about blaming themselves, not me!’ And then he asked after Berris Der. The Chief said: ‘Oh, Berris! He’s in love. That makes everything worse. Who? It’s plain enough: that Philylla girl, one of the Queen’s maids. But he’ll get over it. We do!’ He sounded rather defiant. That was because it was still worrying him that the star on his breast was quite cold and he was a very long journey from Erif. Sphaeros nodded, but, in the presence of this other Spartan, made no comment.
After that battle nothing very much happened for some time. There was a great deal of feeling in the Achaean League that Aratos, with the main body of the army, had not supported Lydiades and the cavalry, and had consequently lost them the battle. Some said it was deliberate treachery, others that it was just his usual dislike of actual fighting. Finally, they said they would give him no more money, and if he wanted to go on with the war he could pay for it himself. And so, for a time, he did. He was an odd little man; he did not care much for other people, but he cared immensely for his rather unexciting political ideals, for the Achaean League of free cities—oligarchies, of course. He had read Aristotle. He saw that the only chance for the Greece of his time was for the cities to bind themselves together as securely as possible. All the little states had been romantic and inspiring in time past, but that was before the days when Alexander’s generals and their successors for nearly a hundred years had made rich and powerful kingdoms out of the barbarian nations: Egypt, Macedonia, Syria, Cappadocia, and so on. As it was, he had to get help, sell himself here and there, but never completely. He had very few friends, but he had one son and he kept a diary. Some day, it seemed to him, this would be published and read, and people would do justice to him, that is, if he was successful. He cared a good deal about the opinion of the world, but did not care whether it was to be his own world, or some future one. Again and again his feeling about Kleomenes was pure annoyed anger at this bad luck which had thrown up, after so many generations of mediocrity, a Spartan king who had to be reckoned with and to whom this future approval might go from those who did not understand. And all these revolutionary ideas of Kleomenes made him look like something very grand to that large number of men in every one of the free cities of the League, who, naturally, were not included in the oligarchy. All the same, thought Aratos, reason would win in the end and certainly reason was on his side.
Tarrik suddenly decided that he wanted to see Athens, and see Athens he did, with Berris and half a dozen others; they went round by sea. Athens had been under the Macedonians up to a few years ago, though not very painfully so. However, it was now free again; the foreign garrisons were gone and there was a fairly full democracy. It was Aratos who had bought off the Macedonian general, for he had a curious intellectual passion for the place, but somehow the Athenians had rather disregarded him and his League. Not that they had any sort of liking for Kleomenes of Sparta, but that was hardly to be expected.
Athens was perfectly accustomed to strangers. Tarrik and his friends found a whole programme of sight-seeing almost inevitably mapped out for them. The time before, when he had been to Greece as a boy with his Aunt Eurydice, they had lived in Corinth, a rather secluded life among oldish people, with a visiting tutor to give Charmantides a good Greek accent and a grounding in ancient history. He had visited Athens for a few days, but somehow the only impressions he had got of it were of his tutor taking him firmly to places of historical interest and making him stand still while he was being lectured to, or else of meeting some other old Scraggy and then the two of them would have endlessly dull conversations while the boy dawdled about and yawned and was not allowed out of sight. He still remembered a sweet-stall they used to pass—always so unkindly to pass! He tried to find it again now so as to buy masses of sweets, but it had disappeared and had to be left as part of the geography in the slowly enlarging Platonic Kingdom of the Unattainable.
There was no denying that they found it exciting. There was the sense of the sea all the time: it kept the mountains back, that had been walling them in all along the horizon, day after day, round Sparta and Megalopolis. And then there was so much actual beauty. At first they could hardly see the trees for the wood; it was difficult to get more than a tangle of impressions, and when it came to pictures and statuary, the guides who had been introduced to them were sometimes rather tryingly reminiscent of Epigethes. Berris was rude to them and was suitably snubbed, and finally he went off on his own and hunted down the things that pleased him and afterwards dragged Tarrik off to see as many as possible.
At first he had been distressed at finding nothing but a naturalistic convention, or at least one that tried to be. Marble and metal alike made soft and plastic, treated like flesh or as clay, not allowed to take their own proper forms. He had not discovered any of the cold, logical lines and masses that he looked for now. The only thing he liked for a long time was the brilliant colour, deep yellow and red and black caught up in the fierce light that came on to everything. If marble was to be treated as they seemed to enjoy treating it, the only thing to do was to pretend it was something else and cover it with paint—but even that was not done by the more modern sculptors.
The actual pictures amused him very much. He had seen very little of the sort before, and he loved finding out what could be done with perspective and grouping. There was one he particularly liked by Philoxenos of Eretria: a huge battle-piece, with Alexander and his generals, the whole background filled up with great pikes, straight and slanting, twenty feet of wall striped with these painted Macedonian sarissas. Another by the same painter had palm trees used as a background in much the same way. It was not more than a few days before he managed to make friends with a young painter, a pupil from one of the famous studios, who was doing the back wall of a colonnade that had been given to the city by a group of rich citizens; it was to go alongside the new fish market, and was being painted with groups of fisher boys pouring the catch out of nets. Then he had a delightful time learning the technicalities of design and material. Soon he was helping to mix the colours and clean the brushes. It all had to be done very rapidly before the plaster dried, and in the end several square feet of that Athenian colonnade were painted by Berris Der with the great sturgeon that they catch in the landward part of the marshes south of Marob.
He found his way about the older stuff too, and with his young painter friend rediscovered some of the archaic things which were just becoming fashionable again with the more advanced groups. There was plenty of three and four hundred year old sculpture stowed away in the backs of temples, too sacred to be destroyed though too old fashioned to be shown. They got leave to draw and measure it and then produced statues of their own with as much of the old conventions as could be worked in nicely. All this amused Berris; none of the Athenian artists whom he met seemed to him serious about their work, as he had been serious about his; but it was a good change for him and he learned all the time, for they were competent craftsmen. He had done hardly any work on marble or stone before and enjoyed finding out about it, watching the way it chipped, fascinated by the new surfaces he could make.
Once,