The Last of the Wine

by Mary Renault

I had seldom seen him in such spirits. I suppose for a long time his nature had been pulling him two ways, and he was glad when his boats were burned for him.

Love, he said, is not a god, for a god cannot want anything; but one of those great spirits who are messengers between gods and men. He does not visit fools, who are content with their low condition, but those who aware of their own need

They used to say of me too that I was not bad for a runner.” He smiled at me; there is a beauty of the soul that works up through bitterness like a vein of marble through earth. “Be sure,” I exclaimed, “the gods will not suffer this forever.” He looked at me as an old man looks at a child. “I come to Sokrates not in the hope of understanding the gods, but that he may lend me, perhaps, his belief that they are good.”

hope we Athenians can do a man’s part for honour’s sake, without being beaten and starved to make us brave. We fight for our City, where the mark of a citizen is to have a mind and speak it, and people live their daily lives as they choose, with none to put them in fear.

a voice in me said, “Know yourself.” And I perceived the truth, that one does not feel such grief for the loss of what one never had, however excellent; I grieved rather for what had once been mine.

The noise and heat died in me, leaving me naked under the sky. I had been many, but now I was one; and to me, myself, grey-eyed Athene spoke from the High City, saying, “Alexias, son of Myron, I am justice, whom you have made a whore and a slave.”

As things got scarcer prices got higher; food took all people had; trade dropped, men fell out of work, rents were not paid to those who had lived on them; every day the army of the poor was growing, and when people had been poor for long enough, they died.

What is honour? In Athens it is one thing, in Sparta another; and among the Medes it is something else again. But go where you will, there is no land where the dead return across the river.”

“Over Apollo’s sanctuary,” he said, “at Delphi, the navel of the earth, is written ‘Nothing too much.’ Extremes breed one another.

the nature of Helios is a secret of the god; and that a man’s first business is to know himself, and seek the source of light in his own soul. We don’t eat everything we see, but have to learn what our bodies can turn to good. So with the mind.”

Who can do good, without knowing what it is? And how will he find it, except in thought, or prayer, or in talk with a few truth-seeking friends, or with the teacher God has sent him?

What is the Demos but as a wave of the sea, that changes substance a thousand times between shore and shore?

Even if Zeus the All-knowing were to put on earth this perfect man we have postulated, would he love the Demos? I think not. He would love knight and commoner, slave and free, Hellene and barbarian, even perhaps the wicked, for they too are the prisons of God-born souls. And the Demos would join with the tyrants, to demand that he be crucified.”

fought for equality between man and man. No one shall say of me that I brought up my son to be better than his fellow citizens.” “Must we forsake the love of excellence, then, till every citizen feels it alike? I did not fight, Anytos, to be crowned where I have not run; but for a City where I can know who my equals really are, and my betters, to do them honour; where a man’s daily life is his own business; and where no one will force a lie on me because it is expedient, or some other man’s will.”