Glory and the Lightning (88 page)

For he had died of exhaustion and the debility brought on him by the plague, and of, said his devoted kinsman Alcibiades with bitterness, a broken heart “inflicted on him by an ungrateful people.”

Alcibiades said, “The glory of Greece was not the glory of the whole city-state. It was the glory of a handful of great men, though their fellows were sleeplessly at war with those heroes and murdered or exiled them. Athens heaped infamy upon Pericles, and only at the very last was he permitted to inscribe the name of his son, Pericles, in the public records of fraternity. If the name of Athens survives the ages it will not be because all Athenians were men of grandeur, patriotic men, artists and scientists and philosophers, and men of extraordinary stature. Only a few labored and loved, and were hated for these qualities. They were not of us. They were visitations of the gods. And we did them to death.”

An immense numbness came to Aspasia, mercifully, when Pericles had died, sighing, in her arms, one hot midnight. It did not lift. She gave up her school and immured herself in her house, with her son, Pericles, until he was called to active service in the war. Then she was alone, seeing few if any of her friends.

It is only the foolish who say that one can live on happy memories, she would mourn to herself, dry-eyed because she could not weep and had not wept even when Pericles had died. Her grief was too deep, too immutable.

It is better to have lived a life of sadness and pain, unalleviated by joy or peace or happiness, she would think. For then one approaches death with relief and gratitude. But joyful memories of a love that has gone, of arms once filled, of gardens which no longer bloom, is a torment worse than any torments in Hades. Ah, if I could have the memory of my love blotted from my mind it might be possible for me to endure with some measure of equanimity, and think of tomorrow. But now I am desolate and memory is the curse of Hecate. Would that I had never lived!

Her only dim consolation—and it did not always console her—was when she looked up at the white and gold glory of the acropolis at sunset or dawn and could contemplate the ineffable majesty of temples and terraces and friezes and columns and colonnades. It was the crown of Athens and it seemed to her that it was deathless and that men would always remember what stood there and bow their heads in wonder and reverence.

Pericles had been entombed near the Academia. But to Aspasia he walked under sun and moon with his friends in the colonnades, Pheidias, Anaxagoras, and all the others who had made Athens glorious, and they were eternally young and their faces eternally illuminated, and, as they walked and conversed they would sometimes pause to look down upon their city and bless her and love her again.

“Ah, my beloved, my dearest one, my love and my god,” she would murmur aloud, lifting her arms to the glory above her. “Wait for me. Forget me not.”

There were occasions when she felt a gentle comfort, and promise.