After the Breakdown of the Treaty Between
the Lacedaemonians and the Athenians
According to Thucydides
Corinth, Argos, Sparta, Athens, and many other smaller
city-states
the Hellenes became a thousand fragments; the great
treaty was broken;
everyone was angry with everyone else; new councils,
deliberations, conferences. The just yesterday friends and
neighbours wouldn’t greet each other in the street anymore;
old enmities have come to the front; new alliances, totally
opposite to the ones before, listen to each other, prepare.
Embassies arrive secretly at night, others leave. The
statues of heroes are left unattended in the squares and
sparrows shit on them in the gardens.
Small groups in the Agora, with sobriety, exaltation, and
passion
discuss our affairs; who appointed them? who nominated
them? and when? We, anyway, didn’t elect them (and besides,
how? and when? New masters again? We can do without
them) April has arrived, the small pepper trees on the sidewalk
have turned green, a gentle green, tender green, childish (it
touches us) although very dusty. The City Services have lost
it. They don’t even go out during the afternoon to sprinkle
the streets. Today, however, at the peristyle of the closed
Council-house the first swallow suddenly appeared and
people cried out “a swallow, look, a swallow, look at
the swallow!”
all in one voice even the ones most opposed “a swallow”
and suddenly
they all turned silent, feeling alone, separated from the
others, as if free men
as men united by the continuance of time, like a public
isolation.
And then, they understood that they’re free in their isolation
but even that (although invisible) was unprotected,
vulnerable a thousand times trapped and alone.
Libros Libertad 